14 June: National Clay Week

 This week is National clay week. Here are 10 things you might not know about clay:

1. What is clay, anyway? It’s a type of fine-grained natural soil material containing clay minerals, which is malleable when wet, but hardens when fired.

2. Humans have known about clay and its properties and have been using it for thousands of years. The earliest pottery shards were found in central Honshu, Japan, and date back to 14,000 BC.

3. Clay was the first known writing medium. Scribes would inscribe script on clay tablets using a stylus, made from a blunt reed.

4. The potter’s wheel was invented in Mesopotamia sometime between 6,000 and 4,000 BC. The Etruscans and the Romans used moulds from the 5th and 6th century BC.

5. The building material loam is made from clay. Between one-half and two-thirds of the world's population live or work in buildings made with clay, often baked into brick.

6. Clay forms as a result of a chemical reaction and weathering of silicate-bearing rocks. Clay deposits are typically associated with environments such as large lake and marine deposits.

7. There are different types of clay, the most common kind of which is earthenware, which may have minerals, small bits of rock or sand in it. It will have been transported by moving Water and is found far from its source, so has picked up minerals and impurities before it settles in a riverbed. Stoneware is a durable and hard clay which comes in different colours from grey or tan to dark brown. Kaolin clay or china clay is the clay found nearest to its source and is therefore the purest kind. It’s used to make porcelain.

8. Clay has been used for medicinal purposes. Kaolin clays can be used to treat an upset stomach. In nature some animals eat clay for this reason and people from some native cultures would carry clay around with them so they could dissolve a little into water to drink with meals to prevent poisoning from any toxins present. More recently, an article in The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy found that certain iron-rich clays are effective in killing bacteria.

9. Picasso may be best known for his paintings, but he worked with clay as well. He worked at the Madoura pottery works in the small Cote d’Azur town of Vallauris, learning the art of clay sculpting from 1948. He created more than 3,500 clay sculptures featuring women, bull-fights, birds and fish.

10. Different types of clay are fired at different temperatures and for varying lengths of time. Traditional Japanese pottery takes up to a week to fire, using wood kilns that were kept burning 24 hours a day and then left to cool for several days. It was such a labour intensive process that potters using this method might only fire their work once a year.

Character birthday

Paragon, a member of the band of villains known as The Bruisers. He is permanently intangible – how long this has been the case, or why is not known. He has no need to breathe or eat. He is an old friend of his team mate Jester, and there have been rumours the pair are gay, and only Paragon's intangible state prevents them from being lovers. Paragon is known for being overconfident and egotistical.