16 September: National Play-Doh Day

National Play-Doh Day has been celebrated on September 16 since 2006.

1. When this substance first hit the shops, it wasn't a toy at all, but a specially formulated goo for removing soot from wallpaper.
2. The wallpaper cleaner was only available in one colour and that was off-White. When it was re-marketed as a toy in 1955 it came in Red, Blue or Yellow. Today it comes in all colours of the rainbow, but red remains the most popular, followed by Purple, Green and blue.
3. It was initially known as "Rainbow Modelling Compound" until Kay Zufall and her husband came up with the more catchy name of Play-Doh.
4. The exact recipe is a closely guarded secret, but we do know that the main ingredients are Water, Salt and flour. It's apparently very easy to make your own - the instructions are on this website: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/playdough-recipe
5. Approximately 100 million containers of Play-Doh are sold each year.
6. Since its inception two billion cans of Play-Doh have been sold. That's equivalent to the weight of 2,000 Statues of Liberty.
7. Similarly if you put all that Play-Doh through the Play-Doh Fun Factory, you'd get a Play-Doh strand long enough to wrap around the equator 300 times.
8. If you used to play with this stuff as a child and are nostalgic for the smell of it, you're in luck because Play-Doh producers Hasbro and Demeter Fragrance Library have made a perfume out of it. According to the website the fragrance is "that fresh, just out of the can, eau de Play-Doh aroma ... meant for highly creative people, who seek a whimsical scent reminiscent of their childhood." You can also get it as a scented candle.
9. In the early days there was a man whose job title was "Play-Doh Expert." His name was Dr. Tien Liu, who helped adapt the original wallpaper cleaner to make it safe for children to play with.
10. Play-Doh might once have been used to help people commit crimes. In the early days of biometric scanners, you could press Play-Doh into the mould of someone's finger, and use it to fool a fingerprint scanner. Before you get any ideas, scanners have come a long way since then so it wouldn't work today. These days a crook has to cut the person's finger off.

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15 September: Battle of Britain Day

Today is Battle of Britain day. The Battle of Britain was fought between the United Kingdom and Germany during the Second World War.

1. The Battle of Britain got its name before it even started. It got its name from something Winston Churchill said in his famous “This was their finest hour” speech on 18th June 1940. He said, “the Battle of France is over … the Battle of Britain is about to begin”.
2. The battle took place over several months with no real consensus as to exactly when it started. Small scale night raids began in late June 1940. The first raid by day was on July 1. The main assault began in mid August. In the UK, the officially recognised dates are July 10 to October 31, 1940, while in Germany it is said to have lasted until June 1941.
3. It was the first ever battle which was almost exclusively fought by air forces.
4. Why did it happen? Hitler recognised that Britain was a major obstacle in the way of his conquering Europe and wanted them out of the war. Surprisingly, his first plan was to negotiate a peace treaty so Britain would be on his side. Winston Churchill told him where he could stick his peace treaty and so Hitler had to move on to plan B – the invasion of Britain, code named Operation Sealion. The main obstacle standing in the way of this was Britain's Air Force, the RAF. The Battle of Britain was essentially Hitler's attempt to establish air superiority over the RAF so he could invade. It failed, and Operation Sealion was permanently shelved. Hence the Battle of Britain is considered the first major defeat of Germany in the war.
5. 15th September 1940 was a day of heavy and sustained fighting as the Luftwaffe launched its largest and most concentrated attack. Around 60 German aircraft were downed by the RAF on that day. The Luftwaffe was defeated so decisively that day that it was the date chosen as Battle of Britain Day in the UK.
6. We don't know for sure how many planes were lost during the Battle of Britain but the official figures say that the RAF lost 1,023 and the Luftwaffe 1,887. 1,542 of the RAF aircrew and 2,585 of the Luftwaffe aircrew were killed. There were around 90,000 civilian casualties.
7. Not all the people fighting on the British side were actually British. There were 2,334 British aircrew, and also 145 Poles, 126 New Zealanders, 98 Canadians, 88 Czechs, 33 Australians, 29 Belgians, 25 South Africans, 13 Frenchmen, 11 Americans, 10 Irishmen and small numbers from other countries, too. The fighter squadron which destroyed the most German aircraft was the Polish No. 303 fighter squadron, which destroyed 126 of them.
8. The most successful British pilot was Eric Stanley Lock, who destroyed at least 20 German aircraft and probably 7 more. Another airman worthy of a mention is RAF Sergeant Ray Holmes. He was flying a Hawker Hurricane fighter over London on 15 September and had run out of ammunition so was about to retreat when he spotted a German plane heading for Buckingham Palace. He steered his plane at the German and cut the tail of his plane off with his wing. The German bomber crashed near Victoria Station and the palace was saved. Holmes's plane was written off, too, but he survived.
9. The head of the RAF at the time was Sir Hugh Dowding. The air defence system in place at the time was called The Dowding System, and there was more to it than pilots and planes. They not only had radar to tell them when an attack was coming but also the Observer Corps, the volunteers who manned observation points 24 hours a day to track incoming aircraft. Once it was known which direction the German aircraft were heading in the information was passed on to the relevant sector which would ‘scramble’ its fighters into action. The Dowding System could process large amounts of information quickly and ensure the defences were only scrambled exactly where they were needed. Then there were mechanics, maintenance staff, and the factory workers producing the aircraft and parts for them.
10. Winston Churchill summed up the effect of the battle and the contribution of RAF with the famous quote, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”. Pilots who fought in the battle are known as “The Few”.

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14 September: Wacky Races

50 years ago, in 1968, The Wacky Races first appeared on TV. It's an American animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions.

1. There were only 17 episodes produced, each featuring two races.
2. The characters in the show were competing to win the title, the "World's Wackiest Racer."
3. The contestants are as follows: The Slag Brothers, Rock and Gravel, in the Boulder Mobile, basically a hollowed out rock on wheels. If ever their car was destroyed, they'd simply find another rock and make a new one. The Gruesome Twosome, monsters Big Gruesome and Little Gruesome, in The Creepy Coupe, a belfry on wheels which could fly with Dragon wings. Professor Pat Pending, a mad scientist, in The Convert-a-Car, a vehicle which could turn into just about anything. Red Max, a Bavarian daredevil pilot, in a car/plane hybrid called The Crimson Haybailer. Penelope Pitstop, the token female in The Compact Pussycat. Sergeant Blast and Private Meekly in The Army Surplus Special. The Ant Hill Mob, seven dwarf gangsters, in The Bulletproof Bomb. Lazy Luke, a hillbilly, who spent most of the race asleep, and his nervous passenger, Blubber Bear, in The Arkansas Chugabug, which was powered by a squirrel who was fed nuts to make the car go faster. Peter Perfect, a chivalrous racer and Penelope's love interest, in The Turbo Terrific, the car which fell apart the most often. Rufus Ruffcut, a lumberjack, and his companion Sawtooth, a Beaver, in The Buzz Wagon.
4. Finally, of course, there's the famous villain, Dick Dastardly, and his sidekick Muttley, in the Mean Machine. The Mean Machine is by far the fastest of the cars – Dastardly always takes an early, commanding lead, but never wins because he always stops to set dastardly traps for the other racers, and because of that, usually comes last. The one time he did win, he was disqualified for extending the nose of his car. His catchphrases are "Drat, drat and double drat!" or "Triple drat!" and even "Curses, foiled again!" His other main catchphrase was, "Muttley, do something!" Muttley is a mixed breed Dog, a mix of bloodhound, pointer, Airedale, and hunting dog. His birthday is April 16.
5. Penelope was a bit of an afterthought, added when Joseph Barbera requested that a woman be included in the line up. Iwao Takamoto and Jerry Eisenberg invented Penelope and her car in two hours. On the one hand, she's a typical blonde damsel in distress clad in Pink, whose vehicle is more of a beauty salon than a car. Other characters are always having to rescue her from either Dick Dastardly or her arch enemy, the Hooded Claw. Penelope never works out that the Hooded Claw is her guardian Sylvester Sneekly. Her catchphrase is “Hay-ulp! Hay-ulp!” On the other hand, when nobody is around to help her she displays amazing intelligence and ingenuity in order to get out of sticky situations, and is said to have been a champion of just about every known sport in college.
6. All the cars are mentioned in the opening titles, apart from the Crimson Haybaler, and the Compact Pussycat, and all the characters, apart from Blast and Meekley.
7. The series has been translated into a number of languages. The titles aren't usually direct translations of “Wacky Races”, however. In other languages the show has been known as The Fools of the Wheel (French), Chiki Chiki Racing Machines (Japanese), The Craziest Race of the World (Portuguese), The bumpy cars (Catalan), Cool races (Polish), The crazy people of the steering wheel (Galacian), SPEED Freaks (Swedish) and Rally of hot knees (Galacian).
8. The series was originally intended to be part of a live-action quiz show made by Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley Productions in which contestants would bet on which Wacky Racer would win. This idea was never used.
9. DC Comics produced a version of the show called Wacky Raceland, a post-apocalyptic tale in which the characters race across a Mad Max style desert wasteland filled with perils, to Utopia. In this version, Muttley is a mutated and robotically-enhanced dog whose intelligence and aggressiveness were slightly enhanced by exposure to a serum created by Professor Pat Pending.
10. There's also a re-boot of the series, produced in 2017, created by Rebecca Himot and Tramm Wigzell. It features all the old favourites, with some plotlines added about their lives outside of Wacky Races. There are some new characters as well, including I.Q. Ickly, Brick Crashman, P.T. Barnstorm, and Pandora Pitstop, Penelope's twin sister.

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September 13: National Peanut Day

On National Peanut Day, 10 things you might not know about peanuts.

1. Peanuts go by a number of names, including groundnuts, earthnuts, goobers, pinders, Manila nuts and monkey nuts. The Latin name for them is Arachis hypogaea.
2. They're not actually nuts at all, but legumes, belonging to the same family as soybeans, chickpeas, Peas, Clover, Liquorice, and Lentils.
3. They are native to South America, where pre-Columbian cultures, such as the Moche, depicted peanuts in their art. Peanut shells dating back 7,600 years have been found in Peru. Peanuts were on sale in Mesoamerica when the Spanish arrived and from there, they spread throughout the world.
4. The country which produces the most peanuts is China, followed by India, Nigeria and the United States, where the major peanut producing states are Georgia, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, Virginia, New Mexico and South Carolina.
5. There are four different types of peanut which can be bought in the shops: Spanish, Runner, Virginia, and Valencia.
6. Two former American presidents were peanut farmers - Thomas Jefferson and Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter's parents had a 360-acre peanut farm; Carter sold peanuts on the streets when he was just five years old.
7. The person who holds the record for peanut throwing is Colin Jackson, a former world champion hurdler from the UK. He threw a peanut 37.92 meters (or 124 feet, four inches) in Cardiff in February 2008.
8. Peanuts are a major source of protein and also contain minerals, antioxidants, and vitamins. They're also cholesterol free. Because they are such a great source of protein, peanut paste is used by the United Nations to feed malnourished children in developing countries.
9. That said, about 0.6% of people in the US have peanut allergies which can be fatal in severe cases. There are enough people with these severe allergies to cause airlines and schools to ban peanuts altogether. There is a theory that if peanuts are introduced into a child's diet early on they are less likely to develop a fatal allergy. In Israel, there is a very low rate of peanut allergy, and it has been hypothesised that this is because there's a puffed peanut snack there which is very popular with small children. Another theory is that food allergies in general are less likely if children are exposed to dirt and germs when they are young.
10. Peanuts aren't just for eating. Peanut oil is used to make paint, varnish, lubricating oil, leather dressings, furniture polish, insecticides, and nitroglycerin. The shells are used to make plastic, wallboard, abrasives, fuel, rayon, Paper and glue. If you buy peanuts in the shell you can recycle the shells into cat litter, kindling, packing material or compost.

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12 September: Lascaux Cave Paintings

It was on this date in 1940 that four teenagers followed their Dog down a hole near Lascaux France and discovered 17,000 year-old drawings now known as the Lascaux Cave Paintings.

1. The first people to see the paintings after all that time were Marcel Ravidat, aged 18, and his friends Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas.
2. The Lascaux Cave is actually a group of connected caves in the Vézère Valley in Aquitaine, France.
3. The cave complex was opened to the public on July 14, 1948, and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
4. There are about 6,000 drawings in the caves, believed to be about 17,000 years old.
5. Most of the paintings are of animals which would have lived in the area 17,000 years ago, but there are also drawings of humans and some abstract patterns. There are no pictures of plants or landscapes.
6. The animals depicted include Horses, bulls, stags, felines, a bird, a Bear and a Rhinoceros. One of the bulls is 17 feet (5.2 m) long, the largest animal discovered so far in cave art. There is something missing, however. There are no depictions of Reindeer, which would have been a major source of food for the people who lived in the area at the time.
7. The paint used was made from mineral pigments such as iron oxide, haematite, manganese and goethite, and a small amount of charcoal. The pigments were mixed with Water or animal fat and swabbed onto the wall or sprayed on through a tube. The colours used are Red, Black, Yellow, violet and Brown. Some of the pictures are carved into the stone.
8. There are distinct sections to the cave complex, and the various chambers have been given names such as the Hall of the Bulls, the Lateral Passage, the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, and the Chamber of Felines. One chamber, called the Abside (Apse) is completely covered in paintings, even on the ceiling which is in places 2.7 metres high (almost 9 feet), suggesting the people who made the paintings knew how to make scaffolding of some kind.
9. So why did those prehistoric people go to all that effort? Opinions vary. They could simply have been depictions of life and hunting. I mean, why do we have wallpaper today? Or they could have had a spiritual or religious significance. Perhaps they were drawn to bring good luck and ensure an abundant hunt. David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes have suggested the art is associated with rituals because it is similar to art found in southern Africa which relates to the visions people might have while trance dancing.
10. The paintings are under threat due to mould and Lichen growing on the walls. Having the caves open to the public altered the composition of the air around them. People breathing, air conditioning and bright lights all took their toll, so in 1963 the caves were closed to the public. Replicas of most of the paintings have been reproduced in a nearby cave and are visited by thousands of people a year. Only scientists and preservationists can see the originals now, and sometimes even they can't. In January 2008, authorities closed the cave for three months because they found black mould growing in there. A single individual was allowed to enter the cave for 20 minutes once a week to monitor climatic conditions.

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11 September: Dr Crippen

Born this date in 1862 was Dr. Crippen, convicted of killing his wife in the early 20^th century. Some facts about him:

1. His full name was Hawley Harvey Crippen and he was born in Coldwater, Michigan.
2. He was a doctor of homeopathy. He graduated from Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College in 1884. He had a homeopathy practice in New York, but when he moved to the UK, his qualification wasn't recognised so he couldn't legally work as a doctor. He worked as a distributor of patent medicines for a company called Munyon's.
3. The wife he allegedly killed was not his first wife. He was married to a woman called Charlotte with whom he had a son, Hawley Otto. Charlotte died of a stroke in 1892 and Hawley Otto was brought up by his grandparents.
4. His second wife was a wannabe music hall singer called Corrine "Cora" Turner, although her name at birth was Kunigunde Mackamotski, and her stage name was Belle Elmore. Crippen spent a lot of time managing her stage career, which got him the sack from Munyon's.
5. His next job was manager of Drouet's Institution for the Deaf, where he hired Ethel Le Neve, a young typist. Crippen started having an affair with her. Meanwhile, Cora was openly having affairs, too, including with one of the couple's paying guests.
6. Cora vanished in 1910 after a party at the Crippen's home, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, Holloway. Crippen told people she had run away back to America with a lover and later died over there. Ethel moved in with him and openly wore Cora's clothes and jewellery. Not everyone believed that. Cora's friend, strongwoman Kate Williams, known as Vulcana, raised her suspicions with the police, as did a couple called John Nash and Lil Hawthorne.
7. Chief Inspector Walter Dew interviewed Crippen and had his house searched, but found nothing and came to the conclusion Crippen was telling the truth. Crippen, however, didn't wait to find out what Dew thought. He and Ethel took off in a panic. They went to Antwerp and boarded a ship to Canada. His first mistake. When he and Ethel vanished, the police got suspicious and ordered a more thorough search of their house. This time, a human torso was found buried in the basement. The body had traces of a sedative drug in it, and had what appeared to be an abdominal scar. Cora was known to have such a scar, so they concluded the body was hers.
8. Crippen and Ethel, meanwhile, were on their way to Canada. He had changed his appearance by shaving off his moustache and was growing a beard; she was disguised as a boy – but not very well as the ship's Captain saw right through it. Crippen's second mistake – booking to travel saloon class. Had they been willing to rough it in third, the Captain would probably not have noticed them. The captain had his telegraphist send a telegram to the British authorities informing them of his suspicions. Dew travelled to Canada on a faster ship and was waiting when Crippen arrived in Quebec. Disguised as a pilot, he boarded the ship. The captain invited Crippen to meet the pilots, whereupon Dew removed his pilot's cap and said, "Good morning, Dr. Crippen. Do you know me? I'm Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard," and arrested him. This made him the first suspect to be caught using wireless telegraphy. Crippen's third mistake was going to Canada rather than to the USA, because at the time, Canada was still a dominion within the British Empire, so he could be arrested without extradition procedures, which would have been necessary if he'd gone to the States.
9. Throughout his trial, Crippen showed no remorse for his wife. He seemed to only care about Ethel's reputation. It took the jury 27 minutes to convict him of murder. He was hanged on 23 November 1910 at Pentonville Prison, London. Theories as to why he killed her, aside from the obvious one of wanting to be free to be with Ethel, include that he'd been giving her the drugs to sedate her and had accidentally given her too much, or that he'd killed her because she had syphilis.
10. Did he kill her at all? The novelist Raymond Chandler once said that he thought it odd that Crippen would successfully dispose of Cora's head and limbs (which were never found) and then bury the rest of her in his house. More recent evidence, comparing the corpse's DNA with that of Cora's living relatives, suggested it wasn't her at all. This led to the theory that Crippen may have been carrying out illegal abortions and the body belonged to a patient who had died during the procedure. However, still more doubt was cast on Crippen's guilt when further tests were done and the torso was found to belong to a man.

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10 September: The Large Hadron Collider

On this date in 2008 the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history was first powered up in Geneva, Switzerland, 10 years ago today. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). CERN is perhaps most famous for its discovery in 2012 of the Higgs Boson (named after British physicist Peter Higgs who predicted its existence in 1964). It has been referred to as the ‘God particle,’ because it allows other particles to build up mass as they pass through its field.

1. It's the largest, most complex and most expensive machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and is an average of 100 metres (330 feet) under the ground. It took 10 years to build at a cost USD 4.1 billion.
2. This massive machine was built to study the smallest things known to science, sub-atomic particles, aiming to smash them together to see what happens, and potentially find something even smaller. Hadrons are composite particles composed of quarks held together by a strong force. They include protons, neutrons, and mesons.
3. It's the world's largest Fridge. It contains magnets which are pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen and then the temperature is brought down even more, to -271.3°C (1.9 K) using liquid Helium.
4. At the other extreme, when particles collide, (600 million times a second) they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun.
5. Particles travel around the HRC at 671,000,000 mph or 99.9999991% of the speed of light.
6. There is more iron in the system of magnets in the HRC than there is in the Eiffel Tower. It also contains superconducting filaments of niobium–titanium about 0.007 mm thick, about 10 times thinner than a human hair. There is enough of this filament to stretch to the Sun and back six times with enough left over for about 150 trips to the Moon.
7. Talking of the Moon, the energy of the proton beam is influenced by the Moon so that tidal variations have to be taken into account when the machine is operated.
8. Built to research the building blocks of the universe and to find out about dark matter and dark energy, Sergio Bertolucci, former Director for Research and Scientific Computing of the facility was reported as saying it could open doors to other dimensions and possibly time travel. Could this mean beings from other time-space dimensions might come and visit us? These portals, Bertolucci said, would only exist for a fraction of a second so it's unlikely. Some say the HRC could produce Black Holes – but they'd be tiny, microscopic ones.
9. The LHC is the emptiest place in the Solar System. So the particles don't collide with anything other than each other the experiment has to take place in an ultra-high vacuum.
10. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day, of course. They will point out that the town in France where CERN is partially situated is called “Saint-Genus-Pouilly.” Pouilly comes from the Latin “Appolliacum” and it's believed there was once a temple to Apollo on the spot, which the residents of the time believed was the gateway to the underworld. They will go on to say that Revelations (9:1-2, 11), makes reference to the name ‘Apollyon': “To him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit…” They may also point out that CERN has chosen Shiva, Hindu goddess of destruction, as its mascot and has a statue of her outside its HQ. While these things might be dismissed as the ramblings of religious nuts, respected scientists like Stephen Hawking and Neil de Grasse Tyson warned of a possible catastrophe causing the planet to explode or space and time to collapse. Two CERN-commissioned safety reviews examined these concerns, noting that the physical conditions and collision events in the LHC occur naturally without hazardous consequences. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays impact Earth with energies far higher than those in the collider. So it's perfectly safe, they said. It's been running for ten years and we're all still here. So far.

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