Good morning.

Earth Day in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of fifty-five, and northwest winds at ten to 15 mph.

The Urban Forestry Commission meets today at 4:30 PM.

For Earth Day, Google’s published a doodle with links to information about several animals (Rufous hummingbird, veiled chameleon, moon jellyfish, dung beetle, puffer fish, macaques):

Earth Day has a strong Wisconsin connection:

1970 – First Earth Day Celebrated
On this date the first Earth Day was celebrated. The event was organized by a 33-member committee in Philadelphia. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson advocated Earth Day to focus national attention on ecological issues. [Source: Earth Day Information Center]

Here’s Puzzability‘s Tuesday game:

This Week’s Game — April 21-25

Mark Antonyms

We’ve searched high and low for this week’s opposites. For each day, we’ll give definitions of two words that, using different meanings, are antonyms of each other.

Example:

Strange / smooth

Answer:

Odd / even

What to Submit:

Submit the antonym pair (as “Odd / even” in the example) for your answer.

Tuesday, April 22

Traffic signal / villain in a movie

Good morning.

Monday brings a probability of afternoon showers or thundershowers and a high of seventy-five.

SpaceX, a private aerospace firm, had a successful launch of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule on Friday. Two days’ time later, on Easter, the capsule successful arrived at the International Space Station with tons (literally) of supplies and equipment.

Here’s NASA’s video of the Friday launch:

Today is the day (by tradition from 753 BC) on which Rome is founded.

It’s John Muir’s birthday:

1838 – John Muir Born
On this date John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland. He immigrated with his family to Wisconsin in 1849 and spent his youth working on his father’s farms in Marquette County, experiences that are recounted in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). In 1868 he moved to Yosemite Valley, California, where he became a conservationist and leader in the forest preserve movement. His work led to the creation of the first national parks, the saving of California’s redwoods, and the founding of the Sierra Club. [Source:  Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, SHSW 1960, pg. 261]

Puzzability has a new series, entitled, Mark Antonyms.  Here’s Monday’s game:

This Week’s Game — April 21-25

Mark Antonyms

We’ve searched high and low for this week’s opposites. For each day, we’ll give definitions of two words that, using different meanings, are antonyms of each other.

Example:

Strange / smooth

Answer:

Odd / even

What to Submit:

Submit the antonym pair (as “Odd / even” in the example) for your answer.

Monday, April 21

Long overhead microphone holder / woman’s measurement

Good morning.

Saturday in town will be beautiful, with sunny skies and a high of sixty-five. Sunrise today is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:42 PM. The moon is in a waning gibbous phase with seventy-eight percent of its visible disk illuminated.

In the FW third-annual Easter candy poll, there’s an upset of sorts – jelly beans bested chocolate rabbits atop the poll. Of all responses, 34.21% were for jelly beans, 26.32% for chocolate rabbits, 21.05% for marshmallow peeps, 11% for other, and 7.89% for Cadbury eggs.

Four-hundred, fifty-nine light years from our planet, there may be a world of similar size with liquid water:

Using the Kepler space telescope, Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in California and her colleagues detected the planet around a relatively small, cool, reddish star in the constellation Cygnus, which is located about 459 light years from Earth.

Known officially as Kepler-186f, the planet is the outermost of five Earth-size worlds orbiting in that star’s solar system, the scientists said at a news conference Thursday. They also reported their findings in the journal Science.

In the search for worlds where life might take hold, scientists so far have detected 20 potentially habitable planets around other stars. But this one is the first so close in size to Earth that is located within its star’s so-called habitable zone, where it receives the right amount of solar radiation so that water there wouldn’t boil or freeze, the researchers said.

“This is the first validated Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of another star,” Dr. Quintana said. “We can now say other potentially habitable worlds the size of Earth can exist.”