Starting this fall, the state Department of Education will no longer require Indiana’s public schools to teach cursive writing. State officials notified school leaders on April 25 that instead of cursive writing, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use. The Times of Munster reports the memo says schools may continue to teach cursive as a local standard, or they may decide to stop teaching cursive altogether. http://www.indianasnewscenter.com/news/local/Indiana-Schools-Ending-Cursive-Writing-Requirement-124767644.html

Ant factoids According to different estimates, ants can carry 10 - 50 times their body weight. Scientists have described over 12000 ant species. Many more have yet to be discovered, especially in the tropics. The total weight of all ants on Earth is close to that of humans. Ants communicate mainly using chemicals, which they sense with their antennae. In addition, nestmates recognize one another by chemicals on their bodies. They eat other insects, pollinate plants, disperse seeds, move soil, and circulate nutrients.
http://askabiologist.asu.edu/content/ant-factoids

Edible garden Throughout the spring and summer, visitors to the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden in The New York Botanical Garden, open daily 1:30-6 p.m. during the vegetable gardening season, will be able to see a cornucopia of fresh food growing in Mario Batali's Edible Garden display beds: oregano, onions, basil, tomatoes, eggplants, wheat, sweet peppers, and hot peppers in "The Otto Pizza Garden;" escarole, endives, radicchio, fennel, parsley, chard, rosemary, broccoli, arugala, fava beans, shallots, beets, dandelion greens, kale, lettuce, and turnips in "The Babbo Beets, Beans, Garlic, and Greens Garden;" and strawberries and a variety of raspberries in "Batali's Berry Patch." Beginning August 27, Mario Batali's Edible Garden program will allow families to enjoy daily gardening activities and cooking demonstrations that showcase kid-friendly recipes with the chance to sample and search for ingredients in the garden. See what's growing at: http://www.nybg.org/gardens/mario-batali-edible-garden.php

Japanese scientists have discovered that songbirds are using their own form of grammar. The study challenges the belief that only humans are able to use grammatical rules to process strings of sound such as sentences. The experiments, described in Nature Neuroscience in June 2011, were carried out on Bengalese finches by Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of the University of Kyoto in Japan. Bird song can be thought of as being like a sentence, with the different sounds being like words. The scientists played jumbled-up bird songs to individual finches to see whether the birds responded with the usual burst of calls to the jumbled songs. To their surprise they found that there were some jumbled songs that elicited a call-burst response and some that did not. Even more surprising: all the birds responded in the same way. If one bird ignored a jumbled call, all the other birds ignored that call too. http://news.discovery.com/animals/finches-songs-grammar-110627.html

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835, in Florida, MO, died April 21, 1910, in Redding, CT, and is buried in Elmira, NY. He wrote under the psudonym Mark Twain, and sometimes contributed to periodicals under pseudonyms Quentin Curtius Snodgrass, Josh, and S. L. C. Read about his career, awards, and writings at: http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/twainbio.html

Tiny Dublin, Texas Dr Pepper Bottling Co. has been selling the sweet-tasting Dr Pepper soft drink from this small town since 1891. A handful of diehard fans love the soda so much they regularly make pilgrimages to the rural community, and some buy the cane-sugar-sweetened "Dublin Dr Pepper" off the Internet. Now the world's oldest Dr Pepper bottler is locked in an escalating dispute with the owner of the Dr Pepper brand over modern-day trademark rights, Internet sales and cane sugar as it tries to extend its reach across the country. Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc., which owns the brand and licenses territory to Dublin Dr Pepper, sued the bottler, with sales of $7 million a year, in late June. Dr Pepper Snapple—the third-largest U.S. soda company, with revenue of $5.6 billion last year—says Dublin Dr. Pepper is diluting the Dr Pepper brand, as well as stealing sales from other Dr Pepper bottlers by selling outside its approved territory. In a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Sherman, Texas, Dr Pepper Snapple Group is demanding the bottler remove "Dublin'' from its "Dr Pepper'' labels and stop selling the soda beyond a 44-mile radius around Dublin. Dublin Dr Pepper sells less than 1% of Dr Pepper's annual U.S. volume. But its sales and cachet have grown in recent years as it has promoted its status as the oldest Dr Pepper bottler and the fact that it has always used cane sugar to sweeten its soda. By contrast, most bottlers began switching to less-costly high-fructose corn syrup in the 1970s. Miles Gilman, owner of Granny Clark's, a Dublin diner, says customers start ordering the local version when he opens his doors at 6 o'clock in the morning and estimates about one-third are tourists.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584404576440234236392462.html

Website of the Day Cost to Drive costtodrive.com Whether you’re planning a road trip or just trying to save on gas money, this site will tell you how much it costs. Enter your route and car information, and find out approximately how much it will cost you in gas and the size of your carbon footprint.
Number to Know 3: Ranking of Canada in the State of World Liberty Index, which ranks countries according to the degree of economic and personal freedoms that their citizens enjoy. Today is Respect Canada Day.
This Day in History July 15, 1979: President Jimmy Carter gives his famous "malaise" speech, where he characterizes the greatest threat to the country as malaise. (See below for excerpt.)
Daily Quote “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. … I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. …” Jimmy Carter
http://www.mysuburbanlife.com/news/x2108621846/Morning-Minutes-July-15