Teddy Bear Toss Record

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Happy Saint Patrick's Day, and Hi, I'm Johnny Mack with five good news stories. I don't have like Saint Patrick's Day theme for you. I wish they did, but I don't. However, once a year in Hershey, Pennsylvania, thousands of stuffed animals rain down onto the ice at the Hockey Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It's one of Minor League hockey's most unusual and heartwarming traditions. For the past twenty five years, the Hershey Bears of the AHL have hosted an annual Teddy Bear Toss game to benefit children and families across central Pennsylvania. Here's how it goes. As soon as the Bears score their first goal, you throw stuffed animals onto the ice. Crews can spend almost an hour collecting all the toys. Last season, the Hershey Bears at a world record when fans tossed one hundred two thousand, three hundred and forty three stuffed animals onto the ice. Wow.

0:55 This year, the Bear scored just three minutes into the game. By the end of the cleanup, eighty one thousand, seven hundred ninety six stuffed animals had been collected. I'm wondering what happens if they get shut out. That would be awful. The largest private land conservation project in the US has reached a major milestone. The nonprofit American Prairie announced it has removed the one hundredth mile of derelict barbed wire fencing from its landholdings, eliminating roughly five hundred thousand pounds of scrap metal from the landscape that allows wildlife species to move freely across the prairie for the first time in decades. American Prairie spent more than twenty years acquiring and leasing land. They're now trying to get it designated as a National park. If so, the reserve would rank among the ten largest in the contiguous United States. Conservation is estimate that more than ninety percent of the original Great North American Prairie has been lost to development and agriculture. Wow.

1:46 On September eleventh, two thousand and one, David Sylvester lost his friend Kevin. Kevin was working on the ninety ninth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. David was home in Philadelphia watching all this on TV, knowing that his friend was inside nine months after the attacks, David set out on a cross country bicycle journey to honor Kevin's life, riding more than forty two hundred miles from Oregon to Philadelphia. Along the route, at almost every stop, strangers sought conversation, connection, and physical reassurance. David said people wanted to talk, to feel safe, and often a hug. The original two thousand and two ride led to some other rides in two thousand and four, Cairo to Cape Town in two thousand and seven, Istan Bulde, Beijing, and other trips across Australia, Europe, Israel, and the US. David has traveled through forty two countries in all fifty US states, documenting interactions centered on consensual physical touch as a form of communication and healing. In Belfast, he met a Muslim woman who couldn't hug him for religious regions, but he asked whether her smile could count towards his tally. He said sure. All these years later, twenty five thousand miles later, he has spent three years of his life on the road, and he says what has changed is not the presence of pain, but his understanding of healing. Dave Sostor is the author of Brotherren Arms, Real Men Hug, published in December.

3:05 In Iowa, It's the Great Iowa Treasure Hunt. The program, administered by the Iowa State Treasurer, functions as a financial lost and found. Treasury staff work with businesses that have lost contact with account holders whose last known address was in Iowa. When the assets go unclaim, they're transferred to Iowa for safe keeping. Iowa maintains a public searchable database and encourages residents to periodically check whether money or assets are being held in their name. I know both New York and New Jersey do something similar, and it's real. The unclaimed property can come from a wide range of sources, including forgotten bank accounts, on cash checks, insurance proceeds, stockholdings, or dormant utility deposits. One Iowa woman was reunited with four and a half million dollars in McDonald's common stock and accumulated dividends years ago. She had invested fifteen grand and kind of forgot about it. And if you think your dog can understand you, you are correct. I mean I've had dogs for four decades now, no five decades now, and I'm telling you they understand well. Science is now backing Johnny Mackup. Some dogs can acquire vocabulary without you even talking to them, a skill previously thought to be unique to humans. Currently, toddlers by around eighteen months of age can learn new words by overhearing conversations, and now so can the dogs. Some dogs have the ability to learn and retain the names of objects. These animals are called gifted word learner dogs. They're capable of learning the names of hundreds of toys. Here's what the scientists did.

4:37 In one group, owners directly address their dogs while introducing and naming two unfamiliar toys. In the second group, the dogs just observe their owners discussing the toys with another person. In both scenarios, the dogs heard each toy's name for total of about eight minutes. Later, the toys replaced another room and they said, hey, dog, go get the whatever. The dogs selected the correct toy eighty percent of the time when directly addressed and listen to this one hundred percent of the time when they learned by only overhearing it. Huh, I could tell you one word they know and it's spelled O U T those A your five could do stories for today