Category Kids Queries

How to make Derrah game at home?

Derrah is a game like Noughts and Crosses and Go. It is a two-player game from North Africa and is easy to make and fun to play.

You will need:

  • Card or paper
  • Felt-tipped pen
  • Small coin
  • 12 matching seeds, stones, buttons, coins, paper, clips, or beads for each player

Be sure each players’ pieces are different. For example, use white seeds for one and black seeds for another, coins or different coloured buttons.

 

What to do:

  • In Africa, Derrah is played on a wooden board with rows of little round holes, but you can make your own game board. Just trace around a small coin on the paper, drawing six rows of seven circles each. That’s 42 circles that form a rectangle.
  • Decide who goes first. Then set all the pieces on the board, talking turns putting one piece at a time in any empty circle on the board. Only two pieces from the same player can be next to each other.
  • Then take turns moving pieces one space left or right, up or down – but not diagonally. The object is to get three pieces in a row. Choose your moves carefully to try to prevent your opponent from getting three in a row.
  • Each time you get three in a row, you can take one of your opponent’s pieces off the board.

The game ends when one player cannot make any more rows of three, or when all of a player’s pieces has been taken.

 

Picture Credit : Google

How big is the World Wide Web?

According to Google, the World Wide Web is made of more than 60 trillion individual pages – more pages than the number of neurons in your brain.

The Internet is a busy place. Every second, approximately 6,000 tweets are tweeted; more than 40,000 Google queries are searched; and more than 2 million emails are sent, according to Internet Live Stats, a website of the international Real Time Statistics Project.

But these statistics only hint at the size of the Web. As of September 2014, there were 1 billion websites on the Internet, a number that fluctuates by the minute as sites go defunct and others are born. And beneath this constantly changing (but sort of quantifiable) Internet that’s familiar to most people lies the “Deep Web,” which includes things Google and other search engines don’t index. Deep Web content can be as innocuous as the results of a search of an online database or as secretive as black-market forums accessible only to those with special Tor software. (Though Tor isn’t only for illegal activity, it’s used wherever people might have reason to go anonymous online.)

 

Picture Credit : Google

How do air conditioners make my house cold?

The same way your refrigerator chills your soda. Both your fridge and your house’s A/C absorb heat into coils filled with special refrigerant chemicals. The coils remove the heat from the house (or fridge), leaving the air inside comfortably chilly.

When hot air flows over the cold, low-pressure evaporator coils, the refrigerant inside absorbs heat as it changes from a liquid to a gaseous state. To keep cooling efficiently, the air conditioner has to convert the refrigerant gas back to a liquid again. To do that, a compressor puts the gas under high pressure, a process that creates unwanted heat. All the extra heat created by compressing the gas is then evacuated to the outdoors with the help of a second set of coils called condenser coils, and a second fan. As the gas cools, it changes back to a liquid, and the process starts all over again. 

 

Picture Credit : Google

Why do microwaves make my food hot?

Introduced in the late 1960s as a faster way to fix supper, microwave ovens use a special frequency of radio waves – called microwaves – that causes the atoms in liquids and fats to vibrate. That vibration creates heat and cooks food much faster than a conventional oven.

Microwave ovens cook food by generating intermolecular friction between the molecules of the food. The microwaves cause water molecules to vibrate; the increased friction between the molecules results in heat. Microwaves could affect your tissue in a similar way if they were able to escape from the microwave oven. Modern microwave ovens are designed to allow essentially no leakage of microwaves, however. The only time for concern would be if the door is broken or damaged, in which case the oven should not be used.

 

Picture Credit : Google

What do you mean by horseplay?

Researchers discovered something interesting from watching young horses – called foals – at play: Foals that frolicked in the fields were more likely to survive to their first birthday. That must mean such “purposeless activity” plays some role in an animal’s survival. One theory, tested on lab rats, showed that rodents allowed to play were less stressed. (Rats that wrestle make chirping sounds that might be the rodent equivalent of gut-busting laughter.) Rats raised with playmates and fun objects developed bigger brains than rats that grew up in empty, boring cages. Just goes to show: Goofing off is good for you!

 

Picture Credit : Google

Why do animals play?

It might seem obvious why kitties pounce on mouse-shaped toys and puppies nip at each other’s ears in play battles. Many species of animals – particularly in the mammal and bird kingdoms – engage in such “purposeless activities.” Surely they’re practicing skills that will help them later in life, right? But that convenient theory doesn’t survive scientific scrutiny. Kittens forbidden from frolicking in lab experiments (by some seriously coldhearted scientists, no doubt) were no worse at catching mice as adults than cats that enjoyed a play-filled kittenhood. Same goes for coyotes, rodents, and other animals that engage in playful activities. Playtime doesn’t appear to reinforce social bonds in studies of closely knit animals such as meerkats or lions, either. Researchers are at a loss for why animals waste precious energy engaging in purposeless activities – especially since those activities might result in injury.

 

Picture Credit : Google