Category Kids Queries

Studies and media reports suggest that for centuries children were dressed in white till they were a few years old. And gradually, in the early 20th Century, gender-based colours in clothing came about. Interestingly, pink was for boys, and blue for girls. This changed after World War II when men returning from war were expected to get back to work, and women, to return from work and stay at home to look after kids. One of the reports says women shed their factory blues” and embraced the “pink apron”. It is also said that the segregation that pink is for one gender and blue for another is a marketing tactic that came about in the U.S. after World War II, so parents couldn’t hand down the older kid’s clothes to the younger one. Slowly, the colour association spread to other aspects such as toys and furniture for kids, and was used even to segregate adults based on gender. What is now more or less a global phenomenon is basically a conditioning over several decades. This forces individuals to follow the majority rather than their own heart out of fear of being ridiculed or left out. And initially, why was pink chosen for boys, and blue, for girls? Apparently, to show that boys are strong, and girls are dainty. But does it reflect reality? Well, that’s a story for another day!

Toys matter

Every toy, game or sport has the ability to teach the player something. Studies have shown that construction block play can help with spatial (relating to space) awareness, Maths, problem-solving, etc. Playing with dolls can increase empathy, social and nurturing skills, processing of information, language skills, and such. By playing a group sport, you can learn teamwork and sharing, while playing by yourself, you can develop creative ways of keeping yourself occupied. These are just a few examples. Boardgames, DIY kits, toys and sports offer a lot of benefits such as improving motor skills, hand-eye coordination, promoting generosity, physical fitness, mental agility, time management independence, planning, diplomacy, sympathy, self-esteem, confidence, etc. So who needs to develop all these skills? Everyone!

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All children should have food to eat, a safe place to live, good medical care, and an education. These are called rights. A family helps protect its children’s rights.

The biggest “family” in the world is the United Nations, or UN for short. The UN makes rules to protect the rights of everyone in the world’s family. If people somewhere are being mistreated or denied food, safety, shelter, or freedom, the UN can step in to help them.

The UN members include nearly every country in the world. At the UN headquarters in New York City, leaders from those countries work together to keep peace in the world.

The world family plays together too. Athletes from around the world compete in sports at the Olympic Games every two years. The winter games happen one year, and then, two years later, it’s time for the summer games.

The world is filled with different races, different religions, and different ways of life. When the different people get together to solve problems or play sports, they learn to respect each other, help each other, and be friends.

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Your home may be a palace, a flat, a farmhouse, a houseboat, or a mobile home. It is the place where you feel safe, warm, and loved.

But not everyone has a home. Millions of people in the world are homeless. They live in the open and sleep under bridges, in refugee camps, even in open fields.

Sometimes, people lose their homes. Natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes can wipe out entire neighbourhoods or villages and leave many families homeless.

People also lose their homes when they flee from a war or when they are starving and must find food elsewhere. Some people become homeless because they can’t find work or low-cost place to live.

Children whose families are homeless must sometimes spend their childhood working, rather than playing games or going to school.

Fortunately, many people help the homeless. When there are natural disasters, people and groups from all over the world send money, food, and medical supplies. Governments often help people who must flee a war.

Cities have shelters where people can sleep and be safe. Charities provide meals and warm clothes. Some groups build houses for the homeless, and others offer job training.

Ask a grown-up what you can do to help the homeless in your community.

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At school, it’s the head master. On a cricket team, it’s the captain. In an army, it’s the general. These people are leaders and it’s their job to run things.

Countries are run by leaders too. Different countries have different kinds of leaders.

Some leaders are elected by the people of the country. That means the people vote for their leader. They elect a president, prime minister, or premier. Canada, France, India, Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.A. all have elected leaders.

In some countries, the leader is a king or queen. Kings and queens are chosen by the people. They are members of the country’s royal family. When the king or queen dies, another royal family member takes over. Saudi Arabia, Brunei, and Swaziland have ruling kings.

Some countries have both a king or queen and an elected leader. The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have queens or kings, but the real leaders of these countries are prime ministers elected by the people.

Some countries have leaders who are chosen – or who choose themselves – for life. Only when they die will a new leader take charge.

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In a tug of war, many little children pulling together can win the game. They might even drag a grown-up through the mud!

The people on a rowing team must work together, too. If the rowers all pulled their oars when they felt like it, the boat would never get anywhere, much less win a race.

Rowing teams – like many other teams – have a leader. A rowing-team leader is called a coxswain. The coxswain steers the boat and call out the timing to the closest rower. This rower sets the pace so that all the rowers pull at the same time.

People often work together to get a job done. Most of the time, they choose a leader. Then they decide on a plan of action. The leader directs the work of the group and makes sure each person does part of the work.

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Water buffaloes really do love water. In Asia, people use these huge animals to plough fields and rice paddies. Buffaloes are work animals, not pets. Still, children enjoy caring for them – especially when it’s bath time!

After working hard in the sun, buffaloes need a rest. During the hottest part of the day, children ride them to the nearest lake or river. Here, the buffaloes sink happily into the water. They love to wallow in the soft, cool mud with only their eyes and noses showing. The children splash and swim around while the animals cool off. Then, they give the buffaloes a good scrub. After such a nice break, the buffaloes are ready to go on with the day’s work.

Inuit children in Northern Canada help train sled dogs. At stables in the United Kingdom, children may groom horses. On farms around the world, children feed chickens and ducks.

Do you walk your dog or feed your cat? Do you fill the feeder for the birds outside? If you do, you’re helping animals too.

It’s fun to take care of animals – whether they are work animals, pets, or wildlife near our homes.

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Sharing the work means sharing the fun.

People don’t just follow laws and rules. They have responsibilities or jobs, too. By doing these jobs, they help each other and themselves.

In some families, adults and children work side every day, planting, tending and harvesting crops in the fields. In other families, everyone helps sell goods in a small shop or on the street.

Families do different kinds of work in different places. But in every family, grown-ups and children help one another. When everybody helps, the work gets done more quickly. And everyone can share pride in a job well done.

Most children have jobs to do at home, too. Some take out the rubbish or recycling material, put away the laundry or feed the family pet. Some children help take care of their younger brother and sisters. Maybe you lay the table or wash the dishes.

As you do your share of the family’s work, you are learning to be responsible and to help others. What jobs, or responsibilities, do you have at home?

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Every family has rules. Some rules are made by parents and children together. Other rules are made by the parents alone. Once they are set, family rules must be followed.

Rules help the members of a family live happily together. If you break a family rule, what happens? Maybe you have to do extra work as punishment. Maybe you are “grounded” for a while.

Laws are the rules that help the people in a community – or a whole country – live peacefully together. The laws of a town, country, or tribe must be obeyed by all of the people there.

Who makes the laws? In a tribe, it may be the chief and a council of tribal members. In some small towns, most or all of the adults gather together to make laws. In large cities and countries, a few people make the laws for everyone.

What laws do you know? Do you have a favourite law? What law would you make if you were a leader in your community?

Laws affect everyone – even family pets. If you are a pet owner, find out what the local laws are for cats, dogs, horses or other animals you have. For example, some places have a lead law, which means you must walk your dog on a lead. Are registration tags needed? What injections are required? Can you keep a wild animal in your garden?

You may also want to ask a police officer about your local bicycle laws. Does your bike need to be registered? What lights, reflectors, and bells or horns does it need? Are riders required to wear helmets?

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Do you like when people: Let you finish what you are saying? Hold a door open for you? Help you carry a heavy load? Let you join their game?

The word etiquette comes from a French word meaning “ticket”. King Louis XIV posted “tickets” telling people at his palace what to wear and what to do each day.

The first known guide to etiquette was written by a government official in ancient Egypt around 2400 B.C.

Children learn from grown-ups, such as parents and teachers, wherever they go. They learn how to behave at dinner, in school, and in different situations. For example, they learn to sit up straight. They learn to use a serviette when eating. Why do you think it’s good manners not to talk with food in your mouth?

It is almost proper etiquette to say “please” when you ask for something or need help. For example, if you ask a librarian for help finding a book, you say “please”.

When you receive something, you say “thank you” to show you appreciate what you got. It also is good manners to thank people for giving you information.

When you say “excuse me” or “I’m sorry”, you’re telling those near you that you didn’t mean any harm or that you didn’t do something on purpose. For example, when you get off a crowded lift or bus, you say “I’m sorry” if you bump into someone.

Etiquette can be tricky. Sometimes, what is polite in one country might be rude in another. In Japan, you should take off your shoes when you enter a house. In many other parts of the world, guests ususally keep their shoes on.

A tricky part of good manners includes changing your speech to fit the occasion. It would be silly and not very helpful to call, “Excuse me, please, but I’ll catch that for you” when you are playing a ball game. By the time you finished talking, the ball would be on the ground! Ball-playing etiquette requirs you to say, quickly and clearly, “Mine!” when you are catching a flying ball.

What’s the right thing to do? If you don’t know, ask someone. One way to get it “right” most of the time is to act the way you would like others to behave.

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More than 7 billion people call our planet home. There are thousands of different languages and many different religions. In a world so full of people and ideas, how do we all get along?

Friends and neighbours have customs that tell them how to behave. Customs are the “manner” of a country or group of people.

Families and schools have rules about how people should treat one another. The rules spell out what is fair at all.

Countries have laws that tell people what they can and cannot do. Laws show us how to treat other people and our planet with respect.

How should you treat someone from another country? Follow the laws and the rules where you are and respect the local customs. When everyone works together, people get along.

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“Read all about it!” the newspaper seller cries. He knows people want the latest news.

What happened yesterday? Who won the big match? Will it rain tomorrow? People everywhere are curious about events both near and far.

Most people buy newspapers to read at home or while on a train or bus. In some places, newspapers are pinned up on walls so people passing by can read the news. People who can’t read listen as others read the newspaper out loud.

Some newspapers present news on events happening all over the world. Other newspapers print stories about only one neighbourhood or area.

Millions of newspapers are printed every day throughout the world. Nearly every country has at least one daily paper. In many big countries, hundreds of different newspapers are printed and read every day.

Some newspapers have many pages and are printed on huge printing presses. Other newspapers have only a single page and are printed on small copying machines. Some little newspapers are even written by hand.

You can get up-to-the-minute news of the world at the flip of a switch. Electronic machines such as televisions, radios, telephones, mobile phones, and computers put the news at your fingertips.

You can even watch news as it happens, all around the world. Television signals bounce off objects called artificial satellites out in space. The satellites send TV broadcasts from station to station, anywhere on Earth.

Telephone conversations bounce off space satellites or travel through cables lying on the ocean floor so that people can opposite sides of the world can talk to each other.

Using a computer with a modem, a part that connects to phone wires, you can get news from the World Wide Web on the Internet. And you can send and receive news using e-mail.

You can also connect to the Internet without wires, with certain kinds of mobile phones or portable computers. These devices use radio waves to make the connection.

People can send letters, computer files, and other kinds of information from one computer to another using electronic mail or e-mail.

For up-to-the-minute news any time of day or night, people turn on their computers. On the World Wide Web, part of the Internet, electronic newspapers keep people up on the very latest news.

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Today, a plane can take you quickly to any place in the world. But, what if you don’t speak the language of the people there? Don’t worry. Countries around the world use picture signs.

In Afghanistan, some roads are for cars and trucks and others are for camels and donkeys. Drivers from other countries can tell which road is which by picture signs. Almost anyone can understand where to go.

Signs with simple drawings of cars, people, and objects instead of words are easy to “read” even if you can’t read at all.

You read picture signs every day. What do a fork, knife, and spoon on a road sign mean? What does a bed on a sign mean? Have you seen animal-crossing signs for deer, horses, or cows? What is the symbol for a school crossing? How do signs say “School Zone,” or “Deer Crossing”? What signs tell you that toilets and telephones are nearby? Do you know the sign for a playground? The sign for a library?

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For many years, Native American tribes with different languages used hand signs to talk and trade together. Try them by yourself or with a friend!

“Father” – Touch the right side of your chest several times with your right fist.

“Mother” – Touch the left side of your chest several times with your right fist.

“I” – Point to yourself with your right thumb. For the sign “You”, point to the other person with your right thumb.

“Thank you” – Hold your hands chest high, palms facing out. Push your hands slowly toward the person you wish to thank, letting your hands curve downward.

“Bird” – Hold your hands at your shoulders. Move your hands up and down, like the flapping of a bird’s wings.

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Baseball teams in the U.S.A. have their own secret hand signs. A coach on the sideline may touch his hat, pat his knee, or rub his nose to send a message to a player on the field.

People who are deaf use sign language every day. They use their hands and faces to make signs that stand for words or ideas. They also spell out words by shaping letters with their fingers.

You probably already know a few signs yourself. How do you say “Good-bye,” “Okay,” and “Stop!” without making a sound? What other signs do you use or see?

People who are, deaf and blind can learn to feel what people say if words are finger-spelled into their hands.

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Children need to know a lot besides how to read, write and do arithmetic. They also need to learn things that are important in their culture. Children everywhere learn skills that will be useful when they grow up.

In the U.S.A., many young people learn how to use the kitchen stove, so they can help prepare meals. They also learn how to read maps to find places and how to use a library to find out many things.

There is nothing better than knowing your students are inspired and connected to what they are learning and researching. When students feel emotionally connected to their coursework, they often times feel more inspired to be creative and put a great deal of effort into their work. When teaching the importance of cultural heritage, students can easily be inspired by thoughts of their own culture, where they come from; perhaps they are adopted and grew up in a home with a different culture from where they were born, then that student could explore into their birth culture and understand more about themselves in the process of researching. Cultural heritage is deeply personal, but it is also a connection we all share; through connecting with your culture you connect more with those around you. Many students find they share similar cultures with their peers, or they may find a peer who is from a place they want to know more about. This connected learning opens doors for sharing and exploring the world while never really leaving the classroom. Also, as a teacher it is important to allow students the opportunity to connect to their culture because at home they may not have the opportunity to connect with parents about this topic, offering information and research databases for students to dig into a culture is important because it allows a student to thrive and grow, while still learning something they are passionate about.

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Do you go to the same school every day? Some children don’t. They go to lots of different schools, and some days they don’t go school at all!

These children live their families on boats called barges. The barges are always on the move. They travel up and down rivers and canals in the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, carrying goods from one town to another.

In the Netherlands, barge children go to special schools in the towns where the barges stop. While the barges are tied up, the children attend classes. They are also given lessons to work on as they travel.

When the barge gets to the next stop, the children go to another school. They hand in their homework, go to classes, and get more homework to do. In this way, they can keep up with their schoolwork.

When these barge children finish their elementary schooling, they may go to a boarding school for high school.

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Do you go to school in a classroom with lots of desks and chairs at your kitchen table? In a temple or in a one-room schoolhouse? Do you go to school indoors or outdoors?

A school may be any kind of building, or it may not be a building at all! A school is simply a place where students come to learn with help from a teacher. All around the world, children go to schools of all kinds and all sizes to learn things they need to know.

Teachers play a key role in any student’s life. They are like the children’s second parents, adults who are there to supervise when they are not at home. They are knowledgeable on a lot of things, and they should be able to impart a wide array of information and wisdom on specific subject matters, as well as life in general.

School provides an environment where we can learn a lot of basic skills. Children as young as three years old are taught how to read and write at their preschools. They start to learn the alphabet, numbers, and even do some simple arithmetic problems. They also get the chance to practice their drawing, building, problem solving, and cognitive skills.

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Grown-ups – your parents, teachers, neighbours – teach you many things you need to know in life. They learned these things from the grown-ups they grew with. People who are even older than your parents, such as your grandparents, older neighbours, great-aunts, and great-uncles, have plenty to teach you, too!

Older grown-ups have a lifetime of experience to share. They have seen the world in many different ways. After all, they started out as children and have been every age between them and now. They were once your age, and they remember how it feels to get a new bike, have a baby brother or sister, or go to school. They may have helpful answers to your problems and funny stories to tell.

All older grown-ups have special skills. Their jobs and their skills are things they can teach you. Maybe your grandfather known all about fishing. Maybe an older neighbor knows a lot about gardening. Maybe they speak another language or once lived in another country. You can learn a lot from them.

The older grown-ups in your life were once exactly your age. Where did they live? What chores did they do? What games did they play? What books did they read? Ask them! Find out how their childhood was like your own, and how it was different.

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Little children learn while they play. Some play in groups at nursery school. Others visit the homes of their friends or play at home with brothers, sisters, and cousins.

As they play, children teach each other. They learn how to share and how to listen. They find out what their bodies can do. They learn about the world around them. And they learn how to have fun together.

Four-year-old Carlos lives in Spain. He plays with his friends, jumping and climbing in the village. Sometimes they play at one another’s homes.

Rohini, a 4-year-old in India, goes to nursery school with her friends. They play with toys, make things, and listen to stories together.

In the U.S.A., a 4-year-old Sarah lives on a farm in Iowa. She loves to run and explore in the fields and barn with her older brother.

All children enjoy playing with their friends. And while they play, they are learning from everyone and everything around them.

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The world is filled with interesting places to go and fascinating things to know and to do. So where should you go to start learning?

You’re already there – wherever you are. You learn at school, at home, at play. You learn from your family and friends and from your teachers. Books and newspapers, television, radio, telephones, and computers offer information from around the world to you.

We are all learning every day. We learn when we listen, we learn when we look, and we learn when we try new things. We’re learning when we ask questions and when we try to answer them.

Ketwago, a young boy in Botswana, a small country in Africa, was learning to hunt. Pulling his bowstring tighter, he moved slowly forward. “Stoop as low as you can,” said his father from behind him. “When we stoop over, the antelopes think we are animals and they don’t run from us. Then you can get close enough to shoot you arrow”.

Ketwago doesn’t go to school. He is taught by his father and the other grown-ups of his tribe. Children around the world learn different things in different ways.

Children learn from parents, friends, teachers, librarians, sports instructors, and brothers and sisters. Everywhere, families teach their children what they think will help them most in their lives.

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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.)

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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. 

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Software company Microsoft is working on a “universal translator” right now. This high-tech program not only translates your speech into the language of your choice, but it also plays your words aloud in your own voice when you make calls over the Internet using a smartphone or computer.

The existence of a universal translator is sometimes problematic in film and television productions from a logical perspective (for example, aliens who still speak English when no universal translator is in evidence and all characters appear to hear the appropriately translated speech instead of the original speech, the ability to speak in the language when direct translation is possible), and requires some suspension of disbelief when characters’ mouths move in sync with the translated words and not the original language; nonetheless, it removes the need for cumbersome and potentially extensive subtitles, and it eliminates the rather unlikely supposition that every other race in the galaxy has gone to the trouble of learning English.

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The dolphin might be signaling that it’s getting ready to charge. The S-posture is not unique to dolphins in the Bahamas. It’s been documented in other species during intense aggressive situations, including in male humpback whales in Hawaii and captive beluga whales.
 

In addition to displaying a threat, Dolphins use the S-posture during courtship or mating. Denise Herzing has observed that a male will approach a female in an S-posture, and orient his rostrum to the female’s genital area while also buzzing that region with his echolocation. This genital buzz is a kind of foreplay from a distance, and its possible could even have a physical effect on the recipient female!

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They’re trying to get a date. Pairs of male dolphins will develop elaborate underwater routines to impress females. Bottlenose dolphins that engage in synchronized swimming with their peers tend to see the glass as being half full.

Some of these dolphins frequently swim in tight-knit groups, and they’re the ones who appear the most optimistic, according to a study of eight captive animals.

In the experiment, individual dolphins were trained to swim towards one of two targets. They were taught that when they reach the left one, they receive applause and eye contact, while the one on the right delivers herring – the jackpot – and dolphins swim faster towards it.

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They are yelling “back off!” dolphins sometimes snap their jaws when staking out territory, warning other dolphins to keep away. Dolphins can produce extremely loud sounds by rapidly clamping their jaws together. This behavior bangs their teeth together, producing an acoustic signal that transmits large distances. Jaw claps are generally understood to be an aggressive signal, used as a threat. But jaw clapping also occurs during play – the difference between real aggression and play aggression is often very subtle, just like in the case of humans.

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They’re saying hi. Dolphins meeting up will caress each other’s pectoral (or side) fins. Researchers think it’s a greeting, like when we shake hands. Dolphins are known to rub their bodies up against each other, but also to engage in intricate rubbing behaviors using the pectoral fins. Dolphins will rub their fins into the fins of other dolphins, engaging in a behavior that looks a lot like holding hands. They will also rub the bodies of their friends, moving their fins rapidly over the face, flank or genital region, producing what is likely to be a pleasurable sensation. Sometimes dolphins will seek out rubs by positioning their bodies under the fin of their friend. Researchers have observed a behavior where dolphins will rest their fin on the back of their friend, holding it in place for hours at a time – likely a signal to other dolphins of their friendship.

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Depends on where you eat ’em! While eating sounds are considered uncouth in many countries, noodles slurping is actually a respectful sign of enjoyment in Japan. Some Japanese justify their slurping because they say that slurping cools off hot noodles when the noodles come into full direct contact with one’s tongue and ultimately makes it easier to consume them. This group of people also remarked that as time got on, their habit of slurping noodles became so ingrained that regardless of the temperature of the noodles (i.e. hot or cold), they would still slurp their noodles.

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Stretching your arm in front of neighbors at the table disrupts their meals – and is a good way to accidentally upend the gravy boat. It is impolite to reach over someone to pick up food or other items. Diners should always ask for items to be passed along the table to them. In the same vein, diners should pass those items directly to the person who asked. Always scoop food, using the proper utensil, away from you. Always use serving utensils to serve yourself, not your personal silverware.

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Dinnertime is also meeting time for most families, when everyone can discuss the day without smartphones and laptop screens getting in the way. Phones and other distracting items should not be used at the dining table. Reading at a table is permitted only at breakfast, unless the diner is alone. Urgent matters should be handled, after an apology, by stepping away from the table. Should a mobile telephone (or any other modern device) ring or if a text message is received, the diner should ignore the call. In exceptional cases where the diner feels the call may be of an urgent nature, they should ask to be excused, leave the room and take the call (or read the text message) out of earshot of the other diners. Placing a phone, keys, handbag or wallet on the dinner table is considered rude.

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This rule goes back to medieval times, when diners eat shoulder-to-shoulder at narrow feasting tables with no elbow room to spare. Imagine a big old medieval feast given by a ruler or lord. Everybody and their mother wants to go to it, and boast about how they dined with such and such. Most of these feasts would have been served on long tables with benches instead of seats. People would pack in like sardines and there simply was no room to have your elbows on the table without jostling your neighbor and disrupting his ability to eat. Allowing your elbows to nudge the guy next to you and hit his arm while he’s bringing some food to his mouth would be obviously rude. As well, such accidents could cause quarrels, or even violence to break out.

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NASA is planning to capture one. Its Asteroid Redirect Mission may attempt to nab an asteroid in a space probe’s “capture bag” and release the roving rock into lunar orbit. NASA hopes to begin landing astronauts on its captured asteroid by the mid-2020s.

Smaller asteroid impacts may be less catastrophic, but they can still cause significant damage. The space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was only 62 feet (19 m) wide, and it injured more than 1,200 people while damaging thousands of buildings as far as 58 miles (93 kilometers) away from the site of impact. NASA is starting to look for more of those smaller asteroids, now that most of the larger ones have already been cataloged.

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There’s gold (and other precious metals) in those rocks! In fact, a company called Planetary Resources plans to send robot miners to the asteroid belt.

The asteroid belt probably contains millions of asteroids. Astronomers think that the asteroid belt is made up of material that was never able to form into a planet, or of the remains of a planet which broke apart a very long time ago. The asteroids in the asteroid belt come in a variety of sizes. Some are very small (less than a mile across), while others are quite large. The largest asteroid is called Ceres. It is about one-quarter the size of our moon. It is a dwarf planet.

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Asteroids are roving rocks found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

A Meteor also known as shooting stars, meteors are places of rocks or ice that enter the Earth’s atmosphere. As much as 22,000,000 pounds (10,000,000 kg) of meteors burn harmlessly in the atmosphere each day.

Any piece of space debris that survives the fiery entry into Earth’s atmosphere is known as a meteorite once it touches down.

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Although movies portray asteroid belts as spaceship-smashing jumbles of rock, our solar system’s real asteroid belt isn’t nearly so treacherous. The average distance between rocks is nearly a million miles (1.6 million km), which would give spaceship pilots plenty of wiggle room.

It’s estimated that our asteroid belt once contained about 1000 times the mass it currently contains. However, within about one million years of its formation, it was down to somewhere in the vicinity of the stabilized amount we see today. Once this system was stabilized with almost no collisions, the asteroids simply travel in their respective orbits with the field itself neither increasing nor decreasing in mass significantly since that initial stabilization period.

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Nobody knows, but don’t lose any sleep over the thought of a space rock landing in your living room. Several monitoring projects – such as Spacewatch and the Minor Planet Center – use powerful telescopes to scan the skies and track the courses of any “near-Earth objects,” including asteroids that might drift too close to home. NASA has identified 90 percent of all the near-Earth objects large enough to cause catastrophic damage if they stuck our planet. So far, we’re in the clear.

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Because they’ve smashed into every planet in the solar system, including Earth, and one good hit could mean game over for life here. Asteroids travel at tens of thousands of miles an hour – speeds that transfer into destructive energy when they collide with a planet, moon, or each other. An asteroid 450 feet (137 m) across could destroy an entire city. More than a thousand people were injured in 2013 when an asteroid just 62 feet (19 m) wide exploded high in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia. An asteroid impact 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs.

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Stephen Hawking is famous for shedding light on black holes in 1960s through today in England. Considered the most brilliant scientific mind since Einstein, Stephen Hawking is famous for trying to reverse engineer the workings of the universe through quantum physics – or the study of the universe at its teeniest-weeniest level. He’s also an expert on black holes and their bizarre behavior. Based on his observations, Hawking believes that just as the universe began in a cosmic big bang; it will someday end up collapsing into black holes.

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Because space is big. The galaxy might be teeming with life, but the gulfs between stars make visiting our neighbors an impossible mission – at least for now. Remember, it would take thousands of years to travel to the closest star outside our solar system using modern spaceship technology.

As previously mentioned, space is big, so there are tons of regions to listen for alien signals. If we’re not listening precisely in the direction from which a signal is originating, we’d never hear it.

Radio technology may be commonplace here on Earth, but on far-flung worlds, alien societies may have graduated to more advanced communication technologies, like neutrino signals. We can’t decipher those just yet.

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Sports historians debate over the origin of football’s name. One explanation is that, in the mid-1800s, American football evolved from the game of rugby, a rough-and-tumble sport that, in turn, evolved from a much bloodier medieval game called campball. In both rugby and campball, players use their feet as well as their hands to move the ball around, although tossing the ball forward is a no-no. Rules changed all the time in the early days of American football. Even forward tosses were illegal until 1906, when they were introduced to make the sport safer. Players’ use of feet in the game’s early days likely played a role in its name.

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Humans don’t, but some insects sure do. While some bugs drink blood, certain species of moths, bees, and butterflies drink tears. To them, tears are tasty and nutritious, filled with minerals and salts that they need to survive. Most of these “lacryphagous” insects sip the tears of mammals – even humans! Researchers around the world have also seen bees and butterflies slurping liquid from the eyes of alligators and crocodiles, who don’t seem to mind sharing their tears.

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Friends (or foes) who express phony sadness to gain sympathy are said “crocodile tears.” The expression is an old one, based on the myth that alligators and crocodiles cry when they devour their victims. Crocodiles do indeed cry when they eat, but scientists are stumped by the cause. Some researchers suspect that the hissing noises crocodiles make while eating unclogs their sinuses and turns on the waterworks. Saltwater crocodiles, meanwhile, cry to purge excess salt.

So then, while the crocodile eats, any drops of water that result from it “crying” would be ones of insincerity; its tears would not be from genuine sadness. So a comparison is drawn—when someone is displaying feelings of sorrow that are thought to be insincere, or if they are fake crying about something, then their tears are like that of a crocodile. Hence, they are said to be shedding ‘crocodile tears.’

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When someone (for instance, an older relative) seems stubborn about learning something new (say, how to turn on a computer), he or she might shrug and use this tired expression. And when that person does, clue him or her in to this fact: With the proper training, even stubborn breeds of mutts can learn to heel, sit, and roll over well into their golden years. 

Golden people to change their habits or acquire new skills is impossible. puppies are teachable, but older dogs are less apt to be able to be trained, or so popular wisdom had it. by the same token, an octogenarian who has read the morning newspaper for decades is unlikely to be willing, much less eager, to switch to the online edition.
 

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It’s strategy stolen from ostriches, which supposedly nudge their noggins into the ground to avoid danger. When people would rather not face a threatening situation or awful reality, they’re said to have their heads in the sand. The expression has just one problem (well, two problems if you consider it unhealthy to hide from reality): It’s based on a myth. Ostriches don’t really stick their heads in the sand. They do drop down and press their necks against the ground to hide from threats, but they keep their heads out so they can see what’s going on.

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It is a familiar sensation to anyone who has faced a pop quiz, given a speech in front of classmates, or asked a special someone on a date. Your mouth goes dry, your palms get wet with sweat, your heart goes pitter-patter, and your stomach starts to flutter (hence the expression). Of course, you don’t really have a butterfly bouncing around in your belly. These uneasy feelings are your body’s natural reaction to dangerous or stressful situations – a reaction known as the fight-or-flight response. Your brain triggers the release of chemicals that increase the circulation in your stomach and causes the fluttery effect. It’s your body’s way of getting ready to fight or flee a threat – a holdover from when your ancestors had to contend with saber-toothed predators. Hey, that pop quiz doesn’t seem so bad now.

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Because many bats hunt at night and rely on a sonar system to “see” using reflected sound waves – a system known as echolocation – people once assumed these flying mammals were blind. Hence, anyone with poor eyesight might be called “blind as a bat.” But although many species of bats have small eyes, they can all see quite clearly. In fact, researchers have learned that bats will trust their eyes more than their sonar when flying in low light. Bats evolved echolocation to hunt for bugs at night, which gave them a survival edge over mammals and birds that competed for food during the daylight hours. So think twice before you call someone blind as a bat – unless you actually want to compliment their eyesight!

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When we know only a little bit about a big problem, we say it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Icebergs are typically huge. Some are larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One Antarctic iceberg rivals the size of Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean. Most of that icy mass lies below the surface of the water. Only about one-eighth of an iceberg – the famous “tip” from the expression – is visible from above.

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Researchers who study the paranormal (or phenomena beyond the boundaries of science) believe that people leave behind energy when they die – especially when they die a traumatic death – and that energy shows itself as “spectral” activity.

Creepy moans, creaky stairs, flickering lights, sudden chills, shadowy figures, and even human-shaped forms dressed in old-fashioned getups. Using high-tech gadgets, pursuers of the paranormal skulk through old houses, graveyards, and other allegedly haunted spots hoping to document ghostly goings-on. They’ve yet to uncover any conclusive evidence, but that hardly seems to matter: A third of all Americans claim they believe in ghosts.

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A vast region if the Atlantic bounded by Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico, the Bermuda Triangle is notorious for swallowing planes, boats, and ships. According to one report, 75 planes and hundreds of yachts have gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle in the past century. The most famous disappearing act was Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers that took off on a training mission in 1945 and vanished over the Atlantic Ocean. Search crews found no trace of the planes or the 14 men aboard them.

Navigators going back to the days of Christopher Columbus reported confusing compass readings in the Bermuda Triangle. Pilots have complained of an eerie electrical fog that interferes with their instruments. Believers in the paranormal suspect the Triangle is a gateway to another dimension or home to mysterious ship-wrecking technology from the lost city of Atlantis. Even without any supernatural shenanigans, the eerie area is certainly an easy place to get lost. Swift currents and sudden storms send ships swirling in circles. Shipwrecking reefs lie just under the surface in some places; the seafloor dips into trenches five miles (8 km) deep in others. The Triangle has been a superhighway for sea traffic since the early days of exploration, so it makes sense that the region would see more accidents than less-traveled areas. Wreckage not set adrift by the strong currents could sink into the region’s trenches, never to be seen again.

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The first reports of something fishy in Loch Ness, Scotland’s second largest lake, go back 2,000 years, when a fearsome tattooed tribe known as the Picts chiseled the image of a finned creature onto a large stones nearby. Five centuries later, according to one written account, an Irish monk shouted a prayer to repel a monster poised to gobble a Loch Ness bather. A series of high-profile sightings in the 1930s transformed “Nessie” from a creature of folklore into a cryptozoology superstar. More than 4,000 eyewitness accounts of a massive lake monster – some verified by lie-detector testing – have been reported since. As with those of Bigfoot, many of these sightings and photographs were proven as hoaxes, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of true Nessie believers. Their number one Nessie suspect: the plesiosaur, a long-necked marine dinosaur that was supposed to have died out with T. rex and his kin 65 million years ago.

Nessie skeptics believe the sightings are simply cases of mistaken identity. Others, dog-paddling deer, and large sturgeon can look mysterious when their backs break the surface of the lake. High-tech sonar searchers have turned up nothing conclusive from the lake’s murky depths. And yet the search for Nessie continues. At least one website maintains a live camera view of the lake, encouraging viewers to keep a round-the-clock watch for suspicious activity. The ancient Picts may have recorded Nessie in stone; modern creature hunters can now tag the beast online.

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Bigfoot believers print to the eyewitness accounts – more than 3,000 in all – of towering apelike creatures said to wander the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Roughly 10,000 supposed Bigfoot tracks have been reported since the early 1800s – although these prints vary wildly. (Older tracks show four toes; newer ones to have five.) Today the beast is a central figure in cryptozoology the study of legendary creatures, and cryptozoologists (people who study said legendary creatures) think Bigfoot represents a “missing link” between humans and our hairy ancestors. Yet despite decades of Bigfoot hunting, no one has recovered a body of the beast – a fact often cited by nonbelievers as proof that Bigfoot is bogus.

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Shigeru Miyamoto is famous for designing your favorite games in 1980s through today in Japan. You may not know his name, but you certainly know his games. Donkey of Zelda, Mario Kart – all of these landmark titles (along with their characters and many sequels) are the creations of Shigeru Miyamoto, a game designer at Nintendo since the late 1970s. Miyamoto has been called the Steven Spielberg of video games for a reason: His creations combine crowd-pleasing thrills and charming characters with deep, secret-filled game play.

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Armies of jerks lurk on the Internet. And even the most mundane topics set off these cyber-bullying “trolls,” who pick fights over everything from politics to sci-fi plots to sports stats to the merits of a particular pop star. Psychologists think they know why the Internet brings out the worst in people. Human are social animals and evolved with brains wired for face-to-face interaction. The Internet, for all it has done to spread knowledge and shrink the world, has in some ways pushed people farther apart. Web browsers remove people’s faces from conversations while adding anonymity, letting complete strangers behave badly without consequences. Research has shown that people are more likely to criticize others if they’re not in the same room. So while you can’t do anything to curb cattiness online, you can choose to treat others with respect. And escaping the lair of the Internet troll is as easy as hitting the Back button.

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Spend enough time exploring the Internet and you’re bound to see:

Grumpy Cat: People write suitably unhappy captions on photos of this perpetually depressed-looking house cat.

Planking: Planking pranksters pose facedown in public spots for photos they upload to the Internet.  

Diet Coke and Candy: Backyard chemists harness the chemical reaction between Diet Coke and a certain candy to create frothy soda geysers.

Lolcats: Photos of cute cats are captioned with silly, grammatically incorrect messages from the kitty’s point of view, the most famous phrase being “I can has cheezburger?”

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A meme is an idea or a behavior that spreads from person to person while subtly changing over time. Internet memes spread through emails, social media, and on message boards. Unlike viral videos, memes invite people to participate in the behavior or customize the message. Web surfers hope their cheesy tweaks will gain them Internet fame.

Memes that are shared on social media can be widely spread from Facebook, WhatsApp. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Viber and many more.  The majority of internet memes are passed on by teenagers and adults. There are several ways in which a meme can be shared, one is by uploading it on your social media page e.g. Facebook or Instagram, then it is shared or retweeted to your followers. You can say, internet memes are just the adjusted form of sharing a short message or idea.

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He’s trying to trick you into buying a pair of shoes. This is an example of viral marketing. Millions of Web surfers fell for an online video demonstrating the art of “liquid mountaineering,” aka running on water, in summer 2010. The footage featured a group of athletes sprinting farther and farther across the surface of a chilly lake (the secret, apparently, is to pump your feet while wearing the right shoes). It was also totally fake – an advertisement for the brand of shoes worn in the video.

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Sometimes they just want to share funny footage (everyone loves a cute-kitty video!), but more often than not, they want your attention. Viral videos grow in viewership like a snowball rolling down a hill. The more people who pass around the videos an share them with friends, the more popular the videos become! Video creators stand to make a few bucks from websites that pay a little moolah for every view. Advertising companies concoct viral videos in an attempt to build buzz around a product or piece of entertainment by tricking people into talking about it online. Next time you see something stupendous, think twice before hyping it. You might be giving someone free advertising!

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From the get-go, messaging-app Twitter was designed to let people share text messages over mobile phones rather than computers. Most phones can display only a limited amount of characters, so Twitter’s designers restricted its messages length to meet those limits.

When Twitter was born in 2006, it was designed to be used via wireless carriers’ text-messaging services. They were (and are) limited to 160 characters. So Twitter’s creators reserved 20 characters for a user name, leaving 140 characters for the post–not yet known as a “tweet”–itself.

At the time, it was a straightforward accommodation of a technical restriction. But the 140-character limit soon became the single most famous thing about the service. A decade later, it remains a daily fact of life for anyone who ever runs out of characters before concluding a tweet.

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Mom warned you that gum doesn’t digest; it just sits in your stomach soaking in a stew of digestive and taking up space. Acids and enzymes in your stomach make short work of gum’s sugars and flavor additives, but its synthetic-rubber base is one tough glob to digest. That doesn’t mean gum just swirls around and around in your belly like a penny in a washing machine. Like clockwork, your stomach empties its contents into the intestine for further digestion. Any gum gobs, corn kernels, or other tough-to-digest treats go along for the ride. It all gets pushed to the colon and passed in your poop, looking much as it did when you ate it. Not that we suggest you go looking.

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Chewing gum is a funny kind of food – the only kind you’re allowed to play with. Go ahead and chew it, snap it, and blow it into bubbles, but whatever you do, don’t swallow it. Gum’s rubbery properties are a product of its ingredients, including synthetic rubber and softeners that keep it from turning into a chalky block in your mouth. Synthetic rubber? Softeners? Yummy! Or not, which is why gum makers add “flavorings” – the closest thing to food in the ingredients list. And like food, these sweeteners mix with saliva in your mouth and sink to your stomach each time you swallow. Eventually, all the sweeteners head south, leaving you with a flavorless lump of softened rubber to spit into the nearest trash can.

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Sugar is made of molecules of sucrose, a compound held together by relatively weak bonds. When the sucrose molecules mix with water, the water molecules surround and break the bonds holding together the sugar molecule. Th sugar is still in the water, of course (which is why the water tastes sweet), but now it’s dissolved into the new sugar-and-water mix, called a “solution.” Hot water dissolves sugar more quickly – and can hold more of it – because the heat spreads its molecules farther apart, making room for more sucrose.

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When a candy maker and a dentist teamed up to invent a new kind of treat in 1899, they dubbed it “fairy floss” for a reason: As soon as their fluffy confection hit the mouth, it seemed to magically disappear like a fairy in the forest. Thirty years later, fairy floss became known by its more popular name, cotton candy, but its magical properties remained. The secret lies in the recipe. Cotton candy is made of sugar heated – or caramelized – in a special machine, colored by food coloring, and spun at high speeds into thin strands. Despite its fluffy appearance, cotton candy is still basically sugar. And like sugar, it dissolves in water – in this case, the saliva in your mouth.

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For the same reason bagels have holes – so they’re not a gooey mess inside. Although doughnuts and bagels are cooked in different ways (fried and baked, respectively), both are dense with dough when they’re solid disk. To help them cook evenly all the way through, bakers punch out the middles. The holes also helped bakers display doughnuts on sticks when they were introduced in the late 1800s.

Donuts became popular in America around the same time bagels were becoming popular. Bakers and street vendors would often sell bagels stacked on long sticks or strung on a long rope. Some people believe that the holes in donuts allowed them to be sold in a similar way. Many people believe that those pieces of cut-out dough are what are used to make donut holes, which are those little round donut pieces that so many kids love to eat with milk.

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(1) Don’t guzzle water! Although a splash of icy H2O might provide momentary relief, it will only scatter the scorching capsaicin chemical throughout your mouth, spreading the pain.

(2) Do drink milk, which actually works like a vacuum to slurp the capsaicin from your pain receptors. The colder the milk, the better.

(3) If you don’t have milk, you can eat another dairy product such as cottage cheese, yogurt, or – best of all – ice cream!

(4) Mix a tablespoon of sugar into a glass of water, then swish the water around in your mouth and spit it out. The sugar in the water bonds with the capsaicin, clearing it from your mouth.

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A chemist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to answer this very question in 1912. His system measures the heat factor of chili peppers in multiples of 100 “Scoville units,” as rated by human tasters with iron tongues! The higher the rating, the hotter the pepper. Here’s a peppering of peppers from all parts of the Scoville scale spectrum:

Green Bell Pepper: 0 Scoville units

Tabasco Pepper: 50,000 Scoville units

Jalapeno Pepper: 5,000 Scoville units

Habanaga Pepper: 500,000 Scoville units

Ghost Pepper: 1,000,000 Scoville units

The Ghost Pepper is so hot that it will burn your skin unless you wear gloves. The capsaicin concentration in ghost pepper is even higher than the amount used in pepper spray, a nonlethal weapon wielded by police.

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That bowl of four-alarm chili is waging chemical warfare on your tongue. Chili peppers contain capsaicin (pronounced cap-SAY-ah-sin), a substance that triggers the sensations of pain and heat when it touches your tongue (or, in the case of the hottest peppers, even your hands). Pepper plants likely evolved this compound to keep away nibbling animals. Spicy-food connoisseurs build up a resistance to capsaicin by gradually eating progressively hotter peppers until they can nibble thermonuclear meals while working up only a mild sweat.

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Because they’re not real meals. Each dish, dessert, and drink has been carefully prepared and arranged by a “food stylist,” a special food photographer who uses all sorts of sneaky tricks to make dishes look scrumptious for commercials, cookbooks, and menus. The stylist stuffs baked chicken with napkins to plump it up and paints burgers with burnt matches to stimulate grill marks. Milk is substituted with kindergarten glue so cereals don’t look soggy. Dish soap is dabbled on the surface of drinks to give that fresh-poured look. Um, yum?

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Your brain is split into two symmetrical (or mirror-image) halves known as hemispheres, connected by a ribbon of white matter known as the corpus callosum, through which both halves communicate. It’s common knowledge that the right side of the brain is the source of music concertos, masterpiece paintings, and deep emotions, while the left side specializes in solving logic problems and dealing with numbers. But in this case, common knowledge is incorrect. While the various lobes have their specialties (language, memory, sensory perception, etc.), experiments show that both hemispheres pull their weight during every task. While the left hemisphere excels at detecting words in sounds, for example, the right hemisphere detects the emotions in those words.

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It’s just an unfriendly reminder that you have fillings (or some other metal dental work). When two different metals come into contact, an electrical charge passes between them. That’s the zap you feel when tinfoil touches the metal in tour mouth. The jolt travels from the tin to your tooth’s nerve through the filling. People without dental work won’t experience this sensation – yet another reason to brush and floss regularly!

The electric shock travels from the foil into the filling or crown, and then into the nerve. The shock is then sent to the brain as a pain sensation, because that’s what it is, pain. The final step in the process is to remove the foil and NEVER do it again.

The reason your friend didn’t feel any pain is because they more than likely haven’t had any dental work done in the way of fillings or crowns. Essentially, if your mouth is in perfect condition and has never been touched by a dentist, you will feel no pain from chewing aluminum foil.

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Caffeine – a chemical extracted from coffee beans, cacao (the source of chocolate), cola nuts (used in, you guessed it, cola), and tea leaves – offers no nutritional value, yet some adults can’t start their day without a jolt from their cup of joe. The caffeine in coffee, tea, energy drinks, pop, and chocolate stimulates the central nervous system, delivering a boost energy while clearing away the cobwebs of drowsiness (which is why people feel charged up after chugging down a caffeinated drink). But caffeine’s effects are temporary. Once the caffeine wears off, you’re left feeling drained and foggy. You might even have a headache. Drinking too much caffeine will cause your heart to race and your hands to shake. And good luck getting to sleep if you slurp a soda before bedtime.

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Your body’s guts have a lot of give. When you encounter a sudden change in direction and speed, your organs jostle against each other until forces of gravity and momentum reassert themselves and pull everything back into place. Drops on roller coasters (and, to a lesser extent, dips in the road) counteract the forces of gravity and throw your body into a sudden free fall. For an instant, with nothing pushing against it, your stomach rises and you feel that funky sinking feeling that makes roller coasters so much fun and/or terrifying.

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J.K. Rowling is famous for introducing the world to a boy wizard in 1997 through today in England. The “boy who lived” first sparked to life in the imagination of J.K. Rowling when she was riding a train from Manchester to London in 1990. Rowling’s own mother was dying of an illness at the time, which influenced her tale of an orphaned boy and the villainous Voldemort’s quest to conquer death. Low on money and raising her daughter alone, Rowling released her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known as the Sorcerer’s Stone in the U.S.) seven years later, followed by six sequels. Her creation spawned blockbuster movies and even a theme park. She’s now one of the England’s wealthiest people and possibly the most famous English author since William Shakespeare.

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Originally appearing as a carpenter named Jumpman in the Donkey Kong arcade game, Mario was renamed after the landlord of Nintendo’s American warehouse. Mario’s profession changed to plumber when he appeared again in Mario Bros.

Regarding Mario’s origins, it’s common knowledge among game fans that legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created him for 1981’s Donkey Kong arcade game. But few know that Nintendo borrowed Mario’s name and Italian heritage from a real man.

That man’s name is Mario Segale, and he’s not a plumber. He’s a wealthy real estate developer in Tukwila, Washington.  Segale unwittingly stepped into video game history by renting out a warehouse that served as Nintendo’s U.S. headquarters in the early 1980s. At that time, a financially struggling Nintendo of America (NOA) was preparing the U.S. launch of Donkey Kong. Legend has it that NOA President Minoru Arakawa noticed physical similarities between Donkey Kong’s short, dark-haired protagonist and the landlord. So the crew at NOA nicknamed the character Mario, and it stuck.

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Director George Lucas changed the title of the third Star Wars movie from Revenge of the Jedi after realizing that true Jedi wouldn’t seek revenge. The change came just two months before Return of the Jedi was released in cinemas.

It was a big financial problem for Lucas film, who had already released lots of merchandise, trailers and posters with the original title. Since the change fans have speculated that Lucas called it Revenge of the Jedi on purpose, with full intention of changing it later to prevent counterfeiting.

Another rumour claimed it was because the title would be too closely related to Star Trek II: The Vengeance of Khan, which too was changed to Wrath of Khan.

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The company that makes the famous snap-together bricks took its name from the Danish phrase leg godt, which translates to “play well.” Approximately 20 billion LEGO elements (bricks) are made every year in the LEGO factory in Billund – equivalent to approximately 2 million elements an hour or 35,000 a minute. The moulds used in production are accurate to within two-thousandth of a millimeter (0.002 mm), and the accuracy of the moulding process means that only 18 elements in every million produced fail to meet the company’s high quality standard. A professor of mathematics calculated that there are over 915 million ways to combine six LEGO bricks. Laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks sold in a year would reach more than five times round the world. There are about 2,350 different elements in the LEGO range – plus 52 different LEGO colours. Each element may be sold in a wide variety of different colours and decorations, bringing the total number of active combinations to more than 7,000.

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NASA intended to name its first shuttle, built in the 1970s as a test craft for atmospheric flights, the Constitution. But after a letter-writing campaign by fans of the sci-fi show Star Trek, President Gerald Ford asked NASA to name the shuttle Enterprise (the starship from the show). Ford never admitted that h was influenced by the Star Trek show or campaign, however. Regardless, Star Trek fans were thrilled – even though this real-life Enterprise never launched into space.

Enterprise was the culmination of decades of research in “lifting bodies.” Between 1963 and 1975, the Air Force and NASA researched methods of flying winged vehicles back from space and landing them like an aircraft. Six different prototypes were manufactured and flown in 223 glide tests, providing a set of information that was used for the shuttle and similar concepts developed by NASA.

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Researchers have found that between 65 and 80 percent of all conversations could be considered gossip – idle chatter and rumors about people’s private lives. Surprised? Don’t pretend you’ve never dished some dirt yourself! But gossip isn’t all bad, and it does serve a purpose. According to one study, about 5 percent of it is mean-spirited. The rest is considered crucial to making people feel connected and establishing the rules for a functional society.

As a general rule, people associate the concept of gossip with unnecessary, not very relevant information. And sometimes, it’s exactly like that. Think about the rumors we hear about famous people who don’t actually affect our lives.

But other times, gossip can be useful from an individual point of view. Asking a lot of questions can get you valuable information, which can then open up new opportunities to you. However, this type of behavior could be labeled as opportunistic. On top of that, it can also hurt your reputation.

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It’s the price of fame. When movie stars, pro athletes, politicians, and other famous folks are out and about, crews of camera-wielding paparazzi tag along hoping to capture the celebs not looking their best. Paparazzi stalk stars because the perfect unflattering photo can be worth a fortune – sometimes in the millions of dollars – to gossip magazines, TV shows, and websites. Celebrities, meanwhile, are striking back by releasing their own pics on photo-sharing sites before the paparazzi can get their cameras ready.

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Honey mushroom is the largest living thing. Just feet below the floor of Malheur National Forest in Oregon, U.S.A., sprawls the world’s largest living organism: the honey mushroom. For more than 2,500 years, it has spread its fungal filaments through the soil and grown to the size of 1,600 football fields. Now that’s one humongous fungus!

Different types of honey fungus are found all over the world. They fruit nearly year round in warmer ecosystems, and in the late summer to fall in North America. The most well known species is probably Armillaria mellea. The majority of honey fungus species have “rhizomorphs” or “mycelial cords”. These rhizomorphs are black, stringy tendrils that are made up of fungus cells. Their purpose is to channel nutrients and spread the infection of the fungus. Many other types of mushrooms have these as well, but they’re smaller and white.

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Goliath Birdeater is the largest spider. The size of a catcher’s mitt and sprouting inch-long fangs, this relative of the tarantula feeds on rodents and even birds that wander into its burrow. The giant huntsman spider of Southeast Asia has longer legs, but the Goliath birdeater beats it in body size.  The Goliath can reach up to 1-foot in body length and has 1-inch long fangs. The Goliath has tiny hairs on its body that it shoots at whoever or whatever is threatening it. Its bite isn’t deadly to humans (unless you’re allergic), but if you get bit by one, expect to experience severe pain, nausea and profuse sweating.

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African elephant is the largest land animal. Topping 13 feet (4 m) at the shoulder, African elephants are just a bit bigger than their Asian cousins. You can tell the two species apart by their ears: Africa elephant ears are shaped like their home continent.

An African elephant’s large ears also serve many purposes. The ears’ large surface area helps radiate excess heat under the harsh African sun. The ears are also often used to communicate visually. Flapping their ears can signify either aggression or joy. And finally, elephants’ ears, used in conjunction with the soles of their feet and their trunk, aid in the ability to hear sounds over long distances. On average, an elephant can hear another elephant’s call at 4 km (2.5 mi.) away. Under ideal conditions, their range of hearing can be increased to 10 km (6.2 mi.).

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Whale shark is the largest fish. It grows up to 46 feet long (14 m), rivaling a humpback whale in size. Its mouth can open large enough to swallow a human whole. (Reflex, these gentle giants eat only pinhead-size plankton). As thick as the walls of a bank vault, whale sharks skin is six inches (15 m) deep – the thickest of any animals’ – and covered in constellations of yellow spots. Marine biologists photograph these spots to identify whale sharks. Like fingerprints, the spots are unique to each animal.

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Ostrich is the largest bird. These flightless birds grow up to nine feet tall (2.7 m). They also lay the largest egg of any bird. One ostrich egg can weigh as much as two dozen chicken eggs.

Ostriches mainly feed on seeds, shrubs, fruits, flowers and small insects. They also swallowed pebbles for grilling foods in gigerium. Interestingly, ostriches can hold up to 1.3 kilograms of pebbles and sand within their gigerium. Ostriches can also live without water for several days.

The powerful long legs help ostriches for attacking the predators. Ostriches usually live in groups that contain 10 to 50 birds. A female ostrich lays up to 60 eggs in a year. On average, an ostrich egg measure 5.1 inches in diameter and up to 1.4 kg in weight.

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This one’s easy. Nothing tops the titanic size of the blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. The largest specimens grow to the length of a basketball court. A blue whale’s heart is as big as a compact car. Its tail flukes are as wide as a soccer goal. Folds in the skin of the whale’s throat allow it to stretch like a pelican’s, ballooning to monstrous proportions as it consumes tiny shrimplike crustaceans called krill – up to four tons (3.6 t) per day! Once found in every ocean except the high Arctic, blue whales were hunted nearly to extinction. The species began to bounce back after hunting was outlawed in the 1960s, but only a tiny fraction their original numbers remains.

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Of course not, but they sure seem like they do! Cats possess grace and a sense of balance that borders on the supernatural. Their most stupendous superpower is the “righting reflex”: the ability to spin in midair and land on their paws no matter which way they fall. Cats that take a tumble from great heights also spread their legs and bodies to slow the descent. This natural parachute combined with their righting reflex has helped kitties survive accidental falls from skyscrapers.

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Ah, now here’s a question that has dog and cat owners fighting like, well, cats and dogs. Without a doubt, both of these treasured pets and clever, but research has shown that, mutts edge out kitties when it comes to overall smarts. Pooches have bigger brains, learn to understand hundreds of human words, and can be trained for all sorts of important jobs. Cats have a far less impressive work resume (they’re much more difficult to train), although they can learn tricks and are experts at manipulating their masters with one perfectly pitched meow (studies have shown that cats learn which noises get our attention). Researchers believe that dogs became brainer as they evolved alongside humans and had to cope with our demands and problems. Social animals tend to be smarter.

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Of course your cat loves you, but it’s possible your cat might love someone else, too. That’s what researchers discovered when they strapped tiny National Geographic cameras to the collars of 60 house cats and let them roam the suburbs of Athens, Georgia, U.S.A. The cat’s-eye footage revealed that at least one cat in the study lived a double life, splitting his time between two families who each thought they were the cat’s true owners. The two-timing tabby would scratch at one house’s door, nuzzle the owners, tuck into dinner, then scamper to the other house for a second dose of food and affection.

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Researchers can point to a few reasons why Fido and not Miss Whiskers are famously known as men and women “best friend.” For starters, dogs are pack animals, descended from wolves, while cats are solitary and less social. Dogs are hard-wired to get along with others. Plus, pooches and people go way back – as far back as 30,000 years ago, when humans began tossing morsels to wolves in return for protection and help with hunting. Cats, by contrast, have lived with us for only the past 8,000 years or so. Although dogs and cats have developed a deep relationship with humans, canines are more attuned to our feelings and needs.

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Although only lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars can roar, all cats can purr. Researchers aren’t quite sure why cats produce this pleasant rumbling sound, but they think it starts as a way for mommas to reassure kittens that they’re safe. Once cats grow up, purring evolves to convey general contentment. Some scientists think that a cat’s purring sound might even help it develop stronger bones!

But not all cats can purr. Domestic cats, some wild cats and their relatives — civets, genets and mongooses — purr, and even hyenas, raccoons and guinea pigs can purr. However, cats that purr can’t roar, and cats that roar can’t purr because the structures surrounding roaring cats’ larynxes aren’t stiff enough to allow purring.

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Because your kitty thinks your stalking skills could use some work. Biologists think cats share their kills out of motherly instinct. Mama cats bring minced mice and battered birds to their kittens to teach them hunting skills. Trying to stop your cat from hunting and sharing is like asking your brother to stop stinking up the bathroom – it’s battle against nature!

Cats, in spite of being solitary hunters, are a social species, and communication between cats includes the use of a variety of vocalizations (meows, purrs, trills, whistles, grunts and growls), as well as cat pheromones and types of specific body language for cats.

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Cats groom themselves throughout the day using their sandpapery tongues to comb food and dirt from their fur. Unfortunately, they gobble down gobs of loose hair with all that gunk. Feline bellies aren’t equipped to digest strands of fur, so, kersplat! The hair comes out the same way it went in, and you discover soggy fuzz balls all over the house. Hey, a few hair balls are better than a filthy feline!

Hairballs in cats are more likely to appear in long-haired breeds, such as Persians and Maine Coons. Cats that shed a lot or who groom themselves compulsively are also more likely to have hairballs, because they tend to swallow a lot of fur. You may have noticed that your cat didn’t have hairballs as a kitten, but developed them as she grew. This is quite normal — as cats get older they become more adept groomers and therefore more proficient at removing fur from their coats with their tongues, which means more hairballs for you to clean up.

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The easiest way to answer this question is to trade places with your pooch. As a social pack animal, you consider it your job to guard your territory and look after the rest of your pack (in your case, the humans you live with). Feeling at home in Fido’s fur? Good. Now consider this: Nearly every day, a strange human approaches your territory, often while the rest of your pack isn’t home. It’s an intruder! The stranger rattles the front door, trying to get in. You must protect the house! You bark and growl and leap against the door, doing everything in your power to scare away the intruder. And it works! The stranger wanders away to the next house. Mission accomplished…until tomorrow.

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When you try to stop Spot from shoveling away the soil in the backyard, you’re waging a battle against instincts inherited from his wolf ancestors. Dogs dig holes for several reasons including:

To cool off: Freshly dug dirt makes a great escape from the heat on summer days.

To bury themselves: Just like wolves that bury food for survival, dogs feel an instinctive urge to hide precious items – such as bones and chew toys – for later retrieval.

To have fun: Some dog breeds (especially terriers and others bred to hunt burrowing rodents) just enjoy digging.

To keep themselves occupied: Certain dogs suffer separation anxiety when they’re left alone all day. Digging gives them something to do.

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Veterinarians think dogs secrete a thin layer of snot or just lick their noses – to keep them wet, which may help them detect the direction of interesting odors. Dogs with warm, dry noses are just as healthy as those with cold, wet ones.

Dogs are covered in hair and cannot sweat through their skin like people do. Instead, dogs dissipate heat through panting and by evaporation of moisture through their noses & paws. They have special glands inside the nose that secrete a watery fluid to keep the inside of the nose moist and to help keep the dog cool.

A warm nose does not always indicate a fever. The body temperature of your dog can only be determined with an actual thermometer. A warm and dry nose is common in healthy dogs after sleeping. Dry, chapped noses are common in older dogs and in some breeds like Bulldogs or Pugs.  Playing outside or sitting near a heat source can also cause a warm, dry nose.

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When a dog pants, she’s turning on the air-conditioning. Painting sucks in and circulates air to cool her body. Unlike their human best friends, dogs don’t sweat through their skin. They do it through the pads of their paws, but not enough to cool off on a hot afternoon (you’d feel the same way if you played fetch in a fur coat).

Most of us pant from time to time as we run, climb stairs, or otherwise exert ourselves. While dogs may pant while they exercise, though, they do it for different reasons. What’s more, no matter how fast they may pant, dogs won’t experience the dizziness of hyperventilation.

Panting as a cooling mechanism is necessary because dogs do not have an effective system of sweat glands like people do. Instead, dogs cool their bodies using the evaporation of moisture from the mouth and tongue, and by exchanging the hot air of their lungs with cooler external air.

When the outside air temperature is the same or higher than the puppy’s normal body temperature of 102 degrees, panting won’t effectively cool off the puppy and can lead to heat stroke. Hot puppies may also resort to digging to scoop out cool places to rest.

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Fallen leaves, cow plops, roadkill – all sorts of repulsive piles seem like paradise to your pooch, who has a nasty habit of rolling in fifth the instant he or she gets outside (usually right after a bath). But remember, a dog’s nose is a hundred times more sensitive than a human’s. What smells sweet to us – such as dog shampoo – might seem just plain awful to your dog, so he or she will roll in something smelly to overpower the shampoo odor. Some experts believe dogs instinctively roll in poop or dead critters to cover their scent or share these foul finds with pack members. In this case, unfortunately, you’re part of your dog’s pack!

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Spot’s sense of smell is a hundred times more sensitive than yours, and he lives in a world where odor is information. Glands on a dog’s backside transmit all sorts of info about his or her identity, including age, sex, social status, and much more. So when dogs sniff each other’s stinky parts, they’re really just saying hello.

If both dogs are healthy, well-socialized, and supervised, it’s actually a good idea to let them “sniff it out” as much as they want (provided each dog is tolerating it well). Dogs may actually be less likely to fight if they take an adequate amount of “getting-to-sniff-you” time with one another. However, some dogs may get intense with the sniffing while other dogs need their personal space.

Watch the behavior and body language of all dogs. If one dog is overdoing it and the other dog seems annoyed or stresses, then the owners should call their dogs away. Also, it’s ideal to let dogs meet and play in pairs. Dogs are more likely to get overexcited in groups, which can lead to fights. 

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They say old habits die hard – and this particular one goes back to Fido’s ancestors. Wolves and wild dogs turn in circles to tamp down the grass and drive out bugs before dropping for a nap. Your pup inherited that same behavior as instinct, whether he or she is settling down in the backyard or on the bed’s comforter.

Dogs in the wild often dig out their own resting spots. Once they’re satisfied with their work, they may examine it several times over by walking around it in circles. If your pooch circles his bedding site before retiring for a nap or for the night, he’s essentially just checking his digging work and making sure that he has a cozy and safe place to sleep — canine style. Dogs also often circle around as a way of driving out any pesky bugs that may be lingering in their sleeping spots.

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Dog experts disagree over why canines chase their tails in a race they can’t win. Some breeds – German shepherds, Finnish bull terriers, and miniature terriers – hit the spin cycle more than others, leading scientists to think tail-chasing is tied to genetics. But studies show puppies that aren’t properly socialized (for instance, they’re removed from their littermates too early) grow up to be habitual tail-chasers. Another cause could be a lack of vitamins in a dog’s diet. Some trainers suspect this hyperactive habit is a sign of a bored dog that wants to play; other trainers think tail-chasers are overstimulated by other dogs in the house or rowdy kids nearby. In any case, most dogs can be broken of the habit through patient training.

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There’s reason you say “awww” whenever you see a puppy or a smiling baby. We have evolved to think that any creature with a big head, large eyes, and a button nose – features that most human babies share – is cute. Anyone who has had to babysit knows that toddlers require a lot of time and attention – more than the offspring of other animals. Evolution has wired our brains to think babies are cute, which makes us more willing to drop everything we’re doing and care for them. In fact, studies show that babies who are considered extra cute get extra attention. Animals with similar facial features – from kitties to koalas – also set off our cuteness response.

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Kangaroos (along with koalas, opossums, and Tasmanian devils) are marsupials, a type of mammal that nurtures its defenseless newborns in a pouch outside its body. While other types of mammals (known as placental mammals) grow their offspring inside the womb, marsupials give birth relatively early and continue their pregnancies in their pouches. The pouch fulfills all the life-support functions of the womb until the baby kangaroo (called a joey) is ready to hop on its own two feet. Sometimes, older and younger joeys will squeeze into the same pouch. Bet you’ll never complain about your room being cramped again.

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Although wolves are social animals that like to live in happy pack families, some wander the wilderness without ever finding a mate, while others lose their pack members to tragic fates. These lone wolves face many hardships not experienced by those living in packs. Unable to use teamwork to bring down large animals, they must settle for easier-to-kill prey such as birds, beavers, and rodents – mere morsels compared with typical pack feasts. Wherever they wander, lone wolves have to be extra wary: They risk a vicious attack if they enter another pack’s territory.

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A wolf pack relies on teamwork to hunt prey and defend its territory. By working together, a pack can take down much larger animals. And nothing builds team spirit like a good group howl, one of nature’s most haunting sounds. Wolves howl in a chorus often: when they wake up, before a hunt, perhaps even for fun. Audible up to ten miles (16 km) away in the right terrain, a howl also functions as the pack’s long-distance phone service. Wolves will howl to call members to a meeting site, warn of danger to the pups, or tell neighboring packs to keep off their land.

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Of all the cats, lions and tigers produce the loudest roars – loud enough to rattle the suspension of any nearby vehicles. Fatty folds in the throats of these big cats vibrate to create and amplify that sandpapery roaring sound with just a little bit of air pressure from the lungs. Leopards and jaguars – the only other cats that can roar – also have these folds.

The cats are also aided by the strength of their vocal folds, which can withstand stretching and shearing as air moves past them and the folds vibrate. The size of the animal or the vocal fold, or the frequency of the sound, didn’t matter. Elk have vocal folds about the same size, but they make high-pitched sounds. And humans speak in a range of sound frequencies similar to those of lions’ and tigers’ roars, but obviously our voices are much softer.
 

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Because they have something important to say, and they want every animal within five miles (8 km) – the range of a lion’s roar – to get the message. The sole social members of the feline family, lions roar to communicate with the rest of their pack (called a pride). A male lion on patrol will roar to let the females (called lionesses) know that the pride’s territory is free from rogue lions (or lions without a pride), or he might roar to tell other lions to keep their distance. Although not as loud as lions, lionesses roar to call their cubs home or shout for help in the hunt. Tigers, which are solitary animals like all other cats, unleash their roars to convey a simpler message. Keep out of my territory.

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Bats aren’t strong enough to take off from the ground like birds. By hanging upside down, they can drop right into the air and start flying. High-up tree branches and other roosting spots also give bats a place to hide from predators during a day. Unlike your hands (which require muscle power to hold a tight grip), bats’ feet close automatically on branches the instant they start hanging upside down.

By hanging out where few animals would think to look — and most can’t reach anyway — bats can enjoy a safe snooze. You might think bats would have competition from birds and other flying creatures, but the places where bats roost are not typically areas where it would be possible for birds to build a nest.

Bats have developed a special adaptation that makes sleeping upside-down as easy and effortless as sleeping in a bed is for humans. If you clench your fist around a baseball, your body uses muscles and tendons in your fingers, arms, wrists and hand. As the muscles in your arms contract, they pull on tendons, closing your fingers around the ball.

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Because it couldn’t fly over it. No matter how hard they flap their wings, chickens can hope for little more than a short glide and a soft landing. They aren’t really “flightless birds,” a group that includes ostriches, emus, and cassowaries. The breastbones of these birds can’t support the powerful muscles required to pump wings and achieve liftoff. (Penguins, meanwhile, are a different type of flightless birds built for underwater “flight.”) Flightless birds lost their ability to fly through evolution, but chickens became flightless over time through selective breeding, which made them too heavy for liftoff. After all, farmers hardly want their prized poultry soaring north for the winter. The chicken’s ancestor – the red jungle fowl, which is still around today – has retained the ability to fly.

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These tree-climbing natives of the South and Central American rain forests live their lives like they’re on permanent vacation, creeping so slowly that some sloths actually grow moss on their backs. (Although they always look sleepy, sloths doze for only a reasonable 9.6 hours a day, according to a 2008 study.) Their diet – which consists of leaves, flowers, and bits of fruit – is to blame for their slow-motion lifestyle. After all, imagine how sluggish you’d be if all you ate were salad greens, and you had to climb to every room in your house.

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Jamaican Olympic Athlete Usain Bolt is the fastest human. This aptly named sprinter has reached speeds above 23 miles an hour (37 kph). Bolt has the unique muscular build shared by most of the very best sprinters. All human muscles are made of a mix of slow- and fast-twitch fibers—as well as some that are undifferentiated, and will become slow- or fast-twitch depending on how we use them most often. Slow-twitch fibers are built for efficiency and use oxygen to generate energy from sugar. They’re most effective for activities sustained over a long period of time, like distance running. Fast-twitch muscle fibers are used to generate huge amounts of force, but they don’t use oxygen and as a result can’t carry us far. Training can help shape undifferentiated fibers into either slow- or fast-twitch, but for the most part the best runners were born with an imbalance of one or the other. Elite marathoners have way more slow-twitch fibers, and sprinters like Bolt have an abundance of fast-twitch ones.

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Hummingbird is the fastest animal based on body size. A dive-bombing hummingbird is speedier (relatively speaking) than the space shuttle on reentry. Scientists have declared these birds the world’s fastest animals relative to their size. Hummingbird dives at nearly twice the speed relative to its body size than the peregrine falcon, which flies at a maximum velocity of about 200 body lengths per second. The hummingbird is also faster than the swallow, which dives from high-altitude migratory flights at a speed of about 350 body lengths per second.  It also eats small insects to supplement its diet. Males are adorned with a brilliant red crown and their rounded tails have white tips on the outer feathers.

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Peregrine Falcon is the fastest animal overall. This master raptor achieves speeds over 240 miles an hour (386 kph) when it dives, making it the fastest creature on Earth. Peregrines are light in weight, aerodynamically shaped, and have robust respiratory systems; all of which allows them to be the fastest birds of prey, and animals in general. Peregrine falcon numbers took a massive hit during much of the 20th century in North America. The chemical made the falcon’s—and many other birds — eggshells thinner, preventing the embryos from developing, in addition to poisoning adult falcons.

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Marlin is the fastest fish. This shimmering spot fish can zoom to 80 miles an hour (129 kph) when trying to escape the hook of a fishing line. Black marlins are highly prized; hence they are fished for commercial reasons. The black marlin feeds on other smaller fish. Its main diet consists of cephalopods and various fishes. Black marlin is considered a recreational fish. Sports fishers use this fish species for gaming purposes. For example, off the coast of Australia, the black marlin is mostly caught when there is moonlight. This kind of fish resides mostly in warmer regions of the ocean waters such as the Gulf of California, and mostly along the coasts rather than in the deep seas.

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Ostrich is the fastest two-legged animal. Although they’re flightless birds, ostriches can zoom 43 miles an hour (70 kph) and use their wings for steering when being pursued by a predator. When you are travelling at such high speeds it is important to be able to see where you are going and the ostrich is well equipped in this department. Their eyes are the largest of any land animal, and, at 5 centimetres in diameter, they are bigger than their brains!

The Kalahari is a harsh environment for ostriches, however, as far as predators are concerned. Lions, leopards, cheetahs and hyenas all stalk the night. The ostrich is never perfectly at rest, having always to keep an eye out for any of the predators that would happily make a meal out of them.

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Cheetah is the fastest land animal. Cheetahs can sprint for up to 60 seconds at speeds reaching 75 miles an hour (120 kph). Cheetahs have between 2,000 and 3,000 spots, which help them to camouflage themselves. Previously, cheetahs were wide-spread across African and Asian continents, but now they are confined mostly to dry open grasslands of Sub-Saharan Africa, with the majority inhabiting natural reserves or parks. When a cheetah hunts, it gets as close as possible to its prey before trying to outrun it with a burst of speed. The cheetah then uses its paw to swipe the animal to the ground and then suffocates it with a bite to the neck.

It then eats as quickly as possible while looking out for scavengers such as lions, leopards, hyenas, vultures, and jackals, who will steal from the very shy cheetah.

Unlike most other cats, cheetahs prefer to hunt during the day, particularly early morning or early evening.

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For the same reason tigers have stripes: to help them hide while hunting. The cats’ coloration blends with tall grass, and the shifting shadows beneath trees and brush. Leopards, for instance, become virtually invisible when they sneak up on prey before pouncing at the last instant.

A cheetah’s spots cover nearly its entire body and may serve as camouflage by offsetting shadows in the gray-hued grasses they inhabit. Camouflage is not only essential for stalking prey but also for protecting cheetah cubs from predators

The jaguar is covered in ‘rosettes’ for camouflage in its jungle habitat. The spots vary over individual coats and between individual Jaguars. The ‘rosettes’ may include one or several dots and the shape of the dots varies. The spots on the head and neck are generally solid, as are those on the tail, where they may merge to form a band. The underbelly, throat and outer surface of the legs and lower flanks are white.

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Scientists have a few theories about the fashionable fur of these African equids (the family of mammals that includes horses). Some suspect it’s a type of camouflage to keep these herd animals from standing out in a crowd. The stripes break up the animal’s shape (a tactic known as disruptive coloration) as well as help it blend in with its neigbors, making it hard for a lion to see where one zebra ends and the next one begins. A more recent theory suggests that the zebra’s coloration repels bloodsucking insects, which don’t like to land on stripes. The stripes might be a natural pest control.

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(1) Sharks tend to target lone swimmers, so swim in a group.

(2) Leave the water immediately if you’re bleeding.

(3) Stay out of the water during the dawn and twilight hours, when sharks are on the prowl.

(4) Don’t wear shiny watch-bands or jewelry that sharks might mistake for dish scales.

(5) Avoid swimming in river mouths, areas between sandbars, or near drop-offs.

(6) Don’t swim near fishermen or diving seabirds. No reason to become shark bait!

(7) Wear a disguise. A company in Perth, Australia, designed a line of wet suits to make surfers, divers, and snorkelers appear less appetizing to sharks. The suit’s bold stripes mimic the coloration of dangerous marine creatures, such as sea snakes and lion-fish, which shakes avoid.

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Before you run screaming from the water, let’s get one thing clear: Shark attacks are incredibly rare. Far more people are injured by their toilets each year than by hungry shark. You have a 1 in 3,700,000 chance of being killed by a shark. And for every person who dies in the jaws of one of these fearsome fish, two millions sharks perish at the hands of humans.

But shark attacks do happen – an average of 19 attacks per year in the United States (and one fatal attack every two years). Researchers believe such attacks are typically a case of mistaken identity. A shark sees a swimmer’s hands and feet flashing in the murk and confuses them for the scale of a tasty fish. A surfer is a dead ringer for a sea lion or turtle when seen from below. Most shark attacks or humans are bump-and-runs – a quick taste of wet suit or surfboard or skin that tells the shark it has bitten the wrong animal. A bump from a little species might result in a few stitches. Bump-and-runs from great white sharks, which reach more than 20 feet (6 m) in length, can be much more serious.

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Marine biologists can’t always tell why pods of whales and dolphins – sometimes by the hundreds – will swim onto a beach and strand themselves in the surf; often dying en masse unless people manage to shove the behemoths back out to sea. Sometimes the whales are sick with pneumonia or some other illness. Sometimes they’ve suffered attacks from sharks or other whales species. Quirks in the Earth’s magnetic field – which whales follow as part of their biological navigation system – might also play a role. Mass strandings have been recorded as far back as 2,300 years ago, but some scientists speculate that strandings are on the rise today because of pollution and an increase in ocean noise caused by ship traffic and submarine sonar systems.

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With our two arms, two legs, and a dozen joints, humans have it easy when it comes to telling limb from limb. The octopus, on the other hand, has much more complicated body plan. Its eight boneless arms can form joints at any point, bending in all directions like cooked spaghetti noodles. And each arm bristles with hundreds of tooth-tipped suckers that stick to any fleshy surface. Imagine trying to untangle a string of holiday lights covered in glue. You’d think an octopus would spend every day just trying to keep its arms from tangling into one impossible knot, but these undersea wonders have two foolproof systems for keeping their limbs straight:

Smart legs: Each of the octopus’s eight arms has a mind of its own: a network of roughly 400,000 neurons that controls the arm without input from the animal’s main brain. These micro-brains help the arms work together rather than clump together.

Sucker-proof skin: Octopus skin excretes a special chemical. When the suckers brush against the creature’s other arms, they sense the chemical and automatically avoid latching on. The octopus can override this reflex if it wants to (say, it’s battling another octopus). Scientists think octopuses also rely on these chemicals to detect and identify each other.

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Because it’s home to billions of microscopic creatures called Pyrodinium bahamense that shine when disturbed – a phenomenon called bioluminescence. The best spot to see it in action is Laguna Grande, a bay on the northeastern corner of Puerto Rico. Every splash makes the water flash, and darting fish create lightning bolts in the deep.

Sea creatures glow primarily to communicate, defend themselves, and sometimes attract prey. In most parts of the ocean, especially the deeper areas, bioluminescence is the only kind of light ever seen.

Larger glowing denizens of the deep include jellyfish, many types of squid, flashlight fish, hatchetfish, dragonfish, and anglerfish. Other underwater light sources include ribbon worms, copepods, and at least one type of clam.

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Not only do coral reefs account for 25 percent of all life in the ocean, but they also serve as the sea’s early-warning system. The delicate relationship between corals and their algae roommates is vulnerable to the slightest changes in global climate and ocean health. A jump of even two degrees in water temperature sends the algae packing their bags, leaving the coral look. Pollution can poison the sensitive corals in their shallow habitats. When the corals go bad, the rest of the ocean could follow.

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Coral reefs are often called the “rain forests of the sea,” but they’re more like undersea cities for fish, eels, lobsters, and the many other organisms that live here. The workers that build these cities are the corals themselves – minuscule creatures that create a tough limestone skeleton to live in. The structures you see are the skeletons of thousands of coral polyps piled up over the centuries. Corals invite algae roommate into their limestone homes to help them survive and produce the reef’s trademark vivid colors. The algae convert sunlight to food and oxygen for the corals, which in turn nourish the algae with their waste.

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It’s not a teeny-weeny lightbulb or a spark that lights up a firefly’s insides. In fact, this insect’s fiery glow doesn’t produce any heat at all. It’s the product of a chemical reaction inside the bug’s body. By mixing chemicals and oxygen, the firefly switches its night-light on and off and controls its intensity, providing mood lighting for summer evenings in the backyard.

Fireflies are born with their built-in night-lights. They glow as larvae to warn predators not to eat them (firefly bodies contain yucky-fasting chemicals; one taste teaches mot predators to snack elsewhere). In their adult forms, fireflies flash to identify each other and attract mates. Female fireflies go for guy flies with the brightest, flashiest light show.

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A male cricket’s musical instrument is his wings rather than his legs. It is a common misconception that crickets use their legs to create chirping sounds. Actually they use their wings to do so. The sides of their wings are grooved in texture. They also have a jagged edge above the grooves. When these grooved sides of the wings are rubbed against each other, chirping sounds are produced. This action is called stridulation. This music can be produced with either wing, but research shows that most males prefer to use their right wings over the left. Female crickets do not chirp, as they do not have the same anatomy. Let us now look at the purpose of such behavior.

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Crickets were considered to be symbols of good luck and respect in ancient China and Japan. The insects were kept in cages of gold, where people could listen to their melodious chirping. The name cricket comes from the French word ‘criquer’ which means ‘small creaker’. On a calm night, the chirping of crickets in your yard or garden can be a very soothing sound. However, the same chirping can send you into a rage, if the insect has entered your home and is ruining your sleep. On the other hand, chirping is a very important activity in a cricket’s life cycle. They mainly communicate using scent, touch and sound, and sound is the most widely used method.

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Mosquito bites in Africa and elsewhere claim the lives of millions of people each year – far more victims than those killed by sharks and crocodiles. Thee buzzing, bothersome flies spread malaria, dengue fever, and other diseases that are fatal if left untreated.

Using an Environmental Protection Agency-registered insect repellent, covering up while outdoors and keeping mosquitoes outside by using window or door screens are ways to prevent mosquito bites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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No one knows for sure why moths (along with other winged insects) will make a beeline for lightbulbs or burn up in candle flames. The most popular theory is that moths navigate at night by flying parallel to the brightest light source, which in the time before man-made campfires and electricity was the moon or stars. The moon makes a good navigational aid because it never gets any closer, helping the moth keep a straight flight path. Trying to fly parallel to a streetlight or flame short-circuits the moth’s flight computer, causing the moth to fly in tighter and tighter circle until it eventually bounces off the light or burns up.

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Anyone who has wasted time trying to bat this buzzing bug would swear it had powers of teleportation, as it magically disappears at the moment of impact before reappearing an instant later over the potato salad. The good news is flies don’t have superpowers. They’re just aces at flying and have reflexes faster than any fighter pilot’s. How fast? In less than a 100th of a second – or a 50th of the time it takes to blink – a fly can detect an incoming threat from any direction (thanks to large eyes designed to detect movement), perform a roll to change direction, and zip away at full throttle. Scientists credit the flies’ amazing reaction time to a special neuron – or brain cell – running from the bugs’ itty-bitty brains to their muscles. It’s like they have an instant connection between their eyes and their wings.

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They’ve crept through Earth’s crannies for 300 million years and survived the worldwide calamity that wiped out the dinosaurs. Cockroaches keep on crawling and crawling and crawling for all sorts of reasons. They’re more active at night, when it’s easier to hide from predators – and the bottom of your shoe. The roughly 4,500 species of roaches around the world have evolved to fill nearly every ecological niche (including humid sewers, where they reproduce by the millions). Hardier than most insects, roaches are resistant to radiation and can go a month between meals. They’ll eat almost anything – including human eyelashes! But it’s just as well that these brown bugs are such extreme survivors. Their anything-goes diet rids the world of organic garbage. And while roaches might make your skin crawl, they’re a gourmet snack for rodents, birds, lizards, and other small animals.

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Beginning in 2006, beekeepers across the United States reported alarming losses of their hives. Honeybees were fleeing their queens and colonies, never to return. The phenomenon – called colony collapse disorder – continued to spread, and by 2013 beekeepers were reporting average losses of 45 percent of their hives. Honeybees are vital pollinators for everything from apples to almonds, avocados to onions (not to mention the source of all honey), and bee researchers are scrambling to figure out what’s causing the disappearing act. Current suspects include parasites, viruses, and pesticides, and many believe it’s combination of all three.

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They’re the product of a lab experiment gone wrong! This highly aggressive breed of honeybee escaped from a Brazilian lab in 1957, and they have been heading north ever since. They’ll pursue any threat until it drops – and then continue stinging and stinging and stinging! A swarm chasing a Texas man nailed him more than a thousand times! Known to scientists as Africanized bees, they were dubbed “killer bees” by the media.

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Almost anywhere. Eighty percent of people on Earth include insects as a regular part of their diet. That means you’ll find bugs on the menus in every continent – even North America. The Insectarium, a museum infested with insects (kept safely in displays) in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A., serves an assortment of buggy treats, including “Chocolate Chirp Cookies” baked with dry-roasted crickets. Or you can search online for Larvets, an extra-crunchy snack festively packaged in three tasty-sounding varieties: barbecue, cheddar cheese, and Mexican spice. The secret ingredient: farm-raised insect larvae from Hotlix, makers of “original candy that bugs.” Other crunchy Hotlix treats include Scorpion Suckers and Cricket Lick-Its.

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Because you’re probably already eating them. Farms, food-delivery trucks, and food-packaging plants are hardly bug-free environments. Insects cling to the food and crawl through the machinery. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration puts a limit on how many insect parts (and rat hairs and other nasty stuff) can end up in your apple sauce, frozen broccoli, canned mushrooms, ketchup, and other packaged foods, but those itty-bitty bug bites add up. You eat about two pounds (.9 kg) of shredded insect every year. It’s ground into everything during the food-production and packaging processes.

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In many parts of world, insects are just another food group. And why not? Bugs are rich in protein and vitamins. They require fewer resources to raise than cows, pigs, and chickens. Unlike bottom-feeding shrimp, which we pop in our mouths without a second thought, many bugs live on a wholesome diet of grass, leaves, and flowers. Bugs also devour farmers’ crops, so eating pest insects helps protect our veggies.

Many insect species have less than 5 grams of fat per serving. Insect farming can be a more sustainable practice because insects don’t need much space, can live under all sorts of conditions and easy to feed. People describe the taste of insects as nutty with a similar flavor to shrimp and chicken. Grasshoppers, ant eggs, and wasps are considered a delicacy in several countries.

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Because they’re arthropods – the same animal group that includes insects and arachnids. If it has at least six legs, a segmented body, and wears its skeleton like a suit of armor, it’s an arthropod!

Hermit crabs are perhaps the most entertaining creatures in a tide pool. They scuttle quickly about on the bottom of pools and tidal flats scavenging for food. When danger approaches, they withdraw into their shells, blocking the entrance with their thick claws. Hermit crabs are also harmless–if you pick one up and hold still for a bit, they will move out of their shell to explore your hand.

These crabs, who look like tiny lobsters, inhabit discarded snail shells. Their soft, twisted abdomen has been converted into a hook that reaches into an empty snail shell. It then carries the protective shell on its back.

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They wear their skeletons on the outside of their bodies, and they can change these shells just like we change our clothes. When a bug outgrows its bony skin, it sheds it – a process called molting – and grows a new one. The old armor is left behind, although giant centipedes will actually eat their discarded skeletons.

The hard outer shell protects the insect in other ways as well. It helps keep out germs and harmful chemicals. The shell acts as a shock absorber and as a shield against too much heat or cold. It also protects the insect from some of its enemies.

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Because the world would be a lifeless brown ball of dust without them. Many of these creepy creepers feast on feces (poop) and dead plant an animal matter while adding nutrients to the soil for plant life, which is also pollinated by bees and other buzzing insects. Plants in turn are food for other animals and produce oxygen from carbon dioxide. Insects keep the whole process running smoothly, keeping Earth clean and green.

Insects are the only food that sustains certain species of birds, fish and amphibians. Without insect life, the food chain would be severely compromised, since many higher order animals and birds rely upon lower ones for food. If the insects were to be destroyed, many species would also be wiped out.

When insects appear in your home, remember that the local ecosystem needs them not just to survive, but to thrive. Instead of an all-kill program, make yours an all-clear program. Focus on pest management instead of eradication.

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Because they have us outnumbered! More than 80 percent of all species on Earth belong to this wildly diverse group of creatures, and biologists are discovering new bugs all the time. Each square foot of your backyard is crawling with them: grubs, ants, spiders, beetles, centipedes, and grasshoppers. Your bedroom floor is a habitat for dust mites. You have microscopic bugs clinging to your body right now. Feeling itchy yet? Oh, and think about this next time you squash a bug: They’re crucial to our survival.

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Pest control is a billion-dollar business for a reason: Insects and arachnids are the all-stars of nastiness. They reproduce like crazy (a single female aphid, for example, can produce 600 billion offspring in one season)! They have horrible eating habits (houseflies vomit digestive juices on everything they eat and then slurp it up like a sickening soup). They sting or bite (Australia’s funnel-web spider can kill you if you don’t get the antivenom). Their furry legs and murderous jaws (called mandibles) inspire sweat-inducing phobias (intensely strong feelings of distress triggered by specific things).

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Insects: Insects have six legs and three body segments. They include ants, bees, butterflies, cockroaches, and mosquitoes. Insects are the only arthropods (the animal division that includes insects and arachnids) that can fly. Some dragonflies can zoom up to 30 miles an hour (48 kph)!

Bugs: Bugs have specialized mouth parts and hardened front wings. They include cicadas, aphids, shield bugs, and bedbugs. All bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs, which are defined by strawlike mouths made for sucking the sap from plants or (in the case of bedbugs) blood from living hosts.

Arachnids: Arachnids have eight legs and two body segments. They include spiders, ticks, mites, and scorpions. Spiders can spin webs of unbreakable silk to snare prey. They instill greater fear in humans than any other animal, despite the fact that spiders are relatively harmless compared with insects.

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Bombardier Beetles: Talk about packing heat! This breed of beetle can squirt a boiling mix of volatile chemicals from the business end of its abdomen. The spray melts attacking insects and scars human skin.

Hagfish: Nearly blind and not very bright, hagfish bumble around the deep ocean looking for their next meal. If a bigger fish starts trouble, it’s slime time! The hagfish encases itself in a cocoon of protective mucus and emits enough extra go to clog the predator’s gills. If the slimed fish survives this suffocating coup de gross, it learns a valuable lesson: Never hassle a hagfish!

Zorillas: You think a skunk is stinky? It’s got nothing on the striped polecat, aka the zorilla, aka the smelliest animal on Earth! Like a skunk, this member of the weasel family can squirt a stream of sticky fluid from its butt at any animal that crosses its path. The polecat’s spray is almost supernaturally stinky.

Turkey Vultures: With a featherless face made for digging into maggot-ridden roadkill, turkey vultures are already the uncontested leaders of the dirty-bird club. But you haven’t really seen their rotten side until you’ve mad. These bad birds defend themselves by barfing up whatever decomposing flesh they’ve recently devoured, along with powerful stomach acids.

Hippos: When an African hippopotamus emerges from a local mudhole to mark its territory with poop and pee, it doesn’t waste any time spreading its waste. The big beast whips its tail to fan feces and urine in every direction. Scientists aren’t certain why hippos spray their excrement to and fro, but they suspect it might serve to mark territory and attract mates.

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Mess with a skunk and you’ll be sorry! Glands in their butts are loaded with an oily, sticky, stinky musk they can squirt up to ten feet (3 m) away. The spray reeks of sulfurous chemicals called thiols that can potentially knock out, burn, and even kill animals that take a direct hit. Skunks, which are nocturnal (active at night), developed this chemical weapon to deter predators that hunt using smell in the darkness. Most of the time, skunks don’t even need to use their butt blasters. An angry display is often all it takes to frighten away predators, which have learned to associate the skunk’s white stripe with an awful stink.

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Although researchers have taught captive dolphins how to read sign language, deciphering dolphin-speak is tricky because their language is so dependent on what they’re doing (whether they’re playing, fighting, or going after tasty fish). It’s no different for humans. Think about when you raise a hand to say hello. That same gesture could also mean goodbye. Crossing guards raise their hand to say stop. A salesclerk might do it to another planet trying to make sense of it all. Now you know what it’s like to study dolphin communication.

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Scientists suspect dolphins “talk” about everything from basic facts, like their age and gender, to their emotional state. When the going gets tough, they’ll call other pod members for backup. They even have names – so-called social whistle – to summon one another. Intensely social animals, dolphins probably communicate a lot about their relationships.

Though researchers don’t yet fully understand the complexities of a dolphin’s language, these creatures are universally regarded as highly intelligent. Because they are so smart, dolphins can use their voices to articulate relatively sophisticated ideas — for example, a dolphin that has been attacked may communicate what happened to others, then lead them in retaliation or retreat. Similarly, dolphins may use their voices to share information regarding the location of food or potential danger.

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Starting from birth, dolphins squawk, whistle, click, and squeak. Sometimes one dolphin will vocalize, and then another will seem to answer. Members of a pod will communicate in different patterns at the same time, like people chattering at a party. And just as you gesture and change facial expressions as you talk, dolphins communicate non-verbally with varied body posture, jaw snaps, bubble blowing, and fin caresses.

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IQ in animals is hard to measure, considering that they live in such different worlds from us. (A cuttlefish is an Einstein when it comes to blending in with its environment.) Scientists agree that the following creatures are especially brainy:

Octopuses: Octopuses are extremely clever when faced with puzzles (such as figuring out how to open a jar to get a tasty fish or escaping from aquariums). They’ll even gather shells, rocks, and other objects to fortify their lairs. Equipped with more complex brains than other invertebrates (animals without a backbone, such as insects, worms, and snails), octopuses are the smartest spineless creatures.

Orangutans, Chimps and Other Primates: Orangutans, Chimps and Other Primates lead busy social lives.

Nightingales and Crows: Nightingales and Crows are hardly birdbrained. Nightingales can learn to sing 60 different songs. Crows use tools to open nuts.

Pigs: Pigs are fast learners. Researchers have taught them how to play video games and even take a shower when they’re hot. (Turns out pigs don’t really “sweat like pigs.”)

Elephants: Elephants live in complex family groups (and have been known to paint pachyderm masterpieces when provided a few art supplies).

Dolphins: But one animal in particular, the dolphin, shares all these smarty-pants characteristics: tool-use, social networking, creativity, and communication. More than 30 species of dolphins including orcas (aka killer whales) and the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin made famous on TV and in aquarium shows – roam the world’s oceans and rivers. They team up in groups called pods to accomplish tasks. Their brains are nearly as large as ours. They complement their eyesight through echolocation: a method of bouncing sounds off obstacles and the fish around them. They even have their own extreme sport: acrobatic leaps and spins that would make freestyle snowboarders jealous. And they talk to each other using what seems like a learned language instead barks, yips, grunts, shrieks, and other sounds that most animals are born using.

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Actually, we have – but it’s not cheap. Wannabe (and well-to-do) astronauts can climb abroad the G-Force One to fly and bounce around the airplane’s cabin in simulated free fall. The modified 727 flies special acrobatic maneuvers that re-create weightlessness for up to 30 seconds at a stretch. Such “reduced gravity aircraft” aren’t new – NASA has been using them for decades to help astronauts adjust to the sensation of free fall – but a company called the Zero Gravity Corporation is offering civilians a similar experience for $5,000 a ticket!

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Crowded airports, delays, jet lag – travel by plane can be a real pain. Imagine zipping to Hawaii for a surf session, then zapping to Italy for a slice of pizza, all in the time that it takes some planes to taxi for takeoff. Believe it or not, teleporting technology already exists, but it isn’t quite the crew-beaming transporter from Star Trek.

Using a process called quantum teleportation, scientists have figured out how to transfer the characteristics of one atom (the basic unit of matter) to a distant atom. The technology might eventually be used to transmit objects across the solar system. Teleporting people, however, is a trickier matter. The object being “teleported” is essentially destroyed at its point of origin and duplicated at its destination.

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Science fiction from the last century predicted we’d all be zipping through the sky in the family car by now, so why are we still stuck on the ground in highway traffic? Inventors have developed many flying car prototypes – such as the Moller Skycar and the Terrafugia Transition – over the decades, but these flying machines are still too tricky for the average driver to operate without a pilot’s license. They also often involve time-consuming transformations – wings that fold, propellers that tuck away, and the like – to get airborne, making them more like planes that can drive on the road than true flying cars. And then there’s the safety factor. Drivers in malfunctioning cars can simply pull over to the side of the road. Pilots in malfunctioning flying cars better have a parachute.

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Seeing a sailboat travel downwind makes sense even to landlubbers. The wind pushes the sails and the boat moves forward. But seeing a sailboat travel upwind is baffling – especially once you learn that the wind is “pulling” the boat. How is that possible? Simple physics!

It might not look like it, but a sailboat’s sails – especially modern triangular sails – are really just giant wings. Like an airplane wing, each sail is shaped so that air moves faster over one side than it does over the other. This creates lift on the surface of the sail facing the wind, which “pulls” the sail (and the boat to which it’s attached) forward at an angle against the wind even as the wind pushes the boat away in the in the downwind direction. This downwind slippage – known as leeway – is counteracted by a wing that you can’t see: a heavy fin called a keel that runs down the center of the boat underwater. The keel’s weight and shape counteract the force of the wind striking the sail above the water, keeping the boat from sliding downwind or being pushed over by the force of the wind (which is why you often see sailboats leaning over; the weight of the keel is keeping the boat from capsizing).

By controlling the angle of the sails, a captain can chart a course against the wind. Sailing directly into the wind is impossible, however, because the captain always needs to keep the wind at the correct angle to pull the sails forward. By sailing a series of zigzags – or “tacking” – across the wind, the captain can chart course to destinations that lie completely upwind.

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You can neither see it nor feel it, but the air around you is both crucial to your survival and actually weighs something (which is why scuba and oxygen tanks are lighter when they’re empty). Air is thickest and heaviest at sea level, where humans have evolved to live. Planes, on the other hand, fly faster and more smoothly at high altitudes, around 35,000 feet (11 km). Way up there, the air is thin and frigid. Fly this high without your own air supply and you’d pass out from lack of oxygen. So, using a complex mechanical system that takes air from the engines, airplane cabins are “pressurized” to maintain the air pressure of an altitude that the passengers and pilots find comfortable.

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It hits you like a speed bump out of thin air – literally. The plane lurches, your orange juice sloshes on the tray table, and the “Fasten Seat Belt” light illuminates overhead. Turbulence – aka chop or bad air – is as much a part of air travel as bagged pretzels and bad in-flight movies. It’s the reason pilots wear their seat belts at all times, although it’s not dangerous (planes are built to withstand even the most severe turbulence). Thunderstorms and pockets of warm air called updrafts create turbulence, but pilots can usually spot these areas of bad air and steer clear. What pilots can’t see are jet streams, fast-moving rivers of air that course through the atmosphere at altitudes that planes fly. Flying “upstream” in these rivers or skimming along the banks can make even the largest passenger planes rock. If it happens on your flight, don’t panic!

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To land the plane, the pilot lines it up with the runway many miles from the airport. Then he or she slowly reduces engine power, in turn reduces thrust and slows the plane down. With less air moving over the wings, the plane gradually loses lift and descends closer to the ground. Pilots carefully time the reduction in thrust and lift so that the plane touches down gently at the start of the runway (although in passenger planes, a computer-controlled autopilot typically handles the landing).

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Helicopters rely on the same forces – thrust and lift – that propel planes miles into the sky. And helicopters have wings just like planes, except, in their case, the wings aren’t fixed o the fuselage (which is why planes are also called fixed-wings are on the propellers – or “rotors” – that whirl above the whirlybird. The helicopter’s engine spins the rotors, which thrusts them through the air and creates lift, pulling the helicopter vertically into the air. The pilot can control the shape (or “angle of attack”) of the rotors to control the amount of lift, as well as angle them forward or backward to determine the direction of flight. The smaller tail rotor, meanwhile, counteracts the rapid spin of the main rotor so that the helicopter doesn’t whirl out of control (the tail rotor also controls turns). Balancing these rotor systems takes some serious multitasking skills and hand-eye coordination (helicopters are trickier to fly than airplanes), but then “rotary-wing aircraft” are much more nimble in the air, able to take off vertically, hover, and dart in any direction.

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Now you know that flying machines need thrust and lift to get off the ground. Lacking engines, gliders must make up for their lack of thrust by maximizing lift. They have skinny bodies and sprawling wings constructed of ultralight materials. These massive wings provide more lift with less air moving over them than conventional plane wings. Glider pilots seek out “thermals,” columns of heated air that rise up from the ground. Thermals are invisible, but they typically form over dark patches of terrain – parking lots or dirt fields. The pilots circle inside the column, letting the heated air push them higher and higher, until they reach the desired altitude. Then they leave the column and glide slowly back to the ground. Glider pilots can also simulate thrust by flying into strong winds.

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Planes soar with the greatest of ease because of two forces: thrust and lift. Thrust is generated by the engines, which use either propellers or jets to propel the plane forward. That forward motion moves air over the wings, which are shaped so that air passes faster over their tops than bottoms. The slower-moving air below the wings creates higher pressure than the faster-moving air below the wings creates higher pressure creates lift, pushing the wings up. As long as a plane has thrust to propel air over the wings, it has lift. If a plane loses thrust, the wings “stall” and the plane plummets.

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Helium balloons float for the same reason a beach ball floats in water. The balloon and the air inside it weigh less than the equivalent amount of water around it. As a result, the beach ball displaces the water surrounding it, pushing it away as it rises to the surface – a concept known as buoyancy. The same thing happens with a helium balloon. Helium is a special gas that weighs less than the surrounding air: Just like the beach ball in the water, the helium balloon pushes away the surrounding gas and rises above it.

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Hot-air balloons are the oldest type of flight technology (pre-dating the airplane by more than 120 years) for a reason: the principle behind “lighter-than-air” flight is simple. Heated air expands, becoming less dense – or lighter – than cool air, which is why hot air rises and cold air falls. Hot-air balloons carry a heat source (typically a flame) that warms the air inside the balloon is lighter than the air outside of it, and the balloon takes flight.

To keep floating, the pilot continues to fire the burners to keep the air inside the balloon hot. To land, the pilot lets the air inside the balloon cool. When this happens, the molecules slow down and take up less space. The air inside the balloon is no longer less dense than the air outside. The balloon sinks towards the ground. So hot air balloons float because hot air is less dense than cold air.

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Thomas Edison is famous for inventing the light bulb in 1878 in New York, USA. Thomas Edison didn’t invent electricity – a natural form of energy that humans have known about since the time of the ancient Greeks – but he did figure out how to harness it to light a filament in a light bulb as well as transmit it to homes through a grid system of wires. A genius tinkerer, Edison also invented the phonograph, a machine that records sounds and plays music (think it as the great-granddaddy of your MP3 player).

Although Thomas Edison gets credit for inventing the light bulb, a draftsman name Lewis Howard Latimer had a bright idea that revolutionized electric light. Latimer’s carbon filament – the fiber inside the bulb that glows when charged with an electric current – styled it for much longer than Edison’s quick-to-burn-out paper filament.

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A Swiss team of engineers and pilots has developed the Solar Impulse, a spindly airplane that soars on the power of sunshine. Solar panels line nearly every inch of the plane’s passenger-jet-size wingspan, absorbing energy from the sun and storing it in lightweight batteries that power four electric propellers. The plane completed its first overnight flight in 2010, proving that it could harness enough solar power during the day to keep it aloft through the night. Don’t plan to book a solar flight anytime soon, though – the Solar Impulse is strictly a one-seater aircraft, built to be as lightweight at possible. Even the pilot can’t exceed 187 pounds (85 kg).

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Although more and more cars have electric engines (or hybrid gas electric ones) to save on fuel costs and cut down on exhaust that contributes to climate change, the vast majority of automobiles on the road still rely on gasoline for their old-fashioned combustion engines. Applying pressure to the gas pedal mixes fuel and air in the car’s engine, where a small spark ignites the mixture to create tiny explosions – the combustion process. Combustion makes the engine go vroom, vroom, spinning the tires and putting the car in motion.

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You probably ask this question every time the double A’s Wii remote right when you reach the final level. To get to the bottom of why some batteries earn extra life in a recharging station while others are bound for the recycling bin, you first need to know what a battery is. It’s simply a container filled with special chemicals that generate electricity through a chemical reaction. This reaction starts when you place the battery in your gadget and turn it on, completing a circuit that triggers electricity to flow from the battery’s positive terminal, through the wiring of your gadget, and back to the battery’s negative terminal (these terminals are marked with + and – symbols on your battery).

When all the chemicals in a standard, non-rechargeable battery have under gone the reaction process, the battery is dead. Time to drop it off at a recycling station (usually found in hardware stores). Rechargeable batteries, however, contain different chemicals that can react in the opposite direction, filling with electricity when you place them in a charger. Eventually, the special chemicals wear out and the reaction can no longer be reversed. But until that happens, you can recharge them again and again, giving your batteries more extra lives than you’ll find in any video games.

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Apple II is the first successful mass-produced microcomputer designed in 1976. The size of Apple II is smaller than a suitcase. It offered simplicity, the ability to upgrade, and style (for the time, at least) in a sleek beige box that hooked to your TV. Although primitive by today’s standards the Apple II sold in the millions and ushered in the era of personal computing. It was also one of the first personal computers that could play a decent home version of arcade games.

The most important feature of the Apple II was probably its eight expansion slots. No other computer had this kind of flexibility or expansion possibilities. The top of the computer isn’t even attached; it lifts off with little effort allowing easy access to the system motherboard and expansion slots. Dozens of different expansion cards were made by Apple and other manufacturers to add to the Apple II’s capabilities. 

These include – memory expansion, floppy disk controllers, PASCAL, parallel, serial, and SCSI cards, processor accelerators, video cards. 

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ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is the world’s first general-purpose computer designed in 1943. Although it took days to program, ENIAC could perform thousands of calculations in a second. That power required some serious hardware. ENIAC was large enough to live in, weighed more than 30 tons (27 t), and took up the space of a typical single-family house. Built before smaller and more efficient transistors, ENIAC relied or more than 17,000 soda-can-size vacuum tubes that often malfunctioned when the massive machine was powered up. ENIAC’s operators came up with a simple solution for that problem: They never turned it off. The computer ran continuously for more than seven years. It was even rumored (falsely) that ENIAC’s massive power needs were responsible for occasional power outages in the nearby city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

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A Difference Engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed in 1837. The size of this calculator is about as big as your living room. It is devised but never actually built by English mathematician Charles Babbage, this massive contraption relied on metal tumblers and cranks rather than electricity and transistors, yet it had all the components of a modern computer: a memory for storing numbers, a central processing unit for calculating math problems, an input device (punched cards) for entering information, and an output device in the form of a printer and a bell.

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The Antikythera Mechanism is the world’s first analogical computer designed in 100 B.C. The size of this is approx. 1 foot x 6 inches x 4 inches (31 cm x 15 cm x 10 cm). It is recovered from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, this toaster-size device may have been the world’s analog – or mechanical – computer. Archaeologists believe the Greeks used it 2,000 years ago to calculate the courses of constellations and predict eclipses. Smaller than a modern PC, the Antikythera Mechanism contained at least 30 bronze gears and was remarkably efficient for its size. It even had an instruction manual inscribed on copper plates.

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Computers in the 1950s were the size of a house – literally. Today, your vastly more powerful smartphone fits in your jeans pocket. How could anything shrink in size while growing in power? The big breakthrough was the invention of the transistor, a tiny device that controls electronic signals. Like a nerve cell in the human brain, a transistor works with other transistors to store and process information in computing devices (and other gadgets). Transistors were installed on silicon microchips, which replaced much larger vacuum tubes in the 1950s. Many consider the transistor the greater invention of the 20th century. In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the high-tech Intel Corporation, predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a microchip would double every two years. Known as Moore’s Law, his prediction held true. In 1971, computer makers could fit only about 4,000 transistors on a chip; by 2011, they could cram in over 2.5 billion. Today, engineers are searching for the transistor’s successor.

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Although the drink mix Tang and sticky Velcro tape will forever be associated with rockets to the moon and space stations (both Tang and Velcro were shot into space in the early days of the space program), NASA didn’t invent either product. Still, plenty of other spin-offs-or technologies adapted for use here on Earth – came out of NASA-sponsored labs, including:

Memory foam: The spongy material in your mattress was originally designed for aircraft seat cushions.

Ear thermometers: NASA developed heat sensors that doctors now use to take your temperature without sticking a thermometer under your tongue.

Artificial limbs: NASA’s research into robotic astronauts has resulted in more realistic and functional arms and legs for people who have lost theirs in accidents or combat.

Invisible braces: Straightening your pearly whites no longer requires a mouthful of metal, thanks to a tough, transparent plastic originally created for missile systems.

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These uncanny flying objects – which have been wielded as hunting weapons for thousands of years – always return to their tosser (as long as they’re thrown correctly). The secret of the boomerang’s round-trip flight lies in its shape. A curved design combines two wings joined in the middle. Once the boomerang wielder launches the weapon using a strong overhand toss (similar to chucking a baseball), the boomerang back to its point of origin. The Guinness World Record for the longest boomerang throw is a staggering 1,402 feet (427 m)! It was a one-way trip; the boomerang got stuck in a tree. If you threw a boomerang in space it would return to your hand just like it would if you threw it on Earth – a fact verified by experiments on the International Space Station. It’s the passage of air over a boomerang’s wings, not the force of gravity, that’s crucial to a boomerang’s return flight.

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It sounds like something out of Tony Stark’s (Iron Man’s) lab: a machine that creates real-life objects just like a regular printer duplicates pictures and documents from your computer. But 3-D printers are real, and people use them to whip up everything from simple toys like chess pieces and rubber duckies to prototypes of complex inventions. Simply load the printer with a sort of plastic “ink” and select the object you wish to print from a “Thingiverse” of thousands of doodads (or design your own object. Then hit the Print button. Hot-ink guns on robotic arms move within the machine to “print” the object, layer by layer, until it’s complete. Eventually, 3-D printers will evolve to create more complex goodies, including snacks!

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Ralph Baer is famous for inventing video games in 1980s through today in United States. Its origins go back to 1966, when electrical engineer Ralph Baer invented what would become the Magnavox Odyssey, the first video game system. Despite its simple graphics and bleeping sound effects, the Odyssey established all the features of modern game systems: It hooked to your TV, used a handheld controller, and played a variety of games.

Ralph Baer donated his video game prototypes, objects, notes, and schematics to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2006. In 2014, the Museum collected his workshop to become the landmark object for its Innovation Wing.

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No search engines do not search the entire internet. The Internet encompasses much more than just the World Wide Web, the linked pages people typically surf and the portion plumbed by search engines. File-sharing sites, corporate data banks, government “intranets,” workplace servers, and other private sites are strictly off-limits to public snooping. And then there’s the murky region known as “dark net.” Uncharted by search engines, it’s the Internet’s seedy underbelly, home to anonymous users and secret networks that want to stay that way.

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Each time you enter a word or phrase (say, “the five best desserts”) into a search engine, the following things happen behind the scenes in about one-eighth of a second:

Step 1 Search: The search engine uses algorithms (mathematical formulas) to determine exactly what you’re hunting for, adding in synonyms (“tastiest treats”), anticipating your terms before you’ve even finished typing, and offering corrections in case you’ve made a mistake (did you mean “best deserts” instead of “best deserts”?).

Step 2 Sort: Your request is sent to the search engine’s servers. Here, the company that owns the search engine maintains a massive index of all the words, photos, videos, songs, and other data strewn across the World Wide Web. This information – enough to fill hundreds of millions of gigabytes – is continuously collected and updated by programs called “spiders” that crawl across the Web and sift through its information.

Step 3 Collect: From its index, the search engine gathers every Web page with content that matches your search term. Results are filtered based on hundreds of factors, including the pages’ age, the number of people who’ve visited the pages, their estimated reliability, and more.

Step 4 Voila! : The results are ranked as links in your Web browser, with the most relevant Web pages at the top of the list.

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HTTP, which stands for “hypertext transfer protocol,” is the language of rules that controls how your browser navigates the network of linked pages known as the World Wide Web (which is where the “www” comes from). When you enter a website name into your browser’s address bar (or click on a link within a page), protocols contact the site’s hosting server and  fetch the requested Web Page, which then pops up on your computer screen. Many countries – such as Iran, the People’s Republic of China, Syria, and North Korea – block or filter access to the Internet or punish citizens who post information that’s deemed critical to the government.

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Nobody – not a single person, company, or government. The Internet is a network of millions of interconnected computers and servers spread across the globe. A nonprofit international group called the Internet Society does watch over the global network, establishing protocols (a system of rules for sharing data) and promoting its evolution and access to everybody.

Thousands of people and organizations own the Internet. The Internet consists of lots of different bits and pieces, each of which has an owner. Some of these owners can control the quality and level of access you have to the Internet. They might not own the entire system, but they can impact your Internet experience.

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The strands of today’s Internet stretch back to the early 1960s, when computer scientists began brainstorming a system for researchers, educators, and government agencies to share information through their computers. Officials in the United States government saw the value of a network of linked computers that would continue to operate even if bits of it were blasted in a war. The U.S. Department of Defense funded research into an early network known as the ARPANET, which, over time and through many upgrades, evolved into the modern Internet and the World Wide Web (the system of linked pages that most people browse on the Internet). What started as a link between four computers has grown into a network of at least 75 million servers.

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The largest man-made structure at the time of its completion in the 17th century, China’s Great Wall spans 5,500 miles (8,850 km) across northern China, from the Korean border west into the Gobi desert. It actually started out as a series of smaller walls built by Chinese warlords in the seventh century B.C. to defend their individual lands. As China became a united empire, the walls were joined and fortified over the next 2,000 years to repel enemies, particularly the Mongolian and Manchu armies. Built from countless bricks and stones and guarded by watchtowers, the Great Wall is an engineering marvel of the ancient world. You can’t spot the Great Wall from Earth orbit with the naked eye (the wall tends to blend in with the mountainous landscape). Astronauts can see all sorts of other man-made objects – roads, cities, dams, and even the Great Pyramids – from their spaceship portholes.

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It’s a familiar photo snapped by sightseers in the Italian city of Pisa: The subject stands in the foreground pretending to prop up a curiously crooked eight-story tower in the background. The Tower of Pisa’s extreme lean has been around a lot longer than the art of silly tourist photography. The tower, meant to function as a bell tower, started to sway soon after construction on it started more than 800 years ago. Its foundation was set on soil too soft to support its weight. The tower began to lean as soon as its builders completed the second floor in 1178. Construction continued off and on for the next 192 years, but attempts to straighten the tower only made it worse. By the time the tower was completed in 1370, its lean had increased to 1.6 degrees. Its slow topple continued over the centuries, until it eventually reached 5.5 degrees.

It’s stable for now, thanks to some modern architectural mojo. Engineers have shored up the foundation, installed counter-weights and cables, and removed soil from the non-leaning side – fixes that reduced the lean by about 1.5 degrees. The tower is still 13 feet (4m) off its center, but stable, meaning the Leaning Tower of Pisa won’t become the Tumbled Tower of Pisa for at least 300 years.

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Life was no fairy tale in fifth-century Italy. When waves of invaders threatened the countryside and cities in the northeastern part of the country, the locals are needed a safe place to lie low. A marshy lagoon between the mouths of two rivers made a good refuge from the barbarians. The Roman refugees spread their settlement across the lagoon’s 118 islands, connecting them with wooden bridges and commuting in the canals between them. In the centuries since, Venice developed into a thriving city faces a new threat – rising sea levels due to climate change.

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Covered in thin copper plates, the Statue of Liberty (a gift from France) was originally a dull brown when it arrived in New York Harbor in 1885. But unlike most things, the statue actually got prettier with age. Over the next 30 years, she slowly took on the greenish tinge you see today. The salty air from the harbor reacted with the copper to create a thin layer of salt called a patina. Lady Liberty’s green sheen is a good thing: The patina actually protects the statue from rusting.

A natural weathering process — called oxidation — took place when air and water reacted with the copper plates.

Over time, the weathering of the copper created a thin layer of copper carbonate called a patina. Although some people were worried that the changing color of the statue meant it was decaying, the patina actually protects the copper underneath from further corrosion.

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Since it opened in 1937, this architectural wonder spanning San Francisco Bay in California, U.S.A., has always been “International Orange,” a color chosen because it’s easy to spot by passing ships and blends nicely with the land on both sides of the bridge. The name “Golden Gate” was never meant to describe the famous suspension bridge’s color. It’s the name of the strait that marks the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. To make the span even easier to spot by passing ships, the U.S. Navy wanted the Golden Gate Bridge painted like a bumblebee, with black and yellow stripes.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. was the fearless explorer who expanded the boundaries of civil rights in 1950s in America. When Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested in 1955 for not giving up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.A., Martin Luther King, Jr. – a pastor – began his crusade to end discrimination against African Americans. King relied on peaceful demonstrations and marches, the most famous of which was his 250,000-strong March on Washington in 1963, where he delivered one of the most famous speeches in history. A year later, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination and racial segregation in schools and at the workplace.

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Sir Isaac Newton was the fearless explorer who expanded the boundaries of the universe in 1687 in England. One of the history’s most influential minds, this English scientist, mathematician, and philosopher literally wrote the book on physics. His three laws of motion explain how every object in the universe affects the movement of every other object. He helped invent the mathematical study of calculus (now you know who to thank when you take that tricky course). But Newton is most famous for sitting in a garden and spotting an apple falling from a tree – an observation that inspired his law that explains how all objects in the universe attract each other with a force relative to their size and distance from each other. In other words, gravity.

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Don’t believe everything you see in movies and at Halloween parties. Although Vikings are shown as fearsome horn-helmeted raiders in popular culture, archaeological evidence paints a more clearheaded picture. The Norse warriors wore simple iron helmets or no helmets at all.

The bowl of a Viking helmet was made from several pieces of iron joined together with rivets. A band of iron circled the bowl and two other bands crossed at the top of the helmet, and the four openings created were filled with iron plates, creating the bowl shape. Some Vikings helmets had chain mail curtains to provide greater protection to the neck. Other helmets had cheek protectors made from iron plates.

It is estimated that Viking helmets weighed between 2kg and 4kg. Viking warriors often wore their helmets all day long. It is thought that Viking warriors marked their helmets in some way before battles to indicate who they were fighting for.

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Leif Eriksson was the fearless explorer who expanded the boundaries of the world in A.D. 1000 in America. Christopher Columbus sailed into the history books when he “discovered” the New World (the America) in 1492, but archaeologists now think the history books got it wrong. Five hundred years before Columbus set sail, the Viking explorer named Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland to “Vinland,” now believed to be the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada (archaeologists in 1960 found evidence of Eriksson’s settlement). Eriksson spent just one winter in Vinland before sailing home.

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They floated instead of sank when dunked: One test for a suspected sorcerer was to tie him or her to a chair and toss it into a river. Genuine witches – supposedly immune to the holy power of baptism in water – would bob to the surface. Thus proven guilty, they were usually executed. Those innocent of witchcraft would sink instead of float. They often drowned, making this test a lose-lose proposition.

They were left-handed: In the age of witch hunts, southpaws lived under constant suspicion. Left-handedness was seen as an insult to the natural order of things and a sign of evil. In fact, the term “sinister” comes from the Latin word for “left.”

They bore the witch’s mark: Witches were thought to soar on broomsticks to “Sabbaths,” rowdy sorcery conventions held deep in the forest. At these sinister shindigs, the devil would initiate novice spell casters by scarring them with his horns. His “witch’s mark” could take the shape of animals – perhaps a cat or toad – or look like a birthmark. Accused witches underwent head-to-toe inspections for such markings.

They were at least 40 years old: Folks in their 40s are considered middle-aged today, but few people reached such a ripe old age in the 14th and 15th centuries. Those who did were suspected of cozying up with evil forces to achieve a freakishly long life.

They had a falling-out: At the height of the witch panics, people were encouraged to report suspected witches to religious officials and witch hunters. That gave anyone with a grievance the opportunity to get even. They could accuse enemies of witchcraft!

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Centuries before they were portrayed as heroes in the Harry Potter books, witches were considered public enemy number one. Church officials in 16th-century Europe linked the practice of witchcraft to the devil, claiming that all witches drew their power from evil. According to folklore and books written at the time, witches could ruin crops, curdle the milk of livestock, blot out the stars, control the weather, and curse their neighbors. Anyone suffering a run of rotten luck could blame it on a witch. Suspected witches were rounded up, tortured into confessing any number of crimes, and then burned alive at the stake. By the 1700s, as many as 60,000 suspected witches had been tried and executed in Europe.

Fear of witches spread across northern Europe and even to the new colonies in North America. One of the most famous witch trials took place in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) in the 1690s. It started when a group of young girls began suffering from bizarre fits. They blamed a West Indian slave named Tituba for teaching them witchcraft, and soon the list of suspected witches grew to include other villagers, including men and a six-year-old child. The panic that followed cost the lives of 20 people. Scholars suspect the girls who started the ordeal were simply looking for attention. Another possibility: A fungus in the town’s food supply may have caused hallucinations of bewitchment.

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Today, anyone with a beef might hire a lawyer to settle a disagreement in court or simply argue in online message boards and let public opinion decide the victor. But from the Middle Ages up to the early 20th century, men from the upper crust of European and American society relied on one-on-one combat to seek “satisfaction” for even minor slights to their reputations. And so went the “duel,” a deadly deal struck between two men (duelists were nearly always men) to resolve a dispute by calmly standing face-to-face, drawing pistols (or swords), and attacking each other.

Although not all duels were to the death, thousands of men – including famous politicians and military commanders – perished from injuries received in these ghastly grudge matches. Abraham Lincoln escaped a sword duel by apologizing to a local politician he had offended in a newspaper story. Even after duels were outlawed, deaths were still common and victors were often pardoned – as long as they followed the rules. Duelists adhered to a strict code of conduct (known as the code duello, a document typically kept inside every gentleman’s pistol case). To break the rules meant bringing shame on your name, which many considered a fate worse than death.

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Peruse photos from the late 19th century and you’ll notice that every person portrayed – from Civil War generals to Wild West cowboys – looks extremely serious, or even downright mad. It’s as if early photographers never asked their subjects to say “cheese.” You might chalk up all the frowning faces to bad teeth or the inconveniences of early camera technology (long exposure times meant subjects had to sit still for up to a minute), but the truth is more complicated: Smiling was considered bad form. From the days of portrait painting, it was thought that only rude, poor, stupid, or silly people exposed their teeth in formal settings. The tradition continued with portrait photography, which is why everyone in old photos looks like they just got bad news. “A photograph is a most important document,” said American author Mark Twain, “and there is nothing [worse] to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”

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Hosted in special arenas, called lists, within castle walls or in nearby fields, the joust was one of the most thrilling forms of entertainment in the Middle Ages. Two mounted knights in gleaming armor spurred their warhorses at each other in a ferocious charge. Just before the moment of impact, they leveled their 12-foot (3.6-m) lances and – crash! – the weapons splintered against shield and helm. (A knight scored points in a joust by shattering his lance against his opponent’s shield or helm – or knocking him off his horse.)

The joust was part of a larger event called the tournament, which evolved from military training into a spectacle for lords, ladies, and peasants alike. Despite strict rules, tournaments were dangerous games; many knights were permanently injured or killed in jousts. King Henry II of France died in a joust when a lance pierced his visor. But success in the tournament outweighed the risks for knights, who played for keeps. A victor won the loser’s armor and horse, which could be ransomed for a small fortune. The tournament champion might win the favor of a lady in the stands.

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As far back as 1400 B.C., people in Mexico and Central America suited up in painted deerskins and elaborate head-dresses and sprinted across ball courts covered with stone to volley a primitive rubber ball with their hips, knees, shins, elbows, and heads. Many of the ball courts remain today, some with stone rings that may have acted as goals, but the rules to these games have been lost to history. Weighing as much as nine pounds (4 kg), the solid-rubber balls left players bruised and bloody. Games sometimes resulted in broken bones and even death as players dove to the stone court to keep the ball from touching the ground. The ancient athletes played for religious reasons. The games were thought to represent the battle of good against evil. Some games may have ended in sacrificial rituals to appease the gods. A modern version of the ball games –called ulama – is still played today.

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As many as 50,000 spectators gathered in Rome’s Coliseum in the second century A.D. to witness gory spectacles: reenactments of famous battles, live hunts for exotic animals (released from cages kept in an elaborate basement under the sandy floor), and bloody battles between trained warriors. These gladiators were the professional athletes of their day. But although they were celebrities, most gladiators were slaves or prisoners-of-war forced into fighting for the bloodthirsty crowd’s amusement. Rome’s emperors hosted these expensive events – which were often free to the public – to make the citizens happy and thus easier to govern.

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Governments employ spies – also known as spooks, secret agents, case officers, operatives, and intelligence assets – to gather information on foreign governments on their own people in secret, a practice known as espionage. And it’s not just governments that hire these professional snoops. Agents try to sniff out secret information for military organizations and private companies (a special sort of spying called corporate espionage). It’s not a new job (ancient Egypt hired spies to keep an eye on its enemies), and it’s keep busy in times of war and peace, working under a “cover identity” 24 hours a day when they’re in the field. They might do it for the money, love of their country, or hatred of a rival nation, but they all have one thing in common: A spy’s life is full of lies.

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These black-clad warriors emerged from the shadows in the 16th century, when hundreds of power-hungry warlords squabbled over control of Japan. During this violent “feudal” era, warlords relied on their armies of samurai – noble warriors whose code of battle forbade sneaky tactics – to defend their lands and attack rivals. But when they needed to spy on, assassinate, or create confusion among rivals, the warlords hired ninjas.

With no code of honor to put a damper on their business, ninjas hired themselves out to the highest bidder. A ninja might work for a warlord one year, and then spy on that same warlord the next. A ninja on a mission needed to blend in anywhere, from a bustling village to a castle rooftop at midnight. That meant he or she was a master of disguise. When they weren’t wearing their traditional full-body suit to blend in with the shadows, ninjas would dress as farmers, merchants, or musicians to slip unnoticed through the countryside. In one famous siege, a team of ninjas dressed as the castle’s guards and marched right through the front gate, set fire to the fortress, and escaped as the inhabitants bickered over who had started the flames.

The roots of the ninja stretch back to the eighth century – to secretive mountain clans trained in survival, self-defense, stealth, and the art of assassination. These warriors were feared and despised for their sneaky tactics and supposed supernatural powers. According to legend, a ninja could fly, walk on water, and vanish. Two of these powers were real, sort of. (Ninjas wore special wooden shoes to tread on water and explosive powders to disappear in a cloud of smoke.)

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Blackbeard: The notorious Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, let his reputation speak for itself when he ran up his Jolly Roger: “Resist and you will bleed.”

Bartholomew Roberts: Above the flagship of his pirate fleet, the dreaded “Black Bart” flew a flag depicting him standing on the heads of his enemies.

Samuel Bellamy: Flying the skull and crossbones – a universal symbol of poison, disease, and death – “Black Sam” plundered more than 50 ships to become the wealthiest pirate of the 18th century.

John “Calico Jack” Rackham: Cutlasses replaced the traditional crossed bones on the flag of this sharp-dressing real-life version of Captain Jack Sparrow.

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The Pirates of the Caribbean movies portray buccaneer crews as likable bands of high-seas misfits, but real-life “freebooters” were ruthless thieves who relied on their cutthroat reputation to frighten ships into surrendering without a fight (after all, a ship plundered in one piece was worth more than a cannon-blasted wreck). No one knows who flew the first pirate flag, also known as the “Jolly Roger.” It was most likely a simple red or black strip of cloth hoisted above the ship’s tallest mast to send a message to merchant ships: “Surrender or we’ll sink you.” Pirates during the golden age of piracy (from the late 1600s to the early 1700s) decorated their flags with images of skeletons, swords, skulls and crossbones, drops of blood, and other scary symbols to instill as much fear as possible, turning their flags into weapons that messed with the merchant sailors’ minds.

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Paper currency – also known as notes or bills – didn’t appear until the ninth century in China, but it eventually became so common that it lost its value. Consequently, paper currency fell out of use for hundreds of years until it reappeared in 17th century Europe.

It can affect inflation, or the rate at which prices rise for goods and services. The more prices are inflated, the less purchasing power each paper note or coin holds. Inflation can cause all kinds of problems for an economy that doesn’t yet understand the concept; in general, monetary authorities endeavor to keep inflation to a minimum and avoid deflation entirely. Deflation is the opposite of inflation – the lowering of prices – and has a potential to lead to economic depressions if severe.

Checks, debit cards, credit cards, online banking, and smartphone payment technology have decreased the need for people to carry cash in any form.Paper currency – also known as notes or bills – didn’t appear until the ninth century in China, but it eventually became so common that it lost its value. Consequently, paper currency fell out of use for hundreds of years until it reappeared in 17th century Europe.

It can affect inflation, or the rate at which prices rise for goods and services. The more prices are inflated, the less purchasing power each paper note or coin holds. Inflation can cause all kinds of problems for an economy that doesn’t yet understand the concept; in general, monetary authorities endeavor to keep inflation to a minimum and avoid deflation entirely. Deflation is the opposite of inflation – the lowering of prices – and has a potential to lead to economic depressions if severe.

Checks, debit cards, credit cards, online banking, and smartphone payment technology have decreased the need for people to carry cash in any form.

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The first chunks of change you’d recognize as coins – round lumps of precious metals impressed with mages of gods and rulers – appeared around 700 B.C. in Lydia, in modern-day Turkey.

The first coins were made of electrum, an alloy of silver and gold. It appears that many early Lydian coins were minted by merchants as tokens to be used in trade transactions. The Lydian state also minted coins, most of the coins mentioning king Alyattes of Lydia. 

In China, gold coins were first standardized during the Qin dynasty. After the fall of the Qin dynasty, the Han emperors added two other legal tenders: silver coins and “deerskin notes”, a predecessor of paper currency which was a Chinese invention.

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Around the year 1200 B.C., people in China started using mollusk shells called cowries to trade for goods. Cowries became the world’s first form of currency, and they were adopted by civilizations across the world and used until the middle of the 20th century.

Some form of shell money appears to have been found on almost every continent populated by humans: America, Asia, Africa and Australia. The shell most widely used worldwide as currency was the shell of Cypraea Moneta, the money cowry. This species is most abundant in the Indian Ocean, and was collected in the Maldive Islands, in Sri Lanka, along the Malabar coast, in Borneo and on other East Indian islands, and in various parts of the African coast from Ras Hafun to Mozambique. Cowry shell money was an important part of the trade networks of Africa, South Asia, and East Asia.

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They didn’t buy – they bartered! Tens of thousands of years ago, when humans began establishing villages and farms rather than following herds of animals, they traded for what they needed: animal furs for vegetables, plant seeds for fish, arrowheads for farming tools, grain and candle wax for goats and cows.

Phoenicians bartered goods to those located in various other cities across oceans. Babylonian’s also developed an improved bartering system. Goods were exchanged for food, tea, weapons, and spices. At times, human skulls were used as well. Salt was another popular item exchanged. Salt was so valuable that Roman soldiers’ salaries were paid with it. In the Middle Ages, Europeans traveled around the globe to barter crafts and furs in exchange for silks and perfumes. Colonial Americans exchanged musket balls, deer skins, and wheat. When money was invented, bartering did not end, it become more organized.

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Because it buys about everything we need to survive: food, homes, gas for our cars, electricity, heat, water, and cookies-and-cream milk shakes. People invest money in stocks, bank savings plans, property, and their education to eventually make more money.

The importance of money becomes very clear when a person has no money, Money for a poor person is everything, it becomes very important for him to earn so that he can fulfill his basic needs. However, recently everyone has become consumption oriented. We want to buy anything that is new on the market and catches our interest and we are falling prey to the attractive packaging and advertisements of a product. Thus we buy things that we have little need for which in turn makes us want more money. Money enables us to afford a better quality of life; more money means bigger and better houses and cars, better quality products, better entertainment etc. Another advantage is less stress in paying bills and other household expenses. Money may also allow a person to pursue his dreams, for example a person who wants to attain higher education may not be able to without money. 

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Here’s the 4,000-year-old formula in four grisly steps:

Step 1: A priest poked a special hook up the dearly departed’s nose to yank out the brains (which were considered useless).

Step 2: The liver, stomach, intestines, and lungs were all removed, cleaned, preserved, and sealed in special “canopic jars” carved to look like the gods who guard these organs. The heart – considered crucial equipment for the perilous journey through the underworld – was kept in place.

Step 3: Priests packed the body inside and out with a special salt to sop up the moisture. After the body dried for 40 days, it was stuffed with rags and plants so it didn’t look like a deflated balloon.

Step 4: Priests rubbed the corpse’s skin with oils and resins to soften it. Layers of linen, treated with the same oils, were wrapped around the mummy, giving it the famous bandaged look seen in movies. Finally, the priests tucked amulets into the wrappings and uttered spells to activate their protective powers.

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King Tutankhamun, aka King Tut, wasn’t the first boy king to rule ancient Egypt, but he is the most famous, thanks to the discovery of his tomb and its trove of treasures in 1922. The most valuable artifact was Tut’s mummy, nested inside the many coffins and boxlike shrines to protect his spirit for eternity. Unfortunately, Egyptologists a century ago weren’t as gentle with mummies as they are today. They cut Tut into pieces to pry his body from the sticky sacred oils that coated the inside of his coffin. Such rough handling inflicted injuries on the 3,300-year-old mummy that made it tough to tell what caused Tut’s demise.

Some suspected he was murdered. But modern technologies like 3-D scanning revealed that the all-powerful king was actually in poor health. He suffered from a bone disease that made walking a chore. Bouts of malaria left him shaky and weak. None of the tests pointed to foul play as the cause of Tut’s death. Instead, the likely culprit is a broken leg revealed by x-rays. Perhaps the frail pharaoh tumbled from one of the chariots found in his tomb. With his immune system already weakened by malaria, Tut could have easily died from an infection in the busted bone.

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Tomb walls in ancient Egypt were inscribed with spells to frighten away grave robbers. “To all who enter to make evil against this tomb,” read one inscription, “may the crocodile be against them on water and the snakes and scorpions be against them on land.” Indeed, tragedy tracked the discovery of King Tut’s grave by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. When the sponsor of the Tut expedition, Lord Carnarvon, died less than a year after the tomb was opened, reporters pounced on the idea that he’d fallen victim to a mummy’s curse. It wasn’t crocs or scorpions that did in Lord Carnarvon, however. He died from an infected mosquito bite. Despite the threat of curses (along with confusing dead-end corridors and decoy treasure rooms), most royal tombs were raided and robbed in ancient times – sometimes by the very workers who built them and knew their layouts.

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Archaeologists combing Egypt have excavated an entire zoo’s worth of preserved animals: cats, dogs, donkeys, lions, rams, and shrews. Ancient Egyptians made these mummies for many reasons. Beloved pets were embalmed and entombed with their owners so that they might reunite in the afterlife. Sometimes, only the meat was mummified, to serve as an eternal jerky snack. Crocodiles, ibises, and other animals linked to specific gods were mummified by the millions. Although some mummies ended up in museums, the majority of human and animal mummies were burned as torches, used as fertilizer, or even ground up for medicine!

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To the people of ancient Egypt, death was only the beginning. Egyptians kings (called pharaohs) were thought to become gods when they passed away. Ordinary Egyptians believed they would spend eternity with their ancestors in a perfect version of Egypt. But gaining entry into the afterlife wasn’t as easy as tumbling off a pyramid. The Egyptians believed the spirits of their dearly departed wouldn’t have a happy afterlife without access to their former bodies, so priests perfected the process of mummification to keep corpses from rotting away.

Since their rediscovery, in the 19th century, we have learned a great deal about the ancient Egyptians and the reasons they left mummies behind. It is commonly said that the Egyptians mummified their dead to preserve the body for the afterlife, but this is an oversimplification of a very complicated process and a corresponding set of beliefs. The practice of embalming, anointing, wrapping and reciting spells for the dead reflects the sophisticated way in which the Egyptians viewed life, death, and the underworld.

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Before the invention of pulleys or iron tools, Egyptian work crews relied on strong muscles and even stronger ropes. The blocks were quarried on-site or shipped down the Nile River from across the kingdom. Gangs of workers loaded the blocks on wooden sledges and hauled them across sand moistened with water, which made the sledges slide more easily. The blocks were then hauled up long mud ramps at the rate of one block every two minutes. No one knows how laborers were able to get the 2.5-ton stone blocks from the quarries to the building site. Wheels wouldn’t have been useful on the desert sand and gravel, so they most likely dragged the blocks with wooden sleds and ropes. Some think that workers used quarter-circle wooden sleds that fit around a rectangular block. They attached the sleds to the block, and a crew of about eight men rolled them along the ground, much like rolling a keg of beer. Others say the laborers used wooden rollers.

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No. They were built by Egyptian farmers drafted into a national labor force called the corvee, which handled the heavy lifting on pyramid construction sites. They were fed, clothed, and housed, and received medical care when they got hurt on the job. Ancient graffiti hints that these men and women took pride in building a “house of eternal life” for their god-king. And unlike slaves, corvee workers could go home when the work season ended. Still, pyramid building was hardly an easy gig. Archaeologists digging up a worker cemetery found bodies with busted bones and diseases related to a lifetime of heavy lifting.

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The pyramids were built to protect the body of the deceased pharaoh. These massive tombs were constructed to withstand the elements of time and were intended to last forever. Most Ancient Egyptians planned for their death and the pharaoh was no exception. His death was much more elaborate than the typical Ancient Egyptian and considered an important event; this process was tied to the rising and setting of the sun.
It was believed that while alive, the pharaoh represented Horus and upon his death he represented Osiris. During his state as Osiris, he would set the sun, while the new pharaoh, his son, in the image of Horus, would raise the sun. This process continued for hundreds of years and this is why it was important the pharaoh be protected eternally to avoid a cosmic disturbance.

The pharaoh also believed that his death was an extension to a journey towards eternal life. In order to become a “being” of the afterworld, it was important the pharaoh’s physical body be safeguarded and recognizable by his spirit, this in turn, lead to the process of mummification. The process itself consisted of being embalmed then wrapped in fine linen. Once the process of mummification was complete, the pharaoh was buried with his most prized possessions such as jewelry, funerary statues, and items that would aid him in his afterlife.

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It is located in Ur, Iraq. It was built around 21st century B.C. It is 210 feet (64 m) tall. The Great Ziggurat of Ur was dedicated to the moon god Nanna, who was the patron deity of the city. As the Mesopotamian gods were commonly linked to the eastern mountains, the ziggurat may have functioned as a representation of their homes. Thus, the people of Ur believed that their ziggurat was the place on earth where Nanna chose to dwell. Therefore, a single small shrine was placed on the summit of the ziggurat for the god. The people of ancient Mesopotamia believed that their gods had needs just like their mortal subjects. Hence, a bedchamber was provided for Nanna in the shrine on top of his ziggurat. This chamber was occupied by a maiden chosen to be the god’s companion. On the side stairway of the ziggurat’s north western part is a kitchen, which was likely used to prepare food for this god. The god’s mortal servants had to be provided for as well, and the outer enclosure of the ziggurat contained a temple storehouse, the houses of the priests and a royal ceremonial palace.

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It is located in Rome, Italy. It was built around 12 B.C. It is 125 feet (38 m) tall. It was built as a tomb for Roman magistrate Gaius Cestius. The Pyramid of Cestius is constructed of brick and cement, covered in white marble. Originally the interior of his tomb was decorated with lively frescoes, described in detail by early travelers, but now mostly gone. Between 271 and 275 it was built into the fortifications of the Aurelian walls, which likely helped it survive the centuries.

In the interior is the burial chamber, a simple barrel-vaulted rectangular cavity measuring 5.95 metres long, 4.10 m wide and 4.80 m high. When opened in 1660, the chamber was found to be decorated with frescoes, which were recorded by Pietro Santo Bartoli. Only scant traces of these frescoes survive, and no trace of any other contents. The tomb had been sealed when it was built, with no exterior entrance, but had been plundered at some time thereafter, probably during antiquity. Until the end of restoration works in 2015, it was not possible for visitors to access the interior, except by special permission typically only granted to scholars. Since the beginning of May 2015, the pyramid is open to the public every second and fourth Saturday each month. Visitors must arrange their visit in advance.

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It is located in Tinum, Mexico.  It was built around A.D. 1000. It measures 98 feet (30 m). It was built as a temple for sacrificial rituals to a Mayan snake god. All legends aside, crafty and mathematically brilliant architecture combined with the natural rotation of the Earth creates an amazing and somewhat eerie image of a giant snake crawling down the temple. For five hours an illusion of light and shadow creates seven triangles on the side of the staircase starting at the top and inching its way down until it connects the top platform with the giant stone head of the feathered serpent at the bottom. For 45 minutes this impressive shadow stays in its entirety before slowing descending the pyramid and disappearing along with the crowd that gathered to see it.

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Egyptians built more than a hundred pyramid tombs, but the biggest is the Great Pyramid at Giza. Nearly half as tall as the Empire State Building when finished, the Great Pyramid was built from 23 million limestone blocks assembled by a workforce of 20,000 laborers and craftsmen over two decades of construction. It held the title of world’s tallest building for nearly 4,000 years.

There are three known chambers inside the Great Pyramid. The lowest chamber is cut into the bedrock upon which the pyramid was built and was unfinished. The so-called Queen’s Chamber and King’s Chamber are higher up within the pyramid structure. The main part of the Giza complex is a set of buildings that included two mortuary temples in honour of Khufu (one close to the pyramid and one near the Nile), three smaller pyramids for Khufu’s wives, an even smaller “satellite” pyramid, a raised causeway connecting the two temples, and small mastaba tombs surrounding the pyramid for nobles.

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The ancient Egyptians took pyramid construction to new heights along the Nile River in northeastern Africa 5,000 years ago, but they weren’t the only civilization to build massive pyramid-shaped monuments (for even to mummify their dearly departed, which other ancient cultures also practiced). Pyramids were the most structurally sound buildings that could be constructed out of stone – as long as a civilization had sufficient rocks to quarry and the manpower to move them. Cultures all over the world built pyramids throughout history. They came in different forms and functions.

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Eskimos – a broad term for people native to frigid subarctic regions in the United States, Canada, Greenland, and Russia – don’t speak five of them, none of which has a hundred words for snow. The myth of their ice-obsessed vocabulary comes from the way their languages work. Eskimos create larger words (and full sentences) out of smaller “root” words. Their languages have only a few root terms for snow, but to those small terms they add other words to create long one-word descriptions of the snow’s conditions and uses (“the snow is icy and dangerous,” for instance, or “this wet snow is excellent for making a snowman”). The structure of Eskimo language makes it seem like they have hundreds of words for everything, not just snow.

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Although it’s crucial in battle, communication is worthless – even dangerous – if it’s intercepted by the enemy. Even messages created by complex “encryption machines,” which convert plain words into secret codes, can be hacked given enough time. Native Americans, however, speak complex languages that are virtually unknown outside their tribes. Since the First World War, they’ve used their unique linguistic abilities in the U.S. military’s signal corps as “code talkers,” translating sensitive communications into their language and transmitting them much faster than any machine. Even if enemies learned to decode Cherokee, Comanche, Navajo, Choctaw, or any of the other code-talker languages, they would still need to figure out the secret terms for words that didn’t exist in those languages. The Navajo word for “iron fish,” for instance, was used to describe submarines. A tank became “turtle” in Comanche.

The code talkers’ mission was so top secret they weren’t even allowed to share details with their loved ones. Their existence was finally made public in 1968 (23 years after the close of the war), but it took several decades before they recognized for their crucial role in winning World War II.

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Researchers can only guess when humans first began forming sounds into words to communicate thoughts (there certainly weren’t any books to record the invention of language). Ancestors of the human species possessed the mouth and throat parts necessary to pronounce words nearly two million years ago, but they likely didn’t have much to talk about until they started creating complex tools and building fires more than a million years later. The first system of words might have described tools and fire-making techniques. “Carl blow on fire, fire grow big,” Carl the Homo erectus our immediate evolutionary ancestor – may have explained to his campfire pals 500,000 years ago.

No doubt the earliest members of our species – Homo sapiens – added to the conversation when they appeared around 200,000 years ago. But as they started leaving Africa to explore Asia, Europe, and eventually the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago, our human ancestors began to develop more complicated tools – and probably words to describe them – within their own tribes. Their vocabularies grew and split off from the languages spoken by more far-flung groups. The farther these pockets of humanity moved from southwestern Africa – the point of origin for both Homo sapiens and language – the more their languages changed. And that’s why we have nearly 7,000 languages spoken around the world today.

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It is located in Northern Spain. It was painted 15,000 years ago. Using charcoal and the curve of the cave walls to create 3-D effects, ancient artists painted bison, horses, deer, and other animals that looked so realistic, archaeologists thought they were forgeries when the caves were discovered in the late 1800s. They didn’t believe Stone Age artists had the intellectual capacity for such creativity. They were wrong.

The Altamira cave is 270 metres (890 feet) long. In the vestibule numerous archaeological remains belonging to the Aurignacian (Perigordian), upper Solutrean, and lower or middle Magdalenian periods were found, including ceremonial staves and engraved animal shoulder blades. The great lateral chamber that contains most of the paintings measures 18 metres by 9 metres, the height of the vault varying from 1.15 metres to 2.65 metres. The roof of the chamber is covered with paintings, chiefly of bison, executed in a magnificent, vivid polychrome of red, black, and violet tones. There are also two wild boars, some horses, a hind, and some other figures in a simpler style; in addition, there are eight engraved anthropomorphic figures, various handprints, and hand outlines. The other galleries contain numerous black-painted or engraved figures. In many cases, the creator of the designs exploited the natural contours of the rock surface.

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It is located in Southwestern France. It was painted 20,000 years ago. Crammed with more masterpieces than any art museum, this cave complex in the French countryside offers a window into the wild world of our Stone Age ancestors. The cavern walls are awash with stunning etchings of horses, bison, birds, humans, and bulls – one of which is 17 feet (5 m) long.

Besides the paintings, many tools were found at Lascaux. Among these are many flint tools, some of which display signs of being used specifically for carving engravings into the walls. Bone tools were also present. The pigments used at Lascaux contain traces of reindeer antler, most likely introduced either because antler was carved right next to the pigments or because it was used to mix the pigments into water. The remains of shellfish shells, some of them pierced, tie in well with other evidence of personal adornment found among humans living in Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic.

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It is located in Santa Cruz, Argentina. It was painted 13,000 years ago. Profiles of human hands, perhaps created in some sort of coming-of-age ritual, join images of birds and beasts on the walls of this cave system in Patagonian wilderness at the tip of South America. Most of the hands are lefties, leading archaeologists to believe the ancient artists created their stencils by blowing paint through hollow bones held in their right hands.

It takes its name (Cave of the Hands) from the stencilled outlines of human hands in the cave, but there are also many depictions of animals, such as guanacos (Lama guanicoe ), still commonly found in the region, as well as hunting scenes that depict animals and human figures interacting in a dynamic and naturalistic manner. The entrance to the Cueva is screened by a rock wall covered by many hand stencils. Within the rock shelter itself there are five concentrations of rock art, later figures and motifs often superimposed upon those from earlier periods. The paintings were executed with natural mineral pigments – iron oxides (red and purple), kaolin (white), and natrojarosite (yellow), manganese oxide (black) – ground and mixed with some form of binder.

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Ice Age beasts and geometric designs, hunting parties and herds of horses – the painted imagery of our ancestors took many shapes and styles. As far back as 41,000 years ago, working in the dim light of oil lamps, humans (and possibly our Neanderthal relatives) expressed themselves in caverns across the world with etchings and paintings. But while archaeologists know how Stone Age artists turned cave walls into canvasses – by using chisels, charcoal, berries, and even bat poop as paint applied with straw brushes or blown through hollow bones – no one knows for certain why they did it.

In the age before the written word, cave artists probably painted as a form of communication: to teach other members of their group about animals in the region and how to hunt them. Some archaeologists believe cave art may have served as a sort of magic. By painting animals and hunting scenes on the walls of scared caverns, or special caves used for ceremonies rather than as shelter, ancient artists may have hoped to bring success on the next hunt.

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In 2013, NASA announced its “Grand Challenge” to locate any nasty asteroids heading our way and prevent their impact. Rock-stopping options include:

Nuking it: Attack the asteroid with a nuclear missile, smashing it into space dust.

Ramming it: Launch a rocket directly into the asteroid to break it in half or divert its course.

Blasting it: Target the asteroid with a space-based laser to vaporize it before it gets too close.

Redirecting it: Mount rocket engines to the asteroid’s surface to change its course so it misses Earth.

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Comets originate far out in the solar system – some from the Kuiper belt of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune, and others from a more distant region known as the Oort Cloud.

Statistics imply that Oort Cloud may contain as many as a trillion comets and may account for a significant fraction of the mass of the solar system. However, since the individual comets are so small and so far away, we have no direct evidence about the actual existence of the Oort Cloud.

The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region past the orbit of Neptune roughly 30 to 100 AU from the Sun. The Belt contains many icy bodies which can become comets. Occasionally the orbit of a Kuiper Belt object will be disturbed by gravitational interactions with the giant planets in such a way as to cause the object to take up an orbit that crosses into the inner solar system.

Although the Oort Cloud is much farther away from the Sun than the Kuiper Belt, it appears that the Oort Cloud objects were formed closer to the Sun than the Kuiper Belt objects. Small objects formed near the giant planets would have been ejected from the solar system by gravitational encounters. Those that didn’t escape entirely formed the distant Oort Cloud. Small objects that formed farther out had no such interactions, and remained as the Kuiper Belt objects.

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Like asteroids, comets are leftovers from the formation of our solar system, but they’re made of different stuff. Each is an irregular ball of icy slush, frozen gases, and dark minerals just a few miles or kilometers wide. Like planets, some comets orbit the sun on a predictable schedule. Halley’s Comet, the most famous of these weird wanderers, drops by Earth every 76 years or so (it’s not due for its next visit until July 2061)

When the comet gets near the Sun, the Sun’s heat warms it, causing the ices to sublimate (turn directly from ice into steam), releasing also dust and rock from the nucleus. This creates both the coma (a thin atmosphere) surrounding the nucleus as well as the tail of material that generally streams from the nucleus away from the Sun. The size of the coma is thousands, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of kilometers wide and the tail can reach tens of millions of kilometers long. Once the coma and tail form, they outshine and hide the true nucleus.

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California’s Death Valley holds the record for the highest reliably reported air temperature in the world, 56.7°C in July, 1913. In midsummer the desert region averages around 47°C and is the driest place in the US. Hardly the environment you would expect to find hiking trails, resorts, and a bewilderingly green golf course.

Ringed by mountains, Death Valley plunges to 86 metres below sea level, which helps explain the heat. It’s around a three-hour drive from Las Vegas.

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But, not all of it? Nope. In the late 1970s, scientists studying the seafloor discovered geysers belching a boiling mineral-rich stew into the crushing depths of the ocean. These ‘’hydrothermal vents’’ didn’t just look like they were from outer space – they were actually teeming with alien life. Here, in the constant darkness, bacteria convert chemicals into sugars in a process called chemosynthesis. Shrimp, crabs, and eyeless tube worms survive by feeding on these bacteria, creating a food chain completely independent of the sun. Astrobiologist– scientists who study the possibility of life on other planets – examine the vents for examples of life that might exist on planets far from the sun. In fact, they wonder if life on Earth began near these geysers rather than on the surface.

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We can make estimates regarding the composition of Earth’s interior regions is by recording and calculating how dense our planet is.

Crust: A very thin, solid outer layer. The oceanic crust is about 5 km (3 miles) thick. The continental crust is from 30–40 km (18–24 miles) thick.

Mantle: The layer beneath the crust. The mantle is about 2885 km (1790 miles) thick.

Upper mantle: Includes a solid layer fused to the crust. This layer combined with the crust is called the lithosphere. Beneath this is the asthenosphere, which is a partly molten layer. The asthenosphere is thought to be the layer upon which tectonic plates ride. The upper mantle is about 700 km (420 miles) thick.

Lower mantle: Is composed of solid rock under conditions of extremely high temperature and pressure. This layer is about 2,185 km (1,370 miles) thick.

Outer Core: A layer about 2,270 km (1,400 miles) thick, having the properties of a metallic liquid.

Inner Core: A solid, metallic, spherical layer about 1,216 km (755 miles) thick.

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Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun making it the most distant in the solar system. This gas giant planet may have formed much closer to the Sun in early solar system history before migrating to its present position. Large storms whirl through its upper atmosphere, and high-speed winds track around the planet at up 600 meters per second. One of the largest storms ever seen was recorded in 1989. It was called the Great Dark Spot. It lasted about five years. Neptune has 14 moons. The most interesting moon is Triton, a frozen world that is spewing nitrogen ice and dust particles out from below its surface. It was likely captured by the gravitational pull of Neptune. It is probably the coldest world in the solar system.

Distance from the sun: 2,771,162,074 to 2,819,185,846 miles (4,459,753,056 to 4,537,039,826 km)

Length of space journey from Earth: 12 years

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Here are a few of the many reasons why you should visit Uranus:
 

• it’s the only planet that orbit on its side
• experience 42-year nights and days
• it’s four times bigger than Earth
• Uranus is one of the largest planets in the Solar System
• experience the winds that travel up to 2000 km/h !!

Distance from the sun: 1,699,449,110 to 1,868,039,489 miles (2,734,998,229 to 3,006,318,143 km)

Length of space journey from Earth: 9 years

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Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and it is the only planet less dense than water. Saturn is between Jupiter and Uranus. Saturn has 7 rings. Rings are only visible from Earth using a telescope.  Saturn has at least 60 moons and 18 are named. Titan is one of Saturn moons, it has a thick atmosphere, and astronomers think that there may be life on Titan. Saturn is the sixth more important planet on the Solar System. Saturn is one of the biggest planets in the Solar System with Jupiter. Saturn’s rings are made of millions of icy rocks. Saturn is the lightest planet in the Solar System. For many years Saturn was called the ring planet.

Distance from sun: 838,741,509 to 934,237,322 miles (1,349,823,615 to 1,503,509,229 km)

Length of space journey from Earth: 3 years

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The largest planet in our solar system – large enough that 1,300 Earths could fit inside of it – rules over a system of its own. Several of Jupiter’s nearly 70 moons are worthy of your attention. Mega-moon Ganymede is larger than Mercury and has its own magnetic field. Volcanoes on lo, the most volcanic body in the solar system, spew clouds of yellow sulfur nearly 200 miles (322 km) high.

Distance from the sun: 460,237,112 to 507,040,015 miles (740,679,835 to 816,001,807 km)

Length of space journey from Earth: 13 months.

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Mars has a 24-hour day. It has polar ice caps. Its axis is tilted compared with its orbit, just as Earth is tilted on its axis. That means Mars goes through seasons, just like Earth. Mars, as cold as it is, is not as oppressive an environment as almost any other place we can think of going in the Solar System. From a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit and would melt or vaporize most things you sent to its surface. Mercury is also very hot, being close to the Sun.

Distance from the sun: 128,409,598 to 154,865,853 miles (206,655,215 to 249,232,432 km)

Length of space journey from Earth: 3 years

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Venus is the second planet from the Sun, and is Earth’s closest neighbor in the solar system. Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, and sometimes looks like a bright star in the morning or evening sky. The planet is a little smaller than Earth, and is similar to Earth inside. We can’t see the surface of Venus from Earth, because it is covered with thick clouds. However, space missions to Venus have shown us that its surface is covered with craters, volcanoes, mountains, and big lava plains. The surface of Venus is not where you’d like to be, with temperatures that can melt lead, an atmosphere so thick it would crush you and clouds of sulfuric acid that smell like rotten eggs to top it off! 

Distance from the sun: 66,782,596 to 67,693,905 miles (107,476,170 to 108,942,780 km)

Length of space journey from Earth: 6 months

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There are many reasons you may want to visit Mercury. For one, the gravity is about 1/3 of that on Earth, so you can have the same low gravity effect as on the moon. Some phenomena that occurs on Mercury that may be of interest includes magnetic plasma tornadoes cause by conflict between the sun’s radiation and mercury’s magnetic field. Mercury is also the fastest moving planet in the solar system, so you can become the person who traveled the fastest in history. Mercury holds the solar system’s 17th largest mountain, Caloris Montes, and a huge crater called Caloris Basin. Mercury also has a tail that is not visible to the eye, but consists of tiny subatomic particles blown out by the sun.

Distance from the sun: 28,583,702 to 43,382,549 miles 

Length of space journey from Earth: 4 years

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Asteroids are left over from the formation of our solar system. Our solar system began about 4.6 billion years ago when a big cloud of gas and dust collapsed. When this happened, most of the material fell to the center of the cloud and formed the sun.

Some of the condensing dust in the cloud became planets. The objects in the asteroid belt never had the chance to be incorporated into planets. They are leftovers from that time long ago when planets formed.

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Asteroids are chunks of rock that orbit the sun and wander around the solar system. They’re the rubble left over from the solar system’s formation roughly 4.6 billion years ago. An asteroid is made of the same stuff under your feet – rock, bits of metal, maybe some carbon.

There are lots of asteroids in our solar system. Most of them live in the main asteroid belt—a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids hang out in other places, too. For example, some asteroids are found in the orbital path of planets. This means that the asteroid and the planet follow the same path around the sun. 

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It’s not only possible – humans are doing it all the time! Of course, we’re all moving forward in the time right now (at a rate of one second for every second). And according to laws of physics that are far too complicated to explain here, time slows down as a person speeds up. This effect – known as time dilation – is really noticeable only as you approach the speed of light. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station orbit the Earth at about 18,000 mph (29,000 kph), which is just a tiny fraction of light speed, but they’re still moving fast enough to experience time dilation on a measurable scale. Once they return home a six-month assignment, astronauts are actually .007 seconds behind in time compared with their friends and family on Earth.

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The other 27 percent of the universe is made of this stuff, which is easier to detect than dark energy because astronomers can measure its gravitational effect on distant stars. Still, astronomers aren’t sure exactly what dark matter is. Two competing – and cutely named – theories attempt to explain dark matter’s contents: MACHOs, for Massive Compact Halo Objects such as small stars, and WIMPs, for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles left over from the big bang.

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Until recently, astronomers assumed that gravity was slowing the expansion of the universe that began with the big bang. At the end of the last century, however, they learned a shocking fact: The expansion was actually speeding up. The only way to explain this acceleration is that space is filled with… something else. Astronomers call this mystery matter ‘’dark energy.’’ They can’t see it, but they figure it has to exist everywhere, accounting for roughly 68 percent of the stuff in the universe. (Meanwhile, the atoms that make up planets, stars, your pet goldfish, and everything else account for less than 5 percent of the universe.)

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Some seriously strange stuff – and none of it good. Everything would go dark as your spaceship approached the black hole’s swirling ‘’event horizon,’’ or point of no return. The gravity here is so powerful that even light cannot escape the crushing singularity at the center. Your ship and body would stretch into an impossibly thin and long line, like toothpaste squeezed from its tube. As you approached the speed of light, time would slow and eventually stop, although you wouldn’t be alive to notice. 

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Astronomers can’t see these mighty munchers of matter, but they spot their effects across the galaxy. Black holes form when stars 20 times larger than our own sun run out of fuel and go ‘’supernova” – or explode. The dying star’s core collapses under its own gravity until it scrunches into a singularity – or tightly packed point – smaller than an atom. Despite its tiny size, the singularity still packs a gravitational pull many times stronger than our sun. Like a cosmic whirlpool, the black hole pulls in anything – asteroids, planets, other stars, and even light – that gets too close.

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Because charged particles cast off from the sun hit the Earth’s magnetic field 100 miles (160 km) up, making the air molecules glow green, violet, blue or red. These curtains of light are called auroras. The best spots to see the aurora borealis (or northern lights) are Alaska, the northwestern regions of Canada, the southern tips of Iceland and Greenland, Norway, and Siberia, The aurora australis of Southern Hemisphere is trickier to see unless you live in Antarctica.

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That sunshine beaming through your windows might seem completely see-through, but this ‘’white light’’ is actually composed of many colors – a literal rainbow of them. Astronomer Isaac Newton noticed these colors than 300 years ago when he held a special piece of glass called a prism to the sunlight. The prism bent the light into its seven component colors, or wavelengths. Raindrops in the sky act like millions of tiny prisms, scattering the sunlight into its seven colors. A rainbow blossoms into living color when you see it from sunny spot, which is why it looks like rainbows form after a storm.

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It’s been worn by kings and queens, swiped by jewel thieves, and was once feared lost in a ship-wreck, but the Hope Diamond is best known for its history of unhappy owners. King Louis XVI lost his head in the French Revolution. More than a hundred years later, a woman who wore the diamond became convinced it was cursed after her husband, eldest son, and daughter all died. She refused to sell the stone for fear of passing along the curse, and it was later donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

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Diamond form in a variety of colors – from white to black, blue to green, and pink to purple – but the rarest color of all is red. Unlike with other colors (which are caused by chemical impurities), red diamonds result from a rare quirk in the carbon’s molecular structure. Red diamonds’ rarity makes them extremely valueable.

Basically, pure red diamonds do not exist or rather have not been found so far. The available ones are fancy purplish red or brownish red. The red color in combination with other high-quality 3Cs makes them priceless. The two famous red diamonds ever sold are the Moussaieff Redand the Hancock Red Diamond. These diamonds are among the most famous diamonds ever mined. The current value could be extraordinarily high.

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Weighing 1.37 pounds (621 gm) and measuring more than four inches (10 cm) long when it was discovered in 1905, the Cullinan Diamond is the largest diamond ever found. It was cut into nine other diamonds, the largest of which has an estimated value of $400 million.

The diamond was then dispatched to England where it would be entrusted to Premier’s London agent, Sigismund Neumann. To ensure the diamond reached its destination safely it was sent to England in an unmarked postal box, while a replica was publicly accompanied by detectives on a steamer from South Africa as a diversion.

The diamond was later bought by the Transvaal government, which had been reconciled with England after the Anglo-Boer war, for £150,000 and presented to King Edward VII as a goodwill gesture on his 66th birthday on November 9, 1907.

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Earth’s most valuable gemstone is also its hardest natural surface. Only a diamond can scratch another diamond. These rugged rocks are forged 100 miles below your feet, where the molten temperatures and intense pressure of Earth’s mantle put the big squeeze on carbon, one of the planet’s most common elements (your body is nearly 20 percent carbon). Clusters of carbon atoms mash together over billions of years into a dense and rigid pattern. The end result: diamonds. Eventually, lava pushes veins of these rocks toward the surface, where they look more like pieces of glass than glittering  jewels – until a jeweler cuts and polishes them. Scientists figured out how to replicate this process in the 1950s to create itty-bitty artificial diamonds for the tips of cutting tools and industrial drills.

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Carving through 277 miles (446 km) of Arizona, U.S.A, and up to a mile (1.6 km) deep in places, the Grand Canyon exposes millions of years of geological history in layers and layers of colorful rocks. The canyon is proof of the power of water over stone. The raging waters of the Colorado River (along with other forces) carved the canyon over millions of years – a process known as erosion.

The Grand Canyon pink rattlesnake is the most common snake in the park, startling hikers as it suns itself on rocks and sandy trails, searching for lizards to eat. Strong geologic evidence suggests the Colorado River broke out of the west end of the Grand Canyon about five million years ago, and no sooner.

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Tiny creatures are responsible for the color of the cliffs, which stretch for eight miles (13 km) along England’s coastline. The cliffs began to form 70 million years ago when a shallow sea covered the region. Microscopic algae called coccolithophores floated in this sea. When they died, their white calcium skeletons sunk to the bottom, forming a white mud that grew thicker over time. When the seas receded, the mud dried into the white, crumbly chalk we see on the cliffs today.

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Tourists flock to see this geyser blow its top – launching superheated water vapor up to 185 feet (56 m) high – every 92 minutes in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, U.S.A. Geysers are rare geological features, and Old Faithful is doubly rare for its regularity. Researchers were baffled by the punctuality of its eruption until recently, when they managed to chart its subterranean plumbing. It turns out that a large chamber beneath Old Faithful fills with steam bubbles boiled by the molten magma below. Those bubbles become trapped in a tube that leads to the geyser’s mouth. The tube gradually fills with water, the pressure builds, and – whoosh – Old Faithful erupts right on schedule.

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You’ll find it 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from shore in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and California. Bleach bottles and old garbage bins bob amid fishing nets tangled with rotting sea creatures. Scientists call this swirling mass of trash the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. Twice the size of Texas by some estimates, it’s the world’s largest dump.

The seafloor beneath the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may also be an underwater trash heap. Oceanographers and ecologists recently discovered that about 70% of marine debris actually sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

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Soda bottles tumble into the surf. Garbage cans fall off ships. Grocery bags blow out to sea. About 260 million tons (235.9 mt) of plastic are produced each year worldwide, and as much as 10 percent of it ends up in the ocean. Unlike food and other organic garbage, plastic doesn’t dissolve; it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces that can stick around for centuries. Twine, toothbrushes, discarded toys, to-go bags, and less identifiable pieces of plastic drift around and around in an enormous ocean vortex created by currents, sort of like a slowly flushing toilet that never drains.

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Dolphins, seals, whales, sea lions, manatees – these aquatic creatures live in world of water, but their drinking habits are more in line with those of camels and other animals of the desert. Salty seawater is as toxic to marine mammals as it is to us. When they need a drink, marine mammals grab a bite to eat, sucking the moisture from fish, squid, and other aquatic entrees. Seabirds such as terns and albatrosses, meanwhile, have special glands near their eyes that absorb the salt from seawater and flush it out their beaks.

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Yes, but different rates and, in some cases, directions. Venus spins so slowly that its year (roughly 225 Earth days) is shorter than its day (the equivalent of 243 Earth days). It also rotates in the opposite direction: The sun rises in the west and sets in the east!

In our solar system, the giant gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) spin more rapidly on their axes than the inner planets do and possess most of the system’s angular momentum. The sun itself rotates slowly, only once a month. The planets all revolve around the sun in the same direction and in virtually the same plane. In addition, they all rotate in the same general direction, with the exceptions of Venus and Uranus. These differences are believed to stem from collisions that occurred late in the planets’ formation. (A similar collision is believed to have led to the formation of our moon.)

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Astronomers believe these rings formed from bits of asteroids and comets that were captured by the powerful gravity of these ‘’gas giants.’’ Saturn’s rings are the easiest to spot. More than 170,000 miles (270,000 km) wide, dappled with spokes that rotate at different rates, Saturn’s awe- inspiring ring system is actually a glittering shower of ice and rock that orbits the planet. And although the rings stretch about three-fourths of the distance between the Earth and the moon, they’re incredibly thin – about 30 feet (9 m) wide in places.

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Four the planets in the Solar System have rings. They are the four giant gas planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Saturn, which has by far the largest ring system, was known to have rings for a long time. It was not until the 1970s that rings were discovered around the other gas planets. The rings around Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are much smaller, darker, and fainter than the rings of Saturn. Rings around gas giants are thought to be transient over the lifetime of the planetary system. That is, if we had lived at a very different time, perhaps we would not see big rings around Saturn, but another one of the gas giants.

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Rusting iron minerals in the rocks and soil blow into the air – occasionally in planetwide dust storms – giving the atmosphere a rusty tint.

The iron within the dust reacted with oxygen, producing a red rust colour, while the sky appears red as storms carried the dust into the atmosphere. This dusty surface, which is between a few millimeters and two metres deep, sits above hardened lava composed mostly of basalt. The concentration of iron in this basalt is much higher than that on Earth, contributing to the red appearance of Mars.

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Jupiter’s rapid spin, its hurricane-force winds, and the chemical composition of its atmosphere create colorful cloud bands that encircle the planet. One of these bands contains a hurricane large enough to span three Earths. This Great Red Spot has been raging for centuries.

The Great Red Spot is a giant, spinning storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is more than twice the size of Earth! Winds inside this storm reach speeds of about 270 miles per hour. Nobody knows when the Great Red Spot first appeared on Jupiter, but it has been seen on Jupiter ever since people started looking through telescopes about 400 years ago.

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This tiny planet – the smallest in the solar system – is only slightly larger than our moon (and its surface is the spitting image of our moon’s too), so its gravity is too weak to grip a heat-trapping atmosphere.

Because Mercury has no atmosphere, it can’t hold onto its heat very well. The night side of Mercury gets very cold, which brings down the average temperature of the planet and makes it only the second hottest planet in the Solar System after Venus.

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The average temperature here is more than six times hotter the hottest spot on earth, making the Venus the most scorching planet in the solar system. It’s enough here to turn a slab of lead into a molten puddle. Sunset won’t bring relief from the heat either. Day or night, from its north pole to its south pole, every day of the year, Venus is locked in a never-ending heat wave. Blame the blanketing atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which is thick enough at the surface to crush a submarine!

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A planet’s makeup depends largely on its place in the solar system. The four ‘’inner planets’’ formed from the debris that orbited closer to the sun. The ‘’outer planets’’ developed well beyond the orbit of Mars from gases and ice. The eight planets (and numerous dwarf planets) in our solar system come in three flavors…

Terrestrial planets: These smaller inner planets – which include Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars  – are made of solid matter: rocks and metals.

Gas giants: Jupiter and Saturn are titanic balls of hydrogen and helium. Some astronomers consider them failed stars.

Ice giants: The far-flung worlds of Uranus and Neptune are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, but astronomers also call them ice giants because their atmosphere is composed mostly of ‘’icy’’ water, ammonia, and methane.

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Heywood is known for putting in writing some very famous sayings that we still use today, like “the more, the merrier,” “a penny for your thoughts,” and “Rome was not built in a day.” Included among these proverbs is the line, “the moon is made of greene cheese.” This was meant to be a humorous addition to the proverbs, and wasn’t anything that was actually believed. It’s also important to note that in this context, “greene” refers to the cheese’s age and not color.

As with many of Heywood’s proverbs, “the moon is made of greene cheese” would become popular, and eventually make its way into common use.

On April fool’s Day in 2002, NASA released fake images from the Hubble telescope that “proved” the moon was made of green cheese. And in an early version of Google Moon, before high-resolution images of the surface became available, the closest zoom levels depicted a Swiss cheese pattern.

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Somewhere on the moon, there’s an American flag. It was put there by US astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on 20 July 1969, when they became the first two people ever to set foot on the moon. They set it up just as explorers used to do when they discovered a new area. What that gesture really means is ‘this land is ours’. But does the moon belong to the United States? No, because two years before that first moon landing, the Americans had signed the Outer Space Treaty. This states that no country can claim the moon or any other celestial body for its own, but that they belong to everybody. 

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The moon will look larger when it’s closer to the horizon, where trees, hills, and houses give it some perspective. (During occasional ‘’supermoon’’ events, the moon looks slightly larger because it’s at its closest point to Earth in its oval-shaped orbit.)

Humans tend to mentally exaggerate the size of the Moon with respect to the surrounding objects when it is on the horizon. This is because, unlike other everyday objects in the sky—airplanes and birds—humans have no context to determine the size of celestial objects. According to one psychological explanation of the Moon Illusion, this can force people to believe that the Moon is bigger when compared to the objects at the horizon like trees and buildings. This is similar to the Ebbinghaus illusion, which shows that when a circle is surrounded by larger circles, it looks smaller than when it is surrounded by smaller circles.

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The atmosphere closer to the horizon is much thicker and scatters the light, giving the moon (and sun) a reddish tint. When the moon is nearer to the horizon, its light has to pass through more of our atmosphere than when it’s overhead. This means colors like blue are scattered away even more so than before, while orange and red still reach our eyes. This causes the moon to appear orange when it’s still very much white when seen from outer space at the same exact time.

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The moon is made up of large dark volcanic rock. The moon is not like earth, instead of a hot core, the moon is completely cold and dead.  It doesn’t rotate or turn around like the earth either; it faces us in one direction. One thing that the moon does do is that it has an orbit around the earth.  The reason that we see the moon with a glow or shine, is because the light of the sun is reflecting off of the moon that is visible to us.

Think of the moon as a mirror. In the case of the moon, it’s really a bad mirror. Due to the fact that it is made up of such dark material, it reflects only about 12% of the light that hits it. The amount of light that gets bounced back to earth also depends on the time and place of the orbit of the moon.  When the moon’s orbit puts it in direct forward facing to the earth, we get a larger amount of light bounced back.

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One reason the moon has craters because it gets hit by objects, small pieces of rocks that come from outer space. These are pieces of asteroids, comets that are flying around in the solar system. When they hit the surface, there’s an impact.

The moon has no atmosphere, and so even a tiny rock will create a crater. Typically when you see an impact crater, the size of the crater is much larger than the size of the rock that created it. The rock is usually at least three to five times smaller, depending on the amount of energy generated.

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Our moon is literally a chip off the old block, formed around 4.5 billion years ago when a roving ‘’rogue planet’’ the size of Mars collided with the infant Earth and knocked a cloud of debris into orbit. That debris scrunched down into the ball of rock, becoming our moon. But it’s hardly the only moon in the solar system. Roughly 140 natural satellites (another name for moons) orbit the other seven planets, but ours is the only one known simply as ‘’the moon.’’ It’s also the only heavenly body visited by human beings.

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1. Stick to the shade when the sun is strongest – typically between 10 a.m, and 4 p.m.

2. If you can’t avoid the rays, cover up. Smear your exposed skin evenly with sunblock and reapply every two hours.

3. If you don’t like applying sticky sunscreen, wear UV-blocking clothing instead.

4. Just because it’s cloudy out doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. Clouds don’t block UV rays.

5. Take extra precautions in regions closer to the Equator, where the sun is much stronger, or around reflective terrain such as snow, sand, or water.

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• Sun damage to eyes can occur anytime during the year, not just in the summertime, so be sure to wear UV-blocking sunglasses and broad-brimmed hats whenever you’re outside.
• Don’t be fooled by clouds: the sun’s rays can pass through haze and thin clouds.
• Never look directly at the sun. Looking directly at the sun at any time, including during an eclipse, can lead to solar retinopathy, which is damage to the eye’s retina from solar radiation.
• Don’t forget the kids and older family members: everyone is at risk, including children and senior citizens. Protect their eyes with hats and sunglasses.

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The ultraviolet (or UV) light given off by the sun is murder on your eyeballs. (Ever wonder why welders wear helmets? The intense heat of a welding torch generates the same eye-damaging UV light as the sun.) Even the sun’s reflection off water sand, or snow can sunburn our corneas (the clear surface of our eyes), making it feel like the inside of each eyelid is coated with sandpaper. Staring at the sun will damage our retinas, the cells at the rear of the eyes the sense light and color. Recovery from sun damage can take months. In some cases it caused permanent blindness.

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Yes, the sun will eventually burn out. But not for a long, long time.

The sun has used up about half of its hydrogen fuel in the last 4.6 billion years, since its birth. It still has enough hydrogen to last about another 5 billion years. The temperature of the sun’s surface is about 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit (5,726 degrees Celsius).

The sun burns using a nuclear fusion process, combining hydrogen into helium. When the sun runs out of hydrogen, it will fuse helium and other heavier elements until it runs out of fuel.

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It’s not the sun that soars across the sky. The Earth itself is rotating on its axis – one full rotation per day – and that spin makes heavenly bodies appear to rise in the east and set in the west to us Earthlings on the ground.  If viewed from above the celestial north, the Earth would appear to be rotating counter-clockwise. Because of this, to those standing on the Earth’s surface, the Sun appears to be moving around us in a westerly direction at a rate of 15° an hour (or 15? a minute). This is true of all celestial objects observed in the sky, with an “apparent motion” that takes them from east to west.

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Hominids evolved and developed for millions of years prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens on the Earth. This evolution was slow. The development of a new skill or tool often took thousands of years. With the arrival of Homo sapiens, this all changed. The speed of advancements increased dramatically. Instead of thousands of years, great progress was made in hundreds or even dozens of years.

The first Homo sapiens are believed to have been the Neanderthals. Neanderthal people first appeared on the Earth around 200,000 years ago in Africa. They migrated from Africa to the rest of the world around 100,000 years ago. Neanderthals were around five to six feet in height. They had thick sturdy bones, and muscular shoulders, legs, arms and necks. Neanderthals also had large brains. In fact, their brains were slightly larger than those of modern humans.

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The Moon is about 4.5 billion years old and is the only natural satellite in our Solar System.

The moon formed about 30–50 million years after the Earth formed.

The moon came about when a large object hit the Earth and blasted out rocks that all came together and orbited round the Earth.

Eventually they all melted together like in a big heated pot, cooled down and became the Moon.

For another 500 million years pieces of rock kept striking against the surface of the Moon.

You can see the surface of the Moon by using a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. The Moon’s surface shows the damage caused by these large pieces of rock hitting it billions of years ago.

The surface is covered in craters, pits and scars.

The first man to make proper maps of the moon was Galileo.  He didn’t invent the telescope but by 1609 he had developed a telescope that could magnify objects up to 20 times.

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Measurements made in the 18th century to determine how old the Earth is were based on the rate of the Earth’s cooling. The results of these computations vastly underestimated the age of the Earth to be in the hundreds of thousands of years.

The ability to accurately date our planet — which formed out of debris left behind by the birth of the sun — developed with the understanding of radioactive decay. Radioactive substances release subatomic particles at a very steady rate. Sometimes the age of an object can be determined by comparing present amounts of a radioactive substance with the supposed original amount in the object. Uranium is a particularly well-understood, naturally radioactive element.

By measuring lead to uranium ratios in ancient rock samples, in 1953 scientists deftly put Earth’s age at 4.5 to 4.6 billion years, an estimate that stands today.

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The sun is around 4.6 billion years old. Our 4.6-billion-year-old sun will become a red giant in about 5 billion years after it burns up all the hydrogen at its core. By that time, it will have extended in size and swallowed up Venus and Mars, and Earth will be long gone.

In fact, the scientists note that Earth will be gone in about a billion years. That’s because every billion years or so, the sun becomes 10 percent brighter as it ages. The increased brightness will be enough to evaporate our oceans, making life on our planet impossible.

After becoming a red giant, the sun will its dying days turn into a planetary nebula, a massive ring of luminous, interstellar gas and dust left behind.

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One of the basic ways to look at the age of the Milky Way is to look at globular clusters. These are dense clusters of stars that are distributed in a kind of halo around our galaxy. We know that the stars within a globular cluster form around the same time, and we can determine their age by looking at things such as the percentage of their stars that are red dwarfs, or the temperatures of their white dwarfs.

The red dwarf measure is useful because red dwarfs can last for trillions of years, unlike larger stars which only last a few billion. So if a group of stars form at the same time, the larger stars will die off sooner, while the red dwarfs continue to shine. So the more red dwarfs a globular cluster has, the older it is. The white dwarf method relies on the fact a white dwarf is the remnant of a Sun-like star. Once a white dwarf forms, it has no way to produce new energy, so it gradually cools. The cooler the white dwarfs in a globular cluster, the older it is.

It turns out that the oldest of the globular clusters surrounding our galaxy are about 13 billion years old, which means the Milky Way must be at least that old. 

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According to research, the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old. Hubble has helped to measure the age of the universe using two different methods. The first method involves measuring the speeds and distances of galaxies. Because all of the galaxies in the universe are generally moving apart, we infer that they must all have been much closer together sometime in the past. Knowing the current speeds and distances to galaxies, coupled with the rate at which the universe is accelerating, allows us to calculate how long it took for them to reach their current locations. The answer is about 14 billion years. The second method involves measuring the ages of the oldest star clusters. Globular star clusters orbiting our Milky Way are the oldest objects we have found and a detailed analysis of the stars they contain tells us that they formed about 13 billion years ago. The good agreement between these two very different methods is an encouraging sign that we are honing in on the universe’s true age.

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Actually, we don’t know for sure – no more than a bacteria deep inside your belly knows your hair color or shoe size. But unlike bacteria, human astronomers have high-tech sensors and space telescopes. We can measure the distances and densities of star clusters and peer through dense nebulae to the galaxy’s core. By comparing these findings with images of distant galaxies, we get a good idea of our home galaxy’s structure.

Several different telescopes, both on the ground and in space, have taken images of the disk of the Milky Way by taking a series of pictures in different directions – a bit like taking a panoramic picture with your camera or phone. The concentration of stars in a band adds to the evidence that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. If we lived in an elliptical galaxy, we would see the stars of our galaxy spread out all around the sky, not in a single band.

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A little bit of sun goes a long way. Sunlight contains invisible ultraviolet (UV) rays that can damage your skin, causing it to burn or wrinkle, and even lead to skin cancers. A colored chemical material in our skin called melanin absorbs UV rays to minimize the damage. Fair-skinned people (whose ancestors come from less sunny places) have less melanin, so they’re more susceptible to sunburn and forming harmless spots of melanin known as freckles. People with darker skin (whose ancestors come from sunny places) produce more melanin to combat UV damage. But even high levels of melanin aren’t enough to protect skin from wrinkles caused by overexposure to the sun.

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A sunny day can do more than just raise your spirits – it can make you healthier! Your body converts sunlight into vitamin D, a vital vitamin for stronger bones. Adults who get sunlight early in the day are likely to have a lower body mass index, a measure that takes into account weight and height, according to recent study.

The fact that people sleep better if they get light in the morning could account for this, since people who get enough sleep have an easier time managing their weight. The so-called “sunshine vitamin” helps the body absorb calcium, which is essential for bone health.

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It’s a big ball of gas accounting for 99.8 percent of the total mass of the solar system. More than a million Earths would fit inside the sun! A process called nuclear fusion converts hydrogen to helium deep in the sun’s core, where temperatures hit a balmy 27 million degree Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). Fusion creates energy that travels to the sun’s surface in a journey that can take 100,000 years.

The sun produces a wide range of light wavelengths called a spectrum. In addition to the familiar colors people see, the sun’s spectrum contains X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared light and radio waves. The Earth’s atmosphere fortunately blocks most of the harmful wavelengths; without this shielding effect, life would not be possible.

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Think Earth is the most important spot in the solar system? The sun is the real star of the show – literally! The closest star to Earth, it’s the source of all our heat and light. Life wouldn’t exist without it. It’s also the center of our solar system and by far its largest object. Our star’s enormous gravitational pull grips the planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets, keeping them from spinning into deep space. Put simply, we wouldn’t have a solar system without the sun.

Scientists estimate the sun has at least another 5 billion years before it turns into a red giant and swallows up Mercury and Venus. It will also destroy all life on Earth because it will be close to the planet once that change occurs. The temperature of the sun will also increase tenfold from 18 million to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The increase in the sun’s size when it finally begins to change will be due to the heat increase causing expansion.

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That would be Andromeda, a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. Astronomers believe it contains as many as a trillion stars. At 2.5 million light-years away, Andromeda is the farthest thing we can see with the naked eye, but it’s getting closer all the time. Someday, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide, sharing their star dust and spawning new stars. It’s doubtful any humans will see this cosmic collision, which won’t happen until four billion years in the future.

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We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. But even at that high rate, it still takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way!

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. We believe that it consists of a central bulge, 4 major arms, and several shorter arm segments. The Sun (and, of course, the rest of our solar system) is located near the Orion arm, between two major arms (Perseus and Sagittarius). The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years and the Sun is located about 28,000 light-years from the Galactic Centre.

It is interesting to note that recent observations by astronomers suggest that the Milky Way is in fact a “barred spiral galaxy”, not just a spiral galaxy. This means that rather than a simple spherical bulge of gas and stars at its center, it has instead a “bar of stars” crossing the central bulge. 

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As recently as a hundred years ago, astronomers thought the entire universe was contained in the Milky Way. But then Edwin Hubble figured out how to measure the distance of faraway objects. Suddenly, we learned that many smudges in the night sky weren’t within our galaxy at all – they were actually other galaxies outside our own! Today, astronomers suspect that the universe contains about 200 billion other galaxies. However, that figure is unlikely to be reliable. Subsequent sensitive observations found that many faint galaxies were not observed the first time. The most recent, and likely the most accurate, survey found that the real number of galaxies is ten times larger: so, in total, there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, or 2,000 billion, if you prefer.

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A supermassive black hole  is the largest type of black hole in a galaxy, with a mass millions of times that of our sun .Though it can’t be imaged directly because black holes pull in all light, scientists have inferred its presence by looking at the speed and motion of stars and matter close to the galactic center. They have inferred that the movements are influenced by the gravitational pull of a black hole. No one knows how the black holes at the center of galaxies form, but some suspect that they may begin as a cluster of smaller black holes that merge, or as a smaller black hole that consumes enough matter to become a supermassive one.

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The core of the Milky Way is only visible about half of the year. The other half it is located beneath the horizon. In the winter months (December – February) it is not visible at all because it’s too close to the sun. In the spring (March – May), it will first become visible a few hours before sunrise. By June it will rise much earlier before midnight. The summer months (June – August) are generally the best viewing time because it will be up most of the night. By fall (September – November) the Milky Way will be best seen in the evening, before it sets. Twilight can brighten the sky up to 2 hours before sunrise and 2 hours after sunset, so you want to avoid those times.

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The word ‘galaxy’ is derived from a Greek word for ‘milk’. Although there is not absolute proof as to why they named our galaxy as something related to milk, some researchers believe what seems to be the most likely and also most plausible reason for the name – its appearance against the night sky.

The milky band that you see on the edge of the Milky Way is actually a concentrated chunk of millions upon millions of stars that shine incredibly brightly. Also, the image of the Milky Way that we see up in the night sky in unpolluted areas (especially remote, rural locations) is on its side; it is due to the angle of viewing that the galaxy appears to be a thin, shiny arc of light, rather than an enormous, bright disk.

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If you wanted to mail a letter to an alien pen pal in some distant neighborhood of the universe, you’d need to send more than just your street address to receive a reply. Specifically, you’d need to tell your faraway friend that you live on Earth, the third of eight planets (and five ‘’dwarf planets,’’ but we’ll get to those in a bit) in the solar system, a star system in the Milky Way. Earth’s home galaxy, the Milky Way is a disk-shaped vortex of stars, planets, and clouds of interstellar gas and dust (known as nebulae). The Milky Way is a ‘’barred spiral galaxy,’’ meaning it has several arms and a bar that extend from a bulging core thick with gas, dust, and stars. Everything in the galaxy orbits the core.

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The short answer: nothing, nada, zip. But scientists still wonder if something existed before all the nothing. One theory: Our universe is caught in an endless loop of explosions and crunches. Eventually, in billions and billions of years, the iron grip of gravity will slow the growth of the universe, stall it, and then pull everything back toward its center – a process that astrophysicists call the ‘’big crunch.’’ Planets, stars, and galaxies will slowly collapse back into the singularity that started it all, kicking off another big bang and a brand-new universe.

According to another theory, our universe is just one of many, many, many alternate universes just like it in a vast ‘’multiverse.’’ When two of these universes interact at the quantum level (a level smaller than an atom), it kicks off a big bang and the birth of yet another alternate universe.

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Plenty. In fact, they see evidence everywhere they look in the universe. In 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble noticed that galaxies outside the Milky Way – our home galaxy – were zipping away in all directions, as if they originated from a singularity. Astronomers also see the big bang’s ‘’baby pictures’’ in a cosmic crackle of microwave energy and special ripples in gravity, both evidence of that ‘’inflation’’ that gave birth to the universe. The amounts of hydrogen, helium, and other elements across the universe all measure up to the big bang model. Astronomers have also failed to find any stars older than 13.8 billion years, the approximate age of the universe.

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The big bang’’ is the name for the leading theory behind the birth of everything: atoms, light, gravity, gases, stars, planets, galaxies, and even time itself. And while scientists have found plenty of evidence to back up the big bang theory, the name itself isn’t entirely accurate. The universe didn’t begin with a bang (sound didn’t exist yet) or even a mighty explosion (fire and matter didn’t exist either). Even light was a relatively late addition to the cosmic chronology. Confused? Here’s a guide to how scientists think it all began.

1. In the beginning: A long time ago, time didn’t even exist. Neither did space. And in this nothingness hung a supremely hot spot crammed with all the raw ingredients of the universe scrunched into a point thousands of times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Called a ‘’singularity,’’ this spot might even have been smaller than an atom, the basic unit of matter. (But it wasn’t an atom, because atoms didn’t exist yet.)

2. A trillion of a trillionth of a second later: Suddenly, the supremely hot, scrunched-up singularity doubles in size, and then doubles again, and again – at least 90 times – in a process known as inflation. This is the ‘’bang’’ in the big bang, and it get bigger. Expanding faster than the speed of light, this growth spurt defies the laws of physics. Everything in the universe explodes into existence, but at this point it’s little more than a mess of formless heat.

3. One second later: Inflation ends one-millionth of a second after the start of the big bang. The universe’s expansion slows and temperatures cool. At just one second old, the newborn universe contains nature’s fundamental forces. Including the gravity that keeps your feet on the ground and magnetic attraction.

4. 13.8 billion years later: present day: All the matter and energy created by the big bang continues to expand today. New stars form from clouds of gas; old stars die and expel sooty clouds known as nebulae. Planets orbit stars; stars orbit the centers of their galaxies dance with each other. Humans ponder the clockwork of the universe, just as you’re doing now. Got the gist? Good! Let’s move to topics a little less complicated than the birth of time and space.

5. 6 Billion years later: The first stars die and expel the heavier elements that eventually form new stars and planets.

6. 400 million years later: Gravity slowly tugs at the cosmic clouds of hydrogen and helium, squishing them all together to form the first stars. This marks the end of the universe’s dark age. The stars cluster together and form galaxies – including our own Milky Way galaxy.

7. 400,000 years later: The hot mess cools enough for subatomic electrons to join protons and neutrons in the formation of hydrogen atoms, the most common elements in the universe – and the stuff stars are made of. The fog fades so that light can finally shine, but the young universe is still without stars to create light. It continues its expansion in darkness.

8. Three minutes later: Expansion continues. Protons, neutrons, and electrons – the itty-bitty components of atoms – collide and interact to form a sort of super-heated fog, but this mess is much too hot to allow atoms to form – or even light to shine.

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1. Seek shelter! The safest place to be in a thunderstorm is inside.

2. While inside, don’t touch any water faucets or your landline phone (also unplug your computer and other gadgets, which can be damaged by lightning).

3. If you’re stuck outside, avoid standing under tall trees or towers, which attract lightning. Don’t even carry an umbrella!

4. Leave the area – seek shelter or climb into a car – as soon as possible.

5.  If you’re swimming, get out of the water as soon as you spy a storm. A lightning zap can zip more than 20 miles (32 km)!

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Thunder is the loud sound you hear after a lightning flash. Lightning is a bolt of very hot electricity that also makes the air around it very hot. In fact, that air can get as hot as 54,000 degrees. That’s about 44,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun!

When air gets hot, it gets bigger. A balloon that has been stretched over the mouth of an empty plastic bottle will inflate when the bottom of the bottle sits in a bowl of hot water, heating up the air in the bottle. This happens because the air has warmed up, expanded, and the bottle can’t hold it all.

Just like the air in the bottle, the air around lightning gets bigger, too. But this happens really fast, like a giant blast, because it’s so hot. It smashes into the colder air around it, cools off fast, and shrinks again quickly, making a sound wave that we hear as thunder.

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Airplanes are designed to withstand hundreds of thousands of amperes of electricity—far more electricity than a lightning bolt can deliver. An airplane’s first round of defense is ensuring that fuel tanks and fuel lines are fully encased so that it almost impossible for a lightning spark to trigger a fuel explosion.

Adding to that safety precaution, the skin of airplanes—aluminum in older planes, a composite in more modern models—is designed to conduct electricity off of the plane. When lightning strikes a plane, it sends up to 200,000 amperes of electricity rocketing into the plane’s skin. The electricity follows the outer surface of the plane’s frame and then jumps back into the air, thanks to little antenna-like devices called static wicks.

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That old saying is a sham. Bolts strike skyscrapers and other tall buildings twice, thrice, or more. New York City’s Empire State Building gets hit about 100 times each year.

When we see a lightning strike, we’re witnessing the discharge of electricity that has built up in a cloud, which is so strong that it breaks through the ionized air. This creates a stepped leader, or the lightning bolt, that travels downward until it reaches the ground. It is an incredibly quick process that takes only about 30 milliseconds. And right after lightning strikes, it reverberates in quick succession. So, essentially, multiple strikes can happen at the same place in this short period of time. Technically, the lightning is already striking more than once. Even during the same thunderstorm, there is nothing stopping a lightning bolt from striking the same place it had struck previously, even if it was as little as a few seconds earlier or as much as centuries later.

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The odds of the average American getting struck are 1 in 5,000. Lightning strikes about 2,000 people world-wide each year, and 9 out of every 10 victims survive with symptoms ranging from memory loss to dizziness to bizarre scars.

Lightning can kill people (3,696 deaths were recorded in the U.S. between 1959 and 2003) or cause cardiac arrest. Injuries range from severe burns and permanent brain damage to memory loss and personality change. About 10 percent of lightning-stroke victims are killed, and 70 percent suffer serious long-term effects. About 400 people survive lightning strokes in the U.S. each year.

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Ever notice how most batteries have little plus symbols (+) on their tops and minus symbols (-) on their bottoms? A storm cloud is like a big fluffy battery – the most powerful battery on Earth. Drops of rain and bits of ice blow and fall within the cloud, bumping against one another to create static electricity. Positively charged particles rise to the cloud’s top, while negatively charged particles sink to the lower levels. The difference between the positive and negative particles builds up a current, which arcs through the air as intra-cloud lightning, the most common type of lightning.

The much more dangerous cloud-to-ground lightning works its way downward from the negatively charged lower levels of a cloud (or, in some cases, from the positively charged tippy-top) through a stepped leader, a series of negative charges. The trip down the steps happens faster than the blink of an eye: around 200,000 mph (322,000 kph). Once the stepped leader gets within 150 feet (46 m) or so of the surface, it connects with a positive jolt of electricity that rises through an object on the ground, such as a tree, tower, building, or even you (if you’re silly enough to stand outside during a storm). This upward surge is called a steamer, and it’s the flash of lightning you see with your eyes. When it connects with the leader, it creates a channel to conduct electricity from the earth to the cloud. Zzzzzt! Krakow! Lightning can carry up to a billion volts of electricity – about 50,000 times the current of a typical industrial electrical accident.

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From frigid ice ages to globe-spanning heat waves, Earth’s climate has been subject to natural changes throughout its long history. But in the last century or so, temperatures have risen so quickly and consistently that scientists are now certain the causes aren’t natural. Why is it happening? Humans burn fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) to power their homes, cars, planes, and factories. This creates carbon dioxide, which occurs naturally in the atmosphere (animals exhale carbon dioxide, and plants need it for photosynthesis). A so-called greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. Human activity is adding so much extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that it’s causing an artificial climate change – a rapid rise in temperatures across the globe. The decade of 2001-2010 was the warmest ever recorded worldwide.

The rise in global temperatures will cause more than some hot summers. Effects of climate change include:

1. The melting of glaciers and ice caps, resulting in catastrophic sea-level rises. Low-lying cities and coastal areas will flood.

2. An increase in the instances and unpredictability of ‘’extreme weather,’’ such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

3. Longer dry seasons and droughts that will wipe out crops, leading to starvation.

The side effects of climate change will only lessen if humans switch to alternate energy sources (such as solar power), reducing their carbon footprint.

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Two reasons: strong winds and storm surge (the crashing of waves inland). So to understand the answer to this question, you first need to know what causes wind and waves. Temperature differences in the atmosphere create changes in air pressure. Wind is the movement of air from areas of high to low atmospheric pressure. Waves, meanwhile, are created by wind blowing over a body of water. Those tube-shaped ‘’barrels’’ that surfers ride off the north shore of Hawaii? They were created by wind blowing on the ocean’s surface thousands of miles away.

Now, hurricanes typically take shape over tropical oceans and coasts, where the warm ocean waters create an area of low pressure in the moist air. Bundles of thunderstorms form, fueled by the warm ocean temps and whipped into a swirling shape by the Earth’s rotation and growing wind. What starts as a ‘’tropical depression’’ becomes a ‘’tropical storm’’ when the winds reach 39 mph (63 kph). When the winds top 74 mph (119 kph), the storm is officially declared a hurricane.

Hurricane winds can reach 150 mph (241 kph), tearing apart houses and tossing cars. When these massive storms hit land, they bring flooding rain and sometimes spawn tornadoes. Even if a hurricane never makes landfall, its wind can create massive waves three stories high that crash ashore as deadly storm surge.

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Earth’s crust rides on a sea of molten rock called magma, which bubbles to the surface wherever two plates meet. Earthquakes work like pressure valves for this magma (known as lava when it reaches the surface). In ‘’effusive’’ volcanoes (such as the famous volcanoes of Hawaii, U.S.A.), the lava flows at a steady rate, often forming new mountains and islands. Volcanoes with a lot of gases dissolved in their magma and a high content of a chemical known as silica have ‘’explosive’’ eruptions in which they literally blow their tops. Potentially much deadlier than effusive eruptions, explosive volcanoes vaporize the landscape in every direction with hot gas and carpet the terrain with choking ash. The explosive eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D.79 destroyed the ancient Roman town of Pompeii, burying it under 13 to 20 feet (4 to 6 m) of hot ash. The geyser-riddled Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, U.S.A., sits above a ‘’supervolcano’’ that last blew its top 640,000 years ago.

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The ground beneath your feet might feel as solid as a rock, but it’s actually moving every minute of every hour of every day. Earth’s crust is broken into ‘’plates’’ that fit together like puzzle pieces. They’re always on the march, a phenomenon known as continental drift. (The plates creep about as fast as your fingernails grow.) When the plates scrape against each other, they can slip and create an earthquake. Most earthquakes are harmless because they happen far from populated areas or deep beneath the surface of the land or the ocean, but big ones have far-reaching effects. A powerful earthquake in Alaska, U.S.A., in 1964 sunk boats as far away as Louisiana. Earthquakes can cause landslides, fires, and structural damage to cities and roads. Undersea quakes can unleash powerful tsunamis that slosh over the land.

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The green color in leaves and blades of grass comes from a pigment called chlorophyll, which absorbs sunlight during photosynthesis, one of the most important natural processes on Earth. During photosynthesis, plants and trees use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide in the air and water into energy-rich sugars for food. That’s why leaves are at their most lush and greenest during the summer months, when the longer sunlight hours kick photosynthesis into overdrive. One bonus product of the process is oxygen, which is essential for life. In other words, most life on Earth is solar powered.

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Consider seawater’s awful taste a warning: It contains more salt than your cells and organs can handle. Ocean water is nearly four times saltier than the fluids in your body. Your kidneys need freshwater to flush out excess salt, so every gulp of seawater will just make you thirstier and thirstier. You’ll need to take in more freshwater than seawater to avoid dehydration and eventually death.

Although people can’t drink seawater, some marine mammals (like whales and seals) and seabirds (like gulls and albatrosses) can drink seawater. Marine mammals have super efficient kidneys, and seabirds have a special gland in their nose that removes salt from the blood.

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All that dissolves salt makes seawater more dense (or heavier) than freshwater – and objects float more easily in dense water  The saltwater of the ocean influences your buoyancy, or the ability to stay afloat. The buoyancy of salt water helps to increase your swimming speed as you will be closer to the surface. Unlike pool swimming, the germ factor in oceans is usually not as serious due to water circulation. Nevertheless, illnesses can result from microscopic sea life or swallowing too much sea water. Free space is also a benefit to ocean swimming; if one area is crowded, you can easily move elsewhere to find a location for uninterrupted swim.

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The next time you sputter after accidentally swallowing seawater at the beach, consider this: That bitter liquid around you once washed the land. Each drop of refreshing rainwater contains an itty-bit of carbon dioxide absorbed from the air. That gas gives rain a slightly acidic bite, which washes away rocks and soil when the drops splash against the ground. This process creates salty sodium and chloride ions that follow streams and rivers into the ocean. All those ions add up; roughly 3.5 percent of the seawater’s weight is from salt.

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Evolution has armed carnivorous plants with a wild and variety of traps for capturing, killing, and devouring dinner. Consider the pitcher plants, whose leaves are disguised as cups of sweet nectar. Bugs that belly up to the pitcher for a drink tumble inside, where they’re trapped by tiny hairs and digested into goo by special enzymes. Some plants have sticky tentacles that work like flypaper to snare insects. The Venus flytrap, the most famous of the carnivorous plants, has leaves lined with interlocking hairs that snap shut when disturbed by insects. At that point, a trapping plant becomes a sort of short-term stomach where the bug is boiled down into nutrients. The leaf hairs are so sensitive they can tell the difference between a bug (which springs the trap) and a raindrop (which does not). So the next time your parents tell you to eat your vegetables, look at the bright side – at least your vegetables aren’t eating you!

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All plants soak up energy from the sun and slurp nutrients from the dirt. But hundreds of species have developed an ability to add to their diets in sorrier soils, such as acidic swamps and rocky outcrops. They’re called carnivorous plants after their favorite food – fresh meat – which gives them the nutritional boost they need to grow leaves that capture energy from the sun. But humans have nothing to fear from these meat-eating plants. They’re deadly only to morsel-size animals, such as flies, mosquitoes, mice, lizards, frogs, and the occasional unlucky bird.

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These trees may look like they’ve been painted on, but these colors are all natural. This peculiar tree is called Eucalyptus deglupta, commonly known as the Rainbow Eucalyptus, and also known as the Mindanao Gum, or the Rainbow Gum. The multi-coloured streaks on its trunk comes from patches of outer bark that are shed annually at different times, showing the bright-green inner bark. This then darkens and matures to give blue, purple, orange and then maroon tones.

Eucalyptus deglupta is the only Eucalyptus species found naturally in the Northern Hemisphere. It grows naturally in New Britain, New Guinea, Ceram, Sulawesi and Mindanao. Now, this tree is cultivated widely around the world, mainly for pulpwood used in making paper, and also for ornamental purposes.

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These prickly plants have evolved to thrive in sunny deserts and sandy soils that would kill your average potted geranium in less than a day. You might think cacti have spines instead of leaves to jab hungry desert animals looking for a cactus snack, but that’s only half the story. The spines keep the plant from loosing water to the air. They also trap the moisture from morning mist and evening fog. The moisture condenses on the spines (like water drops on a cold soda can), then drips to the ground, where it’s soaked up by the roots. In other words, a cactus’s spines create the planet’s personal rain showers.

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The fragrance or smell of the flower plays a very important role. Insects, birds, butterflies or animals do not come to the plant knowing that they have to help them in the process of fertilization, but it is the smell of the flowers which attract these creatures. The fragrance strongly attracts the insects and brings them so close to the flower that the pollen gets stuck to their body. Then when these animals get attracted to other plants in the same manner, the pollen goes and gets fertilized with the other flower containing egg cells and results in the production of seeds. The color of the flowers also plays a very important role in attracting them. All flowers do not have a similar smell and the reason behind this is that specific flowers attract specific types of pollinators only so as to make sure that the pollen gets fertilized to the right species. Some plants like orchids have a specific smell which attracts only one pollinator and hence they totally rely on these pollinators for fertilization.

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To set the mood for shootouts at high noon in old cowboy movies, of course. Actually, tumbleweeds tumble to create future generations of tumbling tumbleweeds. The part of the tumbleweed you see blowing end over end in the breeze is actually the above ground portion of many species of desert plants. When the plant matures and dies, it breaks free from its roots in the ground and tumbles in the breeze, spreading new seeds along the way. When the seeds find suitable soil, they take root and sprout new tumbleweed.

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Leaves are colored by molecules called pigments. The pigment that causes leaves to be green is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is important for plants to make food using sunlight. During spring and summer when there is plenty of sunlight, plants make a lot of chlorophyll.

In autumn when it starts to get cold, some plants stop making chlorophyll. Instead, those plants break down chlorophyll into smaller molecules. As chlorophyll goes away, other pigments start to show their colors. This is why leaves turn yellow or red in fall.

The color change usually happens before the leaves fall off of the tree. Why might that be? It takes a lot of energy to make chlorophyll. If the plants break down the chlorophyll and move it out of their leaves before the leaves fall, plants save energy. The plants can reabsorb the molecules that make up chlorophyll. Then, when it’s warm and sunny enough to grow again, the plants can use those molecules to remake the chlorophyll. That way the plants don’t have to make chlorophyll from scratch.

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Earth’s atmosphere not only provides the right mix of breathable air for animals and plants, but it – combined with an oxygen-rich ozone layer and the planet’s electromagnetic field – also acts as a force field against solar radiation and deadly space debris. The solar system’s other planets are typically too hot or too cold to support liquid water, but Earth is just right. Oceans cover nearly 70 percent of the planet’s surface and are a source of the water vapor responsible for our weather.

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It’s a fact confirmed by cartoons and travel shows: Flush a toilet in England and the water swirls counterclockwise; flush one in Australia and it empties clockwise. The reason? The Earth’s rotation experts a spinning force – called the Coriolis Effect – on the draining water, and this force works in opposite directions on either side of the Equator. Flush your toilet to see the Coriolis Effect in full effect. Neat, huh?

There’s just one problem: The Earth’s rotation has nothing to do with the direction of draining toilet water. Hidden jets under the rim of the toilet determine which way the water drains, and that direction varies by manufacture rather than by hemisphere. While the Coriolis Effect affects the spin of large-scale phenomena such as hurricanes, the planet’s rotation is much too slow to affect your flush.

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An Earth with a perfect posture would be a little boring. Instead of seasons, the weather would be pretty much the same year-round, affected only by local storms (and the gradual effects of climate change). Regions that see snowy winters and pleasant summers with the tilt would end up locked in an endless autumn. “Winter’’ and ‘’summer’’ would be destinations rather than times of the year. You’d have to travel farther north or south of the Equator if you wanted to go snowboarding, while summer would exist only in the tropics. Nearly every day of the year would have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.

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The Earth is tilted 23.5 degree on its axis. During the course of its path or revolution around the Sun, it is either tilted toward or away from the Sun. During the summer months, in the Northern hemisphere, although Earth is further away from the sun than in winter, it is actually tilted more directly toward the sun. Because of this, the sun is above the horizon longer, with more rays directly hitting Earth’s surface, resulting in longer daylight hours and warmer temperatures. However, in winter months, although the Earth is closer to the sun, it is tilted away from the sun, in the Northern hemisphere. This results in the sun rising lower in the sky and above the horizon for a shorter period of time, producing less hours of daylight and cooler temperatures.

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We have four seasons because the Earth doesn’t sit up straight: It’s tilted on its axis. As it orbits the sun, the planet’s slight slouch exposes more or less of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to the sun, depending on the time of year. When the South Pole is pointed toward the sun, Australia and other countries south of the Equator receive more direct sun exposure, resulting in warm summer temperatures. At the same time, the North Pole is pointed away from the sun, reducing sun exposure and making for chilly winter temperatures. The farther you are from the Equator, the greater this seasonal effect.

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