Kids are curious about all sorts of concepts and never stop bothering us with their thought-provoking and annoying questions. Here are eight of them about our planet and how to answer them.
Kids are curious about all sorts of concepts and never stop bothering us with their thought-provoking, and annoying questions. Here are eight of them about the planet earth, and how to answer them.
You bet! Every day the earth adds on around five hundred tons of dust every day in its journey through the space. So, if you say that the world in 4 billion years old, that means it has put on sixteen million million million tons in its life. Don't worry about it getting too fat to move though! Even that huge amount of weight is only a tiny proportion of how heavy it really is!
They do! In a storm thunder and lightning always happen at the same time! The problem is, you have to be right at the spot where the lightning strikes in order to realize this. If you're at the right spot, you might not live to tell the tale! Do you sometimes hear a jet plane before you see it? That's because it is traveling faster than the sound it is making! It is the same with thunder and lightning. Light travels way faster than sound so although you see the light almost at once you don't hear the thunder (which some people think are the angels playing soccer!) until a while later. The sound in fact travels at the speed of one mile a second. So, next time you see some lightning, count! One, two, three… bang! You can tell how many miles away the storm is.
There is a question and a half - or even a question and three quarters! The real answer is that nobody knows - we haven't counted them all yet. Around 1.8 million have been accounted for - that is spotted, recorded and recognized by the scientific community. How may haven't been discovered yet? Well, we could make a guesstimate! There are somewhere between ten and thirty million species that have not been classified yet. Mankind hasn't really been as sharp eyed and clever as it could have been! Although most of these species are bound to be invertebrates or plants, scientists estimate that we still haven't uncovered abut five thousand mammals, which should be pretty easy to spot! Maybe you are going to be the one to finally discover the Yeti!
How many stars are there in the sky? Chemicals are made up of different combinations of elements. So far, we have discovered one hundred and sixteen elements, such as hydrogen and oxygen, but that number may increase as our science advances. Chemical elements are the blocks from which compounds are made. So, for example, hydrogen and oxygen join together to make water. Carbon and oxygen join together to make carbon dioxide. Our scientists are constantly creating more chemical compounds in their laboratories, the crazy guys they are, so the number increases all the time!
Women often talk about their biological clock and if they have one, you can bet your bottom dollar that trees have one as well! In a lot of trees, leaf fall is triggered by the days becoming shorter and the temperature getting colder as summer turns to fall (or autumn if you are British!). The substance that gives the leaves their color - chlorophyll - is diminished. The leaf, as it loses its green color, shows what lies beneath. These are yellow and orange pigments called carotenoids which sound like something out of a science fiction novel. Think for a second about carrots, growing underground. No sunlight so no production of chlorophyll, so they are orange! Some scientists believe that the change of color is due to a hormone imbalance! When the days draw in the plant hormones that stop the leaves from falling break down. Experiments have shown that if these hormones are injected in to trees at this time of year, then the leaves stay green!
When the oceans first formed it was very likely that they were not salty at all. The rivers that flowed in to the seas eroded rocks which contained salt and that's how it got there. All the rivers in the world have minerals and salt in them and it all gets concentrated in the seas. We have to blame the clouds for this! When the sun evaporates sea water to make clouds out of it, the salt gets left behind. The cycle continues when the clouds eventually produces rain, this falls to the ground and ends up in the rivers flowing towards, you've guessed it, the sea. As it flows, more rocks are eroded and more salt goes in to the sea. As Simba once sang, it's all part of “The Circle of Life!
Imagine if you were able to go back four and a half million years. If you could, you would fry on the spot because it was pretty hot back then. If you could remain alive you would see volcano after volcano after volcano - all erupting. A lot of the earth's atmosphere came from the gasses that these huge volcanoes spewed out. These guys made Pompeii look like a picnic! One of these gases was water vapor. This eventually cooled and formed droplets of water. These drops would get heavy and fall, ending up on the earth. So, in a chicken and egg kind of situation, you can safely say that the raindrop came before the seas.
The whole of the fiftieth state. Yes, that's right, Hawaii is the biggest volcano in the world! Its base is on the bottom of the ocean and the top is the Mauna Kea mountain summit. Add these two distances together - island to ocean floor is seventeen thousand feet and island to top of Mount Mauna Kea is another thirteen thousand and you get thirty thousand feet in total. Golly gosh - that's bigger than Mount Everest!
