Art & History

Great Women You Should Know: Betty Skelton

In our series of Great Women You Should Know … here comes daredevil and adventurer Betty Skelton

When she was eight, Betty fell in love with aeroplanes. She watched them flying over her house every day, she devoured books about them, and she begged her parents to take her to airfields where she would persuade pilots to take her on rides above the clouds.

Betty must have been a very persuasive person, because she also talked a young Navy pilot into giving the whole family flying lessons. And when I say whole family, I mean it: Betty flew her first plane solo when she was just twelve years old. She might have been a tiny daredevil, but she was so scared her mother would scold her for doing it that she kept it a secret for a week!

Science, Nature and Tech

Water and Engineering – Water, Wonderful Life

Dr Lesley Beeton is a scientist, who studies what the DNA code tells us about human life and health. She has always loved science, and believes that science doesn’t just happen in laboratories. It happens all around us. Science keeps aeroplanes flying, electricity flowing, and the internet speedy.

Dr Beeton grew up in South Africa. Some of you may have traveled there for your holidays, to see the game reserves or Table Mountain. But even if you haven’t been there, we can all still learn something from the experiences of southern Africa.

Science, Nature and Tech

SCIENCE NEWS – Discovery of An Underground Ocean

Earth’s Underground Ocean

In 1864 the French author, Jules Verne, published his novel “Journey To The Interior of the Earth”. In this book 3 men explore volcanic tunnels that lead miles beneath the Earth’s surface, and have a number of strange encounters along the way. One of these is the discovery of a massive ocean, deep underground. Now, 150 years later, it seems that Monsieur Verne’s imagination may have been more accurate than he knew.

An enormous reservoir of water, roughly 3 times bigger than all of the Earth’s oceans put together, has been detected 400 miles below the surface. The water is trapped inside a layer of blue rock called ringwoodite, in the layer of hot rock between the Earth’s core and its surface) that is known as the mantle.

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