How Much Sleep Do Kids Need?
Julianne Robertson investigates the world of snoozes, forty winks, cat naps and snoring. What is SLEEP, why do we need it, and how much sleep do kids need?
A couple of nights ago I was feeling really, really tired, so I went to bed early. I slept soundly, without even dreaming, until about 5am, when I woke up. It felt like I’d only been sleeping for about 5 minutes! After that, I fell back to sleep but had lots of vivid dreams and when I woke up a couple of hours later, it felt like I’d been asleep for a long time. After all that I still felt well-rested and was ready for the day.
All this made me wonder – what IS sleep? Why is it that some nights we feel like we’ve had a really good nights’ sleep, while other nights we still feel tired when we wake up in the morning? Here’s what I’ve discovered about sleep…
Exploring Australian Alone
Sally-Anne was out and about in Australian, and took us along on a virtual trip. She shared her first impressions of the country, and then her love of the city of Melbourne.
In this report, she explains why she went to Australia alone, and what it is like to travel without companions.
If you’ve been reading some of my reports from Australia, you’d be forgiven for wondering why I haven’t mentioned any of the people I’m travelling with. That’s because there isn’t anyone, I’m on this trip all by myself. I wasn’t too worried before I came because I’m quite used to doing things alone. I live in my own flat, I went to a different high school to everyone I knew from primary school and I quite often go and visit places by myself, but I’d never travelled alone. In fact, I’d never been outside of Europe at all, even with other people, so the whole trip was a bit nerve-wracking, if exciting.
A Kid-Friendly Explanation of The Big Bang & An Amazing New Discovery by Scientists
Most scientists believe that the Universe began in a Big Bang around 14 billion years ago. The entire Universe was inside a bubble thousands of times smaller than a pinhead, and was hotter and denser than anything we can imagine.
When the explosion called the Big Bang happened, the Universe as we know it was born. In a fraction of a second, the Universe grew from smaller than a single atom to larger than a galaxy. It kept on growing, and is still expanding today.
Now researchers in America think they have found traces left in the sky that prove this that the Big Bang did really happen. It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes. These twists of light are called ‘gravitational waves’ – the effect is a little bit like how waves form on the surface when you drop a big stone in a pond. However, you also have to imagine that the Big Bang formed the pond itself.
The team leading the project, known as BICEP2, has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky. The aim was to find evidence of ‘inflation’ – the idea that the cosmos grew rapidly in its first trillionth, or trillionth of a trillionth of a second – growing from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble.
The leader of the team, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said:
“This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics – the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe.”
Over the coming years, scientists will work hard to investigate every aspect of this discovery. Other experiments will be carried out to see if they can replicate the findings of the American team. If this research is confirmed, it will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time.
EDIT
Dr Sarah Bearchell drew our attention to this video, which explains the concept of gravity and gravitational waves with the help of a towel, an apple and a ping pong ball. Check it out