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Science, Nature and Tech

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

Science, Nature and Tech

Resources to Learn To Code – by FireTechCamp

In my last post here, I gave a few ideas as to why you as a young woman should get your hands dirty with coding: it’s fun, it’s easy, it’s creative, and it’s meaningful. Today I wanted to follow that up with some resources for where you can get that knowledge.

Home, Health & Style, Popular

6 Things Kids with Special Needs Wish EVERYONE Would Do

When we published our article 6 Things Parents Wish Their Kids Would Do … and 6 Things Kids Wish Their Parents Would Do, one of our readers got in touch to say we should do one for the things that kids with special needs wish EVERYONE would do. So we asked our followers, and came up with this list.

It was a bit tricky to put the list together, because there are so many different kinds of “special needs”. For some children, their disability is quite well manageable with medication, or with assistance and therapy, and you’d hardly know they had any additional needs. You may have heard of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome – these are part of the autistic disorder spectrum, a range of conditions that affect how people communicate and relate to people around them. You can’t tell by looking at someone if they have ASD.

Other children have disabilities that are apparent when you meet them, such as those with Down’s Syndrome, which we have covered in more detail here. Or they might use a wheelchair to get around.

What thing do they all have in common? They sometimes get asked really silly questions, and get treated badly by people. Make sure you aren’t one of them, by listening to what the kids (and their parents) had to say!

Written By You

Cat’s Bats

Cat is 10 years old and has recently moved back from living abroad. She is settling into school in UK and learning to read and write in English (until now she was schooled in French, so it is a bit of a change). Her favourite animals are bats, and here she tells us a bit about them.

Home, Health & Style, Popular

Good Relationships – Healthy Relationships – Tips for Kids

Relationships are hard at any age. Remember that we don’t just talk about relationships when we mean a boyfriend or a girlfriend – it’s about how you get on with your parents, your friends and other people important to you.

There are certain basic ideas that are important to developing good relationships; you master these and life suddenly becomes a lot less stressful! Alice Hoyle has some ideas that may help you have better relationships with the people in your life.

Communication

Image by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Communication is the most important aspect of any relationship. Sharing things with people in your life is important. We do this mostly by speaking and listening. It is important to share how you feel about things and to listen and try to understand how others feel about things (this is called empathy).

How good are you at both talking AND listening? If you favour doing only one of them in a relationship then this isn’t as balanced as it could be- you probably need to work on doing both and so should the other person.

Also sometimes people might say something but their body language (how someone uses their body or their facial expression) maybe saying something different. Take some time to consider what is your body language saying when you talk? What is their body language saying? Do you make eye contact when you talk?

A key to successful communication is to use “I” statements instead of “you” statements- eg. “I feel sad when you call me silly” is better than “You calling me silly makes me sad” because the second one can put the person on the defensive straight away and the conversation can go badly after that.