Science, Nature and Tech

Charity Shop Shopping = Chopping

Do you want to save money and still look good? Do you want to be original but not so weird-looking people scatter when you approach?
We’ve already looked at the trend towards vintage clothes but how do you make sure you’re more chic than geek? Here’s my take on successful charity shop hopping. Perhaps you have some more you could add?

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Home, Health & Style

What is Counselling?

ids When something’s on your mind, it can help to talk about it and share it with someone else. But what if you don’t want to talk to your friends or family, or you can’t?
That’s where counselling can help.

Basically, counselling is just a space for you to look at your feelings. You do this with a trained counsellor who is experienced at working with young people. You don’t have to talk for the whole time – counsellors also use sand trays, drawing and modelling to help explore feelings. They won’t make you talk about something you don’t want to; it’s your time to use how you want. Even if your school has suggested you see a counsellor, you don’t have to – and you see them for as long as you want to.

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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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Language & Literature

Shooting stars, Weather, and Rocks falling from the Sky!

 

 

What do shooting stars, weather and rocks falling from the sky have in common? Are you wondering whether we have gone mad asking such a question? Do rocks ever fall from the sky? Of course they do! You might know them better as “meteorites”, and they are meteors, or rocks from outer space, that fall down to the earth. And what does that have to do with weather? It’s not like they come down like rain! And before you say to yourself “meteor shower”, remember that a meteor is actually a shooting star, a space-rock that burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Related, yes, but weather, no.

The weather connection is through another word, generally used to mean “study of the weather”. That word is “meteorology”. As you can see, all three have something in common – the word “meteor”.

So what is this word, and how did it come to mean these different things?

Meteor came into English through French in the late 15th century. In French it was meteore. Very similar, you might think. Does this mean that it is a French word. Not at all. The next question we must ask ourselves is where did French get it from? The answer is from Medieval Latin meteorum, which meant “things in the heavens”. But this is not the end of the tale. Latin took the word from ancient Greek, and in Greek we can analyse the word to see what it really means.

The Greek word μετέωρα (meteora) can be broken into two parts: meta, which means “over, beyond” and aora, which comes from the verb αείρω/ αίρω (aeiro, airo), which meant “to raise, lift up”. Even today, in Modern Greek, αιωρείται (aioreitai) means “it hovers”. All this means that the original meaning of the word was “thing that is raised in the air”. And even in ancient times this developed to mean “things in the sky” and gradually came to have the meaning it does today.

Another interesting point is that the word “air” is in fact from the same root as αείρω (aeiro), which makes it a distant cousin, or cognate, of “meteor”.

 

Did you know:

One of the largest and most famous meteor craters is to be found in northern Arizona, desert of the U.S. It is 1,200m wide, 170m deep and calculated to be created 50,000 years ago! It is more commonly known as the Barringer Crater.

Screenshot 2013-10-28 at 09.49.14

 

 

 

Title Photography: Mike Lewinski 2013

Amanda Scheliga 2007 

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Art & History, Written By You

Gentry or Servant? Which Would You Choose To Be? – Written By You

You will all know what a ‘servant’ is, I am sure  – Perhaps your Mum says that sometimes when you ask her to do too much for you ‘Do you think I am your servant?’ 🙂

Do you know we mean when we say ‘the gentry’? According to this website 

The gentry were the people who were knights, squires, gentlemen and gentlewoman whose fortunes were great that they did not have to work with their hands for a living. Their numbers grew rapidly and became the most important class during Elizabethan time. They could start as a knight and through generations and marriages, they could gradually build a wealth and title. Most of the important people of this time came from this class.

Back in Tudor times (between 1485 and 1603), a person couldn’t choose to be born into the gentry. Today groups of people all over the world get together to reenact various periods of history, including the Tudor period.

Alison has been on both sides of the gentry/servant divide and tells us all about reenactments, making your own clothes and living like a Tudor girl, at least for a weekend. 

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