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Science, Nature and Tech

Green and Growing: The Life of a Seed

As you know, there is a vast number of different kinds of plants growing all over the world, from snowy slopes to Amazon rain forests to dusty deserts: plant life is everywhere. So how does it all work? Lets start with seeds.

The Life of a Seed

Picture a seed – I am sure you have all seen them. It will have a hard outer shell to protect it. When it has found the right conditions of warmth and moisture, this shell will crack or split as a root pushes its way out to take hold in the soil. Then the plant will start to grow and a shoot will make its way upwards, with the root growing down, to draw moisture from the ground and provide some balance for the plant, keeping it firm in its place.

Just like you and me, plants need food to grow. Their food is very different from ours, of course! Here’s what they do: the leaves draw water up from the roots, through the stem, and they also soak up sunlight and air. These three things combine to make food in the leaves, where it is stored. Now think of an onion. It is formed to store the food for the plant.

School & Career

Women You Should Know – Conductor Alice Farnham

The musician and conductor Alice Farnham spoke to us about being a conductor, and the new courses for young women that she is giving at Morley College in Great Britain.

The courses are designed to get more girls and women interested in conducting.

Science, Nature and Tech

Lightning Never Strikes Twice

Continuing our Fact or Fable series, today we take a look at the saying ‘Lightning never strikes twice’, with our Science Editor Samantha Gouldson investigating.

Lightning forms when excess amounts of positive and negative electric charge build up in storm clouds. This causes sparks, kind of like static electricity. Sometimes the sparks jump between the clouds but often they jump between the clouds and the ground.

It’s not just thunderstorms that have lightning either; snow storms, sand storms and even the clouds produced by erupting volcanoes can all cause lightning.

The idea that lightning doesn’t strike twice is a popular saying but one that it’s easy to disprove.

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

CURIOUS CREATURES 2 – The Stag Beetle

The strangest creatures are, to me,

The ones I love the best.

The creepy, crawly and the odd

Are cooler than the rest…

These magnificent beasties are the armoured vehicles of the insect population and the largest terrestrial-dwelling beetles in the UK. Their common name is a reference – unsurprisingly – to their antler-shaped “mandibles” or jaws, which they use to fight over territory, but not, perhaps surprisingly, to win the respect of female Stag Beetles..!

These Curious Creatures have intrigued me ever since I found an expired female stag beetle (see below ) in a south-west France many years ago. I drew it next to a blackbird’s feather, captivated by the different tones of black, the textural contrasts and inky depths of colour. I found it – and still find them all as a species – fascinating and beautiful, particularly the males, with their extraordinary maroon-red mandibles.