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.

News & Politics, Popular

What is Separation of Powers?

Have you ever heard this term and wondered what is the separation of powers exactly, and why is it so important? If so, then read on because we are going to explain it!

Brandon Mowinkel / Unsplash

Separation of powers isn’t a new idea – in fact, even the Ancient Greeks had a version of this political system, as did the Romans. There are variations in place across the world.

Each country has a slightly different setup, so we’ll use the United States to explain the concept.

What is the Separation of Powers?

The idea behind it is to have a system in place that prevents one person or group from having all the power over an entire country. If you think back to the days when countries were ruled by a king or queen, who made decisions that affected the lives of everyone who lived in their kingdom – sometimes that went well, but often it didn’t. Instead of one person having all the power, a democracy splits the power between different people or groups of people.

When you think of the person who runs the country, you probably think of the President. The President represents the EXECUTIVE branch of the government.

In the USA, that means that the President executes the instructions of Congress, signs Executive Orders, selects judges to be approved by Congress, and is in charge of the armed forces (the navy, army and airforce).

By the way – don’t get confused by the word ‘execute’, which can mean ‘to put to death, to murder’ but can also mean ‘to carry out, to accomplish’. The President carries out the instructions from Congress, he doesn’t kill them all!

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