Science, Nature and Tech

Help A Hedgehog

Gretta is a  freelance journalist who blogs at mumsdotravel.com. She and her family are worried how the local wildlife are coping with the lack of water. Strange as it may seem in a country that is famous for rain, there has not been enough of it in the past years in UK.
Read on to find out how to help hedgehogs and other wildlife.

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Art & History

Early English – The Latin Alphabet

In our last post, we discovered the runic alphabet and the Futhorc, and now we are going to look at what came next. The Latin alphabet.

The Futhorc was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet. However, it seems that the Latin alphabet was not perfectly suited to represent English, which contained sounds that did not exist in Latin, and so people adapted it with the addition of a few runes: thorn to represent ‘th’ and wynn to represent ‘w’, as well as a few adaptations in usage of the already existing Latin letters in order to make them better suited to representing English sounds.

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Art & History

Great Women You Should Know… Hedy Lamar

You probably do not know who the actor Hedy Lamarr was as her last film credit was in 1958. If you ask your parents they may have a vague recollection or at least know her name.
What they probably don’t realize is that she wasn’t only an actor. She was a philosopher and, most importantly this month as we remember the World Wars and the sacrifices made during those wars, she was an inventor. She and avant-garde composer George Antheil worked together to create the first broad-spectrum frequency hopping wireless communications.
“What on earth is that?”, you’re probably thinking!

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Science, Nature and Tech

CURIOUS CREATURES 3 – The Naked Mole Rat

 

The strangest creatures are, to me,

The ones I love the best.

The slimy, ugly and the odd

Are cooler than the rest…

 

When I began this Curious Creatures series for Jump! Mag, I made a list of animals and insects I wanted to cover. I began with the ones I had some sort of connection with and most were animals close to home that I’d seen or heard, which intrigued and inspired me.
But rather impatiently, I’m now going to go a bit further afield and invite you to join me in the strange and extra-extraordinary world of  “Curiouser and Curiouser”*Creature number 3… 

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News & Politics

Let Toys Be Toys

Have you ever noticed that children’s toys are often labeled as “Boys” or “Girls” toys?
Very often, the girls’ toy area will be a sea of pink and glitter with a lot of beauty, cooking, fashion and baby doll items.  The boys’ area will have action figures, construction and science kids, plastic guns and dinosaurs.  Even board games can sometimes be separated in this way. Tina takes a closer look at why this is unfair for all kids, and what a group called Let Toys be Toys are doing about it.

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