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What is the Point in Learning Chemistry?
Have you ever sat in a Maths class wondering why you will ever need to be able to do long division without a calculator? Or silently cursed your Geography teacher while learning about the formation of oxbow lakes? And History?
That’s all in the past and irrelevant, isn’t it? In this series of articles we will look at some of the subjects we learn at school, and try and answer the question: What’s the point in learning… Chemistry?
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
12 Awesome Book Resources for Kids
Looking for great Book Resources for kids? These are our favourite sites for avid readers, and to inspire and encourage reluctant bookworms.
If you know of any book resources that we have missed, do let us know and we will add them to the list!
You can also browse our articles on Books on Jump! Mag.
What is Roller Derby?
You might have heard of Roller Derby but still be asking yourself, ‘What is Roller Derby?’.
It is a sport that originated in the USA in the 1930s and has evolved over the last eighty years. The modern version of the sport is fast, fun and mainly by girls and women. Joanne Brady has been finding out a bit about the sport and the women who play it.
Is Our Fate Really Out of Our Control? – Written By You
Do you think that our lives are set out before we are born, and things are ‘just meant to be’? That’s what we mean by ‘fate’, a force beyond our control that determines our future. Gabriela has been thinking about this since her English class held a discussion on the topic, and she shares her thoughts with us.