Science magazine for children: Packed with science stories, science facts, science features, and other science learning resources for children. Discover the known, the unknown, and little-known facts in our science articles. Learn the how and why of everyday things and explore rare and exotic living species.
358 items in this section. Displaying page 32 of 36
Excerpts from 'Everything has a History'
Haldane’s books are the best for communicating science to a layperson. He wrote almost 300 brilliant articles on popular science for ordinary workers, many of which were later collated into books such as ‘Everything has a History’, ‘Science in Everyday Life’ and ‘On Being the Right Size’. Here are two chapters from ‘Everything has a History’. How Bees Communicate: Eight years ago, I gave an account in ‘The Daily Worker’ of the early work of Von Frisch and others on the language of bees....
Watery Facts
The Pacific Ocean is three times bigger than Asia, the biggest continent on Earth. It covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface. Its widest part is about 1770 km or 11000 miles. That distance would take you halfway around the world. Ninety seven per cent of all the water on Earth is salty. Only 3 per cent is fresh water. Of that 3 per cent of fresh water, over 2 per cent is frozen in ice sheets and glaciers....
A Smelly New World on the Web
Every time you blink, someone is forming an Internet company somewhere in the world. That is the pace at which the Internet fever has caught on with people. They could be young college students with dreams of making a fortune or middle-aged individuals trying to lure the goddess of wealth. Each one is searching for the one great idea that could make his web company click in a big way. And they are trying all sorts of gimmicks to attract people towards their websites....
Are Fish Dumb?
There was a time when people thought that fish were dumb creatures. Until they invented machines which could detect sounds under water. And guess what these machines heard? A string of grunts, clicks, thumps and other kinds of sounds. It was the fish doing a lot of underwater talking! It seems that they have a lot to talk about, for each sound has a different meaning. There is a kind of fish called the croaker. They actually croak like a frog!...
Who was the US President for a Day?
Quick all you quizzards and prospective Who Wants to be a Millionaire candidates: Who was the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth Presidents of the United States? James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore . .? Yeah, but what about David Atchison? Wasn’t he sworn in after Polk? So shouldn’t Atchison be the 12th president and not Zachary Taylor? Yes. It’s true. There was a gap of a day between Polk stepping down and Taylor taking over. And Atchison stepped in as President – just for one day!...
What is Leukaemia?
Some 15 years back when I was still in school, our class teacher, Mrs. Khurana, would remain absent from school and class almost every other day. We kids were very happy without realising and neither did we bother to find out the reason for her absence. It was only later that our principal informed us that Mrs. Khurana’s only son was suffering from leukaemia (wrongly called blood cancer). I remember later that Mrs. Khurana took her son to abroad where he underwent a bone marrow transplant....
Why Do Knuckles Pop?
Have you ever laced your fingers together and bent your fingers back? If you pressed hard on any bent finger, you would have heard a popping sound? Finger joints produce that loud c-r-a-c-king sound. The sound comes when bubbles in the fluid around the joint burst! Our entire body is made of a skeleton of 206 bones. Bones help in giving shape and support to the body and help us move about. Our bones are not too long otherwise we would not be able to bend or grasp things....
Who’s Who at the Zoo
“Who’s Who at the Zoo” is an amazing book of animals by Ruskin Bond. Published by National Book Trust, India. Each animal is special; none too stupid or ugly, says the author. Out of 24 animal friends talked of in the book, here are some for you. The Zoo is For You In an overcrowded world, where the forests and wilderness are fast disappearing, it is becoming more and more difficult for many birds and animals to find food and shelter....
Do Some Animals Farm?
We all live the way we do in villages and cities because a long, long time ago, the early humans gave up hunting for farming. They domesticated plant species by cultivation, ploughed the land and harvested the grain. That was the beginning of civilisation as we understand it. But, do you know that certain ant species were actually farming fungus years before humans learnt how to farm? For many millions of years, ants belonging to the attines group were farming and cultivating fungi in their anthill nests....
When was the First Circumnavigation by Air?
Ever since Colombus set sail to see if the world was flat or round, intrepid explorers have vied with each other to go around the earth. The world has been circumnavigated by sea by Marco Polo and people have walked across continents from end to end. But until 1924 no one had tried to circumnavigate the world by air except over a continent by a balloon in a Jules Verne novel. Eight Americans decided to circumnavigate the world by plane....