How did rockets originate and develop? Rockets were first known to be used in 1232, when the Mongols were advancing into China. While besieging a Chinese city, they came under attack from rockets carrying fire. The Chinese had invented gunpowder long before, and developed their fire rockets from rockets used in fireworks. However, gun-power came to be used to fire cannons and rockets were little used thereafter. In 1420, an Italian...

What kind of weapons were used by ancient man? The first kind of tool made by man was a stone that was broken to give an edge that could be used for scraping. These simple pebble tools were used probably more than one million years ago. Eventually, ancient man found that a stone could be shaped into a blade. A rough one is called a chopper and a sharper blade a...

Why do bees dance? Honey bees take nectar and pollen from bright, open flowers like buttercups, daisies and roses. The whole life of the hive depends upon the worker bees finding the right sort of flowers, so they send scouts out to hunt for them. When they return, the scouts show the workers where to go by performing a ‘dance’ on the comb. The round dance means that food is nearby....

How do bees run their hive?   A bee’s life is very organised. Each bee —queen, drone and worker — has a special role,  and it is the queen and worker bees who decide how many drones there should be in 1 the hive. All the worker bees are sterile females and the drones are male. There are about 6o,000 bees in the hive and only about 1,000 of these are...

How many bees live in a hive?   On average, there are about 6o,000 worker bees living in a hive. On top of this you must allow for the drones and, of course, the queen bee. It is an amazing figure when you think of the size of the hive and the amount of honey that is stored there during the winter. As you know, the drones are turned out as...

What is a Queen Bee? You must have heard of the expression ‘queen bee’ describing someone who does lots of work in a community and enjoys being the centre of attention. This aptly describes the role of the queen bee in a hive of honey bees. Honey bees, like ants, are social insects, and long ago man found that they were quite happy to live as a colony in a wooden...

How widespread is the use of Television?   Television is used in many industries. Banks and stores use ‘closed-circuit’ TV for security. Undersea oil-wells use remote-controlled cameras to check pipelines. Nuclear power stations use TV to watch dangerous areas. But its most widespread use is broadcasting the programmes we watch at home. TV brings us entertainment, news and advertisements. Once people had to amuse themselves or go to a local theatre....

What is an outside broadcast?   Of course, if we want to make a programme about an earthquake, or even a city street, we cannot bring this inside the studio. Instead we take the studio outside. The ‘outside broadcast’ teams use a specially-equipped van as a mobile control-room. They have smaller, movable cameras and microphones. There are even video-tape cameras, for making TV recordings, not much bigger than home-movie cameras. In...