Can all Birds fly? Millions of years ago, before the earth began to break up into the shapes of the continents and islands as we know them today, most birds could fly. But as the oceans covered strips of land which once connected land masses, and continents began to form by earth movements, animals which could not fly, unlike the birds, became restricted to certain parts of the earth. This meant...

How do male penguins help to look after the eggs? Not all birds build nests for their young at breeding time, and the emperor penguin, which lives at the South Pole, is one of them. The female emperor, the largest of the penguin family, at about 107 cm (42 in) high, lays her one egg onto the snow or ice, then the male immediately rolls it onto his feet with the...

Is it possible to bend light? You cannot shine a torch round a corner because light normally travels in straight lines. When light hits something several different things may happen to it. If the object is black then almost all the light will be soaked up. If it is white most of the light will bounce off in all directions and we will see it clearly. If it is coloured then...

Is white light really coloured ?   Have you ever seen a rainbow ? We see rainbow when there are lots of tiny drops of water in the air and the sun shines through them. Ordinarily sunlight is white and water is clear, so how do they give a coloured rain-bow? The answer was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton, an English scientist who lived in the seventeenth century. Ordinary white light...

Where does Light come from?   Natural light comes mostly from the sun. The sun is a huge ball of fiery gas and is tremendously hot. Light from the sun reaches us during the day when we are on the side of the Earth turned towards it. The first men de-pended on the sun and could only see well during the day. The only way they had of making light was...

Can we split Atoms? Ordinary chemical changes like burning and rusting do not alter the nuclei of the atoms. However, the nucleus of an atom is not solid. It is made up of even smaller particles called `protons’ and ‘neutrons’. Normally a nucleus cannot be broken up. However, some substances have atoms with very large nuclei made up of hundreds of neutrons and protons. Some of these nuclei are unstable and...

What is an Atom? Suppose we were to take a piece of an element, say iron, and keep dividing it up into smaller and smaller pieces. The smallest bit of iron we could have would he an ‘atom’. Each element has its own atoms. All iron atoms are alike. All oxygen atoms are alike. But iron atoms are different from oxygen atoms. Look at the diagram of an oxygen atom. In...

What are chemical elements and compounds? When Water boils into steam or freezes into ice it looks feels very different. However, if steam is cooled down, or ice is heated, they return to liquid water. Both are really just forms of water. Steam is water as a gas and ice is water as a solid.  If we heat paper instead of water it catches fire and burns into smoke and ash....