Innehållsförteckning för Jul/Aug 2023 från What on Earth! Magazine

PHOTOS DON'T LOOK DOWN! This jaw-dropping photograph shows two BASE-jumpers, Fred Fugen and Vincent Reffet, shortly after they leapt off the top of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Don't be alarmed, though – they're both wearing parachutes! AAHH! A FLYING PIG! The pig on the left is leaping into the lead in a race around a specially created course at Pennywell Farm in Devon, UK, which features jumps, banks and other obstacles. The racing animals are all miniature pigs, which are also called micro pigs. The pigs are bred (and [trained for this exciting annual race!) on the farm. THE WINGED ROCK This eerily dramatic rock formation is found on the plains of New Mexico, USA. Called Ship Rock, it's made from rocks that solidified in…

Cheetahs are the best sprinters, but other animals have more stamina, which means they can keep going at high speed for longer. Here are the average speeds that some animals can maintain for about 20 miles: Ostrich 30mph Could run a marathon* in: 53 minutes. Pronghorn antelope 30mph Could run a marathon in: 53 minutes. Camel 25 mph Could run a marathon in: 1 hour and 3 minutes. Alaskan husky sled dog 15 mph Could run a marathon in: 1 hour and 45 minutes. Horse 11 mph Could run a marathon in: 2 hours and 30 minutes.** *A marathon is a longdistance race run over 26.2 miles. The fastest ever recorded marathon time by a human being is 1 hour and 59 minutes by the Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge. Kipchoge's…

We humans love a lot of people in a lot of different ways. We love our families, our friends and our partners. But do animals do the same? It certainly looks like it. Bonobos are great apes closely related to humans. In 2011, a group of researchers from Japan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were tracking a gang of about twenty bonobos. One day, the group was looking for fruit in a swampy area. One of them, a male the researchers called Malusu, got his hand caught in a metal trap. Malusu broke the small tree the trap was attached to. Then another member of his group unwound the vines that held the broken tree to the trap, tried to remove the trap from Malusu's hand, and licked…

MONOPOLY In a nutshell: Monopoly is a hugely popular board game played all over the world. The aim of the game is to buy, sell and trade properties around the board (which is pictured above) to try to accumulate as much ‘money’ as possible. Invented: American Charles Darrow was given a patent, or official licence, to make and sell the game of Monopoly in 1935. Did you know? In 2018, Monopoly's current makers, the toy company Hasbro, introduced an official Cheaters Edition, in which players are encouraged to steal from the bank, lie and break the rules! CLUEDO In a nutshell: Cluedo is a murder mystery board game in which the players race to solve a murder in a country house by correctly identifying which character committed the murder, the…

BEACH BIKINI BUCKET CRAB FRISBEE ICECREAM SANDCASTLE SPADE SUMMER SWIMMING TOWEL WAVE Can you spot the names of 20 games hidden in our boat word search puzzle? One point for each word found. BACKGAMMON BATTLESHIP CARDS CHECKERS CHESS CLUEDO DOMINOS DUPLO HOPSCOTCH JENGA LEGO MINECRAFT MONOPOLY POKEMON ROBLOX SCRABBLE SUDOKU TETRIS TOP TRUMPS UNO…

1932 Master carpenter and joiner Ole Kirk Kristiansen starts making wooden toys in Denmark. He aims for high quality and craftsmanship in all the toys he makes. LEGO 1936 Taking letters from the Danish phrase LEg GOdt, meaning ‘play well’, Kristiansen names his company LEGO, unaware that the word lego in Latin means ‘I put together’. 1937 Ole Kirk Kristiansen's son Godtfred starts designing wooden toys at the age of 17. 1946 Ole Kirk Kristiansen orders the company's first plastic injection moulding machine from the UK. 1969 LEGO DUPLO bricks – twice the size of a LEGO brick in all dimensions – launches globally for younger children. 1968 The first LEGOLAND park opens, in Billund, Denmark. 1964 The first LEGO building instruction is introduced. 1963 Godtfred Kirk Kristiansen announces the…

The octopus is one of the most peculiar and fascinating creatures on Earth. Here we look inside an octopus's body to discover some of the secrets of its unique anatomy… WHAT ON EARTH! Each sucker on an octopus's arm has more taste receptors than a human tongue! VIEW FROM BELOW The image on the right shows what the main illustration would look like from below. The octopus's mouth is at the centre of its arms. It has a beak-like structure around its mouth which it uses to break open shells and scrape the meat from inside. LIFE CYCLE The life cycle of an octopus has four stages: egg, larva, juvenile and adult. Male octopuses die within months of mating. A female octopus can release between 20,000 and 100,000 eggs. The…

Ten of the fastest animals on land Cheetah*** 75 mph Pronghorn antelope 61 mph Quarter horse**** 55 mph Springbok 55 mph Blue wildebeest 50 mph Indian antelope 50 mph Lion 50 mph Greyhound 45 mph Kangaroo 44mph Hare 43 mph ***A cheetah can accelerate from 0 to almost 60 miles per hour in three seconds, which is quicker than many sports cars. ****A quarter horse is an American breed of horse and is the world's fastest over short distances. Listified! by Andrew Pettie and illustrated by Andres Lozano is out now.…

One of the most powerful feelings of all is the sadness and loss when someone we care about dies. But is the same true for animals? Do cats feel terribly sad when a family member dies? Do fish miss their departed friends? It looks as if the answer might be at least partly yes. A team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, USA, led by Anne Engh, studied chacma baboons in the Okavango Delta in Botswana to better understand the monkeys’ emotions. We know that in humans, different chemicals released by the body are related to different feelings. So the scientists are looking at which chemicals are being released by the baboons. They do this by looking at the chemicals found in female baboons’ poo. Sometimes a close friend…

CHESS About the game: Chess is a game of strategy in which two opposing players move 16 pieces (white versus black) around a chequered board. The aim is to trap your opponent's king in a position from which it is impossible to escape. The opponents: IBM's Deep Blue vs chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. What happened? Deep Blue, a giant chess-playing computer developed by the technology company IBM, became the first computer to defeat a current chess world champion under normal playing conditions when it beat the great Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a game in February 1996. Unfortunately for Deep Blue, however, Kasparov hit back and ultimately won the match four games to two. The following year, the computer and the human champion played a highly publicised rematch, pictured left,…

When was the last time you got really angry and yelled at someone? Maybe they broke something you really loved. Or maybe they said something horrible. Even though we try to control our temper, anger and aggression are completely natural. Animals get aggressive, too. Canadian zoologist Anne Innis Dagg is a world expert on giraffes and one of the very first scientists to spend years watching animals in the wild. She observed that male giraffes can battle for the right to mate with females. They throw their long, heavy necks and heads against one another with all their strength. Giraffe necks can stretch up to 1.8 metres long and weigh 270 kilograms. And while these contests can be very fierce, the giraffes are rarely seriously hurt. The weaker giraffe usually…

SUPER MARIO BROS. About the game: Super Mario Bros, is a long-running family of platform games in which the plumber Super Mario, pictured right, and his friends walk, run and jump across different levels, evading obstacles and battling enemies. Mario's ultimate goal is usually to save a princess from the evil Bowser. Launched: 1985. Did you know? Mario started out as a carpenter instead of a plumber. And he was first referred to as Jumpman because he often had to leap over obstacles to complete the game. However, while the American team whose job it was to launch the first Mario Bros, game in the United States were trying to think of a better name for him, they were interrupted by the man who owned the building their offices were…

COMMON OCTOPUS The best-known octopus species is the common octopus. It grows to around 1.3 metres and 10 kilograms, and lives in holes or rocky crevices on the seabed. It hunts at night, feeding on crabs and other crustaceans. WHAT ON EARTH! The word octopus comes from the Greek word októpus, which means ‘eight foot’. It's hard to think of a creature as wonderfully unusual as an octopus. With an octopus's eight arms, three hearts and nine brains (not to mention its ability to change colour and squirt clouds of ink) you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was an alien lifeform beamed down to Earth from another planet! In fact, as you can see on the map on the right, octopuses live in seas all around the world, after…

Flying kites is a popular pastime all around the world. A kite, like those illustrated above, is a device that soars through the air at the end of a line. It is named after the kite bird, which is a type of hawk that also soars gracefully in the air. Kites come in all kinds of colours and designs. They can be used for a variety of purposes, including for scientific research, as a competitive sport and just for fun. People have been flying kites for around 3,000 years, probably starting in China with kites made from strips of bamboo covered in silk. Kite-flying is an ancient custom in East Asia. In Korea, people fly kites during the first days of the New Year. In China, the ninth day of…

Pupils and teachers at the wonderful Sir Thomas Abney School in Hackney, East London, have been enjoying the latest issues of Britannica's What on Earth! Magazine in the classroom. As well as finding out fascinating new facts and tackling the puzzles and games, the children have been sending us their favourite jokes and riddles (the two featured below are from pupils) and giving us fantastic ideas about how we can make the magazine even better. Thank you Bay and Mulberry class! We are so pleased that you're enjoying your magazines!…