Innehållsförteckning för November 2023 från What on Earth! Magazine

Information about the world outside and the workings of the body is collected and transmitted to the brain through the senses. Scientists think that humans could have more than 20 different senses - and here are some of the most important: 1 TOUCH Touch is thought to be the first sense a human develops, after just eight weeks in the womb. The areas of your body that are most sensitive to touch include your lips, tongue and fingers. 2 SIGHT The human eye contains more than 100 million lightsensitive cells and can tell the difference between 10 million different colours.* 3 HEARING Your ears are still working even while you’re asleep. During sleep, your brain ignores most sounds, only reacting to loud or unexpected noises. 4 SMELL You have around 400 types of smelling…

The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. Did you know, for example, that a single human brain contains as many as 86 billion neurons, or nerve cells? Or that there can be as many as 1 billion connections between the neurons in a piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand? So why is the brain such a powerful and complicated organ? The answer is that it is the body’s control centre. As part of your central nervous system, it receives and makes sense of signals sent from nerve cells in the rest of the body. It sends information to the body’s muscles and organs. It controls a person’s thoughts and feelings, allowing them to make sense of the outside world. And…

Joy, sadness, fear. These are emotions - and we experience a huge range of them. Emotions are the way we react to the world around us. Inside the brain, there’s an emotion control centre called the limbic system. It’s made up of different parts. One part, the hippocampus, helps the brain to remember and learn things. The amygdala is almond shaped and helps to regulate emotions such as anger. The tiny hypothalamus controls how you react to an emotion, like giving you goosebumps if you’re afraid. THE 7 UNIVERSAL FACIAL EXPRESSIONS One of the most important ways humans communicate their emotions is through facial expressions. Humans can make up to 10,000 different facial expressions. However, scientists believe that there are only seven universal ones, each used to communicate one of…

This month: Early humans and Neanderthals! The fossil specimen we call Lucy was an ape who lived in what is now Ethiopia in Africa about 3.2 million years ago. Her bones were discovered in 1974 by a team of scientists headed by Donald Johanson. They gave her a woman’s name because her skeleton was small, which they guessed meant she was female. They called her Lucy because when they were celebrating the find, the team was listening to the song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by the Beatles. Her species name is Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy was about 1.1 metres tall and weighed about twenty-nine kilograms. When her discovery was announced to the world, Lucy caused a sensation. Why? Because experts could tell from the shape of her bones that…

Sport Word Search Number Triangles! A B C Futoshiki! A B Spot the Difference Cube It! A D Connect the Planets Sudoku! Changing Rooms Picture Quiz Word Up! 1. Puppy 2. Cake 3. Family 4. Magazine 5. Father 6. Chips 7. Jungle 8. Singing Word Wheel 1. Boomerang 2. Orange 3. Groom 4. Anger 5. Marge 6. Ogre Name the Artist 1. Georgia O’Keeffe 2. Jackson Pollock 3. Edgar Degas 4. Yayoi Kusama 5. Salvador Dalí 6. Andy Warhol 7. Edmonia Lewis 8. Banksy 9. Pablo Picasso…

The brain has three major areas - the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brain stem - which are each highlighted on the right. The cerebrum contains four lobes: the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital, each of which is responsible for different functions in the body. Neurons in the brain - which are cells that send and receive messages - communicate with our sense organs and other parts of the body. The messages travel along the spinal cord, a long bundle of nerves found inside the spine. WHAT ARE NEURONS? Neurons are the information carriers inside your brain. Each neuron consists of a cell body with branching structures that extend from the cell body like the branches of a tree. The average neuron is connected to 1,000 or more other cells…

KEPLER-186F Distance 500 500 light-years from Earth. Dimensions 7,454 kilometres (4,632 miles) in radius. DR JAMES O’DONOGHUE Planetary scientist Question How many planets are there in the universe, and how many might have life? From Aziz, age 10 Answer Our solar system contains one star, which we call the Sun, along with eight planets, including Earth. People have known for thousands of years that Earth is not the only planet in our solar system. But it was only in 1992 that scientists first discovered planets orbiting around other stars. These planets are called exoplanets. ‘Exo-’ means ‘outside’ in Greek, and these planets are outside our solar system. By the year 2000, scientists had discovered 46 exoplanets. By 2010, there were 511. And today there are more than 5,500 confirmed exoplanets!…

The flea’s ability to jump so far isn’t only thanks to the muscles in its legs. Inside its thorax, a flea has some rubbery stuff called resilin. When the flea folds its back legs, ready to leap, the muscles in its thorax contract, and this action squishes the resilin. When the flea pushes off with its legs, the resilin bounces back, a bit like a coiled spring, enabling the flea to launch itself up to 50 centimetres away. The awe-inspiring Britannica’s Encyclopedia Infographica is out now. …which is equal to a human adult leaping over 340 m or 3.4 football pitches in a single jump.…

The model supercar with almost as many parts as the real thing! Young engineer Jake took three days to complete his awesome scale model. Do you love making amazing machines at home? Then you will want to see this fantastic scale model of a supercar constructed from scratch by budding engineer Jake, age 9. As you can see, Jake’s LEGO model of a Ford GT 2022 is every bit as impressive as the real-life supercar, which costs almost half a million pounds and has a top speed of 216 mph! The LEGO version was fiendishly complicated to assemble. The box contained 1,466 separate pieces and came with its own 275-page instruction booklet! Over the course of three days, Jake completed the 1:12 scale model by himself. This included building a…

Yayoi Kusama (1929-now) is an artist from Japan who is famous for her installations and sculptures. She loves to incorporate polka dots into her art. In the 1960s she climbed the Brooklyn Bridge in the USA wearing a polka dot leotard to protest war. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an American painter who is known for his technique of dripping or splashing paint onto a canvas. He would often use very large canvases - he even knocked down a wall in his home to make room for one! Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a painter and sculptor from Spain who helped start the art style called Cubism. In this style, artists break down subjects into shapes and rearrange them from multiple perspectives. He was once accused of stealing the famous painting Mona Lisa,…