Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från What on Earth! Magazine

START HERE In 1960, two Soviet dogs, Belka and Strelka, were the first dogs to survive being sent into space. They orbited Earth 17 times, then safely returned home Every day the International Space Station circles the Earth 16 times In the night sky, there are more dogs represented in the constellations than cats. Worth about S15 BILLION in today's money, the highest-earning athlete in history may have been a chariot driver from ancient Rome In Norse mythology, Freyja, the goddess of love, rode a CHARIOT pulled by large cats The largest-ever game of hide-and-seek took place in China and involved 1,437 people Salarium, the word ancient Roman soldiers would have used for their wages, comes from the Latin word for SALT According to some historians, Roman soldiers played a…

How to chat… ORANGUTAN There are three species (or types) of these rust-coloured great apes. They live in the remaining forests of Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia. Orangutans are very intelligent and also very loud! Some of their calls can be heard more than 1.5 kilometres away. Send It In! We want to hear your best ape impressions! Record yourself making the noises listed here and email the fi le to editor@whatonearth.co.uk The best ape impression will win a copy of the new book How to Chat Chicken!…

Today there are more than 600 known species of carnivorous plants found around the world – plus probably many more that have not yet been discovered. Being carnivorous means eating meat. But plants don't chase down and capture their prey the way carnivorous animals such as lions do. Many plants rely on nutrients from dead insects or animals in the soil, but that doesn't make them carnivores. To be considered truly carnivorous, a plant must attract, capture and digest its prey – like the plants featured here. Most carnivorous plants eat insects or spiders. Although some eat tiny protozoans (single-celled creatures). Other plants can even eat small mammals and birds! HOW A VENUS FLYTRAP EATS 1 Flies are attracted to Venus flytraps because they look delicious and red and smell…

The solstice is when the Sun is furthest north or south from Earth's equator. Earth travels around the Sun on a path called an orbit, and it is also slightly tilted. Around the 20th June each year, the North Pole is tilted towards the Sun. This is summer in the Northern Hemisphere. At the same time, it is winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Another solstice happens in December. Many people observe and celebrate the solstices. Let's find out what they're up to, using the brilliant new book: Solstice, Around the World on the Longest, Shortest Day, by Jen Breach! Hours of sunlight on 21st June 1 SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE Stonehenge is an ancient circle of standing stones. Nobody is quite sure why it was constructed, but it aligns with the Sun…

ACCIDENTAL GENIUS Five ingenious things invented by people who were trying to make something totally diferent 1 Fireworks – invented around 800 CE According to legend, the first fireworks were invented by a Chinese chemist. The chemist mixed a powder called potassium nitrate with sulphur and charcoal in the hope it would give him eternal life. Instead, the mixture caught fire and exploded. This exploding powder – later known as gunpowder – was packed into bamboo tubes and lit, setting off the world's first fireworks. 2 Silly Putty – 1943 Scottish inventor and chemist James Wright was working on an engineering project to make a hard rubber when, to his surprise, he found that one of the mixtures he'd created could bounce. The company Wright was working for couldn't see…

INFOGRAPHICS WHAT ON EARTH! Although UY Scuti is much bigger across than the Sun, it is only about 30 times the mass. UY SCUTI 1,476,300,000 miles across That's 1,708 times wider than the Sun Located near the centre of the Milky Way, UY Scuti is a hypergiant star, which is even bigger than a supergiant star. You could fit at least a quadrillion planet Earths inside UY Scuti. SUN 864,337 miles across The Sun looks tiny next to UY Scuti. However, the Sun is much, much bigger than Earth. You could fit 1,300,000 planet Earths inside the Sun.…

What's big and grey and protects you from rain? An umbrellaphant! Which vegetable is always in a bad mood? A grumpea! What do you call an antelope with three legs? A slantelope! Question: What do you call bears with no ears? Answer: B! HA! HA! Which Roman emperor always carries a handkerchief? Julius Sneezer! Tickle your ribs and tease your brain with our favourite gags and riddles, hand-picked by our jokes editor May. What type of insect is always on time? A clockroach!` Question: A man goes out in the rain without a hat or umbrella yet not a hair on his head gets wet. How is this possible? Answer: He's bald! Who stole the soap at bath time? A robber duck! What did the llama say when it was…

PHOTOS THE CHASE The heart-stopping photograph of a cheetah hunting a zebra and its foal was taken in Kenya in Africa. Scientists estimate that there are fewer than 8,000 African cheetahs living in the wild. GALAXY QUEST The Italian photographer Lorenzo Ranieri Tenti travelled to Tenerife, an island off the coast of West Africa, to take this spectacular photograph of the Milky Way. The lower levels of light pollution in Tenerife mean that many more stars are visible in the night sky. BIRD'S EYE VIEW This unusual photo of Spain's capital city, Madrid, reveals what its streets and red-tiled buildings look like from above. The rectangle at the centre is Plaza Mayor, one of the oldest and most famous squares in the city. If you ask your grown-up to help…

DESCRIBE THIS DOG! If you wanted to describe this dog, you would probably say ‘the lazy brown dog’, but not ‘the brown lazy dog’. You may have learnt at school that adjectives are words that describe nouns. For instance, in the sentence ‘I have a blue pencil’, the word ‘blue’ is an adjective that describes the noun ‘pencil’. In English, adjectives usually come before the nouns they describe. What you might not know is that there's an order that adjectives have to be used in to make sense to English speakers. If you're a native English speaker, you do this automatically! Let's take a look… el perro marrón perezoso (the dog brown lazy) WHY IS THAT? There is an order of adjectives that English speakers use. Adjectives that are based…

FOOD WORD SEARCH Can you spot the 20 food-related words hidden in our jumbo word search puzzle? Good luck! The six-sided shape on the left can be folded up to form a cube. Only two of the cubes below can be made by it. Which are they? CUBE IT! SPOT THE DIFFERENCE Can you spot all 20 diferences between these two under-the-sea illustrations? WORD WHEEL Use the word wheel to help find the answers to the six clues below. All the answers contain the middle letter, and each letter can only be used once. Clue: an umbrella-like device that allows a person wearing it to fall slowly to the ground (9 letters). Answer: Clue: a section of a book (7 letters). Answer: Clue: a thick woven fabric that covers the…

Ocean sunfish 300 million eggs African driver ant 4 million eggs* Atlantic sturgeon 2.5 million eggs Seahorse 2,000 babies** Puff adder 156 babies Tailless tenrec 32 babies*** Naked mole rat 28 babies Virginia opossum 25 babies Grey partridge 22 eggs Rabbits 14 babies *Each month. **Very unusually in the animal kingdom, it is the male seahorses that become pregnant and give birth. ***The tailless tenrec is a small hedgehog-like mammal that lives in Madagascar. If you haven't seen one before, this might be because it can hibernate for up to 75 per cent of the year!…

ELEMENTS IN THE HUMAN BODY Most of your body is made of five elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and calcium. Traces of lots of other elements, such as sodium and iron, make up the remaining 2.5 per cent (and there is even a bit of gold in there, too). WHAT ON EARTH! Among the 2.5% ‘other’ elements in your body are iron, silicon, silver and lead! WHERE THESE ELEMENTS WERE CREATED Three-quarters of your body was made in giant star explosions called supernovae. These spectacular explosions fuse lighter elements together to form heavier elements, such as oxygen. Elements such as nitrogen are also created inside smaller low-mass stars. These stars burn up less dramatically than exploding massive stars. Some of the most simple elements in your body, such as hydrogen,…

Meet the first glow-in-the-dark animals Scientists now think that the first animals to be able to glow in the dark appeared over 540 million years ago, which is more than 300 million years earlier than previously thought. The ability of living things to glow is called bioluminescence. A lot of animals can do it, including fish, fireflies and jellyfish. Bioluminescence can be used for camouflage, hunting and even communicating. According to new research, the first bioluminescent animals were a class of sea-dwelling creatures called octocorals. The world's funniest crab joke – as chosen by a group of crabs! The Crab Museum in Margate, UK, held a competition to find the ‘world's funniest crab joke’. Some 700 jokes were submitted to the museum, which claims to be the only crab-themed museum…

We usually think of plants as being pretty harmless. You've probably rolled around in grass or collected a bouquet of wildflowers without any alarming side-effects (unless you accidentally disturbed a bee!). So you might be surprised to learn that some plants can be quite dangerous, even to us humans. Some plants, called carnivorous plants, lure in insects before digesting their prey as a meaty meal! Other plants produce toxic poisons that can kill. And some plants have unexpectedly deadly ways of spreading their seeds. Read on as we find out more about some of the dangerous and even deadly plants that could be lurking in a flowerbed or botanical garden near you… WHAT ON EARTH! Over 100 species of poisonous plants can be found in the UK alone – so…

POiSONOUS VS VENOMOUS Many people confuse the meanings of the words ‘poisonous’ and ‘venomous’. Poisons and venoms are both very dangerous substances that can make humans and other animals very sick! The diff erence between them is how the toxins get into the body. Poisons are ingested – that is, eaten or drunk. Whereas venoms are injected, such as by a bite or sting. Here's a quick rule to help you remember: if you bite something toxic, it's poison. If it bites you, that's venom. Oleander Oleander is a small tree or shrub with pretty fl owers that is often used in landscaping. There might be some on your street! Be careful not to touch or chew on an oleander, because it is quite poisonous. Hemlock Hemlock is a member…

What is the Sun? Our Sun is a star – a giant ball of burning gas. It's made mostly of hydrogen and helium, with some metals at its core. It would be impossible to visit the Sun's core in person because the temperature there can reach 15,000,000°C. However, by collecting information about the Sun from a distance, using space probes and telescopes, scientists can work out what is happening inside. 1. CORE The core is the hottest part of the Sun. At the core, nuclear reactions, in which hydrogen fuses to form helium, generate the Sun's heat and light. 2. RADIATIVE ZONE Light and heat energy radiate slowly outwards, taking a long, zigzagging path towards the surface. 3. CONVECTIVE ZONE Great currents of hot gases bubble upwards, while cooler, denser…

Amazing robots – designed by you! Inspired by our May Issue cover feature, which was all about the Rise of the Robots, we invited young artists to draw their very own robot and send it in. As you can see, the army of extraordinary robots we received came in all diferent shapes and sizes! So huge congratulations to all the budding robot designers who entered the competition. And a special well done to our three category winners: 5-year-old Oneli, 9-year-old Penelope and 11-year-old Isaac. They will each receive a free subscription to What on Earth! Magazine and a copy of our brilliant ‘magic lens’ book Marvellous Machines. Bravo! To watch a video showcasing all the fantastic entries, go to: www.whatonearth.pub/robots…