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If you haven’t already started to write things down on a computer, or other electronic device, then you are going to soon. You are going to be doing it a lot at school and then later when you go to work. Grown ups are using paper and pens less and less these days.

You can and should learn a number of skills to make writing on electronic devices simpler and better. In my opinion one of the most important of these is to learn how to touch-type; to write quickly without making mistakes using all ten fingers of both hands across the whole keyboard. With practice it is possible to be able to write at almost the same speed as it does to think. This is very difficult to do when using a pen and paper, and my handwriting looks like a drunk spider has escaped across my page from an inkwell when I try to write at anything approaching this speed. We will talk about learning to touch-type another time.

In the same way that there are different types of real paper, there are also different types of electronic paper. Knowing which kind to use is another useful trick, so that is what I am going to talk to you about today. Real paper can be shaped differently, have different thicknesses, and be of different colours. It may respond in unusual ways to some types of pen or pencil. Writing on electronic devices doesn’t involve paper, of course, but there is a choice of what software programme to use. Each allow you to write words in your alphabet of choice but they get to that result by means that are not the same. They record electronic writing in different file formats. You could think of files as electronic paper. Often these sheets of electronic paper are not readable by any other software. This is a problem if you want to use more than one device - such as a computer, a phone, a tablet, or a web-based word processor - to write on the same bit of electronic paper. Imagine only being able to use one type of pen on a piece of paper! Worse than this, the software applications you use today might not necessarily be around in five, ten or fifteen years from now. The homework you finish this year might not be able to be read again by the time you have left school and may be lost forever. OK maybe that’s not so terrible, but you get the idea; if you are bothering to keep your electronic documents then you want them to be readable in the distant future.

So my suggestion to avoid these problems would be to use text files. This type of electronic paper is just about the smallest and simplest type you could use. You can recognise text files because they have a .txt at the end of their name. Text files only include information about the letters, numbers and other symbols that you can see and so they only take up a small space on your device’s filing system or memory. Small is good when it concerns disk space and sharing files. How small are they? Well the text file I created writing this blog post was just 8 kilobytes. The same amount of words in a word processor software file was 459 kilobytes. The text file was 57 times smaller! Most applications and software can open text files because they are so simple. This makes it possible to use multiple devices to write on the same sheet of electronic paper, and it means that they will be readable a long way into the future by newer electronic devices. For those reasons you want to use this type of file above all others if you can.

The downside of using text files as digital notepaper is that they can’t do a lot. They are text and nothing else. All the extra stuff that people do with their writing using their word processors can’t be recorded in a text file. For example, making some text bold or writing a list of items with those items automatically numbered. But then a few years ago something changed. You couldn’t do those things with text files until something called markdown came along and changed things for the better.
Markdown is a way of writing that uses regular text file-friendly characters to put back in the formatting and other stuff that you can’t normally have in plain text files. It uses special marks amongst normal writing that a computer programme understands as being instructions about what to do with parts of the text. These marks don’t get in the way and still allow the text to be read easily by humans. It is very simple to use and, because you are going to use text files as your electronic paper of choice for all the reasons I’ve suggested you should, you should learn some basic markdown to help yourself in the years to come.

A simple example of how to use markdown would be to show you how to make a small amount of text appear bold. You do this by putting two asterisks ** at the beginning of the text selection and then another two asterisks at the end. So if I want to make these words bold, then I put two asterisks either side like this: **these words**. Any computer writing program that understand markdown - some don’t but many new ones do - will know that this is the instruction to make these words go bold. Instead of two asterisks you could use two underscore characters __ to do the same thing.
Another example of markdown is creating bulleted lists. If you create a list with asterisks, dashes or plus signs for every point, a markdown-friendly software programme will turn that into a proper bulleted list like this:
  • Item one
  • Item two
  • Item three
I made the above list by simply typing this:

- Item one
- Item two
- Item three

The software I am using automatically turned the dashes into round bullet points.




There are lots more things that markdown can do. Take a look at the website of John Gruber, who invented it. If you want more then another clever chap created more types of special mark that can be used by lots of apps and programmes to create tables, citations, and other things you might need when you are a bit older and maybe doing a college degree. His name is Fletcher Penney and his website about his special marks, called MultiMarkdown, can be found here.

That is enough information for you to know the basics of what markdown is and know where to find out more about it. I can’t teach you much more other than to say that the best way to learn the special signs that make text files more useful is to start using them yourself and play with them to see what they can do.

The last thing I will do is to mention some software that can understand markdown in text files. I use a Mac and my favourite markdown editor is Byword. It also has an iOS application for iPads and iPhones. IA Writer and Writeroom do similar things I’m told. I heard that WriteMonkey is a solid bit of software for writing markdown on the PC but I’ve not used it myself. The Day One journal/diary Mac software - which is the best way I’ve seen to write an electronic diary, by the way - and iOS app understands markdown too. If you want to use a web-based writer then I’ve successfully used Dillinger although the saving of files somewhere such as in my dropbox folder was a bit tricky to understand at first. There are other markdown-understanding web word processors around I’m sure.

I am very glad that I learned how to use markdown with plain text files this year, and I’m sure that I will be using this way of writing on electronic devices for many years to come. I’m sure if you investigate it and get the hang of it that you will be doing the same too.

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Anonymous 0 Comments


This blog post was written for my nephew, Eshan, who asked me to write about this subject.

You wanted me to write something for you about computers and so here is a blog post about them. This post comes after one about secret codes for a reason: computers are here because of secret codes and now they are everywhere. No matter what job they do, or where they are, all computers have a lot in common with each other.

The word computer is not modern. It was first used 400 years ago to describe a person who did maths. Someone who did calculations - or computations as they can be called - was a computer. Today we use the same word to talk about machines that do the same things with numbers.




A computer is a machine that can do maths of different kinds. It can do different sums, depending upon what it is told to do. The sums it is asked to do are called a program, and the person telling it what to do is the programmer. Programmers tell computers what to do by writing down the instructions in a special language that the computer understands.

The difference between a computer and a calculator is that a calculator needs someone to put in the numbers and read the results. A computer doesn’t need an operator. Once it has a program to follow it can get on with it alone without any help.

The idea of a machine that could do maths was thought of a long time ago, in the 1600s, but the first proper ones were made in World War II to do maths to break Germany’s powerful secret codes that were themselves created by machines. The first computers were not very powerful and were enormous: sometimes as big as rooms. At first they were hand-operated mechanical machines, but very soon after electric computers were invented. Ever since then computers have become more powerful and smaller year by year. Nowadays they are everywhere. In phones, in cars, in planes and even in watches. They are still getting smaller and more powerful.

No matter how tiny or fast they are, all computers are made up of the following parts:
The Number Factory
The most important bit of a computer is the number factory where the maths happens. The very first computer machines could only do one set of sums. To change what they could do meant changing the wiring of the machine, which was difficult and took a long time. So someone invented a programmable computer that could do different sums depending upon what instructions it was given. At first these instructions were short and simple but now they can be very long and complicated. For example, the maths needed to make a web browser surf the internet, or to play an audio file, as you are doing now, can be many millions of instructions. This is OK, because modern computers can carry out billions of instructions per second! The part of the computer that does all this work - the number factory - is known as the central processing unit or CPU.
The Memory
A computer reads instructions just like you are reading this blog post, from start to finish, but some instructions are more complicated. They could be like this:
From this line go back to the second paragraph of this blog post, read the first line, and then come straight back to this line without reading anything else inbetween and then carry on reading from here.
Or this:
Carry on reading, but do not read the last paragraph of this blog post if the time is after 3pm in the afternoon and before 10pm at night.
To do this jumping back and forth kind of reading you need a memory. To follow the first instruction I wrote above you would need to remember what I told you to do and then remember how to get back to the line of writing you started from. Every computer is the same, and so needs a memory.
A Language
Every different type of number factory has its own special language called a machine code. So the computer in a mobile phone can’t understand the language of a computer in a car, for example. Instead of having words made of letters, computers have words made of numbers. It would be very difficult and very time-consuming for humans to write instructions in machine code, and so instead they write the instructions in an easier to understand programming language. This is then translated into machine code by an translating program that programmers use called a compiler.


Parts to Put Information In
There has to be a way of giving the computer instructions. Information has to go in somehow to program it. There are lots of ways to do this with modern computers. A home computer will often have a keyboard and a mouse. Games console have gamepads. In a car there will be sensors, such as ones measuring how much air is in the tyres.
Parts to Get Information Out
There is little point in making a computer do a calculation if it doesn’t do something with the results for a purpose. So there will be parts of a computer to do something after it has followed the instructions in the program. You might be able to see information on a display screen, such as on a home computer or smart phone. A printer will write something onto paper. The computer could be connected to speakers so you may hear something after it does its work.

Computers are everywhere. The obvious ones are the personal computers and laptops in our homes, or the smart phones or tablet devices we carry around with us. The less obvious ones are those in modern cars, in shop tills, and now in wristwatches.

The reason computers are everywhere is because they are so useful. We can do incredibly hard mathematics with them, such as programming them to fly rockets in space, or to predict what the weather is going to be tomorrow or to work out how many miles a car has left before it runs out of petrol. We can play complicated games and make imaginary worlds on home computers and gaming consoles. We can talk to each other on phones, or over Skype; write letters and then print them out; or post them up on the internet for people to read.

I hope that gives you a helpful introduction to how computers work. We can talk more about them another time.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Why Do People Need Secret Codes?

Imagine you have a secret you want to tell your best friend, but nobody else. Perhaps last night you discovered you could fly. If everyone found out they would ask you lots of boring questions like, “What does my house look like from the sky?”, and your Dad would want your help cleaning out the gutters of the house. Yuk. Stuff like that.

If you were alone with your best friend in the same room then sharing the secret would be easy to do, but if he or she was somewhere else, or you were not alone, that would be more tricky. Somehow you would need to send the secret to that person in a way that only they could understand it. How could you do that?


You could make up your own special language that only the two of you could understand, but creating a brand new language would be very hard work and would take up a lot of time and practice; years probably. All that effort just in case one day you need to share a secret. That’s quite extreme.

How Secret Codes Work

A simpler way would be to use your normal language, but wrap up the message in a secret code. That would be a bit like sending a letter in a locked envelope. If you gave your best friend, and only your best friend, the key to unlock the envelope before you sent the message, then only he or she would be able to open it and know its true meaning. This is how all secret codes work.

I’m going to teach you a few new words. A secret code can also be called a cipher. Its pronounced ‘si-fer’. The original message in your language is called the plaintext. The message written in secret code is called the ciphertext. The act of turning a message into the coded message is called encryption; you encrypt the message. The act of turning the coded message back into the normal message is called decryption; you decrypt the coded message. The exact way encryption and decryption works is called the key for that particular code.

An Example: The Caesar Cipher

The best way to explain how this works is to show you. Let’s use a real secret code that was used a long time ago. It’s called the Caesar cipher, and is named after the famous Roman general, Julius Caesar, who used this way of encrypting his important letters, such as commands to his soldiers on the battlefield, so that his enemy wouldn’t understand them if they found them.

Let’s imagine that you want to send your friend the message “I can fly.”. The way this particular cipher works is that it swaps each letter in the message to a different letter in the alphabet to make it look like nonsense. The Caesar cipher transforms each letter into the letter 3 places further up the alphabet. They key to this code is +3. Other types of cipher transform letters in different ways to do the same thing. Our plaintext message is icanfly when written with no spaces inbetween. Now let’s encrypt the message. The table below shows how that transformation works for each letter of the alphabet using the Caesar cipher:
After encryption the message reads “MFDQIOB”.  That doesn’t mean anything to most people, does it? But to your friend, who knows what you have done, it does. When they receive the message they know they need to do the opposite transformation to be able to read it. In this case, they will need to change each letter in the ciphertext to the letter 3 places before it in the alphabet and then put the gaps back in sensible places so that the message makes sense:
So your friend will turn MFDQIOB into icanfly and then understand that you have cracked the ability to fly.

There are lots of ways of turning plaintext into ciphertext and back again. The history of secret codes is interesting on its own, but one of the most wonderful things about it is that nearly 80 years ago some British people who were trying to break some secret codes that they didn’t have the keys for created the World’s first computers to help them. I’ll tell you more about that in my next blog post.

EBHEBH

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The stars on a clear night look as if each are the same distance away from us. Some appear bright and big, and some small and dim. It looks like a curved picture has been hung up across the sky. Because we are small creatures living on a little rocky planet that circles around a normal sized star we don’t find it easy to understand how big the Universe really is. Really, the night sky is our view of the Universe, and it has incredible depth. Some stars are close and some are very far away, and they can be very different sizes and brightnesses.

At this time of year an easy-to-see constellation is high in the sky just after the sun sets. It is called Orion, sometimes known as Orion the Hunter, and if you look at the picture at the top of this post you might see why. You have to use your imagination a bit - you do to see any of the pictures people say you can see in the night sky - but it can look a bit like a someone holding a bow with their other arm raised high behind as if pulling the bowstring or holding a club. There are three equally bright stars in the middle that might be the hunter’s belt.

A little bit down and to the left of this group of stars is a very bright star that you should see easily unless there is a cloud or a tree or a building in the way. This star is called Sirius and the ancient Egyptians used to think it very important because, when it rose on a certain summer morning after being behind the Sun for 70 days, it meant that the river Nile was about to flood and water the desert. We still think it important for a more simple reason; it is the brightest star in the sky.

Both the Orion group of stars and bright Sirius are almost directly south of wherever you are, if you look for them between 7pm and 9pm in the evening at this time of year, so I thought now would be a good time to point them out to you. I hope you get a clear sky one evening this month so you can see them for yourself before bedtime.

Among these beautiful lights there are some giant stars. Which do you think is the biggest star in this part of the sky? If I didn’t know better I would say Sirius, because it is the brightest, and if all stars were the same distance away from us that would be true but they aren’t.

Sirius is eight and a half light years away from us. That is a distance that the human brain can’t really imagine: how far a torch beam would have traveled eight and a half years after it left the torch. Even so, this is one of our Sun’s neighbours; the seventh closest star. It is bigger and brighter than our Sun. If we could swap them around and make Sirius our Sun it would be about 26 times as bright. This is because it is bigger in size, and also because it is burning hotter: so it sends out more light. But in this part of the night sky there are even bigger and brighter stars than this.

There is a star to the right side and above Orion’s bow. It belongs to a neighbouring constellation, Taurus the Bull. Our hunter is chasing this bull. If you spend some time looking at the sky you may notice that this star looks a bit red rather than white or blue. It is a giant red star called Aldebaran and is about 67 light years away; so nearly eight times further away than Sirius. Although it doesn’t look as bright as Sirius it is 16 times brighter and much bigger. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you hold a small torch close to your eye it will be brighter than the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling but only because it is closer to your eye. Sirius appears brighter than Aldebaran for the same reason. If you were able to fly close to huge Aldebaran the red light would be as bright as 425 suns, but it is not the brightest star out there in that part of the sky.

The bright white-blue star at the foot of Orion is called Rigel. It is twice as far away as Aldebaran - 860 light years - but still appears just as bright. It is a huge blue giant and as bright as 85,000 suns if you could get close enough to see for yourself! Just as bright as this but a bit closer at 560 light years away is the red giant Betelguese. It is the same distance above and to the left of the three belt stars of Orion as Rigel is below and to the right. If your eyes get used to the dark you may be able to see the difference in colour between red Betelguese and blue Rigel. Huge and amazing though these giant stars are, they are not the brightest in Orion.

The three lovely belt stars are easy to find in a clear sky but they aren’t the brightest to our eyes. The middle of the three, Alnilam, is twice as far away as Rigel - 1340 light years - and if you could get close enough you would see that it is as bright as 375,000 suns. It is a blue supergiant, which is a pretty good name for a star that is 20 times the size as our Sun and five times hotter.
I hope I haven’t clouded your head with numbers. If you can turn these numbers into a picture you will start to see how three-dimensional the night sky truly is and how stars aren’t necessarily like their neighbours.

Here is a drawing I have made to show you how far away these five stars are from us compared to each other:



I’ve also made another drawing to show you how big they are compared to each other:


A few weeks ago I found this old but good video on YouTube about the sizes of things in space. Some of the giants I have shown you are in it and some even bigger ones too. I hope this helps you imagine how big the Sun, Sirius, Rigel and Aldebaran are compared to each other:




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Source: Image courtesy K. Churyumov

The photo above was taken by Klim Churyumov on 21st September 1969 using a big telescope in Kazakstan whilst on a comet hunting expedition with one of his researchers, Svetlana Gerasimenko. It is of course our friend comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko and this was our first glimpse of it when it was discovered by these two astronomers. They had no idea of course that 45 years later we would be sending a robot spacecraft to orbit and then land on it.

The European Space Agency have funded a short film that explores how important the Rosetta mission might be to us, the human race, in the future. It is a bit dramatic for my personal taste, but still good. Watch it on a big screen with the volume up if you can and press the enlarge button on the video controls at the bottom right of the video below:



So far, Rosetta has been an amazing success. Just like the guy says in the film, all sorts of things could have gone wrong before it arrived at the comet but amazingly they haven’t. It isn’t just about what we have learnt already and what we might learn over the next year whilst the mission continues. It is also about the fact that we’ve had the ambition and bravery to actually do something so difficult and get this far.
Anonymous 1 Comments



How old is our planet, Earth? It’s old. Really old. Mind-staggeringly, head-hurtingly old. In a minute I will give you one useful number that will help you understand how old and how all the rest of history fits into the picture.

Before I do that lets talk about big numbers. What is the biggest number you can imagine? I can imagine 10 things with no problem at all. 100. Yep, easy. 1000? There were nearly 1000 people at my senior school so I can think of that number. How about 100 schools like that put together, so 100 000? Its possible to think of that. Ten of those is 1 000 000 - one million. I stop there. That is about the limit of what I can imagine but that is good enough for now.

So imagine those numbers in terms of years. I don’t know about you, but for me that is a bit harder. I’ve lived for 41 years so even 100 years is a long time. 1000 years ago we know our country was in Saxon times just before the Normans invaded in 1066. 10 000 years ago we are beyond written human history so we don’t have stories from those times about what people were doing then. 1 million years seems like an incredibly long time to think of, doesn’t it?

Well our magic number is four thousand five hundred and forty. 4540. Because the Earth is around 4540 of those 1 million years old! But 4540 is a simple number and it will be very helpful to remember when later on we talk about fossils and dinosaurs and such like.

The picture at the top of this post shows how some people talk about time in the Earth’s long lifetime. These four really long periods of time are called eons. There are other ways of describing the Earth’s many ages and we will talk about them another time. The start and end of these ages can be said to have happened so many millions of years ago, which can be written MYA. So for example the beginning of the Phanezoic eon, the eon we are living in now, began 542 million years ago or 542MYA. This is the age where the first plant and animal fossils were found - before that there were probably only tiny microscopic bacteria and viruses that lived on our planet. You’ll see from the picture that plants and animals came quite late on the scene in Earth’s lifetime.

How do we know how old the Earth is? There are a number of different ways we know but I’ll tell you one way that you’ll understand if you’ve read my other posts about what stuff is made of. There is a type of metal in some of the rocks in the Earth called Uranium. Like all materials it is made of lego-brick like atoms. Uranium atoms are a bit unstable, but only a bit. From time to time one atom will suddenly change into another one - a lead atom. Lead is a metal too and in very old houses water pipes used to be made of it. Actually it changes into a misfit isotope lead atom not a regular normal one. It doesn’t happen very often. In fact if you took a lump of uranium of any size it would take 700 million years for half of the atoms in that lump to turn to lead. By measuring how much misfit lead isotope is in meteorites and moon rock - which we think were made at the same time as the Earth - then we can work backwards and know when that rock was made. So far all the rocks we have tested point to a number about 4500 million years.

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Anonymous 1 Comments

Image courtesy of ESA

In my rush to tell you all about the Rosetta mission and update you on it’s progress I forgot to tell you why the European Space Agency (ESA) are chasing a comet in the first place.

Comets are special because they were made at the same time that the other parts of the solar system were made - the Sun and the planets - but since that time, out in deep space, nothing much has happened to them. Our comet 67/P has been circling the Sun far far away in the Oort cloud until some time ago something bumped it and then it fell towards the Sun ending up travelling in a much shorter elliptical loop where we first noticed it in 1969. Despite the change in path, it is still the same lump of rock and ice that it always was since the beginning of the solar system. What is it made of? That is the question that Rosetta and Philae are going to find out. It is the first time we’ve had the chance to land on the surface of one of these ancient bits of our solar system and touch it and smell it. Up until now we’ve only seen comets from Earth or from shorter a distance away from a space mission. Never before have we been this close.

There are eleven measuring machines on the main Rosetta orbiter spacecraft and ten on Philae, the lander. Each of them was built by different teams of people in Europe and the information from each will go back to these same teams during the mission. Have a look at the ESA web page here to see what each of them does.

There is also a question that the Rosetta mission may help to answer; where did the water on Earth come from? A long way back near the beginning of the solar system lots of big rocks and chunks of ice that later became planets, asteroids and comets flew around bashing into each other. Where do you think the craters on the Moon came from? Probably most of the big ones were created around this time called the Late Heavy Bombardment. No one is quite sure why it took place but we have good evidence it really happened. Some people think that a lot of the water on our planet also arrived around this time from icy comets hitting the Earth. How could we ever know if that is really true? How about landing on an ancient comet now and finding out what type of water is in it?



OK that sounds an odd thing to say. What do I mean what type of water? Well, water, like all things, as we know from earlier blog posts, is made of lego brick-like atoms. What I haven’t said before is that water has misfit atoms in a very small number of molecules. Think of them as lego bricks that are the wrong colour for their normal type. We call these misfit molecules isotopes. Water has two different types of misfit. We know how common they are in our water on Earth - have a look at the picture above - but we also know that they can be present in different amounts in water from other parts of the solar system. So that is what I mean by type of water - the amount of isotopes give water from different sources their own different fingerprint, if you want to call it that. If the water on comet 67/P has the same proportion of misfit isotopes that would be another clue to suggest that our water on Earth originally came from comets crashing into it. If it does not, that’s not a problem, it helps us to look in other places for where it might have come from instead. Our water may have come from asteroids in the past, from the rocks that made up the early Earth, or from early plants or bacteria living much before the dinosaurs.

So as well as being an amazing thing to do in and of itself, landing on this comet may also give us another clue as to where our own water originally came from.

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Source: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Since I wrote to you about the Rosetta space mission a few things have happened that I wanted to tell you about. When I first mentioned the comet to you in August, the spacecraft was about 100km away from comet 67/P - the same distance from Luton to Coventry - but now, a few weeks later, it is only 10km away. It is exactly on schedule as was planned when it blasted off from Earth ten and a half years ago.

In less than 3 weeks the small robot landing craft, called Philae, will set off from the main Rosetta spaceship and land on the surface of the comet - the first time that the human race has ever attempted to do this. We have only just properly seen the comet after Rosetta got close enough to start taking good photos of it and so up until now the people at the European Space Agency (ESA) who are running the mission weren’t sure where the lander was going to touch down. For the past few weeks they have been looking at the surface of the comet to try to find a place that is both a good spot to land safely but also interesting enough to bother going there at all and now they have, a place called site J.

You will remember that comet 67/P is a funny shape - a bit like a rubber duck. Site J is on the ‘head’ of the two lumps of the comet. If Site J doesn’t work out during the landing then ESA have a back up landing site called Site C on the other lump, the ‘body’ of the rubber duck. The photo at the top of the blog shows where site J is on the comet and the photo below this paragraph shows a close up of it taken when Rosetta was 30km away from it a few days ago. Click on it to make it nice and big.

Source: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Of course Site J is a bit of a dull name for a place that is going to make history and so ESA have started a competition for people to give the place a better and more interesting name. Want to have a go? Then follow this link and send them your suggestion.  You have a few more days before the competition closes on 22nd October.

By the way, as you know, I normally try to create the photos and drawings I use on my blog posts myself. When I’m talking about a comet deep in space that is of course very hard to do but instead I’ve used photos that ESA have been taking using the cameras on Rosetta and then putting on their website, www.esa.int. I’ve used the full sized images they have published so make sure you click on all of them to see them in greater detail. Remember, these are not works of art or imaginary drawings made up by special effects people, they are photos of a real space object that has come from far outside our solar system. If you have a moment go and have a look at more fantastic photos on their website. Here is a photo Rosetta took of itself, with the comet in the background, a few days ago:

Source: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Philae will land on the comet on 12th November. I’ll try to remember to give you another news report around then.

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A few weeks ago I wrote to you about how everything was made of tiny little lego-brick-like atoms. Later, I wrote about how some things, like gold and diamonds, are made up of the same type of atom-brick. But like most toys made from of lego bricks, most things in reality are made up of many different types of atom joined together not just one type.



Like lego, atoms can be made to join with other atoms to make bigger and more complicated shaped bricks. These bigger bricks are known as molecules. It is this fact that makes the world around us full of very different types of stuff. Although the whole universe, that we know of so far, is made up of just 98 types of atom you can build very different types of things by joining them together in different ways and different arrangements. It is worth saying that although they are bigger than atoms, molecules are still very very small things indeed. Even the big complicated ones.


The above picture shows six lego brick molecules that I made up in my head using just four types of lego brick. It didn’t take me very long to do. Have a go yourself if you have some lego or other building blocks at home. Make some models of molecules and see how easy it is to come up with new shapes using only a few types of brick.


A good example of a very simple and small molecule is water. It is made of one type of atom brick joined up with two types of another. One drop of water contains huge numbers of these molecules rubbing against and sliding around each other. It just so happens that this combination and arrangement of atom bricks makes stuff that is wet in warm weather but frozen solid when it’s cold and that can turn into vapour when it gets very hot, such as in a kettle.

For an example of a much more complicated molecule that contains lots of different types of atom bricks you need look no further than your own hair and finger nails. Much of these parts of you is built from molecules of something called keratin. One molecule of keratin is made of more than 4000 atoms stuck together in a long spiral shape. These molecules stick to each other to make very long, strong chains. If water is just like three Lego bricks of two different types joined together then this molecule is like the Lego Star Wars Death Star - made of lots of bricks of lots of different types. The Death Star model has 3803 bricks to be exact so a keratin molecule has even more parts than that. Even so, it is still very small because atoms are incredibly tiny things indeed.

Because they are all sorts of shapes and sizes each type of molecule acts differently to others. This is why millions of water molecules together in a glass of water are see-through and liquid but lots of keratin molecules create tough bendy stuff like your nails.

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We all know that out in space things go around other things. They circle round and round. Our planet, the Earth, goes around the Sun. Our Moon travels around us. The moons of Jupiter orbit around it and Jupiter itself rotates around the Sun just like we do.

The words we use to describe this movement are a bit misleading. They can make you think that things travel around other things in perfect circles. Around. Round. Orbit. Circle. The fact that the planets and our Sun are sphere-shaped also gets us into the same mindset. So let me tell you something that might surprise you; the planets in our solar system don’t go around the Sun in circles like the drawing at the top of this post. They follow a different shaped path shown in the drawing below:


The shape of these paths are called ellipses. An ellipse is like an oval shape. In space, things go around other things in elliptical orbits not circular orbits. There are a few important things to say about this. Let’s use the Sun and the Earth as an example but the same rules apply to all things in orbit around other things.

Firstly, the Sun is not in the centre of the ellipse. It’s over to one side. If we think of us on the Earth going around the Sun once every year this means that we are at different distances to the Sun depending upon where we are on that path. Because the path is so big and the ellipse is nearly circular we don’t noticeably see the Sun getting bigger or smaller in the sky. However, there are times the Moon is a little bit closer or further away on its elliptical orbit around us and it is possible to measure the difference in size. You may have heard some people get carried away and talk about a ‘super moon’ on nights when the Moon is full and also closest to the Earth - but take it from me, it isn’t very noticeable.

Secondly, the shape of the ellipse can be different. It can be very long and narrow or almost circular. Comets have very long narrow paths, whereas most of the planets have nearly circular ellipses. The long narrow elliptical paths have their centre very far to one side, whereas the circular ones have it almost in the middle. This is why comets come from so far away out in space and go so close around the Sun, sometimes close enough to burn up completely.



Thirdly, the reason for the elliptical shape is gravity. The Sun is heavier and is pulling the Earth towards it. Because the Earth has speed of its own in another direction it doesn’t simply get pulled into the Sun, but these two forces cause the elliptical orbit that it travels upon. This also means that the speed of travel is not the same all the time. Half the time during the orbit our Earth is falling towards the Sun and is speeding up, whereas, after it has passed it at the closest distance it ever gets to it, it flies away from the Sun and starts to slow down. The second half of Earth’s orbit is spent slowing down until it reaches the most distant point away from the Sun when it begins the cycle again speeding up and falling towards it.

So how fast does the Earth travel around the Sun? It depends upon what day you ask and where in it’s orbit it happens to be. It is closest to the Sun (and fastest) around 3rd January each year and furthest away (and so slowest) around 4th July. Instead people give the simple answer as an average of all those possible speeds, which is just under 30 kilometres every second or 66 000 miles per hour. If it helps, thats fast enough to get to the Moon in 3 and half hours! But remember because the Earth travels on an ellipse not a circle half of the days of the year we go faster than that and half of the year we go slower.

The last thing to say is that with elliptical paths you can see that it is much easier for two or more orbits to cross one another, increasing the chance of space objects bumping into each other at high speeds. This makes for a much more exciting Universe and explains why, everywhere we look around the Solar System, things have and still are bumping into other things. Next time you look at the craters on the Moon think about how they got there.

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Anonymous 2 Comments

We all like ladybirds. They are the colourful beetles that we sometimes see in the garden or in the park. They don’t bite or sting, they do a good job by eating the little insects who attack our garden flowers and are even quite friendly - allowing us to pick them up, if we are gentle, and then unfolding their wings and flying away when they have had enough of the attention.

You probably know already that there are different kinds of ladybirds. Most are red and black, but some are yellow and black, some are orange and black , some are white and black and some are black with red spots. They also have different numbers of spots on their backs. Some have two spots, some have five spots, some have seven spots, some have eleven, and so on all the way to twenty-four spots. It isn’t true that a ladybird gets more spots as it gets older - they stay the same number all through it’s adult life. All in all there are 47 different kinds of ladybird in Britain!

The photo at the top of this blog post is a seven-spot ladybird that I found on one of my apple tree’s in my back garden. It was sitting on that leaf when I found it. The seven-spot is one of the most common types of ladybird in Britain. Sadly this year I’ve only seen two so far in my garden, and it may have been the same one twice!

Where do ladybirds come from? Are there baby ladybirds? Well, yes! But they don’t look quite like the grown-up ones. Here is a photo of a baby ladybird I photographed earlier this summer:


Do you remember the famous story about the Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle? A ladybird also starts out in life as a little egg on a leaf and then, instead of hatching out as a hungry caterpillar, it hatches out as a hungry baby ladybird. Baby insects of many kinds, not just ladybirds, are called larvae, so we will use that word too. Ladybird larvae hatch out in late spring or early summer and eat the same little insects that the grown up ladybirds eat. A few weeks later, after a whole lot of munching, they make a house for themselves, just like the hungry caterpillar does, called a pupa. They stay covered up in this special house for about a week and then come out as a beautiful grown up ladybird. Here is a photo of two pupae (the word is different for more than one pupa) sharing the same stinging nettle leaf:


At the time I am writing this post, at the end of August, most of the adults will have emerged by now but you might still be able to see the pupae houses that they left behind if you look around carefully. The really interesting thing about ladybird pupae is that every different type of ladybird has its own style and colour of pupa. There are lots more pictures of ladybirds, nymphs and pupae that I have taken this summer on my tumblr photo stream so be sure to have a look there if you want to see more photos.

If you want to learn more about the different kinds of ladybirds you might be able to find in your garden or in the park then I would recommend two fold out poster guides by the Field Studies Council; Guide to Ladybirds of the British Isles and Guide to the Ladybird Larvae of the British Isles. They are small enough that you could take them to the park to help you recognise different kids of ladybird or you could put them up on your wall at home. If you are really really interested in knowing more about ladybirds then I would have a look at the UK Ladybird Survey website - it has lots more stuff about the ladybirds that live in our country.

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Catching Up With A Comet

Photo by ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Ten years ago the European Space Agency launched a rocket into the sky. It whizzed around the sun a few times, speeding up as it went, and then around a few planets, including the Earth three times, on a cleverly planned path to hit a very small target a long way away. Clever is not really a big enough word - you try throwing something at target so far away that it won’t hit it until ten years later! The spacecraft at the top of this rocket is called Rosetta.

At the beginning of this month, August 2014, Rosetta reached its target, a comet speeding its way towards our Sun that at the moment is somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This comet has the rather long and difficult name of 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, because of the two people who discovered it. For the sake of the rest of this blog post, and mostly because I can’t pronounce it properly, let’s just call it comet 67/P. Here is a map of Rosetta’s journey:

Source: ESA
Comets are big dirty snowballs of ice and rock that sometimes come from very far out in space and loop around the sun. We think there are countless numbers of them surrounding our solar system in a dark region of space far away from the light of our star called the Oort Cloud, where they have been for a very long time not doing very much. Comets are different from asteroids - asteroids are made mostly of rock and are only found inside our solar system. Sometimes something, maybe a bump with a neighbour, causes a comet to fall in towards the Sun from the Oort cloud and it begins a long journey slowly picking up speed - it can take millions of years until it reaches the inner solar system. Three or four of these long-period comets fall in towards us like this each year. When they arrive they sometimes loop around the Sun and whizz off again never to return, sometimes they get too close and burn up and sometimes they get ‘captured’ by the Sun’s gravity and start to make much smaller circles inside the solar system where we can see them buzzing past us at regular intervals thereafter - we call these ones short-period comets.

This comet, 67/P, is a short-period comet that goes around the Sun every six and a half years or so and is about 3 kilometres by 5 kilometres in size. Since it was discovered it has been around the sun seven times. It isn’t a perfect sphere as you might imagine it should be. Far from it, as you can see from the photo at the beginning of this post, it is an odd shape.

Of course you already know that comets are things that sometimes are bright enough to be seen in the night sky and they have long tails behind them. So where is the tail on this one? The tails are caused when comets get closer to the sun and some of the ice begins to melt. Comet 67/P is on its way toward the sun right now and it is going to be Rosetta’s job to follow it closely for the next 18 months and watch what happens to it as it starts to melt and its tail begins to grow. In fact it is already starting to melt as this next photo shows:

Photo by ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Unfortunately, like most comets, 67/P isn’t close enough or big enough to be so bright that we can see it from Earth with our own eyes, although it can be seen with a telescope. But you don’t need a telescope. The cameras on Rosetta are sending back the most incredible pictures we have ever seen of a comet close up.

This event is important because this is the closest we have ever been to a comet before. The Rosetta spacecraft is less than 100 kilometres from the comet right now and soon will be about 30 kilometres away. In November, it is going to launch a small landing craft, called Philae, onto the surface of the comet. We’ve never tried anything like this before. We’ve seen plenty of comets in telescopes but have never touched one until now.

Knowing more about comets is important because we think they are very old - as old as our Sun and the planets spinning around it. Learning more about comets may mean we learn more about how our solar system was created 4500 million years ago. When Rosetta finds out some more interesting things I’ll let you know.

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Anonymous 2 Comments

These past few weeks you might have seen some tall-ish green plants with bright yellow flowers at the top. They grow in fields and rough ground all through the summer and one place you can find them a lot is by the sides of roads. This plant is called ragwort. Sometimes ragwort has stripey yellow caterpillars on it. This summer I have noticed lots of ragwort and lots of caterpillars. Maybe like you, I had no idea what these were called. It turns out they are called Cinnabar Moth Caterpillars and they are rather special.



Normally small animals want to be colours that help them hide in the places that they live. Yellow and black is a funny colour if you want to hide on green plant stems and leaves; its a very loud colour mix that can be seen easily! Do you know of other animals that are yellow and black striped? Bees and wasps are too and, as every small boy and girl knows, these insects are dangerous and have nasty stings. They don’t need to hide - their stripes are a warning to other animals. The stripey caterpillar is saying the same thing to other creatures, particularly to small birds who might want to eat it as a tasty snack. It is saying “Watch out, you might not like the taste of me!” and they are right - because the caterpillars don’t taste nice and are poisonous to things who eat them.

Here is the really clever bit; how do these little caterpillars become poisonous? They are not born that way. They eat the leaves of a poisonous plant and become poisonous themselves. Which plant? Ragwort! Ragwort tastes bad and is poisonous to animals who try to eat it, even big animals like horses, so obviously don’t try that yourself, but it is not poisonous to Cinnabar Moth caterpillars and I suppose that they must like the taste of it because they eat a lot of it - many ragwort plants I have seen these past few days have had all the leaves chomped off!

Just as in the story everybody knows, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, eventually these stripey caterpillars make a cocoon for themselves and then turn into a beautiful butterfly. Well not a butterfly actually in this case but a moth. A Cinnabar Moth is a moth that flies in the daytime, unlike most moths who fly at night time, and it also looks a lot more pretty than most moths do. It is poisonous too, which is why it is not worried about having a beautiful bright red colour on it. Here is a picture of what one looks like, but I didn’t take it:

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons | Taken by Svdmolen
In the next few weeks there should be a lot less caterpillars and a lot more moths so maybe I will find some and take a photo of one myself to show you. In the meantime have a look and see if you can find any ragwort, caterpillars or moths like these where you live.

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Imagine you are in a deep dark forest. Imagine incredibly tall, slender tree trunks that sprout out of the ground and reach up all the way into the sky. Moving around on the ground is not easy because of the criss-cross of tree trunks that overlap each other. The noise of the wind moving through the tops of the tall trees is very loud. On the floor of this forest it is quite dark but the sky can normally be seen because, unlike in the woods that you and I know, there are not so many leaves on the trees here.

Now imagine that you live in this forest and you want to talk to your family or to your friends. You know they are not so far away but you can’t see them all of the time because of all the trees in the way. How would you find them? How would you let them know you are there and you are OK? You would probably shout very loud to talk to them. Louder than the noise of the wind blowing through the leaves. Your shouting might sound like this:

listen to ‘Grasshoppers & Crickets’ on Audioboo

(sorry for the funny robotic sounds - Audioboo thought it was being clever by trying to correct the hum of the crickets!)

Welcome to the world of grasshoppers and crickets! I recorded the sound of these grasshoppers talking to each other in a field close to my home. Here is a photo of that field. It is just a meadow of grass in July.



To you and me it is a meadow of grass about waist height but to a small insect it is that great forest I have described. I also took the picture of that pretty green grasshopper at the top of this blog post in the same field on the same day. It was about the size of the tip of my thumb. Shortly after I took a photo of another grasshopper that I found in the same patch of grass:



Whoa! Wait a minute! They look very different but they both look like grasshoppers, don’t they? What is going on here?

It turns out that in my country, Britain, there is not just one type of grasshopper. There are 28 types! There are 15 different types of grasshopper and 13 types of cricket. Some of them live here all the time and some are tourists who come around from time to time. Standing up and seeing them from a distance they have always looked the same to me. The first time I noticed a difference between them was when I took these two photos. The second darker one I noticed was quite a bit bigger than the first - about half the length of my thumb. The photos close up show all sorts of other differences. What differences can you see between them?

So you see a grasshopper is not just a grasshopper. Any grasshopper you see in the summertime belongs to its own special family and there are other types from different families that look similar from far away but different close up. Next time you see one take a closer look if you can and see if you can find out what it’s family name is. If you want some help with that I am using the Field Studies Council Guide to British grasshoppers and allied insects fold out booklet and you might find that helpful too.

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Seeing the stars is a hard thing to do when you are young. This is one of the reasons why I want to tell you some useful things about stars on this blog - so that when you do get the chance to see them with your own eyes you are able to look for the things that are interesting. When you are young every minute of star-gazing time is precious.

I’m writing this in July. In the UK, where I live, it is summertime. This should be a good time for seeing the stars because the skies are often less cloudy and it is normally nice and warm outside. The evenings are warm but they are also light, which is where the problem begins. That big star very close to our planet that we call the Sun is still in the sky or has only just gone down under the horizon and the sky is still too bright to see any stars. They are there, of course. They are there all day but imagine trying to see a small candle flame at the end of the road when someone is shining a powerful torch up close in your face - you just won’t see that candle.

This time of year most children go to bed when it is still light outside. Or should do. By the time the stars are properly out and nice and bright it is nearly midnight! That is no good at all even for many grown-ups. Things are different in winter in the UK. Nights are much longer and around Christmas time it can be dark by four o’clock in the afternoon and it will stay that way until nearly eight o’clock in the morning. That gives us 16 hours of darkness where we might be able to see the stars! That sounds much better, doesn’t it? But it is winter and it is more likely that there will be bad weather and clouds in the way that block out the stars. If there aren’t it is quite likely that the sky will be beautifully clear and full of stars but it will also be very cold outdoors and after a short while you’ll want to go back inside and warm up.

When it is warm outdoors in summer, the sky is light in the evening. When the sky is dark in the evening in winter, it is often also very cold. So you see it really is not easy to watch the stars with your own eyes when you are young living here in Britain. I have been thinking about this problem and I have some ideas about how to get outdoors and see the night sky. Here are my ideas:

Idea 1 - If the weather forecast says the sky is going to be clear one night in Spring (February to April) or Autumn (September to November) that might be the time to go outdoors when the sky gets dark earlier than the summer but it is still warmer than in winter.

Idea 2 -  It is difficult to see most stars on warm, light summer evenings but it is sometimes possible to see planets. Mercury and Venus can sometimes be seen in the sky shortly after the sun goes down and when they are there they are usually very bright. Sometimes Mars and Jupiter are also in the sky at this time of year and can be seen earlier in the evening twilight before the stars come out. It is best to look at a star chart on a phone application or on the internet before you go out to know if there are any planets up that evening and where in the sky they will be.

Idea 3 - The same is true for the Moon in summer. It will be in different parts of the sky at different times of the month but there will be one week every month when the Moon will be in the sky and easily seen during the early evening, if the weather lets you.

Idea 4 - On a cold clear winter evening wrap up really warm and go outside for just ten minutes and see how many stars you can see. Don’t worry about looking for anything in particular. Just stand underneath them and enjoy the view. Then keep that memory safe. Whenever you see a photo of stars you can remember that you stood under the same stars yourself. Even just ten minutes of sky-watching is better than no minutes.

Idea 5 - Keep reading my blog posts about stars as and when I post new ones on this web site. When you are able to get out next and see real stars you may be able to find some that I’ve been talking about and know some more about them.

There is nothing like seeing the stars for yourself in real life, rather than hearing people talking about them, or seeing pictures of them on television or in a picture.

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Arcturus peering through the clouds at night | Image copyright Graham Jarvis 2014, all rights reserved
Today I’m going to tell you about a star. Just one. Its not a particularly special star but there is a very good reason that I am going to talk to you about this star first, of all the many many stars in the sky. It is because it is easy to find. If we are going to to talk about stars in the night sky together I want to you to be able to look up and see what I am seeing. Even if you don’t know much about stars, I think I will be able to teach you how to find this one.

The name of this star is Arcturus. Funny name, isn’t it? All stars have names given to them by people who watch stars for a living but some stars have nick-names that are often very old. Arcturus means something like “bear-watcher”, in the Greek language. Why would a star watch a bear? Well it goes back to the days before television and street lights, when people had little to do in the evening but look up at the stars on clear nights. They imagined they could join the stars with lines (like a dot-to-dot puzzle) and draw shapes with them. Its the same as when you see a cloud in the sky that looks like something familiar. One shape high up in the sky they thought looked like a big bear. It also was in the northern part of the sky and north was the direction that Greek-speaking people knew bears lived. The star we are talking about, Arcturus, isn’t part of this dot-to-dot shape but is nearby - like it might be at a distance watching the bear-shape. So that is how it got its name.

These days we don’t see bears in our gardens quite so often and street lights make the night stars a bit harder to see and so the dot-to-dot bear shape is harder to notice. I am sure you have seen another shape up in the sky that we would both recognise. To me it looks like a saucepan and handle. To others it looks like an old-fashioned plough; the type that used to be pulled by horses on farm fields. Have you seen that shape before? It is called The Plough or The Big Dipper and is actually part of the nose and back of the big bear. Don’t worry if you you can’t see the whole bear - I still can’t make out all of it either. The Plough shape is often found high in the Northern part of the sky. I made a picture of the shape so you can look at the night sky and find it yourself one night:
So if that is the nose of the bear then where is the bear-watcher? It is not so far away. If you draw an imaginary curved line using the curve of the saucepan’s handle to guide you then you will find a very bright star a little distance away. People who like watching stars remember this way of finding it by saying they arc to Arcturus. Look at the dotted line curve on the diagram and follow it to the bright star.

Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the sky. Two of the even brighter stars can only be seen in places much further south than where I live in England and so, for me, Arcturus is the second brightest star in my sky. The best time to see it is in the Spring and Summer.

I really hope that you get a chance to see it for yourself in your sky because I want to talk more about it another time and I want you to know that it is a real thing. Not something that someone made up in a story. But I will understand if you don’t get a chance to see it by the time I next write. If fact, the difficulties of being able to see the stars when you are young is what I will talk about next time.

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