Big World Little Professors

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.

If you would like to listen to this blog post instead then press play on the audioboo widget below:

listen to ‘A Grasshopper Is Not Just A Grasshopper’ on Audioboo

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stars

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.

If you would like to listen to this post instead of reading it then press play on the audioboo widget below:

listen to ‘Sky-Watching Is Hard When You Are Young’ on Audioboo

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stars

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.

If you would like to listen to this post instead of reading it then press play on the audioboo widget below:

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science

Last time we talked about stuff being made of Lego-like bricks called atoms. Just to be clear before we talk more, when I say atoms are like Lego bricks I don’t mean exactly the same as them. Real atoms are not actually Lego bricks. You know already that they are much much smaller. In some ways atoms can be sticky like Lego bricks and they can fit together in different ways, but in other ways they are different too. I’m using something you know about to describe something else that you don’t to help you to draw a picture in your mind. It is not always the best drawn picture, but knowing about Lego, as I’m sure you do, is still really helpful to understand how these atom things work and how reality is made, even though they are not exactly the same thing. All of the real world around you is made from these atoms, so it is worth trying to understand.

Let me tell you another thing about atoms using lego bricks to draw the picture in your mind. If you make something made of the same type of lego brick, for example if you made something from one hundred red square bricks, then it will be something that is made only of square red bricks. But the thing you make from those bricks won’t have to be square and blocky, though it will be red. You could build a tall tower from those bricks or small little blocks made of just two red bricks each or giant rings made of bricks. Some stuff that we see around us is just like this - made of only one type of atom and some people say it is made of just one element. As we said before we know of 118 different elements or different types of brick, in our not perfect Lego illustration.

A good example of an element is a precious diamond. It is made up of just one type of small little atom. Each atom-brick is closely joined to all of its neighbours which is why a diamond is very hard stuff indeed - in fact one of the hardest things there is. Another example is the metal gold. Gold atoms don’t join well with other types of atom and so they are often found joined together having a private party on their own. This is also why gold things stay golden and shiny for a very long time when other things made with different more friendly atom-bricks will change. For example, iron goes rusty because iron atoms quite easily join up with oxygen atoms in the air to make rust; which is something made of both types of atom. We will talk more later about stuff that is made from more than one type of element.

So the picture at the top of this post is the diamond engagement ring I gave to my wife on the day I asked her to marry me. And now you know that it is mostly made up of just two types of atom-brick. Don’t tell her that though she might feel a bit cheated.

In the real world, just as in the box containing your Lego bricks, things are rarely that simple or ordered. Most of the stuff you can see around you is made up of many different types of atom bricks joined together in repeating patterns that create similar looking bigger blocks. These blocks are called molecules. Most things are made of molecules. We will talk more about them next time.

If you would prefer to listen to this post instead of reading it press play on the widget below:

listen to ‘Buildings Things From Lego-Like Atoms’ on Audioboo

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