Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i What on Earth! Magazine

START HERE Jackrcibbits use their huge ears to help release body heat and keep cool in the desert Not all deserts are hot. The world’s largest desert is in Antarctica, where temperatures can drop below -89°C Thorny devils, desert-dwelling lizards from Australia, use their skin like a straw to suck in water from sand and transport it directly to the lizard’s mouth like a drink There’s a hole in a desert in Turkmenistan that contains a fire that’s been burning for more than 50 years It rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn The ancient Greeks and Romans thought diamonds were tears from the gods A dog named Honey Bun accidentally ate £7,500 worth of diamonds from her owner’s jewellery store. The diamonds came out safely from the other end A…

COLOURFUL CHARACTERS Nine colours named after people (and small animated henchmen) International Klein Blue French artist Yves Klein invented a deep, dark blue colour, then registered the formula for his new colour with the government. It was known as IKB for short. Baker-Miller pink An American scientist called Alexander G. Schauss designed this soothing pink colour. He had been conducting studies into the effect different colours had on mood and behaviour and hoped his new pink would make people who looked at it less worried and frustrated. It’s named after two members of staff at a naval prison where Schauss completed one of his experiments: the naval commander (Baker) and warder (Miller). Hooker’s green The 19th-century British scientific illustrator William Hooker created this warm, gentle green for his drawings, so…

KAAAH! (Danger in the sky!) PURRRRRR (I’m happy.) WHEE WHEE WHEE! (This is tasty!) Send It In! We want to hear your best chicken impressions! Record yourself making the chicken noises listed here and email the file to editor@whatonearth.co.uk The Champion Chicken will win a copy of the new book How to Chat Chicken! BUOK BUOK BUK BUK BUK BUK BUBKBK (Danger on the ground!) BUOAK, BUOAK, BA- GAWK (Move please, I need that nest!) GGGGGRRRRRRRRRR (Get away from me and my eggs!)…

WHAT ON EARTH! If you coul d drive to the Moon at 100 mph, it would take you about 100 days! EARTH Alternatively, you could fit 30 planet Earths in the space between Earth and the Moon! THE MOON’S ORBIT The Moon’s orbit around Earth is not a perfect circle. It’s more like a slightly flattened circle. At its furthest point from Earth, called the apogee, the Moon is 405,500 kilometres away. At its closest point, the perigee, the Moon is 363,000 kilometres away. On average the gap is about 384,000 kilometres. That’s the measurement we’ve used for this infographic.…

MACHINES WORD SEARCH Can you spot the names of 23 machines hidden in our jumbo word search puzzle? Good luck! AEROPLANE BICYCLE CATAMARAN DINGHY ELECTRIC CAR FORKLIFT TRUCK GONDOLA HELICOPTER ICEBREAKER JEEP KAYAK MOPED NARROWBOAT OCEAN LINER PEDALO ROCKET SUBMARINE TAXI UNICYCLE VAN WHEELCHAIR YACHT ZEPPELIN CUBE IT! 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? SPOT THE DIFFERENCE Can you spot all 20 differences between these two forest 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: something a scientist might create ( 9letters). Answer:…

GARDENS IN THE SKY These towering, human-made ‘supertrees’ in Singapore, Southeast Asia, have beautiful tropical flowers and ferns growing around their metal frames. You can walk between the trees on ‘skywalks’ built 50 metres up in the air! OOOH! EARTH AND SKY The bright band of stars in the sky are among billions in the Milky Way. A continual process of freezing, thawing and evaporation has created the hexagon-shaped mud flats on the ground below. FETCH! Just before this hilarious I photo was taken in a park in New York, USA, the dog’s owner threw a ball. The dog then launched itself into the air and opened its mouth wide to catch the ball. Bravo! WOW! KEEPING COOL During a summer heatwave, one of the best ways to cool down…

WHERE BIG CATS LIVE Big cats are found all over the world, although some of them prefer more specific habitats than others. Pumas, for instance, live in mountains, forests and even deserts throughout the Americas. Snow leopards, on the other hand, are found only in the mountains of Central Asia. Use the map key below to find out where big cats live. Mountain Lion Jaguar Cheetah Lion Leopard Tiger Snow Leopard Clouded Leopard WHAT ON EARTH! You may have heard lions called ‘king of the jungle’, but in fact lions live in savannahs and grasslands! A CAT OF MANY COUNTRIES The puma has the biggest range of any land mammal in the Western hemisphere. It can be found in more than twenty different countries, from Canada in North America all…

We humans are a very visual species. Did you know that around 70 per cent of the way our brain perceives the world is visual? Or that people can identify a picture of a familiar object in just 13 thousandths of a second? This is what makes infographics so powerful. An infographic reveals information using pictures. Most infographics represent collections of facts, which we call data. Showing data in pictures helps us to understand information at a glance - and can even make us go ‘Wow!’ You have probably already seen infographics such as maps, charts, graphs and timelines in your daily life or at school. In this feature, we’ll dive deep into data about our universe. Some of the graphics are worth taking time to explore, but others you…

Dunhuang star map, 700 CE This is the earliest known atlas of the stars, created hundreds of years before the invention of the telescope. It was discovered among thousands of ancient manuscripts in a cave in Dunhuang, China. Find out more at www.bl.uk/collection-items/chinese-star-chart. Florence Nightingale’s war mortality diagram, 1858 British nurse Florence Nightingale created an infographic called a rose diagram to persuade politicians of the importance of cleanliness and hygiene in hospitals. The improvements in sanitation that she fought for have saved millions of lives. Find out more at www.britannica.com/biography/Florence-Nightingale. Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, 1869 All the matter in the universe is made from basic chemical elements, and the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev created a system for arranging them called the periodic table. Mendeleev’s table helps scientists to understand how…

DR LAURA KALIN Linguist Question: What is the oldest language still spoken today? From Josh, age 8 Answer To answer this question, we first have to decide what it means for a language to have an age - and this is no simple task! For starters, all living languages, which means all languages that continue to be learned and used today, are always changing. When children learn a language from the people around them, they always change it at least a little bit. Over time, these little changes pile onto each other, until eventually the language is considered a new language that is separate from the language it came from. In this sense, every language used today is, at most, a few hundred years old. We could instead count a…

In 1494 Spain and Portugal signed a pact called the Treaty of Tordesillas. Incredible as it sounds today, this agreement was meant to divide the entire world between them. They agreed to divide the world into two parts along a line drawn down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Everything ‘discovered’ to the east would ‘belong’ to Portugal, everything to the west to Spain. Of course, nobody asked the people who already lived in Africa, Asia or the Americas what they thought of this plan. This was the beginning of something called western colonialism. That’s the time period when European countries went about taking control of faraway places and exploiting their people and natural resources to make themselves rich. We have seen a lot of empires come and go in…

The case of the cosmic question mark… In July the European Space Agency released this stunning image of stars forming 1,470 light years from Earth. But below the stars and the disc of material that helps the stars to grow, there was a mystery of the cosmos - in the form of a question mark! Scientists aren’t yet sure what the question mark is, but they have some ideas. The red colour means that it’s quite far away. And it is probably a distant galaxy, or even two galaxies colliding! This fish hides behind other fish to sneak up on prey Scientists have discovered that the small West Atlantic trumpetfish uses extremely sneaky tactics to catch its prey. The trumpetfish is a predator that lives near coral reefs. People diving…

Have you ever wondered what your pet cat’s miaow means? Or what a firefly’s flash is signalling? Our animal expert Dr Nick is here to help! Animals communicate for lots of different reasons: to ask for food or make friends, or to defend their territory or find a mate. Animals don’t talk with words in the same way humans do. But they do often use sounds, movements or even smells to get their point across. Join us as we journey through the animal kingdom and learn how to chat with chickens, gossip with gorillas and have discussions with dogs. Each month you’ll learn some cool animal noises and other ways animals communicate, as well as their translations. Why not try them out for yourself as you go, to really get…

Counting and order Infographics can be as simple as showing how many of a certain thing there are. They might also contain extra information, including, for example, what size they are, or what temperature they are, or what they are made of. Measurement and rules Many infographics are about measuring things, such as height, weight, length and speed. Look out for measurements running along the top, bottom, or up the side of charts, and measuring rules that run across illustrations. All of them will show the unit of measurement being used - for example, metres, years, kilograms or percentages. Scale Some infographics show things ‘to scale’. This means we are not seeing a picture of the real distance or size, but a fixed measurement that represents a much bigger or…

Napoleon vs. the Bunnies When: 1807 What happened: Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most powerful rulers in history. But he did lose his share of battles - including one, in 1807, against an army of bunnies! Napoleon had decided to have a rabbit hunt to celebrate the end of a war between the French Empire and Imperial Russia. His chief of staff ordered local farmers to gather up hundreds of rabbits in cages for the hunt. When it was time, they opened the cages and released the rabbits. However, these bunnies were not afraid of humans. In fact, they thought it was time to eat! The hungry bunnies swarmed around Napoleon and his guests, chewing at their clothes and boots. Unable to position their guns to shoot something so…