Innholdsfortegnelse for 167 i The Week Junior

On 15 February, thousands of students across the UK went on strike to protest against climate change. A strike is when a group of people stop working as a form of protest. Climate change is the name given to long-term change in weather patterns, mostly caused by the harmful gases released by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. What happened? Students from at least 60 towns across the UK walked out of school to demand that the Government does more to stop climate change. Organisers said more than 10,000 students, from primary school to university, skipped classes to take part in demonstrations in cities such as Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, London and Manchester. They waved bright placards and chanted as they marched. In Manchester, Matt Sourby, 18, from…

A robot exploring the surface of Mars has stopped working after more than 14 years, marking the end of an important chapter in the exploration of the planet. The rover, named Opportunity, officially died on 13 February after a layer of dust stopped its solar batteries from recharging. It had not been heard from since June last year. The rover, nicknamed Oppy, was launched in 2003 and arrived on Mars on 25 January 2004, with the expectation of carrying out a 90-day mission. Instead, it carried out tasks for almost 15 years, including the discovery that Mars had once been wet and could have supported life. NASA, the US space agency, received its final signal from Oppy last summer when Mars was hit by a severe dust storm. The robot…

24 February 1981 Charles and Diana reveal engagement On 24 February 1981, the Prince of Wales (also known as Prince Charles) and Lady Diana Spencer revealed that they were engaged. Diana said she was “delighted and thrilled, blissfully happy”. The pair would later get married, on 29 July 1981, in front of a TV audience of around 750 million people. Many people said it was a fairytale romance. The couple had their first child, Prince William, less than a year later, followed by Prince Harry in 1984, but in 1993, Charles and Diana separated.…

One of the UK’s biggest collections of symbols, known as witches’ marks, has been identified in an English cave system. Previously, tour guides believed that the carvings at Creswell Crags on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were historic graffiti, but they have recently discovered that they are much creepier than that. Witches’ marks were popular from the 16th until the 18th century and were used by people who believed in witchcraft. They thought the symbols would protect them from evil spirits, so they etched the markings into churches and houses. Hundreds, possibly up to a thousand, were carved into the Creswell Crags caves. The most common of the etchings is a VV, which is thought to be religious and relate to the Virgin Mary. There are also diagonal lines,…

An incredibly rare fish that prefers walking to swimming is the focus of conservation in Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia. The fish was close to extinction before a breeding programme helped increase the population. ● LIFESPAN IN THE WILD: Unknown. ● HABITAT: The fish are usually found in the sandbeds in water five to 10 metres deep. There are just three known colonies off the coast of south-eastern Australia. ● DIET: They eat shrimps, worms and small shellfish. ● FUN FACT: Spotted handfish are incredibly rare. Between 1990 and 1994, just two were recorded in the wild. A BIT FISHY Although the handfish can swim, according to scientists they’re about as good at it as chickens are at flying.…

Birds of a feather Rainbow lorikeets enjoy a Valentine’s Day rose at West Midlands Safari Park. Desert disguise The Maraya concert hall in Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia. Stuck fast Fishing boats trapped in the frozen Bohai Sea, China. Fish food A diver hands out vegetables at Tokyo’s Sunshine Aquarium in Japan. Dancing in the streets Men in masks perform during a political meeting in Nigeria. Toyrannosaurus rex A life-size T.rex under construction at Bright Bricks in Hampshire.…

They’re known for their nifty inventions, dislike of a certain penguin, and ability to get into spectacular messes. However,, perhaps the most famous thing about Wallace and Gromit is their passion for cheese. Wensleydale is their favourite, and Wallace likes nothing more than a good slice with some crackers. Now the duo is set for a cheesy tour to celebrate 30 years in showbusiness. To mark three decades since they first appeared on screens in A Grand Day Out, Wallace and Gromit are embarking on a cheese-fuelled adventure around the country. The inventor and his dog will visit moree than 15 locations as part of CheeseFest UK 2019, taking with them some fantastic cheeses, and the real-life geniuses behind the characters. The aim is to promote delicious cheeses as well…

Bake banana and walnut bread What you need ● 100g butter, plus a bit extra for greasing ● 140g caster sugar ● 1 egg, beaten ● 225g plain flour, sieved ● 2tsp baking powder ● 4 ripe bananas ● 85g walnuts ● 50ml milk ● Loaf tin ● Baking parchment ● Large mixing bowl ● Fork ● Sharp knife ● Wire rack Instructions Heat the oven to 180° C. Grease the inside of the loaf tin with butter and line the base with baking parchment. Grease this with butter too. Mix the butter, sugar and egg in a large bowl. Then, slowly mix in the flour and baking powder, trying not to create any lumps. Peel and mash the four ripe bananas, and chop the walnuts into pieces and add…

Eight Members of Parliament (MPs) have resigned from the Labour party to set up a new independent group. The MPs criticised the Labour leadership for its approach to Brexit (the UK’s upcoming departure from the European Union – a trade organisation of 28 countries) as well as reports of antisemitic abuse within the party. Antisemitism is the unfair, unequal or unkind behaviour towards people because they are Jewish. As The Week Junior went to press, three Conservative party MPs had also joined the group.…

France Protesters march against antisemitism Protesters took to the streets across France on 19 February in response to growing antisemitism in the city of Paris and beyond. Antisemitism is the term for unfair, unequal or unkind behaviour towards people because they are Jewish. There has been a series of such incidents recently, including Jewish people being verbally abused in the streets. Fourteen political parties helped organise the protests, and jointly said, “Antisemitism is not an opinion but a crime.” The US Trump declares a national emergency On 15 February, US president Donald Trump said there was a national emergency at the country’s southern border with Mexico. Under US law, such an announcement gives Trump significant new powers, which he says he will use to fund the building of a wall…

Dogs are becoming more of a threat to wild animals and are partly responsible for the extinction of nearly a dozen species, according to a new study. The research was carried out in Chile, in South America, and measured the impact of roaming domestic dogs. There are around one billion pet pooches in the world, and although many are kept in houses and rely on their owners, others venture out by themselves. These dogs are described as free-ranging, and are the ones causing the most problems. Scientists have warned that these canines are a threat to around 200 different wild species. Dogs killing wild animals is only part of the issue. They also cause problems by transmitting diseases to wildlife, stealing prey from wild animals, and otherwise disturbing their environment.…

Spring is just around the corner, but hundreds of teenage athletes have been competing at the European Youth Olympic Winter Festival. Held in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the south-east of Europe, the event saw more than 900 youngsters from 46 nations take part in eight winter sports. These were alpine skiing, biathlon (cross-country skiing and shooting), cross-country skiing, curling, figure-skating, ice hockey, snowboarding and short-track speed skating. The Great Britain team had 27 athletes aged 15–18, who competed in all the sports apart from ice hockey. The British mixed curling team of Hamish Gallacher, Angus Bryce, Robyn Munro and Inca Maguire picked up a gold medal, beating Switzerland 6-2 in the final on 15 February. Curling is a sport played on ice between two teams. Players slide stones as close…

(Templar Publishing) Explore our planet with this unique book full of stunning paper-cut art. The cleverly designed pages incorporate a series of flaps and cut-outs that help bring to life all the different layers of our Earth, introducing a variety of different landscapes. You’ll explore underground cave systems, icy glaciers and the depths of the ocean; and find out how a volcano erupts, how clouds form and how Earth’s tectonic plates work. The eye-catching art was created by Elisa Cerri and Maurizio Santucci of Italian illustration studio Bomboland, which specialises in paper-cut art. As well as their beautiful illustrations, each colourful page spread has a scattering of bitesize stats and facts, and there is a glossary at the back to explain the more complicated words.…

Autochef Don’t enjoy cooking? It might be worth trying the Autochef – a contraption designed to cook and serve some delicious hot meals. It sounds great, except it’s slightly prone to malfunctioning, sending hot tea and eggs flying across the kitchen. The Snoozatron The Snoozatron is the perfect solution to a bad night’s sleep. It can fluff pillows, fill hot-water bottles, drop off teddy bears, and play relaxing music. Wallace loves it, but Gromit is less of a fan. Why? Because he has to dress up as a sheep to help Wallace fall asleep. Techno trousers Wallace adapted this impressive pair of NASA-developed trousers for Gromit as a new outfit for walkies. They can walk up walls, making them useful around the house, but can also be hijacked by the…

Good news for fans of sloths, skunks and flamingos, not to mention waffles, Y-front pants and yo-yos. The organisation that’s in charge of approving new emojis has announced the next 59 that will be coming to smartphones in 2019. In fact, the Unicode Consortium says that once versions with different genders and skin tones are factored in, there’ll be a total of 230 new emojis to use in your messages and social posts. Besides those mentioned above, other new symbols will represent mechanical arms and legs; deaf people with hearing aids; people in wheelchairs; and a guide dog. There are also new emojis showing couples holding hands, in different gender and skin-tone combinations. Ballet shoes, a Hindu temple, an otter and an ice cube also made the cut for the…

Turning rubbish into gold medals Medals at the next Olympic Games will be made out of old mobile phones, cameras and laptops. For the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, organisers plan to remove any gold, silver and bronze they can find inside disused electronics and use them to make the prizes. Organisers started getting the junk together in 2017 and hit the target for bronze in June last year. They hope to have collected enough metal for all the medals by the end of March. Pizza costs large slice of your bank balance US customers have paid more than £1,240 for pizzas that should have cost just £15. A technical glitch means Domino’s accidentally charged 80 times more than the proper price. One family in Texas raised their concerns…

A19-year-old British teenager who left the UK when she was 15 to join Islamic State (IS) now wants to return to the UK. IS is an extremist terrorist movement that formed its own state in Iraq and Syria. Shamima Begum ran away from home with two friends four years ago and married an IS fighter in Syria. When IS lost territory in fierce fighting, Begum fled the group and went to a refugee camp. She was found by a journalist earlier this month and revealed that she was pregnant, giving birth on 16 February. She says she should be allowed to raise her child in the UK and says there is “no evidence I did anything dangerous”. Begum’s family in the UK say she was just a child herself when…

Members of Parliament (MPs) have said there should be tougher laws to stop social media companies like Facebook spreading fake news. Fake news is the term for false or misleading stories that trick you into believing they are true. Social media makes it easy for people to spread false information online very quickly. A group of MPs has been investigating social media companies and has now revealed its findings. It wants companies like Facebook and Twitter to protect their users from fake news and keep their personal information safe. Last year Facebook got into trouble for allowing companies to gather information about its users without their knowledge or permission. The MPs accused Facebook of behaving like “digital gangsters” and criticised the company’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg. They said he had not…

A12th century toilet seat that would have had room for three people is going on display for the first time at the Museum of London Docklands. The oak plank, which would have been placed over a cesspit (a hole used for getting rid of waste and sewage) near the River Thames, still has axe marks in it where the holes were cut. The seat is part of a display about London’s secret rivers that will explore the city’s waterways, many of which have been lost over time.…

A restaurant in London has begun serving a lasagne made from grey squirrel meat, causing a row on social media. Customers interviewed by the BBC described it as tasting like a cross between chicken and rabbit and said it was delicious. In fact, they said they wouldn’t have known it was squirrel. Head chef Ivan Tisdall-Downes, who made the grey squirrel lasagne, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that grey squirrels are tasty, sustainable and – importantly – a pest whose numbers need to be controlled. They’re also a threat to the red squirrel population, which is declining in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. However, other people say eating grey squirrels is downright cruel. What do you think? Should we eat grey squirrels? Yes – grey squirrels are a pest If…

The multi-award-winning author Andrea Levy has died of breast cancer at the age of 62. Levy was known for her remarkable historical novels, set in both the UK and Jamaica, where her parents were from. Much of her writing, such as the novel Small Island, focused on telling the stories of black immigrants (someone who moves to live in a different country) who arrived in the UK in the 1940s and 50s. Speaking in 2015, she explained, “All my books look at what it is to be black and British, trying to put back into history the people who got left out – people like my dad.” In 2018 she said of her illness, “I accept that I am going to die of it, but while I am living, I…

A team of scientists believe they have discovered evidence of the earliest organisms that were able to move from one place to another on their own. The wiggly structures were found in a piece of 2.1-billion-year-old rock from a quarry in Gabon, a country in central Africa. If correct, this pushes back the time when living things started to move by 1.5 billion years. The scientists believe that the tiny tube-shaped fossils were created by living things moving through soft mud. They date back to a time when the planet was home to simple organisms made of more than one cell. Some modernexamples, such as strange living things called slime moulds, can live freely as single cells but also team up to find food. The team took X-rays of the…

Anew BBC TV channel aimed at Scottish viewers will launch on 24 February. BBC Scotland will be equally made up of new and repeated programmes. Among the new programmes set to appear is a music series called Emeli Sandé’s Street Symphony, in which the singer travels across Scotland to recruit her favourite street buskers for a special concert. Shows about Scottish food, football, wedding planners, motoring and freestyle dancers are all due to be broadcast in the first week. There will also be a documentary series called The Children’s Hospital, which takes a look inside the Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital. BBC Scotland’s main broadcasting hours will be 7pm until midnight. Between midday and 7pm it will screen some BBC Two programmes, with extra Scottish material – such as footage from…

E in hoff ganeuon o wlad y gan” is how music-streaming app Spotify introduced its latest playlist, Cân y Cymry. Translated from Welsh, it means “All our favourites from the land of song”. The playlist was launched to celebrate Welsh-language music, tying in with Welsh Language Music Day (Dydd Miwsig Cymru) on 8 February. It’s also perfectly timed for St David’s Day – he’s the patron saint of Wales – on 1 March. The playlist includes some of the most popular Welsh music on Spotify, from artists including the Super Furry Animals, Gruff Rhys and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. “Music has no borders, and a great song can come from anywhere, no matter what language it is in,” said Spotify’s Dexter Batson, who created the playlist. “Musicians performing music in the…

“I won second prize in the Science+Nature competition, which was tickets to the National Space Centre in Leicester. I came on my birthday with my sister and dad. First, we looked at a few objects before going into a 3D planetarium. When we had finished in the planetarium, we had lunch in the picnic area. There was a (pretend) rocket which occasionally let out pretend rocket exhaust! All around there were television screens showing important events in space history, such as Yuri Gagarin, the first person to visit space. After lunch we went to the rocket tower to see a Thor-Able rocket and a Blue Streak fuel tank. On every level there were games about how to land rockets on the Moon and how to make spaceships work. On one…

“My art homework was based on the theme of dance and graffiti, so I decided to make one with the logo for the Paralympic Dancing, and incorporate it into the word dance. The reason I used the Paralympic Dancing logo is because my dance partner at school was in a wheelchair.”  Jack “This is me reading The Week Junior on my mum’s new headstand stool. I really enjoy both things, so I decided to put them together. This is one of my favourite issues because I love animals and I enjoyed reading about how fascinating birds are!” Tula “Whenever I get a Week Junior, I show the Animal of the Week to Fizz, my baby tortoise.” Darcy…

US children turning English after copying Peppa Pig Children in the US are starting to speak with English accents because they’ve spent too long watching Peppa Pig, according to parents. One mum shared a video of her three-year-old son Oliver talking with such an accent. She said, “(He) started doing it pretty quickly, out of nowhere, when he started watching Peppa Pig. We think it’s really funny.” Casey Neistat, a YouTuber, also said his daughter spoke with a “slight but pronounced British accent” that she learned from the hit show. So is this real, or is it just one pig joke?* Fishing for compliments A fish and chip shop has sold bouquets of flowers made from fried food to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Simpsons Fish and Chips, which has branches in…