Race to page 26 to discover some radiant facts about rainbows. Did you know that they are actually circular?
A wild and wonderful world awaits you inside!
All the robots on our cover were created by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) image generator. Our human designer Mark then grouped them together.
FACTOPIA!
Follow the trail of crazily connected facts on page 4, from mysterious holes in the seafloor to the smelliest place on Earth!
HOW TO CHAT…
Learn how to prattle with giant pandas and speak with snow leopards on page 12.
WHAT ON EARTH! Page 6
PUZZLES & GAMES Page 30
THE WHAT ON EARTH QUIZ Page 40
NOBODY KNOWS Page 23
Where do the scientific names for animal and plant species come from – and why do they always contain two words? All is revealed on page 16
What is the world’s favourite fruit? And which fruit was the first to be grown in space?
Tuck in to a feast of mouth-watering fruit facts on page 43
Some of the weirdest facts in the history of science await you on page 34
To win ALL the brilliant books featured in our May Issue, just answer this question:
What is a kakapo?
Send your answer to editor@whatonearth.co.uk and a winner will be chosen at random by our jokes editor May. Good luck!
Turn to page 10 to discover how amazing ‘star dunes’ are formed in the desert over thousands of years.
Look out for this month’s selection, hand-picked by our jokes editor May, on page 50.
You can also find all these books (and more!) at whatonearthbooks.com/ shop
Follow the trail of crazily connected facts all the way from holes in the seafloor… to the smelliest place on Earth!
By Kate Hale, Paige Towler, Julie Beer and Rose Davidson Illustrations by Andy Smith
Scientists discovered more than 5,000 strange holes on the seafloor off the coast of California, USA. They aren’t sure how they got there
Only one-fifth of the ocean floor has been mapped by scientists
There are lakes and rivers on the seafloor – some even have their own waves
Crocodiles can’t stick tongues
When opossums are under attack, they stick out their tongues and produce a foul smell, appearing to be dead. orange tongues covered in spiky bristles that help them grip and swallow fish whole
Underwater volcanoes can form bubbles large enough to swallow a ship
Some corals make their own ‘sunscreen’ by producing bright colours, which attract algae that help shield the corals from harmful rays
African penguins sometimes dig nests on top of piles of their own poo on beaches near Cape Town, South Africa
Swimming or taking a boat is the only way to get to the oldest cemetery in Camiguin, in the Philippines, because the cemetery sank following a volcanic eruption in the 1870s.
In 1578, workers discovered mysterious skeletons –believed to be the holy remains of lost saints – in the
of Rome. The skeletons were sent to churches across Europe, where they were covered in gold clothing and jewels
The ancient Egyptians revered Nile crocodiles. One ancient historian claimed some were tamed and decorated with jewellery
Seal Island, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, is said to be the
It’s home to up to 75,000 fur seals whose poo smells like rotting fish!
Famous tennis players Andre Agassi of the United States and Roger Federer of Switzerland enjoyed a friendly rally on this unique tennis court high in the sky. The court is on the helipad of a hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 211 metres up!
This imaginatively designed building, which looks like a giant cube perched on a human neck and chin, is La Tête Carrée Library in Nice, France. The 25-metre-high structure is fittingly titled ‘Thinking Inside the Box’. Inside are three floors full of books!
These two peacocks were caught in what looks like a bit of a scuffle by a photographer in Kerala, India. Male peafowl (peacocks) are known for their colourful trains of feathers. Sometimes they fight to protect their territory. Female peafowl, called peahens, are more muted in colour.
This Fennec fox is popping its head out of a desert sand dune. Photographer
Lukas Zeman took a series of fox photos inspired by the book The Little Prince, in which the Prince also meets a desert fox. Fennec foxes have huge ears that help them to release heat and stay cool in the desert.
ALL FIRED UP
To get this awesome shot of a cloud above a volcano in Chile, photographer Francisco Negroni camped out for 10 days in his car waiting for an eruption. Negroni’s atmospheric photo, called ‘A Perfect Cloud’, won him an award for Weather Photographer of the Year.
A 270-million-year-old fossil found in the fossilised skull collection at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., USA, has been named after Kermit, the world’s most famous amphibian. The newly discovered species – named Kermitops gratus because it reminded scientists of the Muppet – is thought to be one of the earliest ancestors of modern frogs. If you’d like to find out about why new species are sometimes named after famous people, turn to page 16.
When you are trying to return a serve at tennis, the time it takes you to see and react to the moving ball is crucial. New research conducted at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, suggests that some people have an advantage in fastmoving situations because they are able to process more visual information per second than others. Scientists used a ‘flicker test’, which flashes a
light at increasing speed until it is blinking so fast it appears to be a constant light. Some participants saw a steady light at 35 flickers per second. Others could still see the light flashing at 60 flickers per second. Being able to see more information per second in this way could give some people an advantage in many sports. It could also help animals to escape from predators.
Professional tennis players typically have less than half a second to see and react to their opponent’s serve.
Star dunes, like the one pictured on the right, are found in deserts in Africa, Asia and North America. They have even formed on the surface of Mars! But until now scientists have not been able to say how many years it takes for a star dune to form. By measuring how recently different grains
of sand within the dune were last exposed to sunlight, scientists from the UK calculated that one star dune in Morocco is more than 12,000 years old! Star dunes are created at locations in the desert where a strong wind blows from different directions over the course of a year.
The newly discovered fossil (top), a skull of a modern frog (middle) and Kermit (bottom).
You can find beetles crawling all over our planet. In fact, around 25 per cent of all animal species are beetles. One of the newest additions is Excastra albopilosa, which was recently discovered in
Australia. As you can see, it is an extremely hairy beast! Scientists think the beetle’s long, fluffy hairs could help it by fooling predators into thinking that it’s covered in fungus, and so less tasty to eat.
It can take more than 10,000 years for a star dune to form in the desert.
Human beings haven’t walked on the Moon for more than 50 years. But all that is set to change in 2026, when NASA is planning a new crewed space mission that intends to land a team of astronauts near the lunar South Pole. When the astronauts get there, they will need a specially designed vehicle to help them explore the Moon’s rugged surface and conduct experiments.
NASA has just announced that it has asked three companies to build Moon
rovers that can be driven by astronauts and also operated from Earth via remote control. The best designed Moon rover will get the job!
Watch a video showing the Astrolab rover, below, in action.
Giant pandas might look cuddly, but they are actually solitary creatures that prefer to be left alone. Mothers and babies talk to one another, though. And so do adults looking for a mate. Giant pandas are found in the forests of southwest China.
(You look nice.)
Male pandas make bleating noises to attract a mate. These noises are similar to the sounds made by sheep.
Chirp c h i rp chip
(Oh… thank you very much!)
Females respond with chirps if they are interested.
Illustration by Adrienne Barman
WOW-WOW (I’m sad.)
High up in the mountains of Central Asia, there are a number of sounds
you should listen for. If you hear any of these, you might be close to one of the rarest big cats in the world – the snow leopard. And you should also be very wary. You don’t want to be confused for a Himalayan blue sheep – this cat’s favourite food!
(I’m angry.)
(I’m comfy.)
As with other cats, big or small, growls can be signs of annoyance or of feeling threatened.
Tigers, jaguars and snow leopards can’t purr because of the shape of their throats. But blowing air through their nose, making a ‘huff’ sound, can mean a similar thing.
Wewanttohearyourbest panda or snow leopard impressions!
Recordyourselfmakingtheanimal noises listed here and email the file to editor@whatonearth.co.uk
Thetopimpressionistwillwinacopyof the new book How to Chat Chicken!
Unlike many other big cats, snow leopards can’t roar. Instead they use a sound similar to a loud, long yowl to greet each other.
The hiss is one step up from the growl and is the last warning before an attack.
Your guide to the wonderful world of linguistics and languages. This month: taxonomy and tautonyms!
Many species of living things are known by both common names and scientific names. For example, the common name for you and me is ‘human’ and the scientific name is Homo sapiens. Some species, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, are known only by their scientific name. But why are scientific names two words, and who came up with them in the first place?
Taxonomy is the classification of living things. In the 1700s, a Swedish scientist named Carolus Linnaeus popularised a system for keeping track of all
Sometimes a species will have the same name for both genus and species. These special names are called tautonyms (‘tauto-’ means ‘the same’ and ‘-nym’ means ‘name’).
living things and how they are related. He gave them two names: genus, for organisms that are very similar and probably have a common ancestor, and species, for one type of organism within a genus. For example, Homo is the genus that includes humans, and it also includes our ancestors Homo erectus and Homo habilis.
Carolus Linnaeus is known as the ‘father of modern taxonomy’.
Linnaeus’s system uses Latin names because Latin was the language scientists and other
Here are some examples:
Gulo gulo (wolverine)
Iguana iguana (common iguana)
scholars used at that time. New scientific names are still usually made up using Latin, although sometimes they include words in other languages. For example, there is a type of spider named Hotwheels sisyphus, after the Hot Wheels model toy cars. Sometimes scientific names include the name of the person who discovered the organism or the place it was found. Sometimes they are named after someone else entirely, like a celebrity!
Gorilla gorilla (Westerngorilla)
Sula (red-footedsulabooby, a type of bird)
Natrix natrix (European grass snake)
(bream,Boopsboops atypeoffish)
Bufobufo (common toad)
Some subspecies, which are smaller and often geographically defined groups within the wider animal species, have the same scientific name for their genus, species and subspecies. The Western lowland gorilla, for example, which is a subspecies of the Western gorilla, has the scientific name Gorilla gorilla gorilla!
Craspedotropis gretathunbergae
This species of snail is very sensitive to changes in temperature and
Maaradactylus spielbergi
This pterosaur lived in the Cretaceous Period in what is now Brazil.
Aleiodes shakirae
This parasitic wasp makes caterpillars bend and shake in different ways.
Legionella shakespearei
This bacterium was discovered in Stratford-upon-Avon in England.
Acisoma attenboroughi
This dragonfly was named in honour of a famous naturalist's birthday.
Desis bobmarleyi
This underwater spider was named after the song ‘High Tide or Low Tide’.
Can you match the famous person with the animal named after them? Hint: the famous person's name is hidden somewhere in the Latinised name of the animal. Some of the animals have traits that reminded the scientists who discovered them of the famous person. And sometimes the scientists were just big fans of the famous person!
Sir David Attenborough is a famous natural historian and television presenter who has travelled the world.
William Shakespeare was a famous playwright who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in England.
Shakira is a Colombian singer and songwriter who is known for her belly-dance performances on stage.
Greta Thunberg is an environmental activist from Sweden who speaks out about the dangers of climate change.
Bob Marley was a famous singer and songwriter from Jamaica. He was a pioneer of the reggae genre of music.
Steven Spielberg is a film director from the United States. He has directed many films, including Jurassic Park
For thousands of years, people have imagined machines that could talk and move by themselves. Today, robots are everywhere. How did we get here? And what will the robots do next?
By Benjamin Weiner
Humans have sent robotic roverstoexplorethe surface of Mars. This meansplanetthatMarsistheonly (thatweknowof)thatisfullyinhabited byrobots!
Robots are machines that can act like living beings: some can walk around, others can move objects from one place to another. Robotics is the science of making these astonishing machines. You may think that robots are quite a modern invention, but actually people have been imagining and designing robots for thousands of years! Of course, we’ve come a long way since the first robot creations. Today, the science of robotics is changing the way our world works. Robot arms are building cars in factories.
Robot dogs are keeping elderly people company in nursing homes. Robot baristas are brewing coffee (and asking
This graph shows the estimated rise in the number of industrial robots, which are robots that help to make things in factories, between 1990 and 2040.
for tips from their customers). And robots are even patrolling the aisles of supermarkets, cleaning up products that have been knocked over or spilt by accident.
How did we get to this brave new world of the robot? And where are we going next? To find out, we will travel back in time to discover the amazing history of robots. We will also investigate how scientists are now using machines to replace and perform the function of different parts of the body. And we’ll learn about the remotecontrolled drones whizzing through the ocean and the sky.
Let’s robo-go!
Continued on next page
From 3,000-year-old automated machines to cutting-edge robots powered by AI, here are some of the most important and interesting milestones in the history of robotics.
The Ancient Babylonians develop a water clock, a machine that uses a regular flow of water to measure time and is considered to be one of the first robotic devices.
1400 BCE
Unimate 001, the first robotic arm, is used in a factory assembly line in the USA to pick up hot pieces of metal and place them in a cooling liquid. It is created by George Devol, who is known as the ‘grandfather of robotics’.
1961
400 BCE Chinese engineer King-Shu Tse designs a mechanical bird and horse.
Muslim scholar, engineer and inventor Ismail al-Jazari writes The BookofKnowledge ofIngenious Mechanical Devices, which describes dozens of machines, including a ‘robot band’ of four automated musicians.
1950
Alan Turing invents the ‘Imitation Game’, which is now often known as the Turing Test. The test puts a human being in conversation with an unknown partner, and they have to determine whether the partner is a human or a computer.
Developed at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, Wabot 2 can read sheet music and play the piano!
1982
1994
Developed at Stanford Health Care in the USA, the CyberKnife medical robot is used to reduce or remove unwanted tumours, or growths, inside the body with very precise beams of radiation.
1206
Konrad Zuse invents the main language of modern computers. It is made up of strings of 0s and 1s. This binary coding system enables us to program machines to solve maths problems, store information and so much more.
1939
1997
Sojourner becomes the first wheeled robot to explore another planet. Named after the African American civil rights activist Sojourner Truth, this NASA robot was equipped with six wheels, three cameras, and lots of scientific tools to explore the surface of Mars.
1302
The Artois royal family creates ‘prank robots’ around their castle in France. Sneaky machines were set up to dump water on their guests and cover them in flour!
Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci is said to have built a robotic knight, which could stand, sit, cross its arms and even raise its visor. It is the first known human-shaped robot in Europe.
1495
2016
1739
French inventor
Jacques de Vaucanson creates a mechanical duck that could beat its wings and splash around in a pool. It could also ‘eat’ grain from a human’s hand, appear to digest it, and then push a poo-like pellet out of its bottom!
1902
Leonardo Torres
Quevedo of Spain develops one of the first systems for remote control, using radio signals to operate machines from a distance. In 1906, he operated a boat filled with human passengers from more than a mile away.
Czech science-fiction writer Karel Čapek is the first person to use the term ‘robot’ to describe a machine that resembles or performs the movements and functions of a human being.
1921
The robotics company Boston Dynamics creates Spot, a robotic dog. Spot can run up a flight of stairs and even grip and turn a door handle to open it. 2023
2010
Robots are demonstrated in Japan that are able to predict and respond to the movements of their human ballroom-dancing partners.
2005
2050?
The singularity is the name for a point in the future when robots and computers powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) might become more intelligent than humans, and able to learn and develop by themselves. Some people are concerned about what impact the singularity might have on humans. Other experts predict that it won’t happen at all.
Driverless cars, which use a combination of computers, video cameras and other sensors to drive and navigate, start to be tested on roads.
BotBar, a coffee shop that uses a robot to make coffee for its customers, opens in New York, USA. The robot barista, whose name is Adam, even asks for tips!
2023
A small computer chip implanted into a person’s brain can receive and interpret electrical signals. The computer translates these brain signals into digital commands, so that the person can control a cursor on a computer screen or type on a keyboard just by thinking about it! Scientists hope that this will be a revolutionary technology for people who have mobility impairments.
A cochlear implant helps people with hearing impairments to regain a sense of hearing.
A small computer mimics the role performed by the human ear, coding sounds into electrical signals that are then transmitted to the brain.
A teen uses a brain- computer interface. This works in a similar way to the cochlear implant in the ear. A bionic eye, also known as a visual prosthesis, translates shapes and colours into electrical signals that are then sent to the brain, which interprets them as vision.
People with the medical condition diabetes need to monitor how much sugar is in their blood so that they don’t become sick. Now, a small device called a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) can take blood sugar readings throughout the day. When blood sugar levels drop too low, the CGM can instruct a pump to add the sugar-regulating hormone insulin to the person’s bloodstream.
A complex blood-pumping device can help patients with serious heart conditions stay alive until they are able to receive a heart transplant from a human donor. Scientists have yet to develop a robotic heart that can be used permanently. But they are working on it!
The biospleen, which is a human-made device about the size of a pack of cards, is able to perform the role of the spleen for people who do not have one. It filters and cleans the blood the same way a natural spleen does.
Discover how robots and other cutting-edge technologies are revolutionising the world of medicine.
Scientists are not just working on replacing body parts, but adding new ones such as a third thumb!
Although these tiny robots are still in the early stages of development, scientists think that nanobots could one day diagnose and treat diseases from inside the body. After entering the body, via the bloodstream, for example, nanobots could head directly to the source of illness, or even into individual cells in order to deliver medicine and perform nano-surgery.
Nanobots can be just 0.1 micron in size. That’s so small, you would have to line up 400 in a row just to be able to see them!
Surgeons have attached bionic hands to the arms of people who have lost their own hands. With practice, people learn how to direct their prosthetic hand to pick up objects, type on a keyboard and play games. They do this by moving muscles in their arms and shoulders. In the future, people may be able to control their prosthetic limbs directly from the brain!
Designing prosthetic legs, ankles and feet that can walk, run and jump in the same way as human legs do is one of the hardest challenges in robotics. Scientists have now invented foot prosthetics that enable people without feet to stand, retain balance and even run. Other full-leg robotic prosthetics use a series of sensors to simulate the complex way a human leg moves.
Prosthetics help people do sport.
A smart glucose monitor.Find out about drones and why they could soon be taking over our skies…
A drone is an aircraft with no humans on board. Humans control drones remotely or program them with directions for where to go. The first drones were developed in Britain and the USA during the First World War, which happened between 1914 and 1918. The British Aerial Target, which was a small radiocontrolled aircraft, was first tested in March 1917. After 100 years of advances and refinements, drones are now buzzing through the skies all around the world. They come in different shapes and sizes and are used to perform multiple tasks. Drones can be used to deliver parcels and to help people navigate dangerous situations, such as fighting fires. Drones are also used for fun, in drone races or to capture videos from high in the sky! Drones have even been used in place of fireworks to create dazzling displays.
Today, most drones have to be piloted by a human being, via remote control, in order to fly safely. At the very least, a human needs to tell them where to go. But as computer and artificial intelligence (AI) technology becomes more advanced, drones
The world’s fastest cameraFormuladroneisdesignedtofilm 1carsduringarace. Thedronehasatop speedofmorethan 350 km/h!
will be able to make more of their own decisions as they are flying. This will allow them to navigate the skies and avoid unexpected obstacles all on their own. In the future, it is possible that drones could become the world’s primary form of transport – and maybe even carry human passengers!
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Nine different types of rainbow
Prepare to be amazed (and amused!) by the unusual facts crammed into these irresistible lists.
Rainbows are caused by water droplets in the atmosphere. When light passes through the droplets, it bends and spreads out, forming a band of colours.*
1 Primary rainbow
The classic. The colour sequence of a primary rainbow is: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
2 Double rainbows
This is when a faint, secondary rainbow appears above the first one. They’re caused by light reflecting twice inside the raindrop. This second reflection** causes red
to be on the inner section of the arch, with violet on the outer section.
3 Twinned rainbows
These are the rarest type of rainbows, when two rainbows start from the same base but then split to form a primary and secondary arc across the sky. They are usually caused by a rain cloud that contains different sizes and shapes of raindrops.
4 Reflection rainbows
Sometimes sunlight reflects off a flat body of water first and then bounces up to create a rainbow in the air above the water. This is called a reflection rainbow.
5 Reflected rainbows
This is the name for any rainbow you see reflected on the surface of a flat body of water, such as a lake. (Not to be confused with a reflection rainbow, above!)
6 Monochrome rainbows
These rainbows only display one colour, which is usually red. They happen at sunrise or sunset, when sunlight has to travel further through Earth’s atmosphere because the Sun is low in the sky. This ‘scatters’ the light with shorter wavelengths (yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) so only the longer-wavelength red and orange are visible.
7 Supernumerary rainbows
These are smaller rainbows in lighter, pastel colours that appear as an extra coloured band running inside the first rainbow. They form when sunlight bounces off small water droplets of 1 mm or less.
8 Fogbows
Because the water droplets in fog are much smaller than raindrops, fogbows have much fainter colours than rainbows.
Get ready for playtime by learning these fascinating facts about toys!
70 billion
The amount of money in pounds that people around the world spend on toys each year.
700 million
The number of tiny rubber wheels made by LEGO each year, which means the Danish toy company is the world’s No. 1 tyre manufacturer.
500 million+
The number of copies of Tetris that have been sold, making it the most popular paid-for computer game of all time.
4.8 million
The price in pounds of L’Oiseleur (which is French for ‘the bird trainer’), the world’s most expensive doll.*
They mostly appear white with a reddish tinge on the outer edge and a bluish tinge on the inner edge.
Moonbows, also called lunar rainbows, are created in the same way as rainbows but with moonlight – which is actually sunlight reflected by the Moon. They form the same spectrum of colours but are usually fainter.
Moonlight passing through water droplets makes a pretty moonbow around the Moon.
Above: a double rainbow over the Raja Ampat Islands in Indonesia.
*Rainbows often look like arches, but they are actually full circles. Rainbows only look like arches when seen from the ground because the bottom part of the circle is usually blocked by the horizon.
**A rainbow’s order is defined by the number of times that light reflects inside the water droplets. Primary rainbows are first-order rainbows and double rainbows are secondorder. It is possible to see third- and fourth-order rainbows too, but they become increasingly faint as the number increases. Scientists in a laboratory have detected a 200th-order rainbow!
Listified!, written by Andrew Pettie and illustrated by Andrés Lozano, is out now.
4,600
The estimated age in years of the Royal Game of Ur, the oldest playable board game in the world.
168
The total number of dots on a standard set of dominoes.
120
The distance in kilometres of the world’s longest model railway line, which ran between Fort William and Inverness in Scotland.**
40
The number of storeys in the tallest recorded Jenga tower, which players build, layer by layer, by balancing wooden blocks on top of each other.
3.13
The time in seconds it took Max Park to solve a Rubik’s Cube, setting a new world record.
*L’Oiseleur is a 1.2-metretall mechanical doll that can move on its own and play the flute. It does this thanks to a complex system of internal cogs and gears. The doll has more than 2,300 different parts, needs no batteries or motors, and took more than 15,000 working hours to build.
**The toy train that travelled the length of the record-breaking model railway had a top speed of 5 kilometres per hour and took 9 days to complete its journey!
Would you like to have a curly tail like a monkey? Or a giant tongue like an anteater? Lots of animals rely on their tongues and tails to do important jobs, such as catching prey or for keeping balance. Here are some of the largest and longest tongues and tails in the animal kingdom.
1x = one times its body length (excluding the tail)
As it leaves its mouth, achameleon’stongue can travel at 100 km/h!
Stumped? Don’t worry, you can find the answers to all the puzzles on page 48.
Can you spot the 20 science words hidden in our jumbo word search puzzle? Good luck!
U U P S I Y H W V Z O N A C L O V T E R
X L M S I R P H I K K H W J X W I U U U
P P T I J L U N S H S I P P P B R Z V H
O R V R A K Y A R X B A C W R K G X I I
J O C S A A M Q A M L M T O Y R Y X Q I
O D E X V V C A L N I E A I A Z D B W W
U R L F N T I I G C T H B V L S A R Z B
L R H H X G K O R C F Y I I V D T A S A
E S F M Q N K O L P E T R Q C W O L N O
Y X Z U W Q S A Z E Y P S R Y E Y V D V
B R A I N C A I C O T U A I P U D E V B
L D M W O U F P E Y I E B T L Z A K D Y
Y R E P T B P E S D C A J O J I J M B X
A I E R N S L L Y H P O R O L H C T C H
Q T Y G A Y D P M N F T N Z H O C O F A
V X O R O R X Y E C C N Q Y P J F O N B
I N E M N R F U P G X O R U J B S L C I
J Q L U J O R N N B A C B U B S S C J T
H H J L V O O E I P O M A S I P W E F A
P U Q F N C A B P F Z O O L O G Y T C T
The six-sided shape on the left can be folded up to form a cube. Only two of the cubes at right can be made by it. Which are they?
ATOM
BRAIN
CHLOROPHYLL
DECIBEL
FOSSIL
GRAVITY
HABITAT
INFRARED
JOULE
KEVLAR
LASER
MICROSCOPE
NEURON
ORBIT
PRISM
SILICON
ULTRAVIOLET
VOLCANO
X-RAY
ZOOLOGY
A B C D
Can you spot all 2O differences between these two playground illustrations?
Use the word wheel to help find the answers to the five clues below. All the answers contain the middle letter, and each letter can only be used once.
Clue: a hundredth anniversary of an important event (9 letters).
Answer:
Clue: a school restaurant for pupils and teachers (7 letters).
Answer:
Clue: a sugary fluid that bees collect from flowers to make honey (6 letters).
Answer:
Clue: the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun once (4 letters).
Answer:
Clue: Mount ____. The largest active volcano in Europe, found on the island of Sicily (4 letters).
Answer:
Can you find your way through our maze of square rooms? Enter through the door marked with the red arrow, then try to find your way to the exit by going through the correct sequence of open doors. Good luck!
Fill in the missing numbers so that every row and column includes the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Use the inequality signs as clues and make sure numbers always obey the inequality sign between them. This means that the arrows between the numbers always point towards the smaller number.
Here is an example:
In the three squares shown above, the number A must be less than 3 and greater than the missing number B.
We know all the numbers must be between 1 and 4 , so therefore A must be 2 and B must be 1.
Can you work out what you are looking at in each of these seven photos? 5
Draw a line to connect each pair of planets. You can’t use diagonal lines and the lines can’t cross or touch each other. You must fill the whole grid with lines but only one line is allowed in each square.
In the triangles below, the numbers inside the squares are the sum of the two numbers in the connected circles. For example:
Can you work out which number should appear in each of the circles? All the numbers in the circles are between 1 and 10 and a number can only be used once in each triangle.
Fill all the empty squares so that every row, column and 3x2 box contains each of the numbers 1 to 6.
Discover some of the weirdest and wildest facts known to science – from crime-fighting bugs and flower clocks to alien octopuses from outer space.
Words by Ali Eldridge Illustrations by Andy SmithForensic entomologists study insects to help the police solve crimes. Forensic entomologists can tell by examining the insects present at a human crime scene what time the crime probably occurred. They estimate the time based on the type of insects that they find and what stage of development the bugs are in. The first known use of forensic entomology to solve a crime was in 13th-century China!
A teacher from Northern Ireland holds the world record for the loudest ever shout.
Annalisa Wray’s record-setting shout was 121.7 decibels, which is almost as loud as a jet engine!
Here are
some other noisy records: the loudest human whistle was 125 decibels. The loudest burp was 112.4 decibels, which is about as loud as a pneumatic drill. There is no officially recorded loudest fart. However, some people claim that
in 1972 Paul Hunn, from Michigan, USA, did a fart registering 118.1 decibels!
‘Island gigantism’ is a phenomenon in which animals that live on islands can grow larger than similar species that live on the mainland. This happens because animals that live on islands have less competition for food, and because islands usually don’t have many predator species. The island country of New Zealand, for example, is home to many large species, including the kakapo (a flightless parrot), the giant weta (a type of giant cricket) and kauri land snails (a large species of snail). It has giant plants, too!
You are taller when you wake up in the morning than you are at night. The human spine is made up of 33 bones, which are separated by rubbery cushions that are about 7–10 mm thick. These spinal discs are filled with a watery jellylike substance. When you are upright during the
At about 6 kg, the kakapo is the heaviest species of parrot!
day, your spinal discs are compressed by gravity. When you lie down at night, they can expand again. Astronauts who go into space get taller because of this. And with less gravity pulling down on them, these astronauts can be up to 3 per cent taller in space than they are on Earth.
Australia is moving north by about 7 cm each year. The tectonic plate (which is a giant piece of Earth’s crust) that Australia sits on moves
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There may be microscopic creatures living on the Moon!
A spacecraft carrying tardigrades crash-landed on the Moon. Tardigrades are microscopic animals that can survive extreme temperatures and dehydration. Scientists think it is likely they survived the crash.
Continued from previous page
quickly compared to the others. In 2017, Australian officials updated the country’s GPS coordinates by 1.8 metres to keep up with its movement!
There’s a spot in the Pacific Ocean called the ‘spacecraft cemetery’. Spacecraft, including old rockets, satellites and even space stations, are crashed here on purpose. The location was chosen specifically because it is the furthest place in the ocean from land, which means it is very unlikely any person or structure would be hit by the falling space debris.
Seeds have been taken to space and then planted on Earth. Millions of tomato seeds that had been in space for six years were brought back to Earth and given to school children to see how the seeds would grow after their time in space. The ‘space seeds’ grew just as well as seeds that never left Earth do
If you dropped a feather and a bowling ball at the same time on the Moon, they would hit the ground at the same time!
However, this isn’t the case on Earth. On our planet, resistance from the air makes the feather fall more slowly. The Moon has no air to form currents or cause resistance.
produced more fruit! A similar experiment was conducted with ‘Moon trees’, which grew from seeds taken to the Moon and back in the 1970s.
Catfish in a river in France sometimes hunt pigeons.
The catfish in France’s Tarn river have adapted over time to hunt their unlikely flying prey. The large fish have been seen leaping out of the water onto land. They grab pigeons and drag them into the river.
You can make diamonds from peanut butter.
Scientists in Germany used high temperature and pressure conditions similar to those found inside Earth to turn peanut butter, which is rich in carbon, into diamonds.
A nuclear scientist used LEGO bricks to build a device at short notice, since the toy bricks are able to withstand powerful radiation. The scientist, Michael Deveaux, was working at CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. An issue with a piece of equipment meant his team urgently needed a movable table to hold samples for testing. Making a table in a shop that would have been both lightweight and able to withstand radiation would have taken too long. So Michael decided to make his own table, and was inspired to build it out of LEGO after playing with his two-year-old daughter. Michael and his brother, an architect, assembled the table out of LEGO bricks and added an electric motor. The device
A group of scientists published a paper that said octopuses are aliens from outer space. The scientists said that octopuses and other cephalopods could have dropped onto Earth frozen in ice. However, there is not yet any way to prove this icy hypothesis, so it’s much more likely they came from Earth!
worked perfectly for the experiment, although fellow scientists at CERN later tried to add LEGO trees to spruce up the structure! Now, Michael says, the LEGO device sits in his office so it can be used by scientists – or his children!
There is a rock in Europe that is home to a colony of wild monkeys.
The Rock of Gibraltar is a huge limestone rock found in the British territory of Gibraltar, which is located to the south of Spain. The colossal rock, which is about 425 metres high, dates back to the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed Earth. It is full of twisty tunnels that are popular among tourists. It is also an important place for archaeologists to hunt for fossils. Remains of Neanderthals and their settlements have been found here. Today, most of the area is set aside as a nature reserve. It is home to Europe’s only group of wild monkeys, about 300 Barbary macaques who are organised into five troops. The macaques were protected by the British army for most of the
In 1835, a newspaper printed made-up reports supposedly from an astronomer who had discovered amazing things on the Moon. The astronomer reported that the Moon had beaches, pyramids and animals such as zebras and beavers walking upright! This is now known as the ‘Great Moon Hoax’.
Below: the Barbary macaques that live on the Rock of Gibraltar are a popular attraction for tourists.
20th century. The ‘Keeper of the Apes’ would make an official record of all of the monkeys who lived on Gibraltar, including births and deaths and what they ate. They would even publish funny birth announcements to keep people updated.
Botanists in 19th-century Sweden created gardens that could tell the time. In these clock-shaped gardens, a different flower would bloom at every hour between 3am and 8pm. The idea was devised by scientist Carolus Linnaeus (see this month’s Word Up!
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Above: Michael Deveaux’s clever LEGO contraption at the CERN laboratory.
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on page 16 to learn another important way he contributed to science!) in the 1700s. He carefully noted the times that certain plants opened and closed during the day. Later botanists designed gardens based on his ideas, though only some worked well.
The creator of the periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev, arranged it like a deck of cards in the game of solitaire. The Russian scientist wrote down all the chemical elements on cards and arranged them as players do in the popular card game. At the time, there were only 63 known elements!
A palaeontologist presenting a fossil of the newly discovered prehistoric marine reptile
Elasmosaurus in 1868 accidentally put the skull on the fossil’s tail instead of its neck. Elasmosaurus may have weighed about 2,000 kilograms, which is more than a car. Despite this, it had a very skinny neck, with many more bones than its tail. This is probably why its discoverer got a bit mixed up when putting its fossilised skeleton back together!
They are able to perform research and test samples without having to return back to the land. The aquanauts live in the base for about ten days at a time. Living underwater allows them to prevent decompression sickness and to go on longer underwater dives than divers from the surface can.
There is a laboratory under the sea!
The Aquarius Reef Base, located off the coast of Florida, USA, is the world’s only underwater laboratory. The scientists who study there are called aquanauts. They use the laboratory to study ocean habitats, especially the nearby coral reefs.
Radium, one of the most toxic elements, was once used in toothpaste. When radium was discovered, nobody knew about the dangers of radioactivity. Radium was used in many products, including toothpaste, hair creams and even food, as it was thought to have health benefits. Radium was also used in paints because it could help make dials light up, such as those in watches. Now we know that long-term exposure to radium can damage human cells and cause serious health problems. Today, it is banned or regulated in many countries to keep people safe.
Researchers have discovered that ants were ‘farming’ fungi
60 million years before humans learnt to farm!
There are about 240 known species of fungus-farming
ants. They live in the Americas and in the Caribbean. The fungi they grow are no longer found in the wild, which means they depend entirely on ants. The ants farm the fungi underground, where the
conditions are not suitable for other types of fungi to grow. When a queen ant’s daughter leaves to start a new colony, she takes a piece of the fungus with her to start a new fungus farm within her new colony.
Electricity was first used to power cars in the early 1800s. This was nearly 200 years before the first Tesla car hit the road! In the early 1900s electric cars were very popular. There were even electric taxis in New York, USA. However, in 1908, American inventor Henry Ford introduced his Model T petrol car, which was much cheaper than an electric car. By 1912, electric cars cost more than twice as much as petrol cars, making them less popular with drivers.
Science FACTopia, by Rose Davidson, is out now.
1 What is the collective name for a group of dolphins?
a. A swim
b. A herd
c. A pod
d. A leap
2 Puck the budgerigar holds the world record for having the largest vocabulary of any bird. How many words could Puck say?
a. 28
b. 72
c. 172
d. 1,728
3 Which is the largest animal ever to have lived on Earth?
a. Argentinosaurus
b. Blue whale
Test your family’s brainpower by playing the What on Earth! Quiz together. Regular readers may have an advantage because some of the facts appeared in previous issues of the magazine. Don’t worry if you don’t know them all, though – the answers are at the end of the quiz!
c. Megalodon
d. Woolly mammoth
4 Which type of animal is responsible for killing the largest number of human beings each year?
a. Lion
b. Shark
c. Snake
d. Mosquito
5 Approximately how fast could an ostrich run a marathon (26.2 miles)?
a. 55 minutes
b. 1 hour and 5 minutes
c. 1 hour and 25 minutes
d. 1 hour and 45 minutes
6
Which is the most common farm animal on Earth?
a. Pigs
b. Cows
c. Chickens
d. Goats
7 How old is the Universe?
a. 45 million years
b. 4.5 billion years
c. 13.8 billion years
d. 138 billion years
8 What colour are the precious gemstones known as rubies?
a. Green
b. Red
c. Blue
d. Yellow
9 What percentage of the species alive on Earth today do scientists estimate have yet to be discovered?
a. 6%
b. 46%
c. 66%
d. 86%
10 The Kármán Line is an imaginary boundary that separates Earth’s atmosphere and space How far is it above sea level?
a. 1 kilometre
b. 10 kilometres
c. 100 kilometres
d. 1,000 kilometres
13 In which part of your body would you find your philtrum?
a. Head
b. Hand
c. Foot
d. Stomach
14 Which world religion has the largest number of followers?
a. Islam
b. Hinduism
c. Buddhism
d. Christianity
15 In which of these popular team sports might you ‘nutmeg’ an opponent?
a. Cricket
b. Netball
c. Football
d. Volleyball
11 Which of these places contains the largest amount of water in total?
a. All the rivers on Earth
b. Earth’s atmosphere, including all the clouds
c. All the snow and ice at the North Pole and at the South Pole
d. All the seas and oceans on Earth
16 Maracas (pictured below) are a type of what?
a. Musical instrument
b. Toy
c. Weapon
d. Cooking utensil
17 Sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were all famous what?
a. Singers
b. Scientists
c. Writers
12 Approximately how long does it take particles of energy called photons to travel from the Sun’s inner core to its surface?
a. 17 years
b. 170 years
c. 1,700 years
d. 170,000 years
d. Acrobats
18 How many runners make up a relay team?
a. 3
b. 4
c. 5
d. 6
Continued from previous page
19 There are around 8 billion human beings living on Earth today. Approximately what percentage of these people live in the Northern Hemisphere?
a. 30%
b. 50%
c. 70%
d. 90%
20 What is the capital city of Spain?
a. Barcelona
b. Rome
c. Madrid
d. Lisbon
21 In which continent is Victoria Falls (pictured above), which is the waterfall with the world’s largest sheet of falling water?
a. Europe
b. Africa
c. North America
d. South America
22 The lotus flower (pictured below) is the national flower of which country in Asia?
a. Japan
b. China
which is the flag of the reigning British monarch?
a. England, Scotland and Wales
Each of these emoji sequences represents the title of a popular film. Can you work out the name of each movie?
c. Thailand
d. India
23 Which three countries are represented on the Royal Standard (shown above),
b. England, Scotland and Ireland
c. Ireland, Scotland and Wales
d. England, Scotland and France
24 According to surveys conducted by psychologists, which is the world’s happiest country?
a. Finland
b. France
c. UK
d. Australia
The year the first fruit – a tomato – was grown in outer space, by US astronaut Frank Rubio on the International Space Station.
7,500
The number of varieties of edible* apples in the world. Yum!
135 million
The number of metric tonnes of bananas grown around the world each year, making bananas the most popular fruit on Earth.
1,400
The number of tiny seeds that you could find inside a single pomegranate.
34,500 Thenumberoffruitstickers collectedbyAntoineSecco ofFrancebetween1993and 2004tocreatetheworld’s largestcollection!
£300
The size of the fine, in pounds, that you could be given for taking a durian fruit – which is the world’s stinkiest fruit** – onto public transport in Southeast Asia.
1,226
The weight of the world’s heaviest pumpkin in kilograms. Pumpkins are the heaviest type of fruit, and this record-breaking whopper weighed more than a small car!
0.25
The size of the world’s smallest fruit –the one-seeded fruit of a duckweed plant called Wolffiaglobosa – in millimetres, which is roughly the size of a grain of salt.
£110
The price of a single Yubari King melon, which is grown in the Japanese city of Yubari and is thought to be the world’s most expensive fruit.
*Edible means suitable for humans to eat.
**The durian fruit smells like rotten onions! Though if you are brave enough to eat one, the yellow flesh inside tastes nice and sweet, like custard.
Each month we feature an amazing story from world history taken from the bestselling book by Christopher Lloyd, with illustrations by Andy Forshaw. This month: the fall of the dinosaurs and rise of mammals!
Dinosaurs might have been the most successful land animals of their time, but there were plenty of other creatures around during that time as well.
Many kinds of mammals evolved during dinosaur times. They evolved from earlier creatures such as Dimetrodon, which had a large sail on its back that scientists think helped it control its body temperature.
But mammals went even further in developing ways to control their temperatures. The ability to keep your body warm when it’s cold outside is called being warm-blooded. While theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex developed feathers, mammals developed fur to help keep them warm.
The earliest mammals
Below: this sabretoothed squirrel was a shrew-like mammal with fangs.
were mouse-like insect eaters, but by the end of the Cretaceous Period sixty-six million years ago, there were climbing mammals and burrowing mammals and mammals that glided from tree to tree. While one species was sucking down termites, another was digging the meat out of shellfish or munching tasty leaves.
All early mammals had one thing in common: they lived in the shadow of hungry dinosaurs that usually hunted by day and were always looking for their next meal. Probably for that reason, lots of early mammals were nocturnal, which means they were active at night, when it was safer to go out, and slept during the day.
Much later, a few mammals, such as bats and dolphins, would develop this amazing hearing even more. They use echolocation to create a mental picture of the world around them using sound. Another way nocturnal mammals became pros at night hunting was by growing the smell-interpreting part of their brains. They used their noses to find the yummy food they craved. If you have a pet cat or dog, you’ll probably know exactly what I mean!
10
The estimated diameter of the asteroid in kilometres.
Here are some mind-boggling facts about the asteroid impact that is thought to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Below is a map of Earth as it looked 66 million years ago.
Most nocturnal mammals have eyes that contain lots of light-sensitive cells called rods. These help animals such as cats see when there’s very little light. Some of these nocturnal mammals have eyes that are great at detecting movement. They can see their prey darting around even in very low light. Our distant ancestors who shared their world with the likes of T. Rex probably first developed eyes like this. Mammals also developed excellent hearing. This allowed them to detect the faintest rustle of a possible meal in leaves and grasses.
72,000
The asteroid’s estimated speed as it hit Earth in kilometres per hour, which is more than 100 times faster than a jet aeroplane. The impact of the collision created a giant crater in the surface of the Earth.
180
N AMERICA
ATLANTIC
Chicxulub crater
AFRICA
S AMERICA INDIA
AUSTRALIA
The width of the crater in kilometres.
66,000,000
The number of years ago that the asteroid collided with Earth.
75 The percentage of plant and animal species that became extinct after the asteroid’s impact.
600 The depth in metres of the sedimentary sand and rock that lies on top of the crater today.
Dinosaurs had dominated life on land for about 180 million years until disaster struck and they were wiped out. Only the birds, which are a type of dinosaur, survived. Flying reptiles called pterosaurs also vanished. So did the marine reptiles, except for turtles, which somehow survived. It was also the end of the road for the ammonites, spiral-shaped relations of today’s octopus and squid. How could this happen? Many scientists think that about 66 million years ago,
a humongous asteroid many kilometres wide hurtled towards Earth. Down came this enormous chunk of deadly rock and ice, possibly splitting up into several pieces before finally smashing into an unsuspecting world.
It hit Earth with the force of thousands of nuclear bombs, blasting a crater some 180 kilometres wide. Everything in a 1,000-kilometre-wide area was vaporised in seconds, leaving behind an enormous cloud of deathly hot, toxic gas.
The noise and sight of the impact would have deafened and blinded countless living
creatures. Many of those not killed by the blast would have been drowned by giant waves created by the impact. Earth was plunged into darkness by thick heavy clouds of rock and dust lasting for as long as a year. Plants all over the world died from lack of sunlight and from a cooling climate. Even on the opposite side of the globe from the impact, animals died of starvation. It is estimated that 75 per cent of all plant and animal species became extinct. Dinosaur times were over, just like that.
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58 MYA Plesiadapis
A primate-like mammal, skilled at climbing trees, which evolves in North America and crosses to Europe via Greenland.
65 million years ago (MYA)
60 MYA
55 MYA Hyracotherium
An ancestor of today’s horses, though it is only as big as a medium-sized dog.
Continued from previous page
Mammals, many of which were well-adapted for living in the dark as we have seen, were quick off the block once the dinosaurs were gone. Well, it seems quick when you’re moving through time as fast as we are.
Within five million years, mammals of all shapes and sizes roamed the land.
This period of time, from fifty-six to thirty-four million years ago, is called the Eocene (which means ‘new dawn’ in ancient Greek). If the entire history of the Earth from its beginning was squashed down into twenty-four hours, this would have happened between 11:42 and 11:49pm.
It’s now that the ancestors of modern mammals come onto the scene. There were
50 MYA Miacis
A carnivorous distant ancestor to cats and dogs that lives in what is now North America.
55 MYA
47 MYA Eomanis
50 MYA
carnivorous predators such as Andrewsarchus, which looked like a wolf but was twenty-two times bigger than its modern cousin. Even more amazing was the ‘thunder beast’ Megacerops. This was one huge plant eater that looked like a rhinoceros but was the size of a modern elephant.
Not all Eocene mammals were gigantic. The ancestors of today’s horses appeared then, too. One was Hyracotherium, which was only as big as a medium-sized dog.
One group of Eocene mammals is of very special interest to us. In fact, creatures from this group – called primates – will become the main focus of the next part of our story. Modern primates include monkeys and apes, lemurs and aye-ayes. But the first primates looked more like
48 MYA Palaeochiropteryx
The first bat known to use a basic system of echolocation to find its prey in the dark.
35 MYA Palaeolagus
An early pangolin, the only mammal with scales, which eats termites with its very long tongue.
45 MYA
47 MYA
Darwinius
An early species of primate. Darwinius was named after the famous evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin.
40 MYA squirrels. Early primate fossils have been found in places all over the world.
A primitive hare, though it has shorter hind legs than modern hares and so may have been unable to hop.
Around thirty million years ago, during the Oligocene epoch, monkeys emerged in Africa or Asia. Soon after, one or more groups of these monkeys somehow crossed the Atlantic. It’s a bit of a mystery how they did it. Some experts think they found themselves bobbing on a raft in the middle of the ocean, eventually to be washed ashore on the coast of what is now Brazil. We call the
35 MYA
38 MYA
Megacerops
This giant mammal looked like a rhinoceros but was even bigger – about the size of a modern elephant.
33 MYA Nimravus
An early sabre-toothed cat-like carnivore.
25 MYA
32 MYA Miohippus
Horses with longer legs could run from predators in open landscapes.
20 MYA
15 MYA
14 MYA Giraffokeryx
A short-necked giraffe with two pairs of horn-like ossicones, it roams across Europe, Africa and Asia.
30 MYA
descendants of the monkeys that made this journey New World monkeys. The ones that stayed behind in Africa and Asia are called Old World monkeys. These two main groups of monkeys still exist today.
The New World monkeys of South America, such as spider monkeys, use their tails to help them swing and balance in the trees. Some species can happily hang from a branch by their tail alone. It’s as if they have an extra hand.
20 MYA Dendropithecus
A gibbon-like ape that excels at swinging from tree branches.
10 MYA
12.2 MYA Sivapithecus
5 MYA
Apes and Old World monkeys evolved from a common ancestor, with apes probably branching off by about twenty-five million years ago.
Palaeontologists have found fossils of early apes in Europe, Asia and Africa. So it’s hard to figure out where they first appeared. Over time, these early apes evolved into today’s great apes – orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.
Yes, you are an ape! Biologists have discovered that the DNA in you and me is 98 per cent the same as the DNA of other great apes. And they’ve worked out that humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor that probably lived sometime between six million and eight million years ago.:
10 MYA Mammut
Elephant-like herbivores with giant tusks, they included mastodons that roam throughout Europe and America.
A likely ancestor to modern orangutans that spends time on the ground as well as in trees.
12 MYA Machairodus
A large, fierce sabretoothed cat that roams throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.
Find out why cherry blossom is a Japanese national obsession.
The arrival of the cherry blossom in spring is one of the most keenly anticipated events on the Japanese calendar. Cherry blossom, or sakura, as it is known in Japan, symbolises hope, renewal, and also the fleeting nature of life. Millions of Japanese people gather in gardens and parks to take part in hanami, the ancient custom of flower viewing. There are even sakura forecasts on television that predict when the first blossoms will arrive!
Our jokes editor May, who visited Ueno Park with her friend Taiga, who lives in Tokyo, reports: ‘The cherry blossoms are beautiful in Japan and there are lots of people, stalls and excitement. It has the same buzzing atmosphere as New Year’s Eve in the UK.’
Why did the library? go into the blackbird
Where do armies? keep their generals
What complaining? never stops animal
Up their sleevies! A noceros! whine-
It was bookworms! looking for
WhatQuestion: begins with an E and ends with an E but only contains one letter?
AnAnswer:envelope!
What do you on his head? seagull with a call a man
Cliff!
Tickle your ribs and tease your brain with our favourite gags and riddles, hand-picked by our jokes editor May.
IfQuestion: you drop a yellow hat in the Red Sea, what does it become?
Answer: Wet!
Question:
What are the on a animals farm? funniest A drizzly bear! Cowmedians!
wrecks!
Tyrannosaurus crash dinosaurs get when two their cars? What do you
I cannot be emptied but never stay full for long.
What am I?
Answer: The Moon!
What do you
in the rain? that’s stuck out call a bear
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