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Articles on Curious Kids

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One of the ways we work out what proto-language might have been like is by looking at languages which have developed from nothing in recent times. One of the best examples is Nicaraguan Sign Language. Unsplash/Jo Hilton

Curious Kids: how did spoken language start?

In the space of a few short years, deaf Nicaraguan school children created their own language. This example may give us a clue about how spoken language developed over thousands of years.
Chemicals poured down the sink or pumped into the atmosphere can eventually end up in the groundwater, which means less available fresh water for us to use. Flickr/Kamil Porembiński

Curious Kids: how is water made?

While making small volumes of pure water in a lab is possible, it’s not practical. The reaction is expensive, releases lots of energy, and can cause really massive explosions.
There’s a very good reason for those leg hairs. Flickr/Hamish Irvine

Curious Kids: why do spiders have hairy legs?

Believe it or not, I have studied the hairy legs of spiders for years and can give you some definitive answers on this.
Your tongue has special parts, bundled together as taste buds, that pick up flavour. But your other senses also help your brain work out how something tastes. Flickr/Jessica Lucia

Curious Kids: how do tongues taste food?

Your tongue, saliva and nose work together to help you taste your food.
An artist’s impression of Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. It is the first planet that NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed to orbit in a star’s habitable zone - the region around a star where liquid water, a requirement for life on Earth, could persist. NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Curious Kids: why has nobody found any life outside of Earth?

Life could exist in another solar system in a different part our galaxy. Or in another galaxy far away. We don’t have the perfect technology yet to study such far away places but we’re still trying.
Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash

Curious Kids: do ants have blood?

Ants have something similar to blood, but it’s called haemolymph. Some insects use it in unusual ways. When threatened by a predator, blister beetles can squirt haemolymph from their knees.
Some dogs may associate car travel with trips to the beach or park – while others only remember trips to the vet. Linda Colquhoun/flickr

Curious Kids: is it true dogs don’t like to travel?

Travel can come with danger, so dogs have mostly evolved to avoid being over-adventurous. That said, dogs may see some kinds of travel as a chance to find things they want – like food or a mate.
One important reason for the Spartans’ obsession with fighting was the constant possibility they would need these skills in war and also at home, in Sparta itself. Shutterstock

Curious Kids: who were the Spartans?

From about age seven, Spartan children learned to fight and practise obeying orders. They also staged pretend battles. Boys and girls were trained separately.
Mountains keep growing and growing and growing for many millions of years until they are so heavy that they can no longer grow taller, only wider. Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash

Curious Kids: how do mountains form?

When I was little, geologists worked out Earth’s surface was made of pieces, like a giant puzzle. Those pieces, called “tectonic plates”, move and bump into each other and mountains form.
This year saw the launch of the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on our Curious Kids articles. The Conversation/ABC

Something for everyone: the best of Curious Kids in 2018

Whatever your age, whatever your favourite topic – space, animals, nature, physics, how bodies work – we’ve got a Curious Kids article for you.
Colour blind people are really good at spotting things that are far away, and they are better than most people at telling things apart by their shape. Shutterstock

Curious Kids: why are people colour blind?

Some colour blind people only have two kinds of cone cell in their eye. Others have three kinds, but the cones do not pick up the same light waves as the cone cells in most people’s eyes do.

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