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.
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From about age seven, Spartan children learned to fight and practise obeying orders. They also staged pretend battles. Boys and girls were trained separately.
Our eyes don’t grow much at all – but when we’re very young, we still need to learn how to see.
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
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.
Not many people realise ants can make their own medicine.
Flickr/Pimthida
Hydrogen peroxide is a chemical that can kill germs. It is found in two things many ants love to eat: nectar and honey dew.
It would be nice to blast dangerous nuclear waste far away from Earth, or into the Sun where it won’t cause any harm. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds.
NASA
At the end of the day, the problem is that no-one on Earth wants nuclear waste stored near them, and it’s not safe or cost-effective to blast it into space.
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
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.
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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.
Twice every day the Bureau of Meteorology sends out the official weather forecasts for towns and cities across Australia. Here’s how we work out what to say in them.
The Earth’s core is cooling down, and one day it will be completely solid – when that happens, Earth might look a lot like Mars.
The South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescopes (pictured above) may discover clues that could teach us if there was something else ‘before’ the Big Bang.
Dr. Keith Vanderlinde/NSF
Long ago in the distant past, our entire Universe was microscopic – just like an atom – and obeyed completely different rules of cause and effect.
A lot of people have spent a very long time wondering what causes cancer – and scientists still can’t say for certain why an individual person might have it.
Marina del Castell/Flickr
It can actually be very tricky to define a species, but in the 1900s, scientists found a pretty good way.
If you went to Mars, you’d need to be able to survive an extremely punishing environment. This picture, taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, gives you an idea.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.
I’ve worked with NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project for 16 years. If you got yourself a ticket to Mars, here’s how I’d advise you to prepare. And by the way, any mistake could kill you.
In fact, it’s not even the moths eating your clothes.
Flickr/Vlad Proklov
Even the Voyager spacecraft are controlled remotely, 20 billion kilometres away. It takes 20 hours for instructions to travel from Earth to the spacecraft but we can do it – using a remote.