Category Archives: Listicles

Sci-Fi vs Sci-Fact

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It’s World Space Week, so naturally, we seized the opportunity to stick on our favourite sci-fi blockbusters. However, with our scientific minds always at work, we couldn’t rest easy without sharing with you those space movies that are more fiction than science…

Star Wars

Okay, so we appreciate this galactic fantasy series isn’t ever going to be exactly scientifically accurate, what with all the aliens, droids, space travel and the mystical “Force”. But those space battles that Star Wars is known for, featuring all kinds of explosions and blasts? Well, in reality, they would actually be silent. Sound waves travel via the vibration of atoms and molecules in a medium such as air. Space is a vacuum, devoid of all matter – including gases – meaning the sound vibrations wouldn’t work.

Armageddon

Even if it were feasible to land on an asteroid and drill into the centre of it (just in case you were wondering, it isn’t), the energy required to destroy this huge, Texas-sized, asteroid would amount to a LOT more than one nuclear bomb. The most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated on earth, Big Ivan, has a total energy output of 418,000 terajoules. Leicester post-graduate students found that in order to split this asteroid in two, Bruce Willis would have had to detonate a bomb with 800 trillion terajoules of energy output.

The Martian

Ahh, a little respite from the scientific disaster that is Armageddon, The Martian is actually hailed as one of the most scientifically accurate sci-fi movies of all time. The main plot line (humans visiting Mars) looks to be scientifically feasible at some point in the future, and growing potatoes with a combination of your own excretion and Martian soil? Possible, apparently. However, whilst we’re willing to give credit where it’s due, this film is not without its inaccuracies.

The main scientific issue with this film is actually the driving force behind the whole plot – the sand storm that leaves Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, stranded on Mars. Whilst sand storms definitely do occur on Mars, the atmosphere is so thin compared to Earth’s that a 100mph wind on Mars would feel more like an 11mph wind does on Earth – making it unlikely to cause the destruction that sees Watney separated from his crew.

Interstellar

The astronauts in Interstellar make use of a wormhole next to Saturn, which enables them to travel from our galaxy to an entirely different galaxy in a short amount of time. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wormholes are a possibility.

A wormhole is created by warping the fabric of space-time. If you think of space as a flat piece of paper, the distance is great between one end of the paper and the other. Bend the paper in half and the opposite ends of the paper are now much closer – punch a hole between the two ends of paper and you now have a tunnel which grants you instantaneous access between both ends, instead of travelling the long way from one end of the flat sheet of paper to the other.

However, astrophysicist Kip Thorne points out that in reality, there is a strong indication that wormholes through which humans could travel are forbidden by the laws of physics. Should we ever come across one, a wormhole is likely to be so unstable that the walls of it will collapse so fast that nothing is able to make it through.

Gravity

A central plot point in this film depends on Clooney’s character, Matt Kowalski, whizzing from the Hubble Space Telescope to the International Space Station using his jet pack. However, Hubble orbits at an altitude of 559 kilometres whilst the ISS sits at 423 kilometres; the distance in orbit between the two makes travelling between them completely unfeasible (especially in a jet pack).

World Animal Day

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Today is World Animal Day, a day to celebrate and raise the status of animals. Humans are often thought to be the animals with the highest status and intelligence due to our effortless ability to use tools, develop language and dominate the globe. However there are millions of species that have evolved traits and talents that humans could only ever dream of. Here is our list of some of the most amazing animal adaptations.

1. Bioluminescence


Bioluminescence is the ability to emit light. Fire flies and glow worms are well known for their ability to light up but they are not alone, lots of insects and even a species of snail (Quantula striata) hold the protein Luciferin, allowing them to emit light. The protein reacts with oxygen using a specific type of enzyme – luciferase. The chemical reaction gives off the bright glowing colours.

Deep down in the ocean, there is little light from the sun so many marine animals have evolved bioluminence. Others, such as the Sea Goosberry above don’t emit their own light but can refract light to give this dazzling rainbow effect. Even if it’s not technically bioluminescent – we’re still very jealous!

2. Camouflage

In contrast to flashy bioluminescent animals that stand out, some creatures prefer to blend in…

When you think of a camouflaged animal, most people would think of the classic colour–changing chameleon but octopus and squids are the real masters of disguise. They have thousands of cells known as chromotaphores across their skin, these contain pigments and can expand and shrink to change the colour of the skin. These animals can also change the appearance of their skin’s texture and use their soft body and tentacles to morph into a different shape.

The Mimic Octopus takes this a step further and manipulates its body into the shape of other animals to fool its predators into thinking it’s a different marine species – now that would be a fun superpower to have!

3. Mimicry

All the most famous superheroes have a disguise! Like the mimic octopus, some relatively harmless animals have found a clever way to avoid predators by copying the colours, body shape and even behaviour of harmful species. This is known as Batesian Mimicry, and can be seen in animals such as the caterpillar Hemeroplanes triptolemus above, which cleverly disguises itself as a poisonous snake by blowing air into its head!

Mimicry can also happen when two harmful species that have a common predator evolve separately to have similar warning signals such as bright colours or patterns, that show the predators that they are poisonous or taste unpleasant.  This is known as Mullerian Mimicry and can often be seen in butterflies and snakes. So two entirely different (and possibly poisonous!) species of butterflies may look identical.

4. Invisibility

Glass Squid

If camoflauge doesn’t work, how about being invisible? Maybe not completely invisible, but many species have come close by evolving to become transparent. The glasswing butterfly has evolved to have transparent panes in its wings, making it more difficult for predators to spot.

The glass squid and some species of jellyfish have evolved transparent bodies making them extremely difficult for predators to spot them in the depths of the ocean.

5. Regrowing limbs

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If all these adaptations for hiding fail and you’re caught by a predator – what next? Well some species such as the Mexican salamander, the axolotl, have evolved the ability to regrow parts of the body so it’s not a big deal if something does take a bite out of them.

When an axolotl loses a limb, the cells at the cut off point lose their identity; they are no long skins cells or muscle cells and they become generic cells that are able to develop into whatever the axolotl needs them to be to regrow whatever was lost. Whilst humans have come a long way in developing amazing prosthetic and even bionic limbs, we’re unlikely to evolve the ability to completely regrow body parts anytime soon.

If you want to see some amazing axolotls yourself, take a trip to Newcastle University’s Natural History Museum, the Great North Museum: Hancock.

6. Outside Digestion

Speaking of regrowing limbs – starfish can also happily regrow spines but that’s not their only talent – they can also digest their food in a very interesting way. Instead of taking food in through the mouth, instead they take their stomach out of their body and put it on the food. Their stomach then digests the food into a mushy soup which the starfish can then draw into it’s body along with it’s stomach.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be top priority for a superpower but it is impressive! You can see the starfish in action in our aquarium at the Dove Marine Lab in Cullercoats.

7. Flight

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Moving from the seas to the skies, I’m sure many of us would love to have the ability to fly. Of course many creatures have mastered this, mainly birds and insects but some reptiles, fish and mammals, such as the flying squirrel, have evolved flaps of skin that allow them to glide through the air.

One of the most impressive flyers of the animal world is the bar-tailed godwit. This little bird weighs around 500g but is capable of flying immense distances. The longest recorded migration of this species was from Alaska to New Zealand – a distance of 11,680km! The journey took nine days and the bar-tailed godwit didn’t stop once. Very impressive considering most of us couldn’t even stay awake for nine days!

8. Echolocation

Onto another famous flyer – the bat. Flight isn’t this mammal’s only superpower as it can also navigate in the dark without sight. It does this by using echolocation. Bats send out a high frequency sound and listen for the echos coming back. By comparing the outgoing sound with the returning sound, bats tell how far away obstacles are, how big they are and even if they are moving. They are able to build up a picture of the world around them using sound, just as we are able to using sight.

This impressive power may not be so out of reach for humans. Several blind people have taught themselves how to navigate using echolocation. They produce sounds either by tapping a cane against the floor, creating clicks with their tongue or snapping their fingers and then listen for the echos, just as echolocating animals do.

9. UV Vision

Image result for uv light reindeer

Whilst some animals, like bats, have relatively poor vision, other see much more than we could imagine. The light that we can see, known as the visible spectrum, covers the wavelengths 380nm – 760nm. Ultraviolet light sits just outside this so our eyes are unable to detect it. Some animals including butterflies, some birds and even reindeer have evolved the ability to see UV.

Reindeer are thought to have evolved this ability as it helps them identify lichens for food, and urine indicating predators in the snow. To us, these would blend in but in ultraviolet light there is much more of a contrast.

10. Mind Control

Our final adaptation may perhaps be the most sought after superpower – mind control. This isn’t just the stuff of science fiction movies and comic books, some animals have actually achieved it. The green-banded broodsac is a parasitic flatworm that infects snails in order to reach birds, their ideal host species. The parasite infects the snails and causes their tentacles to bulge, making them look like a caterpillar. It influences the snail and makes them move from the shade and up to the tops of leaves and branches where they are easily visible to birds. As the tentacles now look like a delicious meal for the birds, they’re prime targets. Once eaten, the parasite is able to continue it’s life inside the bird.

Which of these animal superpowers would you like to have?

Your Questions Answered!

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As we have reached the end of the school year, here is a little round up of some of our favourite questions that children have asked us during STEM workshops.

1. Why doesn’t the energy ball give you an electric shock?

The energy ball is a little device we have that looks like a ping pong ball with two metal strips on top. Inside there is a light, a buzzer and a battery. If two people touch one metal strip each and then with their other hands touch each other, the ball lights up and buzzes. This works because we are conductors of electricity – electrons from the battery flow through us and back into the ball to complete the circuit.

The reason you don’t feel a shock when touching the energy ball because there isn’t enough electricity flowing through you to be able to feel it, and certainly not enough to harm you!

2. What do plants poo and wee? – St Wilfrids, Blyth

All living things have seven things in common – movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. The sixth one, excretion, is a scientific word for producing waste. In humans, and many animals, that is our poo and our wee. They are the leftover waste products that our body doesn’t need so gets rid of.

Plants are living things, just like us, but you may have noticed they don’t poo or wee like we do. Rather than eat food like us, they make their own through photosynthesis. This produces a waste gas called oxygen which we breath in. Plants excrete oxygen rather than poo or wee.

3. Why does the moon control the sea? – Grange First School

Gravity is the force that keeps us close to the Earth, all really big things like planets and stars have a gravitational pull that attracts things near by. Because the moon is so big and so close to Earth it has quite a strong gravitational pull on our planet. The moon causes the water in the oceans facing it to pull towards it, resulting in a high tide. The pull of the sun’s gravity and the Earth’s own gravity also have an effect on the tides.

4. I’m the only one who can touch their nose with their tongue, is that because of my genes? – St Marys, Jarrow

Touching your nose with your tongue is known as Gorlin’s Sign. It is associated with a genetic disorder but not everyone that can do it has the disorder. About 10% of people without the disorder can touch their nose with their tongue and it does not appear to be due to genes you have inherited from your parents.

5. Why do we get goosebumps? – Billingham South Community School

We often get goosebumps when we’re cold, but they don’t do much to help us warm up, so why do we get them? Before we evolved to be modern humans, our ancestors were much hairier, we they got cold, getting goosebumps would cause their hairs to stand on end. As they had much more hair than us, they were able to trap a layer of air in the hair by doing this, providing them with extra insulation to keep them warm.

Although goosebumps are no longer helpful to us, we haven’t lost the trait through evolution because it doesn’t harm us. Therefore if a person was born with a mutation in their genes meaning they didn’t get goosebumps, they wouldn’t be at an advantage because of it so the non-goosebump genes wouldn’t necessarily be passed on more than the goosebump genes.

 

If you have any STEM related questions that you would like us to answer, just leave a comment in the box below!

International Girls in ICT Day 2017

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There is a huge shortfall of ICT professionals worldwide, with many companies looking to increase the number of women working for them. However, many girls don’t even consider a career in ICT. We decided to celebrate some influential women in ICT from the times computers were invented to now.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

Ada was an English Mathematician who worked on the ‘Analytical Engine’, one of the first designs for modern computers.  She recognised that computers could do a lot more than was previously thought and designed the first algorithm that could be carried out by computers. She is often called the first computer programmer for designing this.

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray

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Joan was an English cryptanalyst (analysing information systems to breach cryptographic security systems) who is best known for her work as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II. She worked on the Enigma project, which cracked the German system of encoding their messages and led to WWII being much shorter and saving thousands of lives. The Enigma project was a very early form of ICT.

Grace Hopper

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Grace was an American Computer Scientist and a United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was the first person to develop a compiler, despite being told by many people that it would never work. A compiler is a programme that changes what you write on a computer into a language that can be understood by the computer. This allows computers to work with words rather than just numbers as was previously done. There is now a yearly Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, giving women in computer science a chance to share their research.

Anita Borg

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Working as a computer scientist  she developed ways to analyse high speed memory systems in computers. She founded Systers, a network for women in technology, and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. In 1997, she founded the Institute for Women and Technology (now the Anita Borg Institute), to increase the number of women in technology and their impact on the world.

Marissa Mayer

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She joined Google as employee number 20 and as their first female engineer after studying computer science at university. She oversaw the layout of Google’s home page and became Vice President of search products and user experience. In 2012 she became president and CEO of Yahoo! and led them to buy Tumblr in 2013.

Ten Amazing Facts about the human body!

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You take it everywhere you go, but I bet that there are a few facts about your body that you didn’t know!

1. There is enough DNA in the human body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back – 17 times! 

There are about 37 trillion cells in the human body, all of them containing about 5cm of of DNA (when uncoiled). DNA is made up of lots of different nucleotide pairs that can decide some of our features such as eye and hair colour.

2. The average human body contains ten times more bacterial cells than human cells.

However bacteria are much smaller so don’t take up that much space. Lots of these bacterial cells are important, such as intestinal bacteria that help keep our immune systems healthy.unravelled-dna

3. Except for identical twins, each person on Earth has a unique smell.

Just how we each have individual finger prints we all have our own smell. This is determined by your genes, and can be used by other animals to identify individuals.

4. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body. 

The average heart pumps about 70ml of blood out with each beat and a healthy heart beats around 70 times a minute.

5. By the time you go to bed at night you are about 1 cm shorter than when you woke up that morning.

This is because the cartilage between your bones is compressed throughout the day.

6. Nerve impulses to and from the brain can travel as fast as 250 miles per hour. 

A nerve impulse is an electrical signal that sends messages to the brain when the nerve is triggered by a stimulus. It is really important that they travel fast, for example, if you burn your finger it’s important that your brain gets the message to stop touching it quickly.nerves

7. There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee.

Humans are not quite the naked apes that we’re made out to be. We have lots of hair, but on most of us it’s not obvious as a majority of the hairs are too fine or light to be seen.

8. The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels.

To put that in perspective, the distance around the earth is about 25,000 miles, so your blood vessels could travel more than two times around the Earth if laid out.blood-vessels

9. Babies are always born with blue eyes.

The colour of your eyes depends on the genes you get from your parents, but at birth most babies appear to have blue eyes. The reason behind this is the pigment melanin. The melanin in a newborn’s eyes often needs time after birth to be fully deposited or to be darkened by exposure to ultraviolet light, later revealing the baby’s true eye colour.

10. Every day an adult body produces 300 billion new cells.

Your body not only needs energy to keep your organs up and running but also to constantly repair and build new cells to form the building blocks of your body itself.

Inspiring Female Scientists from Newcastle #BeBoldForChange

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Susan Mary Auld

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Susan was born in Tynemouth in 1915 and was the first woman to graduate as a naval architect from Armstrong College at what was then Durham University. She went on to have an illustrious career as a pioneering architect in the Royal Navy. She was responsible for designing the floating vessels that were used to land Allied troops on D-Day in France in 1944.

Myriam Neaimeh

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Myriam Neaimeh is a researcher at Newcastle University who specialises in renewable technology and smart cities. She is currently working with Japanese car giant Nissan to investigate if batteries from electric cars can be re-used to power homes in the future. She is also a talented footballer and plays in midfield for Newcastle United Women’s FC (having been an international player in her home country of Lebanon).

Nicola Curtin

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Professor Nicola Curtin from Newcastle University, has been leading research into the development of ‘smart’ cancer drugs called PARP inhibitors. Since 2008 more than 7,000 patients have been treated during trials of the drugs, which have fewer side effects than chemotherapy. They work by targeting a weakness in cancer cells and stop an enzyme (PARP) from repairing their DNA. In 2010 her team were awarded the Translational Cancer Research Prize by Cancer Research UK.

Rachel Parsons

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Rachel Parsons was born in 1855 into a family of engineers and grew up in Tyneside. In 1910 she was one of the first three women to study Mechanical Sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge. As a woman she was unable to graduate but went on to become a director of her father’s Steam Turbine Company based in Wallsend. She oversaw the recruitment and training of women to replace the men who had left to join the armed forces and campaigned for equal access for all to technical schools and colleges. She was also a founder member of the Women’s Engineering Society.

Chi Onwurah

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Chi Onwurah was born in Wallsend and, after a couple of years in Nigeria, returned with her mother to the North East. She studied Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London and went on to have a position as Head of Telecoms Technology at OFCOM. She was elected to Parliament in 2010 and has campaigned about the lack of women in engineering jobs in the UK (which has the lowest proportion in Europe) and the limiting of children by gender stereotypes. She regularly supports activities that encourage girls into STEM.

Zoe Williams

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Zoe Williams is a well-known TV personality who studied medicine at Newcastle University from 2001. She makes regular appearances on This Morning and Trust Me I’m a Doctor and she works with Public Health England as a clinical champion for physical activity. She founded Fit4Life which runs inspiring children’s workshops about healthy living. She has competed in a number of professional sports including Athletics and Rugby Union and appeared as ‘Amazon’ on Sky 1’s Gladiators.

Helen Foster

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Professor Helen Foster led a team of Newcastle University scientists to research a better way of diagnosing childhood arthritis. Until recently there wasn’t an agreed way of assessing children’s joints which caused delays in treatment and unnecessary invasive investigations. The team developed a new tool for joint examination called pGALS which is now taught to medical students and used by doctors across the world. As a result of this success the team went on to develop free teaching resources and video demonstrations for a more detailed examination (pREMS).

Our top STEM jokes!

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It’s nearly Christmas and that means it’s time for awful Christmas cracker jokes. Hopefully our favourite STEM jokes will be a bit more funny! Scientific explanations are underneath each one.

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Neutrons make up the middle (nucleus) of atoms and don’t have any electric charge, unlike protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged).

joke5

Light is made up of small particles, these are called photons. Therefore, a photon is travelling light.

joke6

The chemical symbol for oxygen is O and potassium is K.

joke4

H2O is water, but H202 is hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide would cause chemical burns and choking if it was drunk.

joke3

Atoms are very small and make up everything, including us.

joke9

Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment in physics, where a cat is kept in a box with a radioactive source and poison. Until the box is opened, the cat can be assumed to be both dead and alive.

joke1

Helium is a noble gas, this means it is doesn’t react with other elements so is inert.

joke10

Extrapolation is when you estimate what the result may be beyond what you measured. The joke is that some people can’t extrapolate from data so can’t work out the end of the joke

joke2

Binary is a way of using two different symbols, 0 and 1, to represent any number, this is often used to create code for computers. 10 in binary is the same as writing 2. Therefore, there are two types of people, those who understand binary and those who don’t.

joke12

If an atom loses an electron (a negatively charged particle) it will become positively charged.

joke11

If time travel is ever invented, it doesn’t matter when as you can just travel back in time with the time machine.

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Anti gravity is a place or object that is free from the force of gravity, so would float around.                       joke13

This is a play on words, as the atmosphere in a restaurant is how you feel when you are there, but in science terms the atmosphere is a mixture of gases that surrounds the Earth. The moon has a much thinner atmosphere than the Earth and was originally thought not to have one.

 

Black History Month: 6 Influential Black Scientists

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To honour Black History Month, we’ve taken a look at some notable black scientists and what they have achieved in their scientific fields.

1. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806)

The son of a former slave, Benjamin was born in Maryland, USA. In 1753, he produced the first working clock in America, it struck every hour on the hour. Benjamin was also a keen astronomer and worked on calculating lunar and solar eclipses.

2. Ernest Everett Just (1883-1941)

Raised by his mother in South Carolina, USA, Ernest grew up to become an influential biologist. He argued that cells should be studied as a whole under normal conditions, rather than breaking them up and subjecting them to unnatural lab conditions.

3. Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975)

Percy was born in Alabama and went on to study at Harvard University and the University of Vienna in Austria. Percy was an American chemist who focused on researching the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. His work paved the way for the mass production of contraceptive pills and he also worked on large scale synthesis of human hormones, such as testosterone.

 

4. Charles Richard Drew (1904-1950)

Charles was the first African American to earn a Doctor of Medical Science degree. During World War II, Charles worked on a revolutionary project called Blood for Britain, he created trucks that stored refrigerated blood that could be transported to soldiers in need. He also set up blood donation centers and ensured all blood was tested and handled correctly. Charles’ work led to the American Red Cross Blood Bank and undoubtedly saved thousands of lives.

5. Maggie Aderin-Pocock (1968)


Born to Nigerian parents, Maggie grew up in London with dyslexia and the ambition of becoming an astronaut. Despite discouraging teachers, she went on to earn a BSc in Physics and a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London. Maggie worked on a project to probe the centre of stars billions of miles away. Maggie is passionate about inspiring young children to pursue careers in science and has presented various BBC science documentaries.

 

6. Mae Jemison (1956)

Mae was the first African American woman to travel in space. She is a keen advocate of science education with a particularly interest in getting more minority students to go into science. Through her own company, the Jemison Group, Mae runs a science camp for children aged 12-16.

 

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9 Scientific Mistakes in Disney and Pixar

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Sorry to crush your dreams but we have inspected some of our favourite Disney films and some things just don’t sit right in our scientific minds. Here are nine examples of what would really happen, according to science. But remember anything is possible in the world of Disney…

1. Finding Nemo

All clown fish are born male. Each group of clown fish has one female, the biggest fish. When the female dies, the biggest male fish will become female, this is know as being a sequential hermaphrodite.  When Nemo’s mother was killed by the barracuda, Marlin would have become female, leaving Nemo as the dominant male.

finding-nemo

2. The Lion King

Rafiki is introduced to us in the Lion King, where he performs Simba’s birth ceremony. He also sings a song in the film “Asante sana, squash banana, wewe nugu, mimi hapana”. This is a Swahili rhyme which translates to “Thank you very much (squash banana), you’re a baboon and I’m not!”. Rafiki doesn’t belong to any species, he is a cross between a mandrill and a baboon, he has the colourful nose and cheeks of a mandrill and the mane and long tail of a baboon.

3. Up

In the film Up, Carl ties thousands of balloons to his house to go on an adventure to South America. However, the number of balloons he uses are not enough to lift a house. Estimating that the house weighs 45,000 kg, you would need over 3 million balloons!

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4. Inside Out

Inside Out personifies five major emotions; Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust which all work together to guide and protect their human (Riley). However, there are actually six core emotions, with Disney missing out surprise. These six emotions are found to be universally recognized and expressed across the world, even in remote tribes that would not have learned the meaning of such facial expressions elsewhere.

inside-out-pixar-disney

5. Tarzan

After baby Tarzan was left alone in the jungle to be raised by gorillas, he eventually grows up and meets Jane who teaches him to speak English. Unfortunately in the real world, no matter how great a teacher Jane was, Tarzan would never have been able to talk. Scientists have described a critical period up to the age of 5 which is vital for language development. If children, like Tarzan, aren’t exposed to a human language in this time they will be unable to learn to speak later in life.

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6. Aladdin

Aladdin and Jasmine travel from Cairo (Egypt) to Athens (Greece) in one second on the magic carpet, meaning they would have to travel at 621 miles per second! The air resistance would be 100 million times larger than their weight, causing them to burn up, like when meteors burn up when they enter our atmosphere.

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7. Star Wars

Star Wars is well know for its fights in space, full of explosions, blaster and engine sounds. However, space is a vacuum, meaning that it is devoid of matter, there are no gases or air there. Sound can’t travel in a vacuum, as sound vibrations don’t work, therefore we shouldn’t be able to hear any sound.

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8. The Good Dinosaur

In the good dinosaur, a young dinosaur by the name of Arlo befriends a human boy. Arlo is an Apatosaurus which lived around 151 million years ago. Human beings as we are or Homo sapiens only evolved between 200,000 to 100,000 years ago so in reality Arlo and his friend would have missed each other by quite a few million years.

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9. Finding Dory

When searching for Dory’s family in Finding Dory, we discover that Dory was born in captivity, in an aquarium. However, Dory is a species of fish known as the Blue Tang. This species can’t be bred in captivity and have to be caught from their wild home of coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific Sea.

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7 Senses you aren’t taught in school

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Everyone is taught in primary school about our 5 senses – hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste. But did you know we actually have several secret senses? You might not even be consciously aware of some of them, yet you use them everyday.

1. Balance

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Most of us manage to stay upright on two feet without falling over. You can probably stand on one leg or in a unusual stance for a period of time without toppling. This is all due to our sense of balance or equilibrioception. You balance is kept steady by the level of a fluid in the vestibular system in your inner ears.

Try testing your balance – Stand with your heels and back against a wall, then try to bend forwards. You’ll find you won’t be able to or you might fall over. When you bend forwards, your bum needs to stick out behind your feet in order to stabilise your centre of balance and stop you tipping over.

2. Heat

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When you’re near a fire, you’ll be able to feel the heat on your skin even though the fire isn’t touching you. This heat, as well as the absense of heat, is detected by thermoceptors in your skin.

Thermoception aids your body by giving the correct response when you start getting too hot or too cold. For example, when you’re cold the hairs on your arms will stand up, this response has evolved as it helps to trap air and give you an extra layer of insulation, although nowadays you can probably just put on another jumper.

3. Painpain

Nociception is the perception of pain throughout the body, whether it’s a physical cut or damage to an internal organ. It signals to your body that there is a potential threat and calls for an appropriate response.

4. Body Awareness

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This is a sense you will use all the time but you’ve probably never even thought about it. Also called, proprioception, it is the unconscious awareness of where your body parts are in space and in relation to the rest of you.

Test your proprioception by closing your eyes and touching your nose. Despite not being able to see your hand or nose, I bet you were pretty accurate in finding it?

5. Electrocreception

shark

This isn’t a sense that you have but lots of marine animals commonly use electrorecption to hunt for food. Sharks take advantage of the high conductivity of salt water, their electrorecptivity allows them to detect the electric signals produced by the activity of fish. Duck billed platypus, believe it or not, hunt in a similar way to sharks as they have thousands of electroreceptors in the mucous glands on their bills.

6. Echolocation

beluga

Bats are famous for their echolocation abilities. Although they aren’t completely blind, they hunt at night when it’s almost impossible to see and so echolocation evolved as an alternative to sight to help them navigate. They produce sounds so high pitched, we can’t usually hear them. This sound echos and bounces back to the bats, they use the returning noises to build up an internal image of their surroundings.

They’re not the only ones with this impressive talent, if you’ve seen Finding Dory, you may have noticed Bailey the Beluga Whale also uses echolocation. Belugas use a fatty deposit, known as a melon, on their head to target their sounds in different directions.

7. Magnetoreception

pidgeon

Many birds have the ability to detect magnet fields. This sense is called magnetoreception and is used to help birds find their way on long migrations. No one is quite sure how birds detect or see magnetic fields but there are hypotheses that suggest they use either a protein called cryptochrome or the highly magnetic compound, iron oxide.

Interestingly human eyes contain cryptochromes but we aren’t able to utilise the protein to detect a magnetic field.

senses