Universe

Yes, they can. Besides the damage done by the powerful winds of a hurricane, these huge, terrifying storms can also cause damage in other ways. Hurricanes create waves that the strong winds drive to shore. Some of these waves can be as high as a four or five story building and are called “hurricane waves.” […]

In March, 1889, the United States, Germany, and England were on the brink of war. A German war ship had shelled the small town of Apia on the island of Western Samoa and destroyed American property. Three American warships sailed into the harbor, where they came face to face with three German warships and one […]

“Hard” water doesn’t feel any different from “soft” water. Water is called “hard” when it has certain minerals, calcium and magnesium salts, dissolved in it. If the water doesn’t contain these salts, it is said to be “soft.” People like soft water because it is better for doing laundry, doing the dishes, and even for […]

Yes. Water usually freezes at 32 degrees F. By keeping the water very, very still, it is possible to keep it from freezing until the temperature drops down to 24 degrees F. Of course, this never happens in nature, only in the scientist’s laboratory. Outside, water is always moving, even when it appears to be […]

When water changes to ice, it becomes lighter. It is the only substance on earth that is lighter as a solid than as a liquid. This means that when the water in a lake freezes, the ice floats to the top, and fish swim beneath it. It is very, very rare for a lake to […]

At 2:00 A.M., December 16, 1811, the greatest earthquake ever to hit the United States turned the entire Mississippi River valley upside-down and inside-out. Twenty foot-deep cracks in the earth opened up, some of them five miles long. The land of the valley rolled in waves like an ocean. The bottom of the Mississippi River […]

How long will the Sun Last? It will be a long time before the sun begins to burn out, at least 5 billion years. The sun is made of hydrogen and helium and radiates energy by nuclear fusion of the hydrogen into helium. When that does happen, the sun will get bigger and become a […]

Yes. On September 26, 1935, ships of the Japanese navy in the Pacific Ocean were caught in a terrible hurricane. The fierce winds made some of the largest waves ever recorded. Many were 40, 50 and 60 feet high. Some monster waves were as high as 90 feet. Waves caused by the winds of a […]

The planet is Pluto was known as the farthest planet from the sun till 2006. It no longer has that title. Now called a dwarf planet, it is no longer classified as a planet. It is so far from the sun, our solar system’s source of heat, that even on a “summer” day Pluto is […]

Yes. Many of the beaches on Florida’s east coast, which fronts on the Atlantic Ocean, are actually disappearing. They are being washed away by hurricane winds and waves. Not long ago, Miami had beautiful wide beaches all day long. Now, the only time Miami has beaches is when the tide is out, meaning at low […]

They are called flash floods because they happen very rapidly. Flash floods are caused by sudden rainstorms in hilly or mountainous areas. The water rushes down the hillsides and into valleys or gullies. Streams overflow, swamping roads and bridges. It all happens so fast that people are taken by surprise. That’s what happened in Heppner, […]

Not only does the light from the stars appear to twinkle or jump about, it also appears to change color. When the light from the stars is traveling through space, there is no twinkling or changing of color. It is the earth’s atmosphere that makes the stars twinkle and change color. This is brought about […]

It was an F5 tornado, and was the worst single tornado in history to hit any portion of the U.S.A. This one storm killed 689 people and injured another 3,000. Again and again it touched down, smashing 30 towns and cities. It completely destroyed six of these. In just five hours, it traveled an distance […]

The surface of the Moon can get very hot indeed. Much hotter than it does on earth. On the daylight side of the moon, temperatures rise above the boiling point of water, 280 degrees F. Temperatures on the moon go up and down very fast with the coming and leaving of sunlight. In just one […]

Believe it or not, the moon nods both yes and no. The nods or movements are called librations. The slow nod “no” from side to side, which lets us see first one “cheek” of the moon and then the other, is called longitudinal libration. The nod “yes,” which shows us the “forehead” and then the […]

For thousands of years, desert travelers have heard the sounds of bells ringing in the desert. The sounds are usually triggered by wind passing over dunes or by walking on the sand. Many have thought they came from an ancient monastery’s bells, now buried by the constantly moving sands. Some even thought they were the […]

The hottest continent on earth is Africa. It was on this continent, in the country of Libya, a desert nation on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, in which the highest temperatures on earth were recorded. The thermometer hit a record high of 136.4 degrees F. The United States comes in second in the race […]

Jet streams are high-speed winds that circle the southern and Northern hemispheres. In order to find them, you have to climb to at least 10,000 feet or, perhaps, even 40,000 feet. Jet Streams occur at the tropopause and are caused by a combination of atmospheric heating and the earth’s rotation on its own axis. They […]

Amazingly, thick San Francisco fog had kept San Francisco Harbor hidden for almost 200 Years. In the year 1579, Sir Francis Drake, the famous English sea captain and navigator, sailed his ship, the Golden Hind, up what is now the west coast of the United States. He and his men were looking for a good, […]

Many ship captains throughout history have found that the answer to this question is yes. It wasn’t until the 20th century that men learned how to build ships that could resist the power of Arctic ice. One of the most famous cases of a ship being crushed was that of the Jeannette, a steamship that […]

When you put salt on ice or snow, it begins to melt. This is because the salt lowers the freezing point of water. The more salt added, the more it melts. As the salt dissolves, it creates heat, melting more water and dissolving more salt. That’s why towns plow roads to clear them of snow […]

Early in the morning on June 30, 1908, a burning mass of something hit central Siberia so hard that 300 miles away, men and horses were knocked off their feet to the ground. Indeed the shock was felt in England, 3,500 miles away. For years, scientists tried to find out what it was that hit […]

Shale Oil is a sedimentary rock also known as oil shale. Humans have used oil shale as a fuel since prehistoric times, since it generally burns without any processing. In the Iron Age the Britons used to polish it and form it into ornaments. Industrial mining of oil shale fist started in 1837 in Autun, […]

Radio Waves follow the curve of the earth’s surface. You might think that such a radio signal would shoot straight up and into outer space. It would, were it not for the mirror-like effect of something called the ionosphere. The ionosphere makes up a large portion of the earth’s atmosphere starting at from 50 to […]

There Two North Poles, and there are also two South Poles. The “true” poles are the “top” and “bottom” of the earth when the Equator is figured as its center. A compass needle lines up with earth’s magnetic field and points to Magnetic North and Magnetic South. It is a long walk between the magnetic […]

You didn’t know that air weighed anything? Well, it does, and we call that weight air pressure. At sea level, the average air pressure, or weight of all the earth’s atmosphere pressing down on one square inch of ground, is 14.7 pounds. This pressure, or weight varies with time and weather. Fair weather is associated […]

Every time a hurricane strikes land, there are reports of millions of fireflies being blown about by the wind. Actually, the tiny dots of light are not fireflies. They are sparks caused by the friction of grains of sand being blown about by the powerful winds. There is a name for all this “magic.” It […]

The Hornet Spook Light, also called the Tri-State Spook Light, or Hornet Ghost Light, has been scaring people for more than 70 years. It is described as a luminous, shining spot that floats in mid-air. Some people say it looks like a bobbing lantern. Its hometown is Neosho, Missouri. No one has been able to […]

Both bows are shaped the same way, but instead of being a beautiful arc made up of different colors, a moonbow has only one shade. It is a silvery white, the color of moonlight. There are only two places on earth where you can see a moonbow. One is the Zambezi River in South Africa, […]

Many people have described the sound of a tornado high in the air as similar to the “Buzzing of a Million Bees”. Still others describe it as a screaming, hissing sound. When a tornado is approaching, however, the sound changes, and many describe it as a giant blow torch or 1,000 trains rushing through a […]

Most people who get caught in a tornado aren’t so lucky. Some strange “miracles” do occur, however. On April 9, 1947, a man living near Higgins, Texas, opened his front door and was lifted out of his house by a tornado’s wind. He went sailing over treetops for 200 feet, then, very gently, landed on […]

It isn’t very big, and few people know about it, but there is a real desert in Maine. It is called the Desert of Maine and is located south of the town of Freeport. In 1779, the Tuttle family had a 300-acre potato farm on the site. The farm was also home to a small […]

In the rain forests of Sumatra, an Indonesian island, grows a very strange plant called the rafflesia. This plant has no stem and no leaves, but consists of just a single flower. And that flower is the biggest in the world, often measuring over three feet across. A full-grown rafflesia weighs 15 pounds, and can […]

Rhubarb is a vegetable that is often baked in a pie and used as a dessert. The plant consists of large leaves, up to two feet across in some cases, on long, thick stalks. The stalks may be an inch in diameter and up to two feet long. But the stalk is really part of […]

You may have seen the small, moss-like plants called lichens covering rocks or the branches of old trees. Though you’d never guess it from looking at these plants, lichens are really two plants in one: a fungus and an alga. The fungus and alga in a lichen live so closely together that you’d need a […]

The green, brown, and red seaweed you find washed up on the beach or floating in the water are kinds of plants called algae. These plants have green chlorophyll, just as ordinary green leaves do, and can make their own food from sunlight and nutrients in the soil or water. But algae are as different […]

Can you imagine a cactus taller than a five-story building? The saguaro, a slow-growing cactus found in the American Southwest and in Mexico, can grow higher than some oak trees. One saguaro in Arizona stands 52 feet tall, while another in Mexico is over 58 feet tall, and weighs about 20,000 pounds!

A slime mold may sound like a disease or an infection, but it’s actually a very odd plant. It’s so odd, in fact, that scientists once thought the slime mold was an animal. Because, like an animal, a slime mold can crawl! A slime mold begins its life as a group of small cells that […]

Can you imagine a tree as tall as a seven-story building? Sure, some trees in your neighborhood may be that tall. But can you imagine a single leaf that big? The raffia palm is a tree that grows in the tropics of South America and Indian Ocean islands. While the average size of most palm […]

A tiny fungus that scientists call Zoophagus insidians has a most unusual way of catching the microscopic animals that form its diet. This fungus, which lives in the water, has short branches, called hyphae, along its main stem. When tiny water animals, called rotifers, bite into these hyphae, the rotifers swell up inside the fungus’s […]

The term “carrot-topped” is often used for a person with reddish hair, but not all carrots are orange-red. There are white carrots, yellow carrots, and pale green carrots. And if you were to look at some Dutch paintings from the 16th century, you’d find purple carrots too, because that’s what carrots looked like at the […]

The Seychelles coconut, found only in the Seychelles Islands near Africa, produces the largest seeds in the plant kingdom. The fruit of this palm tree looks like two coconuts joined together, the reason for its other name, the “double coconut.” Because the coconut contains just one seed, scientists consider the entire fruit to be the […]

Birthworts are a family of shrubs and vines with about 600 members. One kind of European birthwort has the habit of “kidnapping” insects that visit its flowers in search of nectar. The “ransom” that the plant seeks is bits of birthwort pollen on the insect’s body. The birthwort’s flower forms a long curved tube, in […]

Almost all plants move their leaves and stems in some way, but usually this movement is so slow that we can’t see it. However, this is not true for a common plant called the mimosa. Normally, the long, thin leaves of this plant extend straight out from the stem, and the stem is erect. But […]

If you were to see a banana plantation, you’d probably say “yes,” bananas do grow on trees. But although banana plants certainly look like trees, growing up to 30 feet tall, they’re really giant shoots, the banana plant is an herb, not a tree! In fact, the banana is the largest plant on earth without […]

Seeds aren’t really alive, but they do have the power to become living things. No one knows for sure how long a seed can exist without being planted before it loses its power to grow into a plant. But it could be almost forever. A seed found in China and proven to be 1,400 years […]

The krubi, a plant found in the jungles of Indonesia, is remarkable for two reasons. First, it’s the fastest-growing plant on earth; and second, it forms the biggest group of flowers in the plant kingdom. The krubi looks something like an overgrown tulip, with a long spike growing upward out of its center. But the […]

If you think a tree can have only one trunk, and that all trees grow from the ground up, then you’ve never seen a banyan tree. The seeds of this tree, also known as the Indian fig tree, are dropped by birds into the branches of other trees, where they take root. Soon the new […]

It’s hard for a plant to grow inside a cave, where there is little fresh air and no direct sunlight. But some plants do thrive inside caves, and one even makes its own light! This plant is a moss that grows on the walls of some caves in Europe. The small, thin branches that make […]

The elephant tree of Mexico borrows a page from the defensive system of the skunk. Just as the skunk discharges a scented spray when danger threatens, the elephant tree sends out a spray of foul-smelling oil when it’s attacked by an animal. The elephant tree got its name because its trunk and branches look like […]

One of the major differences between an animal and a plant is that an animal can move from place to place, while a plant is rooted to the spot where it grows. But there are some plants that can actually move from place to place in search of water! The resurrection plant, a desert plant […]

That depends on what you call “pretty.” Certainly, flowers don’t smell pretty to themselves; their aroma is intended only to attract insects that can help pollinate the plant. Insects, too, probably don’t find that a flower smells “pretty”; they simply visit the flower for its nectar. One flower whose aroma is definitely not pretty is […]

The biggest living thing on earth isn’t the whale, it’s a tree! The California Big Trees are a kind of sequoia tree growing in Sequoia National Park in California. Some of these giants grow to a height of 270 feet. The redwood trees are taller, sometimes reaching heights over 350 feet, but the Big Trees […]

During storms at sea, sailors have often seen balls of glowing light hovering over the tip of their ship’s masts. Other people have seen the same glow at the end of church spires, at the tops of trees, or at the tips of airplane wings. Sailors believed the glow was a sign that St. Elmo, […]

Heat, light, radio waves, and x-rays are all forms of energy. The difference between the various forms of energy depends on the wavelength of the energy waves. Radio waves, for instance, have a very long wavelength, while x-rays have a very short wavelength. We can see only a very small portion of the energy waves […]

A light-year may appear to be a measure of time, but it’s actually a measure of distance. A light-year is the distance that light would travel during the course of one earth year. Light travels at the speed of about 186,282 miles per second! And there are a little more than 31.5 million seconds in […]

The word fiord, sometimes spelled fjord, comes from Norway, where fiords are common. A fiord is a narrow inlet or arm of the sea that runs far inland, and is bordered by high, steep cliffs that reach far below the surface of the water. Most fiords are more than a half-mile deep. The world’s longest […]

A shoreline seems to mark the point where a land mass ends and the ocean floor begins. But that isn’t exactly so. Every land mass includes a shelf of land that extends out into the ocean, sloping downward. This shelf of submerged land is called the continental shelf. Along the East Coast of the United […]

The lines that divide the world’s time zones meet at the North and South Poles, so the zones get narrower as they near’ the poles. An Alaskan airline offers a flight over the Arctic regions that includes a circular flight around the North Pole. If you were to circle the North Pole, you’d pass through […]