6

While I’m looking through the daily papers I often come across odd pictures and very short stories and, having gathered a few together over the past couple of weeks I thought you might enjoy my top four contenders for the Wildlife’s Got Talent contest!!

8

A what??! I have to admit that I had no idea what an echinoderm was before I discovered a weird and wonderful news item in one of the daily rags the other day! But this echinoderm is unlike any of its friends or relations! Read on …

20

Alvarez had studied the work of his colleague Juan Vucetich, head of the bureau of statistics for the La Plata police. Vucetich had discovered a method of analyzing and classifying fingerprints that made them easy both to file and, equally vital, to retrieve. Until then, the police authorities had largely ignored his work. But because of the Rojas case and subsequent successes, Argentina adopted fingerprinting as its sole method of identifying criminals – the first country in the world to do so.

12

The mathematicians of ancient Greece attributed characters to numbers and awarded some of the status of perfection. For Euclid, one of the finding fathers of modern mathematics, a perfect number was one that equaled the sum of its own divisors – that is numbers that will divide into it without leaving a remainder. The first perfect number is 6: its divisors are 1, 2, and 3, 14 which add up to 6. The second is 28 (1 + two + four + seven + 14). The Greeks knew only two other perfect: 496 and 8,128.

15

A program being established by NASA will eventually cover and area 10 million times larger than that investigated so far. Using specially designed equipment, it will focus on some 1,000 carefully chosen sun-type stars. The hope is to detect radio signals. The equipment will also scan the entire sky over a wide range of frequencies. Although each point will be observed for only few seconds, the survey will increase the probability that all potential sites for intelligent life have been examined.

15

The Sun has 11 –year cycles of sunspot activity due to changes in its magnetic field. The increased surface activity means that more changed solar particles reach Earth’s atmosphere, causing radio interference and aurora. Nuclear reactions in the Sun’s core send waves of energy flowing to the surface, where it is given off as light, heat and other radiation.The Sun’s diameter is 1,392,000 km (865,000 miles). More than one million Earths would fit inside the Sun.

16

Although evidence is scanty, it appears that four monkeys were the first animals to enter the earth’s stratosphere via a V – 2rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico, in 1951. The next year Aerobee rockets with monkeys and mice on board were frequently launched to test the effects of weightlessness. But usually the U.S.S.R. is credited with having started the age of space travel by launching the dog Laika into orbit on board Sputnik two on November 3, 1957.

6

Who would have thought that worms can be so beautiful?

15

An amazing collection of photographs – recognisable shapes in the clouds – can you tell what it is yet?

4

Five examples of freaky fungus.