11

Charles Darwin was a scientist who came up with the revolutionary idea that plants and animals evolve (change) over time by a process called natural selection.

6

30,000 years ago the compass would have pointed south, and it may well do so again in the future. This dramatic shift in polarity takes place on a global scale, and its causes lie deep in the countless trillions of atoms that make up the earth.

16

In Russia the keen eyesight of the pigeon is put to a very practical use for, at one factory in Moscow, they are used to sort ball-bearings. After four or five weeks special training, the birds inspect the ball-bearings as they pass on a conveyor. If any show the least blemish the pigeons peck a special plate which operates a reject sign, the faulty bearing is removed and the birds is rewarded with a few millet seeds.

12

Elephants have always fascinated us with their great size, power and grace. The Roman armies took them into battle to overawe their enemies, and Indian princes used them as symbols of power and prestige. Trained Asian elephants have been employed as draught animals for centuries, and in south-east Asia the elephant was long the mainstay of the timber trade.

10

There were strange omens everywhere. Nature itself seemed disturbed. Far from their native habitats, subtropical barracuda were swimming in the ocean off Portland, Oregon, and red crabs appeared on the beaches at San Diego, California. Areas of the Rocky Mountains had record snowfalls. Farther south, in Ecuador, unseasonal torrential rains destroyed 800 houses, ruined the rice and banana crops, and washed away roads and bridges. In Peru, fishermen sat idle, for the shoals of anchovy had vanished from the ocean. The sea had become unusually warm.

9

Pines and Cedars are the most long-lived trees. These conifers are abundant along the West Coast of the United States where they live as long as 3,000 to 4,000 years, or in the case of bristlecone pines, nearly 5,000 years.

2

The most popular current theory on the origin of the Universe states that space and time began 15 billion years ago with the Big Bang and that the Universe has been expanding ever since.
No one knows how, or if, the Universe will end.

3

A modern accelerator is shaped like a doughnut. Inside, magnets propel beams of hydrogen protons millions of times around of times around the ring. As the protons collide, they produce a debris of short- lived particles that scientist want to study.

12

More amazing still is that generation after generation of these butterflies find their way back to the same place on the other side of the continent year after year. How do they do it?

4

The Duck Billed Platypus of eastern Australia is one of nature’s strangest creatures – so strange that when the first complete specimen of a platypus arrived in London in 1798, scientists at the British Museum thought that someone was playing a practical joke on them.