Science

Gravity still pulls hard on the Space Station, and yet it never falls. It was assembled in orbit, and you can watch it cross the evening sky.

Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury sits closer to the Sun. Being wrapped in thick cloud beats being nearest the fire.

A sundial tells time using nothing but a shadow. Turn a paper plate into a clock, then build it again months later and watch the marks shift.

The Moon is not changing shape. What changes is how much of its sunlit half faces Earth, and that cycle takes about a month.

Nothing holds the Space Station up and nothing balances gravity. It is falling, every second, and it keeps missing the Earth.

A star does not twinkle. Our air does. And a star's color tells scientists exactly how hot it is, without anyone ever going near one.

Every tap says red is hot and blue is cold. The sky says the opposite, and the sky is right. A star's color is a thermometer.

The Moon is a ball, and a ball has no straight edges anywhere on it. So why does a half Moon have one? Because you are seeing a circle edge-on.

The Sun crosses your sky at fifteen degrees an hour without going anywhere. You are the thing that moved — and a second, slower motion shifts your marks.

Soak a clean chicken bone in vinegar for a week and you can tie it in a knot. Nothing was added. One of its two ingredients was taken away.

Three organs are working inside you right now without you thinking about it. Your heart has not paused once since before you were born.

A muscle pulls by getting shorter, but it never squashes or folds. Inside, two sets of threads haul themselves past each other and neither one shrinks.

Your eyes do not see and your ears do not hear. They collect, and they send. The seeing and the hearing happen in your brain.

Every muscle you have can only pull, never push. You have more than 600, and moving anything takes at least two working as a pair.

You were born with more bones than you have now. As you grow, some fuse together, so the count goes down while the skeleton gets stronger.

Your brain weighs about 3 pounds and uses a fifth of all the energy you eat. It keeps spending it all night, because it never switches off.

Light, sound and pressure all arrive at your brain as identical little pulses. What makes one of them a sight is where the pulse ends up.

Turn a magnet around and it pushes away what it was just pulling. Find out why, with experiments you can run using paper clips and string.

Sound is not a thing by itself. It is a vibration passing through air, water or solid rock, and how it travels explains how you hear it.

Rub a balloon on your hair and it will pick up paper and bend a stream of water. Here is what is actually moving, and why your hair stands up.

Iron is already full of tiny magnets, all pointing different ways. A magnet only has to turn them. Copper has none to turn.

A note is a lap time. The wobble runs to the end of the string and back, and a longer string means a slower lap and a lower note.

Stir sugar into water and it vanishes. Weigh the glass and nothing has gone. And stirring does not break the sugar up, which is not what most people think.

Almost every substance sinks in a puddle of itself. Water is one of the rare ones that does not, and a pond full of living fish depends on it.

A metal table leg and a wooden one have sat in the same room all night. Put a thermometer on each and they read the same. So why does only one feel cold?

An aluminium can lies in a puddle for a year and comes out shiny. An iron nail beside it turns to crumbs. Both metals react with the air, so what is different?