Discovery

Summer Diversions

Mix about half a cup of cornflour with a small amount of water. The resulting "ooblek" exhibits a rather bizarre phenomenon, behaving sometimes like a liquid and sometimes like a solid.

Stir it slowly and it behaves like a thick liquid, running past either side of the stirring implement. Try and stir it fast or hit it, and it suddenly becomes hard and will appear to break before flowing together once more. Pump it up and down and the material locks hard in place.

It's an interesting example of a viscoelastic material. When the ooblek encounters fast motion or an impact, the molecules can no longer move fast enough past each other to produce the liquid effect, and they effectively "lock" to form an apparent solid.

Longevity Stakes

• A dog or a cat?
• A day on Venus or a day on Earth?
• Steak wrapped in plastic or steak wrapped in brown paper?
• A tortoise or a sponge?
• A pencil or a ball-point pen?

Increase Your Word Power

Albedo Bdellism

Eyot Furcula

Light-foot Momilogy

Ololygmancy Phaneromania

Ratite Suint

Point to Ponder

Drop a piece of buttered toast and it will always land face down on the carpet for maximum messiness. When a cat falls, it always lands on its feet.

If you tie a piece of buttered toast face up to the back of a cat and then drop the animal, which way up would the cat land? (Please note, this is a thought experiment only!)

Answers

Tiddles could live to the ripe old age of 30, but Rover and Rex are likely to have headed for the Kennel in the Sky by the time they are 20.

Venus and Earth are sometimes called the twin planets because they are close in size. A "day" on Venus, however, takes 243 Earth-days from sunrise to sunset.

Keep your steak in brown paper, as the air circulation from the loose wrapping keeps the outside of the meat dry and inhibits bacterial growth; the plastic keeps it moist, providing a more friendly environment for bacterial reproduction.

The oldest documented turtle is said to have lived around 170 years, but that doesn't come anywhere near the potentially immortal lifespan of the sponge.

An HB pencil can draw a line more than 40 kilometres in length, but you're lucky to get more than 3 kilometres of writing out of a ball-point.


Albedo: the proportion of light reflected by a planet
Bdellism: the practice of using leeches for bloodletting
Eyot: a small island in a river or lake
Furcula: the wishbone of a bird
Light-foot: one-billionth of a second
Momilogy: the study of mummies
Ololygmancy: foretelling the future by interpreting the howling of dogs
Phaneromania: the habit of picking at pimples or biting one's nails
Ratite: a flightless running bird, such as a kiwi
Suint: the dried perspiration of sheep