Britannica

A QUICK TURNAROUND This brave rider and her horse are competing in a barrel race. Each time the horse passes a barrel, it needs to slow down sharply before racing on to the next one! SANPIT! MAKING A SPLASH! The steeplechase is a longdistance running race in which athletes have to leap over a hurdle and water obstacle placed on the track. German athlete Lea Meyer unfortunately clipped the hurdle as she jumped over it, causing her to plunge head first into the water! MOON MOUNTAIN To take this stunning photo of the Moon rising above a mountain, Spanish photographer Jordi Coy had to be exactly six miles away from the mountain. Jordi then put his camera in the perfect position so that the Moon would look as if it…

Lessons of the blinking mudskipper Mudskipper fish are extraordinary animals for several reasons, including the fact that they live on both land and in water. They are also the only fish that blink! Scientists at Penn State University, USA, have been studying mudskippers’ blinking to understand why they do it - which, as with humans, is mostly to clean and protect their eyes - and to discover more about how this unusual behaviour for fish helps them to survive on land as well as in the water. This could provide fascinating clues as to how, hundreds of millions of years ago, humans’ fishy ancestors evolved to become land animals, too. NASA’s robot snake goes in search of hidden aliens We have yet to find evidence of life anywhere else in…

IS BEING LEFT-HANDED AN ADVANTAGE? IS BEING LEFT-HANDED AN ADVANTAGE? Most people (around 89%) are right-handed and just 10% are left-handed. Yet if you follow the performance of professional athletes in sports that demand superb hand-eye coordination, such as tennis, cricket and baseball, you’ll notice that far more than 10% of the top players are left-handed. (This includes the two great tennis players pictured on this page: Martina Navratilova and Rafael Nadal.) Sports scientists have two potential explanations for this. The first is that the way left-handed people play contains an element of surprise, because the angles at which they hit or throw the ball are different to the majority of right-handed people. The second is that, according to scientific studies, the two hemispheres, or halves, of left-handed people’s brains…

Readers ask. Experts answer. Send your questions to: experts@britannicamagazine.com DR JAMES O’DONOGHUE Planetary scientist Question: What would happen if humans tried to land on Jupiter? From Finn, age 13 Answer Because Jupiter is largely made of hydrogen gas and helium gas, it doesn’t have a solid surface to land ‘on’. But it’s still useful for scientists to define an imaginary surface on Jupiter, so that we can say how big the planet is. This imaginary surface is defined as being the distance from the centre of Jupiter at which the atmospheric pressure is the same as the atmospheric pressure here on the surface of Earth - in other words, the same pressure you’re feeling right now from the atmospheric gases that surround you. This point is roughly 40 km above…

SHARK TALES DID YOU KNOW? Sharks have such a powerful sense of smell they could detect a single drop of blood in a bathtub of water! DID YOU KNOW? A shark’s ears are sensitive enough to hear sounds from several hundred metres away, helping it to locate prey. Sharks are some of the oldest animals on Earth. They first emerged more than 300 million years ago and there are still more than 300 species, or types, of shark swimming in our seas today. As you will discover when you see our fantastic pull-out poster on page 26, sharks come in all shapes and sizes. The giant, 19-metre-long whale shark is the largest living fish, while the smallest shark, the dwarf lantern shark, is only about 17 centimetres long. On the…

AMPULLAE A shark’s snout is covered in small pores, or holes, called ampullae of Lorenzini. These pores can detect tiny electrical currents in the water which are given off by the shark’s prey. NOSTRIL These are used for smelling, not breathing. TEETH Most species of shark have several rows of teeth. As you can see in the diagram below, as the front row of teeth wears down, newer rows of teeth move forwards in the shark’s mouth to replace them. Some sharks can use and lose more than 20,000 teeth in their lifetime! EYE A shark has eyes on either sides of its head, which gives it almost 360° vision. PECTORAL FIN The shark uses this fin to balance and steer. The fins are shaped in the same way as…