Earthquakes on the ocean floor can give a tremendous push to surroundings seawater and create one or more large, destructive waves called tsunamis, also known as seismic sea waves. Some people ca...
DNA (short for deoxyribonucleic acid) is the basic unit of control of human life. It is a highly complex substance formed from a chain of chemical units called nucleotides. All the the instructions for growing a...
There is more than one gene for eye pigment, as shown in the illustration below, but brown is always dominant over blue. Two people, one with two genes for brown eyes, the other with two genes for blue...
People are rapidly destroying the world's rain forests. In 1950, rain forests covered about 8,700,000 square miles (22,533,000 square km) of the earth. This area would cover about three-quarters of Africa. Today,...
From a hazy mixture of history and legend, we learn that China's first ruling family was the Hsia. The legendary first emperors are said to have tamed the rivers, so that farmers could grow millet and wheat. The...
In the AD 500s, an Italian named Benedict of Nursia drew up a set of rules for monks (or people in monasteries). All monks must be poor, unmarried and obedient. Monks wore simple robes, shaved their...
The most powerful ruler among the English kings was acknowledged as 'bretwalda', or supreme king. The Sutton Hoo ship burial site in Suffolk was discovered in AD 1939. It is almost certainly the monument to...
Rome grew from a small kingdom in Italy. It became a republic and one of the mightiest empires of the ancient world, with an empire stretching the length of the Mediterranean Sea. At its peak, the Roman Empire...
Egyptian picture-writing is known as HIEROGLYPHICS. This language is made up of about 750 signs, with pictures of people, animals and objects. until hieroglyphics was deciphered in modern times, it was not known that most of the picture represented sounds and syllables,...
More than 5,000 years ago Europeans were building spectacular stone monuments. Many of these are still standing today, as mysterious relics of a long-gone society. The huge stones that were used are called megaliths...
