Tag
Energy
Fuel, power, and where the go comes from — 58 tiny stories across 8 shelves.
Physics
Invisible forces you can play with — 13 stories.
All physics →Passing motion along
What Happens When Things Crash?
Motion is never destroyed in a crash, only handed over. What decides the damage is not the speed itself but how long the stop is allowed to take.
Let’s go →Jostling passed along
Why Does a Metal Spoon Get Hot?
No atom ever travels along the spoon; each stays put and passes the jiggle on. Metal feels cold only because it pulls heat out of your hand fast.
Let’s go →It never goes anywhere
Where Does Energy Go When Things Stop?
Energy is never used up when something stops. It has only changed form, and every change spills a little as heat that is hard to use again.
Let’s go →Everything is shaking
What Is Heat?
Heat is not a substance you add. It is how fast the atoms are jiggling, which is why a thermometer is really a gauge of atomic speed.
Let’s go →Nothing changes for free
Why Do Things Keep Moving?
An object keeps doing exactly what it was doing until something makes it stop. Every change of speed or direction has to be paid for with a force.
Let’s go →It makes nothing — it slows
Does a Coat Make You Warm?
A coat makes no heat of its own. It traps still air, which slows the escape of the warmth your body is already producing every second.
Let’s go →Light marching in step
What Makes a Laser Different From a Torch?
A torch throws every colour every way with the waves unrelated. A laser is one colour, one direction, and every wave stepping in time.
Let’s go →Mass times speed
Why Are Heavy Things Hard to Stop?
Nothing is lost when things collide: what one object loses another gains. Airbags, crash mats and bent knees simply make the stop take longer.
Let’s go →Newton's third law
Every Push Has a Push Back
You cannot push anything without it pushing back exactly as hard. That pair of forces is what makes walking, swimming and flying possible at all.
Let’s go →Pushing in time
Why Does One Note Rattle the Window?
Every object has a rhythm it swings at naturally. A sound matching that rhythm adds a push on every swing, so tiny pushes build into a rattle.
Let’s go →Air, pushed
How Does Sound Travel?
Sound is not a thing that flies. It is a squeeze handed from one air molecule to the next, passed all the way along to your eardrum.
Let’s go →Storing a push
How Do Springs Work?
A spring stores the work you put into squashing or stretching it, then hands that energy straight back as it returns to its own shape.
Let’s go →About a hundred watts of it
You Are Glowing Right Now
Warm objects radiate light whose colour depends on their temperature — yours is infrared, invisible to us and perfectly obvious to the right camera.
Let’s go →How things work
Everyday machines, taken apart — 13 stories.
All how things work →A sealed tank of chemicals
Why Does a Battery Run Out?
A battery stores reacting chemicals rather than electricity, and that reaction can only happen a fixed number of times before it is spent.
Let’s go →A shove converted to a spin
How Does a Bang Turn a Wheel?
Burning fuel shoves a piston down a tube, and a crankshaft bends that straight shove into the round motion the wheels actually need.
Let’s go →Someone else's computer, in a shed
Where Is the Cloud?
The cloud is not in the sky. It is racks of computers in big cooled buildings, holding copies of your files and a vast electricity bill.
Let’s go →Rain, stored on a hillside
How Does a Dam Make Electricity?
A dam is a battery filled by the weather: it holds rain high up and lets it fall through a turbine, turning the height it loses into power.
Let’s go →Oil that refuses to be squashed
How Does a Digger Lift So Much?
Oil cannot be squashed, so pressure from a small piston reaches a much larger one, which pushes proportionally harder. That is the whole arm.
Let’s go →Only lifting the difference
Why Does a Lift Need a Counterweight?
A counterweight balances almost all of the car, so the motor only ever lifts the difference between the two — a small fraction of the whole load.
Let’s go →A magnet, some wire, and movement
How Is Electricity Actually Made?
Every generator on Earth does one thing: it moves a magnet past coils of wire. Run the same machine backwards and it is a motor instead.
Let’s go →Splitting atoms to boil a kettle
How Does Nuclear Power Work?
A nuclear station is an ordinary steam power station with a very strange fire: split atoms make the heat, control rods hold the rate steady.
Let’s go →Three pins, three different jobs
What Is Happening Inside a Plug?
A plug has several pins because electricity needs a way in, a way back, and an escape to the ground, plus a fuse designed to fail on purpose.
Let’s go →Pushed hard so less is lost
Why Are Power Lines So High Up?
Power lines carry electricity at enormous voltage because that wastes far less on the journey, then transformers step it back down.
Let’s go →Almost all of them boil water
How Does a Power Station Work?
Coal, gas and nuclear stations look nothing alike and all do one thing — boil water, so the steam spins a magnet inside coils of wire.
Let’s go →Light knocking electrons loose
How Does Sunlight Become Electricity?
Each packet of sunlight can knock one electron loose, and a solar cell is layered so that every freed electron flows the same way out.
Let’s go →Three blades, and each one is a wing
How Does a Wind Turbine Work?
A turbine blade is not pushed by the wind, it is lifted sideways like a wing — and no turbine can take more than two-fifths of the wind's energy.
Let’s go →Life & body
Seeds, hearts, senses, and growing things — 10 stories.
All life & body →Four things in a river
What Is Blood Made Of?
Blood is mostly salty water carrying three cargoes: red cells that ferry oxygen, white cells that stand guard, and fragments that plug the leaks.
Let’s go →Fetching oxygen, dumping waste
Why Do We Breathe?
Breathing collects the oxygen that releases energy from food and dumps the carbon dioxide left over. The urge to breathe comes from the waste, not the air.
Let’s go →The colour it refuses
Why Are Leaves Green?
Green is the one colour chlorophyll cannot use, so it is thrown back at you. The yellows sit underneath all summer, until autumn strips the green away.
Let’s go →Demand outrunning supply
Why Does Exercise Make You Puff?
Working muscles burn oxygen far faster than resting ones, so breathing and heart rate climb to keep up. Puffing is the delivery system catching up.
Let’s go →Energy passed along
Who Eats Whom?
Every step of a food chain spends about 90% of its energy simply living, so a tenth passes upward. After four or five links there is nothing left.
Let’s go →The food is the small part
What Gets Wasted When Food Is Thrown Away?
Throwing away a sandwich wastes the field, the water, the fuel and the year behind it — and about a third of all food grown is never eaten.
Let’s go →Only ever pulling
How Do Muscles Move You?
Muscles can only pull, never push, so they come in opposing pairs and use bones as levers to turn a short pull into a much larger movement.
Let’s go →Building food from air
How Do Plants Eat Light?
Plants build sugar out of air, water and light. A tree is made mostly of air — its carbon comes from carbon dioxide, not from the soil it stands in.
Let’s go →Muscles working for the heat, not the movement
Why Do You Shiver When You Are Cold?
Shivering makes your muscles do deliberately useless work, because a muscle is a poor engine and most of its effort comes out as heat anyway.
Let’s go →Taken apart, then absorbed
What Happens to Food You Eat?
Nothing is absorbed until it is molecule-sized. Acid unravels proteins, but the real work happens in seven metres of small intestine folded very small.
Let’s go →What things are made of
Atoms, metal, glass, plastic, and every kind of stuff — 8 stories.
All what things are made of →Light, cheap to reuse, and it protects itself
Why Are Drink Cans Made of Aluminium?
Aluminium is light, does not rust because it seals itself, and can be recycled with a fraction of the energy it took to make.
Let’s go →Burning wood twice
Why Does Charcoal Burn Hotter Than Wood?
Charcoal is wood already half burned: baked without air until only carbon remains, so everything that would have made smoke has gone.
Let’s go →Loose electrons, and a price that works
Why Are Wires Made of Copper?
Silver conducts slightly better, yet almost every wire is copper: its outer electrons drift free, and it wins on price and on bending.
Let’s go →Sunlight from a very long time ago
What Is Crude Oil?
Crude oil is the squashed remains of tiny sea creatures, cooked under rock — so burning it releases sunlight caught a hundred million years ago.
Let’s go →Millions of small links, joined into chains
What Is Plastic Actually Made Of?
Heating lets the chains slide without breaking, so plastic can be moulded again — but different chains refuse to mix, which is why sorting matters.
Let’s go →Melting versus mashing
Why Does Glass Recycle Better Than Paper?
Melting rebuilds glass and metal exactly, but tearing paper apart shortens its fibres a little each time, so paper eventually runs out of lives.
Let’s go →The wick drinks its own fuel
Why Does a Candle Burn for Hours?
The wick is not the fuel and solid wax will not catch: the flame melts the wax, the wick lifts it, and what actually burns is the vapour.
Let’s go →Glowing gas, not glowing wood
What Actually Is a Flame?
A flame is not the wood burning. It is gas driven out of the wood by heat, glowing as it meets oxygen — which is why heat, air or fuel each put it out.
Let’s go →Space
Crashy night-sky stories — 5 stories.
All space →The Sun is leaking
What Is the Solar Wind?
The Sun leaks a steady stream of particles that blows out past every planet. Earth's magnetic field is the reason almost none of it reaches us.
Let’s go →A sun, seen from far away
What Is a Star?
Nothing in a star burns — there is no oxygen out there. Its own weight crushes the middle to millions of degrees, and the light leaks out of that.
Let’s go →Not burning at all
What Is the Sun Burning?
The Sun is not on fire. Its own weight crushes hydrogen into helium, and the scrap of mass lost in that swap comes back out as light and heat.
Let’s go →A very slow journey with a fast ending
The Last Eight Minutes Were the Easy Part
Energy from the Sun's core takes an enormous time to bounce its way out before the eight-minute run to Earth — and that delay is very hard to pin down.
Let’s go →The heaviest stars only
How Does a Star Explode?
A giant star spends its life holding itself up. When its core can no longer push back it falls in within a second, and the rebound tears it apart.
Let’s go →Earth & sky
Weather, light, and the air around us — 4 stories.
All earth & sky →Rock finally slipping
Why Does the Ground Shake?
Earth's plates grind past one another, snag, and hold. The shaking is centuries of stored strain let go in seconds when the snag finally gives way.
Let’s go →A giant spark
What Is Lightning?
Lightning is the doorknob spark scaled up beyond imagining: a storm cloud builds millions of volts against the ground, and eventually the air gives way.
Let’s go →A wave that is all the way down
Why Are Tsunamis So Dangerous?
An ordinary wave is surface motion. A tsunami moves the entire depth of the ocean, so it carries far more water than its modest height at sea suggests.
Let’s go →Energy moving, water staying
Do Waves Carry Water Along?
A wave carries energy across the sea while the water mostly circles on the spot. Waves break when the seabed drags on their base and the top runs ahead.
Let’s go →Everyday wonders
Kitchen, bubbles, echoes, and odd little magic — 3 stories.
All everyday wonders →Tangled chains straightening out
Why Do Rubber Bands Snap Back?
Rubber is a mass of tangled molecule chains. Stretching straightens them, and they snap back for the simple reason that tangled is far more likely.
Let’s go →Pushing in time
How Do You Make a Swing Go Higher?
A swing has exactly one natural rhythm. Pumping works by feeding it a little energy in time with that rhythm, arc after arc, until the arc is huge.
Let’s go →Angled blades catching moving air
How Does a Windmill Turn?
Angled blades deflect moving air sideways and the air shoves back. The tip travels far faster than the root, so a blade is twisted along its length.
Let’s go →Animals
Creatures on land, in the sea, and in the air — 2 stories.
All animals →Running the engine hot
Why Does a Hummingbird Eat All Day?
Wings beating fifty times a second and a heart running past a thousand a minute add up to nearly its own weight in nectar taken in before dark.
Let’s go →Getting your energy back
Why Does a Kangaroo Hop?
A kangaroo's tendons store and return energy like springs, so hopping fast costs it almost nothing more than hopping slowly does.
Let’s go →