Isabel Thomas - The Bedtime Book of Impossible Questions

For everyone who doesn't take 'I don't know' for an answer I.T.

To Fionn, if ever I dont know an answer, please refer to this A.C.

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This electronic edition published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in Great Britain 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Text copyright Isabel Thomas, 2022

Illustrations copyright Aaron Cushley, 2022

Illustration David Novick, 2019

Isabel Thomas and Aaron Cushley have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author and Illustrator of this work

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ISBN: 978-1-5266-2375-1 (HB)
ISBN: 978-1-5266-2753-7 (eBook)

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Contents

Why don't humans have tails?
Could a tortoise really win a race with a hare?

Can I learn to speak to animals?

Are cats liquid or solid?

Science isnt about knowing lots of facts or getting the right answer all the time. Its not even about wearing a lab coat.

Science is about asking questions .

They can be sensible questions.

They can be silly questions.

Best of all, they can be

IMPOSSIBLE QUESTIONS!

The history of science is paved with impossible questions .

Each one is a stepping stone on the path to understanding the universe and everything in it.

But this path is not yet finished

Every answer leads to new impossible questions ... and new stepping stones!

This book explores some of the impossible questions that are still bamboozling biologists, confusing chemists and making physicists feel perplexed .

None of the answers are 100 per cent correct as any scientist will tell you, there is no such thing as a perfect answer !

They are just our best answers based on the evidence available right now. As scientists continue to experiment , explore , collect and discover more information, the answers will probably change.

The impossible questions in this book will help you explore life, the universe and everything in it and the best time to do this (as every scientist knows) is at bedtime.

Next time it rains, go outside and take a big sniff . After dry days, a rain shower can make the air smell clean, sweet, fresh and earthy rather like a walk in the woods. Lots of people like this smell and it even has a name petrichor (say peh-truh-kaw). Its not the smell of raindrops themselves, because pure water doesnt have a smell. It actually comes from microbes that live in the soil. Every teaspoon of soil contains up to a billion of these tiny living things. They do a very important job feeding on dead leaves and other things that were once alive, recycling the minerals that new life needs to grow. As they go about their lives, microbes make an oil called geosmin. When raindrops splatter on dusty, dry soil, tiny particles of geosmin are thrown up into the air and get carried away on the wind eventually reaching our noses ! Nobody knows exactly why the microbes make geosmin. One idea is that they might be trying to hitch a lift to new homes on the animals and insects that come to snuffle the lovely smell. If you like the smell, you dont have to wait for a rainy day beetroot plants make geosmin too!

Sadly, a rainbow is not a solid object that we can touch. Its more like millions of moving mirrors made of water. You see a rainbow when sunlight bounces off raindrops towards your eyes. For this to happen, you have to be standing with your back to the sun, looking towards a rainy part of the sky (or even water being sprayed by a hose!). Sunlight is a mixture of different colours. As sunlight travels into a raindrop, it slows down a little and changes direction. This splits the sunlight up into its different colours. The coloured light then bounces off the back of the raindrop, as if it were a mirror. If you happen to be looking that way, the light reaches your eyes. Each raindrop reflects a single colour towards your eyes, but when you look towards a rainy sky you are seeing millions of drops at once . Together, they reflect red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet light towards your eyes. Your brain tries to make sense of this trick of the light. It tells you that youre looking at a flat, colourful circle somewhere in the distance. Up close, we cant see the colours reflected by raindrops. So you cant touch a rainbow that you can see. But you could go and stand in the rain thats making a rainbow for somebody else.

Your nose can sniff out at least a trillion different smells, but its your brains job to tell you if theyre nasty or nice. Everyones brain is different, but there are some odours that most people agree are DISGUSTING. One of these is skatole, the substance that gives poo its smell. Although its revolting in big doses, a little skatole can smell lovely and sweet it gives flowers such as jasmine their scent and is even used to flavour vanilla ice cream! Another well-known pong is skunk spray, a smelly substance containing sulphur. Predators squirted by skunks stink for up to three weeks !