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sheep

A discartoon

By That's life

Opposite cartoon

If I succeeded in my discartoon,

you should have fallen asleep from boredom before you reached this sentence. But if you’re still awake, let’s discuss prefixes, shall we?

English is a funny language that is full of rules that seem to work about 80% of the time. Take prefixes for example.

A prefix as defined by the Oxford dictionary is “a letter or group of letters added to the beginning of a word to change its meaning.” So dis means not and by placing it in front of say like, changes the meaning to not like. The key thing to note here is that when you remove the dis from dislike, you end up with a recognisable word – like. But here’s the 20% catch – you can’t take this approach to all words starting with dis. Take the following:

  • Discreet – What I’m about to tell you is no secret. Please be creet about this information and share with everyone you meet”
  • Disrupt – The dogs stopped barking allowing me to sleep rupted all night long.

Can you think of any other prefix anomalies?

Baaaa! Baaaa! Zzzzzz!

By Animals

I typed ‘sleeping sheep’ into Google to see what would pop up.

I found a game called ‘Sheep Dash’ on a BBC website. It tests your reaction time to tranquillising the fleeing sheep. If you hit them, they go to sleep. It then gives you a result. I didn’t fare too well. Apart from a woeful speed statistic of 0.87 seconds average speed response time, I was given the badge “sluggish snail”.

Let me know how you fared?

Let’s go on a magic carpet ride

By Pot Luck

What is it with all these scientists exploring the domains of fairy tales and legends?

When I created the invisible cloak cartoon, I discovered that scientists had actually achieved an invisible cloak (well, not exactly, but did a whole heaps of calculations and demonstrated on a small model). Thinking that flying carpets would be a no go zone, I was surprised to find a mathematician (and a team – can you imagine asking for a support team – how would that conversation go with your boss, I wonder) has proven mathematically it is possible. (See Telegraph post for those technically inclined).

To a scientist, this means it’s possible in theory, but to an engineer, this means the next trick is to achieve this in practical terms.

What other cool things in fairy tales do you wish were possible? You may find some scientist and their support team are busy trying to make it true, just for you!

Morning commute

By Animals

Don’t think this train is aerodynamic enough to beat the current world train speed records.  During trials, the French V150 clocked 574 km/hr in 2007 (conventional rail) and the Japanese MLX01 clocked 581km/hr in 2003 (unconventional train – it’s that whizz bang magnetic one).