I Wonder Why...

Facts About Worms

At Lunchtime on Friday, To Koha found some worms on the field. We discussed how worms benefit our garden, what they look like and debated whether or not they have eyes. After a colourful discussion we decided to check onm the Internet to see if our ideas and theories were correct. We found the following information:

A worm has no arms, legs or eyes. Worms live where there is food, moisture, oxygen and a favourable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else. In one acre of land, there can be more than a million earthworms. The largest earthworm ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet from its nose to the tip of its tail. Worms tunnel deeply in the soil and bring subsoil closer to the surface mixing it with the topsoil. Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is an important nutrient for plants. Worms are cold-blooded animals. Even though worms don’t have eyes, they can sense light, especially at their anterior (front end). They move away from light and will become paralyzed if exposed to light for too long (approximately one hour). If a worm’s skin dries out, it will die. Worms can eat their weight each day. Worms are invertebrates, they have no spines.

How Lightning Happens On Friday afternoon there was an exciting thunderstorm. We know that thunder is the sound of the lightning, and sound travels slower than light. We didn’t however, know how lightning happens, so we searched on Google using the search terms ‘lightning’ and ‘originate’. We were rewarded with the following information.

Lightning is an electric current, and just like the electricity lurking in the outlets in your house, it can be deadly. Have you ever gotten a shock by shuffling across a carpet and then touching something made of metal? Then you've experienced the same process that makes lightning.

Within a thundercloud, many small bits of ice bump into each other as they swirl around in the air. All those collisions create an electrical charge, just like the one that built up in you when you crossed the carpet.
After a while, the whole cloud fills up with electrical charges (usually with a negative charge closest to the earth). Since opposites attract each other, that causes a positive charge to build up on the ground beneath the cloud. The ground's electrical charge concentrates around anything that sticks up, such as mountains, lone trees, people, or even blades of grass. The charge streaming up from these points eventually connects with a charge reaching down from the clouds, and--zap!--lightning strikes.
The intense heat of the lightning bolt causes the surrounding air to explode outward with a gigantic boom--thunder.