The first year of life

A message from Life co-author, Helen Stephenson
If you have any experience of babies, then you know that they develop very quickly. Every week you see huge changes in their bodies and what they have learned to do. But I’d love to know what babies are thinking about, wouldn’t you? And I’d love to understand more about how a baby’s brain works.

A newborn baby can see, hear and feel. By the age of five, a child can talk, ride a bike and invent imaginary friends. How does this development happen? We don’t understand the way language, thinking and planning develop very well. Now scientists are using new technology to ‘see’ into children’s brains. And they are discovering new information about the way a baby’s brain develops.

A study in 2010 showed that the experiences a child has in their first few years affect the development of the brain. It showed that children who received more attention often had higher IQs. The brain of a newborn baby has nearly a hundred billion neurons. This is the same number as an adult’s brain. As they grow, a baby receives information through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. This information creates connections between different parts of the brain. At the age of three, there are a hundred trillion connections.

One experiment looked at images of babies’ brains while they were listening to different sounds. The sounds were in different sequences. For example, one sequence was mu-ba-ba. This is the pattern ‘A-B-B’. Another sequence was mu-ba-ge. This is the pattern ‘A-B-C’. The images showed that the part of the brain responsible for speech was more active during ‘A-B-B’ patterns. This shows that babies can tell the difference between different patterns. This experiment is interesting because sequences of words are important to grammar and meaning. Compare two sentences with the same words in a different order: ‘John killed the bear’ is very different from ‘The bear killed John.’ So babies are starting to learn grammatical rules from the beginning of life.

Researchers also know that babies need to hear a lot of language in order to understand grammar rules. But there is a big difference between listening to television, audio books or the internet, and interacting with people. One study compared two groups of nine-month-old American babies. One group watched videos of Mandarin Chinese sounds. In the other group, people spoke the same sounds to the babies. The test results showed that the second group could recognise different sounds, however the first group learned nothing. The scientist, Patricia Kuhl, said this result was very surprising. It suggests that social experience is essential to successful brain development in babies.

Glossary:
neuron (n)  a type of cell that carries messages from your brain to other parts of your body

Keywords: 

feel (v) to notice something that is near you or is happening to you

hear (v) to be aware of a sound in your ears

hearing (n) the ability to hear

listening (n) the act of giving something your attention using your ears

see (v) to notice things with your eyes

sight (n) the ability to see

smell (v) to notice something with your nose; (n) the ability to notice something with your nose

speech (n) the ability to speak

taste (v) to be able to experience the flavour of something with your tongue; (n) the ability to taste something

touch (v) to feel something by putting your hand or finger on it; (n) the ability to feel something with your hand or finger

Wild weather

A message from Life co-author, Helen Stephenson.

British people are famous for always talking about the weather, but there’s a good reason for this. The British Isles is located in a place where two huge weather systems meet. This means our weather can change many times in just one day! Although we are used to this, strange things have been happening in recent years. In fact, this is the same for many other places around the world. Most people seem to have experienced weather that was hotter, wetter, drier or wilder than normal. This article, based on an article by Peter Miller from the September 2013 issue of National Geographic Magazine, looks at what is happening to our weather.

What is happening to our weather?

What is ‘extreme’ weather? Why are people talking about it these days? ‘Extreme’ weather is an unusual weather event  such as rainfall, a drought or a heat wave in the wrong place or at the wrong time. In theory, they are very rare. But these days, our TV screens are constantly showing such extreme weather events. Take just three news stories from 2010: 28 centimetres of rain fell on Rio de Janeiro in 24 hours, Nashville, USA, had 33 centimetres of rain in two days and there was record rainfall in Pakistan.

The effects of this kind of rainfall are dramatic and lethal. In Rio de Janeiro, landslides followed, burying hundreds of people. In Pakistan, the floods affected 20 million people. Meanwhile, other parts of the world suffer devastating droughts. Australia, Russia and East Africa have been hit in the last ten years. And then there are unexpected heat waves, such as in 2003 in Europe. That summer, 35,000 deaths were said to be heat-related.

So, what is happening to our weather? Are these extreme events part of a natural cycle? Or are they caused by human activity and its effects on the Earth’s climate? Peter Miller says it’s probably a mixture of both of these things. On the one hand, the most important influences on weather events are natural cycles in the climate. Two of the most famous weather cycles, El Niño and La Niña, originate in the Pacific Ocean. The heat from the warm ocean rises high into the atmosphere and affects weather all around the world. On the other hand, the temperature of the Earth’s oceans is slowly but steadily going up. And this is a result of human activity. We are producing greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heat warms up the atmosphere, land and oceans. Warmer oceans produce more water vapour – think of heating a pan of water in your kitchen. Turn up the heat, it produces steam more quickly. Satellite data tells us that the water vapour in the atmosphere has gone up by four percent in 25 years. This warm, wet air turns into the rain, storms, hurricanes and typhoons that we are increasingly experiencing.

Climate scientist, Michael Oppenheimer, says that we need to face the reality of climate change. And we also need to act now to save lives and money in the future.

Keywords: 

air (n) the mixture of gases that is around the Earth and that we breathe

atmosphere (n) the air around the Earth

climate (n) the general weather conditions that are typical of a place

cycle (n) a series of things that are repeated again and again

death (n) the end of life

drought (n) a long period of time without rain

event (n) something that happens, especially something important or unusual

heat (n) the quality of being warm, or the temperature of something that is warm

hit (v) to have a bad effect on someone or something

lethal (adj) extremely dangerous and causing death

rainfall (n) the amount of rain that falls

steam (n) the hot mist that forms when water boils

Sylvia Earle

A message from Life co-author, Helen Stephenson

I remember learning at school that about three-quarters of the Earth’s surface was covered in water. I thought this was amazing. It was too big an idea for me to understand. On the other hand, I grew up quite close to the sea. I was very familiar with the view of the sea on the horizon. Later, when I grew up, I didn’t like living in places that were too far from the sea, and, in fact, I have lived my whole life (apart from a brief period) in coastal places. I have, sadly, got used to seeing polluted coastlines, but I still find it hard to imagine that we can really destroy the oceans. This article talks about that idea.

Sylvia Earle: National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence
Sylvia Earle was called a "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine. She’s an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer.

Sylvia Earle is one of the world's most famous marine scientists and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. She loves to go diving in the ocean. She has spent a lot of her life both  in and under the waves. Earle has led more than a hundred expeditions and she set a record for solo diving in 1,000-metre deep water. In total, she has spent more than 7,000 hours underwater.
Earle describes the first time she went to the ocean: ‘I was three years old and I got knocked over by a wave. The ocean certainly got my attention! It wasn’t frightening, it was thrilling. And since then I have been fascinated by life in the ocean.’
In the past, Earle was the chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA. Now one of her jobs is with Google Earth’s Ocean. Earle’s special focus is on developing a global network of areas on the land and in the ocean. This network will protect and support the living systems that are important to the planet. She explains why this is important: ‘When I first went to the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea looked like a blue infinity. It seemed to be too large and too wild to be damaged by the action of people.  Then, in a few decades, not thousands of years, the blue wilderness of my childhood disappeared. By the end of the 20th century, about 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, turtles, whales and many other large creatures had disappeared from the Gulf. They had been there for millions of years.’
Some people don’t understand why the ocean is so important to life on Earth. Earle explains that ‘the ocean is the foundation of our life support system. The ocean is alive. The living things in the ocean generate oxygen and take up carbon. If we don’t have the ocean, we don’t have a planet that works.’
The Gulf of Mexico has had many problems, especially after the Deepwater Horizon Oil disaster of 2010, but Earle says, ‘In 2003 I found positive signs in clear, deep water far from the mouth of the Mississippi River. It was full of life. Large areas of the Gulf are not damaged. Protecting the most important places will be good for the future of the Gulf and for all of us.’

Keywords: 

carbon (n) a chemical element that is present in all animals and plants and in coal and oil

creature (n) any living thing that is not a plant

deep (adj) a long way down from the surface to the bottom of something

diving (n) the sport or activity of working or looking around underwater, using special breathing equipment

generate (v) to produce something

marine (adj) relating to the sea or to animals and plants that live in the sea

ocean (n) one of the five very large areas of sea on the Earth's surface

oxygen (n) a colourless gas that exists in large quantities in the air. All plants and animals need oxygen in order to live.

planet (n) a large round object in space that moves around a star. The Earth is an example of a planet.

take up (phr-v) if something takes up air, food or liquid, it uses it in its body. Plants use carbon to live.

wave (n) a line of higher water that moves on the surface of the sea which is caused by the wind or tide making the water rise and fall

wild (adj) natural and not used by people

wilderness (n) a large natural area of land or sea that is not used by people