1

Freckles are caused by a skin pigment called melanin. Melanin absorbs and reflects the sun’s ultraviolet light, helping to protect skin from sun damage. It’s also what makes some people’s skin darker. Fairer-skinned folks have less melanin, so when they spend time in the sun they often get freckles instead of a tan, especially on their faces, arms, and shoulders. The tendency toward freckling is genetic, so if your mom or dad have freckles, you’re more likely to have them too. Freckles can be different colours on different people, but a single person’s freckles are usually the same colour. There’s no medical reason to remove most freckles, but some people just don’t like them. Various treatments can get rid of freckles, but the procedures can be pretty serious, involving freezing the skin, laser zapping, chemical peels, and more. If you use sunscreen or just stay out of the sun, simple freckles may fade on their own. Freckles don’t usually turn into skin cancer, but you should see a doctor about any weird-looking or unusually coloured patches on your skin.

2

After Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt broke the 100-meter world record at the 2008 Olympics, Mark Denny, a biologist at Stanford University, wondered: Had “Lightning Bolt” sprinted as fast as a human can go? After analysing records back to the 1920s, Denny predicts humans may one day cover 100m in only 9.48 seconds, or 0.10 seconds faster than Bolt’s current record of 9.58 seconds - a lot speedier in a sport where differences are measured by the 100th of a second. How can you improve your fitness even when your brain says no way? There are tricks to coax your muscles into running faster and biking longer. In a 2012 study, English cyclists were told to pedal as fast as they could. Then they raced against a computerized competitor going one percent faster, and kept up. So it’s a good idea to train with someone better.

3

Fifty years ago, companies trying to increase awareness of their products knew exactly how to reach customers. They focused their advertising efforts on television, newspapers and magazines, and spent time developing creative adverts that they knew millions of people would see. But today’s consumers are flooded with information on a daily basis. In the age of social media, over 4.75 billion pieces of content are added to the social media sites every 24 hours. How do companies and their products get noticed? Getting social media users to share content is important to success. Having content shared quickly with many users can make millions of pounds for a company. But how can a company create such a marketing campaign? First of all, it has to understand why people share information and then use that in its advertising. Advertising is certainly different to what it was fifty years ago, but the profits from a great campaign can still be huge.

4

Who looks at a banana peel and thinks, “I could turn that into plastic”? Elif Bilgin, for one. At age 16, the high school student from Istanbul, Turkey, even won a 2013 Google Science Fair award for her plan to turn banana peels into a bioplastic. The word “bioplastic” can be used to describe a plastic that is biodegradable, meaning it breaks down over time. But the word also refers to a plastic made with renewable resources such as vegetable oils, starches, and other biology-based ingredients. Some, but not all, plastics made of renewable resources are also biodegradable. In her project description, Elif explains that she wanted to work with bioplastics because they could help to reduce air, land, and water pollution caused by traditional plastics, which are made with petroleum. It took her 10 tries over the course of two years, but she finally came up with a way to make a banana-peel plastic that is sturdy and stable enough to be used in such products as artificial limbs and cable insulation. Elif says she loves doing scientific research, and one of her inspirations is Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who studied radioactivity. She hopes to do more projects that could be good for the environment. Her biggest dream? To one day build a “greenhouse made of waste materials.”

5

In 2013, a group of Dutch college students invented a car that not only converts sunlight to power while moving, it even produces energy while it’s parked. They named it Stella. Because solar energy is free and cleaner than fossil fuels, sun-powered cars are becoming a popular concept. Their bodies are light, the panels that turn sunlight to solar energy are efficient, and the batteries that store the energy they produce are becoming smaller, lighter, and more powerful. These advancements have enabled electric cars to go further and faster, and to haul more weight than ever before. The 65 square feet of solar panels on Stella’s roof capture and store solar energy so efficiently that the car is “energy positive,” meaning she makes more energy than she uses. The extra electricity can be transferred to a city’s power grid for others to use. Stella is big enough to take four people on a trip of up to 420 miles on a single charge. (By comparison, Tesla Motors says its Model S can go 240 miles on one charge.) In fact, Stella won first place in an electric car competition in Australia by travelling almost 1,900 miles powered by nothing but sunlight. Stella is still a hand-built prototype made of cutting-edge materials, but if all goes well, she’ll evolve into a mass-produced car that anyone can buy.