What would happen if you could take
an elevator to space?
Pack a toothbrush. This ride would last two weeks! Scientists believe the elevator car would
ascend a 60,000-mile-long cable that connects to a space station at over a hundred miles
an hour. By the time you approached the end, the force of gravity would’ve decreased. Then
you’d start to feel the effects of centrifugal force, which draws objects rotating in a circle
(in this case, you rotating with Earth) away from the circle’s center (in this scenario, the
planet’s core). This force would push you against the elevator’s ceiling. Once you reached
the station, you’d enter a waiting spaceship and blast off into the cosmos.
What would happen
if woolly mammoths
came back to life?
This might have mammoth effects. Some
think it could help curb global warming.
How? Herds of now-extinct mammoths
once lived on grasslands in and around the
Arctic. They helped maintain their habitat
by eating plants and, uh, depositing digested
seeds, which grew into new plants. After the
mammoths vanished, much of this grass did
too. Soil releases carbon dioxide, a gas that
warms the planet. Without plants to cover
the ground here, more gas can get into the
air. If mammoths returned, they might once
again spread seeds and create a new layer of
vegetation that’d keep a lot of the gas from
entering the atmosphere. Soundswoollycool.What would happen
if you never
stopped growing?
You’d need a lot of custom-fitted clothing.
Not including growth spurts (during which
boys tend to grow more than girls), the
average growth rate for kids is 2.5 inches a
year until age 17 or so. That’s when genes—
genetic codes that determine traits—signal
the body to stop growing. On average a
fully grown male is five feet nine inches tall,
and a fully grown female is five feet four
inches tall. If you grew until the age of, say,
80, you’d add another 13 feet or so to your
height. That’d make you about as tall as a
two-story house!NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KIDS 7
BY CRISPIN BOYER ART BY JOE ROCCOTRY ONLINE
FEBRUARY 15-22.
natgeokids.com
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