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In this trick, you’ll wrap a shoelace around a pencil and a strip of cardboard. The string seems to pass straight through both, tearing the cardboard, but leaving the pencil untouched!

Voyager, Pathfinder, Cassini. Humanity has sent out dozens of plucky little space probes to explore our solar system. But when these robots need to call home, who’s listening in?

Feeling festive? This cool mathematical bauble is fun to make, and looks great too!

Picture this: you’ve just bought a nice little cake, just for you. Then your friends show up, wanting a piece. Lucky for you, mathematicians have developed some pretty cool ways of sharing.

Scientists have discovered a new Australian dinosaur, and it’s a big one! Several giant bones, some over one metre long, were uncovered near the town of Winton in central Queensland. But what’s got scientists all worked up isn’t what it looks like: it’s where it came from.

Let’s look at a few interesting patterns you can get by dividing. Some of these patterns need a lot of digits, so get the best calculator you can find.

Spare a thought for taxonomists. Their job is to separate life into groups, from the great kingdoms of plants to animals, all the way down to individual species. Sometimes they have an easy job. For example, brown bears are easy to distinguish from polar bears. Other times, the differences are harder to find

There are plenty of patterns inside a flower. Let’s follow one and see what drawing we get!

If you’ve ever flown overseas, you might have experienced jetlag. For example, daytime in London is night in Sydney, so your body can get very confused on a journey between the two. But jetlag isn’t just a human phenomenon, or even just an animal phenomenon. Turns out sunflowers can get jet lag too!

Tired of tic-tac-toe? Try Achi, a trickier game from the African country of Ghana.