Mount Beauty Secondary College

School News

Work Related Skills

WRS students are often on the lookout for ways to get practical experience that they can use in their work lives. These students worked together to check marquees in preparation for the upcoming Hoppet. 

Science Week

Decoding the Universe

This week we played science songs for the bell music, Year 7s completed an escape room, VCE biology students modelled DNA meiosis and JS82 modelled tectonic plates with layers of bread, jam and fossils.

Staff were treated to a brain break morning tea and quiz and luckily were able to correctly answer most of the questions!

Remember, science is all around you in the big and small things of life.  Some fun facts for you to ponder:

  1. Earth’s rotation is changing speed. It's actually slowing. This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
  2. The fear of long words is called Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. The 36-letter word was first used by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BCE to criticise those writers with an unreasonable penchant for long words. It was American poet Aimee Nezheukumatathil, possibly afraid of their own surname, who coined the term as we know it in 2000.
  3. Mount Everest isn't the tallest mountain on Earth. Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the twin volcanoes, are taller than Mount Everestt due to 4.2km of their heights being submerged underwater. The twin volcanoes measure a staggering 10.2km in total, compared to Everest’s paltry 8.8km.
  4. A horse normally has more than one horsepower. A study in 1993 showed that the maximum power a horse can produce is 18,000W, around 24 horsepower.
  5. Bananas are radioactive. Due to being rich in potassium, every banana is actually slightly radioactive thanks to containing the natural isotope potassium-40. Interestingly, your body contains around 16mg of potassium-40, meaning you’re around 280 times more radioactive than a banana already. Any excess potassium-40 you gain from a banana is excreted out within a few hours.