20 Questions with Dr Karl

On Wednesday, we were lucky enough to have a zoom session with Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. Some of the questions we asked were:

• Is there a bigger star than the sun? (Yes!)
• When you are on a roller coaster, why does it feel like your insides are crammed at the bottom of your torso? (Basically because that is what is actually happening.)
• Can you make extinct animals come back to life? (They are trying and have tried with the mammoth, but are having no luck.)
• What happens if you go through a black hole? (No one knows, but they believe a process called 'spaghettification' which is where an object is stretched in the direction of the black hole (and compressed perpendicular to it as it falls).
• What is happening when we feel like we are falling during our sleep? (The Moro reflex is a remnant of our tree-swinging days! For our primate ancestors, research suggests, the Moro reflex helped monkeys not fall from trees. So when you are sleeping, for a minute, your body thinks you're falling. In response, the brain causes your muscles to tense as a way to "catch yourself" before falling down — and that makes your body jerk AKA the Moro reflex.)