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Reaching Altitude: Prepare To Go Sky High!

On this journey you will go to Mount Everest and back, the home to many mountain goats and other rare species. The animals living here must cope with cold, lack of food, and steep rocky terrain.

A mountain is a large landform that rises above the surrounding land. They can have high elevations that produce a colder climate than the rest. There is no fixed shape for a mountain. But they usually have sharp, jagged edges, but the size, height and steepness can be different. Mount Everest, the higest mountain in the world, in the Himalayas of Asia, has a summit of 8,850 metres.

The formation of a mountain is the same as a volcano. The magma builds up pressure, whilst two tectonic plates push and rub each other, and in the end the magma explodes, pushing the two plates up in a triangular shape. As the lava made this happen, it doesn’t have enough time to burst out or come to the surface because the two plates have already fixed together. Scientists studying this never really know wether the end result is a mountain or a volcano.

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Too Cold To Handle: The Science Behind Brain Freeze

When you eat ice cream or something cold, you will probably experience brain freeze. It happens when you gulp a cold substance too quickly for your brain to cope with. Brain freeze is a way of telling your body to slow down and take it easy. It doesn’t feel particularly nice, but at least it works. Here’s how it happens: when you slurp up a really cold drink or eat ice cream too fast you are rapidly changing the temperature in the back of your throat, which feeds blood to the brain.  The brain can’t actually feel pain despite its many sensors, but actually brain freeze occurs on the outer layer of brain tissue, where the throat meets. When the cold hits, it causes a strange feeling which is what causes the pain you feel when you get brain freeze.