Pinocchio plays pranks upon the kindly woodcarver Geppetto, is duped by the Fox and the Cat, kills the pedantic Talking Cricket, and narrowly escapes death, with the help of the blue-haired Fairy. A wooden puppet without strings, Pinocchio is a tragicomic figure, a poor, illiterate, naughty peasant boy who has few choices in life but usually chooses to shirk his responsibilities and get into trouble.
Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of our time, and is famous around the world because he wrote and talked about cosmology - the science of the universe - in a way that people could understand. He had a terrible disease called ALS, and for many years could only move and speak with the help of machines. But this did not stop him working to try and understand our world better. Will people travel in time one day? Where did the universe come from?
Imagine an animal with teeth as big as bananas - and a brain as big as an orange. Or a flying animal with wings as wide as a small plane. Think about a tail that could knock a man's head off, or a mouth with hundreds of teeth. Is it any surprise that people are interested in dinosaurs? Nobody has ever seen a living dinosaur, but millions of us go every year to stare at the bones of these enormous animals. In books, films, and games, we can't get enough of the secrets of the dinosaur world.
Thousands of years ago, people looked out across an ocean and asked themselves, 'What is on the other side?' And the bravest of them began to travel and find the answers - beautiful islands, frozen lands, different peoples... And there are still interesting questions about the oceans. Why does the water go up and down twice a day? Why do most animals and plants live near the land? And what can possibly live at the bottom of the ocean, thousands of metres down, where there is no light? Surely nothing can stay alive in a place like that
