As the weather starts to warm in Australia, you might notice the pleasant flutter of butterflies in your garden during the day. And perhaps if you’ve left a porch light on during the night, you will see a flurry of moths have gathered around it.

To an untrained eye, these fluttering insects can seem similar. And indeed, both are from the order of insects called Lepidoptera, which roughly translates to “scaly wings”. That’s because the wings of butterflies and moths are covered in microscopic scales. These scales are important for providing these insects with their beautiful colours, and they’re the cause of the “dust” that often comes off moths when handled or found in the back of a pantry.

But there are some key differences between these two kinds of creatures. So what makes a moth a moth and a butterfly a butterfly?

What is a moth?

When we think about moths, we’re often thinking about little, brown, (definitely not) boring insects in our pantries, and flying around our porch lights. However, there is so much variation in this group of insects, given there are about 22,000 species in Australia.

Moths generally have straight antennae. But if they’re males, their antennae are often fluffy and feather-like. These fluffy antennae are used to help them find mates from large distances.

Most moths are nocturnal, preferring to fly at night. And many flowers are adapted to be pollinated by night-flying insects such as moths. Dragonfruit, for example, benefit from pollination by moths and the flowers bloom at night.

Because they fly at night, moths can’t use the same visual cues, such as sunlight, that butterflies use to navigate. Instead, they use a range of non-visual cues to know where they are in the dark. For example, Australian bogong moths, which can travel up to 1,000 kilometres during their migrations, are known to use magnetic fields and stars to navigate.

Many moths are excellent at camouflage. Historically, there have been stories surrounding how peppered moths became darker due to the industrial revolution, but there are much more impressive moths! For example, moths from the genus Eudocima manage to look like a curled leaf with completely flat wings. Bee hawk-moths can trick us into thinking they’re bees.

Due to the significant amount of time they spend camouflaging and travelling at night, there’s less value to moths to be extremely colourful. So many moth species are duller in colour than their flamboyant cousins, the butterflies.

They’re also less hungry. Generally speaking, lepidopterans have a long coiled mouthpart to help them feed on nectar (and sometimes other things, including corpses).

However, many moths spend so much time feeding as caterpillars, that as adult moths they don’t have mouthparts. They live short adult lives that include mating and starving to death.

What is a butterfly?

Butterflies are the charismatic, popular members of the insect world, and with good reason. They come in a range of colours, and can be large and relatively easy to see. However, there are a lot less butterflies in Australia compared to moths, approximately 450 species.

So what makes a butterfly a butterfly?

The main factor that determines a butterfly is its clubbed antennae. Unlike those of moths, butterfly antennae consist of a long thread with a bead at the end. However, this can be pretty hard to see while they are fluttering around!

Butterflies are also day flying. This drastically changes how they look and behave in comparison to moths. Butterflies come in a range of bright and beautiful colours because they can be seen during the day.

Some butterflies are colourful simply to attract mates. Some, such as monarch butterflies, have aposematic displays, which aim to warn off predators by advertising the butterfly’s potential to be poisonous. Others, such as European swallowtails use deimatic displays, aimed to startle predators by imitating something scary like a face.

There are also examples of caterpillars that mimic bird poo, but that’s less of a defining factor.

There are always exceptions to the rules

We can’t talk about moths without discussing some of the species that don’t necessarily follow all the rules. There are many brightly coloured moths, including the Madagascan sunset moth and the heliotrope moth.

To make things more confusing there are also groups of moths that have hardly any scales on their wings, including clearwing moths.

Not all moths fly around at night, either. Tiger moths, for example, are frequently seen flying during the daytime, and are brightly coloured.

So sometimes, it can be really hard to determine where the line is between a moth and a butterfly.

How can we help moths and butterflies?

Our fluttering insects face many threats, including pesticide use, climate change and habitat loss. Planting a range of flowers in your garden can help provide food and habitat for moths and butterflies.

You can also get involved in citizen science, by uploading sightings of insects you see on apps like iNaturalist. If you’re interested in learning more about the grand travel of bogong moths, take photos of ones you see and upload them to Bogong Watch.

Caitlyn Forster, Associate Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

Who invented the light bulb? – Preben, age 5, New York City

When people name the most important inventions in history, light bulbs are usually on the list. They were much safer than earlier light sources, and they made more activities, for both work and play, possible after the Sun went down.

More than a century after its invention, illustrators still use a lit bulb to symbolize a great idea. Credit typically goes to inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison, who created the first commercial light and power system in the United States.

But as a historian and author of a book about how electric lighting changed the U.S., I know that the actual story is more complicated and interesting. It shows that complex inventions are not created by a single genius, no matter how talented he or she may be, but by many creative minds and hands working on the same problem.

Making light − and delivering it

In the 1870s, Edison raced against other inventors to find a way of producing light from electric current. Americans were keen to give up their gas and kerosene lamps for something that promised to be cleaner and safer. Candles offered little light and posed a fire hazard. Some customers in cities had brighter gas lamps, but they were expensive, hard to operate and polluted the air.

When Edison began working on the challenge, he learned from many other inventors’ ideas and failed experiments. They all were trying to figure out how to send a current through a thin carbon thread encased in glass, making it hot enough to glow without burning out.

In England, for example, chemist Joseph Swan patented an incandescent bulb and lit his own house in 1878. Then in 1881, at a great exhibition on electricity in Paris, Edison and several other inventors demonstrated their light bulbs.

Edison’s version proved to be the brightest and longest-lasting. In 1882 he connected it to a full working system that lit up dozens of homes and offices in downtown Manhattan.

But Edison’s bulb was just one piece of a much more complicated system that included an efficient dynamo – the powerful machine that generated electricity – plus a network of underground wires and new types of lamps. Edison also created the meter, a device that measured how much electricity each household used, so that he could tell how much to charge his customers.

Edison’s invention wasn’t just a science experiment – it was a commercial product that many people proved eager to buy.

Inventing an invention factory

As I show in my book, Edison did not solve these many technical challenges on his own.

At his farmhouse laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison hired a team of skilled technicians and trained scientists, and he filled his lab with every possible tool and material. He liked to boast that he had only a fourth grade education, but he knew enough to recruit men who had the skills he lacked. Edison also convinced banker J.P. Morgan and other investors to provide financial backing to pay for his experiments and bring them to market.

Historians often say that Edison’s greatest invention was this collaborative workshop, which he called an “invention factory.” It was capable of launching amazing new machines on a regular basis. Edison set the agenda for its work – a role that earned him the nickname “the wizard of Menlo Park.”

Here was the beginning of what we now call “research and development” – the network of universities and laboratories that produce technological breakthroughs today, ranging from lifesaving vaccines to the internet, as well as many improvements in the electric lights we use now.

Sparking an electric revolution

Many people found creative ways to use Edison’s light bulb. Factory owners and office managers installed electric light to extend the workday past sunset. Others used it for fun purposes, such as movie marquees, amusement parks, store windows, Christmas trees and evening baseball games.

Theater directors and photographers adapted the light to their arts. Doctors used small bulbs to peer inside the body during surgery. Architects and city planners, sign-makers and deep-sea explorers adapted the new light for all kinds of specialized uses. Through their actions, humanity’s relationship to day and night was reinvented – often in ways that Edison never could have anticipated.

Today people take for granted that they can have all the light they need at the flick of a switch. But that luxury requires a network of power stations, transmission lines and utility poles, managed by teams of trained engineers and electricians. To deliver it, electric power companies grew into an industry monitored by insurance companies and public utility regulators.

Edison’s first fragile light bulbs were just one early step in the electric revolution that has helped create today’s richly illuminated world.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Ernest Freeberg, Professor of History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Who invented art? – Grace, aged nine, Belfast, UK

Before we can answer this question, we need to think about another one: “what is art?” Art is something people make to share ideas or feelings. It can make others think or feel something too. Art can be many things including music, stories, paintings or drawings.

Cave paintings are often called the first art ever made. However, it’s possible the people who created the paintings thought of them as mysterious and powerful, quite different from art as we think of it today.

So who made them, why did they make them, and where can we find them? In a cave called Chauvet in southern France, archaeologists found drawings of animals such as woolly rhinos and mammoths that died out over 10,000 years ago. The people who made the drawings used black charcoal and red ochre – a colour made from crushed-up rocks that were chewed and spat into the artist’s hand, then pressed against the cave walls. Similar cave paintings have been found in Australia, India and Somaliland.

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation that gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.com and make sure you include the asker’s first name, age and town or city. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our very best.

Some people think the cave paintings weren’t just for fun or decoration. They believe the drawings were supposed to be a kind of “magic”. By drawing animals like deer or bison, they argue, the person who made the picture (maybe a hunter) thought it would give them magical power over the animal they were hoping to catch.

Early thinking about art

A long time ago, a Greek thinker named Aristotle said that the point of art was to imitate the world around us. For him, art wasn’t just painting or drawing – it also included acting and even giving speeches. Because artists used their hands to make things, people thought of them like workers or craftspeople – similar to cooks, hairdressers, or blacksmiths.

In 13th- and 14th-century Europe, art was mostly connected to the church, and was made to help people feel closer to God. Artists were part of groups called guilds, based on the kind of work they did, and people saw them more as skilled workers than as creative individuals.

It wasn’t until the 15th and 16th centuries, known as the Renaissance in Europe, that artists began to see themselves as creators, not just craftsmen. A big change happened in 1436 when a man named Leon Battista Alberti wrote a famous book called On Painting, which claimed that art was just as important as poetry and science. His ideas had a huge effect in the city of Florence in Italy, where three very famous artists worked: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.

People started to think more about artists as special individuals, which was shown in another important book, Lives of the Artists, written by Giorgio Vasari in 1550.

Art began to be divided into two groups. The first was called the “fine arts”, which included painting, sculpture and drawing. These were seen as more important because they expressed big ideas and emotions. The second group was called the “decorative arts”, like glass-making, wood-carving and book decorations. These were thought to be less important because they were more about looking nice or being useful.

Changing how people think about art

In the late 19th century, people started to like the decorative arts more, because artists wanted to focus on handmade things instead of factory-made items. But painting was still seen as the most important kind of art. Then, in 1914, a French artist named Marcel Duchamp changed how people thought about art.

He started using everyday objects and turning them into art just by choosing them and signing them. He called these “readymades”. His most famous one was called Fountain – it was actually a type of toilet (a urinal) that he signed with a fake name, “R. Mutt”, and tried to put in an art show in New York in 1917. Duchamp said that picking an ordinary object and calling it art was enough to make it art, because the artist made the choice.

Duchamp helped change art by showing that it isn’t just about painting or making statues – it’s also about ideas.

Today, many artists use their work to talk about important issues and to make people think. In this way, they are no different from the artists of the past – such as the first cave dwellers who exerted power over their prey, or Duchamp, who challenged the very meaning of art.

And so the answer to the question “who invented art?” is quite simple. Humankind invented art – from the moment we were able to trace a pattern in the sand, or transfer a simple idea to the wall of a cave.

Frances Fowle, Personal Chair of Nineteenth-Century Art, History of Art, University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

What is meant by solar storm and solar wind? – Nihal, age 11, Amalapuram, India

Every day on Earth, you experience weather. You feel the wind blowing and see clouds move across the sky. Sometimes there are storms where the wind gets really strong, it might rain, or there might be thunder and lightning.

Did you know that there’s weather in space too? It all starts with the Sun.

The Sun: The bright star in our solar system

The Sun is a very hot, very big ball of gas at the center of our solar system. Its surface can reach a blistering 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius). That’s nearly five times hotter than lava that spews from volcanoes on Earth, and just like lava, the Sun glows from the heat.

The Sun is made up of what solar physicists like us call plasma.

Normal gases, like the air you breathe on Earth, are made up of atoms bouncing around. Atoms consist of a positively charged bundle of particles called the nucleus and negatively charged particles called electrons. The nucleus and the electrons are tightly stuck together so that atoms are overall neutral – that is, they have no charge.

A gas becomes a plasma when the atoms it’s made of become so hot that their negatively charged electrons split apart from their positively charged nuclei. Now that the charged particles are separated from each other, the plasma can conduct electricity, and magnetic fields may pull the plasma or push it away.

Solar wind blows out of the Sun all the time

Sometimes, the Moon lines up with Sun, blocking it from view and turning the sky dark. This phenomenon is called a total solar eclipse. During an eclipse, you can see faint, wispy structures surrounding the Moon that extend across the sky. In that moment, what you are seeing is the Sun’s atmosphere: the corona.

The corona can reach millions of degrees, which is much hotter than the Sun’s surface. In fact, the corona is so hot that the particles shoot out of the Sun, escaping from the Sun’s gravity, engulfing the entire solar system. This stream of plasma is called the solar wind.

The solar wind’s invisible, continuous gust of plasma fills a bubble in space that extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto. It can reach up to 2 million miles per hour (3 million kilometers per hour) – at that speed, the solar wind would take less than a minute to circle the Earth. For comparison, the International Space Station takes 90 minutes to go around the Earth.

While it’s hard to see the solar wind directly in photos once it leaves the corona, we can measure the gas directly with instruments in space. Scientists have recently gotten up close and personal with it by sending missions such as the Parker Solar Probe closer to the Sun than ever before. The Parker Solar Probe flies directly into the solar wind and measures the gas directly just as it escapes the Sun – like a weather station.

The Parker Solar Probe also has a specialized camera that points sideways to see the Sun’s light as it scatters off the solar wind. Light scattering is the same process that makes the sky blue on Earth.

Big solar explosions

The solar wind surrounds and engulfs the Earth and other planets all the time, but most of the time it is safely guided around us by our planet’s magnetic field. However, occasionally the Sun also generates huge explosions that release big clouds of plasma into our solar system, some of which are directed toward Earth. These massive events are called coronal mass ejections.

Compared to the solar wind, which is always blowing, coronal mass ejections are short-lived but extreme. You can think of them as solar storms. Solar storms also involve one important force that doesn’t really play a role in the weather on Earth: magnetism.

The Sun is like a giant magnet. All magnets create what we call magnetic field lines, which are lines along which charged particles such as plasma have an easy time traveling. The Sun’s magnetic field lines can be very twisted, and the solar wind and coronal mass ejections deform and drag them outward from the Sun.

When these solar storms reach Earth, their coiled magnetic fields can sometimes interact with our planet’s own magnetic field and cause disturbances called space weather.

Space weather is caused by the Sun

The Earth has a magnetic field and a protective bubble: the magnetosphere. The magnetosphere shields us from the Sun’s solar wind and solar storms, acting like a force field to keep living things safe from the energetic particles released by the Sun.

Most of the time this protective bubble works so well that you can’t tell that there is anything special happening out in space. During particularly big storms, however, some solar wind plasma can make it down into the Earth’s atmosphere. As coronal mass ejections pass over Earth, their magnetic field can interact with Earth’s magnetic field. The Sun and Earth’s magnetic field lines untangle and rearrange, and for a short while these fields can link together and let the Sun’s plasma in.

When this happens, it can cause big magnetic storms all over the world. This interaction between ejections from the Sun and the Earth is what scientists refer to as space weather.

Space weather is just like the weather on Earth, generated by its atmosphere. It is important for scientists to understand and predict this space weather, as it can lead to power blackouts, interrupt communication and even cause satellites to prematurely fall down to Earth.

Besides these dangers though, space weather can create beautiful light shows in the sky called Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, and Southern Lights, or aurora australis. You can observe these if you’re near the North or South Poles. If you ever get a chance to see them, remember what you’re seeing is space weather, the result of eruptions and solar wind from the Sun.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Yeimy J. Rivera, Researcher in Astrophysics, Smithsonian Institution; Rosa Tatiana Niembro Hernández, Astrophysicist, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Smithsonian Institution, and Samuel Badman, Researcher in Astrophysics, Smithsonian Institution

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.