Imagine a world without any lights – just the stars and the moon! Enchanting, isn’t it? Well, for the people of Sark, this is a reality. Yes! Sark, the smallest of the four Channel Islands, located 80 miles off the coast of England, has been officially recognised as the ‘World’s First Dark Sky Island’ by the International Dark-sky Association (IDA).

There are no streetlights on this island, nor are there any cars! Unbelievable but true. Even the locals have changed the lighting of their homes so that it doesn’t clash with the starlight. That means when night falls, one can see the glorious Milky Way with millions of stars dotting the night sky without any pollution marring its beauty. Simply marvellous! And reading this, one can’t help but wonder what the night sky in our cities once might have looked like!

Sure, we all know dogs can’t make out the difference between colours but did you know that sharks can’t, either? A recent study by Australian scientists found that sharks would be quite confused if it came to choosing between colours, even contrasting ones such as yellow and red. Why? Well, they studied the retinas of 17 shark species and found that they have only one (or none) type of cone cell.

Retinas use two main types of light-sensitive cells to allow animals to see: Rod cells help measure brightness, while various types of cone cells help distinguish colours. Of course, there are more than 400 species of sharks.

It is hard to imagine a dinosaur that’s not gigantic and ferocious but a team of palaeontologists from the University College London has discovered a fossil that’s not just small, but also single-fingered!

The new dinosaur species, titled Linhenykus monodactylus, was found in Inner Mongolia, China. It belongs to the Alvarezsauroidea, a branch of the carnivorous dinosaur group Theropoda, members of which later evolved into Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velicoraptors.

The team found that the dinosaur couldn’t have been heavier than a fully-grown parrot. Now, we really can’t imagine a dinosaur being compared to a parrot. Can we? Not only that, this particular species has just one claw, a feature that none of the other species possess.

You have already seen it in Star Trek and Harry Potter – a cloak that turns you invisible! And soon, this could be a reality.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have managed to turn a paper clip invisible! Here is how it was done. The team used a naturally forming crystal called calcite, which has extraordinary light bending abilities. By placing the crystals over the paper clip, it bounced light around it, rendering it totally invisible to the naked eye. Wondering whether it will ever be possible to turn a human being invisible?

Yes! This might happen soon! After all, earlier studies have only been able to turn really, really small objects invisible, thousands of times smaller than a paper clip. And now that the paper clip has been made invisible, let us hope an invisible cloak big enough for a person is made soon. Missing school won’t be such a difficult task then, right?