Page 174 - How It Works - Book Of Amazing Answers To Curious Questions, Volume 05-15

Why were

the names of

the planets

chosen?

lanetary names in our Solar
PSystem are derived from
mythology – except for Earth,
which comes from Middle
English. Since five of the planets
can be seen by the naked eye,
they have been called many
things depending on the culture
over the centuries before their
current names became standard.
Uranus (previously thought to
have been a star) is the only
planet whose name comes from
Greek rather than Roman
mythology. Neptune’s
discoverers argued over who
could name it, while former
planet Pluto’s name was
suggested by an 11-year-old in
the UK. There were no planetary
naming rules until 1919, when
the International Astronomical
Ex-planet Pluto could have been called Union (IAU) formed. The IAU is
Atlas, Constance, Cronus, Minerva,
Percival or a number of other names currently in charge of naming all
celestial objects.

How did

speech evolve?

peech and language are two
Sseparate things, but their evolution
is linked. Humans are different from
other primates because our larynx
(voice box) is lower down in our throats.
Scientists think that this might have
helped early humans to sound bigger
and scarier than we really were. Having
a low larynx means that we can move
our tongues much more freely and
make a much wider range of sounds. In
the animal kingdom, whales use their
vocal repertoire to signal their
membership of a family group –
individuals learn songs from one
another, making it easy to spot an
outsider. One hypothesis is that early
human speech was used in much the
same way, evolving as a mechanism to Human speech is made possible
by our unusual anatomy
detect people who didn’t belong.

174 How It Works