Frost Magazine loves everything science so we are very excited about The Times and The Sunday Times launching a month-long campaign that will see both newspapers publish a series of inspirational guides, pullout posters and supplements designed to help readers and their families get smarter.

The ‘Instant Wisdom’ campaign kicks-off this weekend (09/09) in The Sunday Times with the first part of ‘100 Answers Every Grown Up Needs To Know’, a free supplement that gives parents all the tools necessary to answer those tricky questions children ask. The second part will be in The Sunday Times the following weekend.

The Times will also run an eight-part ‘How to Be Smarter’ series which includes grammar training for grown ups; brain trainers; guidance on how to do a cryptic crossword; puzzles and a summary of the best bits of Shakespeare. The Sunday Times will consolidate the series with a double-sided activity poster featuring 75 facts and skills every child needs to know.

The campaign will culminate with The Sunday Times University Guide, the definitive university rankings providing prospective students with all the information they need to make the next step after school or college.

Paul Croughton, Commissioning Editor at The Sunday Times Magazine and Editor of the 100 Answers Every Grown Up Needs To Know supplement, said: “The Times and The Sunday Times are renowned for both authoritative and entertaining education and learning content. We publish the definitive universities and schools guides and our quizzes, crosswords and brainteasers are hugely popular with readers. The Instant Wisdom campaign will amalgamate and develop some of this great content over the course of four weeks to give families up and down the country a reason to come together, learn something new and help each other get smarter.”

The campaign is supported by UK-wide digital outdoor advertising, a radio promotional campaign and an interactive Instant Wisdom quiz free on The Sunday Times website.

Get smarter with these five questions and answers from 100 Answers Every Grown Up Needs To Know – published free inside The Sunday Times this weekend:

1. Is time travel possible? Amazingly, the known laws of physics don’t rule it out. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it is theoretically possible to create a “wormhole” in the fabric of spacetime, allowing us to tunnel through to other eras. Obviously, nobody knows how to do it yet, and the results would be a bit mind-boggling. Suppose you jumped into a time machine, travelled back to when your grandfather was young… and accidentally landed on him before he’d met your grandmother. Then your parents could not exist, and neither could you — yet there you are, having flattened grandad. Many scientists think this “grandfather paradox” rules out time travel. Another bit of evidence is that we have yet to meet anyone from the future who has successfully travelled back in time — unless, of course, they’re here, but don’t like to talk about it. There is a way anyone can see into the past, though: look up. Gazing at Polaris, the north star, is to see it as it was back when Elizabeth I ruled England.

2. How big is the universe? Bigger than you can possibly imagine. In fact, the ancient Greeks came up with an argument for why the universe must be infinitely big. If it were only finite, it would have an edge, but that would mark the boundary with something else — which would then be part of the universe, and so on forever. Yet astronomers now know that, although the true universe may be infinite, we can see only a part of it. That’s because, ever since it was created in the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, it has been expanding, with distant galaxies racing away from each other at an ever-faster rate. That means there’s a distance at which these galaxies seem to be receding from us at the speed of light — and so remain forever invisible. This marks the edge of the visible universe, and it’s about 46 billion light years away.

3. Is the Bermuda triangle real? Sure: it’s a triangular expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, spanning about 400,000 sq miles between Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. But the idea that “bad things happen” to those who enter the triangle is another story. It began in the 1950s, with reports that five torpedo bombers and their 14 crew had vanished off the Florida coast in 1945. Soon people began looking into it, and that case, Flight 19, was joined by other odd events dating back to the mysterious loss in 1918 of the American supply ship Cyclops, with all 306 on board, near Bermuda. By the 1970s, a catalogue of strange disappearances had been linked to the triangle — along with a host of theories, ranging from rogue waves to alien abductions. The most likely, although not very exciting, explanation is simple probability: if you draw a huge triangle over one of the busiest shipping and flight zones in the world, chances are it’ll have seen a few odd events over the course of a century or so.

4. How do planes fly? When the Wright brothers made their first powered flight, in 1903, they had little understanding of the science that kept their ramshackle craft aloft. Yet amazingly, even today, many explanations of how planes fly are just plain wrong. Most talk about how the air passing over the curved top of a wing gets squeezed, and so moves faster than that passing underneath — creating a pressure difference that generates lift. But, while this sounds plausible, it’s based on laws of physics that just don’t apply in the case of air. The real answer to why aircraft fly is buried in something called the Navier-Stokes equations on fluid mechanics — formulas so complicated, nobody has ever completely solved them. This is a real problem for wing designers, who have been forced to rely on various mathematical tricks, scale models and computer simulations to design efficient wings. While they succeed in keeping planes aloft, the fact remains that there’s no simple way to explain how. Weird, no?

5. Is anything wetter than water? Weirdly, yes. To a scientist, the wetness of a liquid depends on its surface tension — that is, the tendency of its molecules to stick together, rather than spread over and into a surface. (The lower the surface tension, the wetter the liquid.) Oddly enough, water isn’t especially wet as liquids go: many others, including alcohol and acetic acid (vinegar), are much wetter. Water itself can be made wetter, though — by using “surfactants” such as soap, which reduce surface tension.