More Links from Mystery Science

Mystery Science has several extra activities to use after lessons. Check them out, and share with family and friends if you'd like!

Can you identify these animals by the sounds they make?

Here's a video with the sounds of animals in the woods at night. Your job is to guess what animal is making each sound. We recommend stopping the video after 15 seconds of each sound to give yourself  a chance to guess.
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The video is 2-1/2 minutes long and includes six different animals. Ready? Play it here.

Why don't we see everything upside-down?

Light makes an upside-down picture on the retina of your model eye. The picture on the retina of your real eye is also upside down. So why don’t you see everything upside-down? Ask your students if they can think of an experiment that might answer this question.

Here's an experiment some scientists tried. They had someone wear eyeglasses that flipped the picture in their eyes so it was right-side-up. To find out what happened, watch this video.

It turns out that the answer is not in your eyes -- but in your brain. Your brain learns to make sense of the picture in your eyes -- whether it's right-side-up or upside-down.

An Online Vision Simulator

 This online simulator lets you see what happens to an image when you change the distance between the lens and the object.

A gecko's eyes in the dark

Here's a video of a gecko in the dark, and in the light... notice how much light his eyes let in when it's dark! Click here to view the video.

A couple of online reflex games

  • Slap Shot lets you practice reacting like a hockey goalie. Use the arrow keys on the keyboard to choose where to block (left, right, up, or down).
  • Zap a Fly lets you see how you'd do as a hungry frog, trying to catch a fly for dinner. Test your reflexes with sight and with sound.

Some MysteryDoug videos