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We think we are the strongest animals on Earth. But is that really true? This is the surprising story of bacteria and viruses and the places they can live, how fast they can grow and how dangerous they can be. Bacteria and viruses can kill millions of people in just a few years (1470 words)

The story and the film are famous. A huge ship was travelling from Britain to the United States a hundred years ago. It was the largest ship in the world and it was full with more than two thousand people - rich and poor. But it hit an iceberg and most people died. This is the story of The Titanic (560 words)

Old age is not just a biological state but also a social concept. What was considered ‘old’ thirty years ago is a normal life span today and dying at a great age in Bangladesh might be a tragically young death in Japan. Governments want us to work longer but employers often want young recruits. Read about some of these issues in this article (820 words).

Geronimo was an Apache fighter, one of the last American Indians to fight against the coming of Europeans to the United States. He lived to be an old man, forbidden to travel and a prisoner on a small area of land. But, when he was young, he made many white Americans afraid and his name was used as a way of stopping children from behaving badly. This is his story (600 words).

The Ku Klux Klan started after the southern states of America lost the war against the North in 1865. They wanted black people to be slaves. They lost that fight, but they tried to keep their old way of life by stopping black people from voting. They raped the women, burnt their homes and killed many men. At one time, there were thousands of Ku Klux Klan but today that number is probably under 5,000. This is the story of the group (700 words).

Cricket is the most English of games, but it is far more popular in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh than it is in its home country. The Scots, Irish and Welsh never enjoyed it and foreigners can’t believe that a game can last for days and, in the end, there is sometimes no winner. (950 words)

A brief history of antibiotics from the days when people ate spiders’ webs for their antibiotic qualities to the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in the months before the Second World War. Antibiotics have changed medicine and made the world a much safer place but many diseases can now escape the effects of this wonder drug. (425 words).

Dr. Crippen’s name was well-known in Britain long after he was hanged for murdering his wife. But did he really do it? He behaved like a guilty man. He tried to run away to Canada with his lover and we know his wife was sleeping with other men. But when the body found at his home was examined by a research team, they claimed it was actually a man. (860 words)

Al-Biruni was a Muslim scholar who was born at the end of the 10th century and wrote over 140 books. He was interested in astrology, pharmacy, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, physics, mineralogy and languages. Read about his remarkable achievements and the world he lived in (1,330 words).

Every night we go to sleep and, in the morning, get up again. But we do not understand a lot about why we need sleep or what our bodies do when we are in bed. This story tells you something about sleep and the problems that happen when we do not sleep enough (830 words).

Johnannes Gutenberg changed the world. Before him, people copied books by hand. They wrote every word and started the page again if they made a mistake. Of course, books were very, very expensive and so nobody learnt to read. Gutenberg made a machine that made books cheap and easy to copy fast – very fast. This is his story (420 words)...

Martin Luther King is the only American with a national holiday for his birthday. But he was not a great soldier or president or businessman. He was black and fought for his people to have the same rights as whites. Read about his story here (830 words).

In 1945, the Second World War was coming to an end. The Germans stopped fighting in Europe and Hitler was dead. But, in the East, the Japanese preferred to die as soldiers. The Americans knew that many of their soldiers were going to die fighting. So, they dropped the first atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the story of the hundreds of thousands that died (400 words).

For Lavoisier in revolutionary France and the religious socialist, Priestley, in England, science meant very different things. For the Frenchman who devised the metric system, it was about systematising our knowledge of the world. For the Englishman, it was all part of realising God’s great plan for us. The paths of the two men crossed but their beliefs were very different. (1,850 words)

Conan Doyle was an extraordinary man: he looked after his sick wife for many, many years and never touched his lady friend until his wife was dead. He investigated criminal cases, like his detective, Sherlock Holmes, where he thought there was injustice. He was an accomplished sportsman and he believed in fairies and dead spirits. (1580 words).