Amazing answers to your curious questions

Are toucans related to woodpeckers?

They belong to different families, but the same order: Piciformes. Woodpeckers make up about half of the 400 species of Piciformes, but toucans form a much smaller family of around 40 species. Woodpeckers and toucans share an arrangement of toes that have two pointing forward and two pointing back to help them grip branches. Piciformes are also unusual in not having down feathers, even as chicks. But belonging to the same order isn’t an especially close relationship. Toucans do use their huge beaks to reach into holes in hollow trees, but this is to steal eggs from other nests. They don’t drill through the bark and mostly eat fruit, unlike woodpeckers which are insectivores.

WHY IS TITAN SO ACTIVE?

Astronomers think that the Saturnian moon Titan’s unusual geological activity is down to a combination of its size, its composition and its position in Saturn’s system of moons. The second-largest satellite in the Solar System, Titan is composed of rock and ice with a much lower melting point than the rocks of the inner planets – low enough for ‘cryovolcanic’ activity to gradually reshape the surface over time. Titan’s size also allows it to retain a substantial amount of heat from the collisions that formed it. Until recently, astronomers thought that this was the main driving force behind Titan’s activity. But in 2012, maps of the moon’s gravity field from the Cassini probe showed its shape is ‘squashed’ rather than spherical. This means that different parts of Titan experience different tidal pulls from Saturn and other nearby moons as it orbits the planet over a 16-day cycle. This constant tugging at the interior is now thought to generate much of Titan’s internal heat.

WHAT IS BITCOIN AND WHO CREATED IT?

Bitcoin is a digital currency first described in 2008 by an anonymous developer with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin was created as a way of transferring funds internationally without having to pay bank charges or currency conversion fees.