Prematurely overcome by the holiday spirit, we failed to send a round-up last week. Apologies for that. One of the most popular questions from that week – also with a holiday flavour – was what to do during a lightning storm at the beach. Are you safer on the beach or in the water? The discussion contains a fair bit of disagreement, but some great tips for optimum lightning-avoidance behaviour.

This week's questions started with whether the wind affects sound waves (it does, but not in the way you might expect), and whether the foods we crave are the ones our bodies actually need (let's hope so).

Here's one for the physics-minded: ever wondered why most rocket launch pads are sited near the equator? It's to make the most of the rotational velocity of the Earth's surface, which is greatest at the equator. But can you think of any other ways we exploit this tremendous energy source? So far, not many readers can.

If you've ever been caught by brambles while walking in the countryside, you might be curious why the thorns of roses and blackberries are designed to catch animals rather than repel them. Could it be that roses are actually carnivorous?

Finally, August is the month for… meteor-hunting. The Perseid meteor shower is at its height on 12 August. One of our readers reckons he can hear meteors. Is that possible?

Enjoy your weekend.

Michael (acting for Kat)

Can your voice really be "snatched" away by the wind, or is it just that the sound of the wind covers the sound of your voice. If wind does affect sound waves, can it also affect light?

If you took some incompressable material that takes up, say, exactly 1 liter, and you cooled them to the point where all of the atoms became Bose-Einstein Condensates (sorry if im using the name in a wrong way), what would happen if you compressed the container/forced the condensates into another container with a volume of 1 cup, and then heated the material (so when the waves become atoms again, there is not enough space for all the atoms)? Would the atoms break the container, or become some sort of superimposed atom, or something else?

I am exploring the properties of waves when traveling thorough a transparent medium. I observed that when white light is shone through a prism the blue light refracts more than the red light in the spectrum. This is due to the interaction between the blue light and the molecules within that medium. 

I wish to know if anyone can give me more details the nature of this interaction.

A more through explanation as to why wavelength of the light effects the speed through a medium would be appreciated and any relevant laws or theories as this is a mystery to me.

i have seen that when a sine wave is applied to a shear-thickening non-newtonian fluid, a standing wave is created that looks quite cool. Are there any songs that could produce the same effect, and if not, why not?

Tsunamis move fast, and tow-in surfers use various vehicles to catch large waves. A friend has a son who wants to ride a 100-foot wave. Is this possible? How big of a wave could an unassisted surfer catch?

I was in Caswell bay, a good surfing beach just west of Swansea, South Wales. The waves come ashore as in any other beach. Similarly, beaches on the opposite side of the Bristol Channel, 23 miles away,  also receive waves coming onshore - in the opposite direction to my waves in Caswell. How are waves generated in a funnel-like Bristol channel that impinge on both opposite shores. Surely, the wind does not have enough energy or distance to generate these - does it? If so, the wind must blow in opposite directions from mid-channel - surley impossible!

Young’s dual slit experiment shows particles to have a wave-like nature as photons or electrons create an interference pattern when fired through the slits. Even when particles are fired individually through the slits, an interference pattern still builds up implying each particle must go through both slits and interfere with itself - clearly a pathway that is hard to imagine! However wouldn’t performing this experiment in a cloud chamber using electrons (again fired individually) reveal the electrons’ pathway(s)? Also would turning the cloud (or bubble) chamber on and off cause the interference pattern to appear and disappear (I have heard that identifying the slit through which an electron passes removes the interference pattern but would this be the case in the cloud chamber as proposed here?). Many thanks.

When I charged a flash camera beside a radio set to AM, I noticed a series of sounds produced, similar to that of the harmonics of a sliding square waveform with frequencies above 16000 Hz. How do they interfere and what part of the camera generates radio waves?