The reason that birds can sit unharmed on power lines is that no current flows through them because they are not completing the electrical circuit by sitting on one line only. Rather like water flowing down hill, electricity needs to flow down an electrical hill, otherwise known as a potential difference. So if you connect the plus side of a battery to the minus side current flows because there are lots of positive charges at the plus pole and very few at the negative, so the current flows to try to equal things out. So going back to the bird sitting on a power line, no current flows through the bird because it has the same charge as the wire it is sitting on. If it were to straddle a positive and a negative line, on the other hand, it would certainly be curtains ! Ditto if it put one leg on the ground and another leg on the wire. Under these circumstances there is a big difference between the amount of charge in the wire and the charge on the ground, so electricity would flow through the bird in an attempt to balance things out.

This is because the oil spreads out to form a very thin film on the surface of the water, but of varying thickness. In some places it is literally a molecule thick, whilst in other places it is much thicker. When light passes through the oil some of it is reflected back off the different layers of oil, whilst some carries on and is reflected off the surface of the water lying below. Because the light waves have now travelled different distances before being reflected they mix together producing a spectrum of colours - because the thickness of the oil layer varies. For the super intelligent the light spectrum occurs because, having travelled slightly different distances, some of the waves are now 'out of phase' and cancel each other out, producing dark spots, whilst others add together, producing lighter spots.

A mirage is a trick of light seen in hot places like deserts (hence the association with thirsty travellers) and road surfaces. Like the end of a rainbow (another light trick) you can never actually reach a mirage. They form because when air is heated up light rays pass through it more rapidly, causing them to bend, or refract, upwards. They bend upwards because warm air close to the road surface, for instance, allows the light to pass through more rapidly than cooler air higher up, but when the rays reach your eye they are interpreted as coming from the road surface (like a reflection), rather than the sky, and so you see a mirage.