Science News for Kids articles from January 2007

Science News for Kids archives from January 2007

Morphing a wing to save fuel.(FlexSys)
January 3, 2007... Airplanes of the future might change the shape of their wings as they fly. A Michigan-based company called FlexSys has created shape-shifting wings that recently performed well in flight tests. And these special wings do more than just...

The littlest lemurs.
January 3, 2007... Ziggy is not amused. The tiny creature has already been trapped in a box and hauled through the rainforest. Some of his hair has been clipped. Now, he crouches on the floor of a cage, while three pairs of human eyes stare at him. One of...

Titan's massive mountains.
January 3, 2007... Saturn's moon Titan has long fascinated scientists with its thick atmosphere, liquid-filled lakes, textured landscape, and other Earth-like qualities. New images now reveal the largest mountains yet discovered on Titan. The peaks are 1.5...

A star's belt of dust and rocks.(University of Florida)
January 10, 2007... Between Mars and Jupiter, a band of rocks and dust orbits our sun. Astronomers call it the asteroid belt, and they think that it contains scraps of rock left over from a time when the planets formed nearly 5 billion years ago. New evidence...

Fossil forests.
January 10, 2007... Fossil trees have a story to tell. Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. The first traces of life appeared roughly 3.7 billion years ago. Land plants finally emerged more than 3 billion years later. Our immediate human...

G-tunes with a message.(gibbons)
January 10, 2007... Making music can be fun and relaxing. For gibbons in the forests of Southeast Asia, singing is also a way to communicate. New research shows that these small apes vary the order of the notes in their tunes to get across certain messages....

A giant flower's new family.(rafflesia)(Brief article)
January 17, 2007... You may know someone who's taller, shorter, blonder, or more artistic than all of his or her relatives. The phenomenon can make you wonder at the strange ways in which family trees sometimes work. Rafflesia plants present a similar puzzle....

Shrimpy invaders.(crustaceans)
January 17, 2007... A new type of shrimplike crustacean has appeared in the Great Lakes, and that's not necessarily a good thing. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These crustaceans, called mysid shrimp, normally live in rivers near the western coast of the Caspian...

Strange Neptune.
January 17, 2007... Astronomers look for rules. They seek theories and develop models that tidily explain how planets form, how moons move, and how the universe came to look the way it does. But these scientists also keep finding exceptions to their rules. In...

Chicken eggs as drug factories.(Brief article)
January 24, 2007... Medicine comes in lots of different packages. Painkillers in a tablet can make your headache go away. Antibiotic cream from a tube can prevent your cuts from becoming infected. But can medicine come packaged in chicken eggs? A team of...

Island extinctions.(Australia)
January 24, 2007... People arrived in Australia about 50,000 years ago. Soon after, many of the island's large mammals disappeared, new evidence suggests. Among the animals that went extinct were several species of kangaroos and wombats and some other...

Video game violence.
January 24, 2007... We read every message that readers submit to Science News for Kids, and we learn a lot from what you say. Two articles that really got you talking looked at video games. One story argued that video games can be good for you (see "What Video...

An ancient feathered biplane.(Microraptor gui)
January 31, 2007... When the Wright Brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk in 1903, they flew a plane with two sets of wings, one below the other. Their feat went down in history as the first successful flight by a heavier-than-air aircraft. New evidence suggests...

Odor-chasing penguins.
January 31, 2007... The smell of rotten eggs probably makes you cringe. But, for penguins, this smell might mean there's a meal nearby. New research shows that penguins are attracted to this rotten-egg smell and probably use it when foraging for food in the...

Rocking the house.(model houses)
January 31, 2007... Imagine what it might be like if you were in your bedroom during an earthquake. Your bed shakes. Books and stuffed animals tumble from shelves. Your computer monitor skitters across your desk and crashes to the floor. The walls creak and groan...