Science News for Kids articles from March 2006

Science News for Kids archives from March 2006

Big woman of the distant past.
March 1, 2006... If you want to know how tall you'll be, take a look at your adult relatives. My whole family is small, and I stopped growing at 5 feet 2 inches. My tall friends, on the other hand, have lanky limbs, just like their parents do. Usually, they...

Coral gardens.
March 1, 2006... On their first visit to Davidson Seamount in 2002, scientists realized that they had discovered a very unusual place. What was once an underwater volcano has become home to an unexpectedly diverse community of enormous and colorful sea...

Storm on Saturn.(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Saturn is a stormy place, and a spacecraft recently photographed the most powerful squall ever seen on the ringed planet. The spacecraft, called Cassini, has been orbiting and inspecting Saturn since July 2004. The first signs of this storm...

Cannibal crickets.
March 8, 2006... It sounds like the makings of a creepy movie. Swarms of insects band together and march across the landscape. They crawl over everything in their path, and they make an eerie rustling sound as they move. Along the way, they eat each other when...

Spotlight on an exploding star.(Brief article)
March 8, 2006... The catastrophic collapse of a star is attracting a lot of attention right now. Astronomers were drawn to the distant explosion by a gamma-ray burst--radiation of extremely high energy. They then detected the fiery glow of the exploding...

Taking a spill for science.
March 8, 2006... A cartoon character slips on a banana peel. On a TV show featuring home videos, people spin and tumble while trying to dance on a slippery floor. Your friend topples into a swimming pool while retrieving a beach ball. In such cases,...

A satellite of your own.
March 15, 2006... A rocket soars into space. It releases a satellite, which goes into orbit around Earth. The satellite begins collecting data and sending signals. You listen in on the information coming from outer space, proud that you played a role in...

A volcano's deadly ash.(Brief article)
March 15, 2006... Every few hundred years, a sleeping giant in southern Italy awakens with a bang, spewing volcanic ash across the countryside. The volcano, called Mount Vesuvius, formed 25,000 years ago. During its most explosive eruptions, the volcano...

Predicting solar storms.
March 15, 2006... The sun is a lot more than a giant ball of hot gas. Its surface is speckled with dark spots and roiled by energy-packed storms that shoot out massive clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields. Predicting when such solar storms occur...

How much babies know.
March 22, 2006... Babies can seem pretty helpless. They can't talk or use a spoon properly. They can't go to the bathroom by themselves. A long time ago, you were a baby yourself. But you've made the transition from crying infant to independent kid. As...

Mammals in the shadow of dinosaurs.
March 22, 2006... Dinosaurs spent 170 million years on Earth before they suddenly died out about 65 million years ago. After dinosaurs disappeared, mammals took over. It turns out that small mammals lived during the reign of dinosaurs, too. And over the...

Ultrasonic frogs raise the pitch.
March 22, 2006... Cartoon superheroes have included bats, spiders, and turtles. It may be time to add frogs to the list of animals that have special powers. Scientists have found signs of ultrasonic communication in a frog species that lives in China....

Bald eagles forever.
March 29, 2006... It's easy to see a bald eagle in the United States. Just look at the official seal on a $1 bill. To the nation's founders, the big, white-headed bird represented freedom and majestic beauty, and it quickly became a national symbol. Today,...

Coral islands survive a tsunami.
March 29, 2006... Tiny coral-reef islands far out in the ocean may seem fragile. But scientists now know that they aren't so easily swept away. In December 2004, a large, undersea earthquake rumbled in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra. The...

Fiery dust from an icy comet.
March 29, 2006... When a space probe collected samples of dust from a comet, it returned to Earth with some surprises. Even though comets are frozen balls of ice and dust, the dust samples contained minerals that form only at high temperatures. In other...