Science News for Kids articles from March 2009

Science News for Kids archives from March 2009

Getting the dirt on carbon.(carbon's chemical cycle)
March 4, 2009... Each year, spring comes, plants bloom and the trees leaf out in their full green glory. Come fall, while diving into piles of fallen leaves, you may think the life cycle of the leaf has come to an end. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But that's...

Sponges' secret weapon.
March 4, 2009... Bacteria are tiny, single-celled organisms that can cause disease in humans through infection. Bacteria can live almost anywhere: in soil, water, food or your body. We can cure many types of bacterial infections with the use of medicine called...

Watching deep-space fireworks.(gamma-ray bursts)
March 4, 2009... Space is full of fireworks: Galaxies smash into each other, dying stars explode and high-energy particles race toward us at the speed of light. The most powerful explosions in the universe are brilliant flashes of light called gamma-ray bursts....

Newly named fish crawls and hops.(newly discovered frogfish named Histiophryne psychedelica)
March 11, 2009... In January 2008, divers swimming off an Indonesian island saw an unusual fish. To try to identify the strange-looking swimmer, they took pictures and sent them to fish expert Ted Pietsch of the University of Washington in Seattle. Pietsch has...

The metal detector in your mouth.
March 11, 2009... When you taste lemons, you know it because they're sour. Sugar tastes sweet. Salt tastes, well... salty. Tastes buds on the surface of your tongue help you identify food that you've put into your mouth. Until recently, scientists believed...

Deep-space dancers.(black hole )
March 18, 2009... If you gaze through a telescope at a distant galaxy, it may glow brightly with the light of hundreds of millions of stars. Despite all that light, most scientists think that at the center of a big galaxy lies something very dark: a black hole....

Fish needs see-through head.(barreleyes)
March 18, 2009... The fish in the picture is alive and you're looking inside its head. Really. It's not a medical freak. Just a kind of fish with a naturally see-through forehead. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A new species, you might think. But no. The story...

Pondering the puzzling platypus.
March 18, 2009... The first European scientist who saw a platypus thought it was a fake. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the late 18th century, British scientist George Shaw received a package from the governor of Australia. Shaw found strange things when he...

Bringing fish back up to size.(fish size evolution and recreational fishing)
March 25, 2009... Anyone who has ever gone fishing probably knows this general rule: Keep the big ones, throw the smaller ones back. The idea behind the rule is simple--the larger fish are assumed to be older. If you were to keep the smaller ones, they would not...

Reading a mind's memories.(spatial memory and scanning the brain by magnetic resonance imaging)
March 25, 2009... To see Albus Dumbledore's memories, Harry Potter simply had to look into the pensieve, sit back and wait for the show to begin. For us Muggles, reading minds isn't quite so simple. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It may not be simple, but it...