Science News for Kids articles from November 2006

Science News for Kids archives from November 2006

Battling mastodons.
November 3, 2006... Mastodons no longer exist, but their fossils provide glimpses of how they once lived. Researchers now say that marks on fossil tusks suggest that male mastodons fought violent battles with each other at a certain time every year of their...

Decoding how bees work.(honeybee )
November 3, 2006... Bees have a lifestyle that would be difficult for people to imitate. Like termites and ants, only a few members of the group have babies, but everyone else chips in to work and take care of the little ones. Scientists have long wondered...

Living in the desert.(water conservation by desert animals)
November 3, 2006... When you're hot and thirsty, you're likely to drink a glass of cold water or head for a shady spot to cool down. What you surely don't do is shrink your liver to a fraction of its original size. But that's just what a type of gazelle does...

A new basketball gets slick.
November 8, 2006... Basketball players need more than strength, speed, and skills to be on top of their game. Technology, too, can make the difference between a slam dunk and a stolen ball. Now, technology and basketball seem to have collided, and some...

Math of the world.
November 8, 2006... If you know where to look, you can find math anywhere you go. Math is not just in the numbers on a cash register or at a football game. It's in bathroom- tiling patterns, the shapes of clouds and trees, the arrangement of a flower's petals,...

Space umbrellas to shield earth.(prevent global warming)
November 8, 2006... On a hot, clear day, an umbrella can provide cooling relief from the sun's scorching rays. The same concept might one day help protect Earth from the accumulating heat of global warming. Building a single umbrella big enough to shade the...

Disease detectives.
November 15, 2006... Anytown, U.S.A., has a serious problem. One of its residents is very sick. Doctors suspect avian influenza. The disease, also called bird flu, can be devastating. "If we do nothing," says Taylor Jones, the freckle-faced mayor of Anytown,...

Hot pepper, hot spider.(release same chemical in human body)
November 15, 2006... Hot peppers and painful spider bites don't seem to have much in common. Both, however, can cause a similar burning sensation. New research now suggests a reason why. A chemical in hot peppers and different ones in spider venom happen to...

Sharp eye on the sun.(Hinode takes photographs of sun)(Brief article)
November 15, 2006... The sun is hotter than anything you can probably imagine, but that may not be the most striking thing about our closest star. The real surprise is that the sun's thin outer atmosphere, or corona, is much, much hotter than the sun's surface. ...

Chicken talk.
November 29, 2006... Translate this: Cluck cluck. Tck tck. Squawk. Get it? If you were a chicken, you might. According to new research, chickens make meaningful sounds that refer to objects around them. A pecking chicken that goes "tck, tck, tck," for example,...

Nonstop robot.(developed by Cornell University and University of Vermont)
November 29, 2006... In some of the scariest science fiction scenarios, evil robots refuse to die, no matter how fiercely people fight back. Now, science fiction has edged into science fact. For the first time, researchers have created a robotic machine that...

Putting the squeeze on toothpaste.
November 29, 2006... There's nothing scientific about the way I shop for toothpaste. One brand happens to have the same name as the street on which I grew up. So, that's the kind I buy. Quite a bit of science, however, goes into making toothpaste. Every year,...