Science News for Kids articles from October 2007

Science News for Kids archives from October 2007

A Long haul.
October 3, 2007... Long before the invention of cars, planes, or motorboats, people were exploring the globe. Some of these travelers undertook trips of thousands of miles across oceans. Starting about 4,000 years ago, for example, courageous mariners settled the...

Play for science.
October 3, 2007... Daniel Kunkle spent most of his time in graduate school playing with a colorful puzzle called a Rubik's Cube. And for 20 years, Jonathan Schaeffer worked on winning at checkers. The two researchers weren't goofing off. With clever computer...

Underwater Jungles.
October 3, 2007... Thick forests of brown algae, called kelp, cling to the seafloor in cold waters throughout the world. There are about 100 kinds, including giant kelp, which stretch as high as 30 meters (100 feet). Kelp forests support a diversity of creatures,...

Crows Carry Cameras for Science.
October 10, 2007... Small video cameras have started to show up everywhere--on the helmets of skiers, in the cages of zoo animals, and in medical tools that enter the human body, among other places. Now, British biologists have found a new location for...

Flush-Free Fertilizer.
October 10, 2007... Most urine ends up in the toilet, as it should. But the garden may be another appropriate place to send human pee, according to scientists in Finland. The yellow liquid appears to help cabbages grow. Researchers from the University of...

A dangerous meal.
October 17, 2007... It's impolite to spit out the first bite of your dinner. But to a type of Australian snake, this rude behavior is a matter of life and death. The snake, called a floodplain death adder, eats two types of frogs that are hard to stomach. The...

Sun got your tail?(comets)
October 17, 2007... An amateur astronomer made a surprising discovery last spring. He discovered that a comet orbiting the sun appeared to have lost one of its two tails. Scientists are now studying this comet and others in greater detail. Comets are balls of...

Weaving with Light.(Portable Light for the Huichol people )
October 17, 2007... In the rugged Sierra Madre mountain range of west central Mexico, the native Huichol people live much the way their ancestors did--without electricity. That's because it's too expensive to string power lines to the remote mountain areas where...

Acid snails.
October 24, 2007... Conditions in the world's oceans are changing, thanks to human activities. And those changes might be affecting the ability of a small snail to defend itself, suggests a new study. Factories, cars, and other machines spit out lots of a gas...

Ancient cave behavior.(stone age people of south africa)
October 24, 2007... People have been acting like people--in other words, they've been making tools, creating rituals, and sharing food--for a long time. That's the conclusion of a recent study from South Africa's southern coast. There, in a cave perched above...

Big machine reveals small worlds.(synchrotron (particle accelerator))
October 24, 2007... Inside a shiny new machine in suburban Melbourne, Australia, tiny particles are whizzing around at nearly the speed of light. The football-field-size machine, called a synchrotron, uses tubes, magnets, vacuum pumps, and other gadgetry to...

Digging dinos.(Oryctodromeus cubicularis, burrowing dinosaur)
October 31, 2007... Dinosaurs didn't just roam the Earth's surface during their reign on the planet tens of millions of years ago. New evidence suggests that some dinos also spent time underground. Paleontologists from Montana State University in Bozeman made...

Fear matters.
October 31, 2007... Halloween is a spooky time of year. After hearing all the scary stories and seeing all the scary costumes, you might start to imagine ghosts lurking in the shadows, witches flying across the sky, and skeletons dancing in graveyards. You...

Monster black holes.
October 31, 2007... Black holes have long captured the imaginations of both kids and scientists. These incredibly dense objects cram the mass of huge suns into tiny points of space. The gravity of a black hole is so intense that it sucks in everything around it,...