Page Type: Elementary

Scientists recently discovered a pair of 500-year-old potatoes on the coast of Peru. Remarkably, the spuds date back to the Inca empire, which once stretched across a large part of South America.

The potatoes, which were found in an ancient Inca storage room, survived for centuries because of the way they were preserved. The Inca people grew potatoes in the Andes Mountains. Then they exposed the potatoes to daytime sunlight and freezing nighttime mountain temperatures, over and over until they dried out. This technique, called freeze-drying, turned the potatoes into what is known as chuño.

Anderson Taylor has loved fossils since he was 3 years old, so it may be no surprise that he now runs a fossil museum. What is a surprise is that Anderson is only 11. As the founder and operator of the Cambridge Natural History Museum in Cambridge, Illinois, he’s the youngest museum curator in the world.

When he was 3, Anderson found a fossil in his driveway—the first of many. 

“So the gravel that’s in our driveway is limestone, and limestone is legitimately just fossils. And that’s actually how my first fossil was found,” Anderson told National Public Radio (NPR). “It’s called a crinoid. They were very cool animals that looked like plants, surprisingly.”

Slime is just slime, right? Not if you’re a snail. Scientists have found that snails produce different types of slime depending on their needs.

Why Snails Make Slime

If you’ve ever observed a snail in motion, you may have noticed that it leaves a trail of slime, or mucus, behind. A snail uses a single foot to move. The foot can produce slime to make it easier for the animal to glide its body along any surface.

But that’s just one purpose of a snail’s slime. 

“Snail slime…is fascinating—a natural work of art,” Mariella Gabler told National Public Radio (NPR). Gabler studies physical chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Germany.

Gabler and other researchers noticed that snails produce slime for different reasons. While slime can make it easier for snails to glide, it can also help them stick to surfaces. Sticky slime can stop snails’ predators in their tracks, too, as long as those predators are small enough.

Researchers also noticed that snail slime doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes it’s gooey, for example, while other times it’s like foam. The researchers wondered whether there are key differences between slime that’s used for one reason and slime that’s used for another.

Not All Slime Is the Same 

Gabler and a team of scientists studied what snail slime is made of. They found that all snail slime contains certain ingredients, including proteins and ions such as calcium. But each type of slime contains different amounts of these ingredients.

“The more collagen and calcium were present, the stiffer, more cohesive and sticky mucus became,” Gabler told NPR.

The findings could help researchers make their own slime for use in medicine. For example, sticky slime could be used to help close wounds.

Scientist Kausik Mukhopadhyay, who wasn’t involved in the snail study, is excited about the findings. 

“Nature is always smarter than us,” Mukhopadhyay told NPR.

Dogs and cats can’t pose for a camera like we can. So why are their pictures always so adorable? Whatever the reason, pet photos are so popular that some professional photographers specialize in taking them. The International Pet Photography Awards honors the best pet photographers in the world, and this year’s winners are the cat’s meow.

If you’ve ever eaten a breakfast cereal that turned milk pink or blue, it may be because the cereal contained brightly colored food dye. That’s about to change. WH Kellogg says it will remove artificial food dyes from breakfast cereals sold in the United States by the end of 2026. 

It’s not that Kellogg cereals like Froot Loops and Apple Jacks will be colorless. The company says it will maintain the colors by replacing the artificial dyes with fruit juices. This is something Kellogg has already done with its cereals that are sold in Canada and some other countries, where there are rules on how and when certain food dyes can be used.

Wildfires can cause a massive amount of destruction. But in Spain, a group of four-legged firefighters are helping to keep the blazes under control.

An organization called Tivissa Donkeys Firefighters has been putting rescued donkeys to work since 2020. More than 30 of Tivissa’s donkeys eat dry grass in the Catalonia region of Spain, keeping it from getting overgrown. The donkeys also break up this vegetation just by walking on it, so wildfires don’t have a clear path. As a result, fires have less fuel and spread less easily.

It’s a job that could also be done by goats and sheep, which are herbivores (plant-eaters) like donkeys. But Joan Cedó Sans, who founded Tivissa, says donkeys are the most effective firefighters. 

“The work donkeys do, neither goats nor sheep can do,” Cedó told CNN. “[Donkeys] weigh more, so every time they tread [step on the ground], they tread harder, they eat more.” 

Tivissa isn’t just a firefighting organization. It’s also an animal rescue, taking in donkeys that have been mistreated in some way. Now the animals lead a peaceful life, doing what they would naturally do while unknowingly helping to prevent disasters. 

It’s not easy to make a living as an artist. That’s why Lilyan Lauzon, an artist herself, wanted to find a way to make it easier for people to discover new art. She came up with a vending machine that sells tiny artworks.

A vending machine is a machine that sells something—usually food, but not always. A customer puts cash into the machine or scans a credit card. The customer then presses a button to select the item they want, and the machine releases the item.

Located inside Inkwell Booksellers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Lauzon’s vending machine is filled with “mini art” created by local artists. An artist can contact Lauzon to have their artwork placed in the machine for free. Each artist’s work is placed in its own row, where information about the artist is displayed. Artists receive all the money from the sale of their work.

“I just wanted it to be as easy as possible for artists to get into the vending machine,” Lauzon told Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. “That’s why I set it up the way I did. To make it…easy for any artist to get their art featured, but also easy for community members to…support a local artist and have some small little local art in their homes.”

Each piece of mini art is placed inside an envelope. Customers select an artist but don’t know what they’re buying until they’ve already paid for it. But the artwork is only one dollar. That means most people can afford to take a chance and possibly discover a new favorite artist.

Customers love it. More than 80 artists have been featured in the mini art machine so far. Together, they’ve made more than $3,000!

A woman in the U.S. state of Tennessee was able to start her own flower-growing business, thanks to some generous neighbors. 

Marisa Mender-Franklin is a florist, meaning she grows and sells flowers. Mender-Franklin, who was once an art teacher, discovered her love of flowers when she grew them to decorate her own wedding in 2020. The experience gave her an idea: Why not start a flower farm and sell the flowers? There was just one problem. Mender-Franklin didn’t have enough land. 

Which animals make the most caring parents? Dinosaurs may be on the list. Scientists have found evidence that some dinosaurs carefully selected the food they gave their young.

Researchers at Ohio State University learned what dinosaur families ate by studying the wear and tear on the teeth of a type of duck-billed dinosaur called Maiasaura. Maiasaura, which lived in North America about 80 million years ago, was an herbivore. This means it ate plants, not animals.

The researchers found differences between the wear and tear on adult Maiasaura teeth versus juvenile (young) teeth. Adult teeth showed that dinosaur parents often ate stems and leaves, which are fairly hard to chew. Juvenile teeth suggested that young dinosaurs were eating softer fruits.

You never know what treasures are lurking under the ground. When a 6-year-old named Henrik Refsnes Mørtvedt discovered a half-buried metal object, it turned out to be a sword that was made more than 1,000 years ago.

Henrik, who lives in Norway, found the sword while walking through a field with his 1st-grade class this past April. The students were trying to find rocks for an art project. Spotting the metal in the ground, Henrik had two thoughts. One was, “What if a tractor drives over the metal, and its tire is ruined?” The other was, “What if this is some kind of important object?” 

“This part stuck out,” Henrik later told Hadeland, a Norwegian newspaper, pointing to the sword’s handle. “It was rust and dirt. So I thought I would pick it up and see what it was.”

That’s when the full object was revealed. It was a sword with a single-edged (sharp on only one side) blade called an enegget. Henrik’s teachers decided to call some archaeologists, scientists who study objects from the ancient past.