Page Type: Elementary

Can a robot help slow the pace of climate change? Two college students named Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça believe the answer is yes. The friends have created Trovador, a robot that plants new trees in areas where fires have burned down forests. 

Bernardino and Mendonça have a special connection to forests. They grew up playing in the woods near their homes in Portugal, a nation in Europe. But since 1980, wildfires have destroyed more than a million acres of Portugal’s forests. This is because climate change has led to hotter, dryer weather in the area. Both heat and dry air can lead to more fires. 

Experts say it’s important to restore forests because trees can help reduce the effects of climate change. Tree shade helps keep the planet cool. Plus, trees help clean the air by trapping harmful carbon and giving off healthful oxygen. 

Bernardino and Mendonça were still in high school when they built the first version of Trovador. Like other inventors, they kept building new versions, each one better than the last. Trovador looks like a spider, only it has six “legs.” 

Using those legs, the lightweight robot can easily move up and down Portugal’s steep slopes—something humans struggle to do. Even the first version of Trovador could plant trees 28 percent faster than a human. The newest one can plant up to 200 saplings, or baby trees, per hour!

“We build all-terrain robots that carry baby trees on their backs and plant them [without help] across difficult [landscapes],” Bernardino and Mendonça told Smithsonian Magazine.

Bernardino and Mendonça plan to keep improving Trovador. They hope to make the robot easy to use and cheap to build so that it can be used in forests in their backyard and beyond.

Scientists are studying a “spider mega-city” in a cave on the border between Greece and Albania. Sulfur Cave is home to what may be the world’s largest spiderweb, with tons of eight-legged residents. Even more remarkably, the spiders on the web are not all the same species. 

The giant web, which is really many funnel-shaped spiderwebs put together, measures more than 1,100 square feet (105 square meters). That’s about the size of many school classrooms. It’s a good thing the web is so large, because scientists say that more than 100,000 spiders make it their home! 

There are two species on the web: Tegenaria domestica (also called the barn funnel weaver or the domestic house spider) and Prinerigone vagans. Scientists say the T. domestica spiders built the web and the P. vagans spiders moved in. 

A hungry wolf in British Columbia, Canada, helped scientists make what they believe is an incredible discovery. And all she did was find a clever way to get some food!

Here’s what happened. The Heitsuk (or Haíɫzaqv) Nation, Indigenous (native) people who live in the area, set up a camera because they wanted to find out which animal was destroying crab traps they had placed in a body of water. When they looked at the video, they saw something remarkable.

In the video, a wolf swam out to a buoy (a floating object that marked the location of the crab trap), put the buoy in her mouth, and swam back to shore. Then she used her mouth to grab the line that was attached to the buoy on one end and a trap on the other. The wolf pulled the line toward the shore until the trap came out of the water. Then she pulled the trap to the shore. Next, she broke into the cup holding the delicious fish that was meant to attract crabs and had a nice meal.

You may know Superman from the many times he has appeared in movies. But the legendary superhero first appeared in comic books almost 90 years ago. Recently, one of the first Superman comic books sold in an auction for a record-high price.

A copy of Superman #1, the first comic book dedicated to the hero known as the Man of Steel, sold for $9.12 million. The comic book, which was printed in 1939 and originally cost 10 cents, has become far more valuable over the years because it’s old, rare, and in near-perfect condition.

Three brothers from California found the comic book in the attic of their mother’s home in 2024, after she died. It had been placed in a cardboard box along with some newspapers. The brothers found other comic books in the attic, but Superman #1 stood out. Although Superman had appeared in other comic books before this one, Superman #1 was the first in which he was the main character.

How do veterinarians clean a tiger’s teeth or x-ray a tortoise? A handful of zoos around the United States are giving visitors a chance to find out by opening their veterinary exam rooms to the public. 

Denver Zoo, Oklahoma City Zoo, Nashville Zoo, and New Jersey’s Turtle Back Zoo are among the zoos where visitors can get a behind-the-scenes look at creature care. Recently, visitors to Turtle Back Zoo watched from the other side of a plate-glass window as a sulcata tortoise got a checkup in an exam room. The tortoise was a new arrival to the zoo, having recently been found on a street, according to the Associated Press. Since sulcata tortoises aren’t native to the United States, it’s not clear where this one came from. It’s possible that it was a pet that was lost or abandoned. Now, it’s safe in the zoo’s care. 

Slime is getting its time in the spotlight! The gooey stuff, which has entertained generations of kids, is now part of America’s National Toy Hall of Fame, along with the board games Trivial Pursuit and Battleship.

Each year, the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, honors toys that encourage creative play and have lasting popularity. Anyone can nominate a toy for the Hall of Fame by going to its website. Winners are selected by a panel of experts as well as an online voting system that’s open to the public.

In Montclair, New Jersey, many kids ride buses to school. But once a week, a growing number of the town’s elementary school students get to school using the power of their own two legs. They’re part of Montclair’s “bike bus,” a group of kids and adults who ride their bikes to school together every Friday.

Now in its third year, the Montclair bike bus includes up to 400 people who follow a 5-mile (8-kilometer) route, stopping at each of the town’s elementary schools. (Some kids join the bus along the way.) All participants wear helmets, and adult volunteers wear fluorescent safety vests. 

Traveling by bike is Earth-friendly and a great form of exercise. But in many places, the streets are too busy for kids to ride their bikes alone. With the bike bus system, there’s safety in numbers—and many kids say it’s more fun than riding on the school bus.

“It’s not like being on the bus,” said one young participant. “You’re outside, but you’re also biking to school with your friends.”

Montclair isn’t the only community that has started a bike bus. There are hundreds of others in the United States, plus more in Spain, Australia, and other countries.

The giant statues of Easter Island have long been the subject of a mystery. Made of volcanic rock, the ancient statues, called moai, are massive. Yet many of them have somehow been placed in rows, where their huge faces watch over the island. Experts have long wondered how the heavy statues were moved to their present locations. A new study may have solved the mystery. 

What Are the Moai Statues?

The moai statues are giant figures that have faces and torsos but no legs. There are about 900 moai statues on Easter Island, which is located in the Pacific Ocean about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) west of Chile.

The moai were made between the years 700 and 1680 by the Rapa Nui people, who are indigenous (native) to the island. The statues were carved near the source of the rock and then moved to locations all over Easter Island. But since there was no machinery at the time, no one—not scientists nor the modern-day Rapa Nui people—is sure how the moai were moved.

Moving the Moai

Recently, two anthropologists conducted a study to see if they could solve the mystery. (Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures.) Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona came up with a theory and then put it to the test.

The team began by creating 3D models of the moai to study their design. They noted the shape of each statue’s base and the fact that each one leaned forward. This would have made it easier to move the statue by rocking its base back and forth in a gentle, zigzagging motion, almost as if the statue were walking on its base.

Danielle Boyer has been interested in robots since she was a kid. Now 24, Boyer has developed Skobot, a robot that can help teach Indigenous languages to kids.

Boyer herself is Indigenous, a word that can be used to describe American Indians, or Native Americans, in the United States. She is part of the Ojibwe community. When she was 10, Boyer began noticing that most of the people who spoke Anishinaabemowin (an Ojibwe language) were older. Younger people, like herself, were much less likely to know the language. 

Boyer had identified a widespread problem. Experts say that thousands of languages are dying out as fewer and fewer people speak them. Many of these dying languages are Indigenous. 

“It can be a really scary thing to see that your language is disappearing because to lose your language is to lose your culture,” Boyer told ABC 10 News.

But Boyer has a trick up her sleeve—her knowledge of robotics. A few years ago, Boyer invented Skobot, a robot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to translate English words into Ojibwe words. Designed for kids and teens, Skobot “listens” to the user’s English word and then speaks that word in Anishinaabemowin or another Indigenous language.

Skobot is designed to perch on the user’s shoulder like a bird, but it looks more like a character from the 2015 animated movie Minions. Boyer’s organization, The STEAM Connection, distributes the robot parts to schools. Kids put together the robots and are encouraged to decorate them or even dress them however they like. Made of recycled plastic, Skobot is inexpensive to produce and free to kids. 

When Misty Copeland joined the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) ballet company in 2001, she was ABT’s only Black woman dancer. Copeland became a star, inspiring many people to start dancing. So when she gave her last performance on October 22, the night became a celebration of a wonderful career.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1982, Copeland began taking ballet classes when she was in middle school. In 1998, when she was 15, she won first prize in a ballet competition. That summer, she was awarded a full scholarship to a summer ballet program with the San Francisco Ballet in California. Two years later, she won a scholarship to take part in ABT’s summer program, followed by an invitation to join the ABT studio company for young dancers in training.