Page Type: Elementary

Penguins don’t normally wear sweaters! But that hasn’t stopped a group of women in England from knitting colorful outfits for the little birds. The sweaters (called “jumpers” in England) are meant to help prevent penguins from getting sick if there is an oil spill.

The women, who call themselves the “Knitting Nannas,” live at Hazelgrove Court Care Home, a place where older people live and receive the care they need. The sweaters they knit are being sent to The Penguin Foundation, a group that helps protect penguins and other animals on Australia’s Phillip Island.  

“I have knitted jumpers for both my children but have never knit for a penguin,” 94-year-old Joyce Baxtrem told the BBC.

The sweaters aren’t meant to keep the penguins warm. Penguins’ own waterproof feathers can do that. 

Instead, workers plan to put the sweaters on the penguins if petroleum (oil) spills from a ship into the waters where the island’s 40,000 penguins swim and hunt. This will keep the penguins from accidentally drinking in the toxic petroleum when they use their beaks to preen, or clean, their feathers. The penguins will wear the sweaters until rescue workers have time to wash out the petroleum.

Humans didn’t exist when dinosaurs roamed Earth, but ants did. And a newly discovered fossil shows that ants existed longer ago than scientists realized.

Anderson Lepeco, a researcher at the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, found the ant fossil in the museum’s fossil collection in September 2024. The insect was alive in what is now Brazil about 113 million years ago. That makes it the oldest ant fossil ever found—about 13 million years older than any other known ant fossils. Scientists have named this species Vulcanidris cratensis.

The insect was a member of a subfamily of ants called Haidomyrmecinae, also known as “hell ants.” About the size of a U.S. penny, it had six legs and veiny wings. But its jaws were very different from the jaws of modern ants. Modern ants’ jaws move side to side. Vulcanidris cratensis had jaws that moved up and down. These ants, which hunted other insects, may have used their jaws to stab their prey!

“[The jaws] could have worked as a kind of forklift, moving upwards,” Lepeco told CNN.

Scientists say the discovery helps them understand more about how ants evolved to be so common and widespread in most parts of the world. Today’s ants are found on every continent except Antarctica, but until now, scientists had found prehistoric ant fossils only in parts of Europe and Asia. Discovering the Brazilian fossil has made them realize that ants were widespread earlier than they thought.

Corrie Moreau, an entomologist (insect expert) at Cornell University in New York, says the discovery has changed the story of the ant.

“A single fossil can reframe how we understand the history of an entire group of organisms,” she told Science.

Experts used to think there weren’t very many living things in the seas around Antarctica. After all, these waters are dark, freezing cold, and mostly covered in thick sheets of ice. But when scientists got a rare chance to explore one of these seas, they discovered that it was full of life! 

The opportunity came in January 2025, when a huge iceberg broke from what’s called an “ice shelf” off the coast of Antarctica. For the first time ever, it became possible to explore the water at this location.

Scientists found a large sponge and several soft-bodied animals called anemones under the sea near Antarctica.

When arborists (tree experts) decided to plant trees on some vacant land in Detroit, Michigan, they wanted to go big. So instead of picking maple or oak trees for their project, they chose some of the largest trees on the planet: giant sequoias.

Detroit is the first city chosen for the Giant Sequoia Filter Forest, a tree-planting project aimed at helping cities while also helping preserve the giant sequoia species. Once a much larger city, Detroit lost much of its population when its automobile factories shut down. The city has knocked down many vacant buildings, leaving empty lots with enough space for giant sequoias to grow.

Ayami Sato just made history. When the 35-year-old stepped onto the mound as the starting pitcher for the Toronto Maple Leafs last month, she became the first woman to play on a men’s professional baseball league in Canada.

Sato was on fire during her debut game against the Kitchener Panthers on May 11. In the first two innings, she struck out one batter and did not allow a single batter to reach first base. Although the Maple Leafs lost to the Panthers 6–5, the defeat didn’t make Sato’s presence any less noteworthy.

“The world is watching,” Maple Leafs manager Rob Butler told CTV News. “It’s been amazing the excitement she has brought to Toronto and this league.”

“When I was on the mound and just looking at all the crowds, the big crowds cheering, that was a very memorable memory for me,” Sato told the CBC.

4thA hospital in the United States has a new helper for complicated surgeries. Called Gizmo, this helper isn’t a doctor or a nurse. It’s a robot!

Robots can do many things. There are robots that help build cars, explore the deep sea, and help take care of people as they get older. Gizmo is a surgery robot at Hancock Regional Hospital in the U.S. state of Indiana. The robot will help perform certain surgeries, so surgeons don’t need to make so many incisions, or cuts. The robot arms can use tiny instruments and work in a smaller space, and cameras can magnify places the surgeon needs to look at. Overall, this means that patients can heal faster and don’t need to stay in the hospital as long.

Gizmo got its name with the help of some students from a nearby school after the hospital set up a naming contest for people from the community.

The 4th-grade class at Sugar Creek Elementary School entered the naming contest using a suggestion from student Lili Appleget. Appleget thought of the name Gizmo because it would be easy for kids to pronounce. “It will make kids more calm so when surgeons perform surgery kids will be less worried for surgery,” wrote Lili in the submission letter.

“Parents and kids will not be scared with a name like that! The name Gizmo sounds nice so kids start thinking about happy things,” Lili wrote.

As a prize for winning the naming contest, the 4th-grade class went on a field trip to Hancock Regional Hospital to see the robot in person and meet the doctors who perform surgery.

“This real-world experience has gotten students so excited to write and study robots more. The class is incredibly proud to know that an audience of important community members values their opinion,” Amanda Clawson, the 4th-grade teacher at Sugar Creek Elementary, told the Greenfield Daily Reporter.

The hospital staff are also happy that their new robot helper has a name. Steve Long, the president and CEO of Hancock Health, said, “We are thrilled to welcome Gizmo to Hancock Health’s surgical team and appreciate Mrs. Clawson’s 4th-grade students for coming up with such a creative name.”

A sea lion named Ronan has some serious moves. The 15-year-old can bop her head to a musical beat, something not every kind of animal can do. Scientists say Ronan has an even better sense of rhythm than some humans!

Ronan first demonstrated her musical ability in 2013, when she showed she could keep the beat to rhythms she had heard before and to rhythms that were new to her. This surprised scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory, where Ronan lives. Previously, they had believed that only animals that can make complex sounds with their voices, like humans, primates, and parrots, could keep a beat. (Just imagine trying to get a dog or cat to do this!)

Recently, scientists decided to study Ronan again to see just how good her skills are. In particular, they wanted to see how well Ronan kept a beat compared to humans.

A new kind of baseball bat has taken Major League Baseball by storm. But is the “torpedo bat” worthy of all the hype?

The torpedo bat was developed after scientists employed by the New York Yankees did a study to find out how to increase the speed at which the ball travels after it’s been batted. The scientists noticed that batters were hitting the ball with a lower part of the bat than expected. This led to the invention of the torpedo bat.

On the torpedo bat, the mass of the bat is lower down—closer to the “sweet spot,” where batters usually hit the ball. The goal is to pack the power of the bat into the sweet spot for maximum impact on the ball.

The torpedo bat was made available to Major League Baseball teams last season, but few players showed much interest in trying out a new bat design. Then, in March 2025, the Yankees hit nine home runs in three games using torpedo bats. When Yankees announcer Michael Kay pointed out the new bats, everyone paid attention.

Since then, baseball bat manufacturers have received tons of orders for torpedo bats from MLB teams as well as the public. In professional baseball, pitchers have been improving their performance for years, making it harder for batters to hit the ball. The torpedo bat may give batters a chance to catch up.

A bicycle can change a person’s life. That’s why, for more than 25 years, an organization called Working Bikes has provided bicycles to anyone who needs one.

Located in Chicago, Illinois, Working Bikes is no ordinary bicycle shop. Rather than get its bicycle supply from bike manufacturers, the organization receives donated bicycles from Illinois and the surrounding U.S. states. Hundreds of volunteers repair and refurbish the bicycles until they’re like new and ready for a new owner. Working Bikes teaches the volunteers how to repair the bikes.

“[All the volunteers are] kind of like-minded,” Working Bikes cofounder Amy Little told Streetsblog Chicago in 2024. “You’re doing it because you want to help other people. You’re in it together and fixing bikes or loading bicycles into a container because you feel strongly about it.”

A small fraction of these repaired bikes are sold. The rest are given away, often to kids and adults in the Chicago area.

Other donated bikes, as well as bike parts, are shipped overseas to Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, and other parts of the world. Working Bikes has formed partnerships with several international organizations. One of them, in the African nation of Uganda, uses the donations to teach women how to repair bikes.

Each year in April and May, a TV show has people in Sweden glued to their screens. The show doesn’t have a lot of action. It’s not funny or dramatic, either. Called The Great Moose Migration, the show follows a group of moose that are migrating from one part of Sweden to another.

The Great Moose Migration, which is shown on Swedish TV and on the Internet, follows moose on a journey the animals take every spring. Dozens of moose in northern Sweden swim across the Ångerman River to grazing pastures, where there are plants and berries for them to eat.

The show could be described as reality TV, but it’s actually a livestream. Cameras that have been posted along the moose migration path let viewers see moose, or any other animal, when they pass by.

The livestream is often called “slow TV” because it’s usually not very exciting. Sometimes nothing happens for hours. But many viewers stay tuned so they don’t miss a thing. They never know when they’ll spot a moose.

“I feel relaxed [watching the show], but at the same time I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s a moose. Oh, what if there’s a moose? I can’t [take a break]!’” 20-year-old William Garp Liljefors told the Associated Press.