Page Type: Elementary

How bad is it to drop one piece of garbage on the ground? When an empty bag of Cheetos (a cheesy corn snack) ended up on the floor of a cave, it turned out to be a very big deal.

The bag was discovered inside a cave at Carlsbad Caverns, a national park in New Mexico. Each year about 500,000 people visit Carlsbad Caverns. They’re not supposed to bring food into the caves, which are full of delicate life forms.

“A spilled snack bag may seem [unimportant], but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” a National Park Service (NPS) official wrote on Facebook.

Komodo dragons are the largest living lizards on the planet. But it’s not just their bodies that are powerful. Their teeth are super strong, too—and scientists have learned that this is because they’re coated with a layer of iron. 

Scientists at King’s College in London, England, made the discovery while studying the teeth of several reptiles. These included Komodo dragons, monitor lizards, alligators, crocodiles, and dinosaurs. When scientists put the teeth under a microscope, they found that all of them except the dinosaur teeth had orange markings. It turned out that the orange stuff was iron.

Fans of Thomas the Tank Engine or The Little Engine That Could, listen up! Just as those fictional trains have faces, some real-life trains do too. Eyes have been added to a few subway trains in Boston, Massachusetts, making life a little more fun for the city’s travelers.

Phillip Eng, who runs Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), said the idea came from a group of city residents. The group even brought a package of plastic googly eyes to the MBTA headquarters and suggested sticking them on the front of the city’s subway trains.

“When I saw it, it made me laugh,” Eng told the Associated Press. “I thought we could do something like that to have some fun.”

Eng loved the idea but decided not to use the plastic eyes, fearing they’d fall off the trains and become a safety hazard. Instead, the MBTA used decals (stickers) that look just like googly eyes, without the moving eyeballs. Added to the other details on the front of each train, the eyes make it look like the trains have faces.

Ants live together in colonies, and each ant has a job to do. They all depend on each other. So what happens when an ant becomes injured? Scientists have learned that when a Florida carpenter ant has a certain kind of leg injury, another ant will amputate the injured leg by chewing it off. It may sound harsh, but the amputation usually saves the ant’s life.

Florida carpenter ants can become injured when they defend their home against invaders. If an ant injures its upper leg, another ant will lick the wound and then do the amputation. Scientists noticed that almost all the ants that had a leg amputated survived.

But are these amputations necessary? To find out, scientists tried separating some injured ants from their colonies so they could not have the amputations. Many of those separated ants did not survive. This is why scientists believe that an amputation can save an injured ant’s life.

Scientists believe the amputations stopped leg wounds from getting infected and becoming dangerous.

Scientists also noticed that the ants did an amputation only if the wound was high up on the leg. If the wound was lower on the leg, the ants only licked it. Scientists think it may be harder to stop an infection in the lower leg, so there would be no point in doing an amputation. 

Ants seem to know when to do the amputation and when not to do it. But that doesn’t mean they think carefully about their choices. Instead, they are acting on their instincts, scientist Daniel Kronauer told National Public Radio (NPR).

“[Ants] have basically evolved over like thousands and thousands and probably millions of years to be kind of ‘programmed’ to react to different kinds of injuries in a certain way,” Kronauer said.

Imagine getting around town in a flying car! Minnesota governor Tim Walz took this dream one step toward reality in May 2024, when he signed a bill allowing flying cars on the state’s roads and airstrips. Minnesota is the second state to say yes to flying cars, after New Hampshire.

A few companies are building or planning to build flying cars, which can travel on roads but unfold their wings when they’re ready to take flight. Some of these vehicles take off vertically, like a helicopter. Others need a runway to take off, like an airplane. (Like airplanes and helicopters, flying cars can’t be flown without a pilot’s license.)

One example of a car that takes off on a runway is Samson Sky’s Switchblade, a three-wheeled car with foldable wings that can fly for about 450 miles (720 kilometers) at a time at an altitude below 10,000 feet (3,000 meters). (Commercial airplanes fly at an altitude of about 35,000 feet, or 11,000 meters.) Samson Sky says it will start building its vehicles in the next two years. Yet the company has already sold more than 100 cars, and about 2,400 more cars have been reserved.

Until very recently, many people thought explorers had to be men. They thought the world was too dangerous for women to explore alone. But women explored anyway. A botanist named Ynes Mexia was one of them.

Ynes Mexia was born in Washington, D.C., in 1870, to an American mother and a Mexican father. She loved to read, write, and spend time outdoors. When Mexia finished school, she moved to Mexico, where she helped run, and eventually took over, her father’s ranch. After about 30 years, Mexia moved to San Francisco, California. Her love of the outdoors was as strong as ever, so when she met people who were working to help the environment, she joined them. One of the projects she worked on was to help stop loggers from cutting down California’s famous redwood trees.

Mexia’s interest in trees fed a new dream—to become a botanist, a scientist who studies plants. In 1921, at age 51, Mexia enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study this field. She graduated four years later. Mexia wanted to collect specimens (plant samples) so she and other scientists could study them. At the time, though, women were discouraged from traveling alone, especially in the wild, because of beliefs that they were not as capable as men. Mexia didn’t let this stop her.

Eddie Templeton loves to look for fossils, and he’s found quite a few in Mississippi, where he lives. But in August 2024, Templeton came across something he’d never found before—the tusk of a prehistoric, elephant-like animal called a Columbian mammoth.

Templeton found the tusk sticking out of a mudbank in a creek, where it had been for a long time. Scientists say Columbian mammoths lived between 11,700 and 75,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. Although they looked a lot like elephants, they were far bigger, weighing nearly 22,000 pounds (10,000 kilograms) and growing to be more than 13 feet (4 meters) tall. At 7 feet (2 meters) long, the tusk Templeton discovered was also huge. And it was still in one piece!

At first, Templeton thought the tusk had belonged to a mastodon, another relative of the modern elephant. Templeton and others have found many mastodon fossils in the area. But while Columbian mammoth teeth have been discovered in Mississippi, no one had ever found one of its tusks there. That’s because mammoths couldn’t live in as many different habitats as mastodons could, so their numbers were smaller.

Still, there was something about this tusk. It was curved, nearly making the shape of a C. Mammoths tusks were much more curved than mastodon tusks.

“When I learned it was a mammoth and not a mastodon, I got even more excited,” Templeton told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger. “I’ve never found any part of a mammoth. I always hoped to find a part of a mammoth, but that’s pretty rare down here.”

Templeton sent George Phillips, a paleontologist who works at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, a photo of the tusk. Soon, a team of scientists arrived at the site. It was clear that Templeton had found something rare and special.

“I was kind of open mouthed when I saw the picture,” Phillips told CNN. “I thought, ‘OK, well, cool, a tusk. Wait a second…it’s so curved…. This a mammoth tusk.’”

Beginning about 5,000 years ago, long before there were any motorized vehicles, people somehow arranged giant stone slabs into a monument called Stonehenge, in what’s now England. Recently, scientists found that one of these massive stones came from hundreds of miles away! The discovery makes Stonehenge even more remarkable.

Stonehenge is made up of slabs that have been placed in an incomplete circle, with other stones in the center. Scientists believe that some of the stones came about 16 miles (25 kilometers) away, while others came from about 125 miles (200 km) away, in Wales. The idea that prehistoric people somehow moved these massive stones 125 miles is amazing to think about. But when scientists took a closer look at one of the stones, they concluded that its journey was much longer.

The U.S. gymnastics team had an amazing run at the 2024 Summer Olympics, winning team and individual medals. The gymnasts couldn’t have done it without support from families, coaches, and one very special dog named Beacon.

Beacon, a 4-year-old golden retriever, is the first official therapy dog for the U.S. gymnastics team. His job title is “Goodest Boy.” Gymnastics is a difficult sport, and gymnasts can sometimes feel stressed and worried about competitions. Beacon’s job is to be there for the athletes, whether they want to pet him, rub his belly, chat with him, or just hang out with him.

Beacon and his human, Tracey Callahan Molnar, attended the Olympic Gymnastic Trials earlier in 2024. This is the competition that decides who will compete in the Olympic Games.