Page Type: Elementary

Cuéntame! Translated from Spanish, it means “story me.” Author Meg Medina says it’s important to share stories, whether from books or from real life.

“‘Cuéntame’ is a phrase we use when you’re sitting down with a friend you haven’t seen in a while,” Medina says. “And you say ‘Bueno, cuéntame, so tell me what’s happening.’ … I love that idea because that is what I’m asking: ‘Story me up.’ Tell me the books that you love, [and] I’m going to tell you some of the books that I love.”

Medina is doing a lot of that these days. As the 2023–2024 Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, it’s her job to highlight the importance of children’s books. She calls her approach to the job “Cuéntame! Let’s Talk Books.” And she regularly visits schools and encourages kids to read and share stories with each other.

Growing up in a storytelling family is what led Medina to become an author.

“I came to writing through stories in my family,” she said. “I had very talkative Cuban aunts and grandmothers and mother, and they did a lot of talking and storytelling in the house. And that just developed my ear for story.”

Sea turtles are meant to live in warm water. So when Florida experienced a rare period of cold weather in early 2024, scientists went into action, rescuing more than 60 turtles and transporting them to a safer location.

Scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worked together to rescue the sea turtles from unusually cold waters of St. Joseph Bay, a body of water off the Gulf of Mexico. USGS biologist Margaret Lamont said that without help from humans, the turtles might not have survived.

Stick insects aren’t easy to find. Their twig-like bodies help them hide from hungry predators. But during a hike with his dad in 2021, 14-year-old Davis Marthin Damaledo spotted one of these amazing insects. Even more incredibly, the insect Davis found belongs to an undiscovered species!

Davis found the stick insect on the western side of the island of Timor in Indonesia. The teen, who loves nature and is fascinated with insects, thought this one looked unusual. He decided to gently pick up the insect, along with its eggs. When he got home, Davis contacted Garda Bagus Damastra. Garda is the founder of a science collective (an organization people can join in order to share scientific information) that focuses on certain types of insects, including stick insects. Excited to hear about Davis’s discovery, he contacted three entomologists (scientists who study insects).

Together with Davis, the group named the new species of stick insect Nesiophasma sobesonbaii, after a 19th-century ruler of Indonesia, and set about studying it. This included monitoring the eggs Davis had collected and watching as they hatched and the young stick insects grew to adulthood. The full-grown insects can reach 14 inches (36 centimeters) in length!

What’s the best way to get a bird’s eye view of a city? You could ride a giant Ferris wheel! A new Ferris wheel called the Twin Eye is being planned for Seoul, South Korea, and it won’t just be massive—it will also have an unusual design.

The Twin Eye is set to be 591 feet (180 meters) high, about as tall as a 45-story building. It will have 64 enclosed capsules, each able to hold 20 to 25 people, which means it will be able to carry more than 1,400 passengers at once! Because of the wheel’s size, passengers will be treated to a panoramic view of Seoul once they reach the top. There will be fun at the bottom, too. The wheel will sit on top of a building where people can watch performances and buy food and drinks.

Many people are familiar with Ferris wheels. They’re commonly found at theme parks and carnivals. Most Ferris wheels have spokes, which are bars that connect the outer part of the wheel to the center of the wheel. The entire wheel rotates, moving each car to the top and then back down to the bottom. The spokes help provide support to the outer part of the wheel.

Writing things by hand may be good for our minds. A new study shows that parts of the brain are more active when we are handwriting words than when we’re typing them.

In the study, scientists at a university in Norway recorded the brain activity of 36 students while the students typed a word or handwrote it in cursive with a digital pen. The scientists wanted to see if either of these activities would cause two parts of the brain to be active at the same time. That’s a sign that different parts of the brain are communicating with one another.

The scientists found that when the students wrote words by hand, many parts of their brains were active. When the students typed words, fewer parts of the brain were active. This is partly because writing words with a pen or pencil requires more motor skills, which are skills having to do with moving the body. Typing doesn’t require as much movement. But handwriting also seems to cause more activity in parts of the brain related to learning and memory.

Audrey van der Meer is one of the scientists who was involved in the study. She says people may learn and remember information better when they write it down by hand. But that doesn’t mean everyone should stop using computers and tablets. Typing is often easier and faster than writing. Scientists say it’s possible that writing things down is better for some tasks and typing is better for others.

A primate nearly twice the size of a gorilla once lived in the forests of southern Asia. But a little over 200,000 years ago, it went extinct. A group of researchers say they think they know why.

Scientists first identified the primate, called Gigantopithecus blacki or G. blacki, about 100 years ago based on the existence of huge teeth that didn’t match the teeth of existing primates. But they didn’t know why G. blacki no longer existed. What caused it to die out?

To answer that question, researchers collected some fossilized teeth and used a technique called luminescence dating to determine their age. The oldest teeth were more than two million years old, while the most recent were about 250,000 years old. Scientists estimated that G. blacki went extinct between 215,000 and 295,000 years ago.

Next, it was time to look at what happened toward the end of the primate’s existence. Scientists know that the climate changed around 600,000 or 700,000 years ago. The lush forests where G. blacki lived began to thin out. The fruit trees where it found most of its food were not as plentiful. Unlike other apes, G. blacki was too large to climb the trees and get the fruit that grew higher up. So, what did it eat? Scientists looked at the most recent G. blacki teeth and found scratches on them, suggesting that the huge primates started to eat less nutritious bark and twigs. Researchers say this is why G. blacki became extinct. It just couldn’t survive the changing environment.

If you’re looking for a book you can sink your teeth into, you might want to check out some Newbery and Caldecott Medal winners. Each January, the American Library Association (ALA) gives these prizes to the best children’s book (Newbery) and best picture book (Caldecott) of the previous year. The latest Newbery and Caldecott winners were announced on January 22, 2024, taking their place among some of the greatest kids’ books of all time.

The 2024 Newbery selection is The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers. The story is about a dog named Johannes who roams freely through a city park. Johannes is both the narrator and the “eyes” of the book. With help from some of the park’s other animal residents, he watches over the park to make sure the balance between people and nature is maintained. When the park is thrown off balance, it looks as if the only home Johannes knows could change forever.

The Caldecott Medal went to Big, by author and illustrator Vashti Harrison. The book explores how the words a young girl hears as she grows up affect the way she feels about herself. Like all Caldecott winners, Big has beautiful illustrations that help tell the story. Some of the pages have no words at all—but the pictures show the young girl’s emotions.

“For me, this story was really about the words we give and share with children, and I wanted to make a story that followed a child on a journey towards self-love,” Harrison told National Public Radio (NPR).

Fifteen-year-old Yolanda Renee King is carrying the message of her grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with a new picture book. We Dream a World asks kids to dream of a better world.

Yolanda says the title of the book was inspired by Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which was inspired by a 1941 poem called “I Dream a World,” by Langston Hughes. Both the speech and the poem imagine a kinder, fairer world for everyone, no matter the color of their skin. Yolanda’s book continues this message, but for a new generation.

“This book really, I guess, challenges everyone to imagine a world without racism and violence and discrimination,” Yolanda told National Public Radio (NPR).

We Dream a World was released on January 2, 2024, just 13 days before what would have been Dr. King’s 95th birthday. Yolanda never knew her grandfather, but she has heard many stories about him, listened to his speeches, and watched videos of him. She knew she wanted to continue his work, and the work of her grandmother, Coretta Scott King, from an early age. Today, Yolanda is not only an author but also a public speaker.

“I am very proud to be their granddaughter,” Yolanda said in a 2023 speech at Clemson University in South Carolina. “Their examples belong to all of us. We are all challenged to carry forth their unfinished work.”

Yolanda told NPR that young people can improve the world around them.

“[People] think that, oh, I have to do a speech, [but] it’s not the only way,” she said. “It can be something like using your talents. So if you’re, for instance, an artist, painting art pieces that really reflect what’s going on. And you could write songs or [join] a local group or [start] a club at school. There are just so many ways.”

When a person gets an eye exam, they’re asked to read letters from a chart—but what about dogs? Since our four-legged friends can’t tell us what they’re experiencing, veterinarians know very little about canine vision. Recently, scientists conducted a study they hope will lead to new information about how well dogs see as they age.

The study from the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine was the first step in a larger investigation that uses videos to learn about dog vision. In this early step, scientists wanted to see which videos dogs like best. They asked 1,246 people to observe which videos their dogs paid the closest attention to (a sign that the dogs want to watch) and then answer some questions online. The dog owners also noted their dogs’ breeds and their ages because scientists know that, as with people, dogs’ vision often gets worse as they age.

The study found that dogs enjoy watching videos showing other animals, especially other dogs! They weren’t very interested in watching videos of humans, though. More than 10 percent of the dogs seemed to like cartoons. That could be because, overall, movement on the screen got the dogs’ attention, and cartoons have a lot of that! Scientists noticed that the age and breed of the dog seems to affect how much it’s interested in watching TV.

Now that scientists have this information, they want to do a study that uses video-watching to track vision changes in dogs as they age, veterinary ophthalmologist (eye specialist) Freya Mowat told Spectrum News 1 in Wisconsin.

“The effect of aging and vision changes in dogs is largely unknown,” Mowat said. “Like people, dogs are living longer, and we want to make sure we support a healthier life for them as well.”