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Prior to the 1970s, ambulances weren’t the standard for transporting sick or injured people to hospitals. Police cars, or even hearses—cars used to transport coffins during funerals—would help in an emergency, but the patients would not receive treatment on the way. As a result, many people died on the way to the nearest hospital. 

The situation was even worse in the Hill District, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The city’s police force frequently ignored or delayed calls for emergency transportation to the hospital, leaving Black patients without swift care. So in the 1960s, the community decided to start an ambulance service. Called the Freedom House Ambulance Service, it was the first emergency medical service (EMS) in the United States.  

In 1967, a nonprofit organization called Freedom House Enterprises partnered with the hospital to create a paramedic training course and ambulance service to respond to emergencies in the Hill District. The program had five ambulances and recruited new emergency responders to take an eight-month course where they learned how to provide life-saving care on the way to the hospital. 

It’s estimated that in Freedom House’s first year of service, the paramedics transported more than 4,600 patients and saved about 200 lives, according to data from Peter Safar, the Pittsburgh doctor who designed the training program.

When a pair of hikers discovered a box of treasures in the Czech Republic, they had no idea what its origins might be. But even experts have yet to unravel the mysteries tied to the treasure. They wonder who buried the box and why.

The metal box, which was embedded in a stone wall, contained 10 gold bracelets, a comb, and other items. The most eye-popping part of the treasure was 598 gold coins estimated to be worth about $340,000. The hikers immediately took the box to the nearby Museum of Eastern Bohemia in the town of Hradec Králové. 

When museum experts looked for clues to the origin of the treasure, they noted that the newest coin was dated 1921. This indicated that the box could not have been buried more than 104 years ago. Experts also noticed that none of the coins were local. Some were from France, while others were from the Balkan region of Europe, which is south of the Czech Republic. 

Experts believe that the treasure was buried during one of many periods of unrest in Europe. During the 20th century, the continent saw two world wars, as well as other conflicts. Both world wars involved several countries and forced many people to leave their homes. It’s possible that a wealthy family hid their valuables while fleeing to safety. Another theory is that soldiers looted (stole) the items from one or more abandoned homes.

If you got stung by a scorpion or bitten by a poisonous snake, you’d hurry to the hospital for treatment. It turns out ancient Egyptians also had at least one doctor who could treat wounds caused by poisonous animals—and more.

Archaeologists have uncovered a vibrantly painted 4,100-year-old tomb belonging to an Egyptian doctor. Based on the clues in the tomb, the doctor cared for Egyptian royals and specialized in treating snake bites and scorpion stings. 

The well-preserved tomb bears the doctor’s name, Tetinebefou, and professional titles in hieroglyphs. These titles, combined with brightly colored artwork, help paint a picture of the doctor’s life thousands of years ago.

Humans have been mapping the cosmos for thousands of years, and now a teenager in India has added a new feature to our expanding space map.

Daksh Malik, a 14-year-old from the city of Noida in northern India, has discovered a new asteroid floating between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are rocky space objects that orbit the Sun. Daksh, who has been hunting for asteroids for years through an international astronomy program, will get to name the asteroid when it’s officially added to the asteroid and comet database.

“I thought maybe I could call it ‘Destroyer of the World’,” Daksh jokingly told the Economic Times. “Or since it’s an asteroid, maybe ‘Countdown’ would be a catchy yet ominous-sounding name,” he said more seriously.

NASA, a U.S. agency responsible for space research, is completing a process to verify the new asteroid before Daksh can officially name it. For now, the asteroid is temporarily called “2023 OG40.”

Asteroid Hunting

Daksh’s astronomy journey began in 2022 when his class at school joined a citizen science program under the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC). The IASC is an international group that encourages people to search for moving objects in space. Citizen science is when people who are not scientists participate in scientific research.

Through the program, people like Daksh learn to use astronomical software to analyze NASA data and time-lapse images from telescopes to hunt asteroids. The program participants comb through the data and track bright, moving objects.

A baseball field with a painful past is getting a historic revival. In October 2024, baseball players from across the West Coast of the United States gathered to play on the restored field at Manzanar, California, where thousands of Japanese American citizens were once imprisoned. Despite the baseball field’s dark history, many people consider it to be a symbol of strength and resilience.

During World War II, the U.S. government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans to relocate to prison camps. The government justified this by claiming that Americans of Japanese descent might be reporting U.S. secrets to Japan, which was then an enemy nation. Despite their loyalty to the U.S., these Americans swiftly lost their rights. Whole families were forced to move into camps. These prison camps became known as Japanese American internment camps.

One of these camps was at Manzanar. The camp was located near Death Valley, a desolate place where temperatures range from severely hot to very cold. People lived in barracks behind barbed wire fences. Guards watched them and would not let them leave.

Which women’s ice hockey team will take the gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics? If the results of the 2025 Women’s Hockey World Championship are anything to go by, it will be a tight contest between the United States and Canada. The U.S. won the championship on April 20, defeating the Canadians 4–3.

Tess Janecke scored the winning goal for the U.S. with less than three minutes remaining in overtime. As cheers erupted, Janecke threw her stick into the air and hugged one of her teammates.

“Just shows how strong we are as a group and how much we can persevere through anything. I wouldn’t want to do it with any other group,” Janecke later told The Sports Network (TSN).

It was a nailbiter of a match. The U.S. scored the first two goals in the second period for a 2–0 lead, but Canada tied the game quickly with two goals of their own. The U.S. secured another goal in the third period, only to be matched by Canada for a score of 3–3. With a tie at the end of the third period, the match was forced into overtime.

If you’re happy and you know it, flap your fins! If it’s mealtime and you know it, flap your fins!

While this isn’t an actual turtle song, scientists have discovered that loggerhead sea turtles do a joyful dance—spinning around and flapping their fins in the water—when they expect to find food. Scientists discovered this cute and unexpected turtle behavior while studying the way young loggerhead sea turtles memorize favorite feeding sites in the wild.  

Loggerhead sea turtles begin their lives hatching from eggs buried in the sand and then using their little flippers to run to the ocean. The hatchlings go on to spend their lives in the open ocean, migrating to coastal locations to find food and grow larger. Adult loggerheads are known to migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles for food before making their way back to the beaches where they hatched to mate and lay eggs. After laying eggs, the turtles return to the ocean to find these feeding spots again.

But the open ocean doesn’t have road signs, and sea turtles can’t use GPS or a map to return to their favorite foraging spots. So how do they remember where to go?

Some scientists think that turtles use Earth’s magnetic field to memorize the “magnetic signatures” of these feeding spots. Memorizing these signatures is like marking a favorite restaurant on a map. Scientists think the turtles might have a sense, like an internal compass, that helps them to remember and then return to these feeding sites in the future.

To test this theory, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) in the United States took 62 young loggerhead turtles and put them in large bowls of water surrounded by electromagnets. The electromagnets could produce different magnetic signatures, like what the turtles would experience swimming to a spot in the ocean. When certain electromagnetic signatures were turned on, the scientists would give the loggerheads food so that they would learn to associate a meal with the signature.

Schoolchildren are bringing back the Brazilian Atlantic Forest one tree at a time and one mini forest at a time.

A project called Formigas de Embaúba helps schoolchildren in Brazil’s city of São Paulo plant mini forests of native plant species to reforest parts of the city landscape and connect young people to nature. Formigas de Embaúba is funded by the SUGi Project, a nonprofit organization that works with communities around the world to plant native forests. 

The Formigas program gets its name from ants that live in the embaúba tree, also called the trumpet tree. The ants live inside the tree’s hollow trunk, which provides protection from predators and sweet sap to eat. If other insects or animals come to eat the tree’s leaves, the ants will swarm out and bite the attacker, causing it to flee. In this way, the ants and the tree live in a symbiotic relationship, meaning they work together to protect and take care of each other.

This little but mighty ant is the symbol for the mutual benefit humans and trees can achieve. When people work together to take care of trees and the environment, they also reap the benefits of nature, explained Rafael Ribeiro, who is the cofounder of the Formigas program.

“We are rebuilding an ecosystem of species that evolved together, one protecting the other. The plants attract birds and butterflies. A habitat is created for fauna that don’t have space [elsewhere] in the city,” Ribeiro told Folha de São Paulo, a local newspaper. “Despite being on a small scale, it is in fact a forest.”

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, a giant hairy animal roamed the Earth—the woolly mammoth. Though mammoths are now extinct, a genetics company says it is one step closer to bringing them back with the creation of a much smaller animal—the woolly mouse.

Scientists at Colossal Biosciences in the United States have created “woolly mice” with the shaggy, golden-brown hair of mammoths. The scientists altered the genetics of the mice to give them the same woolly trait that mammoths had.

“We ended up with some absolutely adorable mice that have longer, woolly, golden-colored coats,” Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal, told NPR.

Colossal is a company that hopes to use genetic modification to bring back extinct species like the mammoth. The woolly mice are the first step in this process.

Changing Mouse Genes

Genes dictate all of an organism’s physical and biological traits, like body size and eye color. Altering an organism’s genes can lead to changes in these biological traits, but it is a complicated and difficult process. 

Scientists can alter genes through adding, modifying, or replacing the DNA of an organism. Genetic information collected from mammoths found frozen in ice and permafrost has allowed researchers at laboratories like Colossal to identify which genes cause mammoth traits like shaggy hair. They can then make changes in other organisms, like the mice, to give them mammoth-like traits.

“This is the way that we’re going to create mammoths for the future,” Shapiro told NPR.

Is It a Mammoth?

Colossal aims to eventually alter the genes of Asian elephants, which are the mammoth’s closest living relatives. By starting with lab mice, scientists could first try genetic modification on a much smaller scale.

“The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission. This success brings us a step closer to our goal of bringing back the woolly mammoth,” said Ben Lamm, the cofounder of Colossal.

However, other scientists are skeptical that genetic modification can be used to return the mammoth from extinction. Tori Herridge, a scientist from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, told CNN that it will be much more challenging to make genetic changes in elephants than in mice. Changing these traits to an elephant’s DNA will create something that resembles a mammoth but will not be the real thing, she said.

“You are never going to ‘bring back’ a mammoth,” said Herridge.

The scientists at Colossal are focusing on bringing back not just the mammoth, but other extinct species as well. One of these species is the Australian thylacine—also called the Tasmanian tiger—which humans hunted into extinction in the early 1900s.

Erin Brooks doesn’t live the life of a typical 17-year-old. While most kids her age are going to school and maybe looking for a summer job, Brooks travels the world as a competitive surfer. 

Born in Texas in 2007, Brooks didn’t even think about surfing until her family moved to Hawaii, where the huge Pacific waves are ripe for riding. Then 9 years old, Brooks took a surfing lesson and decided she wanted to dedicate her life to the sport. 

“From the first wave, I knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Brooks told Olympics.com in 2024. “It was in Lahaina, Maui, at a wave called Breakwall. I was like, ‘Wow, this is so cool, and people get to do it every day.’ And that’s what I do now, so it’s cool.”

It took a while for Brooks to develop her skills, but hard work paid off. By the time she was 12, it was clear that she had developed an unusual talent, especially with aerials. An aerial is a difficult surfing trick that involves jumping into the air from atop an ocean wave, surfboard and all. Soon, Brooks was competing in surfing competitions all over the world, accompanied by her parents, who by then had retired from their jobs.