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If you’ve ever gotten into a car on a hot, sunny day, you know it’s not a pleasant experience. A sweltering car is not only uncomfortable but also potentially unsafe. Now, auto company Nissan Motor Co. has come up with new automotive paint that can keep a car’s exterior and interior dramatically cooler. 

Nissan tested the paint at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, which receives abundant sunlight, by parking two cars next to each other—one coated with the cooling paint and one coated with regular auto paint. At the end of the test, the vehicle with the cooling paint was up to 22 °F (12 °C) cooler on the outside and up to 9 °F (5 °C) cooler on the inside than the other vehicle.

All over the planet, kids and teens are finding creative ways to help other people and the environment. The Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes highlights a few notable examples by honoring 25 young people in North America who are making the world a better place. The top 15 honorees each win $10,000, which they can put toward their service work or a college education.

Here are a few of this year’s inspiring winners.

Unlike some of its neighbors in the solar system, Earth has just one moon. But for a brief time, our planet is also being orbited by an asteroid that scientists are calling a mini-moon.

The asteroid, which is named 2024 PT5, entered Earth’s orbit in late September after being captured by our planet’s gravity. It’s expected to remain until November 25, for a total stay of about 56 days. At 33 feet (10 meters) long, 2024 PT5 is about the size of a school bus, and scientists say there’s no danger it will collide with Earth.

But will 2024 PT5 give the Moon a run for its money? Not really, scientists say. Most people won’t be able to see it in our sky. 

“The object is too small and dim for typical amateur telescopes and binoculars,” astronomer Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com. Marcos co-wrote a study about the asteroid. “However, the object is well within the brightness range of typical telescopes used by professional astronomers.” 

2024 PT5 won’t even be around long enough to complete a full orbit around Earth. Eventually, it will go back out into space and join an asteroid belt that’s orbiting the Sun.

Scientists say “mini-moon events” aren’t too unusual. In February 2020, scientists detected another asteroid that had begun to orbit Earth in 2017. It remained in orbit for more than a year after it was spotted. That was what scientists called a “long mini-moon episode.” Unlike long episodes, which occur only every 10 or 20 years, short episodes (like 2024 PT5’s visit) happen several times each decade.

Cats are natural-born hunters, but not all cats actually hunt. A new study shows that whether a cat hunts or not depends partly on its personality.

The ability to hunt is part of a cat’s instinct, meaning cats are born knowing how to hunt. Many cats will hunt even if they’re well fed by humans—so hunger isn’t always related to why a cat goes looking for prey. This made a team of scientists wonder why some cats don’t hunt.

In the study, which took place in France, scientists surveyed 2,508 people whose cats spend at least part of the time outside. The scientists found that only some of these cats brought prey home regularly. The difference between the cats that hunted and the cats that didn’t hunt had nothing to do with age or gender. Instead, it was related to the cats’ personalities. Cats that were more curious, adventurous, or dominant (bold and aggressive) were more likely to be hunters. Cats that were friendlier or shyer were less likely to be hunters.

The scientists also found that cats that spent more time outdoors were more likely to hunt. Also, cats living in rural or suburban areas were more likely to hunt than cats living in cities.

Cat owners know that different cats have different personalities. But scientists only recently considered the idea that a cat’s personality might be related to whether it hunted or not.

“[This study] is super interesting because we’re in an age where we’re spending a lot more time studying cats and cat personalities, and kind of finding all the nuances to the behavior,” cat behaviorist Wailani Sung told USA Today. Sung helped make the 2022 Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat.

Two high school students made headlines when they solved a math problem that’s stumped many mathematicians. Their feat even caught the attention of former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, who pledged a million dollars to the school the students attended.

In 2022, Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson were seniors at St. Mary’s Academy in New Orleans, Louisiana, when they entered a schoolwide math contest related to the Pythagorean theorem. The Pythagorean theorem says that the sum of the squared lengths of the two shorter sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the length of the longer side. So if you know the lengths of two sides of a right triangle, you can use the theorem to figure out the length of the third side. Here’s how the equation is written:

Wolves once roamed around England, unknowingly spreading wildflower and grass seeds that stuck to their fur and paws and fell off miles away. This seed-spreading was important for England’s biodiversity. But since wolves are long gone from that part of the world, their canine cousins—dogs—are pitching in.  

In a town called Lewes, people are putting seed-filled backpacks on their dogs before heading to the Railway Land Nature Reserve. The backpacks are full of holes, so the dogs spread the seeds as they roam freely around the reserve with their humans close by. Project manager Dylan Walker says the dogs walk four times the distance humans do and often squeeze into places where humans don’t go. 

Wolves once unknowingly did this work, often roaming 12 miles (20 kilometers) every night. But wolves became extinct in Britain in the 1700s.

“I signed up [for the project] because it sounded like such a good fit,” dog owner Cressida Murray told the Guardian. “I was asked to place a harness on my chocolate cocker spaniel called Bertie, and he ran around spreading seeds like wolves used to do many years ago.”

Walker got the idea for the project after hearing about a similar project that took place in Chile in 2019. After fires destroyed many acres of forest and drove many animals out, two women tied seed-filled satchels to their three dogs and let them run around the area. Even though the dogs had no idea what they were doing, their work helped turn some charred land green again.

In England, the dogs’ work is paying off, Walker says.

“We’ve already started to see seed germination in some areas, but most of the seeds that have been distributed by the dogs are perennials, which take a couple of years to establish and flower, so hopefully next year we’ll see some clearer results,” he told the Guardian.

Tens of thousands of species are endangered, and that number is growing. So scientists have come up with a way to make sure animal species aren’t lost forever: they want to safeguard animals’ cellular material by storing it on the Moon.

A team of researchers suggest putting frozen cells from many animal species in an enclosure and placing it on the frigid far side of the Moon (the side not facing Earth), where the cells would remain frozen. Freezing the materials is a way to preserve them.

“The purpose is really to create a biorepository to ensure long-term safeguarding of species from extinction,” John Bischof, an engineer from the University of Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio. “This is a way of actually putting away really important genetic material in a place where it will be safe for, potentially, generations.”

The cells could be used to improve genetic diversity in species with very small populations. They could even be used to clone animals.

Scientists say the Moon could be a better storage place than Earth, where climate change is causing temperatures to rise. Already, the country of Norway is home to the Global Seed Vault, where more than one million seed samples from around the world are stored under permafrost to keep them cold. In 2017, the vault was flooded due to melting permafrost. Luckily, no seeds were affected by the flood.

“If there had not been people there, flooding could have damaged the [seed] biorepository,” scientist Mary Hagedorn told the Guardian. Hagedorn was lead author of the study that described the animal cell biorepository.

As they considered storing animal cells, scientists concluded that Earth would be an unreliable location. They decided to look elsewhere. The Moon has a very thin atmosphere, which means there’s no threat of climate change there. Still, the Moon is exposed to solar radiation that can destroy cells. Scientists will need to build a repository that protects the cells from damage.

Hagedorn says we’re nowhere near the point where a biorepository would be built and maintained on the Moon. But there are plans for increased travel to the Moon and maybe even the construction of a base camp there. For now, Hagedorn and her team have outlined a possible plan.

“We know how to do this and can do this and will do this, but it may take decades to finally achieve,” she told the Guardian.