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Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (U.K.) died on September 8, 2022. She was 96 years old. 

Queen Elizabeth was the longest-serving monarch in the history of the U.K. She took the throne in 1952, after the death of her father, King George VI. She was 25 years old. Queen Elizabeth’s reign spanned 70 years.

For many British people, the queen was an important part of their national identity. In the U.K., the monarch (the king or queen) doesn’t rule the people or play an active role in making laws and policies. The true head of the British government is the prime minister. Britain also has a lawmaking body called Parliament. But while monarchs don’t create policy, they do have many official and ceremonial duties. Queen Elizabeth made thousands of public appearances in the U.K. and around the world. She presided over charity events and met heads of state when they visited her country.

The United States wouldn’t be the United States without the Constitution. For 235 years, the U.S. Constitution has been the foundation for the nation’s government and laws. Getting such a significant document written was a tall order—and it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

Here are a few little-known facts about the writing of the Constitution.

The delegates didn’t agree on everything.

The Constitution was written at the Constitutional Convention, a meeting that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Twelve states sent delegates, or representatives, to the convention. The delegates argued over issues such as how powerful the national government should be, how many representatives each state should have in Congress, and whether slavery should be legal. 

The Constitution made some people nervous.

Plenty of Americans were worried that the Constitution would create a federal (national) government that was too powerful. (Remember, they had just fought a war to rid themselves of a powerful king.) The government of Rhode Island opposed the idea of the Constitution so strongly that it refused to send a delegate to the convention. Later, the Bill of Rights was written in order to prevent the federal government from violating Americans’ liberties.

It was summer, and it was hot.

The convention took place during a hot and humid Philadelphia summer at a time before air conditioning or even electric fans existed. There was no fresh air wafting through the Pennsylvania State House—the delegates kept the windows closed so passersby wouldn’t hear their debates. In their long-sleeved shirts, suits that were often made of wool, and stockings, the delegates must have been miserable. It’s fair to say that the building probably didn’t smell that great! 

The Constitution cost $30 to write.

The delegates needed someone with great handwriting to put the words of the Constitution on paper. They paid a clerk named Jacob Shallus $30 ($955 in today’s money) to do the job. It took Shallus about 40 hours to complete the document.

Some of the words are spelled wrong.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was no standard way to spell words in English. Because of this, some of the words in the Constitution aren’t spelled the way we’d spell them. For example, choose is spelled chuse, while Pennsylvania is spelled Pensylvania.

Sixteen-year-old Sophie Araque-Liu of Martin County, Florida, is the winner of the 2022 Doodle for Google contest. The theme of this year’s contest was “I care for myself by….” Araque-Liu’s winning artwork is about the importance of accepting help and support from others.

The artwork, called “Not alone,” depicts Araque-Liu sharing a hug with her mother. It’s meant to represent the love and care she has received from her mom throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I care for myself by letting other people care for me…,” Araque-Liu told TC Palm newspaper. “It’s just amazing to know you still have people supporting you, and you don’t need to try to do everything on your own.”

The annual Doodle for Google contest is open to students in kindergarten through 12th grade who live in the United States or one of its territories. According to the contest rules, artists can work with any material, “from crayons to clay to found objects.” Judges select state and territory winners first and then choose one winner from each of five age groups. Finally, the national winner is selected.

As the winner of the top prize, Araque-Liu got to have her work displayed on Google’s homepage for 24 hours and received a $30,000 college scholarship. The prize also included $50,000 to fund a computer lab or technology program at her school.

“I’m not used to all the attention,” Araque-Liu told TC Palm. “But I’m so happy and so excited.”

Smart technology is all over the place. Humans can ask Alexa to play a favorite song, program a robot to vacuum a room, or send a drone to deliver a package. And soon, we may be able to wear robotic clothing—shirts and pants with smart technology.

Scientists, computer programmers, and clothing designers are teaming up to create smart clothing with a variety of capabilities. The idea is that, rather than just keep us warm, clothing could help our bodies work better.

In 2018, for example, a group of scientists invented a pair of pants with electrical pumps rooted in the fabric. The technology monitors the movement of the wearer to determine when to go into action. The pumps send air into small tubes to help the wearer—possibly someone who is elderly or disabled—do things like get up from a chair.

Jonathan Rossiter, a professor of robotics at the University of Bristol in England, helped develop the technology. “We have developed [pants with] lightweight bubble artificial muscles, which could help people to stand up or to lift objects,” Rossiter told The Guardian.

In Australia, researchers recently developed another smart textile (fabric). In this case, robotic threads were knitted into regular cloth. The threads, which contain fluid-filled tubes, can be programmed to move and even lift wearers who are up to 192 times their weight. The technology has a lot of potential uses, but some scientists envision creating “smart suits” that could be worn to help improve a person’s strength and mobility. 

“Like the Iron Man suit or Spiderman suit,” said lead scientist Thanh Nho Do, comparing such a suit to costumes worn by Marvel Comics superheroes. 

These developments are only the beginning, scientists say. They expect to develop a variety of smart clothing to improve mobility, track people’s vital signs, and more.

Will smart clothing ever make superheroes out of ordinary people? Stay tuned.

A team of scientists is working to bring the Tasmanian tiger species back from the dead. The species, which is also known as the thylacine, has been extinct since the 1930s.

The Tasmanian tiger got its name from the stripes that ran across part of its back. The animal’s head looked like a dog or a wolf, and its body was roughly as large as a medium-sized dog. But while it resembled a canine, the Tasmanian tiger was actually a marsupial. The female carried a litter of young in a pouch on her body until they were about halfway to adulthood. 

Originally, the Tasmanian tiger was found in both Australia and on a nearby island called Tasmania. The species disappeared from mainland Australia at least 2,000 years ago. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they believe changes in climate affected Australia’s thylacine population. The Tasmanian tiger continued to thrive on Tasmania for hundreds of years, playing an important role as the island’s apex (top) marsupial predator. But by the 1800s, humans were blaming the Tasmanian tiger for killing their livestock. They hunted the species to extinction.  

Bringing back the Tasmanian tiger won’t be easy. Scientists will need to figure out the animal’s genome—a map of its DNA—and compare it with the genome of its closest living relative, a mouse-sized marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart. They plan to take cells of the fat-tailed dunnart and change the DNA of these cells so that they more closely resemble thylacine cells. Scientists would then “build” a Tasmanian tiger from these cells. Because the cells would originate from a different species, the newly created Tasmanian tigers wouldn’t be exactly the same as the extinct species. 

You can never be sure exactly what’s going on under the surface. Scientists on the island of Borneo discovered this when they found a previously unknown species of pitcher plant, a type of plant that’s carnivorous (meat-eating). This newly discovered species, which is called Nepenthes pudica, captures its prey underground.

Pitcher plants have “pitchers” that are open at the top and contain sweet fluid. The fluid attracts insects and other small prey—even rodents, in some cases. These animals climb into the pitcher to get a drink but can’t climb back up its smooth, slippery surface. Instead, they fall into the fluid, where they’re digested by the plant. Most such plants grow their pitchers above ground, but Nepenthes pudica is different because its pitchers are underground. 

The scientists discovered Nepenthes pudica by accident. They noticed leaves that they recognized as belonging to a pitcher plant but didn’t see any pitchers—at first. Then they spotted what looked like a damaged pitcher sticking out of the soil. When one of the scientists moved away surrounding moss, he exposed the pitchers and realized they had been growing under the moss.

Nepenthes pudica is the first known underground pitcher plant. There are more than 700 known carnivorous plants. A few of them catch their prey underground. But those other underground meat eaters aren’t pitcher plants. Their traps are small, so their prey is tiny or even microscopic.

Nepenthes pudica’s pitchers, which are up to 4.3 inches (10.9 centimeters) long, trap larger bugs that live underground, including ants, beetles, and mites. Peering into one of the pitchers, scientists found mosquito larvae, nematodes, and a previously unknown worm species.

The U.S. Congress recently passed the most significant climate law in the nation’s history. The legislation is set to reduce U.S. carbon emissions at a time when the effects of climate change have become uncomfortably clear.

The law is called the Inflation Reduction Act. (The name comes from other parts of the legislation that aim to lower costs for health care and energy, among other things.) It will devote nearly $370 billion to reducing carbon emissions—the human-made pollution that is the biggest contributor to climate change. The goal is to get Americans to reduce their use of fossil fuels to power their homes, workplaces, and vehicles.

The law creates tax credits and rebates for companies and individuals who invest in renewable energy technology—things like solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. That means that those who switch to renewable energy will pay less in taxes. 

The law also contains other climate protection measures. For example, it devotes funding to installing energy-efficient technology at industrial sites. Money will also be used to restore forests, which help to lessen the effects of climate change. In addition, fossil fuel companies will be required to pay fees when they produce excess pollution. And communities that are being heavily impacted by pollution will receive funding for clean-up efforts.

Experts say the new law is set to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent from their 2005 peak by the year 2030. 

Reactions to the law have been mixed. Some critics say it costs too much money, while others say it does not go far enough to address the climate crisis. But supporters say that, in a year when the effects of climate change have led to droughts, floods, and heat waves, any action is important.

“It’s so important that we do this, and the benefits are still likely to be so much larger than the costs,” Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at Brookings told the Associated Press. “This is still unquestionably the right thing to do.”

President Biden signed the bill into law on August 16, 2022.

Bill Russell, a basketball legend who helped the Boston Celtics win 11 National Basketball Association (NBA) titles, has died. He was 88.

Russell had an incredible career as both a player and a coach. As a student at the University of San Francisco, he led his team to 55 straight wins, won two National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships, and won a gold medal at the 1956 Olympics. The same year he wowed at the Olympics, Russell was drafted by the Boston Celtics. Playing as a center, he was a defensive whiz and a renowned rebounder. It’s no accident that Russell was on the team during one of the eras when the Celtics dominated the NBA. The Celts won the championship every year between 1959 and 1966. In 1966, Russell became head coach of the Celtics—the first Black head coach in any of the nation’s four major sports leagues. He continued to play until 1969, leading the team to two more championships.

Although he was a hero to many, Russell was also the target of racist attacks. When Russell began his NBA career, racial segregation was legal in the southern United States. In 1961, while in Kentucky for a game, Russell was told he wouldn’t be served at a hotel coffee shop because he was Black. He and four other players informed their coach that they would not play in that night’s game and flew home. 

But life wasn’t necessarily easier in the North. Russell’s house in Massachusetts was burglarized and repeatedly vandalized with racial slurs. 

“We’ve got to show our disapproval of this treatment or else [nothing will change],” Russell once said. “We have the same rights and privileges as anyone else and deserve to be treated accordingly.”

A vocal supporter of civil rights, Russell was in attendance when Martin Luther King, Jr., led a famous civil rights protest known as the March on Washington. He also spoke out against school segregation in Boston, which persisted into the 1970s.

Russell spent the later part of his career as a commentator, an author, and a basketball icon. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and many other players who came after Russell have said they consider him to be a hero.

“Bill Russell was a pioneer—as a player, as a champion, as the NBA’s first Black head coach and as an activist,” Michael Jordan wrote after Russell’s death was announced. “The world has lost a legend.”

Do you ever wish you could sleep later in the morning? Some students in California will be able to hit the snooze button a few times, thanks to a new state law.

The legislation says California middle schools can’t begin the school day before 8 a.m. and high schools can’t start before 8:30 a.m. This is the first law of its kind to pass, although lawmakers in New Jersey and Massachusetts are considering similar legislation.

Why start the school day later? According to experts, teenagers need more sleep than adults do, and their bodies are wired to stay up later compared to people in other age groups. That can make it hard for teens to wake up and be alert in the early hours of the day. Experts say letting teens sleep later leads to less sleep deprivation, which can lead to better grades and improved mood. The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends that middle schools and high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later. 

“It really is in those first early morning hours that children are just essentially half asleep,” said Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with NPR. “They’re not absorbing information. So why are we putting them in the classroom?”

Similar laws have been proposed in other states over the years, but none of them passed. Such laws face opposition from people who argue that later school start times would disrupt scheduling for things like school buses and after-school activities. (If the school day starts later, then activities might need to run later too.) Opponents also say parents might find it difficult to make sure their kids get to school at that later time while they themselves are trying to get ready for work.

The California law will test these concerns…and whether students will benefit from snoozing a little later. It will go into effect for the 2022–2023 school year.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, chances are you’ve been experiencing a very hot summer. Extreme heat has gripped parts of North America, Asia, and Europe—even in places where summers are normally mild. 

One country where the temperature has soared is the United Kingdom (U.K.). In July, parts of the U.K. experienced several days with temperatures higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). At the peak of the heat wave, on July 19, 2022, some areas reached just over 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). This was the hottest temperature ever recorded in the U.K. 

Summer temperatures regularly get into the 90s and even climb above 100 degrees in parts of the U.S. and other countries. But hot weather is not the norm in the U.K., where summer high temperatures average in the 60s and 70s Fahrenheit (teens and 20s Celsius). As a result, the country’s structures aren’t built to withstand high temperatures. As the heat wave of 2022 continued, asphalt and concrete expanded and buckled, forcing officials to close roads and airport runways. 

U.K. government officials urged people to stay home, warning them that being outdoors for too long could be dangerous. But being indoors did not necessarily bring relief. Only about 5 percent of homes in the U.K. are air conditioned. Some people found refuge at shopping centers and offices, many of which are air conditioned. 

Recent heat waves have caused chaos even in places that are more accustomed to high temperatures. In Chongqing, China, for example, unusually high temperatures caused the roof of a museum to begin to melt. In Fort Worth, Texas, heat combined with a lack of rain caused the ground to shift, leading to water main breaks, which is when pipes carrying city water supplies crack. In parts of Europe, hot and dry conditions led to destructive wildfires.

Will next summer be cooler? It’s hard to say. 

While extreme heat waves used to be unusual, scientists say that’s no longer true. Climate change is changing everything. In July, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that as global temperatures rise, heat waves, along with other extreme weather, will become increasingly common. Scientists are concerned about the effect that high temperatures will have on agriculture as well as human health.

“The best solution to this will be…being very ambitious on tackling the causes of this global warming,” said Dr. María Neira, director of the Department of Public Health and Environment at the WHO.