Page Type: Middle

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. 

What’s life like for a honeybee? Scientists glued QR codes to the backs of more than 32,000 bees and learned a few surprising things.

A QR code stores data that can be accessed when the code is scanned. The bees’ tiny QR codes couldn’t hold much more information than a number indicating each bee’s identity—but that was enough.

Entomologists (insect experts), biologists, and engineers from Pennsylvania State University used the codes to find out how far worker bees would travel to find nectar. As each bee left and then reentered the hive, a camera scanned the code to determine the bee’s identity and record the time.

Scientists learned that, while a few bees leave the hive for up to two hours, most don’t spend much more than about five minutes on each trip.

“For now, what we can see is a lot of the trips are very short,” scientist Robyn Underwood told CBS News. “[The bees are] gone less than five minutes because they’re very efficient. They go to the flowers, they fill up, they come back, they want to empty out right away, go back and forth. That’s how bees work. They are like, you know, busy as a bee.”

This finding also suggests that bees don’t travel very far from the hive.

Researchers say the discovery could help beekeepers. Currently, U.S. law states that organic beekeepers must put their hives in places that are free of pesticides within a 3.1-mile (5-kilometer) radius. Since pesticide use is common, it’s hard to find such places. But if bees don’t travel far, then maybe the law doesn’t need to be so strict.

“Pretty much in the continental U.S., you cannot be certified organic beekeepers. Because the amount of land area that is currently in the suggested regulations is so enormous,” Underwood said.

Scientists know that honeybees do what they call “waggle dances,” which are body movements that tell the other bees where nectar can be found. The scientists plan to compare the data about time spent away from the hive with their observations of waggle dances to see if they match. They also want to track the movements of the other members of the colony—the queen and the drones (the male bees in the hive).

Asked to think of an apple, most people will “see” an apple in their minds. They are said to be using their “mind’s eye.” But a small percentage of humans don’t visualize objects or events that they’re thinking of. Scientists are trying to find out why.

The inability to visualize images in the brain is called aphantasia. Scientists estimate that between 1 and 4 percent of people have aphantasia. It’s not clear why some people can use their mind’s eye and others can’t.

The Experiment

To learn more, scientists studied 14 people with aphantasia and 18 people without. During the study, the scientists flashed two striped patterns in front of all the participants’ eyes. One pattern had red horizontal lines, and the other had green vertical lines. As the participants viewed the images, the scientists monitored their brain activity.

The scientists were interested in the primary visual cortex. This is the part of the brain that processes visual information—the things people take in with their eyes. The scientists found that looking at the images caused activity in the primary visual cortex of all the participants, whether they had aphantasia or not. But there was slightly less brain activity in the people with aphantasia.

But what about when the participants were asked to imagine those images? Again, all participants showed activity in their primary visual cortex when they tried to imagine the images. In the people without aphantasia, the brain activity was similar to when they were actually looking at the images. But the brain activity observed in the people with aphantasia was different.

The Results

Scientists say the results of the study suggest that people with aphantasia have different wiring in their brains than people who can imagine images.

There’s still an unanswered question. If people with aphantasia use their primary visual cortex when they try to imagine an image, why doesn’t a picture form in their brains? Scientists hope further study will help them unravel this mystery.

Some inventions use simple solutions to solve big problems. When middle school student Tina Jin learned that billions of people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water, she was inspired to help.

“When I was watching the news after dinner, I was shocked to see children drinking dirty murky brown water,” Jin told the Society for Science, a nonprofit organization that promotes scientific research. “While I was picking which type of water to drink, some people couldn’t even have clean water.”

Drinking contaminated and unfiltered water means risking water-borne illnesses like diarrhea or cholera. However, many people don’t have filtration systems that can clean contaminated water.

This led Jin to wonder, is there a common natural material that could also act as a water filter? That’s when she thought about using animal bones.

Jin says she got the idea while eating with her family. The beef bones in her meal reminded her of a type of human-made filter material called polymer membranes. Since meat is a part of many diets around the world, animal bones are an accessible material nearly everywhere. This inspired her to study the ability of beef bones to filter dirty water.

The bones Jin saw in her meal are called trabecular bones. The inside of a trabecular bone has many small holes, making it look like a sponge. These bones can be found in humans and animals in the spine, at the base of the skull, and at the ends of leg bones like the femur. Jin decided to test whether the trabecular bones could trap impurities when water flows through them.

To make the filter, Jin cleaned trabecular beef bones and sliced them into cross sections. She then tested the bone slices’ ability to filter “dirty” water by pouring black tea, rose tea, water with microplastics, and stream water through the slices. Jin recorded which pore sizes from the bones filtered the water best. Her results showed that the smaller the pore sizes on the bone, the better it was at cleaning water.

A water company in Jin’s hometown of San Jose, California, tested her results and confirmed that her bone-filtered water was drinkable and safe.

“I created this whole method, using 100 percent natural, easily accessible materials and household supplies so that anyone from any part of the world can filter their own dirty water into clean water,” said Jin.

Do aliens exist? A new study raises the possibility that intelligent life is much more common than scientists previously thought!

Scientists have long thought that the existence of humans (Earth’s intelligent life-forms) came about due to a rare and lucky set of conditions and events. This is based on a 1983 theory by a scientist named Brandon Carter. Carter started with the fact that Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, but humans did not exist until about 200,000 years ago. This led him to believe that humans could develop only after a few key conditions were met. And even after that, Carter believed, it took a long time for humans to appear. 

Carter believed that it takes so long for intelligent life to evolve that on most planets, the host star, which is needed for life, would have burned out before that could happen.  Luckily for us, we evolved while our Sun was still young—only a few billion years old.

But a team of scientists at Penn State University say they don’t believe it takes a long time for intelligent life to evolve once a planet is able to support it. In fact, they believe that if conditions are right, intelligent life will evolve. And that means it’s possible that intelligent life exists on any planet where conditions are right.

Rocky planets that are Earth sized are most likely to be able to support life. Scientists believe there are about 1 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy alone, and many of them are likely to be rocky. That doesn’t mean intelligent aliens are living on every one of those planets. But if the Penn State study is correct, it’s possible we’re not alone.

March is Women’s History Month in the United States. Farther down on this page, you can follow a link to learn about hundreds of notable women in science, the arts, government, and more. Some women risked their personal safety to help others. Here is the story of one of those women.

In 1942, Marion Pritchard witnessed Nazi officers putting Jewish children onto a truck bound for concentration camps. Then and there, she decided to become a rescuer. For the rest of World War II, Pritchard would help protect Jewish families from the Nazis.

Born in 1920 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pritchard was a student in 1939, when Germany, led by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government, invaded Poland. Eventually, much of Europe would surrender to Germany. Once the Nazis gained control of an area, they would force Jewish people and other minorities into concentration camps where they subjected them to forced labor and eventually killed them. More than 6 million people died in this mass murder, which is known as the Holocaust. 

The Nazi invasion of Poland led to World War II, between the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy) and the Allied powers (led by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and, eventually, the United States). But the start of the war did not stop Germany from invading its neighbors.

The Netherlands, where Pritchard lived, surrendered to Germany in 1940. Even under Nazi control, there were Dutch resisters—people who engaged in secret activities meant to weaken the Nazis and protect people who were under threat. But acting against the German government was dangerous. In 1941, Pritchard was arrested with a group of student resisters who were meeting at a friend’s house, where she was studying. She spent seven months in jail. It wasn’t long after her release that she saw the Nazis taking Jewish children to concentration camps.

“I was shocked and in tears,” Pritchard told the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Risking her own life, Pritchard began bringing food and clothing to Jewish people who were hiding from the Nazis. In 1942, she was asked to help a 2-year-old who was in danger of being taken to a concentration camp. She first brought the child to her parents’ home and then found a family who lived at a safer location. Throughout the war, she would go on to help save about 150 Jewish children from the Nazis.

Between 1942 and the end of the war in 1945, Pritchard protected a Jewish father and his three young children, hiding them in a home many miles away from Amsterdam. Pritchard moved into the home and helped care for the children. One night, a Dutch police officer who was loyal to the Nazis came to the home to do a search. Pritchard secured the family in a preplanned hiding place. Later, when the officer returned without warning, Pritchard had to act quickly to defend the family. Although it was against her beliefs, she used physical violence to stop the officer. Her action saved four lives, but the events of that night would never leave her mind.

In 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies, and Pritchard went to work helping people who had been displaced by the war. She eventually married an American soldier and settled in the United States. She died in 2016.

In 1984, Pritchard was interviewed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Asked if she had advice for her children and grandchildren, she said, “Do the right thing if you can find out what the right thing is.”

Two canyons on the far side of the Moon are somewhat similar to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But while Earth’s Grand Canyon was carved out by water over millions of years, new research shows that the canyons on the Moon formed in about 10 minutes. 

The lunar canyons are long and narrow, extending out from a huge crater in straight lines. Hoping to learn how the canyons formed, scientists mapped them using data from a lunar orbiter. They learned that, about 3.8 billion years ago, an asteroid or comet hit the Moon, creating the crater and sending rocky debris flying at up to 2,200 miles per hour (3,600 kilometers per hour). A curtain of rocks fell back down and hit the Moon several times, creating rows of small craters that lined up to form the two canyons. 

“Those clusters of rock in that curtain hit the lunar surface in just a staccato series of impacts—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association told National Public Radio.

Researchers calculated that all this took only about 10 minutes. 

The two lunar canyons are smaller than the Grand Canyon but still quite large. One of them, called Vallis Planck, is about 174 miles (280 km) long and 2.2 miles (3.5 km) deep. The other canyon, called Vallis Schrödinger, is about 168 miles (270 km) long and 1.7 miles (2.7 km) deep. The asteroid that started it all was larger than the asteroid that led to the end of the dinosaur age 66 million years ago. 

Since they’re on the Moon’s far side, we can’t see Vallis Planck or Vallis Schrödinger from Earth. But other lunar canyons are visible to us when the sky is clear. They look like white lines radiating out from a crater.