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Blending in
Can you spot the cuttlefish? A common European cuttlefish camouflages itself on the seafloor. Credit: Justine Allen What if you could build a device that could mimic the way undersea creatures escape predators? It could be used as an artificial skin that changes its appearance to hide something (even submarines). As an electronic wallpaper, it could thwart thieves by catching them on a hidden camera. Or the new system could turn an entire wall…
News in the Classroom
SNK stories by academic unit Use Science News for Kids stories in the classroom. We’ve worked with science teachers to classify Science News for Kids stories by subject matter, making it easy for teachers, parents and students to find relevant stories. Anatomy Cardiovascular/Respiratory Digestive/Excretory Endocrine Immunology Integumentary Nervous Skeletal/Muscular Biology Cells Classical Genetics Classification DNA Ecology Energetics…
Cool Jobs: Green Science
…ants, yucca plants, golden pothos and peace lilies. These common plants do some uncommon good: They cleanse the air of harmful chemicals. It’s a benefit Wolverton has spent most of his career studying. He got his start in the 1980s, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA had worried that astronauts might spend months living in stuffy spacecraft. So it asked Wolverton to figure out if plants could make the air h…
Teacher’s Questions for Cool Jobs: Green Science
SCIENCE Before reading: 1. List some ways a plant can change temperature, moisture, light and other aspects of its environment. 2. How would you expect the mix of plants in an ecosystem to respond to wetter climate conditions? How about to drier climate conditions? During reading: 1. Why are trees that grow along the tree line sometimes left without the energy to produce seeds? 2. When the tree line moves north, what does the act…
Cool Jobs: Museum science
…it to their local museum. They are not trying to take their minds off the outbreak. Instead, they come to sift through the museum’s historic collections, looking for clues that might help them save lives. For instance, in the 1990s, there was an outbreak of hantavirus in New Mexico and nearby states. The sometimes-deadly disease causes flulike symptoms and difficulty breathing. At the time, no one knew the source of the outbreak. Some people even…
Teacher’s Questions for Cool Jobs: Museum Science
SCIENCE Before reading: 1. Why are museums important? 2. What types of things can you learn from artifacts kept in a museum? During reading: 1. How did museum specimens help Robert Baker discover the source of the 1990s hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico? 2. Explain how the discovery of hantavirus in rodents helped people limit infection with the deadly virus. 3. What are antibodies? 4. Explain how discovering arenavirus antibodies in deer-mouse…
Cool Jobs: Delving into dung
Sam Wasser’s team has trained dogs to search for the poop of rare animals. Here, a dog named Mason finds maned wolf dung in Brazil. Credit: Matt Baker This is one in a series on careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics made possible by support from the Northrop Grumman Foundation. Beginning in the late 1970s, Sam Wasser spent years following wild yellow baboons across Tanzania, a country in Africa. Wasser wanted to measure ch…
Cool Jobs: Math as entertainment
…tart walking up a wall — and yet have everything look natural.” As a kid, Bin Zafar was a big fan of cartoons and movies. “Looney Tunes were my favorites,” he recalls. He also loved the original Tron, a movie that came out in 1982. Watching it “was the first time I realized, as a child, that the things you see in a movie didn’t have to be real.” Imagine his thrill at being asked to work on the film’s sequel, 28 years later. Bin Zafar points to tw…
Teacher’s Questions for Cool Jobs: Math as Entertainment
…uld understanding the mathematics of how various building materials bend, flex and shake help Bin Zafar in his work? List some of the advantages of 3-D printing. Can you create a 3-by-3 magic square, using each of the numbers 1 through 9 only once? SOCIAL STUDIES With 3-D printing, an object’s design can be shared as a digital file and then printed out. Can you think of several situations where it would be helpful to share the design for an obj…
Teacher’s questions for Cool jobs: Crime scene investigators
SCIENCE Before reading: 1. What is evidence? How can evidence prove a crime suspect’s guilt — or innocence? During reading: Define “forensics.” Name two ways television shows can give a false view of the work of forensic investigators. How do forensic investigators provide context to the evidence they collect? Explain how the weather can affect the work of forensic investigators. What is a person’s “genetic fingerprint?” Why would investigators…
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