When a buzzing hornet comes near, most people want to run away as quickly as possible. But if the hornet targets your home, you will need to find a way to shoo it away. Fortunately, hornets generally don’t target people’s homes. In southern Asia, however, a type of big hornet does frequently attack giant honeybees while they are clustered around their homes. Scientists have discovered how this clever bee species uses “shimmering” to drive such predators away. Shimmering creates a rippling effect on the beehive, similar to the effect seen in a sports stadium...

Not all math skills are learned in the classroom. Some of them come naturally. Consider the split-second calculations you make when you estimate the number of empty seats on the school bus or gauge the number of cookies in a cookie jar. These ballpark estimates can often be done without counting. That’s because humans are born with the ability to approximate, or closely guess, the number of items in a group. Researchers refer to this trait as a person’s “number sense.” Scientists have discovered that this inborn sense of numbers may influence learning and achievem...

It's the ultimate way to pull off a sting: Teach a group of ordinary honeybees to ignore flowers and,  instead, focus on vapors from explosives used in bombs. Then send the bees off in teams to sniff out terrorists. Or track the molecular trail of illicit drugs, or even point police to a rotting corpse. In recent years, researchers have shown that with just a few minutes of training, undercover bees can detect the smell of TNT, methamphetamine or almost any other scent just as the bees would respond to pollen. Wasps’ sniffing abilities may also be put to use finding... (p. 16)

When Alice climbs through the looking glass, she encounters a topsy-turvy world. People are punished before committing a crime, and sometimes fingers bleed before a pinprick occurs. Those strange events reflect a memory that works both ways in that world, allowing people to remember things before they happen. As the Queen explains to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Now, back in this world, scientists are discovering that human memory does indeed work forward. A growing number of studies show that the mental machinery for reliving your past perfo...

Spin around quickly for a long period of time, and you’re likely to lose your balance and fall. Strangely, a similar thing can occur with orbiting bodies such as a planet. Spinning on its axis for millions of years, a planet’s surface features can shift position over time, upsetting its balance. If a major shift occurs, the planet might even tilt over. Now, scientists say such a shift actually happened on Jupiter’s large icy moon Europa. Recent images taken from three different spacecraft — Voyager, Galileo and New Horizons — provide the clues. The images show th...

Science News for Kids explores the sensory explosion that defines the experience of people with this unusual, but not that uncommon nor unwelcome, condition.

Scientists tracking H₂O's highs and lows are finding new clues as to how and why the familiar substance is so odd. Recent research, for example, suggests that water may exist in two distinct liquid phases at ultralow temperatures. (p. 58)