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Researchers learn a lot from mantis shrimp, colorful marine creatures that possess deadly weapons and complex vision.
Published:
2013-03-27 15:41:00
Found in: Science News For Kids
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Animals respond to chemical messages they may not even realize they’re swapping.
Published:
2013-02-08 09:50:00
Found in: Science News For Kids
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Pollution can endanger aquatic animals by damaging their sense of smell.
Published:
2013-02-08 09:57:00
Found in: Science News For Kids
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Scientists uncover fascinating secrets through he study of animal feces.
Published:
2013-01-24 19:12:00
Found in: Science News For Kids
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Howie Choset is a roboticist, but his team’s creations bear little resemblance to C-3PO or R2-D2. Instead, Choset finds inspiration in nature — specifically, snakes.
“A lot of people have this notion that robots are modeled after people,” says Choset, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But the animal kingdom is full of organisms that use different types of locomotion, he says.
The snake robots in Choset’s laboratory can slither, roll, swim and climb straight up. These slender machines, usually built from a series of metal pieces containing motors and e... (p. 32)
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When a group of women in Lisbon, Portugal, entered a cooking contest in 2006, they decided to put their own spin on a Portuguese fish soup. The team created green fettuccine from gelatin flavored with coriander and garlic, meant to mimic an algae bed. Egg yolk–sized spheres, made of algae extract and filled with fish soup, nestled on top.
The contestants had been asked to apply ideas from molecular gastronomy, a field exploring the science of cooking. In 2007, the Lisbon team founded a molecular gastronomy company called Cooking.Lab. The group educates chefs and the public about the field,... (p. 32)
Found in: Chemistry and Food Science
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You’ve probably learned lessons by watching other people goof up. For example, if you saw another kid ride her bike too fast around a corner and fall down, you might ride your bike more slowly on that turn.
“We humans are very sensitive to others’ mistakes,” Masaki Isoda of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan told Science News. And the same is true for other animals, his new data show.
Isoda’s team has discovered that in monkeys, a small part of the animal’s brain is activated when a companion monkey makes an error. The finding appeared August 5 in a scientif...
Published:
2012-08-27 17:58:59
Found in: Science News For Kids
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As a senior staff scientist at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, Paul Doherty has taught kids, high school teachers and the audience of the Late Show with David Letterman about physics. But when he visited India last year, he had a different set of students: monks and nuns.
Doherty is part of Science for Monks, a program run by the Sager Family Foundation in Boston and the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives in Dharamsala, India. The two groups partnered after the Dalai Lama asked them to bring science education to exiled Tibetan monastic communities. In December, Doherty taught ... (p. 32)
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DNA and its partner molecule, RNA, are the only molecules in nature known to carry genetic information. Now scientists have created artificial molecules that also store genetic instructions. These new molecules — called 'XNA' — are similar to DNA and RNA but slightly tweaked.
Visit the new Science News for Kids website and read the full story: DNA, RNA and XNA?
Published:
2012-05-11 15:21:03
Found in: Science News For Kids
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People have linked a truffle’s smell to its environment: the soil it grew in, the tree that nourished it or the weather. Now, scientists say that the secret to a truffle’s aroma is in its DNA, the genetic instructions inside cells that tell them which molecules to make. The findings could help people grow truffles on farms instead of the traditional harvesting method, digging for truffles in the wild.
Visit the new Science News for Kids website and read the full story: Sniffing out truffle scent
Published:
2012-05-05 09:13:39
Found in: Science News For Kids