Pittsburgh’s many hills aren’t kind to bikers. Anyone hoping to pedal to work there has to contend with steep streets like Canton Avenue, which famously climbs at a nearly 40-degree angle. As a result, some residents avoid biking altogether. But University of Pittsburgh graduate Micah Toll, 23, and a few friends recently launched an invention that they hope will increase the city’s pedal power: An electric bike called a Pulse PEVO. A superstrong battery powers the bicycle. Able to hit nearly 20 miles per hour without pedaling, it zips up the city’s most daunting hills. Toll hopes it w...

Not many scientists begin their careers with a busted knee. But that’s exactly how Evan Olin, now 18, got his start. While a freshman at Ossining High School in New York, this competitive runner ran so fast and so hard that he sustained serious injuries to both legs. It kept him off the track for months. Rather than becoming discouraged by his limping gait, however, Olin turned to science. He started exploring how intense activities — like his long jogs — could harm the human body. The summer before his sophomore year, Olin landed a spot working in the lab of Gregory Gutierrez at New Yo...

MAYA may just be the weirdest guest ever at the White House. And that’s saying a lot. The family of President Calvin Coolidge, who served from 1923 to 1929, kept exotic pets, including a raccoon named Rebecca and — very briefly — a black bear. But unlike MAYA, none of those pets was a robot made out of a recycled trash can and an old cordless vacuum cleaner.   On a February day, MAYA the robot stands next to its creator, 14-year-old Benjamin Hylak, in the White House’s State Dining Room. More than 100 students were invited this year to the White House event, including 33 teams th...

This week, the president of the United States invited some big winners to the White House. And no, they don’t play football.   February 7 marked the second ever White House Science Fair. About 100 middle school, high school and college students from across the country got a special invitation to spend the morning meeting with the president and his top scientists. Ten students who had competed in national academic challenges sponsored by Society for Science & the Public — or SSP, publisher of Science News for Kids — were among those honored. Some students even presented their pr...

Gray waves surged over miles and miles of open water, breaking against the bluffs underlying Kaktovik. The tiny village sits precariously on the Beaufort Sea, a frigid body of water bordering Alaska’s northeastern Arctic coast. As the choppy waters inundated vulnerable stretches of shoreline, the surf carved deep chasms into the tall bluffs. Torre Jorgenson, a geomorphologist working near Kaktovik, watched the storm boil up, shaking homes and boats for nearly two days in July 2008. Dramatic erosion followed soon after. Blocks of graphite-colored earth, as much as 10 meters wide and several ... (p. 18)

Look to Texas to see evolution’s true colors. There, speckling the state’s green fields, you’ll find the annual phlox, a flower also known as “Texas pride.” Its petals, a light purple elsewhere, are bright scarlet in the southeast near Austin. This color change isn’t a whim: It’s the annual phlox’s response to the presence of a close cousin, the pointed phlox. Native to East Texas, the pointed phlox also has purplish flowers. Just two genes orchestrate the annual phlox’s shift from purple to red flowers in the fields where it meets its cousin.  But this color change has... (p. 18)

Eurasian diving bell spiders, the only truly aquatic arachnids, survive underwater with the help of “physical gills,” scientists say. (p. 14)

A pancake, not a plume, may fuel the island chain’s volcanoes.