Kids News - Science Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we knew it just a few weeks ago. Millions of people worldwide are now under mandatory or voluntary lockdowns. All public attractions, including museums and aquariums, are shuttered, and the usually crowded streets of popular tourist destinations are desolate. An unanticipated silver lining during these challenging times for humans is that many of the Earth's other inhabitants are finally getting a chance to leave their normal habitats and roam freely....

For most birds, nest-building entails creating a bowl-shaped receptacle of twigs and dry leaves. However, don't tell that to the common tailorbird (Orthotomus sutorius). The tiny birds, found in urban gardens across tropical ecosystems worldwide, go through extraordinary lengths to sew together a comfortable and safe home for their offspring....

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the COVID-19 coronavirus global emergency is now a pandemic. The UN health agency urged countries worldwide to "double-down" on their efforts to curtail the spread of the infectious disease, which has swept into at least 114 countries and killed over 4,000 people in less than three months....

Though many single-celled lifeforms have evolved to survive without oxygen, multicellular organisms have always been believed to need it to live. Now, scientists in Tel Aviv, Israel, have found that Henneguya salminicola, a parasite, which spends its life attached to the muscle tissue of fish, has adapted to living without oxygen....

Celebrated annually on March 14, Pi ("π”) Day is a universal favorite with students and teachers. Though the American holiday, which honors the numerical constant representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, typically begins with a classroom discussion of the symbol, it usually ends with a slice or two of delicious pie. The event is commemorated every March 14 because the irrational number, which continues infinitely without repetition or pattern, is widely recognized as 3.14....

Paleontologists have long determined that modern-day birds evolved from smaller members of the two-legged, meat-eating theropods, such as velociraptors. However, for many years, the only transitional fossil linking the two had been that of the archaeopteryx — a bird-dinosaur hybrid that lived on Earth about 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period....

Since the beginning of 2020, the East African country of Kenya has been battling the nation's worst desert locust outbreak in over 70 years. The destructive swarms, some as big as three times the size of New York City — an estimated 192 billion insects — are eating their way through thousands of acres of crops and animal pastures, decimating livelihoods in the process. Even worse, the locusts, which arrived from neighboring Somalia and Ethiopia, are now spreading to other countries, including Uganda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Congo....

Though it is now arid, the Urumaco region in Venezuela's Falcón State was once a mega wetland that was home to numerous colossal animal species. These included rodents the size of modern-day buffaloes and 10-foot (3-meter) tall carnivorous birds. The latest to join the list of the area's massive creatures is a giant turtle that was 100 times larger than its closest living relative, the Amazon river turtle, and about 1.5 times the size of the world's largest living turtle, the marine leatherback....

Need an extra day to catch up on sleep or to finish an assignment this month? Then you are in luck, because 2020 is a leap year, an event that occurs once every four years. This means that instead of the customary 365 days, the year will have 366 days. Since the extra day is tacked onto the shortest month of the year, February 2020 will have 29 days....