Kids News - Social Studies for Kids

A notorious Somali pirate that terrorized the seas for years is now finally behind bars in Belgium. While that is certainly newsworthy, what is even more so is that Mohamed Abdi Hassan literally handed himself to the lawmakers not because he was sorry, but because he believed they were filmmakers and he, the star of their next blockbuster!...

One of the most poignant memory recalled by some of the 900 survivors from 885-feet long luxury liner Titanic that sank on April 15th 1912, was that of the orchestra playing the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee", to try calm the panicked passengers as they made their way to the lifeboats....

While scientists have built many artificial organs individually, they have never before been put together to create an entire human body. Rex or as he has recently been renamed Frank (after Frankenstein), the world's first fully functional bionic man has just changed that. Now on display at the National Air And Space Museum in Washington D.C., the human clone was assembled in three short months using state-of-the-art organs that were donated by 17 manufacturers - A good thing given that the total cost came to about $1 million USD!...

When the government partially shut down on October 1st, after lawmakers were unable to reach an agreement on what is usually a routine matter - Passing the Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund normal government programs - most political pundits predicted that it would last just a few days. They were obviously wrong....

It has taken over a decade and faced numerous design hurdles, but the new $100 USD bill that Americans fondly call 'Benjamin' finally made its debut on October 8th, 2013. The largest U.S. denomination in circulation, it is not surprisingly, the most recognized form of U.S. Currency worldwide....

Meet Jeff Wilson AKA Professor Dumpster - an environmental scientist and the Dean of Huston Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. The reason for his unusual nickname? He has decided to live in a dumpster for the next year - Yes, the kind that you might find filled with trash behind a restaurant or in an alley....

As we get ready to celebrate Columbus Day on October 14th, here is some food for thought. What if it was not Christopher Columbus, but Chinese Admiral Zheng He that discovered the new world almost seven decades before the Spanish explorer set foot on the island in the Bahamas that we now call San Salvador? That, is something that amateur British historian Gavin Menzies has been asserting for years and he now has new evidence to prove it....

Most people are grossed out by insects and believe them to be just a nuisance. However, a group of students from Montreal-based McGill University think of them as protein that can be used to feed millions of malnourished people worldwide, an idea so powerful that it won them the prestigious 2013 Hult Prize on September 23rd....

When luxury cruise liner Costa Concordia struck a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the shore of Italy's Tuscan Archipelago and collapsed on its side on January 13th, 2012, salvage engineers knew that they had a nightmare on their hands because a rescue operation of a ship this size, had never been done before. To make matters worse, the liner lay right in the midst of the Pelagos Sanctuary, an environmentally protected area of the Mediterranean, which meant that even a small misstep could turn into a disaster....