SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS: Last year, a nasty virus swept across the United States. Called enterovirus D68, it initially left its victims sneezing and coughing. Some even struggled to breathe. But quite a few of these people also developed an even scarier symptom: limbs that could not move. Almost all victims of this paralysis were kids.…
PBS DIGITAL STUDIOS: Baby koalas eat their mothers’ poop, and other un-cuddly facts. (Writer/researcher)
PBS DIGITAL STUDIOS: Scientists have employed sneeze powder, high-speed cameras, and vomiting robots to learn how far our fluids splatter. (Writer/researcher)
Read more Gross Science: How Far Do Sneezes and Vomit Travel?
MUSE: One of these stories is false. Can you spot which one? Croc-Bots Hunt for Hippo Poop: How do you study a river that’s packed with huge, aggressive hippopotamuses? A group of scientists solved that problem by using robots—disguised as crocodiles, naturally. Kenya’s Mara River is home to thousands of hippos. Researchers wanted to find out…
MUSE: Are you a cryptid—a creature that science hasn’t proven to exist? It can be a lonely life. You might be the only one of your kind, wandering the swamps or mountains without a friend. Take a break from terrorizing the locals and follow this flow chart to end your identity crisis. (There are hundreds of…
MUSE: Paleontology is a science with one very squishy problem. Actually, oceans of squishy problems. Fossils can tell scientists a lot about dinosaurs, which left behind plenty of bones and teeth. Animals with shells, too, are easy to find in the fossil record. Yet the earliest ancestors of today’s vertebrates (backboned animals, including humans) had soft bodies.…
MUSE: Fastened securely into their spacesuits, two men stepped onto the surface of Mars. It looked a lot like a regular room with dirt on the floor. The Mars rocks looked pretty much exactly like Earth rocks. The stars in the sky looked like tiny lights stuck onto black-painted walls. And, in fact, they were. These pseudo-explorers had signed up…
MUSE: No one knows what dinosaurs really looked like as they stomped or scurried through ancient jungles. But scientists armed with a 3D printer and robot technology plan to unearth the answers about how dinosaurs moved. How? Easy—they’ll build their own. “The truth is that no paleontologist in the world knows precisely how to put…
MUSE: Rumors flew when the largest physics laboratory in the world scheduled a major announcement for December 13, 2011. Had researchers found the elusive “God particle” at last? Had the final piece of a decades-old puzzle fallen into place? When the big day came, Switzerland’s CERN laboratory announced that it had seen “tantalizing hints” of…
Elizabeth Preston 