Hubble telescope spots ‘northern lights’ on Saturn Over a period of seven months in 2017, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed a beautiful display of northern lights over Saturn’s north pole. Here on Earth, people experience the northern lights (southern lights in the southern hemisphere) when fast-moving particles from the sun travel along the solar wind and interact with the planet’s magnetic field. Auroras, also called the northern or southern lights, are caused by charged particles moving down toward the poles and then interacting with…
The world says goodbye to the beautiful, Brazilian Spix Macaw after BirdLife International announced its extinction Wednesday. The blue-feathered Spix’s macaw which starred in the popular children’s film, Blue Sky Studios’ Rio is now extinct, the BirdLife International said in a recent statistical analysis. The Spix’s macaw, along with the cryptic tree hunter, the Pernambuco pygmy-owl, the poo-uli, is the eighth bird species to go extinct or labeled highly endangered during this century. BirdLife International’s chief scientist, Stuart Butchart, explained…
Cary Bazalgette’s criticism (Letters, 29 December) of our recent letter (Screen-based lifestyle harms children’s health, 26 December) ignores the crucial distinction between content and process. If the process of screen exposure is harmful, any further discussion about content becomes superfluous. What conceivable rationale is there for engaging very young children with ICT screen technologies when it will inappropriately accelerate early child development, distort the natural development of the young child’s delicate growing senses and displace equivalent learning achievable through real,…
Ever wonder what the future holds? Some of the best people to ask might be your kids, nephews or nieces. It turns out, they’ve got a tech-forward outlook on what the future holds. Decluttr.com asked a group of children aged 4- to 11-years-old to conceptualize the tech products they predict people will use in 30 years’ time. Then, the company asked a concept artist to bring their sketches to life. The result? An “eatwatch,” a “recycle bot,” a “print-a-food” and more. For 4-year-old Ayana,…
Women in Saudi Arabia are now allowed to drive. For nearly 30 years, there has been a law in Saudi Arabia that said women could not drive a vehicle. Many women and men protested the law. They said it was outdated and sexist. (“Sexist” means that it is bad because it is against one gender and not others). Saudi women often had to hire a driver in order to get from one place to another, if there was no male available…
In TIME’s cover story this week, senior writer Sean Gregory explores the growing business of kids’ sports — a $15.3 billion industry that has nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Between league fees, camps, equipment, training and travel, families are spending as much as 10% of their income on sports, according to survey research from Utah State University. Sky-high costs are preventing some kids from participating. Overall sports participation rates have declined in the U.S. in recent years, and the trend…
How to get comets, animals, math problems, and more named after you. What’s in a name? Quite a lot actually! We name all kinds of thing in nature, from new species to comets and of course, new inventions. But what does it take to get one of those new things named after you? There are a few different ways to put your name down in the history books, along with scientists and inventors. Which way will you choose? Discover Something…
The more kids exercise, the better they learn. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that kids are more focused after recess. Bodies that move are bodies more equipped to learn. Yet 73 per cent of the average school day is spent sitting, despite an overwhelming amount of data demonstrating that active kids have active minds. Most schools point to recess and physical-education classes as opportunities for kids to be active at school, a model that hasn’t changed much since…
Over the course of three decades, beginning in the late 1940s, the Bay Area psychologist and nursery school director Rhoda Kellogg collected more than one million pieces of art made by children living all around the world. Last winter, the artist Brian Belott, who is a longtime Kellogg fan, finally found himself at the storage site in Connecticut where her vast archive was moved following her death, in 1987, at the age of 89. “When I got to the collection, it was kind of like—I…
Tertius Steyn’s holistic approach to exercise allows children to develop physical strength as well as social and emotional learning. Meanwhile, One Ten offers workouts for young people in exchange for voluntary work. The study, published yesterday in Frontiers in Physiology, asked young boys, untrained men and endurance athletes to do high intensity exercise, then looked at how quickly their muscles fatigued and recovered. The researchers quite literally put the participants through their paces, having them perform strenuous activity on a…