Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Far in the distance, you see something moving...is it a woman? When you look closely, you recognize the motion pattern and body form: it is definitely your mother. As she approaches, you recognize her face and see that she is moving quickly; you can guess that she is worried because you are late for lunch! Humans can visually distinguish others, th...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
When you are playing catch or I Spy, your brain helps you focus on one location and ignore the rest. Did you know that most people are slightly better at focusing on one side of space, either left or right? This is called a focusing bias. The focusing bias is usually so small that you do not notice it in your daily life. This slight bias can be mea...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Sports are fun activities that help kids learn skills, like how to shoot a free throw or skate backwards. But what if sports could teach us more than physical skills and prepare us for life? If the environment is safe and welcoming, sports can also teach us skills that we can use in our lives—life skills! Participating in sports can teach us about ...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Have you ever wondered what happens to the leaves on berry plants after we pick and eat the berries? People usually think that berry leaves have little value, but studies have shown that berry leaves contain many things that are good for our health. If these substances can be extracted from the leaves, these natural extracts could be used by many i...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
If you look up during a storm or when it is foggy, you may see little rivers flowing down the tree branches above your head. These are called branchflows, and they play an important part in moving water along trees and through forests. For scientists who study water, branchflows are really weird! They do not flow on top of something, like rivers th...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Foods can affect the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of our lives and determine our overall health and productivity. Whether we eat chicken nuggets, apples, or watermelon, food is a vital source of energy that keeps the body’s tissues and organs going during our day-to-day activities. In this article, we examine how various nutrients from f...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
The coldest, the windiest, the driest: the continent of Antarctica is a place of extremes. Located at the South Pole, Antarctica is covered by a vast ice sheet, millions of years old and in some areas more than 4,000 m thick. If all this ice were to melt, sea levels would rise by roughly 58 m. Despite its massive size, the Antarctic ice sheet is vu...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Imagine you are at party with loud music playing. What would it be like trying to speak to your friend in all that noise? Scientists call background noise like this “masking sound” because it covers up other sounds, in two ways. The background sound might be so loud that it blocks out other noises, or it might contain information that is distractin...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Water flows through forests in many ways, so it is difficult to understand and predict where and when it will flow. Understanding how water flows through forests is important, as it affects many of the services that forests offer to people, like lumber for houses and cleaner air. Water scientists (called hydrologists) have a way to reduce the compl...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Scientists in the San Francisco Estuary (Estuary) are trying to solve the puzzle of why many small native fishes are starving. Zooplankton are important food for small fish in the Estuary, but there are fewer zooplankton in the Estuary than there used to be. Why are zooplankton in such short supply? Possibly because they are hungry, too! Floating p...
