Kids News - Articles for Grade 3

San Francisco's public trash cans have long outlived their lifespan and need to be replaced. However, the current design is inadequate for the city's burgeoning population and the increasingly larger number of tourists. The garbage receptacles also get rummaged through by scavengers, who leave behind a mess. To alleviate the issues, in 2018, San Francisco Public Works officials set out in search of a perfect trash can. The quest proved harder than they had thought....

Batesian mimicry — where a harmless species mimics a harmful one to escape predators — is widespread in animals. But most recorded examples of the phenomena are visual. For instance, the harmless scarlet kingsnakes have evolved to resemble a venomous species, while the flower-loving hoverflies have adopted the persona of stinging wasps. Now, for the first time, researchers have uncovered a mammal that has developed acoustic Batesian mimicry to scare away predators....

The powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai underwater volcano rocked the island nation of Tonga on January 15, 2022. The spectacular 13-mile-wide explosion is the largest recorded in the 21st century thus far. It expelled ash and gas plumes as high as 19 miles and triggered tsunami warnings across the Pacific....

There have been numerous attempts to create an all-plastic bike. However, most have never made it past the prototype stage. Igus, a Germany-based manufacturer of high-performance plastics, and Dutch start-up MTRL aim to change that with the igus:bike — the world's first urban bike crafted almost entirely from recycled polymer....

The US House of Representatives passed the Inflation Reduction Act on August 12, 2022. The comprehensive legislation, approved by the Senate on August 8, 2022, will be signed into law by President Joe Biden later this week. It is designed to lower health care and energy costs, combat climate change, and increase taxes on large corporations. Major provisions of the bill include:...

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) as they are now called, are finally getting the attention they deserve. On June 9, 2022, NASA announced it had commissioned a study to examine observations of events that "cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena."...

Art experts at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh made an exciting discovery while preparing for an upcoming exhibition. The reverse side of Vincent van Gogh's 1885 painting, Head of a Peasant Woman, features a portrait of the famed artist....

The beautiful island country of Madagascar has a dire school shortage. About a third of Malagasy children have no access to education because the schools are too far away or severely overcrowded. Thinking Huts, a non-profit dedicated to increasing global access to education, believes that 22,000 new schools are needed to fulfill the demand. The organization plans to tackle the issue with a series of 3D-printed schools, the first of which was completed in April 2022....

A sprawling seagrass meadow has just been declared the "world's largest single living organism" based on area. The Poseidon’s ribbon weed seagrass (Posidonia australis) is located in Shark Bay, a protected body of shallow water in Western Australia. It covers an impressive 77 square miles (200 square kilometers) — the equivalent of about 280 soccer fields! The record was previously held by a 3.7 square-mile mushroom, dubbed "Humongous Fungus," in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, USA....