With a simple swish-and-flick of his wand, Ron Weasley yanks a troll’s club high above its head in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Through graceful martial arts moves, element…

If you eat meat, you may have enjoyed gobbling up turkey on Thanksgiving. If you’re a vegetarian, you might have gone for Tofurky. (That tofu-based dish has been made to…

Flamingos are feeding machines. They spend a large part of their day with their heads upside down in water, gobbling up brine shrimp and other small prey. A new study…

Exponent (noun, “EX-poh-nent”) An exponent is a number that tells you how many times to multiply a number by itself. In math, an exponent appears as a superscript after another…

Some vipers are the sprinters of snakes. Researchers compared 36 venomous snakes from three families. Vipers wielded the fastest attacks. Some members of one of the other families could give…

The distant moon Pandora from the Avatar movies is a richly immersive alien world. Dragon-like creatures prowl the skies. Supersmart whalelike beasts write poetry under the sea. Jungle plants glow…

This time of year, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is nearly inescapable. As the song goes, Rudolph is bullied for having a nose so bright it glows (like a lightbulb!). But…

Anya Terón Villodas and Lia González are childhood friends turned science partners. The idea for their project came from Anya’s sister, who had done a science-fair project involving honeybees. Through…

New unfurling parachutes really hit the mark. Scientists were inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami, or paper cutting. They made parachutes that open automatically when dropped. And unlike typical…

Every human being starts with the fusion of two cells: an egg cell from one parent and a sperm cell from the other. But for a variety of reasons, two…