Articles for Grade 7

When luxury cruise liner Costa Concordia struck a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the shore of Italy's Tuscan Archipelago and collapsed on its side on January 13th, 2012, salvage engineers knew that they had a nightmare on their hands because a rescue operation of a ship this size, had never been done before. To make matters worse, the liner lay right in the midst of the Pelagos Sanctuary, an environmentally protected area of the Mediterranean, which meant that even a small misstep could turn into a disaster....

For decades scientists lamented about the demise of the gorgeous Pinocchio lizard. Now it turns out that the reptile, while still rare, is very much around in the cloud forests of South America, an area known for its stunning flora and fauna....

For many years now, Dutch architect Ramon Knoester has been harboring a dream - To recycle the plastic that is polluting our oceans and transform it into a beautiful inhabitable island. He began his work in earnest in 2010, after receiving a grant from the Netherlands government. While it has taken a few years, and he has had to make some tweaks to his original plan, it seems as though this rather impossible sounding idea may actually become a reality, in the very near future....

The fact that kids seem to have an inordinate amount of energy is indisputable. What if this energy could somehow be harnessed and turned into electricity? That was a question that Ben Markham, a retired Vice President of Engineering at ExxonMobil asked himself a few years ago. The result? Empower Playgrounds Inc., non-profit company that has transformed the lives of thousands of young kids in Ghana with a simple yet brilliant idea!...

Over his short illustrious career, base jumper Jeb Corliss has completed over 2,000 stunts including leaping off France's Eiffel Tower, zooming through a waterfall in the Swiss Alps and even, flying across the Tianmen Cave, a 100ft-wide water eroded slit, in China's Tianmen Mountain. However, the stunt he pulled recently was so dangerous that it scared the daredevil himself....

If you think conning or swindling others is something that was invented by the amazingly bright human mind, think again - the cuckoo finch has been doing it for centuries and their con is much more convincing than anything humans have been able to pull, because it entails tricking other birds into raising their chicks!...

Here's some good news for Manga comic book lovers that have always wished to see themselves in one. Japan's Shirai Labs has figured out an almost instant way to insert them in - All the aspiring star has to do, is pose!...

Imagine a scenario where you get to lounge in bed all day and watch as much television, play as many video games or read as many books as you want. If that is not awesome enough, here is the icing on the cake - You even get paid for doing that and not just a tiny amount amount, but an astounding $18,000 USD, for the duration of the fifteen week study!...

They say that when it rains, it pours - This is something Colorado residents can relate to quite literally, given the recent torrential rains that began with just an inch in Boulder on September 1st and then quickly escalated to a record 9.08 inches on September 12th, nearly double the city's previous one-day record and about half of what it gets annually!...