Articles for Grade 8

With Halloween just around the corner, the frenzy to carve out the spookiest pumpkin has begun in earnest, all over the country. But very few people have the talent to transform the gnarly fruits into 3-D zombie masterpieces like pumpkin carver extraordinaire Ray Villafane, who showcased his superior skills last week, at New York Botanical Garden's Giant Pumpkin Carving Weekend....

Mention oysters and the two things that come to mind are slurping them down or wrenching them open for pearls. But now these mollusks may have a bigger role - that of protecting our waterfront cities from rising sea levels and giant storm surges like the one experienced by New York during Hurricane Sandy and helping clean our increasingly polluted waters....

It has taken over a decade and faced numerous design hurdles, but the new $100 USD bill that Americans fondly call 'Benjamin' finally made its debut on October 8th, 2013. The largest U.S. denomination in circulation, it is not surprisingly, the most recognized form of U.S. Currency worldwide....

Meet Jeff Wilson AKA Professor Dumpster - an environmental scientist and the Dean of Huston Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. The reason for his unusual nickname? He has decided to live in a dumpster for the next year - Yes, the kind that you might find filled with trash behind a restaurant or in an alley....

Most people are grossed out by insects and believe them to be just a nuisance. However, a group of students from Montreal-based McGill University think of them as protein that can be used to feed millions of malnourished people worldwide, an idea so powerful that it won them the prestigious 2013 Hult Prize on September 23rd....

To say that 11-year old Michal Bodzianowski knows very little about beer would be an understatement. He has of course never tasted the drink and till his dad explained, had no clue what a microbrewery was. But that didn't deter the sixth-grader from suggesting that astronauts brew the drink in Space as his entry for the Spring 2013 Student Spaceflight Experiments Challenge organized by the National Science Earth And Space Education whose main goal is to inspire the next generation of America's scientists and engineers....

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!...

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!...

With plans underway to lasso asteroids, establish settlements on Mars and send tourists out for quick jaunts, the fact that our future lies in Space is indisputable. However some of these dreams will be left unfulfilled unless we do something about all the junk we have abandoned in Space in the last 55 years....