Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The saga, which began in 1977, continues with the seventh film in the series. 

LUCASFILM

Rated: PG-13

Release date: December 18, 2015

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Starring: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega

It has been 10 years since the release of a new Star Wars movie. But the saga, which began in 1977, now continues with the seventh film in the series. Set “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away,” the new movie picks up the story about 30 years after 1983’s Return of the Jedi. It reveals that while the Rebel Alliance defeated the evil Galactic Empire, and the villainous Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader are gone, the struggle between good and evil is not over. New heroes and villains are carrying on the fight, while some old favorites return. The key players include Rey (Daisy Ridley), who lives as a scavenger on a desert planet, and Finn (John Boyega), a young soldier in the First Order, an organization inspired by the Empire.

Longtime Star Wars fans were thrilled to learn that characters from the original film, such as Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia, will appear. The actors who played those roles were happy to return, too. “I was proud and grateful to once again be involved,” Harrison Ford, who plays Han, told a crowd of more than 6,000 at San Diego Comic-Con in July. “It was great to be back.”

Did you know?

Return of the Jedi ended the story of Luke Skywalker and his friends. Around the time of its release in 1983, Mark Hamill, who plays Luke, told a television interviewer that Star Wars creator George Lucas had spoken to him about possibly playing a much older version of Luke in a future movie.

According to Hamill, Lucas expected the film to be released in 2011. Talk about planning ahead! As it turned out, Lucas was only a few years off. 

Which of the other Star Wars movies have you seen? Did you like them?

Sea World To End Killer Whale Program

SeaWorld announced on Thursday that it would end its iconic killer whale shows and stop breeding the animal. The decision comes after years of criticism that the park’s shows featuring killer whales, also known as orcas, are inhumane. SeaWorld says it plans to introduce "new, inspiring natural orca encounters.” The company also announced a new partnership with the Humane Society of the United States. "As society's understanding of orcas continues to change, SeaWorld is changing with it,” said Joel Manby, president and chief executive officer of SeaWorld Entertainment, Inc. “We commend the company for making this game-changing commitment," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society.

Do you think Sea World decision to end the killer whale program is god or not good? Explain in complete sentences.

Dinosaurs Are Among Us

A new museum exhibit looks at the connections between birds and dinosaurs

The Yutyrannus dinosaur had a shaggy coat of feathers, similar to what birds have today.

Dinosaurs ruled the planet for millions of years, and they are generally believed to have gone extinct. But the reality is that modern versions of dinosaurs are all around us. Scientists have been exploring similarities between birds and dinosaurs, and new research shows that these two types of animals are directly linked.

R. MICKENS—@AMNH

The exhibit Dinosaurs Among Us is now at the American Museum of Natural History.

The connections between birds and dinosaurs are explored in a new museum exhibit called Dinosaurs Among Us at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Mark Norell, the chair of the division of paleontology at the museum, is the curator of the exhibit. He said it is based on new scientific evidence collected over the last two decades. “I think this is really going to shake up the way people think of dinosaurs,” Norell told reporters at a preview event. “One could argue that we still live in the age of dinosaurs.”

Making Connections

The exhibit includes ancient fossils and lifelike models of dinosaurs of all sizes to show the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. It examines several features that are shared between the two species, including feathers, complex brains, the shapes and sizes of eggs, and the ability to fly.

ZHAO CHUANG—COURTESY PEKING NATURAL SCIENCE ORGANIZATION

The Oviraptosaur dinosaur looks like a bird. It was small in size, and had a toothless beak and claws.

 

 

Paleontologists have discovered that many dinosaurs had feathers. Thousands of feathered dinosaur fossils have been found in China in the last 15 years, according to Norell. Today, birds are the only feathered animals alive.

Birds today make nests, lay eggs and tend to babies. Fossil research shows that some dinosaurs also laid eggs and made nests.

Also, birds have wishbones and hollow bones, which are bones that don’t weight much and allow birds to take more air into their lungs. These adaptations help with flight. Some dinosaurs had these features as well. In addition, the exhibit shows that there are many similarities between the legs, claws, and feet of dinosaurs and birds.

New Techniques

Norell noted that the research behind this exhibit is the result of advanced scientific techniques and new technologies. For example, researchers used a scanning process called computed tomography (CT) to look inside the brains of extinct dinosaurs. CTs combine many X-rays to produce a three-dimensional image.

“Modern technology tells us more than we thought we could ever know about the connections between dinosaurs and birds,” Norell said.

Can you tell me how dinosaurs and birds are alike? 

Is This Billy the Kid?

A new photo of a famous outlaw may have been found.

He was a gunfighter and a thief who killed as many as nine people and broke out of jail twice. Billy the Kid was one of the most notorious outlaws of the Wild West.

Billy’s real name was probably Henry McCarty, though he also went by the name William H. Bonney. He was called “the Kid” because he was just a teenager when he became a criminal. He died in 1881, at the age of 21, after a sheriff shot him in New Mexico.

Despite the Kid’s fame, only one photo of him was known to exist. But now a company claims to have found a second photo of the famous outlaw—and it has been valued at $5 million!

DETECTIVE WORK

In 2010, a man named Randy Guijarro bought three photos for $2 at an antique shop in Fresno, California. When he took a closer look at one of the photos, he thought one of the men in it might be Billy the Kid. Last year, Guijarro took the photo to Kagin’s, a company that collects and sells historical objects from the Old West.

David McCarthy, an expert at Kagin’s, agreed that the man in the photo looks like the Kid.

“But just looking alike isn’t enough,” he says.

McCarthy and his team worked for more than a year to carefully authenticate, or prove, that the image was genuine. With help from historians and photography experts, they tried to match the other men in the photo with members of the Kid’s gang.

Last month, Kagin’s announced that it had enough evidence to prove that the man in the photo was Billy the Kid. Some experts believe the photo was taken during a wedding at a ranch in New Mexico.

Kagin’s has put the photo up for sale for $5 million. If it sells for that amount, it would be the most expensive photo ever sold.

NOT SO FAST

However, some people aren’t convinced that the new photo shows the Kid. Mark Lee Gardner, a historian who wrote a book about the outlaw, is one of them. He says there aren’t any historical documents to prove without a doubt that the Kid was ever at the place in New Mexico shown in the picture.

Gardner thinks the debate over the photo is sure to continue. But he says that’s part of the fun of studying history.

“When there’s controversy,” he says, “that means history is alive.”

Billy the Kid was an outlaw a long time ago. While he was famous for being a bad guy, can you make a connection to any people who are famous? Please tell why.

Is This a Lost Ancient City?

Archaeologists may have uncovered the location of an ancient Greek city—and the island that it was on.

For more than 400 years, the fate of an ancient Greek city, called Kane, has baffled experts. The city, mentioned in many ancient texts, was on one of a cluster of three islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands were all located off the coast of modern-day Turkey. Two of the islands, now known as the Garip Islands, are still there.

But the third island, an important stopping point on ancient trade routes, no longer appeared on maps made after the 16th century. Until this past November, no one knew why!

Geo-archaeologists—scientists who study ancient landforms—have helped solve the mystery. The island did not disappear, they say. Well, not exactly anyway. New evidence suggests that this former island is now a mainland peninsula. That’s a piece of land that sticks out from a larger land mass and is almost completely surrounded by water. Most of the state of Florida is an example of a peninsula.

How did the island turn into a peninsula? At one time, a channel, a narrow stretch of water between two areas of land, separated the island and mainland. “The original channel was silted up,” Felix Pirson of the German Archaeology Ins

titute, which led the study, told Scholastic News Online. That means the space between the island and mainland was filled with materials carried by running water. That’s how the peninsula formed.

DIGGING DEEPER

To test their theory of what happened to the island, the geo-archaeologists decided to drill into the peninsula. Instead of finding solid ground, they discovered loose soil and rock. To the scientists, this suggests that the land there had formed somewhat recently, perhaps because of earthquakes or the erosion of agricultural fields on the mainland.

The scientists are looking forward to doing further testing. They hope to figure out exactly when the land bridge between the mainland and the island formed. This could provide them with more information about the area during ancient times, they say. “The aim is to reconstruct the ancient environment [to] understand history,” Pirson says.

Scientists use the scientific method to solve lots of mysteries. What was one experiment we did that we use the scientific method?

A Helping 3-D Hand

A little girl gets a life-changing gift.

BY LILIAN JOCHMANN | FOR THE SCHOLASTIC NEWS KIDS PRESS CORPS

It all started in 2013, when Shea Stollenwerk, then eight years old, asked for a new hand for Christmas. Shea was born with a partial right hand, which restricts her ability to do things that other kids take for granted.

“My mom went online” to look for help, says Shea, who lives in Mukowango, Wisconsin. Shea’s mother, Ranee, soon learned about a community of artists, designers, and scientists who are making big breakthroughs withprosthetic (artificial) hands.

Frankie Flood, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, was among the designers who saw Ranee’s online request. Flood enlisted help from fellow professor Adream Blair and their students, who were learning how to make designs using a 3-D printer, a device that can create layers of material, like plastic or metal, one on top of the other, to produce solid objects.

“We made a mold of Shea’s hand out of plaster,” Flood explains about the beginning of the process. “We made a cast, and then we 3-D scanned her hand.”

A LOW-COST SOLUTION

Flood emphasizes that Shea’s “robo-hand” is not like devices that medical professionals make for people who have lost limbs. Such devices can cost thousands of dollars, whereas a “robo-hand” can be printed for less than $50.

While being fitted in Flood’s laboratory, Shea got to choose the color of her new hand. She went with bright pink. She now has a pink hand, a purple hand, and a purple and pink one, and can do things that she couldn’t do before, like peel potatoes, pick up objects, and catch a ball.

Flood and his team have since built hands for six other local children. Indirectly, they have helped dozens more, by posting their designs online so that people around the world can print them out. Flood is also working on prosthetic legs for military veterans who were injured on the battlefield. “Without a covering, the [prosthetic] leg is kind of ugly and plain,” Flood says. “Soldiers want something that will restore the shape of their leg and make it cooler to look at when they’re playing sports.”

As for Shea, the aspiring musician can now play her viola with help from an adaptive device that Flood’s team created. “Nothing is ever going to hold her back,” Shea’s father, Steve, told a local reporter. “She is going to do what she wants to do, and we are going to be there to help her.”

This is an amazing invention that can help make life easier for some. How is this like the inventors that we have learned about? 

A Supersized Dinosaur

People in New York City can now meet the world’s biggest dinosaur.

BY LINDSAY LOWE

When you think of the biggest creature to ever roam the Earth, you might picture Tyrannosaurus rex. But T. rex would’ve looked small next to a titanosaur. Titanosaurs were the biggest known dinosaurs that ever lived.

Visitors to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City can now see just how huge these creatures really were. Last month, the museum installed a life-sized model of a titanosaur skeleton.

A BIG DISCOVERY

Titanosaurs walked the planet about 100 million years ago. Scientists have found titanosaur fossils (bones, shells, or other traces of animals or plants from millions of years ago, preserved as rock) on every continent. But in 2014, researchers in Argentina unearthed 84 fossils of bones from the largest titanosaur specimen, or example, ever discovered. Scientists determined that this huge herbivore (animal that eats only plants) weighed nearly 70 tons and was about 122 feet long. That’s roughly three times the length of a T. rex.

BUILDING A GIANT

Getting what might be the biggest dinosaur ever to a museum in New York City was quite a challenge. For starters, building a skeleton with the real fossils wasn’t possible. “These bones are extraordinarily heavy,” explains Mark Norell, a paleontologist (scientist who studies fossils and other ancient life-forms) at the AMNH. “Just the thighbone weighs well over 1,000 pounds.”

So Norell and his team decided to create a life-sized replica of the titanosaur. They worked with a company in Canada that used 3-D printers to make lightweight foam copies of each bone. Those replicas were then covered in a hard material called fiberglass. The model of that 1,000-pound thighbone weighs just 25 pounds. Creating the skeleton took about six months. Then it was shipped in pieces to the AMNH.

Next came the really tricky part—fitting the giant dinosaur into its new home. Museum workers had carefully measured the exhibit space and found that the titanosaur was too big to fit into one room! At 39 feet, the dino’s long neck and skull stick out of the exhibit room and into a hallway. The skeleton’s back nearly grazes the museum’s 19-foot-high ceilings. Norell says this exhibit gives visitors a rare, up-close look at the biggest prehistoric beast ever discovered.

“You can see people’s faces when they walk by,” he says. “They’re just amazed.”

We have learned about animal adaptations. How do you think being one of the biggest dinosaurs helped the titanosaur survive?

Terrifying Tooth

A fossil from the biggest shark that ever lived washes ashore in North Carolina.

A man named Denny Bland recently found something much more interesting than a seashell on the shore of North Topsail Beach, North Carolina. He discovered a 6-inch-long tooth. The huge tooth once belonged to a gigantic prehistoric shark called a megalodon.

“Megalodon was one of the scariest predators that ever lived,” says Cynthia Crane. She’s a scientist who runs the Aurora Fossil Museum in North Carolina. “This is mostly because of its humongous size and its constant urge to eat.”

Megalodons could measure up to 60 feet long. That’s bigger than a tractor-trailer truck. It’s also about three times the size of megalodon’s modern-day relative, the great white shark.

These prehistoric giants became extinct more than 2 million years ago. Almost everything scientists know about megalodons comes from their teeth. Megalodons’ skeletons, like those of modern sharks, were made of a soft material called cartilage instead of bone. (We have cartilage in our noses and ears.) Cartilage doesn’t turn into fossils. So, unlike dinosaurs, megalodons left no skeletons. Only fossils of their hard teeth survived.

Scientists have compared the megalodon teeth they’ve found with the teeth of modern sharks. In doing so, they have been able to calculate megalodon’s massive size.

The serrated teeth—teeth that have a rough, jagged edge, similar to a saw—have also given researchers clues about what megalodons ate. Scientists think the teeth’s rough edges were designed to rip apart the flesh of giant whales.

What do you think the megalodon ate? A share that big must of had a huge appetite. 

Whale Hunters

Japan stirs up a debate by restarting its whale-hunting program near Antarctica.

BY JOE BUBAR

In December, four ships armed with harpoons set sail from Japan. They were headed to the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The ships are expected to capture and kill more than 300 whales by early March.

Japan’s whale hunts have been causing debates for years.Commercial whaling (hunting whales as a business) was banned worldwide in 1986, after many whale species had nearly been wiped out. But countries are still allowed to hunt whales for scientific research.

Japan has long claimed that its hunts are done in the name of science, but many animal rights groups and world leaders disagree. In March 2014, the United Nations (U.N.) ordered Japan to end its whale hunts near Antarctica. But this winter, Japanese whalers returned to the Southern Ocean in defiance(a refusal to follow rules or directions) of the U.N.’s orders.

A WHALE OF A DEBATE

Japan’s new whaling program is scheduled to last 12 years. During that time, Japan plans to kill 333 minke (MIN-kuh) whales per year—about one third as many as it hunted in the past. Japan claims that capturing whales will allow scientists to study the giant mammals up close and learn more about their diet and habits.

But opponents of Japan’s whaling program argue that the country is using research as an excuse. Critics say the true goal is to kill whales for their meat. The Japanese have been hunting whales for their meat for centuries and consider whaling an important part of their history.

WHALE WARS

One of the major opponents of Japan’s whaling program is a group called the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. As it has done in past years, the group sent a ship to the Southern Ocean to try to chase away the Japanese whalers. Paul Watson, the founder of Sea Shepherd, says that Japan is breaking international law. He argues that if Japan really wanted to study the whales, it wouldn’t be harming them.

“Anything that needs to be understood about the whales can certainly be discovered without killing them,” he says.

Do you think the Japanese whale hunters should continue or stop hunting whales? Tell why.

An Ancient Temple’s True Colors

A museum uses technology to shed light on Egypt’s colorful past

BY ANNE GOSSEN

 Artists in ancient Egypt painted sculptures and temples in bright colors. Over time, the paint on most of these ancient treasures has worn away. That’s why many of the Egyptian sculptures and temples displayed in museums today are stone-colored. We can only imagine how they originally looked.

Now, a new project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes it easier to picture what these ancient treasures really looked like. In a display titled Color the Temple: Scene 1, light is projected onto a wall of the 2,000-year-old Temple of Dendur (DEN-duhr) to show what it likely looked like when it was freshly painted.

A HISTORIC MOVE

Originally located near the Nile River, the Temple of Dendur is a small structure that was completed around 10 B.C. Years of flooding washed away its paint. In the 1960s, the Egyptian government decided to create an artificial lake that would have submerged, or covered, the temple entirely. To save the temple, Egypt gave it to the United States as a gift. It was taken apart and shipped to the U.S. in 1965. Two years later, the U.S. government gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met built a special wing for it, which opened in 1978. It has been a visitor favorite ever since.

SEEING AN ANCIENT TREASURE IN A NEW LIGHT

The light display is a joint project between the Met’s art historians and a group at the museum called MediaLab that uses technology to create new experiences for visitors. The team chose one scene from the temple’s walls and researched what it might have looked like in color. They studied color illustrations of Egyptian temples from the same period. Historical writings describing what the Temple of Dendur looked like over a century ago were also helpful.

Using this information, they created a lighting display that projects colored light onto the scene’s detailed carvings. The projection shows the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus dressed as a pharaoh(king) in a white kilt and two Egyptian gods in colorful dress. It also highlights different details in the scene, such as the hieroglyphs (written characters). Visitors can see the display through March 19. The Met hopes to use more of this kind of technology in the future.

“We’d love to do all of the [temple’s] scenes!” says Marco Castro Cosio, the MediaLab team leader.

Using science to understand the true colors of the Egyptian artwork adds a deeper understanding of it's beauty. How can you use what you have learned about color to make your work better?