Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: Beautiful, Alien Iceland. Iceland is a landscape that's still being born. While much of the world's once-jagged peaks have gradually worn into sloping hills, gushing rivers and mighty waterfalls have slowed to a trickle of their former flow, and remnants of the last Ice Age melted long ago, it's not so in Iceland. This a young land, one that's still being shaped by the same primeval forces that made much of the world -- fire and ice. Its massive Vatnajokull glacier, which dominates about 10% of the country's landmass, is so large that it's technically classified as an ice cap. The European and North American tectonic plates meet in Iceland, and more than 130 volcanoes have sprung forth from the gap between them.
Iceland has only been populated since about the middle of the ninth century, but already in that short time there have been dozens of major eruptions and lava flows, many of them devastating to human life. Click on any picture to open a larger version. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: The Accidental Sea. Association of Authors' Representatives, Inc. - Home. Writing Children's Books @ Write4Kids.com - How To Write a Children's Book. A spark and a twitch: author Catherine Thimmesh on writing nonfiction for kids. Catherine Thimmesh latest book, Team Moon, explores the unheralded women and men behind the 1969 moon mission.
Whether it's hanging from a trapeze 40 feet in the air, activating the imagination of school kids with an interactive show-and-tell about the first moon walk, or cocooning in her contemporary Eden Prairie home to write her next children's book, 40-year-old Catherine Thimmesh finds ways to invigorate her life and others by discovering the new and noteworthy. Her latest book, for example, doesn't simply explain the extraordinary moment in U.S. history when Neil Armstrong became the first human to stand on a celestial body and look into the heavens and view Earth. Thimmesh knew there was something even more unique than that to share with kids. Mental_floss Blog 5 Places to Almost Die Before You Die. 1. Tiankeng Sinkhole, Xiaozhai, China When I was 18 years old, I took a trip with a few buddies of mine to Lake George in upstate New York. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: Abandoned Belgium (and Luxembourg), Part II.
Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Bug Me While I'm Eating! Bug & Insect Lesson Plans for Kids. Teachers To extend the Insect Safari experience in your classroom, download these free cross-curricular insect lesson plans and creative modules!
These lesson plans are not only fun and easy, but they are correlated to National Science Education Standards. Teaching about pests can be challenging – Schedule The Orkin Man™ to visit your classroom for insect facts from the pest expert. Insect Lesson Plans Are You One of Us? This lesson plan introduces students to systematics, the science of classification of insects and other living things. Science News for Kids: Snapshot: Yummy bugs.
Hunt is on for new Planet Nine For a planet that hasn’t technically been discovered yet, Planet Nine is generating a lot of buzz.
Astronomers have not yet found a new planet orbiting the sun. Yet some remote icy bodies are dropping clues that a giant orb may be lurking on the fringes of the solar system.Six hunks of ice in the debris field beyond Neptune travel on orbits that are aligned with one another. Planetary scientists... 16:40 PM, February 3, 2016 Planets, Mathematics Readability Score: 7.9 Bright night lights, big science In polar regions of the world, a dazzling light show often plays out in the night sky.
Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: The Mojave Deserts Airplane Graveyard. I thought it was a mirage the first time I saw it.
I was driving through the wastes of the Mojave Desert, two hours from anywhere, when off in the shimmering distance appeared the silhouettes of a hundred parked jetliners. I pulled off and tried to get closer to them, but a mean-looking perimeter fence keeps onlookers far away. All I could do was stand and stare, wondering what the hell this massive armada of airplanes was doing here, silently baking in the 110 degree heat. For years afterward I'd ask people what they knew about it, and I kept hearing the same thing: the place has been on lockdown since 9/11, and they won't let civilians anywhere near the boneyard.
But last week my luck changed -- I met a very nice fellow who works there, and with a minimum of cajoling on my part he agreed to take me beyond the high-security fence and show me around. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: the Forgotten High School of Goldfield, Nevada. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: Abandoned Belgium, Part I. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: the Happy, Haunted Island of Poveglia. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: Portugals Bone Chapel. Mental_floss Blog Strange Geographies: Quick Facts About the Netherlands. Cool world attractions.