If your teacher asked you to name some great women rulers, whom would you name? Would you think of some of the great female Egyptian queens, such as Queen Nefertiti, and perhaps the most famous Egyptian queen of all, Cleopatra? Or perhaps you might come up with a ruler who is a little more modern. Many countries around the world are currently ruled by a woman, or have been in very the recent past. These include Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and many other countries, especially in Africa.

It seems like women are working hard to lead their people around the world, but did you know that there are a lot of great female leaders in nature too? A lot of animal societies, especially carnivores (meat eaters), are lead by males. Scientists think this is because the males are often larger and more aggressive (better fighters). But females also lead some populations (groups) of animals. For example, females are dominant (rule) in populations of spotted hyenas. It turns out that when it comes to these meat-eaters, females are more aggressive than males.

Does this mean that more aggressive animals always rule? This may quite possibly be true, at least in carnivore populations. But did you know that in some populations of animals, there are no males at all? Yup, it’s true. Not a single one! It is very rare, but it does happen. One example is the whiptail lizard. All whiptail lizards are female. The question that should be on your mind right now is how in the world do whiptail lizards survive more than one generation? After all, females cannot give birth without male lizards to fertilize their eggs…or can they? Yes they can! Whiptail lizards are unique. The females give birth to an unfertilized egg. The egg hatches and is an exact copy of the mother. In other words, the baby is a clone, just like the clones in Star Wars, but of course, a lot scalier, being lizards and all. Cool!

Confused yet? Why would you have to carry an umbrella about with you if the future is going to be dry? Well, the answer lies in the fact that global warming (climate change caused by human air pollution) is affecting where and when rain and snow is going to fall. Of course, this differs around the world. On average though, our little blue planet is about to get a lot drier in the summer and wetter in the winter. This spells out trouble for many of us. Here’s why…

Scientists who study the climate have observed that changing weather patterns are occurring. In the high latitudes, there will be less snow in the winter and more rain. This means that there will be lots of water in the winter, when we don’t really need it. But there will be less snow. Snow is important because it allows water to be stored high in the mountains. In the late spring and early summer when we need more water, the snow melts and the water fills rivers and streams. If there is less snow in the mountains, less water will be released in the warm season. In other words, less snow in the winter means drier summers. So you’ll have to carry an umbrella for part of the year, but it will be dry for the rest of the year.

This may be a real problem for places that are already experiencing a water shortage. In California, for example, scientists predict that the snow pack in the mountains may soon be 15-30 percent smaller than it is now. Humans may soon have to use this precious resource a lot more carefully!

Who is the world’s oldest person? Today, the world’s oldest person is a lady in the US named Edna Parker. She is a whopping 114 years old! But if you asked the question ten years ago, the oldest living person would have been Jeanne Louise Calment of France. When she died in 1997, she was 122 years old! Wow! I wonder what her secret was?

Humans can live for a long time, but did you know that many animals can live even longer? It’s true. The giant tortoise often lives to be 150 years old in nature, and even older in a zoo. Over all, larger animals seem to live longer than smaller ones, with elephants clocking in at 69 years, horses at 50, and hippos at 49. But this isn’t always the case.

Recently the longest living animal found on Earth so far was pulled out of the icy waters around Iceland. If we had a birthday party for it, there would have to be 405 candles on the cake. To hold all those candles, the cake would have had to be hundreds of times bigger than this creature, which measures just a few inches across. It is a quahog clam.

The clam’s age was determined by counting growth rings on its shell. You can also learn how old a tree is by counting its growth rings too. Both types of rings can provide scientists with information about the climate. A clamshell can provide information about the temperature of the ocean and the amount of salt in it, among other things. And scientists hope to learn a lot about the past 400 years of Earth’s climate from this long-lived clam!

Here’s a colossal whopper of a science story! An enormous dinosaur has been uncovered in Argentina, in South America. Scientists believe it is bigger than any species that has been uncovered before. How big is this enormous dinosaur? It measures 32 meters (105 feet) from its nostrils to the tip of its weighty tail. Or to put it into a better perspective, it’s about the length of two and a half 40-foot school buses! Good grief, I’d hate to meet this fellow in a dark ally, even if he does just eat plants. The threat of being accidentally sat upon is enough on its own!

The dinosaur even has a whopper of a name too—it is called a Futalognkosaurus. Where’d they come up with that fumbler of a name? It’s hard to get your tongue around it, that’s for sure. The name comes from a Mapuche native word that means “chief” and “giant.” It’s pretty exciting for scientists to uncover a nearly complete skeleton of a Futalognkosaurus. It confirms that dinosaurs could grow to this amazingly large size. In the past, bits and pieces of two other giant dinosaurs of a similar size were also found in the same region, but their skeletons weren’t very complete at all.

It makes you wonder how a Futalognkosaurus could grow so large. It must have done nothing but eat! And these super-sized dinosaurs would have had to roam far and wide to find enough food to keep up their massive size. It’s amazing that the bones and joints of a Futalognkosaurus could survive the pressure exerted on them when the massive dinosaur walked. Scientists will be studying the fossil closely in the years to come to find out more about these dinosaurs. And stay tuned for future findings. They may dig up an even bigger one yet!

Today on Science Mysteries… Explained!, we are going to tackle the “Big Momma” of all science mysteries. The mystery we’re going to solve today, or at least possibly shed a little light on, is the mystery concerning the mythical sunken island of Atlantis. Whoa! Atlantis is just a myth, isn’t it? It only exists in movies and in the imagination of a few crazy archaeologists, people who study the past and dig up objects from past civilizations). Doesn’t it?

Well, a surprisingly large number of scholars and scientists have taken the island of Atlantis very seriously in the past, and many do today as well. The story, which was first told thousands of years ago, goes something like this: There was once an island that lay in the ocean off the coast of North Western Africa. The people who lived on it had a very advanced civilization. But about 12 000 years ago the whole island tragically sank below the waves, never to surface again! And now to the mystery… Was the island really located of the coast of Africa? How could it disappear so quickly? Were the people living on it really part of an advanced culture?

Many people have taken up the search for Atlantis over the years. Some scholars suggested it lay off the coast of Greece, not Africa, and it disappeared in a fiery eruption. But that didn’t really match the stories that were passed down. Then in 2001, a geologist discovered a sunken island off the coast of Africa. The island seemed to have sunk into the sea when sea level began to rise after the last Ice Age. (The Ice Age was a period in Earth’s history when much of the planet was covered in ice! When the ice melted, the melt water caused the oceans to rise.) Unfortunately, this didn’t really match the story either, which said the island sank quickly.

Fast-forward a few years. Another scientist checks out the island with sonar and what do you think he found? He found evidence of a super-powerful earthquake that may have caused much of the island to sink into the sea very quickly indeed. So, has the mystery of Atlantis been solved?  It’s hard to say. The story mentions an advanced civilization lived there but no evidence has been found yet. It looks like the search for Atlantis may still be an unfinished story!

If you thought that last blog post on pee power was cool, you’ll just love today’s post on bug juice. Nope, we’re not talking about juicing cockroaches here (hey, that’s cruelty to animals, which is not cool!) Instead we’re talking about bugs in the sense of bacteria, tiny organisms that can only be seen with a microscope. And we’re talking about juice in the sense of electricity. What do the two have in common? Read on to find out.

If you are into animals, you may already know that some one them, like some eels for example, can create electricity. Electric eels are pretty big and can give an unfortunate diver a real shock. But did you now that smaller creatures such as bacteria can also generate electricity? It’s true. And they can do it under super-harsh conditions. No light? Scorching hot? Bombarded with radiation? No problem for these super juice generators!

That’s pretty cool. But the big question is how do we make use of this neat trick? Can we harness the electricity produced by the bacteria in some way? Scientists at MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) think that they have found a way to do just that! Enter the bacteria-powered fuel cell. Give them some plant waste to break down and the bacteria get all fired up in their own self-contained battery. Scientists believe this may be one of the answers to our future energy needs. But, of course, it’s not quite ready for market just yet. There are still a few glitches to work out. Right now, it takes ages for the fuel cell to recharge—about 6 months to recharge a battery like the one you use in your cell phone!

What if you could power your MP3 player just by drinking a bottle of water? Welcome to the incredible world of pee power—or rather pee-powered batteries to be exact. Pee-powered batteries may sound a bit gross, but they may be the sustainable energy choice of the future. How come? Well. The power source, human urine is renewable, inexhaustible, and affordable. Plus, the batteries don’t cause pollution when they are discarded (regular batteries leak toxic chemicals into the landfill when they are tossed away!).

It almost sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? So how does this magical urine battery work? The secret to producing pee-power is a chemical reaction. When the urine contacts a chemical called copper chloride (copper is used to make pennies and chlorine is used to clean drinking water), a reaction occurs. This reaction creates electricity. Just a few drops of urine will generate the same amount of “juice” as your typical AA battery.

Urine batteries aren’t on the market yet, but when they are, what will they be used for? The first thing scientists hope to create is…a self-powered urine test! That’s actually a pretty cool idea. A patient pees in a little container and then the urine itself powers the battery that runs the test. Urine tests can tell doctor all about a patient’s health. If a patient has certain diseases, this can be seen by analyzing chemicals in the urine.

Hmm, this kind of gives a whole new meaning to the words “power pee!”

That’s probably not a question you see tossed around a lot, but it’s actually a really important one. Everywhere you look these days, there is a company advertising that its product is green. Sounds good doesn’t it? But what does that really mean? Do the claims that a product is “green” mean that is good for a planet? You’d think so, but read on. You’ll soon learn that this isn’t always the case!

Have you seen shirts advertised lately that are made of bamboo? Or how about shorts made out of corn? Companies that make items out of these plants claim that they are green. But there is a dark side to a lot of these claims. Let’s look at bamboo for example. This plant may be familiar because it is the main food eaten by panda bears. But it also grows very quickly, and for this reason, it uses up a lot of carbon dioxide, which plants remove for the air to make food with the help of energy from the Sun. Carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases, so it is good thing if plants use a lot of it.

So far it sounds great doesn’t it. But let’s take a walk over to the dark side. It turns out that people need a place to farm bamboo, which grows in the tropics. When people want to start a farm, they have to clear land. In this case, the land they are clearing is land that tropical rainforests grow on. Tropical rainforests absorb enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. They provide a home for a great number of the world’s different plants and animals. They even help regulate the weather. In other words, they are irreplaceable.  And cutting them down spells trouble, big, big trouble.

So it turns out that this “green” product is really not so green after all. Often, it is good to check other people’s claims out for yourself before you believe them. In fact, you really can’t ever go wrong if you always check your facts. Especially as a scientist!

What if there was a way to get to outer space that didn’t involve a rocket or a space shuttle? Here is one solution that sounds so impossible that it just might work. Imagine if you could hook a giant cable from Earth to space and send a space elevator straight to the top. Impossible you say? Sounds like a crazy sci-fi dream straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Not at all, at least not for the students, scientists, and engineers that competed in this year’s Elevator: 2010 Competition is Utah. Teams from around the globe were competing against each other to make a robotic climber that would climb up the long cable of the first space elevator. The wining team from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada powered their robotic climbing elevator with laser beams from the ground.

That sounds pretty cool, but an elevator has to be connected at two ends. On the bottom the super strong cables would be anchored to Earth, but what would they be anchored to at the top end, in outer space? Would you believe a weight that simply floats in space? It’s true. This is a bit tricky, but here is how it will work. The weight would have to be a large object, such as a space station or even an asteroid. The weight would float in space outside of Earth’s orbit. This is the area in space close to Earth, where the planet’s gravity pulls on objects so that they revolve around the plant, for example, communication satellites. The weight would be beyond Earth’s orbit. This means Earth would turn beneath it, keeping the cable of the space elevator pulled tight.

If anyone has ever called you a Neanderthal, you probably figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t meant to be a compliment. What is a Neanderthal? Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalis) are close relatives of Homo sapiens, which are otherwise known as human beings. Even if you’re not a scientist, you can tell we are closely related by the fact that we both carry the name Homo. Neanderthals looked a lot like human beings, but they were actually a totally unique species.

Neanderthals lived in the northern hemisphere, in Asia and Europe. They became extinct 20 000 to 30 000 years ago. Because they lived in cold regions of the world, Neanderthals had a very recognizable characteristic. They had an especially large nose that helped them warm the cold northern air as they breathed. In addition to having a honking hooter, they were short by today’s human standards, and very muscular in build. Scientists were able to determine their structure from remains that they have studied. For a while that was the limit of their knowledge. But now, thanks to advances in know-how and technology, they are learning more.

How are scientists doing this? They are studying the Neanderthal’s genes. Genes are made up of DNA, the hereditary material of the body. They contain special codes that determine our very nature. It is genes that determine whether we have blue or brown eyes, big or small feet, and possibly even if we like to put butter on our popcorn (yup, it’s true.)

Gene research is telling scientists some interesting things about Neanderthals. For example, scientists have discovered, much to their surprise, that many Neanderthals had red hair! Scientists have found a Neanderthal gene that is responsible for both fair skin and red hair. This is common combination in northern Europeans. There is less sunlight in the northern regions, so prehistoric Neanderthals and humans alike would have benefited from having light-colored skin. Why? Before the day of vitamin D fortified milk, people had to rely on the Sun for their vitamin D (the body makes vitamin D when exposed to sunlight), and vitamin D is essential for life. The less color or pigment there is in a person’s skin, the more sunlight they can absorb to make this unique vitamin. So it turns out that red hair and fair skin helped Neanderthals survive, at least for a while. As to why they died out, well that’s for another blog post!