Current Events
U.S. Mayors Embrace Renewable Energy, Other Climate Issues Qatar Inks Fighter Planes Deal with U.S. as Gulf Crisis Deepens Salem Witch Trial Testimony Sets Auction Record Puerto Ricans Vote for Statehood amid Questionable Turnout Avebury Burn Site Predates Stonehenge by 800 Years Qatar Foes Release 'Terror List' as Diplomatic Row Worsens Japan Clears Way for Emperor to Abdicate Middle Eastern Countries Isolate Qatar on Terrorism Charges California Girl, 12, Wins National Spelling Bee Trump on Climate Change Accord: No Deal Press-to Change-o: Stamp Changes with the Rub of a Thumb Long-lost Egyptian Carving Back on Display in Berlin Computer Go Champ Flattens Human Opponent 'Doomsday Vault' Flooding Sparks Quick Repair Ringling-Barnum Big Top Down for Good Ready, Set, AlphaGo: Another Man-AI Matchup Government Relaxes School Lunch Regulations Lawmakers, Parents Target 'Lunch Shaming' Reading a Million Words Worth a Celebration Rome's Past on Display in New Metro Station Climate Change Top of Mind for Arctic Council Toyota Bankrolls Flying Car Startup New York Gives Green Light to Driverless Cars New Shade of Blue to Join Crayon Boxes Egypt Consults the World on Moving King Tut Items First Funerary Garden Found in Egypt Flying Car Market Revs Up with Two New Players Teen Journalist Sleuths to Attend White House Press Dinner School within Fukushima Exclusion Zone Reopens Tiny 2,100-year-old Looms a Pattern of Complexity Gorsuch Rounds Out Supreme Court Membership Norway to Have a Blast Creating Ship Tunnel Mosaics Signal Return of 'Lost' Roman Town Harriet Tubman Photo Sold for $161,000 at Auction 'Doomsday Vault' Gets a Digital Twin Bring Dogs to Work at a Government Department Tokyo Olympics Medals Made from Recycled Metal |
Social Studies for Kids |
A massive monument that was burned in ancient times at the famed Avebury site is 800 years older than previously believed, English scientists have said, after conducting new research using new technologies. Avebury Henge is a collection of three large stone circles, larger and older than the more celebrated Stonehenge. The monument is marked by wooden posts at the Avebury site and is, when viewed from the air, in the shape of a pair of glasses, complete with a gap in between the two circles. 
Ananya Vinay, a 12-year-old from Fresno, Calif., has won the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Bee. She outlasted all other spellers, winning in the 36th round of finals competition. Ananya, who finished in the top 50 in the 2016 bee, is now in the 6th grade at Fresno's Fugman Elementary School. She was one of 291 spellers who took part in the main event, Bee Week, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Md. She spelled marocain correctly to win.
To commemorate the August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, the U.S. Postal Service has created a postage stamp that mimics the actions of the Moon during an eclipse: Put your finger on the stamp, and it changes right before your eyes. The mechanism for making the change is thermochromic ink, which by definition changes with heat. Two photos are embedded on the stamp, and the application of heat, like the body heat emitted by a finger, switches the active photo to the other option. In effect, the Sun becomes the Moon, which is what eclipse watchers see in the sky at the moment of total solar eclipse. Removal of the finger or otherwise heat source allows the stamp to revert to the initial image. 
A Berlin museum can again display a striking stone carving from ancient Egypt, after the long-thought-lost artifact has been returned. Blue faience covers the stone, which depicts a religious scene from the time of the famed pharaoh Ramses II. Shown on the stone is Ptahmose, who was for a time the mayor of Memphis, which was for many years the capital of ancient Egypt. The scene is of Ptahmose worshiping the gods Isis and Osiris. The stone had been in an English collection until 1910, when Berlin's Neues Museum bought it. Allied air raids during World War II damaged the museum, and the Soviet occupation didn't make museum restoration a priority. Thus, the museum did not open until 2009, after an extensive renovation had been completed. The carving, however, was nowhere to be found. 
Score another win for AI. AlphaGo, a product of Google's DeepMind project, has defeated the world's top Go player in three straight matches. The victory followed a similar triumph a year earlier, against another top human player. This time, it was China's Ke Jie showing his Go ability. He has been the world's top Go player for more than two years, but he still lost out in three straight contests against the computerized opponent. The matches took place in Wuzhen, China. AlphaGo won the first match by just one half-point, the closest possible margin of victory. As Ke would attest to, though, a victory is a victory. As well, Google's programmers were quick to stress, the computer engine favors moves that are more likely to guarantee victory and so AlphaGo won't run up the score on an opponent, computerized or otherwise. Seeing the writing on the wall, Ke resigned from the second game, handing the AI the technical 2-out-of-three victory. The third game was no better for Ke. Both players had studied the other's moves, and Ke even tried some unconventional moves that he said later he would not have used against a human opponent.
The final curtain has come down on the nation's oldest circus. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus has closed after nearly 150 years of providing what was billed as the "Greatest Show on Earth." Feld Entertainment, which owns the circus, announced in January 2017 that the circus would close and in May 2017 that elephants would no longer be part of the lineup. The circus had two shows in its final season. The more traditional, three-ring variety had its final show in Providence, R.I., on May 7. The more futuristic circus spectacle, which was called "Out of the This World," had its final show in Uniondale, N.Y., on May 20.
It's Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov all over again.
The famous chess struggle between a grandmaster and a computer made headlines twice, most recently in 1997, when the computer won. Now, the game is Go, an equally ancient game that artificial intelligence has mastered. AlphaGo, an AI program developed by Internet search engine Google, made headlines around the world in 2016 by defeating Lee Se-Dol, a South Korean grandmaster, 4–1. The match, which took place in Seoul, was the first win recorded by a computer player over a human player. In what could be billed as a rematch, the reigning human Go champion, China's Ke Jie, will challenge AlphaGo in a three-game series. The games will take place in Wuzhen, China, and will run on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. 
Being a millionaire doesn't always mean dollars. Sometimes, it means words. Students at the Britt David Magnet Academy in Columbus, Ga., got the royal treatment recently at the school's annual Millionaire Bash. Honorees were students who had qualified by reading 1 million words during the school year. The reading millionaires arrived in style, after a 15-minute ride in a limousine, and walked down a red carpet into the school celebration. Standing outside taking pictures (and holding out photos and other memorabilia for those autographs) were their families.
A newly completed Roman metro station sports a museum showcasing some of the archaeological treasures unearthed during the station's construction. Workers had to dig very far down to accommodate building of the station and the rail line leading to and from it, and the workers found more than 40,000 artifacts during their nearly 10 years of construction. The oldest things found are on the bottom level of the station, 100 feet beneath the surface; relatively newer items are on levels closer to the surface. 
Toyota has joined the pursuit of the flying car. The venerable Japanese automaker has announced plans to invest 40 million yen ($352812) to help a group called Cartivator achieve its dream of having not only a flying car in operation by 2020 but also have one of those cars light the Olympic Flame at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
It's out with the old and bright yellow and in with the newly discovered blue, as Crayola has announced its inspiration for a new crayon color. The crayon manufacturing company recently announced that it would remove dandelion from its color palette. In response for sudden demand for the color to be retired, the company began selling 64-crayon packs containing only dandelion-colored crayons. Crayola also announced that the new color would be a shade of blue, but the specific shade had not been announced. The official name of the pigment is YlnMn, an acronym made up of the chemical symbols of three of the four elements used to create it.
Some King Tut items are on the move. The bed, throne, and a few chests found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, the famed "Boy King" of Ancient Egypt, are being moved from Cairo's Egyptian Museum to a museum being built in another part of the country's capital city. Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities convened a panel of its own archaeologists– along with conservation experts from Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland–to help facilitate the safe transfer of the items
Six Kansas high school students whose investigative efforts resulted in the resignation of their school's principal will be attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C. The six–Maddie Baden, Connor Balthazor, Gina Mathew, Trina Paul, Kali Poenitske, and Patrick Sullivan–gained nationwide attention after their dogged fact-checking exposed questionable credentials of Amy Robertson, the principal at Pittsburg High School. The annual D.C. dinner, which this year takes place on April 29, is put on by the White House Correspondents' Association. The website Huffington Post invited the students and will pay their expenses. The students' advisor, Emily Smith, will accompany the students to the nation's capital and to the dinner.
Norway is planning to blast through solid rock to create the world's first ship tunnel. The tunnel will be 118 feet wide and a mile long and enable ships to pass throught he narrowest part of the Stad peninsula, in the western part of the country. The primary purpose of the tunnel, other than to save transport time for both freight and passenger ships, is to help those ships avoid the often treacherous waters of the Stadhavet Sea and the rocks and other hazards that dot that part of the country's coastline.
It had existed only in writings elsewhere, but the ancient Roman town of Ucetia is once again in focus, this time by modern archaeologists. During construction on a school near the modern town of Uzés, in the south of France, researchers from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research found mosaics, building fragments, and other remains of the Roman settlement, known to modernity only as a name on a stone slab in the nearby town of Nîmes. The site measures more than 43,000 square feet and contains artifacts spanning seven centuries of Roman occupation. 
Now open on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean is an archive for the world's data. The Arctic World Archive sits alongside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a frozen-storage facility built in 2008 to house the world's most important crop seeds. The idea of the seed vault is that it will be opened only after a global catastrophe. The popular nickname is the "doomsday vault." The idea of the data archive is that governments and scientific institutions around the world send in digital data that they wouldn't want to lose in the case of a natural or manmade disaster on a global scale. The vaults' owners will then preserve the data using an analog storage technique: photosensitive film stored in secure boxes.
In a first for the U.S. Government, employees at the Department of the Interior will be able to bring their dogs to work (for more than just a day). Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced the pilot program as a means of boosting morale among the 70,000 employees in the Interior Department. A 2016 survey of federal workers found that just 61 percent of the Interior Department's employees reported being happy in their jobs; Interior's results placed the department 11th out of the 18 largest federal agencies. The first test of Doggy Days at Interior will be on May 5; the next test will be on September 1. Still to be worked out are details such as whether the dogs will need to leashed or vaccinated or fully housebroken (or all of the above). Zinke owns a black-and-white Havanese dog named Ragnar. 
Medals handed out at the 2020 Olympic Games will be made of recycled metal, organisers of the Tokyo Games announced. The goal of the project, which is already under way, is to collect eight tons of raw metal, out of which will come the two tons of pure metal needed to make the approximately 5,000 medals that will be awarded to athletes. 
