Science for Kids — July 26: New worlds, new monkeys, and cameras that swim

Professor Pip climbed to the top of a grassy hill just as the sky was turning purple. His crooked spectacles slid down his nose, and his tail swished excitedly behind him. "Ah! Just in time," he whispered, pulling a small brass telescope from his coat pocket. "The first star of the evening is almost here."

Mia, Leo, and their friend Asha plopped down on the grass beside him.

"What are we looking at, Professor Pip?" asked Asha, hugging her knees.

"Something wonderful," said Pip. He unrolled a tiny paper the size of a postcard. "Say this little rectangle is what one very famous space telescope — the Hubble — sees at a time." Then he unrolled a MUCH larger paper next to it. "And this is what a brand-new telescope, called Roman, will see. In one single click!"

"WHOA," said Leo. "Roman's picture is enormous!"

"Precisely!" said Pip, clapping his paws. "The size of what a telescope can see in one look is called its field of view. Roman's field of view is about a hundred times bigger than Hubble's. Watch."

He held his brass telescope up to Mia's eye. "Zoom in on that pinecone way over there. See?"

"Just the pinecone," Mia said.

"Now put it down and look with just your eyes."

"I can see the whole forest!" said Mia.

"Two very different jobs," said Pip, tapping his nose. "Hubble zooms in on one thing. Roman takes in the whole forest of stars — a big, wide picture. That's why scientists call it a survey telescope."

Leo squinted at the sky. "But why do you WANT a wide picture?"

"Because," said Pip, tail curling, "the universe has secrets that are only visible when you look at LOTS of stars at once. Roman will find planets going around faraway suns — thousands of new worlds! It'll help us understand mysterious things called dark matter and dark energy that hold all the galaxies together. And it can survey the sky about a thousand times faster than Hubble can."

"Oh!" said Asha. "Like using a big butterfly net instead of one tiny jar!"

"Exactly right!" beamed Pip.

The three children looked up together. A tiny silver point of light winked to life above the treetops — the very first star. Pip smiled a quiet smile and adjusted his spectacles.

"When Roman launches this August," he whispered, "we're going to see farther, and wider, than we ever have before."

He pressed a folded paper "sky-window" into each child's paws. "Now you try. Hold this up. What's inside your window tonight?"

Professor Pip trotted along a misty forest path, tail swishing, his big brass magnifying glass held up like a knight's shield. "Follow closely, my fellow scientists!" he called. "The forest is full of clues today."

Mia and Leo padded behind him, peering through cardboard-tube binoculars they'd made that morning.

"Clues to WHAT?" whispered Leo.

"To a monkey," said Pip, eyes twinkling. "A monkey the forest kept hidden for almost twenty years."

"Twenty years?!" gasped Mia. "How can a monkey be lost?"

Pip stopped at a fallen log. From one bulging pocket, he pulled out a stack of dried leaves. From another, a chart with lots of little monkey sketches on it. "Aha! Here's the trick," he said. "Every animal on Earth has a name — a species name. Scientists give one to every kind of creature so they can talk about it. But you can only give a new species a name if you're POSITIVELY sure it isn't just another kind we already know."

He laid ten leaves in a row. "Sort these into piles that look the same."

The children got to work. SNIFF, RUSTLE. Nine of the leaves went into one pile. But one leaf, a smaller one with a tiny orange dot on its edge, went into a pile by itself.

"THIS ONE'S DIFFERENT!" Mia announced.

"Precisely!" cried Pip, clapping his paws. "That is exactly what scientists do with animals. They compare fur, faces, bones, calls, and even DNA. In a huge national park in the Congo called Lomami, a team took a photo of a small black monkey way back in 2008. But they weren't sure it was a NEW kind. So year after year, they collected more photos. More facts. More clues."

He held up his magnifying glass. "And here's the special clue — a bright pinkish-cream patch of skin all around its mouth, like a little dab of ice cream. No other colobus monkey has that. Its closest cousin lives more than a thousand kilometers away!"

"Oh!" said Leo. "Like when we found the button in the sofa that didn't match ANY of our shirts!"

"Curiouser and curiouser!" laughed Pip. "Exactly right. Local people call it likweli — that's its everyday name. Scientists just gave it its official name: Colobus congoensis."

He looked up at the swaying canopy. "There may be fewer than a thousand likweli in the whole world. Which means we've found them just in time to help protect them."

He handed each child a tiny pocket notebook. "Now you try. Go home, watch a creature in your backyard, and write down FIVE things about it no one else has noticed. That's how discovery begins."

Professor Pip knelt on the warm wooden dock, humming to himself. Beside him on a little red wagon sat a big polka-dotted plush whale shark he'd nicknamed Marlow. In one paw, Pip held a tiny brass gadget the size of a walnut. In the other, a small clip.

"Behold!" he announced, holding the gadget up so his crooked spectacles caught the sunlight. "A miniature science camera."

"For MARLOW?" asked Mia, eyes wide.

"For Marlow's pretend cousins," said Pip. "The BIGGEST fish in the whole ocean."

"Whale sharks aren't whales, right?" said Leo, sitting cross-legged.

"Precisely! They're sharks — but they can grow longer than a school bus, and they don't have teeth like a shark movie. They swim gently along, filtering little shrimp called krill right out of the water."

He carefully clipped the tiny camera to Marlow's dorsal fin. CLICK. "Now — the puzzle. Scientists could always watch whale sharks from a boat, but only at the very top of the water. What happened when the sharks dove down? Nobody knew!"

Mia gasped. "So they gave the SHARK the camera!"

"Exactly right!" said Pip, tail curling with delight. "A little device that records data on an animal is called a biologger. In Australia, near a beautiful place called Ningaloo Reef, a team clipped these camera tags on wild whale sharks. Twenty-four hours later — plink — the clips popped off, floated to the surface, and the scientists picked them up."

He held an old wooden picture frame in front of Marlow's snout. "Now imagine looking THROUGH here…"

Leo squinted through it. "I can pretend to see fish! And bubbles! And sunlight beams in the water!"

"That's what the shark's camera saw," said Pip. "And here's the surprise. Scientists thought whale sharks mostly ate at the surface, gulping. WRONG! The footage showed them feeding down to 70 meters — about 230 feet — and doing it in 36 different ways. Some of those ways look almost lazy. Just cruising with their giant mouths open, catching a snack here, a snack there."

"Oh!" said Mia. "Like when I walk past the fruit bowl and grab a grape without even stopping!"

"Curiouser and curiouser!" giggled Pip. "That's exactly what one scientist called it — like snacking from the pantry."

He gazed out at the shimmering lagoon and adjusted his spectacles. "There is so much of the ocean we simply cannot follow. But when we ask the animals to bring the camera along… oh my whiskers, the stories they tell us."

He handed the kids each a paper-plate "camera." "Now you try. Follow a squirrel or a bug in your yard, and imagine what it would film if it could see the world."