Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2020 i National Geographic Kids

WINNER: KOALA Believe it or not, koalas are actually lazier than sloths! Although sloths move slowly, they don’t sleep most of their days away. Despite their near-total lack of trying, koalas win the crown in this showdown! CHECK OUT THE BOOK! FOR MORE CRITTER CONTESTS, WATCH ANIMAL SHOWDOWN. natgeokids.com/may…

THE MAZE OF THE MENACING MINOTAUR Zeus, a tiny hamster with a big ego, is out to prove that he’s worthy of ruling over his fellow pets at Mount Olympus Pet Center, who—like him—are all named after Greek gods and goddesses. In this excerpt from Zeus the Mighty: The Maze of the Menacing Minotaur, Zeus and his best pal, Demeter the grasshopper, have entered a mysterious maze below the pet center to investigate the source of some stifling heat. But something terrifying might be standing in their path … Zeus the Mighty was not lost. He’d been wandering in a warren of metal passages for the past hour. He was deep underground, a long way from his palace on Mount Olympus. He wasn’t even sure if he was still in…

MORE PASTA, PLEASE! Think she saved room for dessert? Michelle Lesco holds the record for fastest time to eat a bowl of pasta, finishing a plateful of noodles in less than 27 seconds. That’s 14 seconds faster than the previous record. Lesco is not a picky eater—she also holds records for fastest time to eat a hot dog with no hands and most mayonnaise eaten in three minutes. Um, yum? “cat”-Itude Is everythIng. SUPER-LONG CAT Make room for this feline. Measuring 47 inches from his nose to the tip of his tail, Barivel holds the record for the longest house cat. He’s as long as a seven-year-old kid is tall! Barivel can leap over some fences and slide mail off his owner’s kitchen counter while standing. Maybe he dreams about extralong mice.…

Dog Digs Up Mammoth Tooth I’M GLAD I DON’T HAVE MAMMOTH HAIR STUCK IN MY TEETH. Whidbey Island, Washington Scout the Labrador retriever is a puppy paleontologist: The dog sniffed out a 13,000-year-old woolly mammoth tooth in his owner’s backyard! At first owner Kirk Lacewell thought the six-inch-long fossilized chomper was a rock. “Then it hit me that dogs don’t usually carry rocks around,” he says. Lacewell emailed photos to the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, where a paleontologist immediately recognized the object as part of a mammoth molar. A relative of today’s elephants, woolly mammoths lived in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago. “So mammoth fossils are fairly common in this part of the country,” museum curator Greg Wilson says. Lacewell…

All rides are fun, but many also use cool technology and scientific forces to really push the limits. Discover the science behind five of the coolest amusementpark rides around the world. PANDEMONIUM WHERE Six Flags Over Georgia in Austell, Georgia THE RIDE Pandemonium takes riders to new heights, swinging them nearly 150 feet aboveground—about as high as a 15-story building. Forty riders strap in around the rim of the disk-like ride. Then the disk starts swinging from side to side until it reaches its peak height, sailing at about 70 miles an hour. COOL SCIENCE: INERTIA After a powerful motor gives this ride, called a pendulum, a push to get started, it continues to move back and forth. That’s because of the force of inertia, which is when an object…

PLAY This city is full of nouns, or people, places, and things. But 12 compound nouns—nouns made up of two or more words, or two words combined to make one word—have been drawn exactly as they’re named. Can you guess the compound nouns illustrated in each of the numbered scenes? Here’s a hint: The answer to number 1 is “sleeping bag.” PLAY MORE GAMES WITH THIS BOOK. Seeing isn’t always believing. Two of these funny signs aren’t real. Can you figure out which two are fake?…

I’M NOT SAYING WHO, BUT ONE OF US NEEDS A BATH. BUSH BABY HABITAT Forest treetops in Africa WEIGHT 2½ to 32 ounces CRYBABY A bush baby’s cry sounds similar to the wails of a human baby. SUPERSIZE EYES These animals have large eyes that help them see better in the dark. Nairobi, Kenya How can you tell that Dina the yellow baboon and Bushy the bush baby are BFFs? They’re always giving each other bear hugs—even when they’re on the move. Bushy often wraps her arms around the baboon’s tummy and holds on upside down as Dina crawls around their enclosure at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage. The critters bonded after arriving at the reserve as infants. “Now Dina acts as Bushy’s mom,” says Edward Kariuki, an orphanage veterinarian. The…

A young koala scrambles up a eucalyptus tree. It’s not trying to grab one of the tasty leaves it loves snacking on—it’s trying to get away from the flames and smoke swirling in the forest beneath it. Earlier this year and in late 2019, a record number of wildfires raged through woodland habitats in Australia, destroying many of the trees koalas live in and rely on for food. The fires burned across some 65,000 square miles, an area the size of Florida. Reports show that more than 8,000 koalas might have been killed in these fires, alongside hundreds of millions of other animals. Koalas aren’t endangered, but they face many other threats in addition to wildfires. Starvation, dog attacks, car accidents, and disease have also put the fuzzy mammals in…

A pack of black-and-tan hound dogs surround a tree in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The dogs are jumping at the base of the tree, barking at something in the branches above: They’ve trapped a rhinoceros poacher. South Africa is home to about 80 percent of the world’s last remaining rhinos. But some 8,000 rhinos have been poached, or illegally hunted, in South Africa since 2008. That’s because the demand for rhino horns has gone up—they’re mostly smuggled into Asia to be used in medicine, even though they have no medicinal value. More than half of these rhinos were killed in Kruger and surrounding areas. To help protect the species, officials came up with a clever idea that was perfect for sniffing out bad guys: Texas hound dogs. GOING TO…