Ancient Egyptians slept under linen sheets on carved wood bed frames. The pillow was made of wood, too. It was more like a padded stand that held the back of the head. These wood pillows kept the head away from crawling insects, and didn’t mess up fa

Koalas are marsupials (mammals with a pouch, like kangaroos) that live in Australia. They eat only the leaves of eucalyptus trees. These leaves are hard to digest and don’t give much energy. So to save their strength, koalas spend most of the day (an

When you’re choosing a pet, how much will it sleep? Snake 16-20 hours Cat 15 hours (in naps) Hamster 14 hours Lizard 12 hours Bird 10 hours Dog 9 hours Guinea Pig 8 hours Rabbit 8 hours Fish 6 hours Tarantula some, we hope ■

OK, I should not have watched Blood-Sucking Vampire Eels from Space right before bed. I just woke everyone up screaming, convinced that giant fanged space eels were crawling up all over my bed. Since my brother’s up anyway, I made him check under th

In a wintry forest, snow lies thick on the ground. The trees are bare. There’s little to eat. But under the snow, a tiny dormouse is curled up in a ball in its nest. Its fluffy tail is wrapped around its body like a blanket. If you peek in, it won’t

When is bedtime? If you don’t have a phone or watch, don’t worry. Inside every living thing is a clock that follows the sun. For a long time, people assumed that daylight told animals when to go to sleep or wake up. See light, wake. See dark, sleep.

Bees do an important job. As they fly from flower to flower, they gather and spread pollen. This helps plants make fruit and seeds. But what if there aren’t enough bees? Researchers have found a new tool that could help: soap bubbles. The scientists

Sleep has puzzled people for a long time.Why do we lie down and zone out for hours every night? Isn’t sleep just a giant waste of time? Could we learn to do without it? Now scientists are beginning to answer some of those questions. They’ve discovere

Hi. My name is Thor, and I’m an artist. People ask me all the time, “Thor, you just have a pencil—how can you make me think I’m looking at a mountain, or a fishpond, or a raccoon?” We artists have lots of tricks. And because I like you, I’ll share

Look up. Now try to draw exactly what you see. It’s not easy, is it? Now, what if you set up a grid of thin threads in front of what you want to draw? Mark the same grid on your paper. As you draw, fill in one square at a time. The “grid method” has

Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter, but he is best known for faking art. He was a forger, an artist who copies famous works of art and sells them as the real thing. Between 1923 and 1945, van Meegeren forged many paintings that he sold for millions

As you walk through the art museum, you spot a weird black shape. What is it? It looks like someone punched a hole in the room. From the side, you can see the outline of a head. But there are no little glints of light from the nose. No darker shadows

Deep in the forests of New Guinea, the superb bird of paradise sports a black feather coat that is almost as dark as Vantablack. Under a microscope, its black feathers look like tiny brushes. These feathers trap light in a way similar to the carbon t

Your eyes help you see the world. But they don’t tell you what you’re looking at. That’s the brain’s job. To decode what the eyes are seeing, the brain uses clues like light, shadow, size, and position. If one object is blocking another, for example,

Can you draw a dot in a circle (with no other lines), without once lifting the pencil from the paper? Do your friends say it’s impossible? Now, show them how it’s done. First, make the center dot on the paper. Then, leaving your pencil on the dot, f