Science for Kids — July 16: Three Great Hiders Finally Found

Professor Pip's little brass telescope was still warm from the twilight sky when he tumbled through the observatory door, spectacles slipping down his nose.

"Oh my whiskers, look what took me ten years to see!" he laughed, pat-pat-patting the pockets of his green lab coat. Out came a small glowing marble, no bigger than a blueberry, and a big brass lantern that he lit with a soft PSH.

Mia, Leo, and Beatrix crowded in from the rug, tails of curiosity practically twitching.

"Today," Pip announced, "we're finding a planet that was very good at hide-and-seek."

"How can a whole planet hide?" said Beatrix.

"Precisely the question!" Pip set the bright lantern in the middle of the workbench. Then he placed the tiny glowing marble right next to it. "Look at the marble. Can you see it?"

The children squinted. The lantern was so bright it almost hurt. The little marble was completely lost in its glow.

"It's gone!" said Leo.

"Not gone," said Pip, waggling a paw. "Hiding. Watch." He held up his other paw and blocked the lantern from view — and just like that, the little marble reappeared, soft and dim. Every child gasped.

"Ooooh! It was there the whole time!"

"That is called glare," Pip said, tail swishing. "Bright light next to something dim can hide the dim thing completely. And when astronomers try to photograph a planet, its star is gazillions of times brighter than the planet. When they finally take a picture of a real planet next to its real star, we call that direct imaging."

He held up an imaginary telescope. "The new planet, called Beta Pictoris d, is 63 light-years away. Two teams of astronomers spent eleven years studying its bright star, and this dim little world was tucked right in the star's glare the whole time. Then — with clever cameras and a huge telescope up on a mountain in Chile, and NASA's James Webb telescope out in space — they finally blocked out just enough starlight and there it was! One team called it 'cosmic hide-and-seek.'"

"Like trying to see a firefly next to a flashlight!" said Mia.

"Exactly right!" beamed Pip. He looked up through the arched window, where the very first stars were starting to prick through the sky. "Somewhere out there, thousands more planets are hiding behind their stars' glare, waiting for us to look just a little more carefully."

He pressed the little marble into Leo's paws. "Now I wonder how many things right here on Earth are hiding in plain sight, just because we haven't blocked out the glare yet."

Professor Pip stood in a warm, misty rainforest clearing, ferns brushing his ankles and a slice of blue sky peeking through the enormous green ceiling above.

"Curiouser and curiouser!" he whispered, patting his pockets until out came his brass magnifying glass, his pocket notebook labeled Notes, and — very carefully — a leaf he'd just plucked from a bush.

Mia, Leo, and Asha stood beside him, necks tipped back, staring up into the canopy.

"Today, my fellow scientists," Pip announced softly, "we are going to learn how you know when an animal is a whole new species."

"What's a species?" asked Asha, pencil already out.

"Oh, splendid question!" Pip held up two nearly-identical leaves. "Watch. Same color. Same size. Same little pointy tip. Are these leaves the same kind of plant?"

"Yes!" said Leo.

Pip flipped both leaves over. One had tiny fuzzy hairs on the underside. The other was smooth as glass.

"AH-HA!" cried Mia.

"AH-HA indeed!" said Pip, spectacles bouncing. "Different from the outside, but even more different when you look closely. A species is a group of living things that share their own special traits — their shape, their calls, and the tiny instructions inside their cells called DNA."

He turned toward the canopy and pointed. "Now. Way up there in the Congo rainforest, in a country called the Democratic Republic of Congo, park rangers kept catching quick photos of a small black monkey with a bright orange patch around its mouth. Local people had a name for it — Likweli — but scientists had never officially studied it. So teams of researchers spent years listening to its deep, rumbly roar, comparing its skull shape, and reading its DNA."

Pip's tail did a little happy swish. "And when everything lined up — the roar, the fur, the DNA — they knew: Likweli is a monkey unlike any other. Its closest cousin lives 1,200 kilometers away! They split apart five million years ago."

"Like recognizing your best friend's laugh from across the playground!" said Mia.

"Precisely!" Pip beamed. Somewhere high above, leaves rustled — maybe just wind, maybe not. He looked up. "Somewhere in those trees, a Likweli might be looking right back at us."

He pressed the notebook into Asha's paws. "Now I wonder — what animal in your backyard has been hiding a secret this whole time?"

The lab was dark except for one soft blue glow — Professor Pip's biggest aquarium, bubbling gently in the corner.

"Oh my whiskers!" Pip whispered, tail swishing so hard it thumped a table. "You are going to LOVE this."

He tumbled two cardboard tubes and a little tealight candle out of his lab-coat pockets. Mia, Leo, and Theo tiptoed up to the aquarium, noses squished right against the glass.

"Today," Pip said softly, "we're learning how creatures see in the deep, deep sea."

"How deep?" asked Theo.

"Deep enough that no sunshine reaches. If you swam down that far, everything would be pitch black — except for tiny sparkles of light that some fish make with their own bodies. That's called bioluminescence."

He handed a tube to each child. "Hold it up to one eye. Look at the candle."

The kids peered through — the candle looked normal enough. But then Pip cupped his paws around the flame so almost no light leaked out sideways. Suddenly the tubes felt useful. The tiny bit of light coming from above was easier to catch when you were looking straight up through a narrow tube.

"WHOOSH!" said Leo. "It's like a spyglass!"

"PRECISELY!" cried Pip. "That is what tubular eyes do. Instead of round eyeballs like ours, some deep-sea fish have eyes shaped like little telescopes, pointed straight up toward whatever faint light is drifting down from above."

He waved a paw at the aquarium. "Now. In the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil, scientists sent a robot named SuBastian 700 meters down — deeper than 40 blue whales stacked nose-to-tail. And there, floating in the darkness, was a barreleye fish. Its whole HEAD is see-through, like a little glass dome full of clear jelly! Inside the dome, two bright green tubular eyes swiveled around, looking straight up. Nobody had ever filmed one alive before — the fish is so delicate that when nets pull it up, its glass head pops."

"Like a periscope on a submarine!" said Theo, eyes huge.

"Exactly right! And the same expedition found thirty-one brand-new deep-sea creatures — jellyfish, comb jellies, and two giant single-celled animals as big as a marble."

Pip padded over to the arched window and looked up at the darkening sky. "The deep ocean has more space to explore than any other place on Earth. Every time we go down, we find creatures nobody has ever seen. Nobody!"

He tapped each child's tube. "Take these home. Tonight, try looking up through one at a very faint star. Then I wonder — what would you invent, if you had to see in the dark?"