Science for Kids — July 21: Sea gardens, raccoon locksmiths, and a very old Mars rock

Professor Pip adjusted his slightly crooked spectacles and reached into the biggest pocket of his forest-green lab coat. Out came a heavy glass jar with a screw-top lid, filled with dark water and tall, waving red creatures shaped like fuzzy pipes.

"Ah! Just the thing," he said, setting it in the middle of his wooden bench. "Come closer, my fellow scientists."

Mia leaned in until her nose almost touched the glass. Leo climbed onto a stool and pressed a fingerprint right where a little pale clam sat on a rock inside.

"Those wiggly red things look like ribbon candy," Mia whispered.

"They're called tubeworms," said Professor Pip. "And they live at the bottom of the sea, in water so deep that no sunlight has ever, ever reached them."

"But… but plants need sun to grow!" Leo said. "And we eat plants! Or animals that eat plants! Everybody eats sunshine!"

Pip's tail swished happily. "Precisely what everyone believed. And then a group of scientists climbed inside a submarine called Striver and drove it down, down, DOWN — nearly ten kilometers below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. And what they saw made them gasp."

He pulled a small chemistry flask from another pocket. Green liquid inside it began to bubble gently. "Down there, hot little cracks open in the ocean floor. Cold water full of tiny chemicals like methane comes creeping out. And these tubeworms — clever things — have made friends with very small bacteria who live inside them."

"Friends?" said Mia. "How do you make friends with a bacteria?"

"By sharing lunch," said Pip. "The bacteria eat the chemicals, the way we would eat a sandwich. And then they share their leftovers with the tubeworm. In return, the tubeworm gives the bacteria a cozy home inside its body. Nobody needs the sun. This kind of eating is called chemosynthesis — making food from chemicals instead of light."

Leo's mouth dropped open. "Oh! Like when Mia gives me half her granola bar and I let her pet my hamster!"

"Exactly right!" cried Pip, clapping his little paws. "A partnership! Two living things helping each other stay alive."

Then he grew very quiet and looked into the dark water in the jar. "The deepest, darkest places aren't empty, my friends. They are just alive in a way we are only starting to understand. And that is why some scientists dream that Jupiter's icy moon Europa, with its hidden ocean underneath the ice, might have gardens like this too."

He handed each child a tiny jar of their own. "Now, my fellow scientists — draw what YOU think might live at the very bottom of an alien sea. I want to see."

Professor Pip patted the pockets of his forest-green lab coat and pulled out a wooden box the size of a lunchbox. It had four different silver latches on the lid: a hook, a slider, a spinning dial, and a lifting bar.

"Aha!" he said. "Today, my fellow scientists, we are going to think like raccoons."

Mia and Leo grinned. They were sitting at a picnic table in Pip's backyard, warm afternoon sun stretched all across the grass.

"Now watch closely." Pip pulled a small bag of dried blueberries from another pocket and tucked them inside the box. "There. A treasure. Mia, you try to open it. Leo, you have to look away — no peeking."

Mia turned the dial slowly. Then she flipped the hook. Then, with a soft click, the lid popped up. "I got it!"

"Excellent!" said Pip. "Now shut it up tight again. Leo, your turn. And no watching how she did it."

Leo tried the lifting bar first. Then the slider. He wiggled the dial in the OPPOSITE direction from Mia. And… click. Open!

Leo laughed. "But I did it totally differently!"

"Precisely!" Pip's whiskers twitched with delight. "Same box. Two different roads to open it. And that is exactly what real scientists just discovered in a town called Laramie, in Wyoming."

He plopped down cross-legged in the grass. "They set out puzzle boxes just like this one — in people's backyards, at a feed store, even in an abandoned old barn. And then they set up little cameras and waited to see who came sniffing."

"Raccoons?" Mia guessed.

"WILD raccoons," Pip nodded. "About one in every four figured out how to open at least one box. But here's the curiouser part — no two raccoons did it the same way. Some spun the dial. Some pried the bar. Some tried three latches at once with clever little paws."

He pulled out his pocket notebook and pointed at a scribble. "The young raccoons were braver. They tried lots of things fast. The older raccoons were slower, more careful. And some raccoons — this is the amazing bit — started with the easy latches, and then, once they got good, moved on to harder ones. That's called learning."

"When somebody figures out their own new way of solving a problem, we call it innovation," Pip said, sounding out the big word. "In-no-VAY-shun."

Leo's eyes went round. "Oh! Like how Grandma ties her shoelaces different from how I tie mine. She has her own way, and it works!"

"Exactly right!" Pip beamed. He gazed up at the fence, where a small striped tail was disappearing over the top. "Every animal has a mind. And every mind is a tiny bit different. That's what makes the world so wonderful."

He handed each child a paperclip. "Now, my fellow scientists — see how many DIFFERENT ways you can make it into a shape. No copying. That's innovation."

Professor Pip stood on top of a rocky hill just as the sun was thinking about going down. He held his round brass magnifying glass in one paw and, from another pocket, produced a small striped rock about the size of a mango. Layers of tan, brown, ochre, and dusty red ran across it in stripes.

"Ah! My favorite kind of storyteller," he said, holding the rock up to the sky.

Mia and Leo tumbled up the hill behind him.

"That's just a rock," Leo said, out of breath.

"A rock, yes," said Pip. "But this rock is a book. Every stripe is a page. And every page is a day, or a season, or a whole long-ago afternoon."

He set the rock on a flat boulder. Then he reached into a pocket, pulled out a shallow tray of flour, and set it beside the rock. From another pocket came three marbles.

"Now watch." Plop! He dropped a marble into the flour. It left a little crater. Plop! Plop! Two more marbles, two more craters. Puffs of white flour drifted up.

Mia clapped. "Meteor rain!"

"Precisely," said Pip. "And this — THIS — is what happened to Mars and to our own Moon a very, very long time ago. The sky rained rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, comets, asteroids, everything. That time is called the Late Heavy Bombardment. It happened almost 4 billion years ago."

Leo tried to whistle at the number and failed. "That's SO much older than Grandma."

"That is older than Earth's oldest mountain," Pip agreed. "And here is the amazing part. A very brave robot named Perseverance — a rolling car-sized geologist that NASA sent to Mars — has been driving around the edge of a giant crater called Jezero. Just a few days ago, scientists announced that Perseverance found a huge stack of layered rock, seventy-five metres tall, that was made during that very rain of comets, almost four billion years ago."

He pointed his magnifying glass at his little striped rock. "Every time a big rock smashed into Mars, it shattered the ground into a thousand little chunks. Then the heat of the crash melted some of them and glued them back together into a new rock. That crashed-and-glued kind of rock has a name too. It's called an impact breccia. Say it with me: brech-EE-ah."

"Brech-EE-ah!" the children shouted.

"Oh!" said Mia, "That's like a Rice Krispie treat. Lots of little pieces stuck together into one big thing!"

"Exactly right!" cried Pip, clapping his little paws so hard his spectacles slipped down his nose. "A Rice Krispie treat made of crashed meteor and molten stone. Perfect."

He turned toward the horizon, where a small reddish dot was climbing up out of the pink sunset sky. "That, my friends, is Mars, glowing in our own evening. And right now, Perseverance is rolling along its dusty hills, reading those pages. Every rock is a page. Every page is a story of a day."

He gave each child a small pebble. "Tonight, when you find Mars in the sky, tell it hello from us. And whisper: 'I know some of your oldest stories now.'"