Science

The storyWho Is Pushing? Who Is Pulling? — Come to the playground. Look close. Someone is pushing. Someone is pulling.

The storyThe Cushion Fort — Rain is falling. Three kids build a fort in the living room. What will they use?

The storyHand on the Drum — You can feel a sound before you can name it.

The storyBehind the Bedsheet — A lamp, a sheet and two hands can make a whole show.

The storyThe Bean in the Cup — A tiny seed sat in a cup of dirt on the windowsill. What would it do?

The storyWho Lives on the Prairie? — Grass taller than you. Buzzing, hopping, singing. Who is out here?

The storyA Month of Stickers — Every morning our class puts one sticker on the weather chart. What will the chart show after thirty days?

The storySeven Nights on the Porch — Nia's grandpa says the moon will change every night this week. She does not believe him. So she checks.

The storyWhere Did the Rain Go? — A big rain fills the playground with puddles and little rivers. The next day they are gone. Where did all that water go?

The storyThe Rope That Would Not Move — Twenty kids pulled as hard as they could, and the flag in the middle stayed right where it was.

The storyThe Marble Run That Took a Whole Saturday — A tall tower of cardboard tubes, one marble, and a question nobody in the house could answer.

The storyThe Sugar That Disappeared — A spoon of sugar vanishes into a cup of tea. Did it stop existing, or just hide?

The storyA Message Across the Gym — Two friends, one flashlight, and a code that turns blinks into words.

The storyThe Monarchs of Room 12 — A jar of milkweed leaves, five tiny eggs, and a class that learned to wait.

The storyThe Fossil in the Mazon Creek Rock — A rust-colored lump from an old coal mine, a hammer tap, and a creature no one had ever seen.

The storyThe Tree in the Pot — A doctor weighed a tree, weighed its dirt, and found a mystery.

The storyWhat the Owl Pellet Was Hiding — A gray lump the size of a thumb held a whole night's hunting.

The storyThe Night the Sirens Went Off — A warm spring evening in Illinois turns strange, and then the whole town hears the same sound.

The storyWhy Illinois Is So Flat — The corn goes on forever because a wall of ice once went on forever too.

The storyThe Shadow Stick on the Blacktop — A broom handle, a piece of chalk and one school day are enough to catch the Earth turning.

The storyThe River Chicago Turned Around — For fifty years the city's own waste flowed into its drinking water, until engineers made a river run the other way.

The storyThe Pollen That Would Not Sit Still — In 1827 a careful botanist looked at pollen in water and saw something that no one could explain for almost eighty years.

The storyThe Night Chicago Burned — In October 1871 a fire started in a barn on the West Side and did not stop until it had crossed the river and eaten the heart of the city.

The storyThe Egg Drop — One raw egg, two stories of stairwell, and a design that has to stop it gently.

The storyThe First Hill — A chain hauls the train up. After that, no motor touches it until the ride is over.

The storyThe Groove That Sings — Put a record under a magnifying glass and you can see sound before you hear it.

The storyFour New Stars Beside Jupiter — One cold January night in 1610, a tube with two pieces of glass changed what the sky was allowed to be.

The storyThe First Look Inside Life — A slice of cork, a drop of pond water, and two men who saw what nobody had seen before.

The storyThe Bee, the Flower and an Old Deal — A clover blossom and a honeybee are trading partners in a deal older than any human city.

The storyThe Fish That Jumped Into the Boat — On the Illinois River, a motor's hum can fill the air with flying fish.

The storyThe Monk Who Counted Peas — In a monastery garden, one patient man found the rules of heredity in thousands of pea plants.

The storyThe Winter the River Ran Backward — In December 1811, the ground under the Mississippi Valley began to shake, and it did not stop for months.

The storyFour Minutes of Night at Noon — On April 8, 2024, the sun went out over Carbondale, Illinois, right on schedule.

The storyThe Water That a City Drinks — Every glass of water in Chicago starts two miles out in Lake Michigan, and keeping it clean once meant turning a river around.

The storyThe Cube That Could Not Get Bigger — Three jelly cubes go into the same dish of vinegar. Only one of them changes color all the way through. Why?

The storyThe Mouse, the Mint and the Air That Came Back — A candle goes out in a sealed jar. A week later, with nothing added but a sprig of mint, it burns again.

The storyThe Picture That Showed the Shape of DNA — In 1952 a single X-ray photograph, taken in a basement lab in London, gave away the secret of the molecule of life.

The storyThe Wolves Come Home to Yellowstone — For seventy years the park had no wolves. Then, in the winter of 1995, a truck pulled up with fourteen of them.

The storyThe Bison Come Back to Nachusa — In the fall of 2014, thirty bison stepped off trailers onto Illinois prairie for the first time in nearly two centuries.

The storyThe Gaps Mendeleev Left on Purpose — In 1869 a Russian chemist arranged the known elements in a table and left empty boxes. Then he described what would fill them.

The storyThe Pile Under the Stadium — On a cold December afternoon in 1942, a stack of graphite bricks on a Chicago squash court did something no human had ever made matter do.

The storyWhat the Dummy Knows — A car slams into a wall at 35 miles per hour. The passenger walks away, because the passenger is not a person.

The storyA Magnet, a Coil and a Twitching Needle — In a London basement in 1831, a bookbinder's apprentice turned motion into electricity, and the modern world switched on.

The storyThe Star That Changed the Map of Everything — One faint dot on a glass photographic plate pushed the edge of the known universe out by millions of light-years.

The storyThe Continents That Fit Together — A weather scientist noticed that South America and Africa looked like torn pieces of one page, and spent his life being told he was wrong.

The storyThe Day the Prairie Came to Washington — Farmers plowed up the grass that held the Great Plains together, and when the rain stopped, the soil itself took to the air.