Perfect for nature-loving 7-12 year olds, each issue of Nat Geo Kids is carefully curated to ignite curiosity and spark conversations about science and nature, empowering children to love and care for our beautiful planet.
Happy New Year, Kids! How paw-geous is this issue’s cover star? The beautiful leopard lives in a protected park in India, alongside some big Bengal tigers. Turn to page 10 to read about this conservation success story, and learn how these predators can co-exist! Also this issue, we meet a very unusual kangaroo that lives up in the trees! Plus, we get the lowdown on life as a polar scientist from NG Explorer Prem Gill, and investigate some cool new gadgets! There are tons of puzzles, adventures, wacky facts and laughs in the issue, too – so turn the page and get stuck in… See you next month!…
Gigantic coral discovered! National Geographic scientists have discovered the world’s largest coral growing in the waters of the Solomon Islands, in the southwest Pacific. The healthy mega-coral, called Pavona clavus, is over 32m long (that’s longer than a blue whale!), 34m wide and 5.5m high. Mostly brown, but also dotted with vivid yellows, blues and reds, it’s made of nearly one billion tiny individual creatures called polyps, which have grown together for at least 300 years. The dome-shaped coral is home to tons of other marine species, like young reef fish, crabs and shrimps. Epic! Lost penguin! Meet Gus, the first wild emperor penguin ever to set flipper on Australia! These 1m-tall penguins usually live in the icy waters of Antarctica, but this bird swam more than 3,400km north to the…
Ball bonanza Belgian eco-designer Mathilde Wittock makes furniture out of old tennis balls – preventing thousands of them from ending up in landfill! Each Bounce Chair (main pic) contains 515 of the balls, which she dyes, cuts in half and slots together, without glue, onto a plywood frame. Game, set and match! Cirque du Ski! Freestyle skier Fabian Bösch has turned the Swiss Alps into a circus by adding hoops, trapeze swings, exercise balls and rails to the slopes. Fabian springs into some stunts off bouncy balls (see main pic above) and ski-jumps onto other snowy obstacles. This is snow joke! Pavement doctor Ever seen pot holes or cracked pavements and walls when you’ve been out and about? Well, French street artist Ememem fills in these cracks with beautiful mosaic…
Sandy surprise! Next time you’re taking a stroll on a beach, have a think about those little grains rubbing between your tootsies! Sand is made up of teeny pieces of rocks and minerals that have broken down over millions of years, as well as little bits of shells and other hard marine organisms smashed into tiny shards by waves. In this stunning close-up picture, photographer and scientist Zhang Choa has zoomed in on some Mediterranean beach sand grains to reveal their incredible shapes, structures and colours. “You can see sea urchin fragments of various colours, and tiny, sharp pieces of sponge,” Zhang explains. “They look like glass scuptures!” His eye-catching photo was an Image of Distinction in the 2024 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition. “The uniqueness of sand far exceeds our…
An elephant lumbers through a forest in southwestern India as spotted deer graze on grass. Suddenly, one of the deer barks out an alarm call, and the herd stands alert - a predator might be lurking nearby. These deer have good reason to be nervous. The forest is home to two powerful predators: Bengal tigers and Indian leopards. This protected park in India, called Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, is one of the few remaining places on Earth where these two big cats co-exist. Around the world, tiger and leopard populations are in decline, and not many habitats can still support them. But at Nagarahole, these two species are thriving alongside each other. PROTECTED FOREST Often when top predators live in the same habitat, they compete for food, which can be trouble…
PREM GILL Polar explorer Prem tells us about studying seals from space, working on Frozen Planet II, and connecting kids to the wonders of polar science! Seal-loving explorer Prem is on a mission to research two of Antarctica’s seal species and discover how their pack-ice habitat is being affected by climate change. To do that, he combines visits to the world’s most remote continent with studying seals from space. Eh?! “I point satellites at the sea ice, take pictures and then count all the seals in the images,” Prem explains. To make sure the tiny dots in the pictures are actually seals and not rocks, Prem also uses top tech to measure the unique light given o? by the animals, and record their body heat. He’s training Artifical Intelligence to help…
