BBC News Stories + Resources for the ClassroomWatch the BBC news story of the day and take the challenge!
Ring ring! “Hello? Outer space on the line.”
Students at Wick High School in the far north of Scotland recently had a conversation they won’t forget. They spoke directly to an astronaut on the International Space Station, which orbits about 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth.
They didn’t have to shout. As the space station passed overhead, the students used an amateur radio to make contact with Joshua Kutryk, an astronaut from Canada. Their school is thought to be the most northerly in the UK ever to reach the space station this way.
The space station travels so fast that the students had only about 10 minutes before it moved out of range. They used every second. One student asked what movies always get wrong about space. Kutryk’s answer: Everything is harder than it looks, even brushing your teeth. Another asked about space food. He said it tastes different up there, even his coffee.
That’s a lot to fit into one short phone call!
If someone at the beach shouts “Shark!”, you swim away, right? Not everyone does. Videos of people swimming with sharks, touching them, and even hugging them are becoming more popular online. Scientists warn that chasing the perfect shot is risky for the person, and for the shark.
Some shark species are fairly calm, but they’re still wild animals, and they can still bite. Researchers who track shark bites around the world say they’ve seen more people bitten while trying to film or photograph sharks.
The sharks can be harmed, too. Studies show that getting close to a shark or touching it raises its levels of stress hormones. Too much stress can weaken a shark’s immune system, make it more likely to die, and even cause pregnant sharks to lose their young.
To be clear, shark bites are still rare. There are only about 70 recorded each year worldwide. But scientists have simple advice for keeping people and sharks safe: admire sharks from a distance.
At the start of 2026, Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo said goodbye to two of its most famous residents: twin giant pandas Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei.
The twins were born at the zoo in 2021 and quickly became stars. In their final weeks in Japan, so many families wanted to see them that visitors were picked by lottery.
The pandas were always meant to go back to China. China doesn’t sell or give away its giant pandas. It lends them to other countries, and the loans often depend on how well the two governments get along. This is known as “panda diplomacy.”
The twins left at a tense moment. Relations between China and Japan worsened after Japan’s new prime minister made comments about Taiwan, an island that governs itself but that China claims as part of its territory.
Now, for the first time since 1972, Japan has no giant pandas. That date matters. 1972 was the year Japan and China restored official relations, and China marked it by sending Japan its first pair of pandas. Japan would like more pandas, but officials say a new loan looks unlikely for now.
So the pandas are home in China, and Japan is waiting for a reply.
Most of us don’t think much about our blood until we get a paper cut or a scraped knee. 16-year-old Vianne has had to think about hers for most of her life. She has thalassemia, a serious blood disorder. Her body couldn’t make enough healthy hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen around the body. She needed blood transfusions every month, and she was often exhausted.
Then she received a new gene-editing treatment.
First, doctors collected some of her stem cells. These are cells that haven’t yet become a particular type, so they can copy themselves and turn into other kinds of cells. In a laboratory, scientists edited the cells’ DNA so they would make more fetal hemoglobin, the kind babies make before they’re born. This extra hemoglobin makes up for the faulty kind that causes thalassemia. Months later, the edited cells were put back into Vianne’s body.
Doctors call the result a “functional cure.” Vianne still has the genetic condition, but its main symptoms have eased so much that she no longer needs transfusions. That means fewer hospital visits and much more energy.
The same treatment is also being used for sickle cell disease. 14-year-old Joel is just starting the process. It isn’t easy: patients need chemotherapy first, to clear space in their bone marrow for the edited cells. But Vianne says it was worth it.
Last month, the electric car company Tesla showed off a stunt that looked like something from a science-fiction film. At a rocket test site in Texas, its new Roadster sports car drove up a curved ramp, launched into the air using rocket-style thrusters, and stayed up for a few seconds before landing.
Tesla’s boss, Elon Musk, said the car used tanks of high-pressure air and thrusters built with technology from SpaceX, his rocket company. When a thruster releases a blast of air, it pushes the car in the opposite direction.
The flight was impressive, but experts had one big question: Why? Compressed air can’t store much energy, so the car can only stay airborne for a very short time.
There were other catches, too. Nobody was inside the car during the demonstration. Musk said that was to make sure no one got hurt. The flying version also isn’t approved for public roads.
The test shows the difference between proving something can be done and proving it’s useful, efficient, safe, and ready for everyday life.
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Greenland's glaciers are melting — and the effects reach much further than you'd think. As glaciers collapse into the sea, they set off a ripple effect that can impact weather, farming, water supplies, and fishing thousands of miles away.
Researchers are heading out on a five-week expedition to Greenland, bringing top-of-the-line equipment to study what's happening to the ice. Greenland might seem far removed from daily life, but the meltwater flows into the Atlantic Ocean, where it can disrupt ocean currents and shift climate patterns. Over time, that could change rainfall patterns in the UK and make winters stormier — which creates problems for farmers, and in turn, for food supply.
Even if you're not worried about vegetables, you're not off the hook. These melting glaciers can also affect fish populations, since changing ocean temperatures and currents disrupt the habitats fish depend on. Greenland's glaciers may be far away, but what happens there doesn't stay there.
“Shoot for the Moon — if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” won’t cut it for NASA, who says “Nah, Moon or bust.”
NASA’s got big plans, and their names are Moonbase 1, 2, and 3. They were too busy working on the science to put more into the names, okay? Moonbase 1 will be the first privately-funded lander to reach the lunar south pole, Moonbase 2 will deliver a record amount of equipment that would support astronauts at a lunar base, and Moonbase 3 will focus on gathering research and data.
But these are just glimpses of NASA’s lunar ambitions, namely to put a base on the Moon. It starts with sending dozens of rovers and lunar landers to scope out the perfect spot, followed by building small cabins for short missions, and then building larger structures sustained by nuclear power for the long term. That’s not until 2033, but NASA wants to send astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2028.
Why did the various wildlife species cross the road? To test the new heathland bridge!
It may look like a bridge that’s just unfinished, but the dirt and grass butting up against the pavement is very intentional.
This heathland bridge separating two commons is the first of its kind to include a network of natural routes that encourage species to reunite for the first time in over 40 years. Man, we would not remember ANYONE’S names! The bridge is home to mosses and vegetative grounds, as well as sand that could be a habitat to species like sand lizards, adders, foxes, deer, and bugs. Lots of bugs.
The bridge connects the heathland on either side, which the Wildlife Trusts are working to restore, so the aim of the bridge is to let wildlife move from side to side, building up the population and their resilience. But, it wasn’t as simple as leaving the bridge half-paved. Crews had to create the heathland by distributing acidic sand before adding areas of ground taken directly from larger heathland sites.
The UK wants to see more hedgehogs, and it’s not because hedgehogs are incredibly cute. Well, not just because of that. The UK’s hedgehog population is in dangerous decline, but part of the solution could be an AI tool called Tessera that uses satellite images to help build a map of hedgehog habitats.
Before Tessera can work its magic, it needs some input. Researchers need to find and learn hedgehogs’ preferred environments by identifying the habitat’s fingerprint. A fingerprint, in this case, is a pattern or collection of characteristics generally found in hedgehog habitats. Maybe your habitat fingerprint would include a freezer full of ice cream and trampoline floors! It has nothing to do with actual fingers, even though that would be a great excuse to spend all day looking at hedgehog paws.
Researchers do their field work in small areas, then input their findings into the software that can extrapolate, show where the other similar habitats are, and record changes over time. The project will hopefully help us learn about where hedgehogs live, how we can help them survive, and how we can set up our homes to comfortably accommodate a hedgehog houseguest.
Did you know we’re still finding new dinosaurs?! You’d think the 66 million years they’ve been extinct would have been enough time for research, but the Natural History Museum is getting ready to welcome yet another new addition — a small dinosaur that they had previously mistaken for a Nanosaurus. It’s a two-legged, herbivorous dinosaur with big feet and a long tail, about the height of a labrador. Scientists have renamed it “Enigmacursor,” which means “puzzling runner,” and would also be a very cool name for the next Nike sneaker.
To determine if a dinosaur (or any creature) is new, researchers try to find unique features, like parts, proportions, and shapes. The Enigmacursor will be displayed at the Natural History Museum and will be an important tool for learning how its bigger relatives evolved, since dinosaurs started their evolution as small animals and became much, much bigger over a long, long time.
Greenland's glaciers are melting — and the effects reach much further than you'd think. As glaciers collapse into the sea, they set off a ripple effect that can impact weather, farming, water supplies, and fishing thousands of miles away.
Researchers are heading out on a five-week expedition to Greenland, bringing top-of-the-line equipment to study what's happening to the ice. Greenland might seem far removed from daily life, but the meltwater flows into the Atlantic Ocean, where it can disrupt ocean currents and shift climate patterns. Over time, that could change rainfall patterns in the UK and make winters stormier — which creates problems for farmers, and in turn, for food supply.
Even if you're not worried about vegetables, you're not off the hook. These melting glaciers can also affect fish populations, since changing ocean temperatures and currents disrupt the habitats fish depend on. Greenland's glaciers may be far away, but what happens there doesn't stay there.
“Shoot for the Moon — if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” won’t cut it for NASA, who says “Nah, Moon or bust.”
NASA’s got big plans, and their names are Moonbase 1, 2, and 3. They were too busy working on the science to put more into the names, okay? Moonbase 1 will be the first privately-funded lander to reach the lunar south pole, Moonbase 2 will deliver a record amount of equipment that would support astronauts at a lunar base, and Moonbase 3 will focus on gathering research and data.
But these are just glimpses of NASA’s lunar ambitions, namely to put a base on the Moon. It starts with sending dozens of rovers and lunar landers to scope out the perfect spot, followed by building small cabins for short missions, and then building larger structures sustained by nuclear power for the long term. That’s not until 2033, but NASA wants to send astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2028.
Why did the various wildlife species cross the road? To test the new heathland bridge!
It may look like a bridge that’s just unfinished, but the dirt and grass butting up against the pavement is very intentional.
This heathland bridge separating two commons is the first of its kind to include a network of natural routes that encourage species to reunite for the first time in over 40 years. Man, we would not remember ANYONE’S names! The bridge is home to mosses and vegetative grounds, as well as sand that could be a habitat to species like sand lizards, adders, foxes, deer, and bugs. Lots of bugs.
The bridge connects the heathland on either side, which the Wildlife Trusts are working to restore, so the aim of the bridge is to let wildlife move from side to side, building up the population and their resilience. But, it wasn’t as simple as leaving the bridge half-paved. Crews had to create the heathland by distributing acidic sand before adding areas of ground taken directly from larger heathland sites.
The UK wants to see more hedgehogs, and it’s not because hedgehogs are incredibly cute. Well, not just because of that. The UK’s hedgehog population is in dangerous decline, but part of the solution could be an AI tool called Tessera that uses satellite images to help build a map of hedgehog habitats.
Before Tessera can work its magic, it needs some input. Researchers need to find and learn hedgehogs’ preferred environments by identifying the habitat’s fingerprint. A fingerprint, in this case, is a pattern or collection of characteristics generally found in hedgehog habitats. Maybe your habitat fingerprint would include a freezer full of ice cream and trampoline floors! It has nothing to do with actual fingers, even though that would be a great excuse to spend all day looking at hedgehog paws.
Researchers do their field work in small areas, then input their findings into the software that can extrapolate, show where the other similar habitats are, and record changes over time. The project will hopefully help us learn about where hedgehogs live, how we can help them survive, and how we can set up our homes to comfortably accommodate a hedgehog houseguest.
Did you know we’re still finding new dinosaurs?! You’d think the 66 million years they’ve been extinct would have been enough time for research, but the Natural History Museum is getting ready to welcome yet another new addition — a small dinosaur that they had previously mistaken for a Nanosaurus. It’s a two-legged, herbivorous dinosaur with big feet and a long tail, about the height of a labrador. Scientists have renamed it “Enigmacursor,” which means “puzzling runner,” and would also be a very cool name for the next Nike sneaker.
To determine if a dinosaur (or any creature) is new, researchers try to find unique features, like parts, proportions, and shapes. The Enigmacursor will be displayed at the Natural History Museum and will be an important tool for learning how its bigger relatives evolved, since dinosaurs started their evolution as small animals and became much, much bigger over a long, long time.
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After almost 1,000 years, the historic Bayeux Tapestry is back where it began.
The 11th Century artwork is thought to have been made in Britain, and it's now on display at the British Museum — one of the UK's largest national museums, located in London — while on loan from France until summer 2027. Think of it as the original comic strip: instead of panels, it uses a continuous, nearly 70-meter-long strip of embroidered fabric (about the length of a football field) to tell the story frame by frame, image after image, all the way across.
The story it tells is the Norman Conquest of 1066: the year William the Conqueror, a duke from Normandy in modern-day France, invaded England and took the throne. Like a comic laid end to end, the tapestry shows the buildup, the battle, and the aftermath — soldiers, ships, horses, and even Halley's Comet all stitched into the sequence. That invasion permanently changed England's ruling family, language, and culture, and is often seen as the starting point of the modern British monarchy.
Moving the tapestry took hours of extremely careful work, since it's so old and delicate. Even people standing near it had to wear protective clothing so stray fibers wouldn't end up on the fabric. It's now displayed flat, inside a protective glass case. Safe to say, it may look like a large piece of fabric, but it's definitely not something you'd want to wipe your hands on if you're missing a napkin.
The loan is also part of a bigger cultural exchange between France and Britain — two neighboring countries separated by the narrow English Channel, with a long and sometimes tense shared history. In exchange for the tapestry, Britain is lending important historical objects of its own back to France.
It's tempting to think that seeing is believing, but that's not always the case. When scrolling the internet, it's important to put on your skepticism hat. There's a lot of fake stuff out there, and some of it is convincing.
For example, a Facebook post appeared to come from York Council — the local government office for the city of York, England. It asked people with spare rooms to house asylum seekers (people who have fled their home country and are asking a government for protection). The post wasn't real, but it spread quickly across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. BBC Verify, the BBC's fact-checking team, estimated it could have reached more than a million people.
Misinformation like this can cause real problems, especially when it spreads about sensitive subjects like asylum seekers. Repeated exposure to false information can also make people question what's true at all — damaging trust between people and communities.
So how can you tell what's fake? Even careful readers are finding it harder to spot, while fake content is getting easier to make — a dangerous combination. The fake council post looked convincing: it had an official logo, professional-sounding text, and even a real email address. But a few small details gave it away: the logo was slightly distorted, some words were misspelled, parts of the image looked unnatural, and the AI-generated hands had too many fingers.
Those details are easy to miss when scrolling quickly — but learning to spot them is exactly what makes the difference between falling for a fake and catching one.
Crop circles have puzzled people for decades, and the Wiltshire countryside — a rural county in southwest England known for its rolling farmland — has had plenty to puzzle over this summer as new formations kept appearing in the fields.
These designs are often symmetrical, intricate, and hard to explain. One of the most famous examples, known as the Galaxy, contained more than 400 interlocking circles and stretched roughly 780 feet — about two and a half soccer fields laid end to end.
Some crop circles are confirmed to be human-made. Others are harder to pin down: witnesses have reported some appearing within a matter of seconds, though these claims haven't been independently verified.
Wiltshire's landscape makes it a particular hotspot — open countryside and high viewpoints make circles easy to spot and photograph. Drones and social media have also made it possible to document circles almost anywhere, not just in traditional hotspots.
As striking as they are to look at, crop circles can be costly for the farmers whose fields they appear in, since the process damages crops. That's also why making one without the landowner's permission counts as criminal damage in the UK — the British legal term for intentionally damaging someone else's property, similar to vandalism or property destruction charges in the US.
Most of our sub-par pictures just take up space on our phones and show off the insides of our pockets, but one blurry photo launched an almost two decades-long scientific endeavor.
A search that began with a picture of a tail in the trees eventually took researchers deep into Lomami National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo on a quest to find out exactly what kind of monkey they were dealing with. Using microphones, cameras and genetic testing, they gathered enough evidence to confirm that the animal is a distinct species, now named Colobus congoensis — the first time a monkey is being named after the Congo!
It belongs to a group of plant-eating primates that live high in trees and do not have thumbs, but the Colobus congoensis has some unique characteristics. It uses a roaring call that announces its presence through dense tropical forest and has distinctive pinkish-orange lips that researchers think could act as a visual signal, perhaps helping it attract a mate. It also gives you someone to blame if your sibling asks, “Who ate the last orange creamsicle?!”
Scientists still have a lot to learn about this monkey, but it seems rare and limited to a particular habitat in the central-eastern part of the country. Researchers hope that officially recognizing it as a separate species will help protect both the monkey and the environment it depends on.
After almost 1,000 years, the historic Bayeux Tapestry is back where it began.
The 11th Century artwork is thought to have been made in Britain, and it's now on display at the British Museum — one of the UK's largest national museums, located in London — while on loan from France until summer 2027. Think of it as the original comic strip: instead of panels, it uses a continuous, nearly 70-meter-long strip of embroidered fabric (about the length of a football field) to tell the story frame by frame, image after image, all the way across.
The story it tells is the Norman Conquest of 1066: the year William the Conqueror, a duke from Normandy in modern-day France, invaded England and took the throne. Like a comic laid end to end, the tapestry shows the buildup, the battle, and the aftermath — soldiers, ships, horses, and even Halley's Comet all stitched into the sequence. That invasion permanently changed England's ruling family, language, and culture, and is often seen as the starting point of the modern British monarchy.
Moving the tapestry took hours of extremely careful work, since it's so old and delicate. Even people standing near it had to wear protective clothing so stray fibers wouldn't end up on the fabric. It's now displayed flat, inside a protective glass case. Safe to say, it may look like a large piece of fabric, but it's definitely not something you'd want to wipe your hands on if you're missing a napkin.
The loan is also part of a bigger cultural exchange between France and Britain — two neighboring countries separated by the narrow English Channel, with a long and sometimes tense shared history. In exchange for the tapestry, Britain is lending important historical objects of its own back to France.
It's tempting to think that seeing is believing, but that's not always the case. When scrolling the internet, it's important to put on your skepticism hat. There's a lot of fake stuff out there, and some of it is convincing.
For example, a Facebook post appeared to come from York Council — the local government office for the city of York, England. It asked people with spare rooms to house asylum seekers (people who have fled their home country and are asking a government for protection). The post wasn't real, but it spread quickly across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. BBC Verify, the BBC's fact-checking team, estimated it could have reached more than a million people.
Misinformation like this can cause real problems, especially when it spreads about sensitive subjects like asylum seekers. Repeated exposure to false information can also make people question what's true at all — damaging trust between people and communities.
So how can you tell what's fake? Even careful readers are finding it harder to spot, while fake content is getting easier to make — a dangerous combination. The fake council post looked convincing: it had an official logo, professional-sounding text, and even a real email address. But a few small details gave it away: the logo was slightly distorted, some words were misspelled, parts of the image looked unnatural, and the AI-generated hands had too many fingers.
Those details are easy to miss when scrolling quickly — but learning to spot them is exactly what makes the difference between falling for a fake and catching one.
Crop circles have puzzled people for decades, and the Wiltshire countryside — a rural county in southwest England known for its rolling farmland — has had plenty to puzzle over this summer as new formations kept appearing in the fields.
These designs are often symmetrical, intricate, and hard to explain. One of the most famous examples, known as the Galaxy, contained more than 400 interlocking circles and stretched roughly 780 feet — about two and a half soccer fields laid end to end.
Some crop circles are confirmed to be human-made. Others are harder to pin down: witnesses have reported some appearing within a matter of seconds, though these claims haven't been independently verified.
Wiltshire's landscape makes it a particular hotspot — open countryside and high viewpoints make circles easy to spot and photograph. Drones and social media have also made it possible to document circles almost anywhere, not just in traditional hotspots.
As striking as they are to look at, crop circles can be costly for the farmers whose fields they appear in, since the process damages crops. That's also why making one without the landowner's permission counts as criminal damage in the UK — the British legal term for intentionally damaging someone else's property, similar to vandalism or property destruction charges in the US.
Most of our sub-par pictures just take up space on our phones and show off the insides of our pockets, but one blurry photo launched an almost two decades-long scientific endeavor.
A search that began with a picture of a tail in the trees eventually took researchers deep into Lomami National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo on a quest to find out exactly what kind of monkey they were dealing with. Using microphones, cameras and genetic testing, they gathered enough evidence to confirm that the animal is a distinct species, now named Colobus congoensis — the first time a monkey is being named after the Congo!
It belongs to a group of plant-eating primates that live high in trees and do not have thumbs, but the Colobus congoensis has some unique characteristics. It uses a roaring call that announces its presence through dense tropical forest and has distinctive pinkish-orange lips that researchers think could act as a visual signal, perhaps helping it attract a mate. It also gives you someone to blame if your sibling asks, “Who ate the last orange creamsicle?!”
Scientists still have a lot to learn about this monkey, but it seems rare and limited to a particular habitat in the central-eastern part of the country. Researchers hope that officially recognizing it as a separate species will help protect both the monkey and the environment it depends on.
Teaching With the News
In our fast-paced world, where information is constantly being shared and consumed, young people need media literacy more than ever.
To help your students dive deeper into news content, we created this bundle of news story response worksheets. We designed these worksheets to be used with any of our news videos and to keep students focused as they watch and enhance comprehension and retention. (Please note that some worksheet types are better fits for certain content and grade levels). Assign students the same one, mix them up, or let them choose!
You can’t have a news story without sources. Introduce your students to the differences between primary and secondary sources. In this lesson, they’ll learn about how journalists ask effective interview questions and verify the accuracy of a source’s account.
News is supposed to be impartial, but that’s not always the case. So how does bias get into the news? Introduce your students to why journalism’s standards of impartiality are so important and how recognizing bias will help them judge the accuracy of the news they encounter. In this lesson, they’ll explore how perspective can shape a report and try their hand at rewriting biased reporting.
In our fast-paced world, where information is constantly being shared and consumed, young people need media literacy more than ever.
To help your students dive deeper into news content, we created this bundle of news story response worksheets. We designed these worksheets to be used with any of our news videos and to keep students focused as they watch and enhance comprehension and retention. (Please note that some worksheet types are better fits for certain content and grade levels). Assign students the same one, mix them up, or let them choose!
You can’t have a news story without sources. Introduce your students to the differences between primary and secondary sources. In this lesson, they’ll learn about how journalists ask effective interview questions and verify the accuracy of a source’s account.
News is supposed to be impartial, but that’s not always the case. So how does bias get into the news? Introduce your students to why journalism’s standards of impartiality are so important and how recognizing bias will help them judge the accuracy of the news they encounter. In this lesson, they’ll explore how perspective can shape a report and try their hand at rewriting biased reporting.