Welcome to Current Events!
We are excited to bring you engaging content to boost students' reading skills and supplement your curriculum.
Here's where we post story updates, additional resources, including Smart Stuff quizzes the Friday before your Monday issue date. Be sure to check back each issue. And encourage your students to read and post to CE’s News Blog.
As a CE subscriber, you also have access to exclusive materials such as access to "The Law of the Land," an online-only issue of Current Events about the U.S. Constitution, an archive of all CE and WR articles from the past five years, and downloadable version of the latest issue of Current Events and its Teacher's guide. Log on to subscriber-only content here.
Please feel free to contact us at edce@weeklyreader.com with any questions, comments or concerns.
Issue 9 News Updates
Mission to Mars
In issue 9 of Current Events, students learned about an upcoming simulated mission to Mars. Share this news update with your students.
Mars and Monkey Business
On October 27, NASA announced it was planning to use monkeys in researching a future Mars mission. The study will expose 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys to low doses of the type of radiation that humans would be exposed to in traveling to Mars. NASA scientists will study how the long-term exposure will affect the monkeys' health. The tests will take place at NASA's Space Radiation Laboratory on Long Island, New York.
NASA has long used lab mice and rats for radiation experiments but scientists say that that monkeys will be better because they are closer to humans in their physical make-up. “We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” Jack Bergman, who is running the NASA study, told Discovery News . “There's a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep-space travel, and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep-space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts.
Animal-rights groups were angry over the proposed experiment.
“NASA's radiation experiments on these sensitive, intelligent primates mark the beginning of another unfortunate chapter in the in the agency's long history of abusing out fellow earthlings in order to explore its seemingly endless list of trivial curiosities about outer space,” Justin Goodman of People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) told The New York Post. “Radiating monkeys will not tell scientists anything about how humans will respond to radiation in space, but it speaks volumes about humans' callous attitude toward animals on our own planet,” said Goodman.
Encourage your students to share their views about the news on CENewsBlog.com.
RSS