By KiddieDaily Editors · Jun 30, 2026 · 4 min read · Ages 8–10 · 1 source

June research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

Bias ratings based on AllSides + Ad Fontes Media. Agreement % = sources covering this story. Always read multiple sources and think critically.

With the FIFA World Cup in full swing, even scientists’ thoughts are turning to soccer (or football for everyone else in the world).

For instance, one common and highly effective dribbling maneuver is the “scissors feint,” in which a player uses the outside of their feet to fake going one way and then cutting to the other. Japanese scientists studied university and junior high school soccer players of varying skill levels to study dribbling dynamics, focusing on the scissors feint. The movements were captured with high-speed cameras.

The researchers looked at several variables, including body speed, joint kinematics, distance between players, and changes in relative speed between attackers and defenders. They described their findings in a paper published in the Japan Journal of Physical Education, Health and Sport Sciences. Most notably, the team found that raw speed is not the only factor in skilled dribbling.

The best players actively regulate their distance to the defender while maintaining a high body speed, for example. They can generate explosive, rapid acceleration by coordinating their knee flexions and extensions. And they have minimal foot lift and a pronounced trunk inclination when executing feints, so their actions are quicker and more deceptive.

Per The Guardian, this year’s FIFA ball design , the Adidas Trionda, seems to be giving goalkeepers a bit of trouble when it comes to reading the ball’s speed and responding accordingly. FIFA shifted last year to the four-panel ball with intentionally deep seams to create optimal in-flight stability and a more predictable trajectory. It’s also designed to function better in wet or humid conditions.

So why are goalkeepers struggling to stop the balls? A paper published last month in the journal Fluids might hold the answer. The authors fired the Trionda ball through a wind tunnel and analyzed the aerodynamics.

(It’s a common experimental approach used to study baseball aerodynamics, too.) They found that the ball traveled faster once it hit a certain velocity regardless of where it was struck. They attribute this to the so-called “drag crisis,” i.e., the point where the air flow around the ball shifts from a smooth laminar flow to a turbulent flow. The resulting disruption in drag makes the ball move faster, so it doesn’t slow down as goalkeepers have been conditioned to expect.

Hitting the ball on the seam reduces drag, and the effect is less likely to occur at higher altitudes. Japan Journal of Physical Education, Health and Sport Sciences, 2026. DOI: 10.5432/jjpehss.07-25031 (About DOIs).

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that employs “digital unwrapping” and crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the first letters from previously unreadable ancient scrolls found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum. The 660-plus scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The badly singed, rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, as even touching them could cause them to crumble.

In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge made its first award for deciphering the first letters, and the following year, the project awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. Last year brought the successful generation of the first X-ray image of the inside of a scroll (PHerc. 172) housed in Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries—a collaboration with the Vesuvius Challenge.

The scroll’s ink has a unique chemical composition, possibly containing lead, which means it shows up more clearly in X-ray scans than other Herculaneum scrolls that have been scanned. That project focused primarily on detecting the presence of ink rather than deciphering the characters or text, although the team was able to identify the Greek word for “disgust.” The latest breakthrough: One of the scrolls, PHerc. 1667, has now been “virtually unrolled” and read in full, with the technical details and a full column-by-column transcription appearing in a preprint on the arXiv.

The text is a philosophical treatise on ethics and human moral progress, and the final column revealed the name Aristocreon, a nephew and disciple of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. So the team believes the scroll likely dates to the 2nd century BCE. There are gaps in the text where the papyrus surface has been lost, but it’s still an impressive achievement.

The team was also able to use higher resolution imaging to reveal ink on another scroll, PHerc. Paris 4, and to recover the title and author of a third scroll, PHerc. Buckyballs, aka buckminsterfullerenes, are carbon molecules comprised of 60 carbon atoms arranged in such a way as to bear an uncanny resemblance to soccer balls—just very tiny nanoscale soccer balls.

They were first discovered in 1985 by Rice University physicists, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the achievement. Buckyballs helped launch the nanotechnology revolution. Now, scientists at Brown University have produced the first experimental evidence for a new kind of “buckyball” molecule made up of 80 boron atoms.

They described their results in a paper published in the journal Chemical Science.

Think About This

What questions does this story raise for you? Talk with your family: Why does this news matter? Who is affected? What might happen next? Is there anything you can do?

🔍 Want to verify this story? Check it on Google Fact Check Explorer →

More stories: Kid News · Archive · Fact Check