National Geographic

Your heart beats 100,000 times every day, and moves all five quarts of blood once around your body every minute. -- National Geographic's The New Everyday Science Explained

Question: Which city is located on one of the Great Lakes -- St. Louis or Milwaukee? Answer: Milwaukee. Too easy? Try this one: Coffee and tea are major crops grown in what part of the world? Answer: Nairobi, Kenya. Do you think you're ready for Jeopardy!? Daniel Lambright, 13, might be. He is the new geography champion at Dasher Green-Owen Brown School in Columbia. On Dec. 17, the eighth-grader bested 15 children in grades four through eight during a competition at the school sponsored by the National Geographic Society.

Now this is for the birds. Literally. National Geographic has just launched a line of birding products. Backyard birders can choose from an array of bird-houses and birdfeeders, such as the Napa Wild Bird Feeder (pictured, $39.97), which is solid-steel, rust-resistant, holds up to 2 1/2 pounds of seed, and is perfect for attracting jays, finches, cardinals and grosbeaks. Also, birders can find several varieties of birdseed, including safflower seed, which deters squirrels; finch blend; or cardinal and songbird blend.

Eirik A.T. Blom, a noted ornithologist and widely published authority on the world of birds, died Wednesday at Sinai Hospital of colon cancer. He was 55. Mr. Blom co-authored the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America, published by the National Geographic Society, and taught a course on birding at the Johns Hopkins University. "Birding defined his life, yet he wasn't one of those who attempted to convert every person he met," said his brother Mark Blom of Ellicott City.

The skeleton of a skipjack fills up Tom Abercrombie's barn. He sets his coffee cup down on the frame of the boat and runs his hand over the white oak wood. "I think you'll agree she's a pretty little devil, very salty," said Abercrombie, 71, a self-taught carpenter who is building a skipjack from scratch. Abercrombie, who for 40 years traveled the world as a reporter and photographer for National Geographic, is smitten with the nearly extinct single-masted workboats that have come to symbolize the Chesapeake Bay and its watermen.

4 kids: FEATURED SITE OF THE MONTH TROPICAL SNOW PEAK: MOUNT KILIMANJARO Hiking shoes are a must for a trek up the mountain at the Crown of Africa Web site at www.altrec.com / features / crownofafrica / .You'll need the Flash 4 plug-in to see all the cool interactive material. Located in the heart of Africa in Tanzania, 19,341-foot Mount Kilimanjaro is a world treasure. The site will fill you in on all the details: the five climate zones, the four routes to the summit and fun historical facts.

WASHINGTON - A replica of 40-foot crocodile longer than a bus, with bone-crushing teeth and what its discoverer calls an "ambush lifestyle," took up residence recently at the National Geographic Society's Explorers Hall. Fortunately, the Sarcosuchus imperator - nicknamed SuperCroc - has been dead for 110 million years. Its bones, recovered from a desert in central Niger in Africa by a team led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, are forbidding enough. Sereno, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic, and Brady Barr, a reptile expert, supplemented the real bones with plaster ones to create the complete SuperCroc skeleton model that went on display at the society.

East Middle School's Matt Wolf is packed and ready for his second trip to the Maryland State Geography Bee today, and this time the seventh-grader says he'll remember his history, too. Matt won the East Middle School geography bee in December and qualified for the state bee by passing a test given by the National Geographic Society, the event's sponsor. The state bee begins with a closed preliminary round at 1:20 p.m. at Montgomery College's Germantown campus. "I'm nervous and excited, kind of both.

Texas just might be taking this "everything's bigger" theme a little too seriously. The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum: The Story of Texas opens April 21 in Austin. Right off the bat, you'll notice the name is big, but you haven't seen anything yet. There's a 35-foot-tall bronze star outside the entrance. The lobby is four stories high and has a 40-foot-diameter mosaic covering its floor. Walk into the next room and behold the Grand Lobby, which sports a 50-foot-diameter granite map of Texas on the floor.

CAN YOU NAME the longest river in Egypt? What do you call the imaginary lines on a map that separate east from west and north from south? How about naming the island nation that is famous for reggae music? We may not know the answers, but Michael T. Hauhn does. The Brooklyn Park Middle School sixth-grader knew enough answers to this type of questions to earn a spot in the state competition of the National Geographic Geography Bee on May 4 at Montgomery College in Germantown. Jan Meaney, geography bee coordinator at the middle school, said 76 students entered the first stage of its competition.