Why do hummingbirds nap? How do coronavirus vaccines work? Can two robotic spacecraft land on the moon at once? How do plant roots compete for water? Do foods like kiwis and cherries affect our sleep patterns?

If you click on any of these articles, you’ll see that they are written for a general reader. Special technical or scientific knowledge is not required, and each is designed to get our attention and keep it — by giving us “news we can use” in our own lives, or by exploring something fascinating in a way that makes it easy to understand and shows us why it matters.

That’s what Times journalists do every day across our Science, Health and Technology sections.

The Learning Network invites middle and high school students around the world to bring that same spirit of inquiry and discovery to finding a STEM-related question, concept, or issue they’re  interested in, and, in 500 words or fewer, explaining it to a general audience in a way that not only helps us understand, but also engages us and makes us see why it’s important.

• It begins with an engaging hook to get readers’ attention and make us care about the subject.

• It quotes experts and/or includes research on the topic to give context and credibility.

• It explains why the topic matters. Why do you care? Why should we care? Whom or what does it affect, why and how? How is it relevant to broader questions in the field, to the world today and to our own lives?

Note: The New York Times is now available to high school students and teachers across the United States for FREE through Sept. 1, 2021. Learn more and invite your classes here. (Please note that once teachers send an invitation, students will need to accept it to get their free account.)

Students who are not yet in high school can get access to Times pieces through The Learning Network. All the activities for students on our site, including mentor texts and writing prompts, plus the Times articles they link to, are free. Students can search for articles using the search tool on our home page (scroll down past the featured articles to the article stream). In the rest of The Times, they can access up to five free articles a month.