Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2018 i Ask Science and Arts Magazine for Kids and Children

MONKEYS ALWAYS BRUSH Do you floss your teeth after a meal? These monkeys do. Nicobar long-tailed macaques are medium-sized monkeys that live on islands in the Indian Ocean. Scientists have spotted these monkeys using lots of tools. When the macaques want to eat a fuzzy or thorny plant, they sometimes use a leaf or a twig to rub the food smooth. Or they might use a piece of trash such as paper or cloth. They use these tools to clean mud off their food too. The researchers also saw the macaques flossing after eating. The animals used grass, feathers, threads, or bits of wire to remove food stuck between their teeth. Other kinds of macaques use tools in similar ways. Those monkeys deserve a sticker from the dentist! New Dino…

Metals are a group of materials that are alike in some ways. Metals are: • Hard and shiny. • Maleable, meaning they can be shaped into objects. • Ductile, meaning they can be pulled out into wire. • Metals carry heat and electricity well. Many metals are also elements, the basic building blocks of all matter. A pure element has only one kind of atom in it. Pure gold has only gold atoms. Pure tin has only tin atoms. Pure metals can blend to make many different alloys: copper + tin = bronze copper + zinc = brass silver + gold = electrum tin + copper + antimony + lead = pewter Metals combine with other elements to make minerals, or rocks. Ore is rock with a lot of one…

Dear Whatson, I like reading books and listening to them. I also write poetry. Here is one of my poems: It’s the end of May Let’s go out and play. Are you done with school? Let’s jump in the pool. Let’s have some fun, Summer’s just begun. Bye for now, Flannery B., age 7, Texas Dear Flannery, Thanks for sharing your lovely poem! It perfectly captures the feeling of a fine May morning. Time to poke my nose up and see some flowers! Regards, Whatson Dear Ask, I’m really into volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters. Could you please make an Ask about natural disasters? I know two cool facts you could use. Fact #1: If there is a natural disaster and it leaves a dead area, in about a year…

Long, Long Ago Shiny Rocks No one knows who picked up the first nugget of gold or copper from a river. But it was long, long ago. People learned to hammer the shiny lumps into jewelry and tools. They found metal to be strong, waterproof, and beautiful. And if a metal object broke, they could re-shape the metal into something else. 5000 BCE Melting Rocks Eventually, someone (maybe a potter baking clay pots) noticed that certain green rocks oozed shiny metal when they got very hot. That metal was copper. Soon, people were collecting rocks and melting them to get more metal. They had invented smelting. 4000 BCE Mixing Metals Mixing copper with tin made a new metal: bronze. Bronze was shaped by pouring the molten metal into sand or…

How does this... turn into this? Bronze is shaped by melting it and pouring it into a mold. It takes several weeks, and quite a few steps... To see how it’s done, we thought we’d ask bronze artist Marshall Svendsen to make us our very own bronze statue. Marshall has been sculpting since he was a kid. He’s been working in metal for about 15 years. He makes his own sculptures and also casts other people’s art in bronze. Found in: malachite and azurite rocks Uses: electrical wire, water pipes, cookware, bronze, killing germs Fun Facts: Cuttlefish and crabs have copper in their blood instead of iron. It makes their blood blue. Bronze is a mix of copper and tin. Found in: cassiterite rock Uses: solder, electronics, pewter, bronze, making…

Where do metals come from? They were all made by stars! We dig metals out of the earth. But how did the metal get in there? The story of Earth’s many metals starts way back at the very beginning of the universe, nearly 14 billion years ago. The universe began with a huge explosion called the Big Bang. At first, there was just hydrogen and helium gas. Gradually, big clouds of gas formed. Some got so huge that they lit up—and became stars. Star Factories Inside stars, the gravity is intense. The centers get so hot that atoms sometimes smash into each other at colossal speeds. They mush together to make whole new atoms. This is called fusion. When atoms fuse, they also release a lot of heat and light,…

In the 1800s, rich ladies showed off by wearing jewelry made of a rare silvery metal—aluminum. The stuff was so exotic that most people had never even heard of it. French emperor Napoleon III served his extra-special guests on aluminum plates. Less important visitors had to use gold. The Shy Metal Aluminum is not rare. In fact, it’s the most common metal in Earth’s crust. But it’s never found by itself, in pure form. That means you’ll never stumble across an aluminum nugget the way a lucky miner might find a lump of gold. And for a long time, no one knew how to get it out of rocks. As far back as the 1700s, scientists suspected a rock called bauxite held metal. But they didn’t know what kind. They…

What would you do? You could make a path connecting them up in the shape of a triangle. But that isn’t the shortest amount Say you want to build a brick path in a playground. It needs to join the swings, sandbox, and seesaw. But to save bricks, you want to keep the total length of the path as short as possible. of path. Can you do better? Try putting a new dot in the middle of the playground. Standing at this point, you can go straight to any of the three places. Move this new dot around and measure how much path you need. You will find that the shortest path has a special central spot. This spot is where the three paths meet at equal angles. An angle…