Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children July/August 2015

So, you want to be an Internet video star! To make your video go viral, simply take note of the following tips. (If you prefer that nobody watch your video except your aunts, reverse these directions.) VIRAL VIDEO HOW-TO DO • Feature adorable animals. Kittens: good. Pandas: excellent. Kittens and baby pandas: OH YES. • Have adorable animals do something ordinary and/or adorable: scamper, wave, yawn, fall asleep in a bowl of food. (Awwwww!) • Use tantalizing titles. (“Baby Panda Never Expected What Happens Next . . .”) • Build tension. For one tiny, terrible moment, the star of your video is in trouble. (Oh no! Tiny baby panda can’t find its mama—because its face is in a bowl of food!) • Resolve tension! (YAY. There is baby panda’s mama,…

Right Place, Right Time Next time you’re about to erase a blurry pic, imagine it contains one of the secrets of the universe. On October 19, 2014, the comet C/2013 A1 (also called Siding Spring, after the observatory where it as discoered e ery cose to ars. he Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a nearby spacecraft, was ae to sna a coue o ictures. he ictures might not look like much, but they were captured ith a ancy too caed the oact econnaissance aging ectroeter or ars, which takes pictures at 107 different wavelengths o ight. [aken a together, these ictures i he astronomers study the makeup of the comet—which may include material from the formation of the solar system. Healthy Hugs study at arnegie eon niersity has ound that hugs can…

From books and graphic novels to movies and TV, the zombie apocalypse chomps through global culture one body part at a time. Depending on the source, zombies are fast or slow. All are insatiable, aggressive, and relentless in spreading their plague. They’re perfect vectors, or disease carriers: in the quest for food (brrraaaiiinnnsss and flesh), they transmit their virus to noninfected humans. No wonder some disease researchers, mathematicians, and policy experts have started to specialize in zombie science. Real Viruses According to a study published by the American Society for Microbiology, “[T]here are a minimum of 320,000 mammalian viruses awaiting discovery.” Any one of those could be what we’d call a “zombie” virus! What about the real, highly infectious diseases similar to what we see in zombie fiction? There’s rabies,…

Everyone knows that many animals have a fantastic sense of smell. Dogs, for example, have up to 60 times more scent receptors in their noses than the average human! But some animals are such super sniffers that they can follow their noses to detect illnesses and other medical conditions long before they might otherwise be discovered. Paging Doctor Dog Some medical detection dogs work with doctors to help identify cancers. They do this by sniffing out volatile organic compounds (VOCs)—subtle chemical signals that our bodies emit in breath, urine, and sweat. Cancers change these odors. Trained dogs have detected ovarian and bladder cancers, and the United Kingdom’s Medical Detection Dogs are currently working on trials to detect cancers of the breast and prostate gland. Studying these remarkable dogs may one…

1. Socialization: When the young rat opens its eyes (at the age of four weeks), it begins interacting with people and getting used to all the stimuli of our world. 2. Click training and scent conditioning: The rat is taught to associate a clicking sound with a delicious food reward. Once the rat learns that a click leads to food, it will have to keep its nose above a tuberculosis-positive sputum (or spit) sample to earn the reward. 3. Scent discrimination: The rat smells positive and negative sputum samples placed under three sniffer holes. When it pauses above the positive sample, the combination of a click and food teaches the rat that this is the correct response. 4. Multiple sample evaluation: Now the rat moves to a larger cage which…

Your mom tells you to wash your hands a hundred times a day. Or maybe your teacher tackles you on your way to the cafeteria, trying to get a squirt of sanitizer on your hands. Everyone knows now that dirty hands spread germs and diseases. But back in the mid-1800s, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made this groundbreaking discovery at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. And everyone thought he was crazy! What’s Going On Here? Semmelweis was an obstetrician who was puzzled by the number of women dying from “childbed fever” in his hospital just days after giving birth. Since it was a teaching hospital, he and his colleagues performed autopsies on the women who died to try to determine the cause. Often they had to leave the autopsy room and rush…