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

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,…

Australia’s koalas are having a pretty rough time. Koalas in the north have been plagued by the koala retrovirus, which attacks their immune systems, leaving the infected animals weakened and vulnerable to cancers and infectious diseases. This virus has been spreading to koalas in the south. Even worse is the infectious disease chlamydia. Scientists estimate that this disease causes up to 50 percent of koala deaths. It’s spread between koalas when they mate. When females are infected, the virus grows in their reproductive tract, compromising their ability to bear young. Fewer baby koalas mean fewer adult koalas, and in combination with large areas of their habitat being cleared, this has caused populations of this species to plummet over the last 20 years. Chlamydia doesn’t just cause infertility. Infected koalas can…

Alex jumps out of bed, ready for her first day at Disease Detective Camp. Ever since hearing about the Ebola outbreaks last fall, she’s wondered if Ebola could make it to her town. And she’s curious how experts track these invisible bugs. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC for short, campers wear badges with their photos and names. Hers reads: Alex, Disease Detective in Training. Passing one of the labs, Alex overhears that there’s been a new outbreak of Ebola! Her heart thuds. A CDC scientist pops out of the lab and briefs the campers. “We’ve got a case of Ebola on our hands. The first step in stopping an outbreak is to understand how the disease spreads.” Alex and her campmates are whisked into a…

In her latest work on infectious diseases, University of South Carolina anthropologist Dr. Sharon DeWitte has been studying some former residents of London. Perfectly ordinary people—except that they died over 600 years ago. By examining fragments of bone collected from medieval burial grounds, DeWitte is working to solve one of medical history‘s most infamous riddles. What was really behind the dreaded ”Black Death“? Q When most people hear ”Black Death,“ they think of a kind of super disease that killed everyone in its path. Is that idea correct? A The Black Death was a terrifying disease. It swept across Europe between 1346 and 1353, killing over 100 million victims. What we’ve been studying is whether an individual’s age, sex, or health made him or her more liable to contract this…

FUTURE FASHION In February, we asked you to predict the future of fashion. Your artwork knocked our socks off! (Now we have to turn them on again. What happened to that sock switch?) KOKO'S KUDOS This month’s runners-up are Aidan, age 11, Massachusetts; Anna B., age 8, California; Natania B., age 15, New Jersey; Renee B., age 10, Missouri; Amelia C., age 8, California; Emma C., age 12, Indiana; Jeffersonn C., age 12, Florida; Taylor C., age 10, Texas; Claire D., age 12, Montana; Eagan E., Idaho; Mason G., age 11, Pennsylvania; Margo J., age 11, Washington D.C.; Michelle P., age 10, Ohio; Kaya R., age 12, Pennsylvania; Catherine T., Texas; and Kienan T., age 11, Kentucky. You can find their entries and more contests at musemagkids.com/museum. NEW CONTEST TEENY…

June 1, 2009. It was a warm and muggy night. Epidemic Intelligence Service officer Karen Neil slumped at her file-cluttered desk at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. She was contemplating a cluster of infections that had broken out across the country. Back in May, 17 people in 13 states had gotten stomach cramps, nausea, and diarrhea from something they’d eaten. Now that same something had sickened 44 people in 22 states. But Neil had no idea what that something was. Or how many more people would fall ill before she and her team could crack the case. She did know one thing, though: she had a full-blown outbreak on her hands. How could Neil be sure that a few scattered people with nasty stomachaches…

Philadelphia, August 1793. The United States was just a teenager, and bustling Philadelphia was its capital. President George Washington lived in a brick mansion on Market Street, a few blocks from the Delaware River. Ships came and went, unloading cargo and passengers from distant ports. Between Washington’s house and the river sat the crowded market filled with stalls selling vegetables, meats, dairy products, and live animals. The smell of rotten food and manure hung heavy in the air, and flies and mosquitoes buzzed constantly. The summer had been extremely hot and dry, and the sewers weren’t draining correctly. One by one, people started falling ill. Fever. Headaches and muscle aches. Vomiting. Dizziness and fatigue. Doctors were called to patients’ bedsides. They prescribed cool drinks, wine, and opium-laced laudanum. They cut…

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,…

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…

• Epidemiologists. These are health workers who study the patterns and causes of diseases. It’s their job to understand how an outbreak is moving, how many people are sick, and how many people have died. • Hospital infection control. These people communicate to doctors at hospitals and clinics about how to keep themselves and their patients safe. They explain how to put on protective gear, and even more important, how to take it off without risk of infecting themselves. • Laboratory staff. They test blood samples taken from people who are sick. This is the only way to tell if someone has Ebola. • Logistics. These people are responsible for getting materials in and around each country—like the protective gear the doctors wear and equipment for the labs. • Health communication. People like Craig Manning…

Q: Can love be scientifically proven? —Sydney H., age 15, Virginia A:“We’ve done it!” says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and the author of the book Why We Love. She put people who claimed to be madly in love—as well as those who had just been dumped—inside an fMRI scanner, a device that measures activity in the brain. Then she watched what happened when they looked at photographs of the objects of their affection. When the subjects saw their sweethearts, blood rushed to parts of their brains that produce dopamine. This chemical is associated with feelings of “wanting, craving, obsession, focus, motivation, and energy,” Fisher explains. She believes that extra dopamine activity is the biological hallmark of romantic love. It’s what makes you think obsessively about the…