Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children March 2016

Higher Ground Where I live there has been a lot of bad weather. Namely: flooding. People are saying this happens only once in a millennium. I had imagined Mayans fleeing onto the roofs of their circular houses, but apparently I was wrong. What I should have been imagining were medieval people rushing into towers. I still like the Mayan image better. —ABIGAIL / age 9 / South Carolina Angry, but Not Extinct I love Muse ! It is a great magazine. My only complaint is that you guys said that cows are going extinct [October 2015]! I didn’t know it was the false fact until I got to the page where it said so! I love cows! I was so upset! They are wonderful, calm, sweet creatures…

Ferocious Girl Power Okay, I know you get this a lot, so be prepared to hear it again: I. LOVE. YOUR. MAG!!!!!!! It gives me cool facts that are easy to remember, and are TOTALLY worth learning. Now here’s a mini description of me: I’m a 12-year-old tomboy who has teal-aqua hair and is a purple belt in tae kwon do, though I will definitely be a ninja sometime. I love Star Wars (my favorite character is Yoda). I don’t mean to brag here, but I’m a really good writer and I’m trying to write a graphic novel, which is WAY easier said than done. (Of course. Duh—anything’s easy to say!) I play heavy metal. If you do not post this, I will send an army of exactly 9,999,999 lovesick…

CONSERVATION Sunscreen Kills Coral IF YOU’RE heading out for a day at the beach, putting on sunscreen is a no-brainer. It helps protect you from sunburns and the chance of skin cancer later on. But while sunscreen is helping you, it seems to be hurting the world’s delicate corals. Although corals may look like brightly colored rocks, these structures are made up of many tiny animals. The animals get their color from friendly algae they hold inside their bodies. As coral animals multiply, they build hard skeletons around themselves to create the rocky structures you see. An international team of scientists found that the common sunscreen ingredient oxybenzone is toxic to baby coral animals. These squishy organisms, called planulae, float through the ocean before settling down to become hard adult…

IMPORTANT NOTE Dihydrogen monoxide is a molecule with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom: H2O. It’s water! The DHMO “conspiracy” started as a joke in the April 1, 1983, edition of a Michigan newspaper called the Durand Express. Many people are fooled by it because the alarming claims (which are all true!) sound official and science-y. A website, dhmo.org, continues the hoax as a reminder to think critically. Water is essential to life. Please do not contact any government officials asking them to ban it. It’s tasteless, odorless, and colorless. It causes nearly 4,000 deaths every year in the United States alone, and yet it’s never been banned. It’s dihydrogen monoxide, or DHMO. DHMO is an ingredient of car exhaust and acid rain. It causes soil erosion, contributes to…

WAS IT A CONSPIRACY? NOPE. BUT NO-MOONIES ARE SKEPTICAL ANYWAY. About 250 miles (400 kilometers) up in the blisteringly hot thermosphere, cosmonauts are drinking espresso and looking down at our watery blue planet from the International Space Station. At National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities around the country, scientists and engineers are busily making complicated components for a manned mission to Mars. And in Japan, a construction company says that by the year 2050, it will be able to build a space elevator that will travel up a cable from the Earth’s surface to a height of almost 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers). Conquering the cosmos? Yeah, we’ve got this. Only, here on Earth, some folks think we never even set foot on the moon. » THAT NEVER HAPPENED “No-moony”…

SPRING BREAK IS COMING and you know you’re going to be seeing your Great Uncle Joe. This would be terrific, since Great Uncle Joe has a big swimming pool and 15 adorable puppies that can’t wait to swim in it with you. Only, you know: Great Uncle Joe is a no-moony. And he can’t wait to try to convince you that Apollo 11 was all a hoax. How can you deal with that much goofy without it ruining your vacation? First of all, don’t think of Great Uncle Joe as irrational, says Dr. Tom Stafford, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Great Uncle Joe is simply using a normal human strategy to update his beliefs. “The way belief works,” Stafford explains, “is that we…