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

Sixty-six million years ago a gigantic asteroid or comet collided with our planet and wiped out the dinosaurs. We’ve known that for decades. Or have we? While the public eagerly embraced that explanation, most scientists were much slower to accept it. A controversy over what really killed the dinos raged for 30 years. Gradual or Sudden? It all started in 1977, when geologist Walter Alvarez brought a piece of limestone to Berkeley, California, from a site in Italy. Alvarez had chiseled the rock from an outcropping in the Appenine mountains. The lower part of the rock sample was white and dense with fossils of ancient sea life. The middle of the rock was a half-inch layer of clay with no fossils. Above that was dark limestone, with just a few…

“Busy, Harriet?” came a voice from the doorway. Dr. Harriet Weisz turned from her monitor. “Come on in, Erik, what’s up?” “Check out this email,” said her colleague. “Somebody claiming to have discovered a new species of insect.” “That wouldn’t be that surprising,” she answered as she took his laptop. “Ten thousand new species are identified every year.” “Yeah, but look at the photos he attached,” said Erik. Harriet skimmed the text as she scrolled down. “‘Previously unknown to science’ . . . ‘missing link’ . . . what the heck?!” She had reached the images. “What is this?” “Kind of looks like cricket legs, you’ve got sort of an earwig structure there at the back, and those wings almost look like Lepidoptera, don’t they?” Erik agreed. “No wonder he’s…

WHEN WATER goes down the drain, a vortex forms. One factor is the Coriolis effect, caused by the Earth’s spin. The Coriolis effect makes ocean currents and hurricanes rotate in opposite directions in opposite hemispheres. The other factor is the current in a sink, tub, or toilet. As water moves toward the narrow bottom of the vortex, it speeds up because of conservation of “angular momentum” or spin. (The same effect makes a skater spin faster when she pulls her arms in.) This spinning action overpowers the Coriolis effect in your toilet bowl or sink. TOURIST TRAPS In some towns near the equator, people will put on a show of draining a tub or bucket of water. South of the equator, it drains clockwise; north of the equator, it drains…

PLENTY OF PEOPLE want to believe in alien life. The Internet is chock full of information about UFOs, including conspiracy theories about Roswell, New Mexico (did an alien spaceship crash there in 1947?) and blurry photos that supposedly show saucers in the sky. Now you can even download UFO apps. APPS FOR UFO HUNTERS Project Capture: When just one person sees a UFO, he or she could be imagining things (or playing a trick). But if lots of people see it, then something probably really was up there. Project capture allows you to share photos, videos, and descriptions of UFO sightings. You can also check out nearby sightings and comment on them or flag them as fakes. (Free, iPhone) Satellite AR: Did you see something strange in the sky? It…

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…

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”…

A painter, a psychologist, and a policeman all walk into a carnival. They ask the cotton-candy man where they should go for a good laugh. He looks to the ring toss and then the fun house and shakes his head. Finally, he points to the caricaturist creating a portrait showing a woman with abnormally gigantic front teeth, chomping on a carrot. Caricatures are drawings that make someone look funny or foolish by exaggerating her appearance or character. The word “caricature” comes from the Italian word caricare, which means “to load” but can also indicate exaggeration. These visual jokes on a page became popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but examples of caricatures can be found as far back as ancient Egyptian art. Today, the uncanny portraits appear on magazine…

Physicist Luis Alvarez was an idea man. He told his students that only one idea in ten is worth pursuing and only one in a hundred might lead to a discovery. Considering how many discoveries he made, he must have had thousands of ideas. In the 1940s, one of his ideas led to a technique that allowed planes to land at night and in fog. It saved many pilots’ lives in World War II. For the rest of his life, veterans would approach him to thank him. In the 1950s, he had an idea for expanding the function of bubble chambers, devices that detected subatomic particles. The discoveries his team made led to a Nobel Prize for Alvarez in 1968. In the 1960s, he suggested using cosmic rays (high-energy subatomic…

Scientists studying the cuttlefish reported that this ocean creature could perform spectacular light shows with its body or make itself look and feel like a pile of pebbles. Researchers examining the ancient bones of the archaeoraptor said it looked like an evolutionary “missing link”: a dinosaur that could fly like a bird. The cuttlefish is a real animal, but the archaeoraptor was a hoax, a combination of different animal skeletons. The world is so full of true wonders that it can be hard to spot a fake one. Would you have been fooled by any of history’s greatest pranks? UNSCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE We’re a lot less likely to be tricked if we listen to scientists, right? Not always. In 1835, Dr. Andrew Grant, an associate of the famous British astronomer Sir…

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…

Sometimes visual jokesters conjure images that we just can’t shake. English caricaturist James Gillray had a knack for creating lively and influential caricatures of political figures during the French Revolution. His main target: Napoleon Bonaparte. Gillray drew Napoleon many times, often caricaturing the French general as extremely short and hotheaded. The most famous of his works, “Plumb-Pudding in Danger,” shows England’s prim and proper prime minister, William Pitt, dining with a stunted and sloppy Napoleon. The two men are carving up a globe that represents a dessert called plum pudding. Another one of Gillray’s caricatures shows King George III scrutinizing a pint-size Napoleon and declaring him among the most “pernicious, little-odious-reptiles that nature ever suffer’d to crawl upon the surface of the Earth.” In reality, Napoleon’s height was average for…

“Slow and steady” is the essence of the theory of uniformitarianism, or gradualism. For the last 200 years the fields of geology and paleontology have schooled researchers in the principle that processes on Earth take place over prolonged periods of time. Uniformitarianism was a reaction against some early geologists who believed, based on their interpretation of the Bible, that the Earth was about 6,000 years old. There hadn’t been a lot of time for slow processes. By that reckoning, only a catastrophe could have created the Himalaya Mountains or the fjords of Norway. Once scientists established that Earth was enormously ancient, gradualism replaced catastrophism. It had become clear to scientists that the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains took many millions of years to form. Gradualism, with its slow, continuous…

YOUR FRIENDS MIGHT LAUGH IF YOU CLOWNED AROUND WITH A TOY CHICKEN ON YOUR HEAD. LITTLE KIDS WOULD PROBABLY LAUGH TOO. AND WHY NOT? YOU’D LOOK RIDICULOUS! HUMOR IS MORE THAN GREAT FUN. IT’S ALSO A BIG PART OF HOW KIDS DEVELOP. A LAUGHING MATTER Most infants start to laugh sometime around four months of age. Within a month or two, tickling isn’t the only thing that tickles their sense of humor. In one study, researchers asked parents and caregivers to do silly things with babies who were five to seven months old. Sometimes the adult gave a cue that the action was meant to be funny, such as laughing or giggling afterward. In other cases, the adult just did the action without added cues. Surprisingly, five- and six-month old…

NEW CONTEST Funny Business HA HA HA! Ahem, excuse us.HA HA HA! We just heard something that tickled our funny bone. Send us anything that makes you laugh! It could be a joke you made up yourself, a drawing of a prank you pulled on your friends, an inside joke with your family, or a photo of something random yet hilarious. Please explain in three sentences or fewer. CONTEST RULES 1. Your contest entry must be your very own original work. Ideas and words should not be copied. 2. Be sure to include your name, age, and full address on your entry. 3. Only one entry per person, please. 4. If you want your work returned, enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope. 5. All entries must be signed by a parent…