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

Empty Threats I would like to write an ode to the humble uglytoad although there’s naught to write about. You see he’s ugly, in and out. While I was thinking of what to say next, my sister spilled drops of apple sauce (I hate it but she likes it. We’re triplets, and that proves that we are not all the same) on this letter, so I’ll close it. I don’t know why everyone threatens you. Obviously they are empty threats—Muse is still coming out—it has not been eaten or erased or disappeared. Anyway, if you don’t publish this, the only thing that will happen to you is that you will make one person slightly less happy. —THAT PERSON BEING A CERTAIN GRACE / age 13 Were they empty, come to…

SCIENTISTS HAVE FOUND THAT NIGHTTIME visits to a medical website can help them predict the next day’s emergency room traffic. About 40 percent of people visiting the emergency room are there for accidents and injuries. The other 60 percent are there for illnesses that don’t need immediate care. This group tends to check the Web before going to the hospital. Researchers in Sweden decided to take advantage of this. They tracked the number of visits to the Stockholm Health Care Guide website in 2011 and 2012 and compared this data to visits to Stockholm-area emergency rooms. They were able to make a mathematical model to predict how many people would come to the ER. Their predicted numbers were correct to within about 10 percent. This is not a totally new…

Life is difficult for children with hearing impairments in Morocco, a country in northern Africa. Very few deaf children in Morocco go to school, and there is no education available for them past sixth grade. Leveling the Playing Field Parents wonder, “Doesn’t my child have the right to a full education?” “Many deaf people [here] are illiterate. The country is losing a wonderful resource,” says Dr. Abdelhadi Soudi. Soudi heads a Moroccan research group at the École Nationale de l’Industrie Minérale. A unique computer technology is filling the education gap in Morocco. The computer program comes from a partnership between Soudi’s research group and an American small business, the Institute for Disabilities Research and Training (IDRT). The computer program works with Arabic, one of the official languages of Morocco, and…

1 Learn all you can. Have a broad knowledge base—all information is important. Don’t learn only what you have to. 2 Think about solutions. Recognize needs yourself how they can be fixed. In the early 1900s, streetcar drivers often drove with the front windows open because of the sleet and rain buildup on the windshield. When visiting New York, Alabama real estate developer Mary Anderson didn’t simply complain about the cold air blowing in the streetcar—she recognized a need for a device to clean windshields, one controlled from inside the vehicle. Anderson patented the windshield wiper in 1903. 3 Look around. Notice anything unusual? Ask why. Actually see the everyday things. Could they be given a new purpose? In World War II, members of a division of Johnson & Johnson…

What if the lights in your local grocery store were powered by the previous day’s garbage? Or the train at your favorite amusement park ran on used cooking oil from the concession stand? These seemingly crazy ideas are actually happening, thanks to new developments in the field of biofuels. Scientists have long understood that fuels like petroleum and coal put excessive amounts of carbon into our environment, contributing to all sorts of problems, including climate change. But the hard part is figuring out a way to replace all the carbon-producing activities we humans have become so dependent on for everything from turning the lights on in the morning, to taking the bus to school, to doing homework on the family computer. Exploring an Alternative Biofuels are liquid fuels that replace…

IF YOU’RE STUCK with a problem and have already thought of all the boring solutions, you need Weird Idea Girl! Weird Idea Girl will distract you from the textbook you’re studying to point out a piece of dandelion fluff dancing through the air. (That’s it! We’ll float the nanobots on seed puffs!) Stuck in an intense discussion where all the possibilities seem lame? Here comes Weird Idea Girl, dribbling the soccer ball that has been lying in the corner. (That’s it! We’ll give everybody their own human-sized hamster ball!) Yes, when your mind has gone blank—in comes Weird Idea Girl, loudly crunching a carrot. (That is SO LOUD. Wait a second. That’s it! We’ll strap cans to our feet and march down the street!) Weird Idea Girl: she does not…

THE CINEREOUS MOURNER, a bird that lives in the rainforests of Peru, does a terrible job guarding its chicks. Luckily, the chicks don’t need their parents’ help. The young birds look like toxic caterpillars that live nearby—they’re about the same size and color, with spiky orange feathers that have white tips. Not only that, but they move like the caterpillars too. This is probably an example of Batesian mimicry, where a harmless animal evolves to look like a dangerous one. For example, the non-venomous king snake looks enough like the venomous coral snake that predators stay away. Frogs mimic each other, and so do many insects, but until now, no one has discovered a case of a bird mimicking an insect.…

You’ve probably heard of dogs protecting houses, people, or maybe a flock of sheep. But what about a big, fluffy dog that protects little, fluffy penguins? Fairy Colony Under Attack Middle Island, just off the coast of Warrnambool, in Victoria, Australia, has long been home to a colony of fairy penguins. Unless you’re a fish, fairy penguins are gentle little souls. The world’s smallest penguin, they spend about half their year at sea. Adult birds waddle back onto solid ground in late winter or spring each year to breed and raise their chicks in shallow burrows around coastal southeastern Australia. Though they are masters of the aquatic domain (their scientific name, Eudyptula minor, means “good little diver”), when ashore, fairy penguins are comically clumsy. Foxes, an introduced pest in Australia,…

Jack Andraka captured headlines when, at age 15, he developed a simple test to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages. His breakthrough came to him while he was half-listening to his freshman biology teacher’s lecture on antibodies that bind to proteins in the blood. At the same time, he was secretly reading an article on carbon nanotubes in Science magazine. Jack wondered if he could line a network of carbon nanotubes with specific antibodies and introduce a drop of the patient’s blood into the tubal network to detect the presence of pancreatic cancer. His idea focused on mesothelin-specific antibodies, because mesothelin is a protein that the body overproduces when pancreatic cancer attacks. Jack emailed his idea to 200 leading cancer researchers. He received 199 rejections, but Dr. Anirban Maitra,…

WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL DO YOU GET if you combine a horse, a monkey, and a kangaroo? It’s a seahorse! These tiny, delicate animals look like creatures from a fairy tale with their horse-shaped heads, monkey-like tails, and kangaroo-like pouches. Seahorses are enchanting and unique. Mates greet each other every day by changing colors and promenading and pirouetting together. Male seahorses become pregnant and carry the babies in their pouches until they give birth. SAVE THE SEAHORSES Unfortunately, seahorses are in trouble. They are rapidly disappearing from our oceans as a result of fishing practices, including shrimp trawling. Bottom trawls gouge ocean bottoms and destroy seagrass beds, mangroves, and coral reefs where seahorses and other marine animals live. “Shrimp is only about 5 percent of the catch in most cases.…

Kids and adults alike have long enjoyed building virtual environments in computer games like SimCity and Minecraft. But what happens to those carefully constructed worlds after you log off ? A group of Internet conservationists are now working to save the worlds that gamers leave behind. The virtual archaeologists are extracting abandoned worlds and cities from the servers of Internet game companies, starting with the earliest version of SimCity in 1989. They say these game settings are important creations that should be saved for future generations. For now, the virtual worlds are being collected in an online museum—but they might be safest if we could print them all out on paper.…

Dogs and other animals work with people in all sorts of places to make the world a better place. Have you heard about . . . ›› giant African pouched rats that are trained to sniff out land mines so the explosives can be defused? (Don’t worry, the rats are too light to set them off!) ›› goat squads using their ravenous appetites for good, eating weeds in areas that machines can’t reach? ›› conservation sniffer dogs—specialist scent-sniffers who can track down invasive pests like weeds or cats, or threatened species like kiwis (the birds, not the fruit), rare plants, or koalas? Some of them even help scientists collect information on other species b y sniffing out poo!…

Math is the key to a new kind of puzzle. A lot of people can’t go without their daily dose of Sudoku. Perhaps you’ve also tangled with these mind-teasing logic puzzles. A Sudoku game usually starts with a nine-by-nine grid. Some of the spaces contain numbers; the others are blank. Your goal is to fill in the blanks with numbers from one to nine so that each row, each column, and each of the nine three-by-three blocks making up the grid contain just one of each of the nine numbers. As far as anyone knows, at least 17 spaces must be filled in with number clues before you can find the one solution of a Sudoku puzzle. And you really don’t need math to solve it. The nine numbers could…