Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

I am a writing/editing geek. I hope you know that I don’t mean to sound rude or like I’m trying to find things wrong with this magazine, but there is a mistake that caught me eye. On page 12 in the May 2016 issue, it says “determine” twice. It absolutely bugs me when people make editing mistakes. Editors, don’t take this the wrong way because, believe me, I make WAY more mistakes in my writing than you do in all of the Muse issues I’ve ever gotten combined. (I’ve been getting this magazine for a LONG time.) Now, I have two other things I need to write about. First, I also love experimenting, so I have a cool experiment you should try. It’s really simple. You just take a raw…

Many modern artists have been inspired by curiosity cabinets. So much so that they’ve made their own versions of wunderkammern. Steffen Dam is a Danish artist who works with glass. He blows specimens that look like things you might find in the jars of Eric Lazo-Wassem’s invertebrate collections at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. But whereas the Yale Peabody specimens are all from the natural world, Dam’s specimens are all imaginary. He thinks making a copy of a real thing is not art and may even look kitschy instead—like an ornament you could buy in a souvenir shop. “A copy can only be art if another dimension is added in a talented way.” By focusing on the art and science of how glass works as you blow it,…

Think about your most treasured possession from your younger days—the blanket or stuffed animal you’d rescue first in a fire. Whatever you choose, it likely has zero value to anyone else. Your tattered blankie or threadbare teddy probably wouldn’t even get picked from the free box at a garage sale. WHEN OBJECTS OWN PEOPLE Of course, if I told you to throw away your precious teddy, you’d refuse. You love and protect her. You’d never dump her in the trash with soggy coffee grounds and slimy banana peels. Now imagine how difficult life would be if you felt that strongly about tossing an ordinary red pen. That’s the experience of people with hoarding problems—they feel compelled to hold on to everything from expired coupons to broken blenders. Because they can’t…

More than 4 million people a year visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Many visitors leave items related to the memory of the more than 58,000 American men and women who died or went missing in the Vietnam War and whose names appear on the memorial’s black granite walls. Every night, National Park Service (NPS) personnel collect these items. They end up at NPS’s Museum Resource Center (MRC)—a building as large as two football fields—in Landover, Maryland. Janet Donlin, museum technician for the National Mall and Memorial Parks, processes the items, which range in size from as small as a pin to as large as a motorcycle. There are around 400,000 and counting. These items are neatly stored in blue boxes or on shelves by the date they…

BOSTON DYNAMICS is a Massachusetts company famous for creating cool (or creepy, depending on your point of view) robots for the United States military and other organizations. It has built robots that can walk on two legs, others that can run like cheetahs, and others that climb walls. The company’s latest creation resembles a small giraffe and does chores. The new bot is called SpotMini. It weighs 65 pounds (29.5 kg). It has four legs with backward-pointing knees and a single arm that looks like a long neck and head. In June 2016, Boston Dynamics released a YouTube video showing off SpotMini’s skills around the house. The robot navigates furniture and stairs with ease. It delicately picks up an empty glass from the sink and loads it in the dishwasher.…

Los Angeles, California, is one of the world’s most glamorous places. Movie stars and fashion models, musicians and superstar athletes mingle under the bright lights of the bustling big city. But right in the middle of this glitz and glamour is a relic left over from a prehistoric world when strange creatures still roamed the Earth. The pits at La Brea bubble with tar—right the middle of a busy urban park! For tens of thousands of years, the La Brea Tar Pits trapped animals big and small, becoming a graveyard for creatures of a lost age. Over time, the tar pits have become a treasure trove of bones. Today, the vast collection at La Brea helps scientists unravel the mysteries of an ancient world. The Age of Giant Beasts Most…

YOU’VE GOT a bunch of stuff, but everything looks different, and nothing matches. How can you organize this mess? No, we’re not talking about your room—let’s not get crazy here! We’re talking about the elements. You know, carbon, magnesium, lead. They were all just rocks-in-a-box, until a guy with a messy beard named Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) arranged them into the famous periodic table of the elements. Now, an updated version of that chart hangs in science classrooms around the globe. Except that it’s much more than a chart. The periodic table lists the substances that make up everything we can see and touch. Plus it tells you how every substance combines with every other substance. Talk about the ultimate collection. So how did Mendeleev do it? Getting Organized Think of…

Some people collect coins. Other people collect stuffed animals, or books, or spoons from around the world. But psychologist Tim Lomas, a lecturer at the University of East London, collects words. Specifically, he collects words about feelings and relationships that exist in only one language on Earth and can’t be directly translated into any other. This unique venture is called the Positive Lexicography Project. (Lexicography is the formal term for creating a dictionary.) It’s an online database that offers a window into the way different cultures use words to explain themselves and their experiences. In it you can find words like voorpret, which is a Dutch word for the feeling of pleasure you get looking forward to an exciting event like a party, or shemomechama, which is Georgian for eating…

DO YOU take selfies everywhere you go and never delete a single one? Do you spend hours organizing old texts? Do you back up everything to multiple hard drives or cloud storage accounts out of fear that something might happen to your data? If yes, you may have a digital-hoarding problem. A person with hoarding disorder accumulates possessions because the idea of getting rid of things causes extreme distress. The possessions may be books, food, clothes, or even pets. As these things build up over time, a person’s home may become unsafe. But what about digital possessions? Owning a ridiculous number of video files can’t make your home unsafe. But it could be a problem if keeping the videos stresses you out. In 2015, a group of researchers proposed adding…

A LITTLE SPACECRAFT called Juno spent five years traveling away from Earth. In July 2016, it finally reached its destination: Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Juno’s mission is to make 37 trips around the gas giant while gathering data with its scientific instruments. The spacecraft will get close enough to peer beneath Jupiter’s clouds. Scientists hope this will help them finally get some answers to big mysteries about the planet: does it have a solid core? How far down do its clouds reach? And which of its neighbors does it like better—Mars or Saturn?…

Once upon a time, there was wonder in the world. Wonder about things we knew were there but could not see. Wonder about how things as different as plants, sea life, and stars fit together. Wonder for what role humans played in the whole giant puzzle. In the fourteenth century, some collectors expressed their wonder by gathering objects together into intricate display cases known as Wunderkammern—a German word meaning “curiosity cabinets.” Wonder cabinets inspired collectors to put groups of related, and also seemingly unrelated, objects together. Like pieces of coral, and unicorn horns, and complicated clocks, and landscape paintings. (The unicorn horns were actually narwhal tusks.) People thought that if they could understand how these things were alike, they could understand how the world worked and their place in it.…

Collections of creepy crawlies can either be a person’s nightmare or an artist’s muse. Award-winning artist Jennifer Angus has 25,000 dead, dried insects in her collection. Using giant cicadas, brightly colored beetles, leaf insects, grasshoppers, and more, Angus carefully designs intricate patterns on walls using thousands of insects. Shown above is an image from her Wonder exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. “People don’t love insects. They love fluffy bunnies and cute tortoises. But insects play an important role in our ecosystem. The goal of my art is to create awareness and open a discussion,” she says. Her insect art has appeared in many countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Spain. She buys her insects from specimen dealers. Dealers gather them from a…

Q: If atoms are empty space, why don’t we just pass through them? —Ben B. A: Physicists used to think that atoms looked a lot like the solar system: a nucleus in the middle with electrons orbiting it at different distances, with empty space in between. That picture makes sense to us because it follows the rules of physics we’re used to, says James Beacham, a physicist at CERN in Switzerland. But there’s a big problem with it. Atoms and the particles inside them don’t actually follow the same rules of physics we do. “Once we get down to the very, very small . . . things start to get really, really weird,” Beacham says. That weirdness is called quantum mechanics, and it’s key to answering your question. Quantum mechanics…

You’ll need A deck of playing cards 1. Spread all the cards out face up on a table. (They’re like the elements once were—all jumbled.) 2. Now lay the cards in rows arranged by suit, from smallest (ace) to biggest (king). Start with hearts. 3. Then beneath that, begin new rows for diamonds, then clubs, then spades. 4. Congratulations, you’ve assembled the periodic table of playing cards! • Card values go up, from left to right—just like atomic numbers do in the real table. • Cards in each column have the same value—the same way elements in each column have similar properties.…