Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children February 2017

This is what I see when I hear one of my favorite songs, “Heroes of Our Time” by DragonForce. Please believe me when I say that the hot pink bunny has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with Muse’s fan mail. —IGGIE C. Hey Iggie, What a picture!!! I love your color choices and all the details. It reminds me of a final battle scene in a movie or a game. I could look at it all afternoon. The song, though? Couldn’t even listen all the way through. —AARTI Aarti, you just don’t get it. I’m with Iggie on the song. But I have my doubts about that HPB. —WHATSI What, No Fries? I’ve just loved your magazine from when I got it the very first time in 2012. My favorite issue…

WHEN YOU need directions, you’re usually better off consulting a map than asking a bird for help. But in Africa, small birds called honeyguides help people hunt for the nests of wild bees. After a person collects the honey from the nest, the bird gets to eat the leftovers. These birds aren’t pets—they’re wild animals that work together with humans. Now scientists have learned a little more about what makes this relationship special. In Mozambique, researchers observed human honey hunters at work. The hunters used a particular “trill-grunt” call to summon honeyguides. The researchers recorded this call. Then they played it and recordings of two similar sounds for the birds. After hearing the trill-grunt call, honeyguides led a person about two-thirds of the time. But other sounds worked one-third of…

AS YOU KNOW IF YOU’VE ever dropped your smartphone on your face while lying in bed, most electronic devices are hard. The buttons and trackpads we use to operate them are stiff too. But what if they were soft and stretchy instead? Researchers are working on a new kind of electronic touchpad that’s exactly that. They built the pad from a soft, see-through material called a hydrogel. It’s extremely flexible—it can stretch to 10 times its original size without breaking. In a demonstration video, the clear pad was wrapped around a person’s forearm. The person tapped on it like a keyboard to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Someday this technology could let you type or play games on all kinds of soft surfaces—or at least make your late-night text messaging…

Edgar Degas is a beloved 19th-century impressionist painter from France. But one of his paintings, Portrait of a Woman, doesn’t look so great. As the oil paint has faded over the decades, a dark cloud has appeared on the woman’s face. It’s the shadow of an earlier painting that Degas covered up. Finally, we can see what the hidden painting looks like. Researchers brought Portrait of a Woman to a particle accelerator called a synchrotron. The device generates a narrow, intense X-ray beam. The team used this beam to scan the artwork and map out the chemical elements in the hidden painting. Knowing those elements allowed them to guess what paint colors are hiding on each part of the canvas. Zinc probably came from white paint, for example. Mercury was…

PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE often looked for connections between the body and mind. For example, subjects in a famous 2012 study sat either inside or next to a large cardboard box while doing a creative test. People who were “outside the box” (get it?) did better. Now researchers have found another figure of speech our brains seem to take literally. In the new study, college students stood in a temperature-controlled room and video chatted with an experimenter. The experimenter asked a series of questions about subjects’ lives. Half the subjects had been told to answer these questions honestly; the other half were supposed to lie. After a 15-minute conversation, subjects filled out a questionnaire about how warm or cold different parts of their bodies felt. People who’d lied reported feeling especially warm…

FROM THE outside, a human brain looks like one solid blob of crinkly, gray tissue. But different areas of that blob do very different jobs. Researchers recently created the most detailed map ever of those brain areas. The scientists studied the cortex, or outermost brain region, of 210 adults. They looked at brain scans called magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Based on the structure of the brain and what the scans revealed about brain activity, the scientists decided where to draw lines between different brain regions. They ended up with a map showing 180 unique areas. Compared to early maps, 97 of those areas are brand new. Doctors and scientists may be able to use the new map to better navigate this mysterious organ.…