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

I would love to say that I am from another planet, or that I’m a famous percussionist from a magical land of talking cats, but unfortunately I can’t say that either is true. I’m just a regular human girl, from a small city in Colorado. I have been reading Muse magazine for almost two years now and am utterly addicted to the page-turning articles and educational tidbits. Every time I pick it up, I have to be dragged out of my room, and my sister has to grab the magazine from my greedy fingers so I’ll stop reading. In the July/August 2016 issue, I was especially excited by the Biosphere 2 article, for I have been there! My favorite part was the ocean exhibit, even though it is dead and…

Earth just got a little less lonely. Astronomers have found evidence that our closest neighboring star hosts a planet that just might have the right conditions for life. The nearest star to Earth is our own sun. But the next nearest star, just over four light years away, is called Proxima Centauri. Scientists think they’ve found a planet orbiting this star that’s about 30 percent larger than Earth. They named the new planet Proxima b. It’s so close to Proxima Centauri that one full trip around the star—or one “year” on Proxima b—lasts just 11 days. The researchers made the discovery by observing tiny wobbles in starlight from Proxima Centauri. If Earth were that close to our own sun, we’d all be toast. But Proxima Centauri is smaller and dimmer…

AS YOU KNOW if you have a pet that likes to walk across the piano keys, not all musical notes sound nice together. The combinations that are pleasant to our ears become chords in our musical compositions. But other groupings of notes seem to clash. This clashing is called “dissonance.” Scientists have suggested that all humans prefer the same combinations of notes. In other words, even people on opposite sides of the planet should have the same opinions about whether notes sound delightful or dissonant. But one Amazonian community has proven this idea wrong. Researchers brought headphones to the Tsimane, a group that lives in isolated villages in the Amazon. They played different groups of musical notes and asked Tsimane subjects how pleasant the sounds were. The Tsimane said dissonant…

Like its undersea cousin the octopus, this robot is super squishy. It’s called Octobot, and researchers 3D printed it out of silicone. For fuel, Octobot uses hydrogen peroxide, a disinfectant that might be in your medicine cabinet at home. The hydrogen peroxide causes a chemical reaction inside the robot that produces gas. Then the gas flows into Octobot’s tentacles to make them wiggle and flex. Soft robots have the potential to do things and go places that traditional, stiff-bodied bots can’t. But until now, all soft robots have had some hard part, like a battery or wires. That makes Octobot a big step—er, squelch?—forward for robotics.…

YOU WON’T GET FAR trying to teach a horse to talk. But horses can communicate with humans using symbols, researchers have found. They trained 23 horses to touch a set of wooden signs with their noses. One sign was a white square with a horizontal black bar. If a horse nosed this sign, someone would put a warm blanket on the animal. Another was a white square with a vertical bar; if a horse touched the sign, the person would take its blanket off. And a third sign was just an empty white square, which meant to leave the horse the way it was. The horses had daily training sessions for two weeks. Afterward, all the horses could use the signs to make themselves more comfortable. On a cold, rainy…

IN A RECENTLY DISCOVERED ancient Egyptian tomb, archaeologists unearthed several papyrus scrolls. Reading the crumbling documents was difficult. But after six years, researchers have finished piecing together and translating the scrolls. One of them held a surprise: the earliest known use of the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” There’s no chicken in the ancient Egyptian version. Instead, the hieroglyphics show a squat bird called a guinea fowl. Then there’s a question about the bird walking across a path. Researchers are pretty sure, based on the rest of the scroll, that the question is supposed to be ironic or humorous. Unfortunately, because some pieces of the papyrus are too badly damaged to read, they still don’t know the punch line.…