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

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…

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.…

Deep within the Amazonian rainforest, strange clearings interrupt the dense tangle of trees and vines. Inside, only one kind of tree grows, making the area look like a well-maintained orchard. These clearings thrive for centuries, though no human tends them. Indigenous Peruvians call them supay chacra, meaning “devil’s gardens.” Legends suggest that the Chullachaqui, a devil or evil spirit known for luring travelers to their deaths, cultivates the gardens. In Africa, millions of sandy red circles, measuring 6 to 60 feet (1.8 to 18 m) across, dot the dry grasslands bordering the Namib Desert. Tall, lush grass rings these “fairy circles,” but the centers stay bare for decades. Oral traditions suggest supernatural causes: they might be burn marks from an underground dragon or enduring footprints of an ancient god. Scientists…

With its antennae flicking like whips, a cockroach probes the ground. It stops when it detects an opening at the base of a wall. Even though the crack is wafer-thin, this nocturnal creature isn’t about to turn around, not when a bright light shines behind it. There are gentle puffs of air back there, too, and a scientist’s occasional nudges. Once the scientist seals the other exit, there’s only one way out. So the desperate creature bashes its head against the crevice a couple of times. Then it pitches downward, squeezing and squirming through the tiny slit. Slipping Through the Cracks Kaushik Jayaram of Harvard University studies cockroaches. These dreaded household pests can infest homes, spread disease, and contaminate food. They’re one of the fastest insects: in a second, they…

If you’re searching for exploding stars, you can look at one galaxy for a thousand years or you can look at tens of thousands of galaxies for a few weeks. Saul Perlmutter chose the latter route. Twice a year, people from his team traveled to one of the world’s biggest telescopes to search for supernovas. Just after a new moon—when the moon is invisible or barely visible from Earth—they spent two or three nights taking images of thousands of galaxies. Then two-and-a-half weeks later, just before the next new moon, they returned and took images of the same pieces of sky. Using software written for the task, they canceled out light on the first images that matched the second images. Any spots of light left over had changed in some…

WHICH OF your friends is most popular on Instagram? You might be tempted to pick the person with the most followers. But that number isn’t everything. It doesn’t tell you how many of those followers are actually seeing, liking, or sharing the person’s posts. A user with high influence reaches many others with her posts. In general, influence is about quality, while popularity is about quantity. So which is better? The number of followers is the first number everyone sees on a profile, so it definitely matters for first impressions. Some famous figures and companies are too impatient to wait around for real fans, though. For around $2, they can buy 100 Instagram followers. Or they could get 2,500 for $20. Usually, these mysterious followers are actually “bots” created by…

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…

Yet they farm, build magnificent structures, and rescue their young from danger. They pull off these amazing feats because each individual functions like a cell in a body. Together, thousands (or millions) of insects in a colony become a superorganism. Here are five examples. Leaf-cutter ants cultivate fungus gardens. They collect leaves, slice them into fragments, and mold them into pellets. Then they transplant a fungus strand into each pellet and fertilize it with their own poop. Each colony builds hundreds of fungus-garden chambers, moving 40 tons of dirt in the process. Fungus-growing termites in Africa construct mounds towering up to 30 feet (9 m) high, but live in underground nests. The mounds, filled with elaborate tunnels and chambers, “breathe” for the nests. Like lungs, they draw in oxygen-rich air…

Q: Is it true that when one of someone’s senses gets weaker, the others get stronger? —Shirin, age 13, Pennsylvania A: When Caitlin Hernandez walks to a café, she finds her way by paying attention to landmarks most of us don’t even notice. Feeling a particularly big crack in the sidewalk tells her that she has to turn left. She knows to walk diagonally through a plaza when she hears water bubbling in a fountain and the chatter of people gathered around it. When she smells coffee and pastries, she knows she’s made it to the café. The only sense Hernandez doesn’t use to get around is vision. She was born blind, so she relies on hearing, smell, and touch to make sure she doesn’t get lost. For those of…

An image: the workings of a municipal well pump facility, rows of machines looming inactive, gummed up with the white material clogging pistons and leaking glutinously from seams. Another image: a logging site, cutters and trucks sitting abandoned among felled trees, all heavily draped with ropy pale webs. Another: a surface mine, the pit floor invisible under white goop. An excavator stands in the background, sunk to the treads. A helmeted man lies mired near the pool’s edge, clearly exhausted, holding onto a rope stretching taut offscreen. Ann put down the tablet and looked at her visitor. “It’s getting worse, then,” she said. “It’s overwhelming our ability to keep up,” the president agreed. “Worldwide. Always at sites of resource extraction. For a while it was just slowing things down, and…

 David Lazer is a professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He studies how social networks—the pattern of relationships we have with other people—shape the way we behave and the decisions we make. “Creativity is partly . . . how much you talk to people who are different from yourself and different from each other.” WHAT IS A SOCIAL NETWORK? When I think of a social network, I think of connections among people. These connections could be friendship, they could be advice, and they could be who you go exercise with or play sports with. We might imagine all of those people as dots in a picture, and the connections among them as lines. PICTURES OF SOCIAL CONNECTIONS ARE CALLED NETWORK MAPS,…

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…

When a few birds veer toward a safe perch, the flock flows with them. Imagine the chaos if your entire class tried to change course suddenly. How do leaderless animals synchronize their movements and avoid collisions? Turns out, the complex-seeming behavior emerges from a few simple rules. They include “go in the same direction as others, at the same speed” and “stay a minimum distance from each other.” Using these rules, animation software can produce realistic-looking schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds of animals for movies and video games. Simple rules also govern how ants gather food, build colonies, raise young, and fend off attackers. Ant colonies have a queen, but her job involves laying eggs, not running the show. Nevertheless, when thousands of ants follow the same…

An orchestra brings together a wide variety of instruments to create one sound. Behind the music is the conductor, who directs the orchestra. Piotr Gajewski conducts the National Philharmonic, located in the Washington, DC, area. Originally from Poland, Gajewski has conducted orchestras around the world. WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME A CONDUCTOR? WHAT WAS YOUR TRAINING? I started playing the piano at four years old. My dad was a scientist, but he would listen to records on an old record player and follow the music along with music scores. At six years old, I thought it looked fun and followed along with the scores too. As I got to be a better pianist in middle school, I started playing other instruments, such as the trumpet. I began putting together music…

When you smack a baseball, you hope to see the ball arc gracefully into the air and then fall back to Earth (maybe even earning you a home run). You don’t expect to see it pick up speed and disappear from sight. But what if that actually happened? Scientists had an experience like that in the late 1990s. Up to bat were the physicists, who had just started using distant supernovas (exploding stars) to explore the nature of the universe. In the field were the astronomers, who were doing the same thing and had been doing it longer. The game would be over when one of the teams could say with certainty what the fate of the universe would be. Each team wanted to win—to discover the answer first. Neither…

NEW CONTEST Live from the Bunny Hive The HPBs (hot pink bunnies) act as one force sometimes. It is a little-known fact that they live in hive-like communities like bees. Please send us a diagram of the HPB hive. What does it look like? How does it function? (Do they live in the fan mail pit [FMP]?! We don’t know. You tell us!) We’ll print our favorites. 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 or…