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

I am a cow-obsessed flip phone who hates cinnamon buns and is possibly going to wear an orange shirt next Thursday. A little while ago I sent my friend Joe (who might possibly be imaginary, but that’s none of your beeswax) a copy of Muse while he was on vacation on Mars with his pet cow, Bubba the Prehistoric Cow. He wanted me to ask you guys if you could write an article about cow farts and methane and such because he doesn’t know much about the subject. If you do not publish this letter, I will send my large army of rubber snakes and plastic flamingos to suck your brains out through your noses. —ALICE, THE AMAZING FLIP PHONE P.S. Could you also maybe do an article about smiles…

You aren’t the only animal that yawns. Lots of other creatures do it too. But no one’s sure why. Scientists may have gotten closer to an answer with their finding that longer yawns come from bigger brains. The team searched YouTube for videos of mammals yawning. They studied clips of 177 yawning animals, from hedgehogs to humans to an elephant. And they found a clear pattern: animals with bigger brains yawned longer. Those with more brain cells in the outer layer of the brain, called the cortex, also yawned for longer. The average mouse yawn lasted less than 1.5 seconds. Primates—monkeys, apes, and humans—yawned for longer than other animals. And the yawns of big-brained humans lasted the longest, over six seconds on average. This is evidence, the researchers say, that…

IN OCTOBER 2016, scientists at the European Space Agency waited nervously as the latest Mars rover, named Schiaparelli, attempted to stick its landing. A spacecraft called the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) had dropped the rover onto the red planet. Schiaparelli was supposed to fall first with a parachute and then use its thrusters to make a gentle landing. But the scientists, waiting for a signal that their rover had safely touched down, heard nothing. The next day, images of the Martian surface confirmed their fears. There was a brand-new crater on Mars: the remains of the poor rover. Researchers estimated it had fallen for 1 to 2 miles (2 to 3 km) before crashing and possibly exploding. All wasn’t lost, though. The TGO made it safely into orbit around Mars.…

You’re climbing into the car for your ride to soccer practice—when you put your hand right in some fresh bird poop on the door handle. Gross! There may be more to this doo-doo disaster than meets the eye. Some birds use each other’s splatter patterns to find food. A biologist in Canada noticed that whenever her hood got pooped on during the day, she’d see a lot of birds perching near the car in the evening. She wondered whether these birds were reading some sort of information in the mess. So she and her team did a series of experiments in the lab and outdoors. They showed photos, or actual poopy cars, to common bird species and watched what the animals did next. They saw that birds use other birds’…

HOW MANY galaxies are in the universe? Researchers used images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and new mathematical models to try to answer this question. Previously, astronomers had estimated that there are about 200 billion galaxies. (That includes our home, the Milky Way Galaxy.) The new mathematical estimate is 10 times higher—there are more like 2 trillion galaxies out there, researchers say. But most are too faint and far away for us to see with any existing telescope. This could help explain why the sky at night looks dark, even though the universe is packed with glowing stars.…

GOOGLE MAPS doesn’t just show you how to get where you’re going. Often, you can zoom in all the way to a sidewalk-level perspective, as if you’re walking inside the map. The feature is called Street View. But it’s not available for remote parts of the world—like the Faroe Islands, a group of islands halfway between Norway and Iceland. Citizens here felt left out because there was no Street View where they lived. So they got help from some sheep. More sheep live in the Faroe Islands than people. Islanders strapped solar-powered cameras to the backs of some local sheep. While the animals wandered around, the cameras gathered footage of the islands’ hills and cliffs. After Google employees found out about the project, dubbed Sheep View, they lent the Faroe…