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

All Hail the HPB Historian In March 2017, Oliver M. asked where the hot pink bunnies come from. Well, after many hours searching through the Muse Mail for evidence that readers have sent in, I am here to tell you their story. The species originated on the planet of Pirikold. They were originally separated into three tribes. The bunnies in each tribe were the primary colors. Around 300 years ago, they migrated to Earth because of a food shortage. They ended up in Siberia and stayed there until the early twenty-first century. From Siberia, they traveled to North American and took up residence in what would become the backyard of Muse reader Casey L. [September 2016]. There they interbred until the majority of the bunnies were hot pink. Then, in…

WHEN YOU’RE SNEEZING, no one wants to get too close to you. But does feeling lonely affect how sick you get in the first place? To find out, scientists recruited 213 people. The people filled out questionnaires about how lonely and isolated they felt. Then the scientists squirted drops that contained cold viruses into the subjects’ noses. Over the next five days, about three-quarters of the subjects caught a cold. People who had said they felt lonely weren’t any more likely to get sick. But if they did get a cold, they felt sicker. Lonely people who got sick reported that their cold symptoms—including sneezing, sore throats, stuffy noses, and headaches—were worse. Sounds like somebody needs a hug!…

Scrape your knee, give yourself a paper cut, or watch a violent movie, and you will observe that blood is a liquid. It splatters, gushes, trickles, and drips. But microscopic red blood cells hold the key to blood’s secret identity: this is a liquid that thinks it’s a solid! Looking Liquid, Acting Solid Blood is a viscoelastic material, which means that it has properties of both liquids and solids. In fact, the word “viscoelastic” is a mash-up of two words: viscosity and elasticity. Viscosity describes how a fluid flows. Think about pouring syrup and pouring water. Water, which has a low viscosity, pours much faster than syrup, which has a high viscosity. Elasticity describes how things stretch and return to their original shape. A rubber band is very elastic and…

1. PULMONARY CIRCULATION moves blood between the heart and lungs. This process fills the blood with oxygen. 2. SYSTEMIC CIRCULATION moves the oxygenated blood between the heart and the rest of the body. LEFT ATRIUM: Where oxygen-rich blood enters the heart through the pulmonary veins RIGHT ATRIUM: Where oxygen-poor blood enters the heart through the vena cava LEFT VENTRICLE: Where oxygen-rich blood is pumped out of the heart to other parts of the body through the aorta RIGHT VENTRICLE: Where oxygen-poor blood is pumped out of the heart and toward the lungs SEPTUM: A thick wall between the right and left sides of the heart CARDIAC VALVES: Flaps that control how blood flows to and from the heart ARTERIES: Large vessels that carry blood away from the heart and into…

Chef Kelila Jaffe is no vampire, but she takes eating blood in stride. As a PhD student in New York University’s nutrition and food studies program, she studies how humans have used animals—including their blood—as a source of food throughout history. She’s also in charge of NYU’s teaching kitchen. DO WE HAVE ANY IDEA WHEN HUMANS STARTED COOKING WITH BLOOD? The first recorded recipes that use blood are from the Yale University Babylonian tablet collection, which date back thousands of years. Those recipes call for blood used as a thickening agent in sauces and soups, and people still use it that way today. BLOOD DOESN’T SOUND VERY APPETIZING. WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE? Blood has a savory-ness, an umami quality, but with a little extra minerality in the flavor, probably…

SUNLIGHT DOESN’T REACH VERY FAR below the surface of the ocean. So life underwater can be extremely dark. But many ocean animals make their own light, called bioluminescence (BYE-oh-LOOM-in-ESS-uhns). They glow or twinkle to attract prey, communicate with each other, or to scare away predators. A new study says this skill is common: three-quarters of the animals in the ocean are bioluminescent. Researchers studied underwater videos taken off the coast of California. Robotic submarines captured the videos over 17 years of dives. When the scientists counted every creature they saw in the footage and noted which ones glowed, they found that 76 percent of animals were bioluminescent. There were plenty of glowing creatures both near the ocean’s surface and in its deepest, darkest depths. These included jellyfish, worms, shrimp, and…

The little spider crawls slowly, purposefully. The eight legs barely seem to move, almost gliding across the vertical surface of the wall. The spider’s large, beady, black eyes—all eight of them— help the predator see with deadly precision. Though it moves slowly as it carefully stalks across the wall, this spider is capable of jumping many times its body length in the blink of an eye. The alert eight-legged, eight-eyed beast has a single focus: to find a meal. A meal of human blood . A Gory Meal Seen up close the vampire spider (Evarcha culicivora) is dark-bodied, brown going toward black, with a bright red—no, blood red—head and front legs. It looks the part of a vampire, as though it has just devoured a gory meal. Back on the…

It’s cold and flu season. Just about everyone around you is sniffling, coughing, and sneezing. When someone near you sneezes, you may see tiny droplets of liquid in the air or even feel their impact if the sneezer fails to cover his or her mouth. What you don’t see is the roiling cloud of warm gas that carries the droplets out of a sneezer’s mouth. Yucky Dust Mathematicians Lydia Bourouiba and John Bush of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wondered just how far the droplets in such a cloud of gas could go. They turned to a combination of high-speed video, lab work, and theoretical calculations to find out. When you cough or sneeze, you eject a cloud of gas carrying droplets that range widely in size. As the…

The experiments sound like something out of a horror movie. Sew two mice together so that they share blood in a single circulatory system. Gross as it may seem, this procedure has led to new discoveries in the study of aging. Studies using the procedure, called parabiosis (pa-ra-byoh-sis), suggest that pumping blood from young mice into old mice can make the old mice act young again. Wow! Reversing the aging process is an exciting goal. But scientists are still testing “young blood” and debating whether it really holds the secret to turning back time. Getting a Tune Up Our bodies are made up of billions of cells containing biological information. Some cells group together to form tissues, which perform specific functions like digesting food or fighting disease. As we get…

At the far left of the top photo, you see an Asian tiger mosquito ( Aedes albopictus ). At right is Psorophora ciliata , sometimes known as a monster mosquito. In the American Southeast, this pest is called a gallinipper or a shaggy-legged gallinipper. At about the size of a dime, it’s one of the largest mosquitoes in the Unites States. Psorophora ciliata often bites cows and horses. But humans report that its bite really hurts. The only possible upside is that “shaggy-legged gallinipper” makes an excellent insult. Ticks climb aboard a person or an animal and insert a barbed feeding tube. Then they suck blood for up to a few days. They can go unnoticed because…

Q: How do optical illusions form? —Jake W., age 12, Oregon A: Susana Martinez-Conde spends a lot of time thinking about illusions. She’s a neuroscientist at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center who studies vision. Martinez-Conde is also the coauthor of the book Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles. She tries to figure out why we see what we do. That might sound simple, but it’s actually anything but. What you see is never an exact reflection of the world around you. When light bounces off an object and into your eyes, your eyes send a signal to your brain. Your brain then interprets that information and figures out what you’re looking at. And that’s when things can get weird.…

IT’S A TYPICAL morning: you wake up, take a shower, brush your teeth, and then prick your arm with a tiny needle. Wait, what? Unless you have a serious disease such as diabetes, you probably haven’t ever tested your own blood. But in the future, that might change. The company Cor already sells a system for home blood testing. You stick your arm using a supposedly painless, disposable, blood-drawing cartridge about the size of a Chapstick. Then you stick the cartridge into a device that looks like the base for an electric toothbrush. A few minutes later, an app on your phone buzzes with updated information, including your current health status and tips on what to eat and how to exercise during the day. “Health is the most important thing…