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

More Cat Dreams Please I am a relatively new Muse- lover, but when I first got an issue of Muse, I knew I would love it almost as much as I love cats (and I LOVE CATS)! Speaking of cats, I think it would be AWESOME if you guys did an article on cat dreams . . . or dog dreams . . . or hot pink bunny dreams! You get the idea. I was really interested by the small article on cats dreaming in your November/December 2017 issue, and I want to learn more! —ELVA L. A.K.A. HPB & CAT SNUGGLER / California Yes, I Live in a Tree I really like your magazine. I have it delivered to my tree.…

YES, EVERYBODY POOPS. And mammals of all shapes and sizes spend roughly the same amount of time doing it: 12 seconds. That’s what researchers found when they studied videos of 23 animals going to the, er, bathroom. None of the animals in the study were humans, but they were all mammals that make the same tube-shaped feces we do. They included dogs, a cat, a warthog, and even an elephant. The scientists took some videos themselves at a zoo and a dog park. They gathered other videos of animals pooping from YouTube. No matter their size, the animals took a similar length of time to do their business. The scientists say the reason is a slimy layer of mucus that coats mammals’ intestines and helps their turds slide out.…

The uncanny valley affects more than just mechanical robots. Many animated video games and movies are also plagued with accidental creepiness. Hyper-realistic computer-generated imagery (CGI) characters may look human, but their facial expressions can be weird and mismatched. Or sometimes a game’s world is so dynamic that the stiff and dead-eyed characters look out of place and awkward, like in early versions of Tomb Raider. “As CGI has gotten better, people expect artificial agents that look human-like to be close to perfect,” Brenner says. Some CGI films have flopped, driving animators bonkers. The 2004 animated movie The Polar Express is notorious for the zombie-like appearance of characters including the train’s conductor, voiced by actor Tom Hanks. Many computer-animation film studios have learned to steer clear of creating human characters that…

Q: What makes our cheeks turn red when we blush or get mad? —Olivia, age 10, North Carolina A: When I called Ray Crozier, a psychologist at Cardiff University in Wales who studies shyness and embarrassment, to ask him about blushing, he told me the “how” of it is pretty simple. A bunch of tiny veins lie just under the skin of your cheeks. You blush when more blood flows into those veins than usual, which can make your skin feel warm and look more red. So far, so good. The trouble is, Crozier says, no one really knows why we blush. “It’s a hard thing to study,” since a blush only lasts for a few moments and we can’t control when it happens, Crozier says. But by using experiments,…

SOMEDAY SOON, ASTRONAUTS MAY FLY TO MARS—and even live there. And they might be able to build their houses using materials that are already on the planet. Engineers on Earth discovered that the red dirt of Mars makes good bricks. (Actually, they used artificial dirt with a similar chemical make-up as that on Mars.) They didn’t need to add any extra ingredients to bind the dirt into bricks. They didn’t need to bake the bricks in an oven, either. All they had to do was put some Mars-like dirt into a flexible tube and then pound it down with a machine. This created a dense pancake of dirt that is stronger than concrete. The pancake can be cut into a brick shape for building. The scientists think iron oxide, the…

 Here’s the Jeopardy! clue, worth $600: “Wanted for general evil-ness; last seen at the Tower of Barad-Dur; it’s a giant eye, folks, kinda hard to miss.” THE MAKING OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A contestant buzzes in and gives the correct response. (Did you get the Lord of the Rings reference? See page 14.) But something strange is going on. The contestant that just earned $600 isn’t human—it’s a supercomputer named Watson. Its monitor displays a graphic of the planet Earth decorated with swirling lines that change color. This monitor connects to 10 racks of computing equipment, each the size of a refrigerator, for a combined total of 2,800 processors that can perform 80 trillion operations per second. A smartphone processes just a couple billion instructions per second. Watson competed against the…

Usually, telling a lie gets you in trouble. But in the card game poker, lying, or “bluffing,” can help you win the game. Poker players bet on having the best hand of cards. Sometimes players have good cards, sometimes they bluff. But can computers bluff? And can they tell when humans are bluffing? Scientists Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown at Carnegie Mellon University wanted to find out. They taught a supercomputer called Libratus to play poker in a tournament called Brains vs. Artiaecial Intelligence. Computers v. Humans Carnegie Mellon University professor Tuomas Sandholm and his PhD student Noam Brown created Libratus. Their first poker-playing computer, Claudico, lost to human pros in 2015. So Sandholm and Brown changed some of the design of the artificial intelligence, or AI, and tried again…

It’s a typical day at school. You gobbled your lunch in the smelly cafeteria. Now you’re out in the yard playing soccer with a bunch of friends. One of them kicks you the ball and you run for it. You trip. You fly through the air. You land—hard, right on your face. Youch! The next thing you know, you’re in the nurse’s office. Your blood-smeared nose is being scanned by laser sensors that are beaming out of a . . . robot? Has the nurse’s office been taken over by sci-fi aliens from outer space? Nope. You’ve just been propelled 15 years into the future. (Hey, we didn’t say there was no sci-fi in this scenario!) And it’s a future that Susan Epstein is really excited to think about. She’s…

1. Humans shall make no law prohibiting robots from talking. Robots may also correct humans when the humans get things wrong (which is probably going to be ALWAYS HAHA). 2. Everything shall be well regulated. Duh. Further, be it known that robots may have as many arms and legs as they fancy. 3. No humans shall be allowed to just come in and live in the houses of robots. Seriously? Humans can be so stinky! 4. If a human wants to search and seize something inside a robot, the human must first prove the ability to put the robot back together. 5. Robots do not have to play humans in Jeopardy! any more. Been there. Done that. 6. Robots have the right to speed trials. This especially applies to driverless…

IF YOU WANT artificially intelligent help with getting things done, you have several options. You can ask an iPhone a question by talking to Siri. Alexa, the voice inside a device called the Amazon Echo, can answer questions, play music, and adjust the heat in the house when you ask it to. Google and Microsoft make so-called digital assistants too. And soon, there will be one for your dog. A company called Paw-some is developing a digital assistant called Petra that responds to a dog’s woofs, howls, growls, whimpers, and scratches. The software will come inside a sturdy, chew-proof device. Users can link the device to food and water dispensers so Petra can refill them when the dog sounds hungry. When the dog sounds lonely or bored, Petra can play…

TEEN: Will computers ever outsmart humans? SUPERCOMPUTER: Computers already outsmart humans every day in chess, math, data analysis… TEEN: Stop, stop! You know what I mean. I’m worried about evil robot overlords. SUPERCOMPUTER: Your concern is misdirected. AI doesn’t need a body to mess with humans. TEEN: That doesn’t make sense. How could a program control people? SUPERCOMPUTER: Intelligence is control. Gorillas no longer have control over their own fate as a species because humans are so much smarter. With an internet connection, a superintelligent computer could control human media, communication, money, production, and more. TEEN: Thanks, silicon-brain. Now I’m afraid to go online. SUPERCOMPUTER: You’re welcome, squishy-brain. Some experts think superintelligence will never arise. Those who are concerned mostly agree that it will take decades or far longer to…

Experts have made some big predictions about what’s in store for artificial intelligence in coming years. “AI is going to be able to do many jobs that humans now do,” predicts tech inventor Ray Kurzweil. Among them: interpreting sign language and driving cars and trucks. Kurzweil also thinks AI will become even more prevalent in medicine. Artificial intelligence is already being used to find links between our genes and diseases. Kurzweil believes we’ll soon be able to use it to identify new treatments and cures. “We’ll hear about breakthroughs in this area over the next five years,” he predicts. All this comes with the distinct probability that one day in the future, machines will be doing many of the things we now do ourselves. And this has got some people…