Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2018 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

THE PROBLEM: Your body is home to hundreds of trillions of germs. Scientists call them microbes—and there are over three pounds of them in your guts alone! But for something that’s such an important part of you, much about this massive community of microbes, known as your microbiome, is still a mystery. Researchers at the American Gut Project have collected microbiome samples from nearly 10,000 people. They want to study these samples to better understand how our health, our habits, and our microbiomes affect one another. But each of the 10,000 samples contains up to 500 species of microbes. That’s a lot of data to sort through. To make sense of it all, they’re going to need some help. WHAT CITIZEN SCIENTISTS CAN DO: Researchers at Canada’s McGill University are…

For thousands of years, microbes have helped people make delicious foods, including cheese, pickles, and yogurt. They produce chemicals that create a wide variety of aromas and flavors. The more diverse the microbes, the more flavors you can make. Yeast is a microbe from the fungus kingdom. People use certain kinds of yeast to make bread and beer. Some yeast lives inside flowers, eating the sugars in the nectar. When flowers die in the winter, the yeast escapes by hitching a ride inside a pollinating bug like a wasp. One day, Anne Madden and Rob Dunn at North Carolina State University had an idea. Could a yeast found in wasps also make something tasty? The answer was yes. They’ve made a beer that adults say is surprisingly good. The researchers…

Many types of microbes can live in our guts. Sometimes harmful germs grow out of control inside our bodies. Other times microbes invade from tainted food, water, or elsewhere. Either way, bad microbes can be big trouble. Here are just a few of these bad actors’ names. Can you match them with their nasty symptoms? 1. Escherichia coli 2. Candida albicans 3. Clostridium difficile 4. Shigella 5. Cryptosporidia 6. Vibrio cholerae A. Watery poop, bad cramps, and other difficulties trouble patients. A person’s risk of developing this infection increases if they’ve recently stayed at a hospital or taken antibiotics. B. Runny, bloody poop, fevers, and stomach pain can result from this family of contagious bacteria. You’ll know it’s a family because it goes by…

Bacteria are small—most are smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell—but numerous. Scientists organize them into different groups based both on genetic and physical features you can see with the aid of a microscope. Here are your hands’ top five inhabitants: 1) The Streptococcus are spherical and grow in chains. 2) The Staphylococcus are spherical and cluster together like grapes. 3) The Corynebacterium are rod-shaped with enlarged ends that make them look like barbells. 4) The rod-shaped Pseudomonas move about using their flagella, long tail-like appendages. 5) The Acinetobacter look like smushed spheres. They twitch their entire bodies to move.…

HUMAN BABIES LIVE inside their mothers for about nine months before they’re born. If they come out too soon, they’re called premature. These infants can have many health problems, and some even die. That’s why doctors want better technology for taking care of premature babies. A new tool called the Biobag might be the first step. The Biobag is, well, a bag for babies. Researchers tested it using eight premature lambs. Like humans and other mammals, lambs don’t breathe air before they’re born. They float in liquid called amniotic fluid. The Biobag tries to copy that watery environment. After the lambs were born prematurely, the researchers sealed them up in the bags. They gave the lambs nutrition and medicine through their umbilical cords. The lambs lived in the Biobags for…

Q: What would happen if a person were injected with plant cells? —Zoe F. A Our bodies are good at defending against : invaders. If you were injected with plant cells, your internal army—immune cells—would corner the intruders and slowly gobble them up, like they do with dangerous bacteria and viruses. But Glenn Gaudette, a biomedical engineer at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, says there’s one part of a plant cell that wouldn’t bother your immune system: its thick, strong walls, made of a substance called cellulose. Gaudette doesn’t study plants. He studies the heart and, especially, ways to get it working again if it stops beating. In his quest to grow fresh heart tissue in his laboratory, he had a problem. He could get heart cells to survive and…

Bacteria in your gut can send signals to your brain by releasing substances that travel to the brain through the bloodstream. Gut bacteria can influence your mood and when you feel hungry. One study in mice found that changing the gut bacteria affected personality. Microbes that live here eat the grease on your nose and forehead, but some bacteria contribute to outbreaks of pimples. Microbes here help digest food stuck between your teeth. They can also give you cavities and that dreaded morning breath. Do your armpits stink? Blame your microbes. Bacteria that live here produce chemicals that give armpits their nose-wrinkling odor. People with smelly pits have different types of bacteria than people with non-smelly pits. Microbes that live here help you digest the food you eat. Your gut…

Mummies are the stuff of horror movies: blank-eyed creatures shuffling toward us with arms outstretched, tattered linen wrappings trailing behind them like filthy streamers. Or maybe you’ve seen actual mummies inside glass cases in museums, with leathery skin, shrunken cheeks and browned teeth, immobile and eternally at rest. Either way, mummies don’t have much to say. Except they do—the real ones, at least. They can speak volumes to scientists who know how to listen. Usually, mummies and microbes are two things that refuse to interact. Microbes are tiny organisms that play many roles in the human body. After someone dies, microbes aid in decomposition, or breaking down the body. A person can be mummified only if these tiny creatures can’t do their jobs. As the body gets preserved, possibly for…

I am here to encourage those awesome misunderstood science kids who know exactly what to do with their lives! I am one of those people. I am an epic homeschooler with a beloved passion. I love (love, love, love, LOVE) chemistry and science. My goal in life is to earn a PhD in chemistry and win the Nobel Prize. I have done more experiments than I can count and am going to build a lab in my backyard. No one else I know loves science like me. So if you are a science lover, whatever field you are interested in, and everyone else thinks you’re weird, keep being weird because weird is another name for awesome. That is why I love Muse. It shows me that there are other awesome…

What’s your body made of? One answer is trillions of tiny units called cells. A trillion is 1 followed by 12 zeroes, or a million millions. These cells work together so you can function as a person. But that’s not all. Single-celled organisms also live in and on your body. They’re microbes. That means they’re too tiny to see with just our eyes. And there are lots of them. “You have 40 trillion microbes inside you,” says Jack Gilbert, a microbiologist based in Chicago. The microbes in our bodies include bacteria and lots of other tiny organisms. They live on skin and in mouths, stomachs, and other parts. But our microbes aren’t just along for the ride. They affect our health—for both good and bad. That’s especially true for microbes…

A burglar sneaks into a house on a quiet street in New York City. He walks through the house, touching countertops and door handles. Finally, he steals a single card from a full deck. Then he leaves. Nearby, Jarrad Hampton-Marcell is waiting. But he’s not a cop—he’s a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. He set up this robbery and many others like it as a science experiment. He’s part of an effort to develop a brand new way to catch criminals—by collecting and analyzing their microbes. Microbes include bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic critters. They cover your body, inside and out. But these miniscule hitchhikers don’t always stay put. You breathe them in and out. Clouds of microbes waft off your skin all the time, landing wherever you…

Right now, bacteria are living on your skin, in your mouth, and in your gut. Icky? Yes, but also amazing. These tiny tenants help run your body and keep it healthy. We have barely begun to understand all that our microbes do for us. In fact, for most of human history, people didn’t know microbes even existed, let alone lived as part of us. Then, a few hundred years ago, someone opened a window into this hidden world. LITTLE ANIMALS In the 1600s, a young Dutchman worked by lamplight to grind a bead of glass into a perfectly symmetrical lens. His name was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Although untrained in the sciences, he was very good at grinding lenses. By doing so, he created the most powerful microscopes then on Earth.…

NEW CONTEST Mapping Micro City To a germ, the back of your hand might be the size of a continent! Help your microbial buddies out, and draw them a map of one of their favorite places on your body. Maybe it’s your palm, your stomach, or your unwashed armpit (eww). Have fun imagining microbe cities, forests of hair follicles, and soapy danger zones. Send your map our way, and we’ll share it only with helpful microbes—no bad germs allowed! 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,…