Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

TONIGHT IS HALLOWEEN, and you have the perfect creepy haunted house set up. But after you go outside to light the jack-o-lanterns, you notice a big problem. Your skeleton is all mixed up. Some fiendish ghoul took apart all the bones, and put them back in the wrong places. But this “ghoul” seems to know a lot about bones. It left a label on each one with its scientific name, and a piece of paper listing curious facts. Use these clues to match each bone to the part of the body where it belongs. Can you fix the skeleton before your friends show up for the haunted house? Match the scientific names with the bones’ locations in the body. We’ve made the first match. Kathryn Hulick lives in Massachusetts with…

If you look at the back of your hand, you may see that some of your blood vessels look blue. Does that mean your blood there is really blue, or is something else going on? Actually, the blood in your body is always red. But when it travels in blood vessels (veins) that happen to be near the surface of your skin, it looks blue. It used to be thought that blood changed color as it traveled through your body. When your grandparents were kids, they learned that blood vessels rich in oxygen were red, and the vessels that had low oxygen levels were blue. This explanation didn’t make much sense. For one, if anyone took a sample from a blue-looking vessel, the blood that came out was always red.…

The team behind the website yourwildlife.org asks the icky questions about the animals, bacteria, fungi, and assorted microbes that live on humans and invites curious people like you and me (known as citizen scientists) to participate in answering them. Over the last few years, Your Wild Life scientists have scoured the skin and delved into the orifices of hundreds of people (and a few other primates), to try to answer some of the big (and, yes, gross) questions about some of the microscopic creatures that call our bodies home. Let’s explore a few of the team’s projects. Project: MEET YOUR MITES! Microscopic parasites are living, breeding, and dying on (and in) your face right now. Demodex mites, tiny arachnids related to spiders, ticks, and scorpions, are found on just about…

You know how B.O. is usually considered a bad thing? Well, Dr. Irene Rodríguez Luján of the Technical University of Madrid in Spain wants to use people’s body odor for good. Rodríguez Luján and her team performed a scientific study to analyze the smell from 13 people’s hands. They were testing to see if they could identify each individual by his or her unique smell. Using body odor to identify people could be very useful at places like airports, where security staff could check your palm smell along with your passport. But Rodríguez Luján and her colleagues didn’t put their noses next to people’s palms and sniff. (Thank goodness!) They used machines and math to capture and analyze the odors. Q Can you explain your team’s area of study? A…

Q: How can one person be good at singing and another not? Everyone has vocal cords!!! —Princess Mary Lynn W., Illinois A: Confession: I’m terrified of singing. I refuse to do karaoke and sometimes even mouth the words to “Happy Birthday.” When I absolutely must eke out a few notes, I can hear that they are hopelessly out of tune, but I can’t seem to fix them. Frustrated, I vow never to sing again. According to Sean Hutchins, the director of research at Canada’s Royal Conservatory, I’m trapped in an all-too-common vicious cycle. “Producing a note is a complex task,” he explains, that requires you to coordinate a bunch of different body parts, from your vocal cords to your tongue. It’s not so easy to hit exactly the right pitch,…

Everybody gets hiccups. That includes cats, some rodents, and even human babies before they are born. But for something so common, hiccups are still not well understood. Are they a relic of the breathing patterns of our evolutionary ancestors? Part of the skills mammals developed in order to drink milk? Or just an unexplained oddity of life? “The bottom line is we don’t know what causes them and we don’t know how to treat them,” says Dr. Tyler Cymet, currently the associate vice president for medical education at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine in Maryland. And if anyone should know, it’s Cymet, because he’s one of the few medical professionals who actually studies hiccups. He conducted a five-year study on 54 hospital patients suffering from hiccups who…

More than 500 years ago, the artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci made a sketch of what was considered at the time to be the ideal human body. His famous drawing of “The Vitruvian Man” shows a handsome man of perfect proportions, each outstretched arm and leg exactly the same length as its mate. The illustration offers an example of bilateral symmetry—where the left and right side of a body are more or less a mirror image of one other. But it turns out that symmetry is more than just a Renaissance ideal of beauty. Modern scientists have found that symmetry offers many advantages. Even when the differences are tiny, the most symmetrical people tend to be faster and healthier than their more irregular counterparts. They’re also considered more attractive—and…

FORGET SMARTPHONES and smart glasses. One day, we might have smart tattoos. The company NewDealDesign came up with an idea for a product called UnderSkin. The device would look like a pair of tattoos on your palm and the side of your thumb, but it would actually be a very thin computer implanted just below your skin. It would draw power from your body’s energy, and you could use it to unlock doors, monitor your health, exchange and store information, or even express your personality. UnderSkin is just an idea—you can’t go out and get one—but the technology exists to make it work. “We assume it is about five years from being real,” says designer Gadi Amit. Writer and technology entrepreneur Amal Graffstra already has a chip called a radio-frequency…

UP IN SPACE Philae Wakes Up THIS JUNE, scientists at the European Space Agency got an exciting message from space. Philae, the probe that successfully landed on a comet in November 2014, had woken up from a long nap. When Philae first arrived at the comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, it didn’t exactly stick the landing. The little robot tumbled into a shadowy crevice, where its solar-powered batteries quickly ran down. After sending some information about the comet back to Earth, Philae went into hibernation. Months later, as the comet traveled closer to the sun, the robot was able to recharge its batteries. Its first 85-second transmission to Earth thrilled scientists. Since then, it’s been sending readings and measurements in short bursts from its home comet. To scientists, that information is the…

A SPIDER’S WEB IS ONE OF THE WONDERS OF NATURE. WHAT CAN COMPARE WITH ITS SYMMETRY, ITS DELICACY, ITS INTRICACY? THE ANCIENT GREEKS IMMORTALIZED ONE SPIDER AND HER WEB IN A MYTH THAT’S BEAUTIFUL . . . AND HORRIFYING. MANY CENTURIES AGO, THERE LIVED A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG MAIDEN NAMED ARACHNE. HER FATHER, IDMON, WAS A MASTER DYER WHO TRAINED ARACHNE FROM AN EARLY AGE AS HIS HELPER. HE HAD ALSO INSTRUCTED HER IN THE ART OF WEAVING. QUICKLY SHE MASTERED EACH SKILL AND SOON WAS PRODUCING THE FINEST WORK ANYONE HAD EVER SEEN. BUT ARACHNE DID NOT REMAIN HUMBLE. SUCH A BOAST DID NOT GO UNNOTICED ON MOUNT OLYMPUS. DISGUISED AS AN OLD WOMAN, ATHENA VISITED ARACHNE’S HOMETOWN, WHERE EVERYONE WAS TALKING OF THE BEAUTIFUL DESIGNS SHE WOVE ON HER…

As the saying goes, he who smelt it dealt it. But if you dealt it, smelt it, and then didn’t get what everyone else was making a fuss about—what gives? On average, every human produces around a liter of gas every single day, which means there’s a lot of the stuff floating around. So what makes one toot so different from the next? Part of the difference from fart to fart can be explained by the foods that different people eat. For example, some foods contain a chemical called sulfur. If you’ve ever accidentally cracked open a rotten egg, you’ll recall that very unpleasant smell! If you love broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, dairy products, or other foods that happen to have a lot of sulfur, then the air from your derrière…

It’s time for a snack, and you and your pal are all set to share a pizza, with each of you getting half. When the pizza arrives, however, you find that the slices are not all the same size. The pizza slicer had made four cuts with equal angles, all crossing at one point, to end up with eight slices. But the crossing point is not at the pizza’s center, so some slices are larger than others. Mathematicians have shown there’s an easy solution to sharing the pizza evenly. They call it the Pizza Theorem. If you and your pal take alternate slices, you each automatically end up with an equal amount. It doesn’t matter where the crossing point is or which wedge you start with. The strategy of going…

HAVE YOU always wanted a tail? To wag when you’re happy, wrap around your toes when you’re cold, or thwap against someone just to annoy them? If so, you are not alone.1 Invest now, and you could do all this—and more! Brush away flies while you read a book! Puff it up to look tough. Or let it droop to tell the world you feel bad. When our website is up, you can click the button that says, “Buy a Tail.” Then, simply have it surgically installed and acquire clothes that have little holes in the back. Unlike other tails on the market that use string or yarn, our tails attach permanently. I do not even know if this is possible. Therefore some of the funds will go toward me…