Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children March 2015

We discovered a tiny, mysterious volume called The Book of Cheers and Chants To Be Used by Any and All Small Things. (It was squeezed between two massive dictionaries at Muse HQ.) Apparently small things need some morale boosting, too. And apparently these cheers don’t need to be Shakespeare, they just need to have a good beat. Belt one out if you’re ever feeling less than big. TINY THING CHEERS, CHANTS, AND TAUNTS Give me a D! D! Give me an I! I! Give me an M! M! Give me another I! I! Give me an N! N! Give me a U! U! What have you got? DIMINU! Is that a word? PROBABLY NOT! So give me a T! T! Give me an I! I! Give me a V! V!…

Gecko Hands for Humans Soon Spiderman won’t be the only one climbing up the side of building. scientists recently figured out a way to scale sheer walls too. They did it by imitating not spiders, but geckos. Engineers at Stanford University invented a device for climbing a smooth wall using two hand pads. They were inspired by the toe pads of geckos, which grip walls using tiny ridges. The human hand pads are made of many small tiles that distribute weight, and each tile is covered in microscopic teeth. Special springs help the pads grip the wall when they’re holding weight, then release easily when the user lifts them. Geckos are small, and scientists have struggled in the past to make gecko-inspired technology big enough for a person. But as…

Imagine living in a community of thousands where everyone’s survival requires hauling objects 20 times their body weight and hustling a hundred miles for a bite to eat. What’s more, most can barely see, and no one tells anyone else what to do. No problem, if you’re an ant. From parched deserts and tropical rainforests to kitchen counters and school playgrounds, ants have figured out how to thrive almost anywhere on the planet. In January 2013, they went even farther—all the way to the International Space Station. Flying a couple hundred miles above the earth’s surface, this pioneer crew of 600 pavement ants was helping scientists crack an age-old mystery: how a group can search an area thoroughly with nobody leading the way. (You might think the queen ant is…

Hundreds of students have already participated in Deborah Gordon’s ant experiment, and you can join them. Go to musemagkids.comeplorations to find instructions for building your own ant enclosure using craft foam and other inexpensive materials. You can collect ants by luring them into small vials with cookie crumbs. Or you can use an aspirator, a tool for sucking the ants up (just make sure you don’t end up with a mouthful of bugs). Watch what happens when ants bump into each other. Do they adjust their paths when a space is less crowded? Afterward, you’ll upload your observations to an online database. “This may help us to discover new algorithms for collective searching that are used by ants never before studied by scientists,” Gordon says.…

Q: What causes itches, and how does scratching stop it? —Julian H., age 11 A: I’m getting itchy just thinking about your question! So I asked Zhou-Feng Chen, the director of the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University in St. Louis, what’s going on. It turns out itches don’t really come from your skin, even though that’s where you usually feel them—they come from your brain. Here’s what happens. An ant scurrying across your arm, or some other irritating disturbance, wakes up nearby nerve cells in your body. These cells’ only job is to detect potentially itchy sensations, and when they do, they send a message to your brain using a “special highway” reserved just for them, Chen explains. Once your brain interprets that message, you start…

We may be close to finding extraterrestrial life in our solar system. But, as one astrobiologist explains, we’ll probably need a microscope to see it. Sunlight glitters from a tiny robot probe as it touches down on an icy moon. Or the spacecraft that finds alien life might be larger. Imagine a craft shuttling astronauts down from a mother ship that has carried them through space for months in a deep, cold sleep. Whether they’re astronauts or people guiding a robot from Earth, you can be sure some of the mission leaders will be astrobiologists. These are scientists looking for extraterrestrial life—in other words, life that did not come from Earth. Extraterrestrial life doesn’t mean human-sized or dog-sized creatures (like “ET” in the movie) that might wave back at the…