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

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!…

Scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California are sending fruit flies (among other creatures) up to the International Space Station. They’re hoping the flies can help them predict some of the physical challenges that astronauts may face when, sometime after 2030, NASA sends the first human mission to Mars. Space is a grand adventure, but it can be hard on human bodies. NASA has already learned some of these lessons the hard way. For instance: having a head cold in space is no picnic. The First Colds in Space In 1968, NASA needed some good press. The year before had been a disaster. All three crew members of the Apollo 1 mission had died in a cabin fire before the spaceship even launched. If NASA was going to put…

Every hundred thousand years or so, a large asteroid or comet hits Earth. The explosive force of the impact sends tons of material into the air and punches a big hole in the crust. We don’t see a lot of these old craters, however, because wind, water, and moving tectonic plates are constantly changing Earth’s surface. Over time, many impact craters become altered or buried deep underground. One such buried crater is underneath Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. In November 2005, Aaron Gronstal, a microbiology student at the Open University in the United Kingdom, visited a drilling project at the Chesapeake crater. His goal: to discover what sort of microbes may live deep underground in the ancient impact site. November 14, 2005 I am standing in the middle of a soybean…

MUMMIFY THIS! Last October we asked you to draw us a picture of your favorite object mummified and ready for burial. We loved your entries so much, we're having them mummified so we can keep them with us forever. KOKO'S KUDOS This month’s runners-up are Thalia I., age 10, California; Paul, age 10, Calfiornia; Hannah S., age 10, New York. You can find their entries and more contests at musemagkids.com/museum. NEW CONTEST STORIES IN THE STARS The Cherokee say the Milky Way came to be when a giant dog spilled a trail of cornmeal across the sky. The Greeks claim Zeus created Ursa Major and the Big Dipper when he sent a bear into the sky to protect it from hunters. What stories do you see in the stars? Invent…

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…

From a distance, the picture looks like a pen-and-ink study of a famous painting. Close up, all you see is a squiggly mess of connected lines that form a jagged but continuous path. Created by Robert Bosch (a mathematician at Oberlin College), the picture is not only an artwork but also a solution to a particular math problem. Suppose you’re planning a trip that takes you to, say, five cities scattered across the country. You want to visit each city once, following a route that adds up to the shortest possible distance. In this case, there are 120 (5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 120) routes that take you to each of the five cities in turn. You could add up the distances for each route…