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

I recently learned that one proposed solar system model stated that everything was made up of four elements: fire, water, earth, and wind/air. Shouldn’t there have been a fifth element—life?! I mean, what did this guy think? Also, how big is the fan mail pit (FMP)?! It appears only 10 percent or so actually have their letter in the magazine. The rest go in the fan mail pit. This FMP must be HUGE!!! If Muse continues to grow in popularity, you guys will have to create a parallel universe and put a planet called FanMailPit inside of it. Maybe in that universe, there ARE four elements that make up everything. —NATHAN A. / age 12 / Texas Something to say? Send letters to Muse Mail, 70 E. Lake St., Suite…

SOMETIME BETWEEN 140 million and 250 million years ago, the first flower bloomed on Earth. Today its descendants grow all around us in every color, shape, and size. It’s hard to imagine what that first blossom looked like. But now scientists have found a way to—almost—peer back in time and see it. Researchers gathered data on the structure of 792 flower species. They combined that information with fossil evidence and a family tree based on DNA. Tracing the family tree back, they were able to reconstruct the structure of the fi rst fl ower. Th e researchers think the fl ower probably had male and female parts in the same blossom, like many plants do today. And its petals were arranged in rings of three, not in a spiral. (The…

Alice finishes folding her note for Bob. She glances around the classroom. Her teacher is busy. She taps the student in front of her and points to Bob. Alice watches the note cross the room. Instead of passing on the note, though, Mallory opens it. She laughs to herself. Alice frowns. Mallory folds up the note and hands it to Bob. She turns and smiles at Alice. The smile is mean. Alice is determined to get a note to Bob without Mallory—or anyone else—reading it. Fine, Alice thinks. I’ll send him a text. The text will face some of the same dangers as the note. Luckily, Alice can handle them. She has lots of experience with cryptography. That’s the process of hiding or disguising information using codes. Alice is an…

If you pay attention to the news, you’d be forgiven for thinking that hackers are bad people. There’s always some story about hackers breaking into computers to steal information. Or hackers have locked up computers so the owners can’t access their own files without paying a ransom. Those activities are against the law. But not all hackers are criminals. Some use their skills to help people and actually fight computer crime. WHAT IS A HACKER?  The terms “hacker” and “hacking” have been around for some time, but it wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that those words started to refer to machines and the people who use them. At that time, a hacker was simply someone who was good at solving mechanical problems, especially in clever and creative ways. It…

David Brumley is on a mission to keep computers secure. As he puts it, his work is “fundamentally about helping support trust in cyberspace.” He also runs contests that teach hacking skills in a safe environment. Brumley and his team at his company ForAllSecure are working on protecting computers using automated cybersecurity systems. He says this type of cybersecurity system is like a self-driving car. “I want to make it fully automatic—like an autopilot to protect computers against attackers!” WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO TRAIN A NEW GENERATION OF PEOPLE WHO’LL PROTECT COMPUTERS? The biggest thing is to give people—hackers—space to explore and permission to think outside the box. Hackers are the only people who make sure computers are safe. Without hackers, who would check that? SO HACKERS AREN’T THE…

Depressed people share photos on Instagram that are bluer, grayer, and darker than the photos happier people share. Researchers discovered this when they used computers to analyze almost 44,000 photos from 166 volunteers’ Instagram accounts. About half of the Instagram users had been diagnosed with depression within the past three years. The analysis showed that photos posted by people who’d been depressed tended to look different. On average, they were less bright and had more blue and gray colors. There was also a difference in the filters people preferred. Non-depressed people especially liked a filter called Valencia, which makes photos brighter. Depressed people were more likely to use a fi lter called Inkwell, which turns color pictures into black-and-white ones. The researchers think the findings might someday help doctors check…

TIRED OF thinking up new passwords for your online accounts? Soon you may be able to let a pigeon pick your password instead. Or peck your password, that is. A company in France is developing a pigeon-powered system for creating passwords. Users will be able to request a password from their computers at home. They can specify how long the password should be. The request will go to a lab in France, where trained pigeons will peck at a keyboard until they reach the user’s desired number of characters. (The pigeons will work in short shifts, and they’ll get to fly around and relax during their off time.) In tests, researchers have found that passwords created by pigeons are harder for hackers to guess than passwords randomly generated by a…

Test your password smarts. PEOPLE HAVE been using passwords to protect computer accounts for more than 50 years, so you’d think we’d be pretty good at it. But many of the things we think we know are wrong. How much do you know about passwords? Take this quiz and find out! TRUE or FALSE 1) “P455w0rd#” is a good password. 2) It’s not safe to use the same password for many different sites or accounts. 3) You should never write down your password. 4) You should never share your passwords with anyone else. ANSWERS 1) False. Passwords should be nearly impossible for someone else to guess, which means not using a simple word in English or another language. Many websites have rules to force users to create stronger passwords, like…

WHEN YOU GO ON VACATION, airport cameras may scan your retinas—the image-forming surfaces inside the eyes. Each human retina has a unique pattern of blood vessels delivering nutrients to its cells. (Amazingly, you see past these tiny vessels without ever noticing them!) In retinal scanning, a low-powered infrared beam maps the shapes of these vessels. Then a computer compares that pattern to a database. In today’s security-conscious world, biometric identification—detecting the unique characteristics of each human body—could provide the ultimate measure of safety. Picture opening a lock, where you are the key. From the unique pattern of radiating lines in the iris (the colored portions of your eyes) to the characteristic shape of your palms, any distinctive physical trait may identify you. All biometrics systems include ways to observe a…

TO GET help with sleep problems, people often have to spend a night in a lab. But being away from home, hooked up to wires and machines, can make it hard to sleep at all. So researchers are working on a new sleep-study method—one that lets people doze comfortably in their own beds. The method uses a plain-looking device that sends low-power radio waves toward a sleeping person. By analyzing how the waves bounce back, the device can measure a person’s breathing and heart rate. In a new study, researchers trained a computer to use this information to judge when a person is in different stages of sleep: awake, light sleep, deep sleep, or REM. (REM stands for rapid eye movement. Dreaming happens during this sleep stage.) Tracking when people…

It’s your best friend’s birthday. You want to send a text. So you pick up your phone. “Passthought?” a voice says in your ear. You close your eyes. And you imagine diving into a swimming pool. The phone unlocks. Wait. What just happened? You didn’t type a password. You didn’t scan your fingerprint. All you had to do was think. BRAIN POWER Today’s phones don’t let you think your password. But in the future, passthoughts may be normal. John Chuang builds and tests passthought systems. He’s an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. “A passthought is just like a password,” he says. “You get to choose what you want to think about.” You could imagine diving. Or singing “Happy Birthday.” Or your dog doing a trick. If you think…

When some people think about numbers, they imagine colors, shapes, and patterns. Picture the whole numbers from 1 to 256. Each of these numbers is either a prime number (divisible only by itself and 1) or a composite number (the product of two or more primes). The only exception is 1, which is in a category all by itself. So, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and 19 start off the list of primes. The other numbers (4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, and so on) are composites. Artist and math lover Margaret Kepner has translated these numbers and their properties into a vivid design. It combines the beauty of art with the logic of mathematics. Creating her colorful designs on a computer, Kepner…

YOU PICK up your phone and stare at it. Instantly, the screen unlocks. But it won’t do that for anyone else. The phone knows who you are. It recognizes the shape of your face. Welcome to the world of the latest iPhone. It comes with a feature called Face ID. Apple executive Phil Schiller described it this way at the product launch: “With the iPhone X, your iPhone is locked until you look at it and it recognizes you. Nothing has ever been more simple, natural, and effortless.” Your face isn’t the only characteristic you can use as a password. Many smartphones already accept fingerprint logins. Other security systems check the shape of the ear, patterns in the eye, or the way a person walks. All of these characteristics, called…