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

“The species we know the least about are the very same species that we interact with most frequently—in backyards and on sidewalks, in street medians and on playgrounds.” — evolutionary ecologist Lauren Nichols, of School of Ants THE PROBLEM Scientists have identified 12,500 species of ants in the world, but they think there may be just as many species still waiting to be discovered. To get a better idea of which ants live in America, Andrea Lucky decided to create a map. It would help her and other ant scientists (called myrmecologists) learn which ants live where, track changes in the ants’ habitat, and maybe identify new species. But to get a lot of detail on their map, Lucky and her lab would need people to collect ants from all…

HUMAN SNEEZES DON’T MEAN much. You might let out an “ah-choo!” because you have a cold, or because it’s allergy season. But African wild dogs seem to use sneezes as votes. Scientists studied packs of African wild dogs in Botswana. This species is a distant cousin to the dogs people keep as pets. Before the animals go for a group hunt, they come together in an excited, tail-wagging meeting. It’s called a rally. The scientists saw that when more wild dogs sneezed during a rally, the pack was more likely to go hunting afterward. When fewer dogs sneezed, the pack more often stayed put. The researchers think sneezes are like votes to get going. (But how does a wild dog say “Someone please pass the tissues”?) That’s the news! Go…

YOU CALL YOURSELF A “PLAY AFICIONADO.” WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT ABOUT PLAY? I take nothing as seriously as play. Brian Sutton-Smith [a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania] has said, “The opposite of play is not work, it’s depression.” That’s incredibly true. When I see somebody who is anxious or struggling in school, I never tell them to work harder. I tell them to play more. Play invigorates the brain and fuels our imagination. If we do not cultivate play, we lose it. HOW CAN SOMEONE “LOSE” PLAY? Little kids just play. That’s how they learn. That’s how we all learn, even adults. But then they start going to school, and it gets more serious, and more serious, and more serious. I see this in high school students all the time—they…

Q: Are there such things as aliens? —Lili L., age 12, Colorado A: People have been wondering about the possibility of life on other worlds for thousands of years. But until recently, there wasn’t much scientists could do to figure it out. That’s because before 1992, they had never detected a planet outside of our solar system, called an exoplanet. Since then, scientists have built better and better telescopes, and now they’ve found thousands. Many exoplanets have rocky surfaces and are just the right distance from their stars to support liquid water. Th at makes them similar to the only planet we know that supports life: Earth. “Those are amongst the most common types of planets in the universe,” says Stephen Kane, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside.…

WITH A WHOLE PARK TO OVERSEE, IT MUST TAKE A LOT TO PLAN A NEW RIDE. HOW FAR IN ADVANCE DO YOU START? It can vary, depending on a lot of factors. But it’s about a three-year process from the day we first start talking about what we want to do to the day we actually put somebody on it. Engineers measure “wind loads”—the force applied to a structure by wind—to make sure that roller coasters can handle blustery conditions. IN THOSE THREE YEARS, WHEN DOES THE RIDE ACTUALLY START BEING BUILT? In an April opening, the off-site construction would begin the prior year in January, starting to fabricate track, starting to fabricate trains. We’d start breaking ground in May of the prior year. SAFETY IS SUCH A BIG PART…

Before I got your September 2017 issue, I was so excited that, about two weeks into August, I started checking my mailbox every day. On the day that it actually did come, I went outside thinking that it wouldn’t be like every other day—that it would come today. My hopes went up incredibly fast. But, when I opened the mailbox, they were suddenly dashed. A sense of dread settled over me. “NOOOOOO!” I cried out in despair. Then, I spotted something. The lowercase “m” of Muse! I immediately pulled it out. Yes! It finally came! In the jumble of catalogs and envelopes, the “boring” white and gray cover looked nothing like the normal colorful, lively, and unusual covers of Muse, and I simply mistook it for an envelope or paper.…

You probably love—or once loved—a playground. This playground might have a giant pod you can climb over and over. Or a swing shaped like a bird’s nest. Or water chutes. Or a cave made of bushes where you and your best friend whisper secrets. You cannot imagine your life without this playground. The First Public Play Spaces But if you had been born more than 150 years ago, this playground would not have existed. Kids back then went to school if they were lucky. They went to work if they weren’t. If they had time to play at all, they played in the streets. Adults didn’t design public spaces for children. And they definitely weren’t for “play.” That started to change in the late nineteenth century. Cities were starting to…

Getting Mucky in Nature Farther upstate, the Hands-on-Nature Anarchy Zone at Ithaca Children’s Garden has another approach. “We have a strong nature-based focus,” says Erin Marteal, executive director. This means that instead of broken-down cars and theater props, it provides loose parts that mostly come from nature: wooden stumps, driftwood, boulders, straw bales, and piles of mulch. And while it provides gardening tools, it only offers items like hammers and saws on special occasions. Without screws and nails, kids build forts, dens, and other structures by balancing and propping things up. They play pretend and create alternate worlds. They climb trees and hang from them in makeshift swings and hammocks. They figure out what objects and materials can and can’t do. Unlike play:groundNYC, there aren’t always playworkers on site. Parents…

AT THE HEIGHT OF the Rubik’s cube craze in the 1980s, one of every five people on the planet had tried the puzzle. You twist it and turn it, and it’s just maddening. Each square on a Rubik’s cube can rotate in every direction. But thanks to complex linkages inside it, the cube itself remains intact. Invented by sculptor and architect Erno Rubik, this seemingly simple cube conceals a staggering secret. You can arrange its colored squares more than 43 quintillion different ways. (One quintillion equals a billion billions.) So at one turn a second, it would still take a trillion-plus years to assemble every combination. That’s a higher number than the age of the universe! Expert solvers are known as “cubists.” They invent complex strategies to move “wrong” squares…

THIS IS A CUBE. Well, some people might not agree. A famous painting by Belgian artist René Magritte depicts a pipe with the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” That’s French for “This is not a pipe.” At first, you look at the painting and think the artist is just joking. He painted a pipe and then said it wasn’t a pipe. I mean, it’s not a very sophisticated joke, but he was trying, right? But then you think a little more. It’s not a pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe. A pipe is made of wood or other solid materials. Magritte’s picture is made of paint, little bits of pigment suspended in oil. A pipe is three dimensional. You can put something (bubbles, or maybe a tiny houseplant)…

A boy slices through thick cardboard with a handsaw. A girl grabs a hammer, nails, and scrap wood and starts pounding. A group of kids builds a bonfire with whatever they can find, their feet slipping in mud. Broken toys and furniture clump around them. Think “playground” and you probably see slides, swings, and monkey bars, not potentially dangerous tools and what looks like trash. And yet “adventure playgrounds” give kids just that: the raw materials they need to let their bodies and imaginations run wild. Trash or Treasure? Can you pronounce this word: Skrammellegepladsen? No? Well, you might want to play in it anyways. That’s because it’s the name of the first adventure playground: the word is Danish for “junk playground.” The man who created it, landscape architect Carl…

What do playgrounds and children’s museums have in common? Both places are built for kids to have fun. But it’s no fun (and no fair!) if some kids can’t join in. The good news? Experts are finding ways to make these places fun for everyone. DESIGNING ACCESSIBLE PLAYGROUNDS Designing playgrounds is a tough job. First, they have to be fun. But they also have to be safe, affordable, and accessible. Kids with disabilities can use and enjoy accessible playgrounds. A disability is anything that limits a person’s movement or ability to do certain activities. Some people can’t get around without the help of a wheelchair or walker. Others have trouble climbing, jumping, or balancing. How do you design a playground for people with such different abilities? One way is to…

GIVE ONE THE slightest whirl, and it just keeps turning. Fidget spinners may be a fairly new toy craze, but technologically, they’re old. They’re “flywheels.” These are comparatively heavy wheels that store energy as rotation. Everything from potters’ wheels to engines use flywheels to hold extra power and then release it later. A low-friction pivot (often using ball bearings) helps the spinner turn longer. Its heavy rotating arms increase what physicists call the spinner’s moment of inertia, which measures how much an object resists changes to its rotation. Yet none of this explains one of the fidget’s most baffling effects. To feel it, just spin one horizontally between your thumb and forefinger. Then rotate your wrist slightly to tilt the spinner left, then right. Did you feel a mysterious force…

ONCE UPON a time, toys didn’t whirr or flash. They didn’t connect to the cloud or unlock special content. They never needed new batteries. They just, well, sat there. They sat there doing nothing . . . until a child came along and unlocked the fun waiting in an ordinary marble or wooden building block. But will future children want to play with such old-fashioned toys? Many experts hope so. The American Specialty Toy Retailing Association is a non-profit that provides kids with toys that “focus on what the child can do, rather than what the toy can do.” Some toys help kids develop important skills. Too many special features may distract from those skills, making play more about the toy and less about the child. For example, a child…