Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2019 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

HPB PSA I am a representative from the Intergalactic Organization of Hot Pink Bunny Hunters (IOHPBH for short). It has recently come to our attention that HPB infestations are at a record high. The information contained in this letter will help you safely and efficiently get rid of these fluffy pink nuisances, rendering them helpless and no longer pink without harming them. How to De-HPB Your Home, Planet, Solar System, or Galaxy: 1. Make sure all residents are informed of the fact that HPB removal will begin (insert date), as they may have to leave if the HPBs put up a fight. A single home should last a couple days. An entire planet will take approximately 2.5 weeks. To calculate the period of time your solar system will take, multiply…

FOR FIVE years, NASA scientists have debated the best place to send a Mars rover in 2020. Now they’ve chosen the robot’s destination. It will land in a site called Jezero Crater. Billions of years ago, a river of water flowed into this crater. That water might have held Martian microbes. That’s why scientists think Jezero Crater is a good spot to search for signs of ancient life. The rover will collect rocks and soil samples. In a future mission, NASA and European scientists hope to bring those samples back to Earth to study them. Now that scientists have decided on the rover’s landing site, they can start mapping exactly where the rover will roll and explore. For an interplanetary road trip, it’s good to plan ahead.…

It is an inarguable mathematical fact that every map is a lie. Well, a map is not a lie in the sense of a statement intended to deceive someone. Maps do give us useful information about the world. But every map is a compromise. Statistician George Box famously said, “All models are wrong.” He was pointing out that no simplified mathematical formulation can perfectly capture the complicated reality of the world. He followed it up, though, with, “But some are useful.” Even models that are incomplete can help us understand the world, as long as we understand their strengths and limitations. The same is true of maps. Mathematical Impossibility In the 1820s, German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss proved the theorema egregium, which is Latin for “remarkable theorem.” (A theorem is…

It was Day 9 of the search, and the hiker still hadn’t been found. One of the largest wildfires in California’s history was raging near the place she’d last been seen, in the remote mountain wilderness. Huge plumes of smoke blocked searching from the air. A Chinook helicopter flew through the haze to land Search-and-Rescue (SAR) teams on the ground. These brave people were the lost hiker’s best hope for rescue. Turns out she was lucky that one teenage searcher was on the team. Kobe’s Rescue Mission Kobe Pole, 15 years old, had already been on over a dozen rescue missions with his mountain rescue team. Like his teammates, Kobe can climb up and rappel down ropes. He can rig lines and pulleys to rescue people from cliffs. He has…

Around the same time that Marie was roaming fields and forests “reading nature,” as her dad called it, world geographers were debating the theory of continental drift. In 1912, a German scientist named Alfred Wegener theorized that millions of years ago, the Earth had just one huge land mass surrounded by ocean. He thought that our continents were on shifting plates that drifted apart. Wegener wrote about his theory in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. His book was translated into many languages. Geologists worldwide all agreed that, well, Wegener was crazy. He was attacked professionally and personally for his ideas. For decades, continental drift was a very touchy subject among scientists.…

“VICTORY CACHE.” The title sounds intriguing, along with its code name, “GCG0XR.” I put the coordinates of the geocache into Google Earth and wait as the world spins around on my screen. Within seconds I hover virtually over the spot where the treasure is hidden, a super-busy intersection with a lot of traffic. The description reads, “. . . along the Emerald Necklace . . . between the Hynes and Fenway T stops . . .” I load the coordinates into my global positioning system (GPS) satellite receiver, feed a calibrated, zoomed-in Google Earth screenshot of the area, and begin to plan my route. I’m on my way to seek a geocache. Geeks Mark the Spot Geocaching is a geeky, modern treasure hunt. You find an interesting location—say the Public…

IMAGINE TURNING on the GPS and seeing an image of your car from above. As the car drives, the map follows along in real time, alerting you to any traffic, pedestrians, animals, or other things nearby. Routes and names of roads appear over the livestream. It’s like the map has come to life. This type of map isn’t available yet. But it could be soon. In 2014, the Worldview-3 satellite was launched into space. Even though it orbits Earth at more than 370 miles (600 km) away, it can capture images of objects on Earth that are just 10 inches (25 cm) across. Peering all the way from outer space, it can make out a smartphone held in your hand. It can tell what types of cars are traveling down…

A wombat is a very adorable Australian mammal with a very weird skill: its poop comes out in cubes. It’s the only animal in the world with turds you could use as dice. But no one knows how or why. To get some clues, researchers studied the intestines of two wombats that had been hit and killed by cars. The scientists saw that feces only formed cubes in the very last part of the intestine. They cleaned out the animals’ intestines and then filled them with a long balloon. This let the scientists measure how tight or stretchy the intestine was. They found that some parts of the intestine walls were stretchier than others. When poop travels through this unevenly tight tube, it squishes into a square shape. But the…

A MERCATOR In the Mercator projection, all the circles are perfectly round, but some are much bigger than others. B GALL-PETERS Here, the images of the circles all have the same area, but they do not all have the same shape. Circles near the equator have become long ellipses, and circles near the poles have become wide ellipses. C EQUAL EARTH Like the Gall-Peters, the circles in the Equal Earth projection all have the same size, but their shapes vary over the Earth. At the equator, they are slightly stretched vertically, and they become stretched more horizontally and tilted as they go towards the poles. D ROBINSON The Robinson projection is a true compromise. Neither areas nor shapes are perfectly preserved, but the creator, Arthur Robinson, thought it balanced aesthetics…

Q: If you were in a car going the speed of light, what would you see if you turned on the headlights? —Micah W., age 18, Texas A: Your question is quite similar to the one that first got a teenaged Albert Einstein pondering the weirdness of special relativity—although as a child of the nineteenth century, he thought about trains instead of cars. He wondered: if I were on a train traveling near the speed of light, would I be able to see my reflection in a mirror well enough to shave? Whether your light-speed vehicle is a car or a train, you and Einstein would both see “exactly what you would see if you were standing still,” says Hal Evans, a physicist at the University of Indiana. If you…

A wave of cold Atlantic water crashes over the side of the research vessel, dousing the scientists standing on deck from head to toe. In their red wet-weather gear, orange lifejackets, and blue safety helmets, they appear ready for anything. But nothing protects against the onslaught of rogue waves. As the water recedes, they slosh around in their boots and return to the task at hand: listening to the ocean and its inhabitants. Their lander is ready to go. The size of a Smart car, it has scientific equipment mounted next to its bright orange floats and communication beacon. This lander is about to spend the next 12 months weighted to the sea floor, recording sonar data. After the lander is released from the winch, it quickly falls out of…

The toy in this geocache is a travel bug. A travel bug is a special object with a dog tag tied around it. When seekers find a travel bug in a geocache, they take it out and put it in the next geocache they find. This way, the bug travels from cache to cache. When seekers log their finds on the geocache website, they report that they have found a travel bug. Anyone can enter a travel bug tag number on the site and see all the places the bug has been, along with pictures uploaded by people who found it.…

Maps of the United States often show the states in different colors. In general, mapmakers use enough colors to make sure states that touch are never the same color. Suppose you have only three colors of pens. Is that enough to fill in all the states? Not quite. Nevada, for example, is surrounded by five other states: California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. There’s no way to color this group of states without using a fourth color. Can you figure out what other US states force the use of a fourth color? Would you ever need five colors? In 1976, two mathematics professors at the University of Illinois proved that four colors would be enough for any map that could be drawn on a flat piece of paper. Curiously, four…

IN THE FORESTS of northeastern Brazil, big dirt piles are everywhere. The mounds are about 8.2 feet (2.5 m) tall, and 30 feet (9 m) wide. But the architects behind the massive building project are tiny: they’re termites. The insects have been living and building here for up to 4,000 years. Some termite species create tall mounds full of complicated tunnels, which they live inside. But when scientists looked inside the Brazilian mounds, they found . . . nothing. Just dirt. That’s because the termites here live underground. As they dig, they carry dirt out of their tunnels and put it into these giant heaps. The researchers estimate that these termites have built 200 million mounds. The dirt inside all those piles would be enough to build the largest Egyptian…

DRAGONS, GRIFFINS, UNICORNS, sea monsters, and other mythical beasts stalk some ancient maps. They appear alongside real creatures, in real places. The Borgia World Map, made in Europe sometime near the end of the Middle Ages, features a drawing of a dragon-like creature in India. It warns that some serpents there can eat an ox in one bite. The same map also shows an elephant, camels, and other animals we now know to be real. Another map of the world, made in Italy during the Renaissance, shows a unicorn in Siberia, mermaids in the ocean, and a centaur in Antarctica. The map Carta Marina offers a truly spectacular menagerie of sea monsters. The Swedish priest Olaus Magnus made the map in 1539. In a book he wrote describing the map,…

In the 1920s, Marie Tharp was a little girl who spent many days bumping along country roads with her dad in his rickety green truck. He worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Soils, visiting farms. He tested soil and drew planting maps for the farmers. Because of her dad’s job, her family moved a lot. By the time she finished high school, Marie had attended 17 schools. When she wasn’t on the road with her dad or in a new school, there was lots of time alone, reading, drawing, and playing violin. Marie wanted to become a soil surveyor like her dad. But she knew that was unlikely. In those days, women rarely had careers in the sciences. Most were only encouraged to work as a teacher, secretary,…

If you know the exact location of three points on a map, and you also know exactly how far you are from each point, then you can figure out exactly where you are. For example, if you are 790 miles (1,271 km) from New York City, 2,016 miles (3,244 km) from Los Angeles, and 719 miles (1,157 km) from Atlanta, then you know that you are in Chicago. No other location in the world can satisfy these three conditions. This method of finding your location is based on angles and geometry and is called triangulation. A GPS receiver calculates its distance from any three of the known 22 satellites in orbit around Earth to calculate its exact location on Earth. On cloudy days, a GPS receiver can’t “see” the satellites…

Utterly Uncharted It seems like most places appear on a map these days—you can see your house, your school, or your favorite ice cream store online! Think of somewhere you know hasn’t been mapped yet. Send us a picture or description of your favorite uncharted place—maybe with monsters, maybe without. We’ll pick which ones we’d like to send our (alas, imaginary) resident cartographer to. CONTEST RULES 1. Your contest entry must be your very own original work. Ideas and words should not be copied. 2. Be sure to include your name, age, and full address on your entry. 3. Only one entry per person, please. 4. If you want your work returned, enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope. 5. All entries must be signed by a parent or legal guardian, saying…