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

Theoretically Serious I’m a serious Whovian, Star Wars fan, and nerd from Ravenclaw, and I would really appreciate it if you would do an issue on theoretical physics and multidimensional topology and geometry. Please mail me a set of slides containing the safest strains of your “scented microbes.” Also, the blueprints for the Color Gun. If you don’t publish this letter, I WILL send my little brother to annoy you, and when he’s finished doing that, I’ll send an army of lime green fire-breathing jackalopes, each of which is armed with a lightsaber to wipe out your army of hot pink bunnies at Muse HQ. This is NOT an empty threat! I’d also like to say that the lime green fire-breathing jackalopes LOVE chocolate and WILL eat all of yours…

WHEN YOUR DENTAL hygienist scrapes plaque off your teeth, you’re probably happy to have it gone. But scientists were glad a medieval skeleton still had its tooth gunk. That material revealed something surprising about the history of writing. The skeleton came from a woman who lived in a German monastery about a thousand years ago. Researchers wanted to study material from her teeth to learn more about the woman’s diet and mouth bacteria. But under a microscope, they discovered a bright blue substance. The blue came from lapis lazuli, a kind of rock. In medieval Europe, lapis lazuli was extremely expensive. It was used to make a blue pigment that only went into the most important books. (Back then, people had to write and illustrate books entirely by hand.) The…

Do you have a drone? As the technology becomes cheaper, many citizens are buying drones and flying them as a hobby. It’s fun to see the world from a drone’s point of view. But one place you should never fly a drone? Over a fire. The drone may be small, but it can cause a huge headache for firefighters. It could fly into a firefighting aircraft and cause a horrible crash. “We’ve had near misses with fire aircraft, such as airtankers, air attack planes, and helicopters,” says firefighter Jessica Gardetto. To avoid any risk of a collision, when wildfire crews see an unknown drone, they have to keep all of their aircraft on the ground. This can prevent them from fighting the fire for several hours. In one instance in…

Individual algae are invisible to the naked eye. Yet if they reach a high population density, some species can tint the surface of the ocean red. This unusual appearance of the surface water is known as a red tide. Although it might look fascinating, red tides are flaming hot warning signs. The high density of algae in a red tide uses up all the dissolved oxygen in water. Without oxygen, fish, corals and other animals suffocate. Algae in red tides also release toxins that can kill fish. Some of these toxins are taken up by mussels and clams, which then pose a danger to any humans who consume them.…

EVERYONE KNOWS fire trucks are red—right? Maybe not for much longer. Several US cities are testing out new fire truck designs. If you spot a hot-pink fire engine zooming down your street and blasting opera music, don’t be surprised. It’s important for other drivers on the road to recognize fire trucks and get out of their way. That’s why most fire trucks are painted a bright red that’s easy to spot. They also use blaring sirens to get the attention of drivers. But psychology research has shown that in most weather conditions, bright pink gets more attention than red. And for city dwellers who are used to hearing sirens on the street, classical music is more surprising. Fire departments hope the new truck design will keep firefighters safer on the…

MILK IS FOR mammals. Human moms make milk to feed their babies, as do other furry species and dolphins and whales. Animals like fish, reptiles, birds, and bugs don’t make milk. Or so we thought. But now researchers have discovered milk from a very surprising mom: a spider. The species is a jumping spider called Toxeus magnus. When a mother spider’s eggs hatch, she starts leaving little droplets of a nutritious, milky liquid around the nest. The baby spiders drink these droplets. After about a week, they start drinking the milk straight from their mother’s body, just like baby mammals. The little spiders stay in the nest and keep drinking milk for about 20 days, until they’re almost grown up. They’re lucky to get so much attention from a parent.…

Q: What made the ice age so cold? —Alex A., age 11, Ohio A: When we say “ice age,” we usually mean the time when woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats roamed the planet. But there have actually been many ice ages throughout Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. That’s because of a surprising cycle: the shape of our planet’s orbit is changing, albeit very slowly. Thanks to the gravitational pull of other bodies in the solar system, Earth’s orbit stretches into an oval and then contracts back into a nearly perfect circle every 200,000 years or so. At the same time, slight variations in the way Earth spins on its axis change how much sunlight reaches different parts of the globe at different times. When these cycles line up in a certain way,…

About 1,700 years ago, the Roman Empire was under attack, and Emperor Constantine had to decide where to station his diminished forces. Constantine organized his legions into four field armies. He needed to protect eight regions with these forces. The trick was to place the armies so that each region was either occupied by an army or was only one step away from an army. But an army could be sent onward only if there was another army to stay behind and defend its original position. Constantine chose to place two armies in Rome and two at his new capital, Constantinople. This meant only Britain could not be reached in one step. Defending Britain would require moving an army from Rome to Gaul, securing Gaul, and moving a second army…

BABY SEA TURTLES have a challenging start to life. Their mothers bury eggs on beaches. When the babies hatch, they have to crawl up through the sand, then dash to the ocean. To avoid predators, sea turtles usually hatch at night. They then follow the brightest light, which should be the moon and stars reflecting off the ocean. But artificial lights can lead baby sea turtles in the wrong direction—which means they won’t survive. Some researchers are addressing this problem with a robot. Scientists sent a little four-wheeled rover onto three beaches in North Carolina. The robot carried light sensors. Patrolling the sand at night, the robot measured how much artificial light—such as the light from a hotel—reached the beaches. The crawling robot let researchers measure light pollution in detail,…

“Just a heads up—there’s a huge plume of smoke and it doesn’t look good.” Dacia Williams’ mom was phoning from her car. She had just taken Williams’ 9-year-old son, Dominic, to school. It was November 8, 2018, and Williams was at home with her 11-year-old son, Anthony. He had a fever and couldn’t go to school. Their house was in Magalia, California, a few miles up the hill from her mother’s home in Paradise. LEAVING PARADISE Williams was used to seeing smoke. Where she lived, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, she could see for miles. In the past 20 years, about a dozen wildfires had burned in this dry, windy area of Northern California. She’d had to evacuate many times. She and Anthony started packing things to…

In November 2018, a few days after California’s deadly Camp Fire started, Tom Calvert arrived on the scene. He’s a battalion chief at Menlo Park Fire Protection District in California. “Visibility was horrible,” he says. “It was incredibly smoky and very hard to breathe.” What he could see was devastation. “As far as you could see, on any street you went down, there was nothing. It was all burned down, all ash.” Calvert didn’t arrive at this heartbreaking scene alone. His team brought along drones. These flying robots soared over burned areas, taking pictures. In one case, a search and rescue team was trying to figure out if a remote, mountainous area contained burned buildings. It would take the human crew half a day to hike there, Calvert says. So…

Fire is capable of turning a lush forest into blackened ash in a matter of minutes. After the blaze, a lifeless landscape of scorched earth is all that remains. But some plants and animals have learned to live with fire. In fact, some species need fire. Lightning strikes have been causing natural wildfires since life first appeared on the planet. Along the way, many different trees have evolved strategies to live with these occasional fires. From the giant sequoias of coastal California to pitch pines in New Jersey, these trees rely on fire as part of their lifecycle. And entire communities of plants and animals thrive within these ecosystems. The problem is, humans don’t like wildfires. Each year, out-of-control infernos destroy homes and claim lives. People fight fires in hopes…

If you were to name a place on Earth that is safe from wildfires, what would it be? Wildfires burn everything on their path, release smoke into the air, and leave ashes on the ground. So far, a wildfire seems to be an air and land problem. Then most of the world should be fireproof, right? After all, water covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. And oceans make up a whopping 96.5 percent of that water. Well, here’s some bad news: even oceans suffer from wildfires. But how can fires affect a vast body of water that doesn’t even burn? Hungry for Ashes Ash is the solid residue a fire leaves behind. Tiny as a dust grain and light as a feather, ash can travel far on winds and…

WIND HOWLED and rain spat in a worsening summer storm. In its path, 29 kids played soccer inside a sports dome. They were attending summer camp in East Windsor, Connecticut on July 1, 2013. Suddenly, the camp director’s cell phone sounded an alarm: tornado warning! She immediately got the kids out of the bubble-like dome and into a sturdier building nearby. “I saw the bubble start shaking, and that’s when I got really scared,” 12-year-old camper Dillon Morando told the Hartford Courant. “I heard it pop,” he said. A tornado destroyed the dome. But all the kids were safe—thanks to the director’s quick thinking and an emergency alert. The alert came from the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system, a US government program. The system works like this. Officials select the…