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

Army of Activists I’m half Indian but born American (I guess that would make me a third Indian because one of my parents is American). I’m a total Star Wars geek. Did you know that one First Order Star Destroyer holds 8,000 stormtroopers but 19,000 officers? Or that the Rebel Alliance was headed by Mon Mothma but founded by Bail Organa (who was killed by the Empire)? I’m a climate change activist and have done a speech to the New York Comptroller and the Teachers Retirement Pension Fund. I would love it if you did an issue on climate change. It is a pressing issue. It is my belief that if there are enough activists, climate change will be stopped! My favorite issue (as of July 2018) is the July/August…

SCIENTISTS WERE surprised by the weird dinosaur bones they dug up in Argentina. The bones belonged to a new species, which they named Bajadasaurus pronuspinax. One of the bones was a back bone, or vertebra. It had a pair of huge spines jutting out of it. The spines were almost 2 feet (58 cm) long. The spines pointed forward, toward the dinosaur’s head. The researchers think Bajadasaurus had a set of these spines running all the way down its neck, kind of like a mohawk hairdo. It wasn’t the only dinosaur with spines. Other species had shorter spines, or spines that pointed backward. Scientists aren’t sure what their purpose was. But the giant, forward-pointing spines of Bajadasaurus probably helped the dino defend itself, the researchers think. Like a built-in fence, the…

Trash day again. Recycling trucks chug along, picking up all the bins. Then the paper, plastic, and aluminum we’ve discarded can be made into new products. But have you ever thought about where that happens? In the United States and much of the world, companies collect and sort recyclables, but do not also repurpose them. They sell the sorted items to other companies that use them to create new products. For decades, companies in China bought most of the world’s recycling. That ended in 2018, when the whole system came crashing down. The Way It Was In 1995, Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yin opened a recycled paper business. She thought she could make money by buying waste paper from around the world and turning it into new products. She was right,…

T he guests at Mia Blasiole’s ninth birthday party made magic happen. The kids thought outside the box. Or rather, the colored bins. They connected, combined, and reconfigured craft materials into new works of art. But perhaps the most magical aspect of the party? It benefited the planet. Community members had donated the materials used in these amazing creations. The same objects could easily have ended up in a landfill. “Stuff You Never Imagined” At Mia’s “Reuse-a-Palooza” party, eight colored bins contained items of matching colors. Staff arranged them in rainbow order. Materials included pipe cleaners, buttons, rings, funnels, and tubes. The inspired kids created one-of-a-kind masterpieces. Mia, for example, created a pair of glasses from wire, hoops, and orange transparent paper. “I learned that you can make cool stuff…

Musicians in the London Philharmonic Orchestra play expensive instruments crafted from the finest materials. But in a slum in Cateura, Paraguay, in South America, an orchestra plays instruments made out of materials recycled from the trash. Their name is Orquesta de Reciclados (the Recycled Orchestra), and they perform for audiences all over the world. Cateura is now famous as the home of the Recycled Orchestra. These musicians create beautiful music out of garbage. Most people who live in Cateura work as “trash pickers.” They collect recyclable materials from the landfill and sell the items for money. They look for glass bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard, or plastic. They can sell one pound of cardboard for five cents. A pound of plastic is worth ten cents. Children aren’t supposed to work in…

MICROPLASTICS are all over the news lately. Actually,these plastic bits 0.2 inches (5 mm) wide or smaller are all over everything—from our food to the insides of animals, and especially in the oceans. Most plastic is non-biodegradable. When something biodegradable breaks down, it chemically changes into new substances. Bacteria and other microbes will digest a banana peel over a few weeks until it becomes soil. By contrast, plastic stays plastic forever. But it can still physically break into smaller pieces. This happens fastest outside, because the ultraviolet light in sunlight weakens and cracks plastic. Eventually, it breaks into smaller pieces. There’s no limit to how small those pieces can get, and that’s how we end up with microplastics. Bigger microplastics might look like individual grains of dust, just barely big…

YOUR PHONE shuts down randomly. You have to charge it constantly. And you can barely see the screen through a spiderweb of cracks. Time for a new phone. But what should you do with the old one? The number one rule: never throw it in a trashcan or recycle bin. It might start a fire or even explode. Smartphones contain lithium-ion batteries. So do tablets, laptop computers, electric cars, and many other devices, including some cameras, headphones, power tools, and more. These batteries offer the most energy for their size compared to other batteries. But if a lithium-ion battery gets damaged, it may overheat, leading to sparks, fire, or even an explosion. In 2017, sanitation workers in New York City tossed an innocent-looking cardboard box into their garbage truck. When…

Remember the bug that chased you away from your picnic last summer? No matter how giant it seemed, chances are it couldn’t compete with Megachile pluto. That’s the largest bee on Earth. Females have a wingspan of about 2.5 inches (6 cm). Males are about half as big. The species is also called Wallace’s giant bee. That’s because naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace found the bug in 1858. But no one else recorded seeing one until 1981. And then the enormous bee disappeared again. In early 2019, a team arrived in Indonesia to search for the missing species. They scoured the jungle, looking inside termite nests, where the bees like to burrow. Finally, they found what they were looking for: a single female Megachile pluto, alive and well. The researchers took…

Most 3D printers use filament to make objects. Filament is like thick plastic thread. It’s even wrapped around a spool, like cotton thread. The head of a 3D printer pulls in a strand of filament and heats it until it melts. Then melted filament comes out a nozzle. The nozzle moves and stacks the melted filament in layers. Each layer builds on top of the last one until the object is done. The heated filament binds together. At the same time, it cools so quickly that it holds its shape. This process is called additive manufacturing. It’s the most common type of consumer 3D printing. But 3D printing isn’t as simple as hitting print and getting a finished object. Often the process creates plastic waste. Prints can fail in the…

A REVOLUTION is underway within the fashion industry. Shoppers and designers alike are making choices to reduce their fashion footprint as sustainability becomes the newest trend. UNDRESSING THE FASHION INDUSTRY Behind the vibrant colors and eye-catching prints of new clothes lies a dirty secret. The fashion industry is one of the world’s most polluting industries. From contaminated soil and dye-stained rivers to tons of textile waste, fashion comes at a high cost to the environment. Added to this, the process of making new clothes consumes large amounts of natural resources. The raw natural materials, such as cotton, that make up fabric require an immense amount of space to grow. Land that’s growing cotton for clothing can’t be used to grow food. Farmers usually use vast amounts of water and pesticides…

Have you ever been stuck in a waiting room with nothing but your boredom and a Rush Hour puzzle? In this logic game, colorful cars and trucks are stuck in a traffic jam in a plastic tray. The goal is to clear a path for a car to the only exit on the grid. Chances are you tried the puzzle. Chances are you left without solving it. Chances are so did the person before you. And the person after you. Rush Hour looks easy, but it is hard. We’re not just saying that because we couldn’t solve it. We have mathematic proof. Japanese puzzle designer Nob Yoshigahara invented Rush Hour in the late 1970s. For the US edition of the game, Yoshigahara and his team developed several sets of puzzles…

IN THE Star Trek TV shows and movies, a technology called a replicator can make food and other objects appear out of thin air. In the real world, the closest thing we have is a 3D printer. It can build solid plastic objects in any shape, one layer at a time. But a new 3D printing technology is a little closer to Star Trek. Instead of building layer by layer, it creates an object nearly all at once. The method starts with a clear tube holding a light-sensitive gel. A projector shines a pattern of light onto the gel. At the same time, the tube spins. Wherever beams of light enter the gel from different angles and meet each other, the gel solidifies into plastic. The technology can complete a…

WHY DO zebras have stripes? Scientists have made a lot of different guesses. They’ve wondered whether stripes camouflage zebras in a herd, help keep them cool, or confuse other animals that want to eat them. One idea has actually held up to testing: stripes help protect zebras from biting flies. To find out how, researchers took videos of flies as they buzzed around zebras and horses. From far away, flies seemed interested in both zebras and horses. But once they got close, they were less likely to land on a zebra. Something about the stripes made them fly away instead. Researchers further tested this by putting striped or solid-colored jackets on horses. Flies landed less often on horses wearing striped jackets. The flies that bite zebras and horses can carry…

Americans have been recycling since the Colonial era, but curbside recycling began in the 1980s. Residents had to sort recyclable trash into different types, such as metal, glass, and paper. By 1990, more than 10,000 communities had some variety of public recycling program. A few California communities introduced the concept of single-stream recycling in 1995. Single-stream recycling allowed people to put all their recyclable goods into one bin—no sorting required. A major issue facing this kind of recycling program is contamination. With so many different types of recyclables mingled together, it can be hard to perfectly separate them all, even using skilled human workers and MRF technology. By 2018, an average of 25 percent of recycled goods end up in a landfill because of contamination, up from around 7 percent…

RESEARCHERS AND ENGINEERS are hard at work developing robots that can identify, sort, and process recyclables. The dream is that robots could do all this work faster, cheaper, more accurately, and more safely than humans. Three of the robots below are already helping improve the recycling process around the world. But two others are just wishful thinking—they don’t really exist. Can you tell the difference? 1. AMANDA • REAL • IMAGINARY Litterbugs watch out! A city park in Tokyo, Japan, is experimenting with a new robot named Amanda. She has a cute, cartoon-like face and a computer screen in her chest. She rolls around park paths, using cameras and AI software to identify people carrying cups, snack packages, or other disposable items. When Amanda sees someone holding trash, the robot politely asks…