Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2020 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Surfer Girl My name is Allison, but you can call me Alli. I live in a city with no ocean but that doesn’t stop me from surfing. Every summer I go up to San Francisco to visit my aunt. My brother and I go to a camp where they teach us how to surf. Although it is a really fun camp and it is the best part of my summer, it makes me very sad when I see plastic floating in the ocean. I can find everything from straws to bags of chips. Of course, I do my part and pick up the trash when I see it, but there are millions of pieces of trash in the ocean that we can’t see. I wonder how we can fix this…

Could you discover a dinosaur at a place like Big Bend? It’s possible. “Visitors can go for a hike here and maybe spot seashells in the limestone deposits, or bits of petrified log,” geologist Don Corrick suggests. “They might notice things informally, or it could lead to a discovery.” But hold on. According to Corrick, the most important step in a dinosaur discovery anywhere (after the excitement!) is don’t remove what you’ve found or disturb the site. He says, “As professionals, we don’t collect every bone we locate unless there’s a good scientific reason for it.” Instead, experts note the location of a find and then report it for future study. That’s also the best advice for amateurs who aspire to be real dinosaur hunters. Corrick confirms, “We have made…

Welcome to Florida . . . 3 million years ago. One day this land will be dominated by gentle breezes, palm trees, and grandparents. But today, it is ruled by a terrifying beast. This monster stands taller than a basketball hoop. It has an enormous razor-sharp beak that can slice through flesh and crack bones. If it lays eyes on you, there’s little point in running away. Long, strong legs make it one of the fastest animals on land. Its speed and strength are rivaled only by its appetite for fresh meat. This creature is Titanis walleri, the largest of all terror birds. Terror birds (family Phorusrhachidae) were gigantic, flightless birds that rose to the top of the food chain after the Cretaceous Period came to a close. For more…

Q: Can love be scientifically proven? —Sydney H., age 15, Virginia A: “We’ve done it!” says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and the author of the book Why We Love. She put people who claimed to be madly in love—as well as those who had just been dumped—inside an fMRI scanner, a device that measures activity in the brain. Then she watched what happened when they looked at photographs of the objects of their affection. When the subjects saw their sweethearts, blood rushed to parts of their brains that produce dopamine. This chemical is associated with feelings of “wanting, craving, obsession, focus, motivation, and energy,” Fisher explains. She believes that extra dopamine activity is the biological hallmark of romantic love. It’s what makes you think obsessively about…

MANY DINOSAURS HAD TOOLS BUILT INTO THEIR SKELETONS. It’s not always clear what those tools were for, though. For example, the stegosaurus probably used its tail spikes for self-defense. But scientists aren’t sure why it had bony plates on its back. A newly discovered dinosaur species might have the most unusual tool of all: a giant screw built into its face. Researchers discovered fossils of the new species, which doesn’t have a name yet, in eastern Asia. Its skull is bizarre. In the middle of the snout, there’s a bony appendage shaped just like a screw. Near the fossils, researchers found traces of deep, narrow holes in the ground. They think the dinosaur drilled these holes with its face. The animal would have had to put its head down, stick…

One day about 66 million years ago, life on our planet changed forever. It happened when an asteroid the size of a mountain tore through the atmosphere and slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula. The collision set off a series of events that killed 75 percent of all animal and plant species, including dinosaurs. Thus ended the Cretaceous geologic period. Fiery debris from the cataclysm set forests within thousands of miles ablaze. Liquefied rock formed tiny blobs of glass that blasted outward from the site and shot through the atmosphere. Meanwhile, a gigantic earthquake caused by the impact propelled seismic waves through the Earth’s crust, sending water sloshing onto land. Far Away in North Dakota Paleontologist Robert DePalma believes he has found evidence of the first minutes to hours of that…

The geologic time scale (GTS) helps scientists figure out timelines related to different layers of rock layers—and how the layers were created. Geologists like Erin Argyilan use the GTS, as do paleontologists (scientists who study fossils) and other Earth scientists. They use it to explain the timing of events and how they relate to the planet’s history. Did You Know? Stratigraphy is a branch of geology that concentrates on studying different types of rock (strata) and how they form layers (stratification). Quartz sediment (also known as sand) moves a lot. As elements like wind, snow, and ice move it around, sand layers up. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) helps geologists pinpoint the last time sand has seen the light of day. This technology lets geologists decode the “time capsule” hidden in…

More than 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, many species died off during a global disaster often called the K-Pg extinction. It followed a devastating asteroid strike in modern-day Mexico. Some scientists believe that huge volcanic eruptions in what is now India also played a role. The end of the Cretaceous Period saw some very big changes in Earth’s oceans and on land, wiping out up to 80 percent of all animal species, including the dinosaurs. But 20 percent of the animals that were alive with the dinosaurs did survive. What were these amazing animals? How and why did they survive while so many others disappeared forever? Behold the survivors of the K-Pg mass extinction! Spider (Arachnid) The earliest web-spinning arachnids (pronounced uh-RAK-nid)…

The Earth is really, really old. It’s so old that it’s tough to imagine how old it is. The best we can do is come up with a metaphor that compares it to things we deal with in everyday life. Dinosaurs went extinct around 66 million years ago. That’s a long time ago, about 1,000 times further back than humans have been around. People that looked like us first turned up about 300,000 years ago. But here’s where it gets wild: the Earth itself formed about 4.54 billion years ago. If you could time travel 66 million years in a single step, you’d have to take about 70 steps to get to the first days of the planet! By the time dinosaurs went extinct, almost 99 percent of Earth’s history…

IN THE JURASSIC PARK MOVIES, scientists bring dinosaurs to life. How? They manage to find dinosaur DNA preserved inside ancient mosquitoes that had sucked up dinosaur blood. DNA is sort of like a recipe. It contains the instructions cells use to build and maintain a living body. If scientists could get living cells to follow a dinosaur DNA recipe, they might be able to bring a dinosaur to life. However, the mosquito trick only worked in the movies. The last dinosaurs died out more than 65 million years ago—and DNA just doesn’t survive that long. Beth Shapiro, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that bringing back dinosaurs from ancient DNA is “completely impossible.” However, some scientists have suggested transforming a living species into…

YOU MAY THINK BABYSITTING IS TOUGH, BUT CLEANER SHRIMP HAVE AN EVEN HARDER JOB. These are little critters that run “cleaning stations” in the ocean. When fish and other animals visit the cleaning stations, cleaner shrimp crawl all over their bodies, nibbling dead skin and parasites. Everyone wins: the shrimp get a meal, and their visitors get clean. But there’s always a risk that a big, hungry visitor will decide to eat the shrimp instead. To find out how cleaner shrimp stay safe on the job, researchers left video cameras near two cleaning stations on an ocean reef. They gathered footage of one cleaner shrimp species and hundreds of visitors. They saw that cleaner shrimp are choosy about their clients. If a visitor was a predator, the shrimp were less…

Imagine if you could travel millions of years back in time. Back to a world of towering mountains, lush forests, and incredible dinosaurs. Well, in a way, it’s possible to make this journey. At Big Bend National Park, in Texas, visitors can come face to face with the Cretaceous world. Don’t expect simple exhibits displayed in museum halls (as wonderful as that can be). Because Big Bend is a place where you can see the skeletons of giant dinosaurs, unearthed from this very land. Where you can stand beneath the enormous, outstretched wing bones of the largest flying creature that ever lived. And then look up into the same skies where such beasts once soared. It’s as close to meeting dinosaurs as we humans will ever come. Shifting Earth Today…

A name can tell you a lot about a person. Take your last name, for example. Does it come from a certain language, a place where your ancestors were born, a traditional family occupation? How about your first name? What does it say about you? If you could change it, would you? What would you change it to, and why? Geologic time has names, too, big names, kind of hard to remember ones—names for eons, eras, periods, and epochs. According to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) the professional organization that oversees any changes to the Geologic Time Scale (more formally known as the International Chronostratigraphic Chart), we are in the Phanerozoic Eon, the Cenozoic Era, the Quaternary Period, and the Holocene Epoch. But when it comes to the Holocene,…

In the 40th century, the most intellectually advanced species in the galaxy initiates a project to bring back as many extinct species as possible. They have already returned hundreds of species to life after careful evaluation by the Committee for the Revivification of Extinct Species (CaRES). The purpose of the committee is to evaluate whether each species meets just one criterion: “There must be no overwhelming, compelling evidence that the species should not be revived.” Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the meeting where members debate the revivification of an extinct species: humans. Next on the list. The discussion is open. Humans are interesting for all the reasons we cited during our chimpanzee review. In addition, they had a fascinating art culture unique among species and an unparalleled…