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

A 6-foot-tall, bespectacled professor got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the ground. He had an aspirator in his mouth, sucking up Pheidole workers like an anteater. My friend and colleague Ed Wilson was on a mission. That night, he needed Pheidole soldiers for his taxonomic work, and he wasn’t having much luck finding them. After spending two weeks or so in the La Selva rainforest of Costa Rica, we had returned to the city of San José. It was the evening before our departure and return to Boston. Ed invited me to a restaurant located behind a little city park close to our hotel. It was at the entrance to the park that he spotted the trail of the Pheidole ant colony. But all that he…

Q: In a lot of movies and books, everything moves slower and is louder to anyone who has shrunk. Is this actually what would happen? —Samuel F., age 12, Virginia A: Maybe—but not because anything about your ear has changed, says Madeline Huberth, who studies the psychology of music at Stanford University. “The world around you is going to be moving at the same pace it was before,” and your ear would still pick up the same range of frequencies and volumes it does now, she says. What would be different is how you feel about those sounds. When you are tiny, “you’re likely to be extremely vulnerable” and, therefore, terrified, Huberth says. Fear doesn’t change the way your ear picks up a noise. But it does change how your…

If you’re looking for someone to get you excited about ants, Magdalena Sorger is happy to help. She’s an ant scientist at North Carolina State University. Originally from Austria, Sorger has collected ants all over the world. She studies how ants evolve based on where they live. She often works with trap-jaw ants. These insects with large, snapping jaws can launch themselves through the air! WHAT GOT YOU INTERESTED IN ANTS? Originally, I was on a very different track. I was getting my business degree in Vienna. In Austria, if you study business, you don’t really do anything outside of business. I chose to go to the US for a semester. When I arrived, I really liked that American schools give you the opportunity to take classes outside of your…

My name’s Liliana. I have been receiving Muse since 2017. As an add on to Sam R.’s letter on origami in the March 2019 issue: if you do make an issue on origami, can you tell us who made the smallest/fastest folded origami ever made? This is a photo of the smallest and second-smallest origami dragon I ever made. The purple dragon is only 1/4 inch tall and 1/2 inch from tail to front! —LILIANA B. (A.K.A. ORIGAMI GIRL TO FRIENDS) P.S. I’m not going to threaten you guys like almost everyone else does. So I understand if this goes to the OFMP (Online Fan Mail Pit). Also, what does Muse stand for? I have More Universe Science Episode (or Extraordinaire). How did you make such tiny folds?! All I…

“Be a hunter and explorer.” This is the advice, says world-renowned entomologist E.O. Wilson in his 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, that he gives to his science students. “If you have the will, there is a discipline in which you can succeed.” Wilson should know. A native of Alabama, the fiercely intelligent, Pulitzer Prize–winning scientist has lived a dream by following a passion—one that he discovered at the ripe old age of 7. As he explains in his autobiography, it began with a hunt for monsters. It was the summer of 1936, and young Wilson was living at Paradise Beach, a small settlement on the east shore of Florida’s Perdido Bay, near Pensacola. One day, while standing in the shallows, he discovered a sea creature that “existed outside my previous imagination.” The…

Worker ants must build, feed, and guard their colony. To do this, they need to communicate with each other. Like most living things, ants depend on chemical odors (known as pheromones) to send messages, such as, “I found food over here . . . this ant looks dead—take him out . . . alert! there’s a stranger in here.” Over the years, E.O. Wilson has carried out hundreds of experiments to find the meanings of these odor signals. You can do an experiment to test the odor signals of ants. Put several drops of sugar water on a piece of paper. Place the paper near some ants. Watch as one ant discovers the food. Other ants will soon follow the first ant’s odor trail. Turn the paper sideways. The ants…

If all ants suddenly disappeared from the planet, life as we know it would collapse. In their book Journey to the Ants, naturalist E.O. Wilson and his colleague Bert Hölldobler analyzed the enormous influence these creatures have on ecosystems. Ants promote plant life, serve as predators and scavengers, and, in turn, serve as food for birds, dragonflies, and spiders. But they also can destroy crops and be serious pests. Wilson estimates that there are 10,000 trillion ants on the planet. They thrive in land habitats from forests to deserts to tropics, from treetop canopies to underground. 1 In excavating their underground nests, ants carry decaying organic matter down into the soil and carry minerals from below into the soil’s upper layers, aerating and enriching it for plants. Along with termites,…

You don’t have to travel to South America to watch leaf-cutter ants at work. Museums and zoos help people take a close-up look at these amazing insects. A large leaf-cutter ant colony lived at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo Invertebrate Exhibit until it closed in 2014. At least 10,000 ants can live within a chamber roughly the size of a shoebox. Large colonies—like the one that was housed at the Invertebrate Exhibit in Washington, DC—often have 15 to 20 such chambers. Today Alan Peters is in charge of the Reptile Discovery Center. Previously, he was the zoo’s curator of invertebrates, animals with no backbone. Ants are invetebrates. “I think of [the leaf-cutter colony] as a body, and each ant has a different function,” explains Peters. Just as different organs perform…

PRETEND THAT YOU’RE A PHEIDOLE ANT. You start at any one of the four entrances at the top (see arrows) of the maze pictured here and exit through any one of the four exits at the bottom. Each time you pass through an intersection with a number, you add that number to your cumulative sum. If the intersection has no number, you add nothing to the sum. You start with a sum of zero. Your mission as a worker ant is to start at one of the entrances and leave through one of the exits with a sum of 100. Once you go through an intersection with a number, you cannot go through that intersection again during your journey. Your ant colony is depending on you. You must solve this…

Spin a globe slowly to find New Zealand. It’s one of the world’s most isolated island countries. Australia, the nearest significant land mass, is over a thousand miles away. Composed of two big islands stretching almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from north to south, and a galaxy of smaller islands, New Zealand is believed to be a fragment of the ancient southern continent of Gondwanaland. Over the past 100 million years, as New Zealand inched its way into its present isolation, plant and animal life emerged on the island. As these hardy survivors adapted to their new island home, they evolved into species that are unique to the region. The process is called adaptive radiation. It involves one plant or animal splitting into many species, to fill different ecological niches—ways…

NEW CONTEST A Living Square There’s life all around us, from the tiniest insect to the neighbor’s dog. Draw a little slice of your own great outdoors! Send us a drawing of all the plants and animals you find in just one square foot of your favorite natural place, whether that’s a park, a forest, or the grass beside the sidewalk. Write a very short description of each living thing you draw. We’ll show off our favorite macro-sized microcosms in a future issue. 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…