Innholdsfortegnelse for Janaury 2021 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

CATE PORTER-PINE TIME TRAVELER CATE was born in 3001 as part of a mysterious experiment. Her adoptive parents founded a very special school, Mnemosyne, in an alternate dimension. Fearless and adventurous, Cate treats friends like family. AARTI OKONKWO DOCUMENTARY ENTHUSIAST AARTI invented a color ray to earn admission to Mnemosyne. She’s smart, creative, and loyal, and an interdimensional incident granted her the power to visit every version of herself in the multiverse. WHATSI TAMATOA THOUGHTFUL MAKER WHATSI emerged from a tragic childhood accident as a cutting-edge cyborg. His mom showers him with love, and sometimes fresh bio-tech. A great listener, Whatsi is fond of comics and meditation. O TYCHO HAPPY-GO-LUCKY O invented a human-animal communication device. He can pull totally reasonable people into shenanigans, even childhood pal Aarti. O sometimes…

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME Hot Dogs in a Hurry EVERY YEAR IN NEW YORK CITY, PEOPLE ENTER A CONTEST TO SEE HOW MANY HOT DOGS THEY CAN EAT IN 10 MINUTES. Competitors gulp down each dog and bun in just a few bites. The 2020 winner scarfed 75 hot dogs. Now a scientist says he has calculated the highest this number can go. The scientist studied data from 39 years of the same contest. Over time, the winners have eaten more and more hot dogs. But there must be a limit to how quickly people can eat—right? The researcher used math to predict records over time. He found that the limit should be 8.3 hot dogs per minute. That works out to 83 hot dogs in a 10-minute contest.…

One rocketed to Earth from a distant planet*. Another encountered a radioactive arachnid**. Every superhero has an origin story. Yet the true account of how these heroes came to be is even more amazing. Because these fictional characters were inspired, in part, by real science. Remarkable new technologies and discoveries touched their creators’ own lives. By combining the science and innovation that fascinated them with artistry and imagination, comic book writers and artists developed the world’s most iconic superheroes. Let’s discover some of the real-life tech that inspired the comic book heroes we all know today. SUPERHERO: SUPERMAN REAL-LIFE TECHNOLOGIES » Bulletproof Vests » Rockets & Space Travel » X-rays After 17-year-old Jerry Siegel’s father died as an innocent bystander during an armed robbery in 1932, the heartbroken teen imagined…

Villains Love a Monologue Every superhero needs a good (or should we say bad) supervillain—a doer of dastardly deeds to defeat. Invent a supervillain. In pictures and/or words, show us their final monologue as they face their super nemesis for the last time. Who are they? What’s their evil plan? And who’s that minion in the corner? Even if your character tends to be long-winded, keep your writing to 100 words or fewer. 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…

Science Fiction Science Facts I’m a normal kid, not some weird god of an HBP planet. I have been getting Muse for years! I miss Kokopelli, but the new Muses are pretty good. Whatsi is my favorite—I think it would be AWESOME to have bionic limbs! I LOVE Star Wars! I know all sorts of random facts about it. The sound of TIE fighters is a combination of elephant sounds and tires on a wet road. The Executor Super Star Destroyer is nearly 12 miles (20 km) long! Could you do a science-fiction themed article? I love reading and watching science fiction. If you send this into the fan mail pit, I won’t send armies of rainbow crocodiles to swarm Muse HQ, but I might be sad . . .…

When you see bats flying around at night, they seem silent. But “even though we can’t hear them, bats are actually very loud in their calls,” says Te Jones. They are screaming sounds that are too high-pitched for your ears. Jones is a graduate student in Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. She studies how bats “see” in the dark using echolocation. As a bat flies, it emits a beam of sound from its mouth or nose, then listens for the echoes bouncing off objects. Jones says a bat can aim the beam in different directions. If an insect flies through the beam, a bat can tell the insect’s size and location, along with how fast it is flying and in what direction. As part of…

How does Daniel Kish feel about being linked with fictional superheroes like Daredevil—blind, fearless, passionate about helping others—or Batman? Many news stories (ahem, including this one) have celebrated Kish’s skills as a “bat man.” Kish raises some concerns about being compared to the Caped Crusader. He asks, “Who wants to live up to that level of superherodom?” Nevertheless, Kish says Batman is his favorite superhero. And he does perceive a few important ways they are similar. First, Batman works hard to achieve his goals. “His heroic abilities come from his painstakingly developing his own capacities. . . . He made himself who and what he is, which I think is something we can all do.” Second, like Kish, Batman is committed to fairness and social justice. Now we know who…

A tall young man with striking features and thick black hair hunches over a piece of paper, pen in hand, eyes closed. He’s about to demonstrate remarkable and mysterious powers of the mind. The year is 1973, and the young man is Uri Geller. He’s appearing on a live television talk show that was very popular in Britain at the time. Before his appearance, a production assistant for the show retreated into a closed room, made a picture of some unknown object, and hid it in an envelope. Geller says he can use the powers of his mind to see it. He doesn’t know how he does it. Maybe he reads the thoughts of the production assistant, a power called telepathy. Or maybe his mind probes inside the envelope to…

Inside almost every living cell is a material called DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA looks like a very long spiral staircase, with two chains that coil around each other and are connected by “rungs” made of molecules called nucleic acids. DNA contains the blueprints that a cell uses to build proteins, which do the work of keeping a living thing alive. The section of DNA that tells a cell how to build a specific protein is called a gene. Scientists use the word “genome” to describe all of a person’s DNA, including genes. All living things—plants, animals, corn, cats, yeast, mosquitoes—have genes. Genes determine many things about a person, including hair color and eye color. They determine the color of a cat’s fur, or the number of kernels on an…

Different kinds of camouflage work better at different depths. Transparency rules near the surface, where predators hunt using sunlight, and a simple shadow can give you away. But transparent tissues may not help you deeper down in the ocean. Here, predators use bioluminescent searchlights; clear tissue reflects that light and stands out against the darker water. So prey animals down in the deep are often red or black. Those colors make them harder to see because they don’t reflect a predator’s blue bioluminescent light. What if you have to hide from both sunlight-searching and bioluminescent-spotting predators? In 2010, Sarah Zylinski, now a biologist at Bangor University in Wales, discovered two deep-sea cephalopods that switch between both strategies. Ordinarily, the tiny Japetella heathi octopus and the hand-sized clubhook squid are transparent.…

The amazing thing about origami is the enormous number of different objects you can make by folding a square sheet of paper. No glue or scissors allowed! You can make airplanes, flowers, butterflies, and noisemakers, or flapping birds, fierce devils, and snappy lobsters. Tom Hull, a mathematician at Western New England University in Springfield, Massachusetts, has been making origami models since he was eight years old. He got started when his uncle gave him a book about origami. When he got to college, Hull found a way to combine his interest in origami with a career in mathematics. He even wrote a book for beginners, called Origami, Plain and Simple, while he was a student. Hull has invented new types of origami designs based on mathematics. Some of these designs…