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

IF YOU LIVE IN CERTAIN PARTS OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES, YOU MAY HAVE HEARD A LOT OF SCREECHING THIS SUMMER, AND NOT JUST FROM YOUR YOUNGER SIBLING. The noise was a very special group of bugs crawling up out of the ground and into our lives. They’re called the Brood X cicadas. There are many species of cicadas that live in different places and appear at different times. Some of these insects have a mysteriously punctual life cycle. Every 17 years, a huge group of them appears. The cicadas mate and die, and their babies crawl underground. The babies drink sap from tree roots and patiently stay below the soil while they grow up. Then—exactly 17 years later—they all burst aboveground at once. The largest group of these 17-year…

Another laboratory accident gave the world the first new blue pigment seen in 200 years! In 2009, researchers at Oregon State University were working on a material for electronics. They’d mixed manganese oxide with yttrium and indium and heated it to a high temperature. To their surprise, the substance emerged with a vivid blue color. Blue is hard to make because it is a rare color in nature. Animal bodies don’t make blue pigments. Birds, butterflies, and other creatures that appear blue use specially shaped scales or feathers to reflect blue light The first blues were made by crushing minerals such as azurite and lapis lazuli, so only the very rich could afford these hues. Indigo, made from plants, faded over time. Cobalt blue and Prussian blue, created in the…

Nothing could be grayer, more predictable, or less surprising than the endless sequence of whole numbers. Right? That’s why people count to calm down and count to put themselves to sleep. Whole numbers define booooooooooring. Not so fast. Many mathematicians like playing with numbers, and sometimes they discover weird patterns that are hard to explain. Here’s a mysterious one you can try out on your calculator. Pick any whole number. If it’s odd, multiply the number by 3, then add 1. If it’s even, divide it by 2. Now, apply the same rules to the answer that you just obtained. Do this over and over again, applying the rules to each new answer. For example, suppose you start with 5. The number 5 is odd, so you multiply it by…

» Lived » 130 million years ago » Non-avian (not related to birds) » Theropod (hollow bones, three-toed limbs) » Carnivore (meat-eating) » Habit » running » Length » 3.5 ft » Weight » 1.2 lbs » Coat » primitive feathers » Coloration » light red to reddish brown along back and limbs » countershaded very light red or white along underside » alternating bands of light red and white down tail » ‘raccoon mask’ of reddish color around eyes » Habitat » body coloration suggests similar color surroundings…

NEW CONTEST Favorite Colors! What’s your favorite color? Can you find it in your favorite places? We’re talking indoors or outdoors, of an object that’s natural or made. It might a red flower or a blue shadow, a purple afghan or an orange umbrella. Is your object from a different country? Fill us in on its backstory, because we think that if a color is near and dear to you, its story might be, too. Send us a photograph or artwork of your color, and we’ll share a rainbow of our favorites. 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…

Hello, all! I wish I could say that I am yet another dragon, or an alien, or any other awesome being. Alas, I am a plain ol’ Homo sapiens. I’ve been subscribed to Muse since January 2016, so I’m somewhat of a veteran. (I mean no offense towards those old enough to remember the Great Cat-Dog Debate. I am impartial on that front.) I’m the proud owner of a male rat named Peter. I am a massive Tolkien fan, but almost every fandom that has been mentioned in the “Muse Mail” section has been a love of mine at one point or another. I miss Kokopelli, and I would be willing to work out a deal with O for his animal translator helmet. I’m interested in a career in marine…

SCIENTISTS HAVE CREATED A WAY FOR PEOPLE TO WRITE USING ONLY THEIR BRAINS. They were working with a man whose hand is paralyzed from a spinal injury. That means he can’t move his hand at all. The scientists implanted a small sensor inside his brain, in an area that has to do with hand movement. Then they asked the man to imagine holding a pen and writing letters. The scientists used a computer program to study the patterns inside their subject’s brain while he imagined writing. Once the computer program learned the patterns, it could translate the man’s thoughts into written words. The subject was able to “write” about 90 letters per minute, using only his mind. This kind of technology could help other paralyzed people in the future.…

“Why grass is green or why our blood is red are mysteries which none have reached unto,” wrote the English poet John Donne in 1612. He wasn’t quite right, because the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher Aristotle had figured out that olors have something to do with light. But it wasn’t until about 53 years after Donne wrote his poem that anyone truly understood how light and color are connected. That was when the English scientist Isaac Newton discovered that sunlight contains within it all the colors of the rainbow. An Amazing Discovery People had known for centuries that light can be separated into the rainbow colors (known as the visible spectrum) when it passes through water or through a faceted crystal prism. But they had thought that the prism somehow…

What color is the sky? Most kids who speak English answer without hesitation—it’s blue. Isn’t that obvious? Maybe not. Forget that the sky sometimes appears gray during a storm, or white with clouds, or even pink and orange at sunrise or sunset. Picture a perfect, clear blue expanse. Many languages have no specific word for this color. It ends up grouped with green. Other languages use just three color words: usually “black” for all dark shades, “white” for all light or bright shades, and “red” for all reddish shades. I first learned about the unusual world of color names while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan. In my Kyrgyz language lessons, I learned the word for blue is kok, pronounced a lot like the English word “cook.” The…

The case of the baffling black bloom starte with one question: Is there such a thing as a black flower? Not one bred to be black, but one that is black by nature. The question so intrigued Rob Nicholson, conservatory manager of the Smith College Botanic Garden in Northampton, Massachusetts, that when he heard reports of the blackest flower in the world, he had to pursue it. As a botanist, Nicholson knows that black flowers are extremely rare. Flowers have evolved to be brightly colored to attract pollinators. An all-black flower would be nearly invisible to them. If such a flower existed, it would raise many questions. How do its pollinators find it? Does it reflect ultraviolet light enabling it to attract insects? Or does it use scent as an…

““Art is what you can get away with.” —artist Andy Warhol” AT AN ART AUCTION IN 2018, SOMEONE PAID $432,500 FOR A FRAMED PORTRAIT OF EDMOND DE BELAMY. A close look at the artwork reveals something unusual. A complicated mathematical formula takes the place of an artist’s signature. A human didn’t make this portrait – a computer did! It was the first artwork created using artificial intelligence (AI) to be sold at auction. A French art collective named Obvious designed and ran the AI that made the portrait. They first trained the AI by showing it many examples of portraits created by European artists in the 18th century. They had it practice generating its own portraits until it could make ones that looked quite similar to the ones in its…

NASA is planning to send two robotic spacecraft to an exciting destination: Venus. Several robots have gone to Mars, and some are exploring its surface now. But Venus, Earth’s other closest neighbor, is harder to visit. That’s because it’s extremely unfriendly. Venus has a poisonous atmosphere, clouds of sulfuric acid, and extreme pressure and heat. Soviet spacecraft that landed on the planet in the 1970s and 1980s only sent back data briefly before they stopped working (and, presumably, melted). One of the new NASA missions will be a sphere that flies down through Venus’s atmosphere, measuring gases and taking pictures. The other robot will stay safely up in space, orbiting the planet to map its surface. The missions should launch between 2028 and 2030, NASA says.…

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THIS BROWN BLOB — ABOUT THE SIZE OF AN ADULT’S SLIPPER — IS AN ANIMAL. It’s called a gumboot chiton. Some people call it a wandering meatloaf. The gumboot chiton scoots around the shorelines of the northern Pacific Ocean, scraping algae off f rocks to eat. It uses a flexible tongue covered in super-hard teeth. Scientists analyzed those teeth to find out what molecules make them so hard. They were surprised to discover a mineral called santabarbaraite. Th s mineral contains iron. Until now, scientists had only ever found santabarbaraite in rocks. The gumboot chiton is the first animal known to have this mineral in its body.…

Scientists and artists love to experiment with different ways to lay out the color spectrum. One of the most popular arrangements is the color wheel, which places different shades of color next to one another in a continuous flow. Artists and designers use color wheels to figure out how colors relate to each other. Three primary colors (typically red, yellow, and blue) are spaced evenly around the wheel. The hues in between represent what happens when those colors get mixed together in different amounts. Colors that lie across from one another on a color wheel are called complementary colors. Red and green, yellow and purple, and blue and orange are the standard complementary colors on the traditional wheel. But “complementary” doesn’t just mean colors that look particularly nice together. Complementary…

You’ve seen them in museums and science books. You think you know how dinosaurs looked. They were big and scary and colored grey, brown, and dull green, like today’s crocodiles or elephants. But wait: What if dinosaurs were brightly colored, like tropical birds, with purple crests, orange bills, and iridescent feathers? Is that just a wildly colored dream? In fact, we’ve just entered the world of paleocoloration. People who work in this emerging field try to discover the true colors of prehistoric creatures. To find out more, we spoke with paleocoloration expert Dr. Caitlin Colleary, assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. WHEN I THINK OF DINOSAURS, I THINK OF FOSSILS, WHICH OFTEN FORM FROM BONES—AND YOU CAN’T TELL THE COLOR OF AN ANIMAL FROM…

Early human artists painted with what they could make from plants, animals, or minerals in the natural world. They dried and ground ingredients into a powder and blended this with water, animal fat, egg whites, or oil to make paints. At its heart, every paint is a pigment, or colored powder, and a binder, a colorless liquid. Mixing colors was so important in the 1700s in Europe that it became its own profession, called colormaking. Colormakers began to improve paints by making ever-more varied colors. Some used chemistry to create artificial pigments The firs mass-produced synthetic colors started coming into circulation in the mid-19th century, and they’ve been popular ever since. The colors an artist brushes onto a canvas today most likely come from a laboratory, where chemists carefully formulated…

Q: How can one person be good at singing and another not? Everyone has vocal cords!!! —Princess Mary Lynn W., Illinois A: Confession: I’m terrified of singing. I refuse to do karaoke and sometimes even mouth the words to “Happy Birthday.” When I absolutely must eke out a few notes, I can hear that they are hopelessly out of tune, but I can’t seem to fix them. Frustrated, I vow never to sing again. According to Sean Hutchins, the director of research at Canada’s Royal Conservatory, I’m trapped in an all-too-common vicious cycle. “Producing a note is a complex task,” he says. It requires you to coordinate a bunch of different body parts, from your vocal cords to your tongue, he explains. It’s not so easy to hit exactly the…