Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

LETTER of the MONTH The Hobbit Who Cried Wolf Firstly, I’d like to say that I am a big fan! I’ve been reading Muse since the “Solar Eclipse” issue (July/August 2017), but I think that my favorite has been the “Birds” issue (October 2019). I really like animals and also fantasy, especially the two together. I was wondering if you could have an issue on cryptozoology or on wolves, because I have been studying them for over two years now. I started studying wolves through the science fair, and I loved it so much I’ve continued to work with spreading the word about wolves and studying them outside of science fair. Did you know that wolves really don’t attack livestock unless they need to? They don’t like coming too…

Ghosts. UFOs. Psychic powers. Bigfoot. Are these things real? The correct, skeptical, scientific answer is: “We don’t know, but probably not.” Despite what you may see on TikTok or YouTube, all the “evidence” for the supernatural is shady or unscientific. et plenty of people believe in these things anyway. Maybe you or someone you know has had a creepy or awe-inspiring e perience that couldn’t be easily e plained. It can be tempting to believe that something magical or mystical lurks out there, just beyond the grasp of science. Why is that? If ghosts and Bigfoot and the like aren’t real, what e plains people’s e periences of these things? One answer is that our brains aren’t computers and our memories aren’t video cameras. We regularly make mistakes in our…

The main characters of bestselling books in the early 1900s weren’t kids or superheroes or people of any kind—they were animals. Nature writers published volumes of stories about animals they’d observed in the wild, and the public gobbled them up. The authors gave their subjects names like Lobo, the King of Currumpaw (a wolf), Raggylug (a cottontail rabbit), and K’Dunk the Fat One (a toad, obviously). Like the names they chose, their stories were often more sentimental than scientific. Today, scientists worry about anthropomorphizing, or making animals seem too much like humans. Some early-20th-century nature writers cared more about telling a good story than sticking to the facts. But they weren’t lying, they insisted. They just stretched the “historical truth” now and then. These books were wildly popular, but not…

In 1783, American inventor and diplomat Benjamin Franklin played chess against an automaton—a mechanical device made to look and act like a person. The faux human matched Franklin, move for move. Until, amazingly, the robot won. In 1809, it even beat Napoléon Bonaparte. (Yes, that Napoléon—the military general and emperor of France!) Is it possible? Did some forgotten genius invent a thinking humanoid machine, centuries ago? No. But the real answer is even more astonishing. Welcome to the true story of the Turk, one of tech history’s most fantastic hoaxes. The Opening Move As a chess opponent, the Turk cut a forbidding figure. Life-sized, it sat behind a great wooden desk dressed in a turban and splendid robes. Inside, the Turk was a whirling maze of gears and wheels. A…

MAGICIAN In high school, Jessica Jane Peterson was student body president and a member of the National Honor Society. Yet there was more to her than met the eye. She spent her summers at a magic camp that she describes as looking like a “real-life Hogwarts castle.” As soon as she graduated, she joined the circus, where she learned how to eat fire and do other stunts. Today, 32-year-old Peterson is the star of her own magic show and performs tricks big and small. She has created new tricks using traditional magic items such as playing cards and handkerchiefs and sometimes combines various tricks to create one larger—and more spectacular—illusion. She has done more than 10,000 shows and currently performs on cruises; she’s sailed to 42 countries. HOW DID YOU…

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR Anaconda Encounters River Dolphins Sometimes dolphins need entertainment, too. Scientists who were photographing river dolphins in Bolivia noticed they were acting weirdly. (These endangered animals live in fresh water, unlike the bottle-nosed dolphins that swim in the ocean.) The scientists spotted a group of dolphins splashing together at the surface, and realized they were carrying a very large snake. They seemed to be using the snake as a toy. The snake was a river predator called a Beni anaconda that can grow about four meters (12 feet) long. The dolphins were dragging the snake around and swimming with it in their mouths. This was the first time scientists have seen these two species interacting. Unfortunately for the anaconda, though, it didn’t survive its playdate. PALEONTOLOGY Triceratops Tussle SOME…

Shruti Agarwal helps catch crooks. She designs comple algorithms, or computer se uences, that are used by e perts to figure out if photographs and videos are fake. She has spent years studying new digital media, technology, and mathematics. This has allowed her to not only keep up with fraudsters but outwit them. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the assachusetts Institute of Technology ( IT) outside Boston. YOU WORK IN DIGITAL FORENSICS. THAT SOUNDS COOL! WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU DO? Digital forensic experts build mathematical models to capture the true properties of an unchanged image. If these properties are absent or disrupted in some part of the image, this can indicate that the image has gone through some tampering. Such manipulations range from innocent changes like increasing contrast…

“Busy, Harriet?” came a voice from the doorway.Harriet Weisz turned from her monitor. “Come on in, Erik, what’s up?” “Check out this email,” said her colleague. “Somebody claiming to have discovered a new species of insect.” “That wouldn’t be that surprising,” she answered as she took his laptop. “Ten thousand new species are identified every year.” “Yeah, but look at the photos he attached,” said Erik. Harriet skimmed the text as she scrolled down. “‘Previously unknown to science’…‘missing link’… What the heck?!” She had reached the images. “What is this?” “Kind of looks like cricket legs, you’ve got sort of an earwig structure there at the back, and those wings almost look like Lepidoptera, don’t they?” Erik said, nodding. “No wonder he’s calling it a missing link.” Harriet had recovered.…

This trick is better than magic. Ready to amaze your friends and family? You need at least two dozen six-sided dice of any size or color; the more dice, the better. Or you can use two decks of cards. Roll the dice and then place them in a long row. Teach your friend how to play the game. Here’s how: 1) Your friend secretly picks a number between one and six. Suppose her secret number is four. Your friend counts down the row and stops on the fourth die, without giving you any clues about what she is doing. 2) Then she checks the number on the fourth die and counts that number down the line. Say the fourth die shows a three; she would move three positions. 3) If…

WAIT, DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! It is the evening of Oct. 30, 1938, the night before Halloween, and the winds of war stir the air in the United States. As you twist the knobs on the wooden radio in your front parlor, you are shocked to hear a sudden, Earthshattering announcement: As this astonishing story unfolds before you, panic is reported nationwide. But, of course, this supposed alien invasion never happened. It was all just a hoax—or at least meant to be a form of entertainment. Nearly a century later, Mercury Theatre’s The War of the Worlds broadcast, narrated by Orson Welles, is still remembered as one of the most famous media deceptions of all time. How could so many people be made to believe such an unbelievable tale? Incredible…

Hands-OnDEEPFAKE YOU’RE SURFING THE INTERNET WHEN YOU SEE A FRIEND’S LATEST POST. Your heart begins to pound. It’s a photo of a truck-sized spider near the public library. Apparently, someone’s been rearing it secretly in their home. You can handle ants. Maybe even cockroaches. But monster spiders? Aaaaaah! Don’t pack your bags just yet, though. Stop. And think: Is this colossal critter truly real? SEEING LIKE AN EXPERT The image may look like a photo. But that doesn’t mean it’s real. Image-editing software makes it possible to doctor an image and show something that isn’t real at all. People may do this to create art, to entertain—or to deceive. Edited images cause problems when people mistakenly believe that a fake image is real. Fraudsters tweak images in different ways. One…

You might be Nessie, the monster swimming in Scotland’s Loch Ness. But as lakes all over the world claim their own cryptids, you could also be Bessie, Cressie, Issie, Aggie, Champ, or some other beast. You are a sewer gator (aka alligator in the sewers). You’re the mysterious, swamp-loving bunyip. No one can agree on what you look like, but you sure are terrifying. A chupacabra, you have spines down your back and drink the blood of goats. You’re Mokele-Mbembe, a long-necked dinosaur who lives in rivers in the Congo. You are intimidating but vegetarian. Named the dingonek or “jungle walrus,” you have long tusks and use your pointed tail as a weapon. You must be a thunderbird, an enormous flying animal often appearing in Native American legends. A huge…

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both loved to test the boundary between the impossible and the improbable. You might say their friendship, based on magic tricks and messages from the dead, was doomed from the start. NEW FRIENDS Early in 1920, the celebrated American magician Harry Houdini was on tour in England. He was an expert at card tricks and pulling live rabbits out of hats, but his specialty was freeing himself from sealed boxes in which he had been placed, bound and handcuffed. No one could figure out how Houdini managed his daring escapes. One of the celebrities who came to see the mystifying American perform was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British mystery writer. Conan Doyle was as famous as Houdini, thanks to his wildly popular…

SMILING AND DANCING, SINGER WHITNEY HOUSTON BELTS OUT SONG AFTER SONG TO A DELIGHTED CROWD AT A CASINO SHOW IN LAS VEGAS. It may seem like a regular performance, except for one little thing: Whitney Houston has been dead for nine years. That figure on stage is not a real person. It’s a hologram. According to physics, a hologram is a 3D (three-dimensional) projection with actual depth. Technically, hologram Whitney is a flat projection that appears 3D thanks to some clever tricks. As it looks like a hologram, that’s what everyone calls it. Whitney’s not alone. A hologram of rapper Tupac Shakur performed at a music festival in 2012, more than a decade after his death. And, thanks to various techniques, the late Elvis Presley performed a duet of his…