Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

One of these images shows a REAL painting by artist Johannes Vermeer. The other shows a FAKE Vermeer. Can you tell which is which? See page 33. Han van Meegeren was a painter with a problem. He tried to sell artwork under his own name, but the critics of the 1920s weren’t keen on it. They were excited by newer, abstract forms of art, like cubism or surrealism. Van Meegeren, on the other hand, excelled at painting in a traditional, realistic style. The Dutch artist decided to trick the art world. He wanted to prove that he could paint just as well as any of the famous old masters. Van Meegeren became an art forger. A forger creates art but claims a famous artist made it. They may sell their…

Have you ever been really hungry, but there wasn’t much to eat in your kitchen? Did you throw together a bunch of stuff you had on hand and were pleasantly surprised when it tasted good? You aren’t alone. Some of our favorite foods were created by accident. Here’s a sample menu of some familiar foods that might never have happened if someone hadn’t created them by mistake. Ice Cream Cone Before the ice cream cone, people ate their ice cream out of dishes or paper wrappers. This changed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair in Missouri. A vendor, the story goes, ran out of dishes to serve his ice cream. Luckily, Ernest A. Hamwi was set up next to him and was selling crisp waffle-like pastries called zalabia. The…

EVERYONE’S LIFE CAN APPEAR PERFECT ON SOCIAL MEDIA. On YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and similar apps, people tend to share their happiest, most picturesque moments. They carefully compose any text to get the message just right. They use filters and enhancements to glam up images and videos. The app sorts the posts with the most likes and comments to the top. The end result? All you see of others’ lives is the best of the best. Your own life may not seem to measure up. Things happen every day that you’d never dare share. You also see all of your posts that don’t get many likes. You may unfairly compare the worst of your life to the very best of others’ lives. “I do feel I need to be perfect and…

Q: Why do some people sleep in longer than others? It can make sleepovers awkward!—Charlotte L., age 11, Oregon A: Sometimes it seems as if there are two kinds of people in the world: larks and owls. Larks wake up bright and early every day. Owls sleep in late, probably because they were up late the night before. In reality, most people fall somewhere between these two extremes. But whatever schedule your internal clock may follow, the pattern your body prefers is more or less fixed throughout your life. Larks will always be larks; owls will always be owls. Except when you’re a teenager. During adolescence, people’s internal clocks tend to get pushed later and later, more toward the owl side of things. If you’re naturally a lark, you might…

EVER THOUGHT YOUR LIFE MIGHT BE PERFECT IF ONLY . . . ? Ever wondered how close to perfect one person is able to be? You may never fully answer all those questions, but you can take a closer look at them with this Perfect Experiment. It is going to ask you to be perfect, but really, the goal is to have fun. You can try this experiment on your own, or you can get a couple of people together and lead them through it. The results are especially interesting with other people! But whether you are attempting this life experiment solo or with others, be sure to think through or talk about the reflection questions on the opposite page. Perfect Experiment: Level One If you’re in a group, take…

If you raise your hand in class, will the teacher notice right away? Do you spend most of your class time learning or is too much other stuff going on all around? Does your teacher know your strengths and how they differ from the kid’s next to you? Your answers to these questions depend partly on the number of students in your class. Researchers argued for decades about whether class size matters for learning. Then an experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s plainly showed that students had learned more in classes with fewer students. Bingo! Inspired by the strong evidence, California rushed to adopt a statewide program to shrink classes. How’d it work out? It didn’t. Things went wrong. Small classes in California were a disappointment. But confronting the unexpected…

Your Turn! Most of these corrections appeared in print or online news media. But watch out: Two of the corrections are fictitious. Read them all and then decide for yourself—which are real corrections and which are fake? This sentence originally misstated that Philip is Mr. Slate’s sloth. Philip is his turtle. 1 ○ REAL ○ FAKE Editor’s note: The divination method used to locate ground water is called dowsing, not drowning. We regret the error. 2 ○ REAL ○ FAKE An obituary on Sept. 20 about Hiroshi Yamauchi, the longtime president of Nintendo, included a quotation from a 1988 New York Times article that inaccurately described the Nintendo video game Super Mario Bros. 2. The brothers Mario and Luigi, who appear in this and other Nintendo games, are plumbers, not janitors. 3 ○…

January 9, 2007. San Francisco, California. Steve Jobs walked onto the stage in front of a cheering crowd. Wearing his signature black turtleneck and blue jeans, he waited for quiet. The crowd held its breath. “We’re going to make some history together today,” he said. Then he introduced the iPhone. Two Sides to the Story Steve Jobs (1955–2011) was a hero of the tech world. But it wasn’t always this way. Jobs, the designer of some of the world’s most popular products, made serious mistakes, too. Jobs’s career spanned three decades. He changed the way people do business and connect with family and friends. But he also hurt people close to him. He cofounded Apple. It’s responsible for iPhones plus iMacs, MacBooks, and iPads, among other things. But he also…

NEW CONTEST SPECTACULAR SLIP-UPS In science—and in life—you can’t be afraid to make mistakes. They mean you’re trying. And errors can sometimes lead to surprising discoveries, useful lessons, or even cool inventions. In no more than 200 words, tell us about a real or fictional mistake that turned out to be a good thing after all. We’ll “accidentally” print our favorites in an upcoming issue of Muse. ANNOUNCING CONTEST WINNERS! Oops! Sorry, we made a mistake with the contest winners to be revealed in this issue. With the entries being science comics, we should have reserved at least two pages for the best of our readers’ excellent work. We’re posting these entries to the Cricket Media website. Visit https://cricketmedia.com/childrens-magazines/muse/ and go to SciCom Comics (September issue) under “Our Favorite Contest…