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

LETTER of the MONTH ZOOZVE or Not ZOOZVE? That Is the Question. My name is Gwen, and I am 12 years old (I will probably be 13 by the time you read this). I have been getting Muse for about two years now, and I love it! I always read it when I am eating—I just think science magazines go better with food. Am I right? Yes. Anywho, I really appreciate the awareness you bring to animals and their habitats. You’re awesome! I would like to inform you about my hobbies. My BIGGEST hobby is competitive swimming—it is my passion. I love the butterfly stroke, and that’s how I qualified for and swam in the state championships this year. The rest of my hobbies are reading, bushcraft [the use of…

Q: If you were in a car going the speed of light, what would you see if you turned on the headlights? —Micah W., age 18, Texas A: Your question is quite similar to the one that first got a teenaged Albert Einstein pondering the weirdness of special relativity. Only as a child of the 19th century, he thought about trains instead of cars. Einstein wondered: If I were on a train traveling near the speed of light, would I be able to see my reflection in a mirror well enough to shave? Whether your light-speed vehicle is a car or a train (or a bike), you and Einstein would both see “exactly what you would see if you were standing still,” says Hal Evans. He’s a physicist at Indiana…

The pizza slicer had made four cuts with equal angles, all crossing at one point, to end up with eight slices. But the crossing point is not at the pizza’s center, so some slices are larger than others. Mathematicians have shown there’s an easy solution to sharing the pizza evenly. They call it the Pizza Theorem. If you and your pal take alternate slices, you each automatically end up with an equal amount. It doesn’t matter where the crossing point is or which wedge you start with. The strategy of going around the pizza and taking alternate slices also gives each person exactly the same amount of edge crust. Nice, if you love stuffed-crust pizza. The Pizza Theorem doesn’t work for a pizza cut into just four slices, but it…

>> TECH DESK AI Chatbot Bests Doctors at Making Diagnoses A medical researcher designed a new study to learn how effective a current top chatbot could be for diagnosing patients. To figure it out, he put together three different groups: physicians alone, physicians who were allowed to use the chatbot, and the chatbot alone. Each group was given six patient cases that hadn’t been published before. They were tasked with figuring out what the problem was with the given patient and how best to treat whatever that might be. A panel of medical experts judged the results without knowing which group gave which answers. The researcher, who is a doctor himself in Boston, Massachusetts, was stunned by the results. The chatbot alone consistently did the best, scoring 90 percent correct…

Alex Wiltschko, in a long, white lab coat and protective glasses, picks up a Nike shoe box and slips a sensor into a tiny hole in the side. Inside is a pair of Air Jordans complete with Nike’s iconic swoosh logos. They look authentic, but do they smell authentic? He watches the screen where the computer is plotting the scent. “Here comes the scent from the fake,” he says. “It’s much, much bigger and different than the signature for the real shoe.” He takes out one of the sneakers and sticks his nose deep into the high-top and confirms what the sensor had detected: These Jordans are fakes! They’re much more pungent and have a stronger chemical scent than real ones. Today, “what people [who are really into sneakers] are…

Have you ever tried the jelly bean test? It’s an experiment that proves the importance of the nose in the sense we call “taste.” Hold your nose closed and put a jelly bean or some other fruitflavored candy in your mouth. Chew the candy. You’ll taste sweetness and maybe a little sourness but not much else. Then open your nose. Suddenly, you’ll get the full force of the fruit flavor. Chewing releases molecules, which are groups of atoms stuck together, in the candy. In the mouth, these molecules trigger basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Odor molecules also float from the back of the mouth up into the nose. THE CHEMICAL SENSES The little bumps on your tongue are called papillae. They hide tiny taste buds. Inside the taste buds…

A PIECE OF GREEN CANDY may look like a single color, but is it? Some inks and dyes are made of one color; others contain hidden colors. You can be a science detective and find out what really gives candy its color. Chromatography is a way to separate out the different colored molecules in a mixture. You dab a substance, such as ink or dye, onto paper. Then you dip the paper into a liquid. As the liquid creeps up the paper, it picks up the colored molecules and carries them along. Different molecules crawl along at different speeds, based on how heavy they are and how well they dissolve in the liquid. The pattern of bands reveals what is in the mixture. Rainbow Candy What makes up the colors…

You may eat your PB&J, or peanut butter and jelly, sandwich without even thinking about what’s holding it together. But without bread, you won’t have a sandwich. You’ll just have a mess. To people from all around the world, bread is an important, familiar food. But it’s also an amazing transformer. To turn into those soft, chewy, and delicious slices of bread, your loaf had to go through an extraordinary series of changes. Who Kneads Dough? You only need four ingredients to make bread: water, flour, salt, and yeast. Yeast is a type of microbe, a living organism too small to see. Flour is dry and powdery. It comes from ground-up grains of wheat. When you add water, the flour absorbs the liquid. The mixture forms clumps. If you continue…