Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children November/December 2016

1) WHAT ARE THE HPBs???? 2) WHAT DO THEY DO???? 3) IS MUSE EDIBLE???? Now, enough about that. I live on the planet Excazario. (Pronounced like this: em-pu-zi-ro-sy. Weird? It’s just my language.) It is an alter ego of what you hoo-mans call Earth. I turned 11 on May 31 and am exactly 100 in your years. My favorite current Muse is Whatsi (NO OFFENSE!) because he is a nerd like me. O is a party-style-be-my-friend kinda person and Aarti is curious every single second of her life. By the way Whatsi . . . can you make a machine that guards Muse headquarters and spits tranquilizer darts out to any HPBs it sees? That would be cool. —TEMANA KORELUNAI, SPELLING GEEK / age 11 / My house, Bernandy, Excazario,…

YOUR DREAMS probably can’t predict the future. But your bad dreams might say something about your hobbies. Specifically, they can predict what instrument you play. Researchers surveyed a large group of teenagers in California about what kinds of bad dreams they had most often. They also asked questions about the kids’ extracurricular interests. They found some surprising relationships between dreams and the musical instruments teens studied. For example, if your most common bad dream is that you’re trying to run away from a threat, but your legs won’t move, you’re likely a brass player. Pianists are more likely to dream about showing up for a test they haven’t prepared for. Drummers often dream about being naked in public or forgetting to wear clothing. And flute players, oddly enough, tend to…

ELECTRIC EELS are famous for frying prey in the Amazonian waters where they live. Recently, a scientist discovered a surprising trick that electric eels use for self-defense. If a large animal comes partway into the water, an eel can leap up and attack the animal. The eel presses its chin against the invader to deliver a shock. With the eel’s head in the air, its shock is even more powerful, because the electricity doesn’t disperse through the water. The discovery is good news for fans of Alexander von Humboldt, a German scientist who explored Central and South America at the turn of the nineteenth century. Humboldt claimed he had seen electric eels leap from the water to attack horses that waded in. But until now, that story seemed like it…

THE DESERT MOSS SYNTRICHIA CANINERVIS lives in some of the driest places on Earth. But unlike some other desert plants, it doesn’t rely on a wide or deep root system to wring every last water drop from the soil. Instead, it snatches moisture from the air to water itself. Each of the plant’s leaves ends in tiny hairs called awns. Each awn is covered in microscopic grooves. Dew condenses in these grooves overnight and then dribbles down each hair toward the plant. The hairs catch fog droplets too. They even help to collect drops of water for the moss when—finally!—it rains.…

TO STAY HEALTHIER, SOME office workers have switched to standing desks. These desks let people stand to work at their computers, instead of sitting down all day. Now researchers in Canada are testing a system that could make working on a computer even more active. The setup lets people control computers by kicking, tapping, and stomping their feet. A person uses the system by standing at a desk while wearing special shoes. Under the desk, a Kinect camera captures the person’s movements, while sensors inside the shoes detect how the person is stepping. Heel taps, toe taps, foot stomps, jumps, and kicks give the computer different commands, like scrolling down a page or opening a new browser tab. And to open a time-wasting page like Facebook, users might have to…

IT’S OBVIOUS that these are the ruins of an ancient city that sank into the sea. You can see broken stone columns and paved floors with no walls. Long ago, a mysterious human culture must have lived here and built these structures. There’s just one catch: there was no city, and these are no ruins. The structures were built by bacteria. When divers discovered this site near a Greek island, they thought theyd found a long-lost city. But scientists who investigated the underwater spot discovered the truth: millions of years ago, methane gas seeped out of the seafloor here. Bacteria fed on the methane and transformed the soil into dolomite, a rock commonly used to make cement. The material hardened into flat sheets, discs, and doughnut shapes that look like…