Innehållsförteckning för April 2021 från Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

What would life be like without flowers? No more cotton T-shirts and jeans, and no more cereal, orange juice, and coffee—because these all come from flowering plants. Come to think of it, no more bacon, either. (After all, what do pigs eat?) No more grass to walk on, no more trees to lie under, and much less oxygen to breathe. You guessed it. If it weren’t for flowering plants, you wouldn’t be here reading this page right now, either! So, what exactly are flowers, anyway? Where did they come from, and what makes them so special? A Rose by Any Other Name If you could watch an hour-long movie of the history of the Earth, flowering plants would show up just before the credits. Somehow, though they made their appearance…

In mid-summer my garden is a-buzz with activity. Yellow-and-black striped insects z-z-zip from flower to flower. They look like bees, but they’re flower flies. Some folks call them hoverflies because they hover over blooms. Regardless of what you call them, they’re members of the syrphid fly family, Syrphidae. The best way to help syrphids is to make your yard more friendly to all kinds of pollinators. Plant a pollinator patch or let part of your backyard go wild. MEET THE FAMILY If you grow flowers, you probably have syrphids (pronounced sir- fids). There are about 6,000 species of syrphid flies worldwide, 900 in North America. They range from 1/4 inches to 3/4 inches (6 to 19 mm) long and sport bee-like camouflage. Some even hum like bees, but they don’t…

Professor Harry E. Hersh is a mathematician and a master chocolate chef. He loves chocolate bar problems like this one: Divide the 8x8 gridded chocolate square into rectangles or squares such that each quadrilateral contains one chocolate piece (and one piece only, not two or more) decorated with a white chocolate number. The number must designate the number of chocolate cells inside the quadrilateral. For example, I’ve drawn a rectangle around four cells that include the number 4. (This is just to indicate what a “legal” quadrilateral is; don’t include my rectangle in your solution.) Can you draw the appropriate quadrilateral around each white chocolate number? What strategy did you use? How long did it take you to solve this problem? Clifford A. Pickover, is the author of Calculus and…

NEW CONTEST Create a Comic Draw a comic strip with a funny punchline! Be sure to follow Pranav S.’s rules: Your comic must be two to seven panels long. It has to have one row of panels, but panels can be shrunk and stacked on top of each other. Use a ruler to outline the edges of the panels. Pranav suggests drawing with a pencil first and tracing your lines with a pen or black marker afterward. Optional: add color! 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 per person, please. 4. If you want your work returned, enclose a…

My name is Ellah and all I want to do is ask for a few topics to be put in an issue. I have been reading Muse for about a year now and I think some of the topics you cover are really cool. The first article I am suggesting is about how animals adapt to changes in their surroundings with all the destruction humans are causing and global warming. The second is about nanotechnology: I would like to learn a bit more about it and its uses. My third topic is mythology: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, or Norse. I don’t care. I already know all of them and I am an animal and mythology nerd (also a book nerd). In my science class at school, we are doing a unit…

In the first half of the twentieth century, Karl von Frisch, an Austrian scientist who studied animal behavior, forever changed our impression of honey bees by discovering the “waggle dance.” It’s a complex series of movements bees use to tell one another where to find food. This discovery made the human community sit up and take notice. The waggle dance may not qualify as a language, but it is a sophisticated form of communication. It was one of our first hints that bees do something very like what we call “thinking.” Bees can count up to four, research shows. Even more remarkably, they can combine several things they’ve learned in one situation and call on that knowledge in new situations. For example, after learning to recognize abstract signs to guide…

Maybe a dinosaur started it all. Imagine a Morelladon strolling through the lush forest of ferns and trees in what today is Northern Spain. Its back, shaped like a sail, breaks the branch of an ancient ginkgo tree. Resin oozes from the gash. A drop of the sticky substance drips to a lower branch, burying four winged insects called thrips. The tiny victims die. Enclosed in their resin-coffin, which hardens over time, their bodies remain protected. The resin turns into a stony substance called amber. Much later, over 100 million years later, scientists stumble upon the piece of amber. It had been placed into the amber collection of the Natural Science Museum of Alava in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. When the scientists took a closer look at their find, they made an…

Q: What is inside a lightbulb that makes it work? —Anthony R., age 10, Michigan A: In the 1870s, two engineers on opposite sides of the Atlantic were trying to figure out how to keep a wire from breaking. Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison both knew that running an electric current through a thin, coiled wire—called a filament—made the wire very hot. That heat glowed. In fact, it glowed brighter than the candles and oil lamps that most people relied on for light after sundown. But the light lasted for only a few minutes before the filament broke. If they could figure out a way to keep the filament in one piece, then they could make a stable electric light. Swan and Edison both tried carbon filaments, which could be…

PLANTS DON’T PRODUCE FRUIT ALL BY THEMSELVES. They get help from bees and other animals that carry pollen from flower to flower. But pollinator populations are falling. In many places, farmers pay to rent bees to visit their crops. That’s expensive. So some engineers have come up with ways to pollinate by machine. Which of these ideas do you like best? 1 ROBOT BEES The most obvious replacement for a bee is a flying robot, called a drone, that carries pollen to flowers. However, tiny drones are exceedingly tricky to build and fly. Researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands built DelFly, a drone about the width of a laptop that can hover, flip, or fly any direction. But its battery lasts just six minutes. The…

TECH DESK Go Ahead, Steal This Egg SEA TURTLES ARE ENDANGERED, so it’s important to keep their eggs safe. But in some places, people steal (or “poach”) sea turtle eggs from their nests and sell them for food. To help protect sea turtles, scientists made fake eggs that can spy on the poachers. The researchers used a 3D printer to make plastic eggs that were squishy, like real sea turtle eggs. Inside the eggs, they put little GPS transmitters. Then they waited on beaches in Costa Rica. When sea turtle moms came ashore to lay their eggs, the researchers snuck one fake egg into each nest. They planted 101 eggs in all. Poachers later dug up some of these nests. They discovered a few of the fake eggs and tossed…

The sound of bees surrounds Helena Arondoski as she approaches a pair of hives. She looks like an outer space explorer, dressed from head to toe in bee suit that’s just the right size for an 11-year-old. “It’s like a big bulky sweatshirt with MC Hammer pants,” she says. The suit helps protect against stings, but it’s not perfect. So she moves slowly and uses a small, handheld smoke machine to calm the bees. Carefully, Helena lifts out a frame from one of the hives, smelling sweet beeswax and seeing the glint of fresh honey. Bees climb over and around the frame, going about their work as she checks to make sure they are healthy. Her family helps care for these hives and many others as volunteers for the organization…

In weather that’s sunny, a bee will make honeyFrom flowers that bloom in the field.She goes to collect her supply of the nectar,As much as the blossom will yield.But when it’s so sweet or there’s so much to eatShe decides it deserves her endorsements,It’s time to contrive to return to the hiveAnd to strive to bring back reinforcements. And when that exploration leads to the evaluationThat the present situation calls for their cooperation,They must share the information that enables navigationTo that promising location that deserves revisitationAnd so what is the foundation for the bees’ communication?They dance. A bee travels forward while shaking her bootyIn part of the dance known as the waggle run.The angle she moves at—and this is the beauty—Is that of the food with respect to the sun.The…

Amber is an extraordinarily helpful witness of past life. Besides insects, scientists have discovered plants, frogs, lizards, and even the head and tail of small dinosaurs entombed in it. The fossils are perfectly preserved because chemicals in the resin protect them from decay. They keep their three-dimensional shape while other fossils are often flattened. One of the most exciting finds is a tick engorged with the blood of a dinosaur caught in a piece of amber. That caught the attention of fans of the movie Jurassic Park. In the movie, scientists pluck a mosquito, which has fed on dinosaur blood, out of a piece of amber. They recover DNA from the blood and use it to revive dinosaurs. Predictably, things go wrong in true Hollywood horror fashion. There are no…