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

I am no fantastical creature with magical powers, nor am I an intergalactic royal. I am not even a junior scientist. I have nothing to threaten you with. I am just a 15-year-old girl who is a bit of a loner. I have trouble making friends and have an anxiety/panic disorder that has been diagnosed by multiple professionals. About a year ago I got a psychiatric service dog. Shortly after that I began reading Muse. My first-ever Muse magazine was about pets and featured service dogs. I was instantly hooked. This may sound like a sob story... but that was not my goal. This is a thank you. A lot of times when I go out with my service dog, people who don’t know the law try to kick me…

Two girls scrape dirt from an area where a house once stood. Bit by bit, they ÿ ll a bucket. A boy takes the bucket and pours the dirt onto a wooden frame lined with a metal screen. Another middle schooler shakes the sifter back and forth. ° e dirt falls away. ° e student picks through rocks and sticks, until she ÿ nds a round, dirt-encrusted object. It looks as if it might be glass, so she adds it to the bag that holds glass artifacts. When the bag is full, another group of middle schoolers empties it and sorts through the objects. A boy lifts the round one out of the pile. Using a soft toothbrush, he gently washes it and scrubs away the dirt, revealing a bead…

Kipton V. Walton, also known as Ranger Kip, serves at the Paul H. Douglas Center for Environmental Education in Gary, Indiana. He’s been fascinated by the great outdoors since he was a little boy and has worked as a National Park Service (NPS) park ranger for almost three decades. He’s in the Interpretation division, which means he gets to help teach people of all ages about plants and animals and how they connect to people. He loves working at one of America’s newest national parks, the Indiana Dunes. The Indiana Dunes National Park stretches across three counties and is home to the Bailly Homestead and a fascinating cemetary. WHAT IS THE BAILLY HOMESTEAD? The Bailly Homestead is a National Historic Landmark located in Porter, Indiana. It was the home of…

NEW CONTEST Curious Cross Sections If you could dig down under your home, what would you find? Just some old cans and broken bricks? Or perhaps…a buried tower full of ancient books? The complete fossil of an ancient, undiscovered creature? Send us a picture (or photos, if you want to get real-world about it!) of the cross-section of your deep dig and we’ll pick our favorite to feature for all the excavation experts out there. 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 self-addressed, stamped envelope. 5. All…

DECAPITATION These Slugs Cut Off Their Own Heads Your body is pretty good at repairing itself. After you scrape your knee, the skin grows back. If you break your arm, the bone will heal. But some animals can grow back entire arms or tails. And some sea slugs can lose their heads and regrow their whole bodies. Researchers discovered two species of sea slug whose head sometimes just . . . falls off Afterward, the head keeps moving around and eating. It doesn’t die, even though its heart and other organs are missing. The neck heals, and within three weeks, the slug’s entire body grows back. Why cut off our own head? Some lizards can shed their tails to escape an animal that’s trying to eat them. But scientists think…

In northern Australia is a rocky, wild area called Arnhem Land. Today, it’s home to the Bunitj people and others. It was also home to the ÿ rst peoples to live in Australia. As early as 26,000 years ago, these humans started journaling by drawing on rock faces. Using charcoal or natural crayons, they depicted themselves with animals they saw. ° e people who came after them kept up the journaling, drawing beside or on top of the original pictures.° e layers of drawings tell a story of strange beasts that lived in Australia thousands of years ago: oversized birds, giant striding kangaroos, and other mega-sized animals. ° ese early artists faced a natural world fraught with dangers we can only get hints of today. On Foot and By Boat…

In early January of 1153, according to legend, Earl Harald found himself in a di˜ cult situation. He and a hundred men were marching across Mainland Orkney to ÿ ght for his land. Everything was going according to plan until the snowstorm started. He couldn’t make his men push through it. ˛ ere was only one place nearby that was big enough for all of them: they would have to take shelter in Orkahaugr, a huge burial mound. If the haugbui—a ghost-like mound-dweller of Norse myth—really was protecting the space, it was going to have to share its home for a while. What Was Orkahaugr? During Earl Harald’s time, Orkahaugr was the name of a site on Mainland Orkney. Today it’s called Maeshowe (pronounced maze-ow). Orkney is an archipelago located…

A COMPUTER can easily defeat a human at chess or even the quiz show Jeopardy. But questions that seem obvious trip them up. Read these three: 1. The trophy would not fit in the suitcase because it was too big. What was too big? 2. The father comforted the son because he was so upset. Who was upset? 3. Th fi h ate the worm because it was hungry. Which animal was hungry? Of course you know the answers. But how do you know so easily? And why might a computer or robot have trouble? That’s the interesting part. There’s a lot more to these sentences than meets the eye. In question 1, the word “it” can refer to either “the trophy” or “the suitcase.” You know which one is…

The place you live in has a history. Before you came to live there, someone was most likely there before you. ˜ ey may have lived an interesting life in your home. And if you could dig down, below the foundation and into the ground, you may discover a deeper history. Archaeology can help uncover the past that’s been buried over time, often without any written record. Layers upon layers of earth reveal history before our eyes—the deeper the layers, the older the stories. Urban Archaeology Corps Digging into the past is exactly the task of student employees with the Urban Archaeology Corps (UAC), a work program run by the National Park Service (NPS). People who work for the UAC range in age from 15 to 26. ˜ ey work…

YOU CAN dig up clues to the past like a real archaeologist. Just follow these steps. You’ll need Hammer Stakes Tape measure Compass or compass app Scissors String Pencil Grid form (paper marked off in squares) Paper bags Notebook Spade Mason’s trowel Whiskbroom Paintbrush Toothbrush Hand screen White correction flui Permanent marker Plastic bags (optional) 1. Choose a site (like a yard, vacant lot, or farm). Get the owner’s permission to dig. 2. Pound a stake into the ground at the site’s southwestern corner. Insert stakes every 5 feet (1.5 m) north and east from the corner stake until the site is covered. Tie pieces of string from stake to stake (not diagonally) to form a grid. 3. Number each square on the grid form. Write each square’s number and…

If you’ve ever wondered why one one word has different meanings— —for for instance, from the ball you kick ck to the ball that’s a dressed-up dance party—then you’ve noticed iced something interesting about the the English language. The language ge’’ss rich vocabulary is the result of f a a unique history. And that history ry reveals itself in the multiple meanings of many words we use se every day. When we hear the word “bark ark,, ”” we use context clues to tell us whether it means the outer surface rface of a tree, the noise a dog makes es,, or a small ship. Those different nt meanings represent distinct words that entered the language at different times and just happen to go by the same name today. Germanic…

Sometime around 1200 CE, a monk in Constantinople busily worked at copying books. He’d been writing all day, and now he needed some more paper—but he couldn’t just go to the store and buy more. Instead of the paper we use today, medieval writers used parchment. Parchment is made of animal skin, stretched and scraped smooth in a process that takes days. Making it was very expensive. The scribe decided to save some time and money: he found some old parchment someone had already written on and, using a very sharp knife, scraped off ost of the layer that had writing on it. Then he turned the parchment sideways and continued writing on his almost-new sheets. About 700 years later, in 1906, a man named Johan Ludvig Heiberg looked through…

MOST OF THE RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS IN MAESHOWE IN ORKNEY, Scotland, are messages dating to the twelfth century (1100s). They’re in a form of the runic alphabet called “medieval runes,” which at that time was called fuþork (pronounced “futhork”). The name comes from its first six letters The symbol þ, called “thorn,” is a letter from older alphabets that we don’t use anymore. It’s pronounced as “th.” The standard fuþork alphabet had 16 letters. However, the Maeshowe inscriptions also include several other runes, for sounds like “g,” “oo,” and “ee.” A few of the inscriptions also incorporated a different kind of rune, called twig runes or tree runes. Runes are a writing system, not a language by themselves. This is good news for us because it means we don’t have to…

Q: What causes itches, and how does scratching stop it? —Julian H., age 11 A: I’m getting itchy just thinking about your question! So I asked Zhou-Feng Chen, the director of the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University in St. Louis, what’s going on. It turns out itches don’t really come from your skin, even though that’s where you usually feel them—they come from your brain. Here’s what happens. An ant scurrying across your arm, or some other irritating disturbance, wakes up nearby nerve cells in your body. These cells’ only job is to detect potentially itchy sensations, and when they do, they send a message to your brain using a “special highway” reserved just for them, Chen explains. Once your brain interprets that message, you start to…