Innehållsförteckning för April 2022 från Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

BABY DUCKS AND GEESE OFTEN SWIM IN A SINGLE-FILE LINE BEHIND A PARENT. Researchers say they’ve figured out why the birds travel this way: Riding mom’s or dad’s waves helps them swim. The scientists used math to model what happens when birds swim in a line. Each bird makes little waves behind it. If a baby is at just the right spot behind its mom or dad, the parent’s waves will help push the baby forward. And the baby’s own waves will help the next sibling in line. This means swimming in a row isn’t just adorable. It’s also easier.…

HIKING CAN BE TOUGH. Sometimes the ground is bumpy, or mosquitoes bite you, or you run out of snacks. It’s even harder for a robot. Usually, walking robots travel by sensing their body’s location in space. They feel the ground as they go and plan out each step. But this makes for slow travel. Some other robots can “look” where they’re going, but surfaces like snow or grass may confuse them. That’s why researchers built a new kind of walking robot. It has four legs and is named ANYmal. The robot walks using both methods at once: It relies on both its sense of its own location and sensors that “see” how far away things are. Researchers tested ANYmal by taking it for a hike in the Alps in Switzerland.…

Imagine that you’re a cricket happily chirping away. What if your mating song begins to attract a deadly enemy? Would you continue to call out? Or would you hush up, hoping to slip quietly under the radar? For the past 20 years, Robin Tinghitella, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Denver in Colorado, has been studying a species of field cricket in Hawaii. She has observed them abandon their signature chirp and fall silent to avoid detection by predators. The crickets were thought to have lost their song for good, until a recent discovery by Tinghitella turned what we know about crickets upside-down and uncovered a new type of song—one that is curiously cat-like in nature. WHEN I THINK OF FIELD CRICKETS, I IMMEDIATELY THINK OF CHIRPING NOISES. A…

I listened in amazement as the tanned, muscular climber in the Yosemite Valley area of California proceeded to describe his entire climb up the sheer granite face of El Capitan. He managed to relate every inch of the six-day climb he’d accomplished a year before. I couldn’t believe what an amazing memory he had. How could I ever hope to achieve this feat of recall? Later, I learned that I too could relate every inch of my scariest climbs. That’s because the emotional fear factor made them unforgettable. Emotion has a very strong effect on memory. Scientists have learned that emotional memories are handled differently in the brain. Most events in our life are held in our memory for only a few minutes—then they’re gone. It takes endless repetition and…

NEW CONTEST The Land of Lost Things Your left sock. Your favorite pen. Your math homework you swore you did; I mean you put it right back in your folder, you really thought you had it, and where else could it possibly even be? When things go missing, where do they go? How do they get there? What else might be in this land of lost things? In words or pictures, help us discover where lost things end up, and we’ll help put some of our favorites on the map. 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,…

Hello! I am an 11-year-old girl with a LOT to say. First off, I have been reading Muse since February 2018, “Pets on the Mind.” My favorite issues of Muse I have gotten are, March 2019, “Bodies in Space,” and also July/August 2019, “The Story Behind Wildfires.” The wildfires issue is probably the best Muse I have ever read. My friend Cassius lives in California, and he and his family had to evacuate the area they live in because of a 2020 fire. On top of that, he also has to do remote schooling in an unfamiliar area without at least going to stop at his friend’s porch to say, “Hi.” When I get to college, I want to become a public speaker to talk about these problems. Cassius and…

EARTHQUAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS AND DEADLY. But they can also make trees grow faster. After an earthquake shakes up the soil, water may flow through the ground more easily. Scientists wondered whether this extra water helps trees grow. They took long, pencil-shaped samples from the trunks of trees in Chile, where there was a major earthquake in 2010. Inside the wood samples, they could see the tree rings. (These are layers that grow each year. You can count a tree’s rings to figure out its age.) And they could see that some trees living in a valley had grown a little extra in the weeks or months right after the earthquake. Trees on the tops of hills, though, had grown less. As the earthquake sent water rushing down to the…

Encompassing much of northern Africa, the Sahara Desert is well known as a scorching hot, dry place. Early European explorers, lacking experience in these harsh conditions, had a harrowing time exploring the Sahara. All too frequently, they never returned from their expeditions. But the Sahara was not always a dry place. Believe it or not, 100 million years ago, the Sahara hosted a wetland teeming with aquatic life: fishes, turtles, crocodiles, and sharks! And many of these animals were gigantic. Traces of a Seaway How do we know the Sahara was a seaway? The Tuareg people, who are native to the Sahara Desert, first found traces of the wetland in fossil shells. The first published descriptions came from European scientists. And in 1850, a team of explorers, originally led by…

YOU’VE GOT A BUNCH OF STUFF, BUT EVERYTHING LOOKS DIFFERENT, AND NOTHING MATCHES. How can you organize this mess? No, we’re not talking about your room—let’s not go overboard here! We’re talking about the elements. You know, carbon, magnesium, lead. They were all just rocks-in-a-box, until a Russian guy with a messy beard named Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) arranged them into the famous periodic table of the elements. Now, an updated version of that chart hangs in science classrooms around the globe. Except that it’s much more than a chart. The periodic table lists the substances that make up everything we can see and touch. Plus, it tells you how every substance combines with every other substance. Talk about the ultimate collection. So, how did Mendeleev do it? Getting Organized Think…

Sharon Roseman was five years old when her world changed forever. She was playing Blind Man’s Bluff—a game of tag in which the “it” person is blindfolded—with friends outside her house. When she removed her blindfold, she couldn’t recognize where she was. “My street was not my street, my house was not my house,” she says. “I was in this totally unfamiliar place that I had never seen before, and it scared me to death.” It was only the beginning. From that moment on, Roseman has been lost every day of her life. Lost Even in Familiar Places Such a turn of events might sound like an episode of The Twilight Zone. But Roseman’s story is true, and she is not alone in her bizarre and frightening experience. As an…

IMAGINE THIS: YOU’RE DIGGING A WELL, AND INSTEAD OF HITTING WATER, YOU UNEARTH A HEADLESS HUMAN TORSO MADE OF POTTERY. This actually happened to farmers in Shaanxi province in central China in 1974. Zhao Kangmin, a local archaeologist, heard of the find and biked over to investigate. He realized that the figure had come from an elaborate tomb built over 2,000 years ago for China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang. Archaeologists eventually discovered three separate pits filled with 8,000 life-sized statues of archers, infantry, cavalry, charioteers, and generals, along with their weapons and horses, all made from terracotta—a type of fired clay. About a mile away (1.5 km) from these pits, there’s a large mound. Archaeologists know that this is the main part of Qin Shihuang’s tomb, but they have never…

It usually takes two parents to make a baby bird. As in other animals, the DNA of a mother and father combine to make a kid. But scientists have discovered that birds called California condors can sometimes hatch babies with no dad. These baby birds have only a mom. There are other kinds of animal moms that can make fatherless babies, such as certain lizards and fishes. But it’s very rare in birds. California condors themselves are rare, too. These birds almost went extinct a few decades ago. When there were only 23 surviving, people captured all the birds and kept them in safe places to help them reproduce. And it worked: Today, there are more than 500 California condors, including hundreds in the wild. Scientists have information about the…

MOST RABBITS AND THEIR RELATIVES ARE HOMEBODIES. These animals don’t go on epic journeys like some other species do. But when researchers put tracking devices onto Arctic hares, they got a surprise. Instead of staying put, some of the hares made long migrations. The scientists tracked the movements of 25 Arctic hares in chilly northern Canada. Twenty of the hares, rather than staying put, traveled toward the same lake. One hare journeyed farther than all the others: She hopped at least 388 kilometers (241 miles) over seven weeks, setting a new rabbit record. Researchers were surprised to learn a hare could make such a long trip. Maybe she was racing an Arctic tortoise?…

On a summer day in 2017, a group of researchers board a small plane in northern Guatemala in Central America. It takes off from the runway and climbs high into the air. Lush green jungle stretches far into the horizon. Its dense canopy covers the uneven landscape, giving it the appearance of a rolling green sea. It’s a beautiful sight. But the researchers inside the cockpit aren’t here for the view. They have come to discover what lies beneath the thick, sprawling greenery. Centuries ago, during about 1,800 BCE to 900 CE, the Maya civilization called this low-lying swampy area home. They were skilled farmers and brave warriors. They studied science, mathematics, and medicine. The Maya people honored their gods by offering sacrifices and building great cities filled with pyramids,…

It turns out the largest bee on Earth is good at hiding. No one had reported seeing Wallace’s giant bee, which is four times larger than a European honey bee, since 1981. Some feared the species had gone extinct. Then, in 2019, a search team found a single female bee in Indonesia. “It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed anymore, to have real proof right there in front of us in the wild,” says Clay Bolt. He’s the photographer who took photos and videos of the insect, proving it still existed. There are thousands of species like Wallace’s giant bee around the world: rare animals and plants that haven’t been seen in the wild for years. These “lost species” may…

Q: If you fired a laser beam straight up, would it be possible to hit a space object, or would it peter out before that could happen? —Alexander M., Guelph, Ontario A: Not only is it possible to hit a space object with a laser, there are scientists who do it for a living. One of them is Tom Murphy, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. As the leader of the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation (APOLLO), Murphy shoots lasers at reflectors that astronauts left on the Moon and measures how long it takes the light to bounce back to Earth. That helps him determine the distance between Earth and the Moon to the millimeter and test different ideas about gravity. Murphy uses a giant laser…

IMAGINE YOU’RE IN SCHOOL AND YOU’RE TAKING AN EXAM. You studied, but you’re still not sure about all the material being covered… • Who is the author of The Secret Garden? Maybe P.L. Travers? (Try again.)* • The third layer of Earth’s atmosphere is the ______ sphere. Darn, I knew that yesterday!** Often, a quiz or test at school requires you to remember all kinds of facts and figures. So, how can you avoid forgetting a fact when you need one? Or retrieving a fact if one gets away from you—preferably before the test is over?! Well, here’s one answer you’ll hopefully never forget: Recall methods can help you remember better. Here are three such techniques. So, stop scratching your head and give ‘em a try. Method #1: Enter the…