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

A More Accessible Muse My grandma has had me subscribed to your magazine for a while now, but I haven’t really been reading the issues. But not because I don’t like them. Because I’m visually impaired, and when I look at even the covers, all I see is a mess I can’t make sense of. (No offense to your cover artists; pretty much every magazine in existence is like this.) Specifically, I have a condition called Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), which is caused by a brain injury affecting the way your brain processes images. It’s not very well known, but it’s made it very difficult for me to read magazines. Fortunately, my mom does look at what comes through our mail, because she pointed out to me the January 2022…

EVERYONE LOVES TO SCRATCH AN ITCH. But it’s harder when you don’t have hands. That’s why some fish scratch themselves with a surprising tool: a shark. Ocean animals often rub against objects like rocks or the sandy seafloor. This helps gets tiny bugs off their bodies and keep them healthy. Scientists recently noticed that some fish also rub their bodies against sharks. Sharks have unique skin that’s extra rough. That might be why fish will risk being eaten for a good scratch. Sharks, though, don’t seem to enjoy being used as back-scratchers. Sometimes they try to swim away, while itchy fish chase them down.…

Starlight contains a wealth of information about the universe if you know how to decode it. For example, we can learn from starlight what stars are made of, how hot they are, and how fast they’re traveling. Astronomers separate starlight into its individual colors. The light from the Sun appears white when it’s all mixed together. When you see a rainbow, though, rain or mist has divided sunlight into all its individual colors. Rainbows of light are called spectra. Spectral analysis is the act of studying these rainbows, while spectroscopy is the science of studying spectra. What have scientists learned by studying star spectra? Star Stuff and Spectral Lines A star’s spectrum can tell us what elements make up that star. The key is looking at what’s missing from the…

Anna Frebel is an Indiana Jones of space. Instead of hunting for ancient artifacts on Earth, she scours the universe for ancient stars. In fact, she has discovered several of the oldest known stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Frebel is an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), located in Cambridge. She has also written a book, Searching for the Oldest Stars. HOW DID YOU GET INTO HUNTING FOR ANCIENT STARS, OR “STELLAR ARCHAEOLOGY,” AS IT’S CALLED? It’s kind of my hobby that worked out. I’ve always been interested in chemistry and the periodic table, and nuclear physics and stars. All these things come together in old stars, because we use them to research the origin of the elements and how they are made. So,…

General relativity gives us a new way of looking at gravity: The mass of a star or planet or galaxy actually warps the space around it. When Albert Einstein created this theory, he realized that even light would curve around massive objects. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing. Dramatic Distortions Galaxies and quasars—the brightest objects in the universe—can be “lensed” by a large galaxy or cluster between us and them. The simplest case is called an Einstein ring. When a quasar, a galaxy, and the Earth are all in a straight line, light traveling from the distant quasar bends around the galaxy in the middle. People on Earth see the quasar as a ring instead of a single point of light. If they’re not all lined up perfectly, things get…

Ever since we learned about Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the world seems stranger, more unfamiliar. You might see two events happen in one order, while to someone else they occur in the reverse order, and you’re both right. Your clock might run faster than someone else’s, even though they’re both accurate. Objects can change size, shape, and even color as they move much faster or slower. What does it mean to live in this puzzling relativistic universe? In the past century, artists have painted and constructed many answers to this question. Space, Time, and Cheese In 1931, Salvador Dali painted one of his most famous works—“The Persistence of Memory.” Many scholars believe that Einstein’s theory of relativity inspired this painting. Dali himself described “Persistence” as a Camembert (a soft,…

Streaming video often lags, stutters, or disconnects. Slow or unreliable internet isn’t merely annoying. It harms kids’ educations and limits adults’ ability to work. Ceciliajean Ashue lives on the Hoh reservation in Washington State. In early 2020, they had very spotty internet. When schools closed during the pandemic, she had to miss work seminars so her three kids could attend remote school. Only one of them could go online at a time. Satellite internet could help solve this problem. Antennas on people’s homes can send signals to satellites orbiting Earth. Then the satellites pass those signals on until they get to ground stations that are hooked up to high-speed internet. For this to work, a satellite always needs to be located over the home with the antenna. That means a…

A tree in the African country of Zimbabwe is so famous that tourists come to visit it. It’s called the Big Tree. It’s a baobab, a kind of tree with a wide trunk and spindly branches. Baobabs can live for a long time. It’s hard to figure out their exact ages, though. Usually, you can find a tree’s age by counting rings inside its trunk. But baobabs don’t grow clear rings. Now scientists have used a tool called radiocarbon dating to study the Big Tree. Living things like animals and plants have certain carbon atoms in their bodies that slowly disappear after their death. By measuring the carbon atoms that are left, scientists can judge how long ago something lived. When they measured carbon atoms in the Big Tree, scientists…

IF YOU HAVE A PRINTER AT HOME, IT MIGHT PRINT YOUR COLORFUL SCHOOL REPORTS BY COMBINING DIFFERENT COLORS OF INK OR TONER. Now scientists have used a printer to create colorful pictures using only one kind of ink: clear. The printer squirts the transparent ink into millions of microscopic domes on a flat surface. The domes have different sizes. That makes them reflect different colors of light. As light bounces off of the array of tiny domes, it produces vibrantly colored pictures. Hues made in this way are called structural colors. Colors such as the blue in your jeans come from dyes, while the brown in your skin results from pigments. But some animals, such as birds, get their bright shades from structural color. Light reflecting off microscopic structures in…

Stars age gracefully, reliably radiating heat and light for millions or billions of years. But when it comes to dying, they put on a show. Stars’ enormous energy comes from hydrogen atoms smashing together inside their cores to make helium, a process called nuclear fusion. When their hydrogen fuel begins to run out, stars begin fusing helium instead. This causes them to swell into red giants, or even super giants, in a last-ditch effort to stay alive. After that, they might go out with a bang, or perhaps more of a burp. Either way, none are content to quietly disappear. “Dead” stars live on as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. These stellar zombies are some of the liveliest, and strangest, objects in the universe. White Dwarfs After the…

Even though astrophysicist Anna Frebel studies some of the oldest stars ever discovered, they aren’t the original stars that formed when the universe began. They belong to the second generation, or Population II, which formed from the remains of the earliest stars. Nobody has ever seen the very first stars—but that could soon change. Scientists recently launched the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most sensitive telescopes ever built. One of its missions is to find the first generation of stars. To do this, it will look deep into the infrared light spectrum. Light from the first star clusters in the early universe is still on its way to us. On its long journey, it has been stretched as the universe has expanded. It reaches us as infrared light,…

Q: If the universe keeps expanding, what is it expanding into? —Aiden K., Ohio A: astronomer In 1929, the Edwin Hubble made an unexpected discovery. When he looked through a telescope at faraway galaxies, he noticed that they appeared to be moving away from Earth. And the farther away the galaxies were from him and his telescope, the faster they seemed to be traveling. That observation is neatly summed up in the often-repeated statement “the universe is expanding.” But “expanding” isn’t really the right word for what’s going on, says Mario De Leo-Winkler, an astronomer and director of the National Council of Sciences of Mexico. Think of a deflated balloon. As you blow it up, the balloon gets bigger and occupies more and more space. Space that was once outside…

What Is Light Pollution? Light pollution happens whenever artificial lighting interferes with the lives of humans, animals, or plants. Hiding most of the stars in the night sky is only one of the problems artificial lighting causes. It can also contribute to a rise of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the atmosphere. It can hinder our sleep. And it can harm animals by interrupting their eating and breeding habits. Of course, we need artificial light. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reduce the amount we use and be smart about how we consume it. The International Dark-Sky Association is working towards these goals. Bettymaya Foott, their Director of Engagement, is optimistic that people can reduce light pollution if we put our minds to it. “Everyone loves the stars, everyone has…

SOME PEOPLE SAY IT’S GOOD LUCK TO SEE A SHOOTING STAR. Scientists studying the northwestern Atlantic Ocean were especially lucky: They found a new species of starfish with a special talent. Scientists usually prefer the name “sea star,” because these animals aren’t really fish. Different species of sea stars live in oceans around the world. They have five or more arms, and crawl along the seafloor using hundreds, or thousands, of tiny sucker-like feet. But the new species has another way of getting around. It can squirt a strong jet of water to push itself off the seafloor. It can even use jets of water to swim for short distances. Because of this ability, scientists nicknamed their new discovery the “shooting starfish.”…

IN NOVEMBER, NASA LAUNCHED A ROBOTIC SPACECRAFT THAT WILL DO SOMETHING NO SPACECRAFT HAS DONE BEFORE. It’s going to try to shove an asteroid. The mission is called DART. It’s flying to a pair of asteroids that are orbiting the Sun. In the fall of 2022, DART will steer itself straight into one of those asteroids, called Dimorphos. Scientists want to learn how crashing into an asteroid changes its path. Dimorphos isn’t an asteroid that could be a hazard for Earth. But someday, astronomers might spot a different space rock heading our way. Shoving that asteroid onto a different path might be a way to protect our planet—and us.…

Earth’s atmosphere interferes with telescopes’ ability to capture stars and other objects in space clearly. Adaptive optics is an intricate technique that helps Earth-based telescopes eliminate about half of atmospheric fuzziness in real time. With this technology, astronomers shine a laser into the sky to create an artificial guide star. Earth’s atmosphere blurs the guide star image, but a ground-based computer programmed with what it should look like adjusts the telescope’s mirror to compensate for the differences—sometimes hundreds of times a second.…

Stars stay stable only as long as the force of gravity pulling in is balanced by pressure from energy radiating out. When a star’s hydrogen starts to run out, helium and then heavier elements are fused together. But eventually the star runs out of fuel entirely. Gravity overpowers radiation pressure, and the star collapses. For stars greater than about eight solar masses, the outer layers fall back onto the dense core. Then they rebound, triggering a huge shock wave. This wave blows off the outer layers of the star in an enormous explosion called a core collapse supernova. A supernova can briefly shine brighter than a whole galaxy.…

Powerful telescopes help us watch events unfold on distant stars or see familiar things in a new way. They can serve as a time machine to the past. They might even guide us toward spotting life on other planets. On Dec. 25, 2021, NASA—in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency—launched the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers, astrophysicists, and amateur stargazers rejoiced at its successful sendoff. The Webb is just one of an incredible new generation of telescopes that will sharpen our focus on outer space. Bigger Can Be Better One of the first things you notice about the new telescopes like the Webb is that they are very large. The Hubble Space Telescope, the flagship space telescope before Webb, is about the size of a…

READY TO TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT? Let’s make a scatter graph of the heights and weights of all the bulldogs, chihuahuas, and greyhounds in one city. Here, one point represents one dog. The height and weight values form the point’s coordinates. On the graph, you’ll see three distinct clumps of points, one for each breed. That’s because each breed tends to grow to about the same size. Do stars clump together into different “breeds,” too? It turns out they do. That’s what the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell noticed in 1913, when he plotted two features of stars. One feature was the stars’ absolute magnitude—how bright they’d appear if placed at a fixed distance from Earth. It may seem odd, but the dimmer an object the higher its magnitude. So, bright…