Innehållsförteckning för April 2023 från Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Muse Mail Hello! My name is oiya. am one of the five rincesses of the rystal Kingdom. I am a very new reader. I have been wanting to write to Muse ever since I got my first issue “Color Me Curious” in November/December 2021. My favorite issue is “Delicious!” (March 2022). I am a chef (and a princess). I was wondering, are Whatsi and Aarti related? And Ms. Acorn, who is your favorite? I was also wondering, are there more colors of bunnies? Can you do a more recent issue on climate change? And for Asian American Pacific Islander History Month, can you do an article about famous Asian Americans? If you put this in the FMP, I will send my head crystal dragon, and trust me, you don’t want…

Science@Work FOREST ECOLOGIST Most people look at a forest and see trees reaching for the sky. Suzanne Simard sees trees holding hands underground. Simard is a well-known forest ecologist—a scientist studying forest patterns and relationships. She works at the University of British Columbia in Canada and is the author of the bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree. With her research, Simard has followed tree roots to an astounding new possible discovery, that trees share and communicate through an underground network. Her science inspired the Tree of Souls in the movie Avatar and has forever changed the way we think about forests. CAN YOU TAKE US ON A WALK-THROUGH A FAVORITE FOREST? When you walk through a forest, usually you follow a trail. But if you get off the trail, you…

When Stephen Sillett climbed his first giant redwood tree, back in 1987, he didn’t know that a new world awaited him up there. At that time the tops of the ancient trees in old-growth redwood forests were unexplored. Scientists assumed they were biological deserts, containing only tree branches. But when Sillett reached the crown of the 300-foot (91-meter) tree, he found a forest above a forest. At its top was a sunny glade alive with mosses, lichens, and even small trees. Growing from a rotting stump in the middle of the crown were huckleberry bushes, laden with berries. It was a thriving ecosystem in the air. Sillett started climbing trees when he was a student at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s. Those experiences led him to become…

Q: What would happen if everybody in the world jumped into the air at the same time? With all that mass suddenly off the world, would it go spinning out of orbit, or what? —Anonymous reader A: Not even close. Benjamin Fong Chao is a geophysicist in Taiwan who has worked with NASA and studied how movements on Earth’s surface affect its rotation. He says, “The total mass of the entire population is minuscule compared to Earth’s.” So, even if everybody squeezed together in the same place and jumped three feet (one meter) into the air, they would budge our planet by no more than 1/10,000 the size of an atom. The effect on Earth’s spin would also be tiny. It would be, he says, “much smaller than, say, the…

PLAY BALL! How Bees Have a Good Time Bees have lots of impressive skills. They can work together. They can navigate between their home and the flowers they feed on. A few years ago, scientists even taught bumblebees how to use their feet to roll small, wooden balls. In that experiment, the bees got a sugary reward for rolling the balls. But sometimes, the bumblebees rolled balls even without a sweet treat. The scientists wondered if rolling balls was just plain fun for the insects. To find out, the scientists put bumblebees on a path with wooden balls on either side. The balls were about as big as marbles. There was no reason for the bees to move the balls around. But some bees left the path and started rolling…

Do the Math Does a 500-year-old sketch explain how all trees grow? The Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) painted beautiful trees in the backgrounds of some of his masterpiece paintings. He was also a visionary scientist. And on a single page of his extraordinary notebooks, this all-around genius hit on a remarkable theory about trees. He wrote and illustrated a simple mathematical formula that might explain how all trees grow. Five hundred years later, modern-day experts have finally put da Vinci’s formula to the test. They have subjected it to our 21st-century science. So, does the da Vinci code for trees still stand up? Look at a Tree Beginning from its trunk, a tree’s branches grow smaller as the tree rises. The tree branches into more, smaller stems the…

Your Tech HEALTHY FORESTS PROVIDE HABITATS FOR WILDLIFE, KEEP OUR AIR AND WATER CLEAN, AND HELP SLOW DOWN CLIMATE CHANGE. Wildfires are a normal part of many forest life cycles, but the number and severity of fires are increasing. Forest fires today burn twice as many trees as they did 20 years ago. What should we do to help forests recover? People can plant new trees, but this is a huge and dangerous task. Imagine carrying a sack of seedlings on your back and walking for hours back and forth across a steep mountainside. One person can only plant about two to three acres (one hectare) a day. Could drones do the job instead? DroneSeed, a company based in Seattle, Washington, uses drones to both map the burned terrain and…

A hidden underground network allows trees to move nutrients and chemicals around. The question is why. Trees may appear to be solitary beings. But they are more connected than it seems. Just beneath our feet lurks a complex underground network of fungi. Trees use this system to pass information, share food, and even wage war on their competitors. Ever-clever scientists have nicknamed this network the “wood wide web.” Underground Network Every tree has underground roots that keep it anchored in the soil. Most of these roots are covered in a fuzzy, thread-like fungus that grow in and around tree roots. Together, the roots and fungi are called mycorrhiza. This mycorrhizal network spreads like a web, often connecting the roots of many neighboring trees and plants. Trees and fungi rely on…

Hands-On YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THAT NO TWO SNOWFLAKES ARE ALIKE, AND THAT TINY ACORNS GROW INTO MIGHTY OAKS. But how does that work, exactly? Consider that many of nature’s most complex forms are based on simple geometric shapes. The secret lies in repeating these shapes again and again. Often the repetition occurs at different scales: big to small, or small to big. The resulting shapes are called fractals. They describe many of nature’s most amazing shapes. Some flowers, including Queen Anne’s lace, form a fractal shape. Pinecones are fractals. (Their scales vary slightly in size and in a spiral around the cone.) So are a bird’s feathers and the jagged legs of lightning bolts. The shapes of continents are fractals, too! Scientists and mathematicians study fractals to help understand…

The high desert of northwest New Mexico is a windswept and endless landscape of rolling red hills and dramatic rock formations. These are ancient lands, home to some of the oldest civilizations in North America. For millennia, the Puebloan people thrived in this desert environment. They constructed massive settlements, built from mud and stone and supported by wood gathered from the surrounding mountain forests. In Chaco Canyon stands the ruins of one of these settlements. Pueblo Bonito was a sprawling building that stood five stories tall and contained more than 600 rooms. At its peak around 1080 CE, Pueblo Bonito may have housed up to 1,000 people in a kind of ancient apartment complex. For hundreds of years, Pueblo Bonito marked the cultural epicenter of the Desert Southwest. Then, the…