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

Muse on My Mind Hi! My name is Shivali, and I live in Northern California. I’ve been receiving Muse magazine for about two and a half years. I really love all issues of Muse, and I get really excited when I see a magazine in the mail. I love the comics near the beginning and end—especially Cate! She’s such an inspiring scientist and inventor with a strong and spunky mind of her own, and she has such a carefree and wild personality. Every issue of Muse teaches us about not just important issues that are constantly arising in the world, but also interesting facts in everyday life. I can read Muse front to back without ever getting bored as there’s always something new to learn. My favorite part of the…

Standing on a beach looking out to sea leads many of us to ponder the question, I wonder what is out there? The explorers among us grab a mask and snorkel to see for ourselves. Warm, sunny waters invite hands-on exploration, making for enjoyable vacations. But what about the vast majority of the oceans deeper than 40 meters (131 feet)—beyond the range of most scuba divers? Technological advances, often driven by the military and the oil industry, have given scientists new tools to take them deeper. As a result, ocean exploration has increasingly become robotic. Robots allow scientists to locate and investigate marine animals, ecosystems, and shipwrecks and other submerged archaeological sites at depths beyond that 40-meter easily-accessible depth. Robotic explorers generally fall into two categories, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)…

Planning a trip to the art museum usually doesn’t require flippers and a wet suit. Yet the Underwater Museum of Art (UMA) in Florida has plunged into the art scene with an underwater sculpture exhibit. It s the rst of its kind in the United States. This unusual ocean exhibit is situated in the Florida Panhandle between Panama City and Destin on the Gulf of Mexico. It’s about one mile (1.6 kilometers) offshore Grayton Beach State Park. Here, divers can swim 58 feet (18 meters) below the surface to view marine life interacting with sculptures. Over time, the works metamorphose into a living reef. This eco-tourist exhibit showcases artistic beauty. It also creates a safe haven for marine life and improves the overall health of the ecosystem. Sculptures and Marine…

A Closer Look Ocean animals can be tough to study. Living in the dark, deep, and expansive ocean often keeps them hidden from humans. To learn about marine animals and their behaviors, scientists tag them with small devices. These attachments are similar to the Fitbits or smart watches that some people wear to track their exercise or sleep stages or measure their heart rate. Tags offer scientists a more detailed picture of what’s happening in the ocean. Fishy Research Buddies At a depth of 200 to 1,000 meters (656 to 3,280 feet), the twilight zone is mostly out of reach of sunlight. Scientists interested in its mysteries have recruited partners who can easily dive to those depths: swordfish. Researchers attach one tag high on a swordfish’s dorsal fin and another…

TODAY MINING COMPANIES AND ENTREPRENEURS ARE LOOKING AT THE DEEP SEA WITH DOLLAR SIGNS IN THEIR EYES. They aren’t planning to fish or search for sunken treasure; they see money in potato-sized balls called polymetallic nodules. These seabed rocks grow several millimeters every million years. What makes them so attractive is that they are full of manganese, cobalt, copper, and nickel. These are all key minerals used in a range of high-tech products—including electric car batteries. As climate change has sped up, humans and animals have experienced more extreme weather events, droughts, and higher sea levels. It has made it harder to survive. To combat climate change, scientists are calling for more to be done to reduce the use of fossil fuels like gasoline. In April, US President Joe Biden…

SOME TALK OF BUILDING SETTLEMENTS ON THE MOON OR MARS TO HELP MAKE SURE HUMANITY SURVIVES LONG INTO THE FUTURE. Others have their sights set closer to home: on future cities under the ocean. “Technologically speaking, it is absolutely possible to colonize the bottom of the sea,” says Fabien Cousteau. He’s a well-known ocean explorer based in New York City. He once spent 31 days living in what is currently the world’s only functioning undersea habitat, Aquarius. It’s about the size of a school bus and located 62 feet (nearly 19 meters) below the ocean surface off the Florida Keys. Just as astronauts test what it would be like to live in space, aquanauts (also called oceanauts) try out undersea living with an eye on the future. Escaping from disasters…

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR When Snot Is Cool An Australian animal called the echidna (ih-KID-nuh) is pretty weird. It’s a mammal that lays eggs. It’s covered in spikes and has a long, skinny snout. Now scientists have found one more thing that makes echidnas special: They keep cool in hot weather by blowing snot bubbles. Echidnas can’t sweat to cool off, like we do. They don’t pant like dogs, either. In the summer, they mostly hide during the heat of day and come out at night. But when scientists used cameras to spy on wild echidnas, they often saw the animals outside in daytime temperatures that should have been way too hot. How did they survive? The researchers’ infrared cameras showed which parts of the animals’ bodies were warmest. They saw that…

On the afternoon of July 13, 1733, the Spanish ship named the San Pedro left Havana, Cuba. The ship was loaded with silver coins and precious jewels. This was supposed to be a routine trip, transporting goods from the colonies to Spain. But the San Pedro never completed its voyage. That afternoon, a hurricane roared in. Waves and winds thrashed the ship, breaking it apart. The San Pedro sank, dropping beneath the waves before coming to its final resting place 18 feet (5.5 meters) below. And there the ship sat for more than 200 years. In the 1960s, divers rediscovered the lost ship, still nestled in its sandy grave 18 feet (5.5 meters) below the warm waters off the Florida Keys. In the ruins of the ship, the divers found…

A few miles off Key Largo, Florida, under the ocean’s surface, scientists are at work. Next to Conch Reef, one of the most complex coral reefs in the Florida Keys, sits the Aquarius Reef Base, an underwater research lab. Here, scientists get an unusually close look at the reef and the animals and plants that call this place home. Researchers first began building undersea labs back in the 1960s, and dozens more were created in the following decades. But they were costly to build and maintain, so today Aquarius is the only one left. Diving Into Scientific Research Aquarius’ scientists are known as aquanauts. Before you become an aquanaut, you have to be a strong swimmer and confident diver and feel comfortable staying in the water for many hours a…

More of the United States lies beneath the ocean than above it. No, that’s not because global warming has caused sea levels to rise catastrophically. That’s the way it has been since long before the country was known as the United States. What’s more, this Submerged America, as it’s sometimes called, is not some forsaken place. It’s filled with vibrant animals, gardens, forests, mountains, volcanoes, mesas, and canyons. The United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone extends its borders well into the ocean. It surrounds US lands from American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to the Atlantic seaboard in the east and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea. Only a fraction of Submerged America has been explored by humans; just half has been mapped…

In the control room aboard the vessel S.A. Agulhas II, Chad Bonin and a team of scientists stared intently at a screen. They were watching data pour in from the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that scanned the depths of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. The underwater drone had been running day and night for nearly two weeks. It was searching for what many thought would be too difficult to locate—the Endurance. This lost ship had been captained by the legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton. It had been crushed by shifting ice floes over a century ago, after getting trapped in the Weddell Sea. Remarkably, Shackleton and his crew all managed to escape. Now, after battling blizzards, drifting sea ice, and below-freezing temperatures, the Endurance22 Expedition was nearly out…

Do the Math They ripple across the water and lap up against a seashore. They rise and fall in mid-ocean, and surfers can ride big ones all the way to shore. Ocean waves are always moving. Except not in the way most people think. Because amazingly, it’s only the wave that’s moving forward, and not the water itself. The water in a wave is really only moving up and down, turning in small circles round and round. Let’s see how this happens. As the top of the wave, called the crest, moves forward, water in front of the crest rises in a circular motion to meet it. Meanwhile, water behind the crest begins to fall. This water keeps falling, until it reaches the bottom of the circle. That marks the…

Science @ Work More than 2,000 feet (628 meters) under the surface of the ocean, the enormous tentacles of a giant squid emerged from the darkness. It was responding to the light of an electronic jellyfish called an “e-jelly.” When the giant squid saw the e-jelly flashing, it was most likely looking to devour the jellyfish’s attacker. Instead, it became the first giant squid ever captured on video in its natural habitat. For this 2012 expedition off the coast of Japan, Edith Widder and other marine scientists had teamed up to search for the elusive giant squid. Widder brought a camera she had designed “that could see without being seen.” It captures images in far-red light, which is invisible to most deep-sea inhabitants. She had also created the e-jelly. It…

Help Wanted: Expedition seeks explorers brave enough to face bizarre, glow-in-the-dark creatures. Must be able to navigate safely past vents spewing liquid carbon dioxide, erupting mud volcanoes, and a treacherous lake of molten sulfur. What strange corner of the universe is this expedition headed for? It’s a cozy little planet known as Earth and a spot miles under the surface of the Pacific Ocean called the Mariana Trench. A Hole in the Ocean Floor In 1872, the HMS Challenger expedition set out to map the ocean floor. The explorers spent four years crisscrossing the globe, sailing 70,000 miles (112,654 kilometers)—one-third of the distance to the Moon. It was backbreaking, boring work. Sail about 200 miles (322 kilometers), drop a weighted rope into the water. Measure how much rope it took…