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

Your brain looks like a pinkish-brown blob of gelatin and may seem just as silent. Don’t be fooled by this apparent quietness, though. Around 86 billion nerve cells called neurons form the building blocks of this organ—and they speak. They converse when you’re playing, eating, or just sitting still. Some jabber while you sleep, too. But neurons don’t communicate with sound, as you do when you talk. They speak through tiny bursts of electrical energy called action potentials or spikes. Neurons in the brain send and receive signals using action potentials. It’s almost like a language. Neurons in your eyes, ears, and skin produce action potentials in response to lights, sounds, and touch, respectively. And neurons don’t just speak to one another. Many relay messages to and from your muscles,…

Do the Math The 2015 movie The Man Who Knew Infinity, starring Dev Patel, is no Star Wars blast or Avengers romp. The film quietly tells the true story of a clerk in India who, working on his own, found all sorts of unexpected patterns among numbers. Srinivasa Ramanujan had a special talent for seeing relationships among numbers and finding formulas to describe these patterns. His work eventually caught the attention of noted British mathematician G. H. Hardy. Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge University in England to continue his studies. The biographical film includes a scene illustrating how much numbers were a part of Ramanujan’s life. Hardy visits Ramanujan and notes that the taxi in which he arrived happened to have the “dull” number 1729. Ramanujan quickly…

TECH DESK A Mammoth Mammoth Meatball This very large meatball isn’t made of beef or pork, or even turkey. It’s mammoth meat. Engineers at an Australian company created the unique meatball in a lab. The company grows meat from cells. In the future, this may be a way of creating foods like burgers and bacon without having to raise or kill any animals. To make the mammoth meat, the engineers started with sheep cells. They added the DNA of an extinct wooly mammoth. Some gaps were filled in with genetic information from elephants, which are closely related to mammoths. When they’d grown enough mammoth cells (well, mammoth-ish cells), the team made the cells into a ball and cooked it. No one ate this meatball, though. The company wanted to use…

Hands-On AT YOUR EARLY MORNING MATH CLASS, ALL HEADS ARE BENT. EVERYONE SEEMS TO BE FIERCELY SOLVING PROBLEMS. BUT ARE THEY REALLY? Could you find out without poking or peering at them? There is a way and it s hidden in the brain. The billions of neurons, or nerve cells, in your brain ‌talk to each other using electrical signals. A sensor placed inside the brain can listen to these faint ‌voices.‍ Many neurons all chattering together are ‌loud‍ enough to pass through the brain and bone and reach the scalp. Sensors placed here can pick up their jumbled voices. The activity of hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons combine to form brain waves. More technically called neural oscillations, these waves have repeating upand-down cycles. They can convey information…

We’ve all been in situations where we wish we could read someone’s mind: Does that person like me? What is the answer to my teacher’s question? Is my parent in the right mood to buy me a new video game? Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that the ability to read someone’s mind might not always be a sci-fi fantasy. Imagine the following: A man is on trial for committing a crime—say, stealing from a jewelry store. In the courtroom, he claims that he’s never even been to the store in question, so he couldn’t have possibly done what he is accused of. But during the trial, he undergoes a brain scan. During the scan, he looks at images of his childhood home (a place he recognizes). He sees a restaurant…

Science@Work Imagine you had an accident that paralyzed your arms and legs. So, you get fitted with a brain implant that lets you control robotic limbs, a computer, and more—using your mind. How incredible would that be? Nicholas “Nicho” Hatsopoulos is working toward achieving such mind-boggling goals. He is a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. There, he studies how the brain controls body movements and develops brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). A BCI is a system that interacts with the brain, making it possible for a person to control a computer or robot with their thoughts. It even allows a person to feel touch sensations via a robot hand. Hatsopoulos co-founded the company Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems and heads the University of Chicago’s Hatsopoulos Lab. He has also won an…

Ready? Here’s your assignment: Watch a series of white, singleigit n bers flash against a black computer screen, each visible for slightly longer than one second. Your job is to press one key when the number three appears, and to press a different key for all the other numbers. The computer will respond to your actions with “Correct!” after each appropriate key strike or 'Incorrect" if you make a mistake. It’s easy, right? And it’s somewhat fun at first. But several minutes into this, your thoughts will probably drift from striking the correct keys to wondering how much longer you’ll have to keep doing this. Then you might begin thinking about why one of your friends said that weird thing during class today, or what you have planned for the…

Your Tech AS FAR AS SCIENCE CAN TELL, THE BRAIN CREATES YOUR SENSE OF SELF. Cells called neurons fire in patterns that form your memories, likes, dislikes, quirks, and more. Hypothetically, if some instrument could gather enough information about the neurons in your brain, then that information could be saved in a data file. Then, perhaps, your unique network of neurons could be recreated, either in a computer simulation or in some sort of artificial body. Some science fiction writers have imagined that brain uploads might free humans from aging, disease, and physical pain. We could potentially live forever, like immortal gods and goddesses. That sounds absolutely wild. And it is. No technology comes close to copying an entire brain. For perspective, in 2019, a team of researchers at the…