Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2024 från Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Country Roads, Take Me Gnome Hello, bonjour, hola, and ciao. I’m a tiny, mischievous pixie who’s the heir to the throne at Gnomeland and has been getting Muse for… OVER ONE YEAR ALREADY?!?!?!?! (The first one being “Spellbinding Islands,” July/August 2022) along with Cricket. Most people know me as a regular 11-year-old girl named Leah (but probably 12 when this gets published), but when spring break and summer break come, I go to Gnomeland with my dog. Usually, I live in B.C., Canada, with my younger brothers: a human, a fish, and a dog. My favorite books are Harry Potter and The School for Good and Evil (best book series EVER end of discussion). Question for Cate, do you or anyone else get nauseous when time traveling? (Because I get…

Depicting hair realistically in animated movies is tricky. But animators, visual effects artists, and computer scientists have been making progress in helping characters look natural. In 2023, moviegoers watched a sunbeam light the hair of Miles Morales, the hero of the animated movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. His face had a distinct comic-book appearance. But his hair looked very…well, real. It behaved real too, not bobbing much as he darted and twisted and dived. This life-like hair is all thanks to physics and math. Equations may seem out of place in animated movies. Yet, animators routinely—and successfully—use them to model how movie characters should, for example, move their limbs. No amount of physics and math, however, has yet helped animators and visual effects artists make three-dimensional “reel” hair look absolutely…

Q: How do mountains form? —Lili L., age 12, Colorado A: Most mountains form in places where tectonic plates collide, says Camilo Montes. He’s a geologist at the University of the North in Barranquilla, Colombia. Tectonic plates are like puzzle pieces that fit together to make up the Earth’s crust. But they aren’t frozen in place, and they don’t lock together seamlessly like real jigsaw puzzle pieces do. Tectonic plates move around—albeit very slowly—and bump into one another. When two plates collide, one forces its way under the other. That process is called subduction. The places where it happens are known as subduction zones. They are hot spots for all sorts of geological activity, including earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain building. Montes studies one particularly interesting subduction zone, around Panama. There,…

Here are six feature films coming to theaters in the second half of 2024 that piqued our interest. Note that some have not yet been rated and might not be appropriate for all audiences. It’s for you (and your parents) to decide if any are worthy of your attention. See you at the movies! Twisters is being billed as a sequel of sorts to the hit 1996 movie Twister. It’s an adventure movie about tornado chasers. If it’s anything like its predecessor, it will likely have some romance thrown into the mix, too. Look for the movie to blow into theaters on July 19. White Bird is a drama about a grandmother revealing to her grandson how, when she was young, a boy risked his life to shelter her from…

Movies made magic from the very beginning. Fans could enjoy favorite performances over and over, supposedly forever. Sadly, movie immortality was only an illusion. Far from permanent, those performances were in fact all too perishable. Many early films are now gone. Only 20 percent of American motion pictures shot between 1890 and 1930 still survive. Half the movies produced before 1950 are lost. Gone are classic films featuring big-name talents, such as The Young Rajah (1922) with heartthrob Rudolph Valentino and The Divine Woman (1928) starring the quintessential actress Greta Garbo. Good News, Bad News About Celluloid The hero and the villain of this story are one and the same. A synthetic material called nitrocellulose, also known as cellulose nitrate, is the main ingredient of celluloid. It made the early…

“Now we will tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?” “No,” Meg said flatly. Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote these words in the 1961 middle grade novel A Wrinkle in Time, uses the term tesseract to mean a shortcut through space and time. In her story, space-time folds onto itself. The resulting wrinkles create new paths that allow Mrs. Whatsit, Meg, and others to travel, or tesser, from one end of the galaxy to the other in an instant. L’Engle didn’t make up the word tesseract. She borrowed it from the world of mathematics and efforts to understand and picture the fourth dimension. Then she gave it her own twist. When she wrote A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle was fascinated by Albert Einstein’s notion of time as a fourth dimension…

>> REAL MAGIC A Plant in the Desert Pulls Water From the Air The blockbuster 2024 movie Dune: Part 2 was filmed on location in Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis desert. In the fictional world of the desert planet of Arrakis, water is so scarce that dead bodies are pumped for their moisture. Around the same time this movie was filming, researchers in Abu Dhabi’s desert made what they think is a startling discovery. A plant that thrives there, the Athel tamarisk (Tamarix aphylla), appears to use salt crystals on its leaves to pull water from the air. After a researcher noticed water condensing on these crystals, her team recorded time-lapse videos of the plants. The recordings showed that salt compounds that form during the day on the plants’ leaves swell…

Every morning, an old man stacks 13 blocks. If he doesn’t, the world will disappear. This world is one he built out of his imagination. It defies the ordinary flow of time, occupied by ghosts, unborn souls, and gigantic bloodthirsty birds. But the old man can’t keep stacking these blocks forever, and without a successor, it may all be destroyed. This is part of the story of The Boy and the Heron, the latest anime masterpiece from director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Released in July 2023, this fantasy film follows a Japanese boy during World War II who befriends a talking grey heron. Some parts of the story are inspired by the 1937 novel How Do You Live? Other elements are based on Miyazaki’s own childhood. This year, the…

Art@Work Neon signs flicker and raindrops fall as Miles Morales swings past skyscrapers. A bus teeters on the edge of a bridge, barely restrained by spider webs. Bright colors flash as a portal materializes, connecting dimensions across space and time. All these scenes from the 2023 mega-hit animated movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse are made possible through the art of visual effects. In fact, any part of a movie not captured by the camera is created digitally, by VFX artists. Clara Chan is a visual effects (VFX) supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, located in Vancouver, Canada. Since 2001, she has worked her way up from lighting and look development artist, to lighting lead, computer graphics supervisor, and now VFX supervisor. Besides Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, she’s worked on the Oscar-nominated…