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

Science@Work In March, Beth Shapiro left her job researching and teaching molecular ecology and ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined Colossal, a new company working to de-extinct animals like the woolly mammoth and to develop technologies and methods to help protect living species from going extinct. Though she had worked as a scientific consultant to the company for a couple years, the move surprised even her, she says. In talks, articles, and books—and her interview with us back in April 2018, which follows—she has shared how the process of de-extinction could work. But she also has often underscored how difficult creating mammoth-like animals would be and that the animals would never be 100-percent mammoth. Today, she sees new technologies for de-extinction as crucial to saving…

In the United States and Canada, zombies surge through comic books. They shuffle across screens, hungry for brains. In Haiti, zombis walk harmlessly among the living. They stare blankly and rarely speak. Haitians do not fear these passive beings. They fear becoming one. Many Haitians descend from enslaved people who once worked on sugar plantations. Some of these enslaved people viewed death as the route to freedom. So, zombification was the ultimate punishment. It doomed people to eternal enslavement. Even today, some people believe that bokors (Voodoo sorcerers) can turn people into zombis. After a secret ritual, the bokor’s target will sicken and die. But the person won’t stay dead. The bokor will force them from the tomb as a mindless slave. Recipe for a Zombi In 1962, doctors declared…

NEW CONTEST Art Afterlife Give garbage a new afterlife by turning it into something new. You might repurpose a milk carton as a bird feeder or turn a paper bag into a book cover. Maybe you’ll combine a toilet paper roll, old newspaper, and broken hairbrush to create an abstract sculpture or self-portrait. No matter the objects you choose, get crafty with your recycling and share a picture of your creation with us. We’ll fill a gallery of recycled works in an upcoming issue of Muse. CONTEST RULES 1. Your contest entry must be your very own original work. Ideas and words should not be copied. 2. Be sure to include your name, age, and full address on your entry. 3. Only one entry per person, please. 4. All entries…

>> LIGHT SLEEPERS Chinstrap Penguins Take More Than 10,000 Naps a Day When a chinstrap penguin couple is waiting for their eggs to hatch, one parent goes out to search for food at sea while the other stays behind to protect their eggs. While studying the parents left behind, researchers made a stunning discovery: Chinstrap penguins take more than 10,000 micronaps, or very brief naps, each day. These naps often last mere seconds—an average of four seconds. Yet they add up to more than 11 hours of sleep per day. For the study, researchers from France, Germany, and South Korea studied 14 chinstrap penguin parents on King George Island in Antarctica. They used remote electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring and other non-invasive brain sensors. They also observed the penguins in person and…

Knock. Crack. Thud. From the outside, it looked like an innocent house. A front door, a window on each side, and a couple more windows under the point of the roof. Inside, though, strange things were happening. It was March 1848. All month, eerie noises had been startling the family that lived in this home in Hydesville, New York. The noises particularly seemed to follow the daughters: Kate, 11 years old, and Maggie, 14. The family couldn’t find an explanation. Not mice, not bats, not the wood of the house settling into place. It seemed that someone, something, from somewhere else, was trying to get in touch. At least that’s what the girls’ mother, Margaret Fox, believed. On the night of March 31, Mrs. Fox announced they would attempt to…

Do the Math A visit to a supermarket offers you choices from a wide range of produce, not only vegetables of all sorts but also berries and other fruit. You can decide whether to go for strawberries (delicious with ice cream) or apples (great in pie or just for munching). It’s not so easy for farmers. They have to decide what to grow while worrying about getting their crops enough water and wondering if they’ll make money—or even break even. Many aspects of farming are difficult, says mathematician Estelle Basor. She’s deputy director of the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto in Northern California. Farmers face a lot of unknowns, including weather, pests, and an idea in economics called supply and demand. Farmers may, for example, grow more strawberries…

In around five billion years, the Sun will reach the end of its lifetime. That’s far longer than the 4.5 billion years since the Earth became a planet. It’s tens of thousands times longer than the period since humanity’s ancestors first evolved, and almost a million times longer than the age of civilization. If the average human lifetime is 80 years, then more than 60 million human lifetimes will pass before the Sun dies. Its final phases will bring chaos to the solar system. But in its afterlife, it will, for a time, set the stage for life to evolve in unexpected corners of the outer solar system. A typical star, the Sun is already ancient: a full 4.5 billion years old. Yet it’s not even halfway through its life.…

Your Tech YOUR BIG BROTHER has a social media streak going with his girlfriend, close to 90 days straight. Then, she drops it. She stops liking his image posts and replying to his DMs (direct messages). He texts her and gets no answer. It’s as if she has disappeared off the face of the Earth and become a ghost. Ghosting is a silent rejection. It’s a way of ending a relationship without going through the messy process of telling someone you want to break up. It’s not new. People have always ignored one another as a way of sending a message. But now that social media and digital devices give us countless more ways to reach out to one another, we also have countless more ways to avoid one another.…

A strong wind howls over a snowy plain. A herd of large, shaggy animals grazes on tall grasses and dwarf plants. They look like elephants in winter coats. This peaceful, true-to-life scene could have been found during the last ice age in the northern regions of Asia, Eastern Europe, or North America. The animals, known as woolly mammoths, were closely related to elephants. They exhibited similar traits and behaviors but were better adapted for a cold climate. Mammoths possessed such features as extra fat to keep warm, large feet to walk on snow, and long, curled tusks to crack ice in search of plants to eat. The Woolly Mammoth’s Extinction Alas, like many other species of large mammals alive during this period (the saber-toothed cat, the mastodon), the mammoth did…

Hands-On PLEASE TAKE a deep breath. Then use that air to say these words: “Caesar last breathed in 44 BCE.” History books tell us that’s true. But maybe they don’t tell the whole story. Julius Caesar, the Roman general and politician, did die in that year. But, in a way, his breath lives on. In fact, we can show that, on average, Caesar once breathed a few molecules in the air you just breathed! We can even estimate how many molecules. Does that sound unbelievable? Welcome to one of the most fascinating “thought experiments” in the history of science. Famed Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) originally formulated the experiment to help his students deal with big numbers. This ingenious demonstration also reveals an interesting fact about our atmosphere. Endless…

Q: Why are the skins of witches in kids’ stories supposedly green? Why not pink or yellow? —Sam A., age 11, Oregon A: The first witch shown with vibrant green skin is also the most famous to date: the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. The 1939 movie, that is. In L. Frank Baum’s novel, her skin isn’t any special color. But the filmmakers added color to a lot of things that didn’t pop as brightly in the original story. Dorothy’s silver shoes became ruby slippers. Horses in the Emerald City gained the ability to change color on a whim. And, of course, the Wicked Witch took on her green hue. All the better to highlight the difference between drab, black-and-white Kansas and fantastical Oz, filmed…

Imagine you’re a carpenter ant just going about your business on the floor of the Brazilian rainforest. Suddenly, something hits you in the head—it’s a fungal spore—a single-celled body capable of growing into a new organism. No big deal, you think. Until you start to feel funny—and then you can’t control your own actions anymore. You start walking like a zombie up a branch to a certain type of leaf, and when you get there, you bite down on the leaf and die. The fungus grows out of the top of your head and eventually shoots its own spores at passing ants. This real-life parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is known as the “zombie fungus.” Even though the fungus has no brain or nervous system itself, it still manages to control…