agnieszka biskup — writer & editor

The marsh-dwelling star-nosed mole likes fast food — really fast food. Researchers from Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University have recently discovered that the nearly blind, burrowing creature can eat faster than any other mammal on earth.

Using a high-speed video camera, biologists Kenneth Catania and Fiona Remple filmed star-nosed moles foraging for food in a glass-bottomed artificial tunnel. They found that moles could detect and swallow their tiny prey in about a quarter of a second, faster than the human eye can follow. The mole’s amazing speed is due to the 22 odd-looking appendages that circle its nose in a star, giving the animal its name. It doesn’t use the appendages to smell, but instead to search and probe its dark, underground environment efficiently and quickly.

These supersensitive touch organs can investigate a remarkable 13 targets per second. “Most predators take times ranging from minutes to seconds to handle their prey,” stated Catania in a press release. “The only things I’ve found that come even close are some species of fish.” Catania, of course, has yet to see my pooch inhale a hot dog.

You can see footage of a star-nosed mole foraging at www.exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_mole.htm

This article appeared in the September 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

It takes stuff to make stuff, and you might be surprised at how much stuff it really takes. John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, in their book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, explore the hidden history and environmental costs of making commonplace items, such as newspapers, T-shirts, or computers. They follow the involved chain of events that take place in the making of an everyday thing, from the gathering of its raw materials to its eventual sale and disposal. You’d think throwing something out is wasteful, but more waste is actually generated by its production. According to the authors, in a typical day, Americans throw out about four pounds of garbage each, but in that same day, they consume over 120 pounds in natural resources taken from farms, forests, and mines from all over the planet. The authors don’t expect anyone to stop getting stuff, they just want people to know what’s behind the stuff they get. Here follows their account of what it takes to keep a typical coffee drinker in the United States supplied with a favorite beverage. (The U.S. drinks about one-fifth of the world’s coffee.)

To supply one person who drinks two cups of coffee per day for a year (that’s about 700 cups, for which you’ll need 18 pounds of beans), you need 12 coffee trees.

A Colombian coffee farmer will typically apply about 11 pounds of fertilizers to the 12 trees during the year, as well as a few ounces of pesticides.

The pesticides were synthesized in Germany’s Rhine River Valley.

Workers pick the coffee berries by hand and feed them into a diesel-powered crusher, which removes the beans from the pulpy berries that encase them. For each pound of beans, about two pounds of pulp are dumped into Colombian rivers.

The beans, dried under the sun, travel to New Orleans on an ocean freighter in a 132-pound bag.

The freighter was made in Japan and fueled by Venezuelan oil. The shipyard built the freighter out of Korean steel. The Korean steel mill used iron mined in Australia.

The beans are then trucked to a warehouse in an 18-wheeler, which got six miles per gallon of diesel. From there, a smaller truck delivers the bags to neighborhood grocery stores.

The beans are packaged in four-layer bags made of polyethylene, nylon, aluminum foil, and polyester.

In New Orleans, the beans are roasted for 13 minutes at 400ºF. The roaster burns natural gas pumped from the ground in Texas.

The beans are bought and carried out of the store in a brown paper sack, made at paper mills in Oregon.

They’re brought home in the buyer’s car, which burned one-fifth of a gallon of gasoline during the five-mile round trip to the market.

The beans are ground in a machine assembled in China from imported steel, aluminum, copper, and plastic parts, and then placed into a coffeemaker, with water supplied by pipe from a processing plant. The brew trickles into a glass carafe, and then is poured into a mug that was made in Taiwan. (But if you add cream or sugar, you’d have even more connections to follow . . .)

This article appeared in the May/June 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

What happens when you have a lot of stuff, but happen to live in Tokyo, Japan, one of the most crowded cities in the world, where rents are high and apartments are tiny? You end up with a home that looks a lot like the ones shown below. In his book Tokyo: A Certain Style, Kyoichi Tsuzuki photographed the miniscule, cluttered apartments — not tidied up for the camera — that are home to the average Tokyo-dweller: artists, students, professionals, and even families with children, all of whom must cram their lives and multitude of possessions into the most cramped of quarters. You always make room for the stuff you really want, even if it has to spill out into the hallways.

This article appeared in the May/June 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

Now that we know that the birds called coots can count (see story on page 8), ornithological experts from all over the globe are trying to identify other hitherto unknown avian talents. One of the most dedicated researchers is Professor I. M. Byrdbrane, founder and sole member of the Kittiwake Ornithological Order of Knowledge, also known as KOOK. Byrdbrane has spent countless (a coot would estimate more than three) hours in the field, patiently listening to what, he says, “the little birds tell me.” Thanks to careful observation, dogged persistence, and rampant overuse of cold medicine to ward off a fierce allergy to feather mites, Byrdbrane has made some amazing discoveries, which he is reporting in KOOK’s monthly newsletter, Fowl Play. He writes and edits this publication from a giant nest of twigs, sticks, and marsh grass he built atop KOOK’s headquarters, which also happens to be his garage. (Local authorities are trying to get him down, but Byrdbrane is refusing, saying his flight feathers haven’t come in yet.) Anyway, here are some of his recent findings.

The marbled godwit, with his superb visual acuity, can instantly tell you if your clothes match or not with a nod of his beak.

The kookaburra sits in an old gum tree because he can chew old gum. But, hard as he tries, he can’t blow bubbles.

The common moorhen, related to the coot, can also count, but only in binary.

The northern bobwhite does not whistle his name “bobwhite,” as commonly thought. Instead, he whistles his name in Elvish, “Betheneol Nithrillion.”

The tern is sick of people telling him, “One good tern deserves another.” He says the joke wasn’t funny the first time, and it isn’t funny now. (So what if the laughing gull laughs at it — she’ll laugh at anything.)

The masked booby really hates his name and wishes to be called the Masked Avenger from now on.

This article appeared in the May/June 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

Sometimes it’s hard to read a face and guess what someone is thinking. (See “Deception Detection” on page 8.) But reading a dog’s face can be even harder, so we’ve turned to eminent psychologist Cosmo A. Mastiff, Ph.D. (Dog of Philosophy), of the Kennelfornia Institute of Technology at St. Bernardino, for help. An international expert on identifying the emotional signals of tail wagging, he has recently branched out into reading the front ends of dogs, too. By analyzing one of the greatest and most psychologically perceptive paintings of dogs* ever made, Professor Mastiff unravels what these canines are really feeling. Dogs may never lie about love, but it appears they do cheat at poker, so please be careful if you ever play cards with your pooch, he warns.

This dog is feeling suspicious. Look at his furrowed brow, how he holds his cards close to his chest, and his sideways glance at his neighbor. He wonders whether the pipe-smoking dog is cheating. Or perhaps he’s wondering how it learned to smoke a pipe in the first place. But he sits very nicely. Good sit!

Look at the ears standing straight up: this dog is very alert. But he is also very anxious and worried: look at his wide-open eyes. He is not thinking about poker at all, but whether his master will discover that his favorite pipe has dog drool on it. And how will he explain the teeth marks? Bad dog!

This dog appears to study his cards, but his sleepy, downturned eyes reveal that what he’d really like is a nice, long nap in front of the fire. Oh, and a squeaky rubber carrot toy for when he wakes up. Lie down!

The tightly clenched cigar is the giveaway, as are the ears, turned down and to the side: this bulldog has something to hide. Perhaps he had an accident in the hallway? Aha! The tension in his jaw comes from the effort of hiding that he’s cheating at cards! Very bad dog!

Backs of heads are notoriously difficult to read, but this dog’s head looks smooth and unwrinkled, showing he’s relaxed. He’s had a good night: most of the chips on the table are his. If he only had another ace, he’d be sure to win again. What? He’s cheating with the white bulldog? Very, very bad dog!

This dog is laughing, but there’s no real happiness in it. His eyes are missing the telltale twinkle that reveals true enjoyment. This dog is laughing out of despair. He has barely any chips left, and he is going to bet them all, even though he has no chance of winning, and then roam the streets until morning, knocking over many garbage cans in the process. Bad dog!

This dog is tired, sad, and full of regret; look how low his ears are hanging, and how his eyebrows droop. He doesn’t even look at his cards, but is instead imagining how disappointed his owners will be if they learn that he stayed up all night gambling. He imagines a happy game of fetch with the children in the park. Will he ever be that innocent again? He wishes he had never come. Acknowledging the problem is the first step to change. Good boy! Very good boy!

* We know dogs shouldn’t drink or smoke, but then again, they probably shouldn’t gamble either, so please don’t send us any letters complaining that we’re encouraging puppies to do those things. But if you do catch your puppy playing cards, before punishing him, talk with him gently about why he feels the need to play poker, rather than a healthy game of fetch. Perhaps the most important question you can ask him is, how does he keep the cards from falling out of his paws?

This article appeared in the April 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

If you’ve ever watched a police drama or a crime movie, you’ve probably seen someone hooked up to a polygraph machine, a device that’s used to test whether someone is telling the truth. The machine tracks and graphs body functions that have been linked to lying, such as changes in blood pressure and breathing. By looking at spikes in the resulting graphs, the test administrator can supposedly determine whether someone is lying when asked a specific question. Unfortunately, honest people can show body changes because they’re nervous about the test, and good liars can fool the exam. But Scott Faro of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania may have come up with a better way to detect deception — by scanning a person’s brain.

Faro and his colleagues asked volunteers to shoot a toy gun and then lie about it. Other participants were told to tell the truth. The volunteers were questioned about their actions as they underwent brain scans as well as polygraph exams. The scans showed that different parts of the brain are active when telling a lie than when telling the truth. Also, more areas of the brain were active when the volunteer lied, implying that deception may take more brain effort. In Faro’s study, both tests could accurately distinguish lies from truthful answers. It’s still too early to know whether someone could beat the brain-scan test, but the results suggest that it may be beyond a person’s conscious control, bad news for good liars everywhere.

This article appeared in the April 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

How good are you at face reading? Good enough to tell when someone is lying? Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has studied faces and emotions for decades, writes in his book Emotions Revealed that most of us can recognize the full or intense expressions people make when they feel strongly and have no reason to hide what they feel. But most of us have trouble reading the subtler faces people make when they don’t feel strongly or they’re trying to conceal their emotions. Ekman thinks, however, that we can improve our face-reading skills with practice.

If people are trying to regulate an emotion — for example, to look less sad — their sorrowful expression will still be there, but may appear very slight (the muscles of the face may be contracted just a little instead of a lot) or involve only part of the face. If people are trying to hide the emotion completely, on the other hand, the expression may be extremely brief, appearing for only a fifth of a second or less. (In normal conversation, most expressions last about a second.) Ekman calls these microexpressions. In the hardest faces to read, the expression may be both brief and partial or slight.

To see how good you are at recognizing subtle expressions, take this test from Emotions Revealed. Get a sheet of paper and number the lines from 1 to 12. Write the following words at the top: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise, and enjoyment. These are the choices for the test expressions, but you can also write down other words if you don’t think any of the ones given fit. Look at one picture at a time (cover the others up in some way), and only for a fraction of a second. Then turn away and write down the emotion you think is being displayed. Play your hunches, because you may recognize the expressions without realizing it. Once you’ve finished all 12 pictures, take a break and then try the test again, but look at each photo a bit longer, say a second or two. Then check the answers on page 14.

Don’t worry about how many you missed. Most adults who look at these photographs briefly get about four right. Even when people study them, most don’t get more than eight right. They’re hard to identify because they are partial, slight, or a blend of two emotions. But they should get easier to identify if you practice. And if you want to practice more, you can order a training CD at Ekman’s Web site, www.emotionsrevealed.com.

This article appeared in the April 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.

Isn’t it nice to sleep under the stars? How about sleeping under a quilt of stars instead? Judy Ross, a 68-year-old retired teacher and astronomy enthusiast, has produced this colorful quilt featuring some of her favorite images recorded by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

Called, appropriately enough, What the Hubble Saw, the quilt features (starting clockwise from the lower right) the Red Rectangle Nebula, the Eskimo Nebula, the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy,V838 Monocerotis (a star in the Milky Way), and the supernova remnant N49 (the remains of an exploded star).

Ross says her love of astronomy is due to growing up in the high desert of southern Idaho, “when there was no light pollution and no television and every night was the best show you could ever imagine.” She’s made a dozen or so astronomy-themed quilts.

What the Hubble Saw is now hanging in Ross’s living room. Unfortunately, sized at only 41 by 38 inches, it’s just a little bit too small for her to sleep under.

For more on the Hubble Space Telescope and its spectacular images go to hubblesite.org

To see another Ross quilt go to antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031017.html

This article appeared in the April 2005 issue of the children’s science magazine Muse.