Why do mustard and wasabi make your nose hurt? Mustard and wasabi hurt your nose instead of your tongue and throat because the oil in them turns into a gas. Spices such as mustard and wasabi affect us in a very different way to chili. When you eat a spicy chili, the capsaicin in the […]
#390 Why do mustard and wasabi make your nose hurt? Read More »
Why do mosquito bites itch? Mosquito and insect bites itch because the immune response is triggered after the mosquito finishes biting. There are over 110 trillion mosquitoes from 3,000 different species around the world. I have no idea how they managed to calculate the number of actual mosquitoes. The word “mosquito” comes from Spanish where
#385 Why do mosquito bites itch? Read More »
What is chewing gum made of and what happens if you swallow it? These days, chewing gum is just a gum base with sweeteners and a plasticizer. You can swallow it without any harmful effects. Humans have used something to chew on for thousands of years. A 5,000-year-old lunch of birch bark tar with toothmarks
#384 What is chewing gum made of and what happens if you swallow it? Read More »
Why does a chicken’s head stay perfectly still when you move its body around? Because chickens cannot move their eyeballs in their eye socket and because they don’t have a vestibulo-ocular reflex. Our heads (humans) are pretty much constantly moving, yet we can see perfectly well. This is all thanks to the vestibulo-ocular reflex which
#374 Why does a chicken’s head stay perfectly still when you move its body around? Read More »
How much maple tree sap do you need to make 1 liter of maple syrup? It takes about 40 liters of sap to make 1 liter of maple syrup. Maple syrup is made by taking the sap from sugar maple, black maple, or red maple trees. The trees are tapped when they are about 30
#368 How much maple tree sap do you need to make 1 liter of maple syrup? Read More »
Why are steam burns worse than boiling water burns? Steam burns are more severe than boiling water burns because steam goes through a phase change when it touches your skin, and it can penetrate your pores. Water is made up of molecules and molecules are made up of atoms. These atoms each have electrons and
#367 Why are steam burns worse than boiling water burns? Read More »
Why do people have different blood types? Scientists don’t know why humans have different blood types, but a good hypothesis is that they protect us as a species against different diseases. We have approximately 4.5 to 6 liters of blood, depending on our size. Blood is generally about 10% of our body weight. Blood is
#364 Why do people have different blood types? Read More »
Why can we eat lettuce and spinach, but we can’t eat leaves and grass? We can’t eat leaves and grass because of the cellulose and silica they contain. There are several different ways of getting energy. Plants photosynthesize and make energy, which they store in their cells. Herbivores eat the plants to get the energy
#362 Why can we eat lettuce and spinach, but we can’t eat leaves and grass? Read More »
How does antibiotic resistance happen? Bacteria develop the ability to survive an antibiotic, which is then passed on to future generations. The antibacterial power of some moulds has been known about since 1874, possibly even earlier. In 1897, Ernest Duchesne published a paper about the ability of moulds to kill bacteria. Alexander Fleming noticed that
#355 How does antibiotic resistance happen? Read More »
How do reflexes work? They work by using a reflex arc that bypasses the brain. There are many different types of reflex, but they are generally meant to protect us and to allow us to move around without having to think about everything. Our brains have a limited amount of processing space and if we
#352 How do reflexes work? Read More »
