A Moment of Science

In times of unexpected uncertainty, people may be more prone to paranoia. For instance, during the current global pandemic, many people have been thrown into unanticipated volatility, and this can compel some to seek out who, or what, to blame for that volatility in order to make sense of it.

It's hard to keep our planet pollution-free. Even our clothes are contaminating the planet with all the microfibers they release. New research shows that even wearing clothes releases a significant number of microfibers into the air.

Did you know that a dog's nose can be tens of thousands of times more sensitive than ours? A recent study even suggests that dogs' noses can actually sense heat.

Pretzels, potato chips, and popcorn are all covered in it. It's baked into our bread and mixed into our butter. It snows down on our fies and even our cucumber slices. 

While you’re out in nature, do you ever wonder if your presence changes the way animals interact with each other? Well, in 2018 researchers in California conducted a study showing how human activity can actually influence how carnivorous animals divide shared resources, referred to as resource niche partitioning.

Eastern wolves and coyotes have been interbreeding more frequently over the past several hundred years, and now their hybrids are widespread from the Great Lakes region to the east coast.

With climate change, stronger droughts are challenging the world's forests, meaning species' niches, or environmental requirements, aren't matching up with the environment they live in. But what if forest trees could expand their niches by farming gardens of drought tolerance, where istead of food they grow tiny helpers?

Today, we're talking about talking, and parrots, which can learn to talk, and is why studying the way parrots vocalize can help scientists better understand the way humans vocalize. If you think about it, bird song and talking have a lot in common.

What skin temperature feels comfortable to you? I'm not talking about air temperature, I'm talking about the temperature of your skin itself, under your clothes. Chances are, it's about 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

Figs have their thousands of individual flowers folded up inside them, so they can't rely on bees or wind to pollinate them with a male fig's pollen. That's where the fig wasp comes in. 

Sometimes, when people get stomach aches they are alarmed to find that their tongue has turned black. Fortunately for them, it isn't a life threatening condition. 

If you're eating toast, and you accidentally bump it to the floor, it seems more likely to land buttered side down.  This is one of the most common formulations of Murphy's Law--the tongue-in-cheek axiom that states "If something can go wrong, it probably will."

It can be hard to grow plants indoors, especially in a room without a lot of sunlight. Sometimes it's just a matter of choosing the right plant, though.

A cockroach species in Hawaii called the Pacific beetle cockroach can actually give milk. This isn't the only thing this cockroach has in common with mammals, either. It also gives birth to live young.

Have you ever seen a perfectly cloudless sky?  Cloudless--that is--except for two or three long white lines smeared across the perfect blue sky by airplanes like smudges on a pane of glass.

Today's Moment of Science is about a galaxy called UGC 1382. For a long time, scientists thought it was a fairly small, run-of-the mill galaxy, but then they realized it actually had huge spiral arms.

If you're lucky enough to live where it's sometimes windy and cold, you've probably heard your weatherperson give out two temperatures:  the actual temperature outside, and a temperature based on the wind-chill temperature index.

German scientists studying young beeches and maples knew plants responded to predation, but they wanted to know if plants could tell the difference between a deer chewing their leaves verus being damaged by other factors like storms, or being trampled upon.

Why does the sunset take more time than the sunrise? It takes much less time for the sun to light up the sky at dawn than it does for all the light to disappear after the sun sets at dusk.

Why do some kids become bullies or the victims of bullies? How closely is this linked to how their parents raised them?

Scientists have discovered evidence of another ancient asteroid impact, but not the one that killed the dinosaurs. This asteroid is much, much older than that.

A lot of doctors have been stumped by slim patients showing signs of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes. They'd see or hear about someone who had all of these conditions associated with excess fat, but who didn't have an ounce of extra fat on their bodies.

In 1967 a team of astronomers in Great Britain thought they had found extraterrestrial intelligence. They discovered radio sources in deep space that produced pulses of energy at very precise intervals ranging from milliseconds to seconds.

If I asked you what lichen was, you might say that it's a symbiotic organism that's made up of fungus joined with algae or cyanobacteria. This is what scientists would have said from 1867 up until recently.

Scientists have found zircon crystals in Australia that are over 4 billion years old. Since the Earth is just over 4 and a half billion years old, those zircon crystals are the closest thing we have to a time capsule from Earth in its early years.