All plants and animals on earth engage in a process called respiration. Respiration combines oxygen and the food created during photosynthesis to produce usable energy. One of the byproducts of ...

Our bodies need protein, and proteins contain nitrogen. The air we breathe has plenty of nitrogen to satisfy our needs. But-that nitrogen is not available to us directly from the air. The only way ...

What makes kitchen plastic wrap cling so maddeningly to itself, and so conveniently to the sides of bowls and plates? Plastic wrap clings for two reasons: it's elastic and it's sticky. That ...

Fish do drink water, but how they consume it depends on where they live. Water gets into a fish's body through osmosis, the process in which water diffuses from a higher to a lower concentration.

If blood didn't circulate through our bodies, carrying oxygen and nutrients, people wouldn't be able to live. Blood is so important to life that the body constantly makes new blood. There are ...

Few minor injuries are as painful as the dreaded paper cut. Just thinking about it probably makes you cringe. However, these cuts are usually small, hardly noticeable, and rarely bleed. So what ...

The thaumatrope was invented by an English physician named J. A. Paris in eighteen-twenty-six. It's credited with being the first cinematographic device and shows us something interesting about ...

Picture new parents cooing at their baby on the couch. The baby's quiet and calm, and everyone's at rest. So their heart rates are low, maybe 60 or 70 beats a minute for the adults. What about the ...

Heat is a measure of molecular activity: the faster a thing's molecules move, the more heat that substance contains. And because everything is made of molecules, and molecules are in constant ...

Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko-at mid-century, the American art scene didn't seem like it had room for anyone lacking a Y chromosome. "No matter how many it takes to tango," the ...

A listener from Ontario, California wrote to A Moment of Science with a question her sons had asked her. The boys wondered why is it that when you get sunburned you often feel chilled. It really ...

When you used to enter Dana, Indiana from the south, one of the first things you would see is a portrait of Ernie Pyle, the renowned WWII war correspondent. He was painted on a wall mural ...