Why me?

  Hi, guys! I just got back from a really fun hike in the woods. I saw a lot of cool things, like wallflowers, and lots of birds, and pretty rocks. But I only brought one thing back with me: lots of mosquito bites. Depending on where you live and what time of year it is, if you've spent time outside, you've probably been bitten by mosquitoes too. Long after the mosquito is gone, you're left with red, itchy bumps, and I mean itchy.  So what's going on? Why are mosquito bites so itchy? To answer that question, we need to take a closer look at where these bumps come from. First, let's learn a little bit about the mosquito. For one thing, only female mosquitoes bite. And for another thing, what we call a bite isn't really a bite at all; it's more like a jab from a thing called a proboscis. Proboscis. Proboscis! It's such a fun word to say! A proboscis is a special mouthpart that some insects have. It looks kind of like a long tube or a straw. If you've e...

  Everything about a firetruck makes us stop and look at it. They’re big, bright, loud, and they carry brave people who save lives. But have you ever wondered why they’re red? The answer isn’t 100% clear, but there area few theories out there.  - The “Volunteer” Theory. The earliest fire departments in the 1800s were made up of volunteer firefighters. Since they were unpaid good Samaritans with hardly any funding, they didn’t have much money to spend on equipment, and that included the paint they’d use on their trucks. Back then, red was the cheapest color of paint you could buy, so they went with the budget-friendly option. The traditional red stuck, and today it could be a way to honor our first firefighters! -  Competition. Another theory says that back when fire departments ran on volunteers, there was a lot of pride and competition between departments from town to town. Red was the most sought-after color because it’s bold and catches the eye. Departments wanted...

  Here's a question people are always wondering about: why do people yawn? We do it every day, especially when we're in a boring meeting or we didn't get enough sleep. So it may not surprise you that we don't really understand all the reasons behind why we yawn, and it's not just humans, birds do it; jaguars do it; even fetuses in the womb do it. Oscitation, the act of yawning, happens with almost all vertebrates. The explanation you may be familiar with is that a great big gaping yawn is the brains way of ordering you to take a deep breath. Supposedly it gets rid of extra carbon dioxide and brings in more oxygen. The problem with that is that there is absolutely no truth that yawning really affects your oxygen levels. Instead, recent studies show that yawning is your brain's natural air conditioning system, bringing cooler blood to chill out your overheated, overtired grey matter.  So your brain actually heats up as it uses some 40% of your body's metabolic...

 It's a tale as old as time, or at least, as old as dogs. You let Tommy out the door, and immediately he's munching on the grass like it's covered in bacon grease. Maybe that dog threw it up later, more likely it didn't, either way, it begs the question: why do dogs eat grass? One commonly held theory is dogs use grass as the natural remedy to induce their own vomiting.  The idea here is that Tommy might start grazing when he's feeling gassy or there's something else going on in his digestive system that he wants to get rid of. But so far, there's actually not too much evidence for that, although eating grass can lead to vomiting, that typically only happens to about 25% of dogs. Instead, the simplest explanation is that dogs eat grass because they like it. Let's face it, the average dog will attempt to eat pretty much anything given the chance, and keep in mind that wolves and coyotes and other wild canines regularly dabble in plant eating.  Unlike cats...

  Saying that we never lie would be a lie, and a big one. Everyone lies on certain occasions. According to a study done in 2002 by the University of Massachusetts, 60% of adults can’t have a 10 minute conversation without lying. But why do we lie? Let’s explore what we know about lying. To put it simply, lying is the act of intentionally saying something that is false.  Generally, lies are either fabrications, omissions or distortions of the truth. Surprisingly, humans aren’t the only animal capable of lying. Actually, some monkeys have been observed lying. For example, Koko the gorilla who learned the sign language once lied to the researchers by blaming a kitten for the destruction of a sink in her cage. From an evolutionary perspective, lying allows individuals to increase their chances of survival. Cavemen probably learned quickly that lying was particularly useful. For example, to avoid being killed by their fellow caveman from whom they had stolen food. Pathological...

   Some of the common questions that kids ask are, “why the sky is blue while the clouds aren’t?”, “why is the sun yellow?” and “why does it turn reddish orange during sunrise and sunset?” These questions might look difficult to answer at first. However the physics behind them is not difficult at all! There are two things that play an important role in giving a colour to the sky. One is the atmosphere of the Earth and the other is the sunlight of course. So we need to know a more about these two first. The white light coming from the sun is a mixture of seven primary colours , and each coloured light has a corresponding frequency and wavelength associated with it.  The violet coloured light has the shortest wavelength of all while the red one has the largest wavelength! And what forms the Earth’s atmosphere? The Earth’s atmosphere is mainly composed of gases, dust particles, water droplets and water vapour. Among the gases, Nitrogen is present in abundant quantity, at aro...

People have been keeping track of time, pretty much since people were people. At first we just needed to have an idea of what season it was, and maybe what season was coming up next, and around when. But after the invention of agriculture, it started being important to keep track of each day of the year. Once you start trying to count the days of the year though, it doesn't take long to notice a problem: You just can't make a consistent calendar with the same number of days every year, because there aren't a whole number of days in the year. That is why today's date exists! We have to add an extra day to the calendar every now and then and we do it on February 29th. The main issue is that the Earth's orbit and its rotation don't have anything to do with each other. When our planet spins once around on its axis we call that a day and when it completes a full orbit of the sun, we call that a solar year. Now it'd be nice if Earth always got back to the same pla...