Your daily 90-second dose of real science for real people, with Sandra Tsing Loh!
Look out! Pothole! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Potholes and cracks. Every commuter’s nightmare. If only the problem could fix itself! Enter Congrui Jin and her team at Binghamton and Rutgers universities. They filled in the cracks by hiring some self-motivated construction workers. Who?
Did you know your nose has its own cycle? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. A whopping eighty percent of us have a nasal cycle. Meaning that congestion alternates from one nostril to the other throughout the day. We just don’t usually notice because our
Sorry Spiderman, but you’re no gecko! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Zoologists at the University of Cambridge wondered: Why can some animals with sticky feet scale walls while others can’t? They studied 225 climbing animals of various sizes. From mites and spiders to tree
Are hugs the new chicken soup? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Think of your gut as a soup of friendly bacteria. Everybody’s recipe is custom made to work with our bodies properly. These good bacteria help digest food and fight disease. Scientists know that
Mountain men, rejoice! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science, and some surprising news about beards. British scientists wanted to know if beards were spreading bacteria in hospitals. Why? Because hospital-acquired infections cause thousands of preventable deaths each year. So they swabbed the faces of around
Can you put a bandage on your lungs? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Most of the time during surgery, our wounds are closed with stitches. In a pinch, you can mend a cut with super glue. But glue can also bug your skin and
Autocorrect is great for our phones. But what about our D-N-A? This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. D-N-A is made of building blocks called bases. These bases spell out the blueprints for our cells! Sometimes, mistakes are made, and the wrong base gets swapped in.
Where did the mysterious, pre-Roman Etruscan people come from? Ask the cows! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Thanks to a wealth of Etruscan artifacts, archaeologists know this: The civilization flourished in the first millennium BC in what is now Tuscany. But nobody ever figured
Pee in the pool? NOT cool! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Community pools – hallmarks of summertime fun for kids and grown-ups. And ingrained in our memories of these neighborhood oases is the pungent odor of chlorine. Could you be soaking in more than
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Who doesn’t love a spelling bee? Cute middle-schoolers lisping out words like Xanthosis and Logorrhea! But spelling is vital inside living organisms too! Why? See, cells need proteins to work properly. And these proteins are coded by molecules in