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Moment of Um is your daily answer to those questions that pop up out of nowhere and make you go… ummmmmmm. Brought to you by your friends at Brains On at APM Studios.
155 Episodes
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We know that soil helps many things grow -- but how is it made? It must come from somewhere, right? We talked to farmer Angel Papineu to find the answer. Got a question growing in your brain? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll dig for the truth!
There are more than 8 billion people living on our big wonderful planet. What if all of those people traveled to the exact same spot on Earth and jumped at the same time? What would happen? Would we move the Earth? We asked physicist Dr. Kiley Kennedy to help us find the answer.Got a question jumping around in your brain? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll find an answer that moves you!
Teething, losing teeth, growing new teeth. It’s a part of life that every human goes through! But what about dinosaurs? Did they experience the same thing? We asked paleontologist Shaena Montanari to help us find the answer.Got a dinomite question for us? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help you out because we’re as smart as a thesaurus!
Energy powers our entire universe, whether it’s light from a star or energy stored in the food we eat. But could we ever run out? Will there be a time, far in the future, when the last drop of energy is used up? We asked physicist Dr. Kiley Kennedy to help us find the answer.Got a question that’s draining your mental battery? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact and we’ll find the answer for you, because knowledge is power!
Have you ever noticed how sometimes when you wash and dry a piece of clothing, it comes out a little smaller? Why does that happen? We asked science professor Dr. Mark Lorch to help us find the answer.Got a question that’s tumbling around your brain? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we won’t shrink away from answering it!
Are your ears burning? ‘Cause we’ve been thinking about them. Sure, they’re an incredible self-cleaning marvel that we can wax poetic about all day. Sure, they’re a great place for dads to store all kinds of hairs. But do ears have bones? We asked Olivia Bermingham-McDonogh from the University of Washington to help us find the answer.Heard a good question recently? Send it to us atBrainsOn.org/contact, because we’re ear for you.
Some snakes make a chemical in their bodies called venom. They use it to hunt and protect themselves. Sometimes, if a human gets bitten by a snake, they need to take a special medicine called antivenin. How does this medicine work? We asked pediatrician Emma Gerstenzang to help us find the answer.Got a question that’s snaking around in your brain? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help find a sssssatisfying answer!
Have you noticed that there’s a kind of cheese that’s holier than all the rest? Swiss! Why does it have all those holes anyway? We asked Jenny Eastwood of Small Goods to help us answer this delicious question.Hungry for some answers? Send your questions to BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll briepare an answer justfor you.
Ping pong is a super fun game. It’s like miniature tennis, where people use paddles to make balls fly across a table., and sometimes way, way up in the air! But how do those tiny plastic balls manage to bounce so high? We asked physicist Dr. Kiley Kennedy to help us find the answer. Got a question that’s bouncing around your brain? Ping us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll serve up the answer!
Lots of cars, trucks and buses are powered by gasoline. You put the gasoline in a little hole on the side of the vehicle, it powers the engine and then it comes out of the tailpipe as exhaust fumes. But what’s going on inside that engine? And how does gas turn into exhaust anyway? We asked chemistry professor Dr. Josie Nardo to help us find the answer.Got a question that’s really exhausting you? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll steeryou toward the answer!
Let’s say you wake up on a Tuesday morning feeling fine and fresh. But by the end of the night your throat hurts, you’re coughing, and there’s snot dripping from your nose. What happened in the course of that one day to make you feel so sick? Dr. Courtney Jordan Baechler helps us stick our noses in this (t)issue. Got a question you can’t fever out? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and then be patient! We’ll help find the answer.
There are all different kinds of trees in the world, from towering redwoods to tiny willow trees smaller than an action figure. Why are there so many different sizes of trees, anyway? We asked tree expert Jake Miesbauer to help us find the answer.Got a tree-mendous question? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll ginkGO find the answer!
Have you ever picked up a peach in the supermarket and noticed that its skin is covered in soft fuzz? What’s that about? Should we be taking our peaches to barbershops? And what about kiwis? They’re covered in scratchy hairs! Why do some fruits have fuzz while others have smooth skin? We talked to Dario Chavez from the University of Georgia to find out.Got a fresh ‘n’ fruity question? Send it to us atBrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help find an a-peeling answer.
Black holes are mysterious. They are so dense that no light can escape them, which makes them super hard to find! So how did we discover the first black hole? We asked NASA engineer Varoujan Gorjian to help us find the answer.Got a mystery you’d love to shed some light on? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help search the skies for an answer.
Records are big flat discs with circular lines on them that you can use to play music. But how does a record work, anyway? We asked audio engineer Josh Bonati to help us find the answer.Got a question that’s spinning around in your brain? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help find an answer that’s music to your ears!
Airplanes fly high in the sky and at super fast speeds. But is there a limit to how fast they’re allowed to fly? You know, in the way cars have speed limits? For this episode, we talked to Bobby Sharp, an air traffic controller, who helps us understand if airplanes have a need for speed.Got a question you need answered fast? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll try our plane old best to get it answered!
Have you ever been to the doctor and had them listen to your body with a stethoscope? It’s that funny looking thing that looks like a long rubbery tube with a round metal circle on one end and two ear pieces on the other. Doctors always seem to have one handy, but what is it and how does it work? We asked pediatrician Emma Gerstenzang to help us find the answer.Got a question that you need scoped out? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll prescribe you an answer!
Most of us know that we have a heart. We know that it beats - sometimes faster, sometimes slower. But just how many times does it beat in a day? We asked Dr. Courtney Jordan Baechler to have a heart-to-heart with us about this question. (She is also the host of the podcast Heart-to-Heart Conversations!)Got a question that you just love? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we won’t beat around the bush!
Have you ever seen a sinkhole? These are spots in the Earth’s surface where the ground has collapsed and formed a hole. Sometimes they can be more than a hundred feet deep! But how do sinkholes form? We asked geologist Hazel Barton to help us find the answer.Got a question that’s a real hole in one? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help dig up the answer!
Black holes are super dense spots in space. They have so much gravity that when something falls into a black hole, it can’t escape. We asked UCLA astrophysicist Dakotah Tyler to help us imagine what it would be like if we traveled through one of these dark marvels.Is there a question that’s really pulled you in? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll spaghettiFIND you an answer!
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