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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Nanette Brewer, Indiana University Art Museum Curator of Works on Paper previews a "New in the Gallery" exhbition of British Watercolors from the museum's collection.

Do I really look like that? Fluorescent lights in the workplace and in fitting rooms are notorious for making colors look strange; hence the rule that one should apply makeup under sunlight, but ...

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 ...