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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Human beings have round pupils; cats have pupils shaped like vertical slits. What's the advantage for cats and people, respectively, in those different pupil shapes? Different pupil shapes seem ...

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 ...

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 ...

An amendment to a Senate bill would protect an industrial company from getting sued if its plans to put carbon emissions underground goes awry. The hydrogen production facility in Terre Haute is ...

Mark Hood is a professor of audio engineering at Indiana University, and he owns Echo Park Studios. He's worked with big stars like George Benson, James Taylor, and Bob Dylan, but before that he ...