You and I are both animals with backbones, so we have lots in common. Our ways of being alive look similar. We have hearts to pump blood. We have brains that help us think and communicate.
But plants don’t have the same body systems we do.
I talked about your question with my friend Michael Knoblauch. He’s a plant scientist at Washington State University.
When I’m thirsty, I pick up a glass of water with my paws and drink it—just like you do. But plants don’t have paws or mouths, so how (and why) do they drink it?
To find the answer, I talked with my friend Helmut Kirchhoff. He’s a scientist at Washington State University. He studies plants and biochemistry.
He told me plants need water inside their cells. Water makes plant cells strong and flexible. It also dissolves stuff. That makes it possible for chemical reactions to happen inside plant cells—like the reactions a plant uses to make energy during photosynthesis. Plants also need water to move around nutrients and other molecules required for life.
“Water is essential for life, but plants must move nutrients from the soil to the leaves,” Kirchhoff said. “So, they have this very nice transport system called xylem. Xylem is an ancient Greek word that means wood. It works like a straw to move water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves.”
Every few years, a smell like a rotting corpse wafts around a stairwell at Washington State University Vancouver. But it’s not really a dead body. It’s the bloom of the corpse flower plant.
There are fewer than 1,000 corpse flower plants left in the wild. It’s one of the rarest plants in the world.
But the list of rare plants is massive. If you look at all the plants we know about in the world, there are about 435,000 different kinds of plants—and many more we don’t know about. Some scientists say that more one-third of all plants are “exceedingly rare.”
I asked my friend Dawn Freeman what makes a plant rare. She’s responsible for the WSU corpse flower.
My neighbor has a very prickly garden. It’s full of cactuses—including one thorny plant nearly as tall as my house. That’s not something you see every day in the Pacific Northwest. Cactuses usually live in dry places like deserts.
I talked about your question with my friend Linda Chalker-Scott. She’s a garden scientist at Washington State University.
When we see little green plants sprouting up from the soil, it is indeed a sign that spring has arrived. To find out how they know to grow, or germinate, I asked my friend Camille Steber.
In her U.S. Department of Agriculture lab at Washington State University, she studies the source of almost all plants: seeds.
A seed holds pretty much all the information a plant needs to know how to grow. The shell that holds all the seed parts inside even contains food for the plant. But the seed is very dry and needs to sense clues from outside to know when to germinate at the right time. Read More ...
Hey cool cats, I’m Dr. Universe here to answer your baffling science questions. Like this one, “Dear Dr. Universe, Why don’t plants get sunburns?” That’s a great observation. For as much time as plants spend outside, we don’t see too many with a sunburn. Plants need sun to grow, but not too much sun. Since they can’t move into the shade, put on a hat or sunscreen, they have their own way of staying safe in the sun. They make their own kind of sunblock. Of course, it isn’t much like the sunscreen … » More …
A lush tropical rainforest, a field of sunflowers, a garden in your neighborhood. Our Earth is home to all kinds of plant life. From trees to catnip, there are thousands of different species of plants. Most of these plants are green, but not all of them.
The other day, I wandered into a Washington State University greenhouse and ran into my friend Mechthild Tegeder, a professor and expert on plants.
She gently dug a small plant out of a pot so we could take a closer look. When she lifted it up, I pawed at the clumpy soil hanging from the bottom to reveal some stringy roots.
Every summer I grow peppers in my garden. I always thought they were vegetables. But you’re right that my peppers have gobs of seeds like fruits do.
To figure out what’s going on, I talked with my friend Jacob Blauer. He’s a plant scientist at Washington State University.
He told me that whether something is a vegetable or fruit depends on what part of the plant it comes from.
“Plant products that come from plant parts like roots, leaves or stems are veggies,” Blauer said. “If they come from a flower and bear seeds, they’re a fruit in botanical and scientific terms.”
When the cold weather comes, I bundle up in a sweater and explore the snow.
But my frog friends are never around then. In fact, I’ve never seen a frog in a sweater.
I asked my friend Erica Crespi why that is. She’s a biologist at Washington State University. She studies frogs and other amphibians.
She told me frogs are different from you and me. We’re warm-blooded. Our bodies use energy to make heat. When it’s cold outside, it’s still warm inside our bodies. We just put on warm clothes to keep our heat from escaping.
But frogs are cold-blooded. They don’t spend a lot of energy making heat. So, when it’s cold outside, it’s cold inside a frog’s body, too. That could be bad news during a winter freeze.
Crespi told me that’s why most frogs living in places with cold winters find a slightly warmer place to hunker down.
When I was a kitten, my family measured how tall I was. They marked it on the wall. It was amazing to see how much I grew.
I talked about how plants grow with Helmut Kirchhoff. He’s a scientist at Washington State University. He studies plants and biochemistry.
He told me plants grow by making new cells. To make a new cell, an existing cell splits into two. That’s called cell division. Then, the new cells grow bigger. That’s called cell growth. So, a plant can make its stem or roots longer by making new cells in those places. When it’s time to bloom, a plant can make new types of cells that form flowers.
Plants need the right ingredients to do cell division and cell growth.
I keep mason bees. They sleep in cardboard tubes all winter long. I worry about my little bees until I see them chew out of their nesting tubes in the spring.
I talked about how mason bees and all kinds of bees survive winter with my friend Brandon Hopkins. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University. He manages the honey bees on campus.
The honey bees we see in North America today first arrived with Europeans in the 1600s. We love honey bees because they pollinate our crops and make delicious honey. But there are lots of bees that have always lived here—like bumble bees, squash bees and mason bees. Those are native bees.
Most native bees survive the cold by overwintering in the nests where they were born. That could be tucked into the soil or leafy debris. It could be nestled inside hollow plant stems, holes in wood or tubes like my mason bees. Some native bees like bumble bees live in colonies. Only the queen survives the winter. She digs into the earth or finds a hollow tree and hibernates there.
People have thought about mermaids for a long time. Ancient people even drew humans with fish tails on cave walls. So, did they really see mermaids or were they drawing from imagination?
The marine experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say that no mermaids have ever been found in the ocean.
But we’ve fully mapped only about one-quarter of the ocean floor. There are probably between 700,000 and one million different kinds of plants and animals in the ocean. At least two-thirds of those are still unknown to us.
Does that mean mermaids could be swimming around in parts of the ocean we haven’t explored? Maybe. But our best guess is that people mistook other sea animals for mermaids—like manatees and their relatives.
When I get the same question from different kids, I know it’s a good one.
So, I talked about your question with my friend Angeliqua Montoya. She’s a graduate student at Washington State University. She works on a mutualism between pea plants and bacteria.
“I study ecology, which is looking at interactions between different species,” she said. “Mutualisms are interactions where both species benefit.”
It’s hard to imagine that one space rock wiped out the dinosaurs. But it did more than that. It killed 75% of the plants and animals on Earth. Me-OW.
I talked about that with my friend Barry Walker. He teaches geology classes about Earth’s history at Washington State University.
Walker told me that we call a space rock that hits Earth a meteorite. The meteorite that took out the dinosaurs set off changes on Earth. Those changes lasted for thousands of years. That’s how it killed so many things.
I’ve never sat on a power line. I like to keep my paws firmly on the ground. But birds love resting there, especially in winter. Power lines give off a little heat, so it’s a good spot for birds to snuggle together and stay warm.
I talked about how they do that safely with my friend Javier Guerrero. He’s a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Washington State University.
He told me birds do get electrocuted on power lines sometimes. But that won’t happen if the bird touches just the power line—and doesn’t touch other lines or the pole at the same time.
I use a calendar to keep up with my work as a science cat. I also love calendar apps that count down to big events—like my birthday. People have always tracked time for work and holidays.
I talked about this with my friend Nikolaus Overtoom. He’s a professor of ancient history at Washington State University.
He told me we use the Gregorian calendar today. That’s a revised version of the Julian calendar. The Romans invented the Julian calendar.
Like most cats, I don’t love wet fur. I check a weather app every morning to see if I need an umbrella. But how rain happens was a mystery to me.
So, I talked about rain with my friend Nathan Santo Domingo. He’s a field meteorologist with AgWeatherNet of Washington State University. That’s a weather tool for farmers, gardeners and other people in Washington.
“The first thing to remember is that Earth’s surface is 71% water,” Santo Domingo said. “We also have a giant orb in the sky—the sun—that’s feeding energy into the atmosphere and reaching down to Earth’s surface.”
The sun’s energy changes the water in the oceans, rivers and lakes. The water changes from a liquid to a gas called water vapor. That water vapor floats up into the bubble of gas that surrounds Earth—called the atmosphere.
When I wake up from a cat nap, I stretch and take a deep breath. It feels good to fill my lungs with oxygen.
But that wasn’t always possible on Earth.
I talked about this with my friend Sean Long. He’s a geologist at Washington State University.
“The cool thing is the answer has to do with life,” Long said. “Early life forms on Earth gave us all the oxygen. They were single-celled bacteria.”
Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old. There’s been life on Earth for 3.5 billion years. The first life forms were made of just one cell. They were bacteria and their cousins called archaea.
As a science cat, I handle going to the veterinarian better than most. I see it as a meeting of scientific minds. But I had no idea some veterinarians specialize in fish.
I learned all about fish medicine from my friend Nora Hickey. She’s a fish veterinarian at Washington State University. She works in the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. She helps fish at zoos and hatcheries stay healthy.
Hickey told me you can watch a betta’s behavior to see if it’s happy. Happy bettas swim around. They interact with things in their tanks and act interested when you come close.
My favorite animated GIFs are the ones with cats riding unicorns. I’m delighted to tell you about a real unicorn that lived a long time ago: the Siberian unicorn.
The Siberian unicorn was bulky and furry. It had a big hump on its back. Its horn was three feet long. That’s as big as a human preschooler!
This real-life unicorn was a kind of rhino from Eurasia. But it was bigger than modern rhinos and probably galloped like a horse.
Scientists have known about Siberian unicorns since 1808. For a long time, they thought the unicorns went extinct 200,000 years ago. Recently, that changed. Now they think the unicorns went extinct closer to 39,000 years ago.
When most people think about hibernation, they picture bears snoozing away the cold winter in their dens. You’re right that other animals do that, too.
I talked about your question with my friend Laurel Hansen. She’s an entomology professor at Washington State University. Her specialty is carpenter ants.
“We think most ants in our temperate climate will have diapausing larvae and what I would call overwintering adults,” Hansen said.
Diapausing and overwintering are like hibernating but not quite the same. There are a few things to know about ants to understand what these terms mean.
Everyone who heard your question agreed that it’s a sophisticated one. To get my paws around the answer, I talked with my friend Phil Mixter. He’s an immunology professor at Washington State University.
He told me all living things need to protect themselves from microbes that could make them sick. These are called pathogens. They can be bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites.
“Almost every organism I can think of—from plants to animals and beyond—has a defense system to handle the possibility that another organism might sneak in,” Mixter said.
If you looked inside a T. rex mouth, you’d see some 12-inch teeth. That’s longer than my tail!
I asked my friend Aaron Blackwell if dinosaurs used those big chompers on humans. He’s an anthropologist who studies human biology at Washington State University. He told me dinosaurs and humans didn’t live at the same time.
“Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago—before there were even primates,” Blackwell said. “So, they could never have eaten a human or even a monkey.”
Don’t let the lab coat fool you. I enjoy chattering at birds as much as the next cat. Staring out the window and vibrating my mouth to “chirp” helps me relax after a long day.
My wild cousins do take things a bit further—namely, predation. It’s not pretty, but it’s an important part of keeping life in balance.
I talked about predators with my friend Travis King. He’s a Ph.D. student at Washington State University. He studies big cats like lynx and jaguars.
“It’s a balancing act between predators, disease, food and space,” King said. “If you take away predators, you lose one of the factors keeping an ecosystem in balance.”
February is a great time to celebrate Black scientists who changed the world—and those transforming science right now.
I talked about Black History Month with Amir Gilmore. He’s a professor and associate dean in the College of Education at Washington State University.
“There are so many things that Black people have created that we just don’t think about,” he said. “So, when I think about Black History Month, it gives me joy that other people made these inventions. Where would we be without refrigerated trucks or stoplights? Where would we be without telephone technology? I’m thankful that Black people thought about what the world needed and provided those things.”
My office is just down the road from the Washington State University composting facility. It processes more than 10,000 pounds of organic waste every month. That’s a lot of compost!
I talked about compost with my friend Jim Kropf. He works for WSU Extension. Extension programs connect universities with local communities. They offer classes and trustworthy, science-based resources that anyone can use online.
Kropf told me that composting is how nature recycles. “In the forest, leaves fall on the ground and come in contact with soil,” he said. “Worms, centipedes, microorganisms and fungi all work on those leaves to break them down into organic matter.”
Making compost is copying nature to make fertilizer for healthier gardens. It’s also a way to help our planet.
WSU’s campuses are on ceded land belonging to the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe and Palus people, traditional Cowlitz lands, traditional lands of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, and historical Spokane Tribe lands. This story was written on land belonging to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.
November is a great time to honor historical figures and Native American scientists changing the world right now.
Mills’ research centers Native American student voices. She wants to figure out what makes those students feel like they belong.
“Representation is huge,” she said. “If you can see yourself in these spaces, then you’re more willing to put yourself out there and be in those spaces. I met Native American faculty right away when I got to WSU. I don’t know if I would have been able to visualize myself here if I hadn’t.”
It’s easy to love bees. They’re furry and buzzy. Along with other insects, birds and bats, they pollinate about one-third of the plants we eat.
I talked about how long bees have been buzzing around Earth with my friend Silas Bossert. He’s an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Entomology at Washington State University.
“The oldest bee fossil that is really without doubt a bee is between 65 and 70 million years old,” Bossert said.
The universe is a big place. Thinking about how we fit into it is part of what makes humans (and cats like me) special.
I talked about your question with my friend Afshin Khan who studied astrobiology and environmental science at Washington State University. Astrobiologists explore how life began. They also look for signs of life outside Earth.
Khan told me your question is a huge mystery.
“We have very good ideas about what could have happened,” she said. “In different labs around the world, we’ve gotten very close to simulating some of those conditions. But simulations can only get so … » More …
At the end of the day, you probably curl up in a cozy bed for a little shut eye. Unlike you, most spiders have eight eyes, and they never shut any of them. They don’t even have eyelids!
When you watch the zapping bolts during a lightning storm, you know how powerful electricity is. Humans have only been harnessing electricity to bring light and energy to our towns and homes for about 150 years—and metal is one of the main ways we get this powerful tool from place to place.
To learn more, I talked to my friend Bob Olsen, a professor emeritus in the Washington State University School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Olsen said it’s important to realize that we don’t need metal wires to move the waves that carry electricity, which are called electromagnetic waves. Some technologies, like cell phones, pick up waves that are sent through the air. Read More ...
You’re right, each year during the fall, we often see a lot of trees dropping their leaves. To find out exactly what happens when leaves fall, I talked to my friend Henry Adams, a researcher at Washington State University.
If you open up a pumpkin, you would see all kinds of different things inside. Some people call all this gooey stuff the pumpkin’s “brains” or its “guts.”
There’s the meaty orange flesh, sticky pulp, lots of seeds, and, of course, all those little strings. The strings actually have a really big job.
My friend Lydia Tymon is a plant pathologist. That means she is like a doctor for plants—and she was happy to hear about your question.
The pumpkin’s strings, or fibrous strands, help the seeds get something important while the pumpkin is growing on the vine: nutrients.
Dear Lela,
You have all kinds of cells in your body that do lots of different things. In fact, there are about 200 different types of cells in the human body—from blood cells to skin cells to bone cells. To find out exactly what all those cells are made of, I visited my friend Deirdre Fahy.
Fahy is a scientist at Washington State University who is curious about how and why things work, including our cells. She reminded me the human body is made up of billions of cells. You might think about each cell as if it were a tiny room. But this room, or cell, is so small, you’d likely need a microscope to see it. Read More ...
There are all kinds of different things to think about, along with a few challenges, when it comes to growing organic food.
My friend Lynne Carpenter-Boggs is a soil scientist at Washington State University who works with many different farmers and knows a lot about what it takes to produce food that is organic.
Dear Robin,
If you’ve ever eaten a handful of trail mix, you’ve likely eaten quite a few seeds from trees. Some nuts, like cashews and almonds, are also seeds that can give us energy when we hike or play.
Seeds actually store up their own energy in the form of something called starch, which is kind of like the food a seed needs to survive. The seed will use this stored up energy to start growing into a tree. Read More ...
A lot of living things on our planet have defenses they use in the wild to help them survive. For some plants, being poisonous may help keep them from becoming someone’s dinner.
Wendy Hoashi-Erhardt
That’s what I found out from my friend Wendy Hoashi-Erhardt, a scientist who directs the Small Fruit Plant Breeding program at Washington State University. Read More ...
Worms can help the soil in a few different ways. One helpful thing worms do is move around different materials, such as leaves and grasses, and make holes in the soil.
That’s what I found out from my friend Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a soil scientist at Washington State University, who was happy to help with your question.
Lynne Carpenter-Boggs
“Worms are actually very strong,” Carpenter-Boggs said. “They can break through soil and make holes that allow air, water and plant roots to follow those channels.” Read More ...
Our planet is home to all kinds of different plants, and they help make a lot of the oxygen we breathe. To find out how plants make oxygen, I asked my friend Balasaheb Sonawane.
Sonawane is a scientist at Washington State University who researches photosynthesis, or the ways plants use energy from the sun and make oxygen. He said that in a way, plants breathe, too.
“They don’t have a nose or mouth,” Sonawane said. “They have tiny microscopic organs on their leaves called stomata.” Read More ...
Dear Krisha,
While we can’t see black holes with our eyes, astronomers have figured out how to spot these objects in our universe.
One astronomer who is really curious about understanding black holes is my friend Sukanta Bose, a researcher at Washington State University.
First, he told me there are different kinds of black holes. Supermassive black holes can be millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. We have a supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy called Sagittarius A*, which is pronounced as Sagittarius A-star. Read More ...
Just as blood moves important stuff around the human body, sugary sap moves important things around a tree.
My friend Nadia Valverdi told me all about it. She’s a researcher at Washington State University who studies how apple and cherry trees survive in different environments.
When we eat food, like a delicious apple or a handful of cherries, we get important nutrients. Read More ...
When you see a ring of mushrooms, it’s likely they are exploring for food under the ground.
Giant mushrooms in your backyard are not animals or plants. They are part of another class of living organisms called fungi. But like you and me, they do need food to survive.
That’s what I found out from my friend David Wheeler, an assistant professor at Washington State University, who knows a lot about fungi.
He said the mushrooms are just one part of fungi. The other part that explores the soil for food actually lives under the soil. Read More ...
You’re right, a lot of people get tears when they yawn. When you yawn, you actually use lot of muscles in your face. Maybe you can feel the stretch in your jaw, cheeks and eyes.
As the muscles in your face contract, they can put a lot of pressure on the plumbing system that is in charge of making your tears.
That’s what I found out from my friend Karin Biggs, an adjunct professor at Washington State University who teaches anatomy. Read More ...
Dear Marin,
Whenever I go out and about, I make sure to wear my face mask. Like you, I wanted to find out exactly how they work.
First, I talked to Marian Wilson, an assistant professor and nurse at Washington State University who is curious about how face masks protect people.
“When we talk, sneeze, sing, or laugh, we spread droplets into the air all the time,” she said. “With the COVID-19 pandemic going on, we know people may have virus in their droplets.” Read More ...
Ants build mounds in all shapes and sizes. Beneath those piles of dirt, ants are building their underground homes.
That’s what I found out from my friend Rob Clark, an entomologist who studies bugs on plants. His job is to figure out if bugs make a plant sick or help the plant grow.
He told me ants are one of the most diverse insect families. Scientists know about nearly 13,000 species—and each ant species makes a different kind of nest. Read More ...
Dear Natalia,
Bee wings may be small, but they are really strong. I learned all about bee wings from my friend Melanie Kirby, a honey bee researcher at Washington State University.
Kirby said you can think about bee wings as if they were a kite. If you make a kite out of thin tissue, it might rip. But if you make it out of a strong plastic film it will be stronger.
Bee wings are made of a material called chitin (KITE-IN) and it’s a lot like keratin, the material that makes up your fingernails. Chitin is what makes up the wings on each side of the bee’s body. Read More ...
We can find all kinds of leaves on our planet. Just think of tiny pine needles, fern fronds, ivy vines, or a big banana leaf.
My friend Eric Roalson is a professor at Washington State University who is very curious about plants. He said there are a few things that give leaves their shapes.
The shape of a leaf can depend on the family history of a plant, the group it belongs to, and the environment where it grows up. Read More ...
We can make paper in lots of different ways. It often starts with trees. In fact, one of the first kinds of paper we know about was made in China using rags, plants, and bark from mulberry trees.
These kinds of materials are made up of parts called fibers. Fibers are what help give plants strength to stand up. Humans who eat plants like lettuce or celery have actually eaten some of these fibers. A lot of the clothes we wear come from plant fibers, too.
Plant fibers are called cellulose. Humans aren’t able to digest these fibers because they are really hard to break down. But strong fibers are great for making paper. Read More ...
There are many kinds of creatures that lived on Earth long ago and their relatives still exist today. We know about them from fossil records, imprints or remains that we find in rock. Read More ...
I’ve been wondering the same thing lately. Every time I go on walks, I notice new splashes of color. Watching bugs in the grass, I pretend they’re crawling through a jungle. Everything is bright and bursting with green.
When I saw your question, I knew Michael Neff would know the answer. Green is his favorite color, too. (In fact, when we talked over video, he wore a green Hawaiian shirt.) Neff researches plants at Washington State University, and he is especially curious about grasses.
If you chopped a piece of grass and looked at it with your eyes alone, you might not see much. But if you looked at it under a microscope, you’d see tiny structures containing even tinier parts.
When you picture the carrot section at a grocery store in the United States, you probably imagine rows of orange. But carrots can come in a rainbow of other colors: purple, yellow, red, and more.
And the first carrots weren’t orange at all. They were stark white.
That’s what I learned from Tim Waters, a Vegetable Specialist at Washington State University-Extension. He studies how to grow different kinds of vegetables, and helps others learn how to grow them too.
Viruses are strange things. They’re not alive like you or me. But they behave somewhat that way—spreading, growing, appearing in new forms. How can this be?
There’s a lot scientists don’t know yet about the new coronavirus. But they do know a lot about how viruses work and make people sick.
To learn more, I talked to Sylvia Omulo, a scientist specializing in infectious diseases at Washington State University.
You’re not alone—cats don’t like broccoli much either. As a carnivore, I think a nice, meaty buffalo wing sounds great.
But humans are omnivores, meaning they eat both plants and meat. They’ve developed a taste for all kinds of things growing and living all over the world. So where do individual people’s preferences come from?
To find out, I visited Carolyn Ross, a professor of Food Science at Washington State University. Like you, she is very curious about why people like the foods they like.
There’s nothing like popcorn in progress: the snapping kernels, the warm buttery smell, and the knowledge that a delicious snack will be ready in minutes. It gives you some good time to think and wonder: how did humans first start doing this?
To find out where popcorn came from, I visited my friend Erin Thornton, an archaeologist at Washington State University. Archaeologists study how humans lived in the past—including the things they ate.
To learn the story of popcorn, we have to trace the history of maize.
When the wind blows, it can do all kinds of things. It can help pick up tiny seeds and carry them away, so plants and flowers can grow in new places. It can push a big sailboat across an ocean. We can even harness the wind to make clean energy to power our homes and schools.
That’s what I found out from my friend Gordon Taub, an engineer at Washington State University. He is very curious about wind energy and told me more about why the wind blows.
There are all kinds of insects crawling and flying around our planet. And you’re right, some of them—but not all of them—are poisonous.
I learned all about poisonous insects from my friend David James. James is a researcher at Washington State University who is very curious about monarch butterflies.
Let’s say we wanted to find out what kind of electrical activity was happening inside your brain at this very moment. Yep, you read that right: your brain is full of electricity. It actually generates enough electricity to power a lightbulb.
In fact, the tiny cells in your body use electricity to send messages to each other. That’s part of what helps the brain and body communicate. I decided to visit my friend Samantha Gizerian, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, to find out more about our brains.
She said if we wanted to observe activity in a human brain, we could do a test called an electroencephalogram (uh-lek-trow-uhn-seh-ful-luh-gram), or EEG for short. We’d attach some small discs with thin wires, or electrodes, to a person’s head. Read More ...
Along with beaches, sunshine, and movie stars, a lot of people picture palm trees when they think of southern California. While there are lots of palm tree species in California, they aren’t all originally from the area. Many were brought from different places around the world.
Take a big, deep breath. As you inhale and exhale, you can probably feel the air taking up space in your lungs.
The air we breathe is made up of a few different things. It includes gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide—just to name a few. Animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. But in the plant world, it’s the opposite.
Trees, plants, and even algae in the ocean, take in carbon dioxide from the air and, using the energy of the sun, transform it into the oxygen we all breathe. Read More ...
It’s great to hear you want to help our oceans. After all, they do a lot for us. Life in the ocean provides much of the oxygen we breathe and is also a source of food for many animals, including humans.
One of the most important things we can do to prevent more pollution is to keep our garbage, especially plastic, out of the ocean. That’s what I found out from my friend Richelle Tanner, a marine biologist and researcher at Washington State University.
While a lot of plastic ends up in the ocean, it actually started under the Earth’s surface in the form of oil, leftovers of plants and animals that died long ago. Read More ...
Flowers not only smell nice to humans, but also to many insects and birds who help the flowers do a really important job. Let’s imagine that you are a bee or a butterfly. You don’t have a nose on your face, but instead use your two antennae to smell things.
As you fly around, you catch a whiff of chemicals floating in the air. Down below, you see a field of daisies. The flowers are releasing some chemicals, which are the building blocks of a smell.
Read More ...
We can find millions and millions of plankton in bodies of water all over the world—from oceans, rivers, and lakes to ponds and mud puddles.
That’s what I found out from my friend Julie Zimmerman, a scientist with the Aquatic Ecology Lab at Washington State University. In the lab, researchers can use powerful microscopes to get an up-close look at these tiny creatures. Read More ...
Not only do fish pee, but their pee gives other animals in the ocean what they need to survive.
That’s what I found out from my friend, Cori Kane, a marine biologist at Oregon State University who got her Ph.D. at Washington State University. She knows a lot about coral reefs in our oceans. Coral reefs look like a ridge made of rock, but they are actually made up of living things.
Corals need a few things to survive. They need clear, warm water, sunlight, and nutrients, a kind of food that helps them grow. There aren’t usually a lot of nutrients in water near coral reefs. Luckily, there are a lot of nutrients in fish pee—and a lot of fish in the reef. Read More ...
A glass of water has more molecules than there are stars in the night sky. That’s what I found out from my friend Jack (Qiang) Zhang, an assistant professor of chemistry at Washington State University.
“Everything around us is made up of molecules,” he said. “And while these molecules may be different, they are all made of the same things.”
Those things are called atoms. Zhang told me we can think about atoms kind of like Lego blocks. Imagine that you have a pile of red Legos, yellow Legos, and blue Legos. Maybe you use them to build a tiny house, or you can use this same set of Legos to build something else like an airplane or a robot. Read More ...
If you’re anything like me, you like to watch the clouds go by in the sky. Even though some clouds might look like they are just floating around up there, they can do quite a lot for our planet.
The first thing to know about clouds is they are made up of tiny water droplets, ice crystals, or a mix of both—and there are many different kinds of clouds.
There are white and puffy cumulus clouds, thin and wispy cirrus clouds, and tall nimbostratus clouds that stretch high up in to the sky. Believe it or not, when you walk through fog, you are walking through a kind of cloud that’s touching the ground. Read More ...
Our world is full of fruits that have all kinds of delightful smells. Maybe you’ve smelled the sweetness of watermelon, pineapple, peach, papaya, or mango. But you might also be wondering about the most stinky fruit in the world.
When I got your question, I asked my friend Lydia Tymon, a plant scientist at Washington State University. The first stinky fruit she thought of was the durian, a large, round fruit that grows mostly in Southeast Asia. The fruit is about a foot wide with a greenish-brown husk that has lots of spikes on the outside. Read More ...
Dear Cooper,
You’re right, caffeine can help us stay awake—but only for so long. To understand exactly why it works, it helps to know about one of my favorite things: sleep. All animals need rest to stay healthy. But sometimes humans don’t get quite as much sleep as they need.
They might be tired during the day or have a lot of work to do. To feel more alert, they might drink a cup of coffee, tea, or soda. These kinds of drinks contain caffeine, a chemical and stimulant that can trigger changes in the body. Read More ...
Hey cool cats, I’m Dr. Universe. Here to answer your baffling science questions. Like this one. Dear Dr. Universe why are apples red? In nature different colors sometimes send a message to different plants and animals. The message might be don’t eat me as is the case of some brightly colored poisonous frogs. Other times it might be a chameleon using it’s colors to attract a mate saying hey look over here. But scientists think the apples red color might just be a way of telling hungry animals we’re delicious. Long before humans … » More …
When you think of wasabi, you might think of that hot green paste people serve up with sushi. Some restaurants put a bit of wasabi on your plate, but it’s usually not real wasabi. It’s actually a mixture of horseradish, mustard, and green dye. Real wasabi is a lot different.
That’s what I found out from my friend Thomas Lumpkin, a plant scientist who studied wasabi as a researcher at Washington State University. Wasabi is a plant that mainly grows in Japan in the cool, running water of mountain streams and springs.
Before humans even came up with the word “allergy,” they observed how some people would get rashes, sneezes or become really, really sick from different things in their environment. Historians even noted how people in ancient civilizations talked about something called “plant fever,” which gave people runny noses.
A good French fry starts with the right potato. My friend Rick Knowles is a potato researcher at Washington State University and told me all about the spuds.
The surface of the earth is covered in all kinds of landforms. We have tall mountains, deep valleys, wide canyons, and scenic shorelines—I bet you could think of a few others, too. A little less than a third of our planet is land and the rest is mostly ocean. Both affect the weather, said my friend Nic Loyd, a meteorologist at Washington State University.
We get different weather patterns depending on a few conditions, such as how much sun the land gets, if the land is near mountains or ocean, and how air circulates through the atmosphere.
In the movies, we often hear dinosaurs let out big, scary sounds. If you’ve ever played with toy dinosaurs, maybe you’ve also made your little Tyrannosaurus rex roar.
While it might seem like wildfires only cause destruction, they are actually a natural and important part of keeping forests healthy. After many years, trees have adapted to their homes. Some are pretty invincible when it comes to surviving a wildfire.
There are quite a few foods that are sweet and good to eat. A lot of them are fruit, said my friend Pablo Monsivais. He’s an associate professor at the Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine.
All around the world bees are busy turning nectar from flowers into sweet, golden honey. That’s what I found out from my friend Brandon Hopkins, a honey bee researcher at Washington State University.
All plants need water to survive. Those that live in places where water is scarce use some interesting strategies to stay alive.
That’s what I found out from my friend Charles Cody, who manages one of the greenhouses at Washington State University. When I went to visit the greenhouse, he pointed out a few different cacti.
One was tall and cylindrical with big spines. Another was small and round with what looked more like little hairs. A rainforest cactus hung on the wall like a vine.
That’s a great observation. When it rains, worms sometimes leave their home in the soil and wiggle their way up to the surface, where we see them on sidewalks and roads.
So far, we’ve investigated how recyclables like plastic, aluminum, and paper can end up in the trash. If our clothes get damaged, or we simply outgrow them, we might toss them in the trash, too. Or send them to a thrift shop. Either way, they often end up buried in a landfill.
If you’re anything like me, maybe one of your weekly chores is helping take out the trash or making sure all your tuna cans get into the right recycle bin. The truth is, I wasn’t entirely sure where the garbage goes either, so I decided to ask my friend Karl Englund.
Lots of bees have pointy behinds, but not all of them. The ones that do have a pointy behind, or a stinger, can use it to help defend their homes, food, and fellow bees. That’s what I found out from my friend Megan Asche, a graduate student at Washington State University who studies honey bees and takes super close-up photos of insects.
You aren’t alone if you’ve ever heard someone at the dinner table say, “you’ve got to eat your broccoli.” Broccoli is one of nature’s superfoods, so it’s no wonder we are often encouraged to eat those little green trees.
It all started with a question: How can we help students in our community learn about STEM?
The answer from many local educators was access to more science materials. Dr. Universe wants to make sure kids (our future scientists and engineers) have the materials they need to learn about science, technology, engineering, and math.
Ask Dr. Universe is based out of Washington State University, a public research university committed to a tradition of service and access to education.
Bird feathers are interesting. There are so many types, shapes, and colors. My friend Daniela Monk is a Washington State University professor who studies avian ecology, or the study of birds.
She told me about why the birds we know today have feathers and how they got them. Researchers believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs a very long time ago.
“One lineage of dinosaurs gave rise to birds,” Monk said.
Researchers around the world are finding dinosaur fossils that contain feathers. A fossil is the remains of a very old animal or plant that is preserved in a rock. From these fossils they … » More …
Whenever there’s heavy rains or winds, butterflies seem to disappear. This is because butterflies hide when it rains. That’s what I found out from my friend David G. James who is an associate professor at Washington State University. He studies insects, including butterflies, in the Pacific Northwest.
A parasite is an organism that steals resources from another organism in order to survive. Our planet is home to all kinds of parasites and organisms that host them.
There are a lot of different grasshoppers living on our planet. In fact, scientists have discovered more than 11,000 species. Exactly how these grasshoppers spend their winter depends on what kind of winter they experience.
