Brains On!® is a science podcast for curious kids and adults from American Public Media. Each week, a different kid co-host joins Molly Bloom to find answers to fascinating questions about the world sent in by listeners. Like, do dogs know they’re dogs? Or, why do feet stink? Plus, we have mystery sounds for you to guess, songs for you to dance to, and lots of facts -- all checked by experts.
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And so I would wear really, really heavy boots and really, really big jacket, and then I would wear hats and gloves and and layers. But I think the most interesting thing in the winter is that because you're breathing into your layers of clothes, your eyelashes will get frost on them and build up. So it's like little icicles on your eyelashes and they'll get they'll stick together. And so you're constantly kinda brushing your eyelashes off to get the to get them to unstick. And I have been there when it's been so cold that even your snot freezes. Wow. What kind of research did you do there? So I was lucky enough. I I worked in Antarctica for many years. And, the very first time I went to Antarctica, I got to work in a place called the Dry Valleys, which is a place in Antarctica that doesn't have any snow on the ground. It's very like, it's named dry, a lot of dust and rocks, and it's the closest thing we have on Earth to Mars. So if you imagine pictures you've seen of Mars, the Mars landscape, it looks like that. And I was studying, the soil in in the dry valleys. But after that, then I worked for many years studying the ozone hole. The ozone layer is, is a shield over the earth that absorbs a lot of the sun's ultraviolet radiation. And we would go in the winter, and we would launch balloons, all the way up into the stratosphere, which is the layer of the atmosphere that's above the troposphere where we live. So way up into the atmosphere, we'd launch these huge helium balloons to measure ozone, and and look at the changes each year in the ozone hole, which forms over Antarctica and the Arctic each year. Wow. What's one of the coolest things you saw or did there? Well, I I got to visit the South Pole Station. I think that was pretty special. But maybe the most spectacular thing that I did was, the time of year we were there to
Okay. Okay. I mean, I guess I'll try it. Oh, you know, it's not too bad. I guess you're right. Dang it all usually right. It's still delicious. Like eating his you're listening to brains on from 8 studios. I'm Molly Bloom, and I'm here with Rachel from Buffalo, New York. Hi, Rachel. Hi, Molly. Today, we're going to dip into the world of food, expiration dates. Have you ever seen a bunch of tiny numbers printed on the bottom of a yogurt container or maybe a month and year on a bag of bread? Sometimes these strings of numbers look like a strange code or secret message, but they're not. They're expiration dates. To expire means to go bad or spoil. So the expiration date is the day or month when the food is past its prime. Some say things like sell buy, best before, packed on, and June 2024. And they're designed to help us figure out whether food is fresh and okay eat. So, Rachel, you wrote into us with a question about this. Right? Yeah. I wanted to know how do people choose expiration dates for food? Great question. So what made you think of it? So I watched this video on TED Ed, and it said that for food in cupboards, the expiration dates didn't really matter. Just like Gankadore said. Yeah. So how seriously do you take expiration dates at home? For milk, we sniff it or look inside. And when it's rotten, we throw it out. And for, like, nature bars or anything, we let it slide. Okay. So have you eaten food that is past the expiration date? Oh, yeah. Honestly, it kinda tastes the same. Mhmm. So you were fine. Like, the the granola bar is like, yeah, it tastes pretty
