Onion Tears

Masterpiece Theatre presents: Tears of an Onion. This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Cut an onion, and enzymes break up sulfur compounds. But how do they get in your eye? Zixuan Wu and team at Cornell University compared onion cutting with varying knife sharpness and

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Why So Smelly?

Summer’s coming and the heat is on!  Unfortunately. This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Our sweat is odorless, but our armpits can, er, stink.  Gurdeep Minhas and colleagues at Oxford found the culprit.  In armpit bacteria, there is a transport protein. Picture a conveyor belt bringing

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Smelly Situation

Exercise gives us that healthy glow…but uh-oh, B.O.! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Sweat is our body’s cooling-down mechanism. But does it have to be so smelly? Armpits, I’m looking at you! Our sweat is odorless, so what’s all the stink about? Gurdeep Minhas

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Mercury Madness

I’ll have the seafood platter – hold the mercury! This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science. Coal power plants and paper mills spew pollution – including mercury — into the atmosphere and ocean. It can be nasty stuff, and dangerous, too! But double trouble happens when

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