Boogers

This week, join Ms. Mallory as she slides into the slippery science of snot, boogers, and whale sneezes.

   

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Don'...

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:25 Snot and Mucus
• 2:33 Cilia
• 5:17 Whale Sneezes & Snot Drone
• 7:36 Should You Eat Your Boogers?

Transcript

Opening

Welcome everyone to another episode of 8 minutes of Eww! The place where we use curiosity and science to turn fear into fascination and those ewww’s into Oooo’s. Oh! By the way, I’m your host Ms. Mallory, the Curious Conservationist and self-proclaimed grosslologist. Let’s get started.

Intro

Today, we are talking all about those gross goblets of go that like to hang out in our noses. What am I talking about?

Boogers. 

So hold on to your sneezes because we'll be covering what exactly a booger is. Why do we have them? And if picking and eating them really, is that bad? Okay. Let's get started. Boogers. What are they? Well, boogers are actually made from a slimy fluid called mucus. Say that with me, mucus. Now we may know mucus by its more famous nickname snot, but we are all about the science, right?

So we are going to impress our friends and call it mucus from now on the mucus we're most familiar with is that sticky, slimy stuff we find in our nose, but mucus can also be found in our throat lungs and even our intestines. And surprisingly, we make a lot of this slimy stuff. Just to snot you a picture, our nose and sinuses make enough mucus to fill half of a two liter soda bottle every day.

Now that is a lot of snot, but why would our nose need to make that much mucus in a day? Well, because it has a very important job. Have you ever taken a big breath of air with your mouth open in really cold weather and did your chest? That's because your lungs don't like cold air and they tighten up to protect themselves.

The mucus in your nose helps keep the air moist and warm. Just the way your lungs like it. Mucus also acts like a sticky pad to small, invisible things in the air, like dust, dirt, germs, and pollen. If these made it all the way to our lungs, our lungs would get irritated or even infected, making it really tough to breathe.

Topic 1: Cilia 

So what happens to all this gross stuff that the mucus captures? Luckily, your mucus has friends in the form of small hairs called Celia. Now close your eyes for a second. And imagine you're at this big, crazy concert. Everyone is so excited. And when the singer it's finally done, they jump into the crowd and the, see a fan lifts, the singers high with their hands and moves them back to the stage for another song we call this crowd surfing, right?

Another example might be when you step onto an escalator and how the escalator takes you to the next level. Well, the mucus covered particles carried by the Celia do sort of the same thing. They carry all that debris and all those particles and all that nasty stuff to the front of your nose, where your nostrils are.

And  like the singer getting passed along by a sea of fans to the stage, the cilia doing the same thing with those particles. And when these mucus covered particles get moved to the front of your nose, the air hits it and they become hard. Can anyone guess what we would call these hard bits of mucus-covered dirt, Dustin pollen and superstars boogers.

Bingo. Now remember just like superstars. Not all boogers are the same. Some are long and stringy. Others are hard and crumby. But the key thing to remember is that we all have them. They're there because our body is protecting itself. And speaking of protecting itself, the color of your mucus can be used as a sign to let you know, if you may have a sinus infection or not, mucus is usually clear.

So if you blow your nose and it says green chances are, you may have a sinus infection, but don't worry. They're easy to fix. But what you really need to be careful about is passing those germs on to someone else. 

Topic 2: Sneezes

Did you know, the speed of a sneeze is somewhere around 100 miles per hour. That's about as fast as a major league pitcher, hurling the baseball down to the batter.

It's even faster than a cheetah can run and a single sneeze can send 100,000 germs into the. While that may generally not seem like good news, especially if you're the one standing next to the sneezer right. Sneezing is actually a good thing. Sneezing helps to protect your body by clearing the nose of unwanted bacteri and viruses, but we don't want to spread those bacteri and viruses to others. Right? So you need to be sure to cover up when we sneeze. 

Topic 3: Whale Sneezes

Speaking of a big sneeze, did you know there are robots capturing sneeze juices?  Not our sneeze juice, of course, but whale sneeze juice. This snotbot is a drone armed with a video camera and some petri dishes to capture the mucus a whale exhales through its blowhole (aka the whale’s nostril).  Learning about whales can be very time consuming and quite expensive, so having a flying field assistant to swoop in and collect the good stuff is super helpful. 

But what does a scientist want with whale snot? Well, exhaled breathe not only contains mucus, but actual whale cells. Thes cells are like treasure chests full of information that can tell scientists a bunch of different things— from whether the whale is a male or female, if that female is pregnant and how stressed out it is at that moment. In the past, darts where used to take small piece of whale skin to study.  Now, the whales aren’t even touched and multiple samples can be collected at the fraction of the price and time. All thanks to a the snotbot. 

Topic 4: 

Okay. So the golden question. If boogers really are just dried bits of pollen and dirt surrounded by good mucus, are they really that bad to pick or even eat the answer? It really isn't a good idea. Why. Because booger contain a lot of germs that your body is trying to get rid of.

And if you pick your nose and put that germy burger in your mouth, or maybe on a table, then your body and everyone else's body has to work extra hard in trying to protect itself from getting sick, not to mention the inside of your nose is pretty sensitive and poking around can make it bleed. So moral of the episode, booger really aren't that bad, but if you have bats in the cave, it's really better to blow those boogies out into a tissue than it is to go digging for gold.

Outro

Well, my aspiring gologist Sally, my eight minutes are up. If you love to learn the science behind the creepy Crawley gross and scary, be sure to subscribe cuz every week we'll be doing a new topic. That's it for today. I'm your host, miss Mallory, the curious conservationist and self-proclaimed gologist signing off until another eight minutes of you.

Bye everyone. Thanks.