Can you solve global warming? Hunger? Disease? Can one person make a dent in the world’s big problems? And if you can’t solve a problem, should you try to or just give up? Is it worth working in a problem area if the solution would take multiple lifetimes to achieve?

Fireworks! How they are fun and exciting! Who invented them? Where? When? And how do they work?

Why do we love them? Of course they are lots of fun but is there a downside? Can we make them safer, more fun, less problematic for the environment?

In this episode we talk about all aspects of fireworks we we celebrate July 4th.

Happy 4th to everyone!

In this episode we talk about lying. We try to answer what is a lie, what is a big lie, what's a small or white lie. We also talk about what makes kids (or others) lie and what we can do to prevent that or deal with it. This is a short conversation about this topic. We may have to do another show on this as the discussion was quite interesting.

What is snow? What is rain? How are they different? How is snow formed? What is fog? All of this and more is answered in this episode as we take a nice walk on a snowy field.

We also talk about how clouds form. Clouds are made from water vapor that cools down as it climbs higher. When the vapor cools it the water precipitates out of the air. The same thing happens on land when warmer moist air cools at night and then we get fog :)

Traffic lights are pretty similar in most places, but not always everywhere. We talk about roads signs and driving conventions and standards. This is a good episode to learn how things could be different in places we haven't yet visited.

Why do we throw up and what is puke? Maya had a little flu overnight. So we talked about what that does to your body. The next day she wanted to know about throwing up and puking. It’s always good to talk about things that are hard for kids to experience so that they can learn and feel OK about it. Once she learned that puking is a natural thing and that it’s a process to make the body feel better, she was more curious about it. In this episode we talk about voluntary and involuntary processes in the body. We also talk about defense mechanisms of the body.

In this episode we talk about how moisture in the air turns into frost in the morning as the temperature of air drops overnight. We also talk about the freezing point and melting point of water and other material. To melt ice and frost we can add a little bit of alcohol to the the ice. That lowers its freezing point and makes it melt. This is how the anti-frost spray works.

The skin can feel different things like sharpness of things, or pain, or touch or itching. But the brain interprets what the skin is feeling. The nerves take the information about what the skin is feeling all the way to the brain. Then the brain uses that information to figure out if it’s pain or itching we are feeling.

Some materials like wool make us itch. It depends how sensitive we are to wool. Itching is very helpful for our bodies to deal with things it doesn’t like. We itch so our brain can tell our body to do something about it, like move our arms to scare a mosquito on our arm.

In this episode we talk about how the skin feels coldness and hotness. We also talk about how the air outside is cold at night and warmer in the day and colder in winter and warmer in summer.

Our body is always losing heat. In winter we lose heat more quickly as the weather is colder. That is why we bundle ourselves up. We don’t actually get warmer because of the jacket we wear. We just lose our heat more slowly as the jacket insulates our body and keeps our body heat closer to our body. So you have to zip up your jacket to keep yourself warm.

This episode is about viruses and bacteria and how we get sick. We talk about vaccines. We learn how vaccines are basically a small sample of the virus. The virus goes into the body and introduces the itself to the white blood cells, which are the way the body defends itself. Once the body learns about the disease it knows how to deal with the virus if it sees it in the future.

The picture of the post is when President Obama got a vaccine to show that vaccines are safe. Here’s the link to that story: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/12/21/president-and-first-lady-get-vaccinated