Tiny Matters

If you’re a female and you want to use a contraceptive pill, patch, injection, or device, you have over 250 options. But if you’re a male and you want a contraceptive, you have three options. You can get a vasectomy, you can use condoms, which can have up to a 18% failure rate, or you can use what sex researchers politely call “the withdrawal method,” which is highly unreliable. But there could be another male contraceptive very soon. So what took so long?

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In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, a listener writes in to tell us about being born 3 months premature likely due to their mom having HELLP syndrome, a variant of preeclampsia, and taking part in early trials for surfactants. Then we discuss why horseshoe crab blood is blue and the exciting generation of a one-electron bond between carbon atoms. 

We need your stories — they're what make these bonus episodes possible! Write in to [email protected] *or fill out this form* with your favorite science fact or science news story for a chance to be featured.

A transcript and references for this episode can be found at acs.org/tinymatters.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For thousands of years, the rise and fall of empires and the global economy were closely tied to something you might not expect: spices. The spice trade began around 1000 BCE, localized to southeast Asia and the Middle East. But by the beginning of the next millennia, it had rapidly expanded and nations vied to control it. Today it’s typically far less work to find and purchase spices you want, but just because they’re no longer starting wars that upend nations doesn’t mean they’re any less important. Because while you might think spices are mostly about making your food taste good, science — and particularly chemistry — is finding they can do a whole lot more.

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Links to the Tiny Show and Tell stories are here and here. All Tiny Matters transcripts and references are available here.

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In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we get to the bottom of if glass is a liquid or a solid and why riboflavin makes milk fluorescent. Then we talk about the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) — the first space-based observatory that NASA scientists and their collaborators are sending up into space to detect and study gravitational waves, better known as “ripples in spacetime.” 

We need your stories — they're what make these bonus episodes possible! Write in to [email protected] *or fill out this form* with your favorite science fact or science news story for a chance to be featured.

A transcript and references for this episode can be found at acs.org/tinymatters.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 1856, after yet another day of disappointing experiments, a chemist named William Henry Perkin was cleaning up his glassware when he made a discovery that would harken a new — and colorful — era of science and industry. Just 18 years old, Perkin was a promising young student in a prestigious lab at the Royal College of Chemistry in London and he was supposed to be figuring out a way to make a chemical compound called quinine. Despite his best efforts, Perkin was coming up empty — or rather — producing a lot of dirty dishes with little to show for it. But he did notice that there was a curious goop in one of his flasks, and it turned a brilliant shade of purple in the wash. Intrigued, Perkin decided to try dyeing a swatch of silk with his serendipitous solution. Although he had failed yet again to produce quinine, Perkin had created the very first synthetic dye and launched a scientific industry that is still bringing new drugs and dyes to market today.

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Links to the Tiny Show and Tell stories are here and here. All Tiny Matters transcripts and references are available here.

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In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, a listener on “team wasp” writes in with some interesting info on USDA wasps for pesticide-free pest control and we learn about some wasp versus beetle drama. Then we talk about how our red blood cells use and expel iron, and how a huge percentage of the iron we get is from broken down blood cells.

We need your stories — they're what make these bonus episodes possible! Write in to [email protected] *or fill out this form* with your favorite science fact or science news story for a chance to be featured.

A transcript and references for this episode can be found at acs.org/tinymatters.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Back in April, a company called Colossal Biosciences announced that they had brought dire wolves — ancient canines of Game of Thrones fame — back from extinction. The internet went wild. But while some media outlets proclaimed the return of a long-gone species, many scientists shot back on social media that these weren’t really dire wolves, they were just genetically engineered grey wolves. Suddenly everybody had an opinion on what de-extinction is, what it is not, and whether or not we should be doing things like this in the first place. In this episode, we talk to scientists who have been working in this area for a while, and they not only share their thoughts on these wolves — they completely change our understanding of the term “de-extinction.”

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Links to the Tiny Show and Tell stories are here and here. All Tiny Matters transcripts and references are available here.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we talk about cute woolly mammoth mice and debate whether research to bring back extinct species (or their genes) is ethical or a good use of money and time. Then we discuss the best way to remove microplastics from water.

We need your stories — they're what make these bonus episodes possible! Write in to [email protected] *or fill out this form* with your favorite science fact or science news story for a chance to be featured.

A transcript and references for this episode can be found at acs.org/tinymatters.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.