Wake Up Crew Highlights: May 17, 2022
Meet Gray Lady & Black Betty – our Jay Day and the Day Home Team PET OF THE WEEK
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Your Nose Runs When You Cry
This weekend, my wife & I watched a movie that had a pretty sad-yet-heartwarming ending. And it wasn’t just the tears that were flowing at that ending, but also…well…nasal fluids, too. (Sorry, not trying to be gross. But it happens to all of us.) They seem to be two different systems, right? But are they really? Why does your nose run whenever you cry?
Scientists really don’t know the evolutionary reason why we cry, but they do know a bit about how our tears happen. Basically, emotional stimulation makes our brains transmit messages to our tear ducts that tell them to turn on the tears. But the thing is, those messages go to our eyes, not our noses. So, why does crying seem to trigger mucus production, as well?
Well, actually, it doesn’t really. When you cry, some of your tears leave your eyes & roll down your cheeks. But there are other tears that end up flowing through your tear ducts & down into your nasal cavity, where they join forces with your mucus to create the whole weepy waterworks situation.
But this isn’t always the case when you might have a runny nose. Like whenever you eat spicy foods, for instance; the mucous membranes in your nasal cavity do actually make more of their stuff as a means of trying to flush out the “hot” compounds before they can mess up your respiratory system. Cold air also makes your mucous membranes ramp up their output, too, as their way of warming up & dampening the cold, dry air before it makes it to your lungs.
But when it comes to crying your eyes out at a sad movie or a sad song, everything you’re wiping away with those tissues is actually just from one big sad family.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send a message via my Twitter (@AndyWebbRadio), or email [email protected].
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MUNDANE MYSTERIES: What’s The Human Body’s Smallest Bone?
We humans are basically just a pile of bones filled with gooey bits & tied together in a skin sack. But it’s good to know what goes into making us humans the creatures that we are. So, when someone asked me this question the other day I thought, “Now that’s something everyone should know”. The question was: what is the smallest bone in the human body?
The home of the smallest bone in your body belongs to…your ear. While the first thoughts you might have of your ear involve the fleshy lobe & the cartilaginous ridges, there are, in fact, bones in your ear. Your ear actually houses the three smallest bones in your body, which are called “ossicles”, from a Latin word that means “small bone”. Their individual names also come from Latin: the malleus, or “hammer”; the incus, or “anvil”; and the stapes, or “stirrup”. They’re all connected in a chain & vaguely shaped like what their names suggest. Altogether, the ossicles come to about the size of an orange seed; and of the three, the stapes is the smallest.
Of the three sections of your ear (the outer, middle, and inner ear), your ossicles can be found in your middle ear, between the eardrum & the inner ear area, where they transmit sound vibrations from one place to another. Once vibrations have passed through the middle ear, they hit the cochlea, which turns them into neural signals that your brain receives as auditory information, or sound.
Small or large, if you’ve got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved, send me a message via Twitter (@AndyWebbRadio), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
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