Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Chances are pretty good that you're hearing my voice right now in the car. Well, you're not alone. It turns out that the car is an ideal place for learning, and that is science fact. Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, we teamed up with the Science Museum of Minnesota to study how parents and kids interact as they listen in the car.
And we're going to do a live webinar on Thursday, May 8th, to talk about what we learned from the study. We'll give you tips on sparking more curiosity, developing scientific inquiry skills, and more. All while driving to school or soccer. So join us live on YouTube on Thursday, May 8th at 3 p.m. Eastern. You can find all the info at brainson.org or head to our YouTube channel at Brains On Show.
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield. Our bodies are a wonderful and weird collection of parts that work together to make us tick.
But we don't always know how our bodies work or why they are the way they are. And when people don't know something, they can come up with some pretty fun explanations. Like the other day, I was chatting with a friend who had just had a baby and she called a birthmark on the baby's skin a stork bite. Now, I know that her baby was not bitten by a stork.
But actually, I'm not sure I know what birthmarks are in the first place. It's a good thing Benjamin was asking about birthmarks too. Hi, my name is Benjamin and I'm from Philadelphia. And I would like to know what are birthmarks? A birthmark is a spot on your skin that is present from the moment that you're born. Hi, my name is Dr. Liz Farhan and I'm a dermatologist. And that means that I'm a doctor who specializes in skin.
So there's three main types of birthmarks. There's tan patches, moles, and growths of blood vessels. And they all just have really fancy names. So the first type is a brown patch, and we call it a cafe au lait macule, which means coffee with milk, because the person who named it thought that it looked like a spot of coffee that had spilled. The second type of birthmark is called a mole.
The mole forms on the skin from mole cells growing into an area on the skin. These are usually darker brown in color. They can be small or large. And when these become more raised, they can even have hair growing out of them.
The third type of birthmark can be either a pink patch, which they can call a salmon patch because it looks like a salmon fish, or a stork's bite on the back of the neck, which they named because they thought this is when a stork brought the baby down to delivery, that that's where they would hold the back of the baby's neck. These usually slowly fade with time.
There's also a type of birthmark called an infantile hemangioma, which is a bright red bump on the skin that can grow for several months before eventually shrinking down and disappearing. These can form when blood vessels move to the surface of the skin and then remain after birth. Um, uh,
Okay, so a birthmark is an area of skin that is pigmented, which means colored. These marks show up when a baby is born. Sometimes they can fade away with time, like the birthmark on my friend's baby that definitely was not caused by a real stork. Those are called stork bites because of the old story that storks delivered newborn babies to their parents. But storks don't go flying around with human babies. It's just a funny name for a type of birthmark.
Other kinds of birthmarks, like tan patches or brown bumps called moles, stay on a person's body their whole life and are one thing that makes us all unique. And now that I know this, I can add a new batch of facts to my body of knowledge. Get it?
If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to know more about the skin you're in, check out the Brains On podcast, where we have a whole episode all about how our skin, eyes, and hair get their color. Want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube, where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes. Search Brains On Universe on YouTube and subscribe.
If you have a question, we would love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um... I think a human baby would be too big for a stork to carry. How big are storks? I have so much to learn.
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