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Cover Story

Grades 4-6

Grossology!

By Ritu Upadhyay

Where does the slimy snot in your nose come from? What is that crusty gunk in your eyes when you wake up in the morning? Why does throw- up smell so bad? Science teacher Sylvia Branzei has the answers. Branzei is the author of several books on "grossology," a subject she defines as "the science behind really gross things."

Branzei recently helped turn her disgustingly entertaining biology lessons into a museum show. The Grossology Exhibition will tour at least 16 U.S. science museums for the next five years.

Yuck! What's that smell? Kids at the exhibit take a sniff of different body odors.

Visitors love getting up close and personal with the slimy, smelly science of the human body. One of the exhibit's most popular attractions is the GI (gastrointestinal) Slide. Kids get to experience what a food particle goes through when it travels through the digestive tract. The journey starts with a climb up the tongue, then a slide down the esophagus into the stomach and an exit out the rectum—onto a brown mat!

Other popular features include a "skin" climbing wall and a giant nose. Kids get to climb the wall's zits, blisters and warts. Visitors to the walk-in nose find out what it's like to be a dust particle caught in a nose as air rushes by during a big sneeze.

With his dripping nose, Nigel-nose-it-all introduces kids to the wonders of snot.

Science In Disguise
Branzei got the idea to make lessons out of gross stuff one day in 1993 while she was clipping her toenails. She started examining the gunk underneath her nails and thought that her students would be fascinated by it. "Kids love gross stuff," she says. "This is science in disguise. If we teach students in a way that makes it fun, they'll understand better."

Branzei admits there's not much that grosses her out anymore. But after some thought, she does come up with one example. "In one Eskimo community, when a baby gets a cold, the parents actually suck the snot out of its nose," she explains. "Now that's pretty disgusting!"

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Did You Know?

About 10 billion tiny scales of skin rub off your body every day. In a lifetime, you could fill eight 5-pound bags with dead skin.

Snot is a part of your daily diet. Humans swallow about one quart of nose mucus every day.

The hydrochloric acid in your stomach is so strong that it can eat up stainless steel razor blades.

Your mouth is the most unsanitary part of your whole body. More than 100,000,000 microcreatures live there at any one time. That's more critters than there are people in Australia, Canada and Spain combined!

Ear wax coats the inside of the ear canal to trap nasty stuff like dirt, dust and bugs. The wax dries up, forms little balls and drops out when you yawn, chew or swallow.

Next: Testing, Testing...