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This summer is a sports fan’s dream! Beyond some major soccer tournaments, Paris 2024 kicks off at the end of July. If you think about it, sports are science in motion, which means that buried in incredible athletic feats is a lot of data about how athlete bodies are using and responding to chemistry, biology and physics. That data is helping scientists design new or better tools for athletes.

Today, in honor of this very sporty summer, Sam and Deboki delve into how scientists go about developing the equipment that helps move athletes, and how that equipment is holding importance for the medical field as well, for instance in diagnosing cystic fibrosis in infants. Sam and Deboki will also cover the creative experiments one scientist did to design a better bike saddle for female pro cyclists, who endured decades of intense injuries that ultimately required many to undergo labiaplasties, until American racing cyclist Alison Tetrick came along and said “enough is enough.” Title IX may have revolutionized female sports participation, but until more recently building gender-specific sports equipment from the ground up was unheard of.

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Links to the Tiny Show & Tell stories are here and here. Pick up a Tiny Matters mug here! All Tiny Matters transcripts are available here.

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We have exciting news! This Wednesday, July 10th, Tiny Matters is launching a newsletter! It will come out every 2 weeks, so about twice a month. We will not spam you, promise. You can subscribe at bit.ly/tinymattersnewsletter.

So what will be in this newsletter you may ask? Well, it will of course alert you to the latest episodes, providing you some additional details here and there. We'll also share fun Tiny Matters video clips, tell you about recent science discoveries we can't stop thinking about, provide future episode teasers, get your input, let you know about any upcoming mug raffles, maybe share a pet photo or two... and really just have fun interacting with this community. We (Sam and Deboki) want to get to know you all better and we want you to get to know us!

Every subscription we get means a lot to us. We spend a lot of time on this podcast and all of the content surrounding it, and knowing that we're reaching our listeners is the best feeling!

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In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, Sam and Deboki cover the role parrotfish poop may play in your next beach vacation and how the molecule 2,3-BPG helps people adapt to high altitudes and more.

Want your Tiny Show and Tell featured? Email tinymatters@acs.org with some science news you’re itching to share, a cool science factoid you love telling friends about, or maybe even a personal science story. In every 'Tiny Show and Tell Us' episode, Deboki and Sam will read your emails out loud and then go a bit deeper into the tiny science of it all.

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Standard reference materials — or SRMs — at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) serve as standards for many food, beverage, health, industrial and other products. There are over a thousand SRMs including peanut butter, house dust, dry cat food, soy milk, blueberries, stainless steel, fertilizer, and a DNA profiling standard. SRMs help make products safer and ensure that consumers are getting what they think they’re getting. But how do they work exactly?

In this episode of Tiny Matters, Sam and Deboki cover SRMs that are helping us accurately detect toxic substances like lead and pesticides in our house dust, fight seafood fraud, and keep PFAS out of our meat. Sam also travels to the NIST headquarters outside of Washington, DC to get a behind the scenes tour of how SRMs are made. She even gets a chance to snoop around the warehouse where SRMs are stored.

Email us your science stories/factoids/news that you want to share at tinymatters@acs.org for a chance to be featured on Tiny Show and Tell Us!

Tiny Matters has a YouTube channel! Full-length audio episodes can be found here. And to see video of Sam, Deboki, and episode guests, check out Tiny Matters YouTube shorts here. A video showing 'beef snow' and a bunch of other SRMs is here.

Links to the Tiny Show & Tell stories are here and here. Pick up a Tiny Matters mug here! All Tiny Matters transcripts are available here.

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At the end of 2016, a pilot reported that a volcano in Alaska called Bogoslof was erupting. Bogoslof had been quiet for 24 years, and there wasn’t any equipment on it that scientists could use to track its eruptions. But over the next 8 months, scientists were able to track at least 70 eruptions from Bogoslof, and they did so using something you might not expect: sound.

In this episode of Tiny Matters, we’ll cover what sound can tell us about events as big as volcanoes and ‘Swiftquakes’ and as small as the insect world, where researchers are using AI to track different insect species, leading to important discoveries that could help not just public health but agriculture and climate policy.

Email us your science stories/factoids/news that you want to share at tinymatters@acs.org for a chance to be featured on Tiny Show and Tell Us!

Tiny Matters has a YouTube channel! Full-length audio episodes can be found here. And to see video of Sam, Deboki, and episode guests, check out Tiny Matters YouTube shorts here. Links to the Tiny Show & Tell stories are here and here. Pick up a Tiny Matters mug here! All Tiny Matters transcripts are available here.

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On March 11, 2020, after over 118,000 cases of COVID-19 had been reported in 114 countries, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The term Long COVID began popping up across the globe shortly after. People with Long COVID experience any combination of a huge number of symptoms that range from gastrointestinal issues to brain fog to extreme exhaustion and an inability to do what were once pretty simple tasks like getting dressed, preparing meals, or even getting out of bed.

Although we have a ways to go before we understand a disease as complex as Long COVID, over the last few years scientists have made significant research strides and the millions of people suffering from Long COVID have brought light to health conditions including ME/CFS, that many people didn’t previously realize existed. In this episode, you’ll hear from an ME/CFS researcher, a Long COVID patient about her difficult and winding experience to understand what was happening in her body following a COVID infection, and a journalist and author who recently wrote a book on Long COVID.

Here's a link to Ryan Prior's book, The Long Haul: How Long Covid Survivors Are Revolutionizing Health Care. And here's a list of Long COVID resources:

• https://www.covid.gov/be-informed/longcovid
• https://solvecfs.org/solve-long-covid/long-covid-resources/
• https://www.bu.edu/ceid/training-education/long-covid-resources/
• https://longcovidalliance.org/

Tiny Matters has a YouTube channel! Full-length audio episodes can be found here. And to see video of Sam, Deboki, and episode guests, check out Tiny Matters YouTube shorts here!

Links to the Tiny Show & Tell stories are here and here. Want to watch Sam talk about the (proposed) connection between lead and the fall of the Roman Empire? Watch that video here. Pick up a Tiny Matters mug here! All Tiny Matters transcripts are available here.

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A week ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held its 2024 Met Gala — a yearly event to raise money for the Costume Institute. The gala also marks the opening of the Costume Institute's annual show, which this year is called "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion." The idea behind this exhibit is to showcase pieces from the museum's collection that are too delicate to show on mannequins. Instead, the exhibit will feature recreations of the pieces using AI and 3-D techniques, along with sound and smell. But what about textiles that museums choose to display — how is science used to maintain these incredible, often fragile, pieces of the past?

In this episode of Tiny Matters, Sam and Deboki cover the fascinating textile landscape, from plant-based fibers to the evolution of modern synthetic materials and the investigative approaches used to preserve not just these fabrics but also the stories they tell and the cultural significance they hold.

We have a YouTube channel! Full-length audio episodes can be found here. And to see video of Sam, Deboki, and episode guests, check out Tiny Matters YouTube shorts here!

Links to the Tiny Show & Tell stories are here and here. Pick up a Tiny Matters mug here! All Tiny Matters transcripts are available here.

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Every year, tuberculosis claims over a million lives despite being curable. Tuberculosis or TB is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. About 5–10% of people infected with TB will eventually get symptoms. In the early stages a TB infection might cause chest pain, a cough, night sweats, and loss of appetite. But eventually it could create holes in the lungs and cause you to cough up blood. And of course, TB can be deadly.

In this episode of Tiny Matters, Sam and Deboki talk with TB researcher Uzma Khan as well as John Green, the author of books including The Anthropocene Reviewed, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. John is also the co-creator of Crash Course and one half of the vlogbrothers — the other half being his brother Hank Green, who Deboki and Sam chatted with on the show last year.

Although he's best known as an author and YouTuber, last summer John made headlines for something else: fighting for more equitable access to tuberculosis treatments, particularly bedaquiline, an incredibly effective and essential medicine for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis.

In this episode, Sam and Deboki cover the science and history of this devastating yet treatable disease, the recent public pressure on companies that is leading to increased treatment and testing access, and clinical trials that make John and Uzma hopeful that one day this humanity-plaguing disease could be gone.

If you’d like to learn more, go to tbfighters.org. You can also subscribe to John’s newsletter: tbfighters.org/newsletter.

We have a YouTube channel! Full-length audio episodes can be found here. And to see video of Sam, Deboki, and episode guests, check out Tiny Matters YouTube shorts here!

Links to the Tiny Show & Tell stories are here and here. Pick up a Tiny Matters mug here! All Tiny Matters transcripts are available here.