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Hey there, Smarty Pants.
It's your trusty narrator.
Back with another round of Smarty Q, where I trusty answer your amazing smarty questions about science, history and everything in between.
Let's begin. question, Evie on Spotify asks, how and why did Dolly Parton become a singer?
I will always love you.
And this question.
Dolly Parton grew up in the great smoky mountains of Tennessee in a big family with very little money but lots of music.
Her mom sang old mountain ballads and her uncle gave Dolly her first guitar when she was about eight years old.
Dolly started writing songs as a kid and performed on local radio shows.
The day after she graduated high school, she moved to Nashville, the capital of country music, to chase her dream.
She worked hard writing songs for other singers before becoming a star herself, with hits like Jolene, 9 to 5 and I Will Always Love You.
She became a singer because music was her passion, and she said, I never wanted to be anything else.
Today, she's also known for her kindness, her imagination, library charity, Dollywood amusement park and her legendary style.
Question two.
Sophie asks, who invented beanbags, the kind you warm up?
Aha!
The beanbags you heat up, sometimes called microwave heat packs, were inspired by traditional grain sacks used to keep people warm centuries ago.
The modern microwavable version appeared in the 1980s, when inventors discovered that dried grains, beans and rice could safely absorb heat in a microwave and slowly release it over time.
Some versions use cherry pits or flaxseed because they hold heat especially well.
While no single inventor holds, the credit companies began patenting designs for microwave heating pads in the late 80s and early 90s, long before squishmallows were a thing.
Okay, moving on to question three.
An awesome Spotify listener named I Love Who Smarted asks, Why is ketchup red and mustard yellow?
The answer comes down to the plants they're made from and a little chemistry.
Ketchup gets its bright red color from lycopene, a natural pigment in tomatoes.
Mustard comes from mustard seeds which look yellow-brown, but food makers often add turmeric, a spice containing the golden pigment curcumin, for that classic color.
So ketchup's red comes from tomatoes and mustard's yellow comes from turmeric, both powered by plants.
Okay, we still got two more juicy questions which we'll get to right after a quick break and a word from our sponsors.
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Hey, Trusty here.
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We'll be right back.
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Now back to Smarty Q's.
Question four.
James from Albany, New York asks, what makes sour candy sour?
Sweet question about sour taste, James.
Sour candy gets its tang from acids, the same kinds that make lemon sour.
Candy makers add small amounts of citric acid, malic acid, or tartaric acid.
These acids trigger the taste receptors on your tongue that detect sourness.
Malic acid found in green apples powers warheads, while citric acid from citrus fruits makes sour patch kids tangy.
When the acid mixes with saliva, it releases hydrogen ions that make your mouth say, whoa.
And finally, question five.
Jing from Spotify asks why are some things soft and some things hard, even though they're each made of atoms?
Wow, what a super smart question, Xing.
Everything is made of atoms, but how those atoms connect makes the difference.
In soft materials like rubber or cloth, atoms and molecules are loosely bonded, so they can move or stretch when you press them.
In hard materials like metal or diamond, atoms are tightly packed with strong bonds that don't easily bend.
For example, in diamond, each carbon atom bonds to four others in a rigid structure super hard.
But in graphite, the stuff in pencils, the same atoms form slippery layers so it's soft.
It all comes down to bond strength and structure, not just what the material is made of.
And that's another curiosity-packed episode of SmartyQ.
If you have a question, great or small, that you'd like me to answer, send it to whosmarted, at whosmartedcom, and you might hear your name on a future episode.
Until next time.
Keep on smarting, smarty pants.
