Dear Ms. Scientist,
Why do we cringe at the sound of our own voice?
—Amanda B.
We grow up hearing our own voices in two different ways, air-conducted and bone-conducted. Air-conducted hearing is when sound travels from your mouth, through the air and through your eardrum to the cochlea, the sensory apparatus that conducts sound waves into nerve impulses. This is how we hear any external stimulus, including the sound of our own voices. The recording sounds different from how you perceive your own voice because it does not include bone-conducted hearing. Bone-conducted hearing is when the vibrations from your vocal cords travel through your skull directly to the cochlea. Bone-conducted hearing is at a slightly lower pitch than air-conducted, so the recordings of our voices are at higher pitches than we are expecting, therefore we tend to dislike them.
Dear Ms. Scientist,
The red and orange sunsets viewed from the Hoofer piers are gorgeous, but is there any truth behind the old sailor phrase, “Red at night, a sailor’s delight; red in the morning, sailors take warning”?
—Kyle W.
When the sun is low in the sky, the light shines through the highest concentration of particles in the atmosphere, allowing the light to refract into many colors. When the atmosphere consists of many water and dust particles, red colors with long wavelengths of light shine through while blue colors with shorter wavelengths are broken and scattered. An atmosphere with a lot of moisture and dust is also indicative of a high pressure system and good, stable weather conditions. Since weather systems move from west to east, a red sunset in the west means that good weather is coming. Likewise, a red sunrise in the east means that the high pressure system has passed and it will likely storm.
