Slime. This word sounds pretty unpleasant, doesn't it? But this is a useful thing. Now we'll try to figure out why. What will happen if you catch a cold or just catch an unpleasant virus? You will have a sore throat and sneeze. What will appear after sneezing? That's right, it is mucus. During such illnesses, many viruses and bacteria appear in your body. They make you feel week, headaches and muscle aches. But it is mucus that helps you to remove bacteria from your body. This happens while sneezing. The body uses this method to cleanse itself of the disease as quickly as possible. Indeed, no medicine existed many years ago. Any person could easily die from a common cold. But even then a simple sneeze helped to recover much fast.
Chapter 1. We Love Slime!
WHO LIKES SLIME? EVERYBODY! SLIME IS A WONDERFUL THING!
You can pull it; you can push it. You can put your fingers into it. It's lots of fun to play with. You can even make your own slime at home. Here's how.
You need:
White glue
Water
Borax powder (you can buy this in a grocery store)
Two plastic cups
Fill the first cup with water. Add some borax powder. Mix.
Put some glue in the second cup. Add some water. Mix.
Now take a little of the mix from the first cup and add it to the second cup. Mix well.
Wait 30 seconds.
Excellent! You have SLIME!
Adults like slime, too! A British TV show called Tiswas put people in a glass box and threw slime all over them. The people watching TV loved it!
We like eating slimy things, too. Think of sea animals like oysters. Some people eat uncooked oysters, and they feel very slimy in your mouth! The French are famous for cooking slimy animals like snails, and they like frogs' legs, too.
Then there's okra, a green vegetable from Asia and Africa. It gets slimy when you cook it because it has mucilage inside it - a mix of protein and sugar. Mucilage is plant slime. Mucus is animal slime.
Chapter 2. Is That Water? No, It's Snot!
YOU FEEL BAD. YOU SNEEZE A LOT. YOU HAVE A COLD!
Having a cold means one thing for certain: snot! What is snot? Is it water that comes out of your nose? No, it's mucus.
You can't feel it, but your body is making mucus all the time. Inside your nose, there are small hairs. Every time you breathe in, these hairs catch dirt and germs and stop them from going into your body. But sometimes, the germs get through and grow, and you get a cold.
The cold makes the skin on the inside of your nose swell. At the same time, your body makes more mucus to wash the germs away. This mucus mixes with dirt and germs and becomes snot.
We all have mucus running between our noses and throats, and that's nothing to worry about. It means our bodies are working correctly. But snot can be nasty. It is thicker than mucus. That's why it's more difficult for you to breathe when you have a cold.
What should we do when we have snot in our noses? First of all, look at the color. Does it have any color at all? No? Then that's good. You're normal and healthy. Yellow or green snot isn't so good. Your body is fighting germs, and when it is fighting, snot changes color.
The best thing to do now is to blow your nose. Not everyone does, though. Some people put a finger up their nose and pull snot out - it's called "picking your nose." Don't pick your nose in front of other people. It's not polite.
In the 1920s, a company called Kimberly-Clark started making things called "facial tissues." They were small pieces of soft paper for women to take off their makeup. They called them Kleenex. The company showed pictures of movie stars using them, and women began to buy them.
In the summer of 1927, a man who worked at the Kleenex company had hay fever. Hay fever is something that makes you sneeze a lot, usually in the spring or fall. You get it from breathing pollen.
So what did he do? He used Kleenex facial tissues to blow his nose! Soon, facial tissues weren't just for women and movie stars. Men and children used them, too. Now you can buy tissues in almost every store.
Do animals sneeze? Animals don't use tissues, but they do sneeze.
Sneezing is something we can't easily stop. It's a reflex action. And animals sneeze for some of the same reasons we do - sneezing takes away the things that irritate our noses, like dirt and germs. That's why sneezing sometimes feels nice.
But animals sneeze into the air, not into a tissue.
This means that germs can get out into the air and make other animals sick.
Some animals, iguanas, for example, sneeze a lot. Iguanas don't get more colds than other animals. They sneeze to get salt out of their bodies.
On the Internet, you can see lots of animals sneezing - even an elephant.
That's a big sneeze, so watch out!
Chapter 3. Take That!
IS MUCUS ALWAYS GOOD? NOT FOR EVERYONE!
So mucus is a good, helpful thing to have. But just make sure it's YOUR mucus.
Many animals have poisonous mucus. They use this mucus to scare other animals away and often to kill them.
Take the Spanish dancer sea slug, for example.
Its colorful skin has a nasty taste because it's full of poisonous mucus. It gets the poison from the plants and sea animals it eats. The poison comes out through its skin as slime and kills any predator stupid enough to bite it.
Another colorful animal is the poison dart frog. It comes from Central and South America.
These frogs probably get poison from some of the insects they eat. The poison goes into the mucus on the frog's skin. It's one of the most dangerous animals in the world. Touch a poison dart frog with your fingers and you might soon be dead!
Why are these frogs called "poison dart" frogs? A dart is a thing with a sharp end. You can throw it. Many years ago, some people living in South America took poison from the slime on frogs and put it on the end of a dart. Then, they threw the dart at people from other groups to kill them. The poison from just one frog can kill ten people.
Look at this beautiful animal. It's a skunk from North America. Skunks have an interesting way of using mucus. But don't get too near one! Under the tail is mucus. And not just normal mucus. This is smelly mucus. It smells like a mix of all the bad things you can think of.
A scared skunk lifts its tail and sprays the mucus all over its predator. Usually, the skunk sprays its mucus towards the predator's face. The smell from the mucus makes the predator run away - fast. But the smell stays for a long time.
You can usually tell when skunks are going to spray. They move their feet, make noises, and lift their tails. But what if you can't get away, and a skunk sprays you? What can you do about that smell on your clothes and on your skin?
It isn't easy to get rid of7 it! Some people say you should take a bath in tomato juice. Actually, that doesn't really work. The smell of the juice just covers the smell of skunk mucus for a short time. For your skin, wash a lot with strong soap. For your clothes, you need to go to a store and buy a really strong laundry detergent!
Chapter 4. No Spitting on the Sidewalk!
ANOTHER IMPORTANT SLIME COMES FROM YOUR MOUTH.
Babies drool because they can't keep saliva in their mouths.
Saliva is 99 percent water and 1 percent mucus.
A healthy person makes between one and two liters of saliva every 24 hours. Saliva makes your food wet so it's easier to eat. It also helps break food down before it goes down your throat to your stomach. And saliva is good at fighting germs, too.
Children and adults have a reflex that stops us from drooling, but babies don't. Babies' teeth start pushing through the gums at about 6-12 months, and that hurts! Wet gums don't hurt as much as dry gums. So babies make a lot of saliva to keep their gums wet. That's why babies often have drool running down their chins.
Saliva is a good thing. We need it. But it's not good to spit out your saliva in public.
More than 100 years ago, people often got sick and died from a bad disease called tuberculosis. People caught tuberculosis from other people's saliva. So in 1896, New York City made a law to stop people from spitting in the street. Today, you still can't spit in many places in New York. However, people do it, and nothing usually happens to them.
In Singapore, it's different. There, they also have a law that says people can't spit in public. But if a police officer in Singapore sees you spitting, you will have to pay a lot of money.
Animals have saliva, too.
But animals have more ways of using it than we do. Some birds called swifts use saliva to build their nests. It takes the birds 25-30 days to build a nest.
And then guess what happens? Some people eat the nests because they believe eating them makes you healthy. They make soup from the birds' nests. It's easy, and it's slimy! You heat the nest in water, and the birds' mucus goes slimy.
Even 1,000 years ago, people in China made bird's nest soup. Today, a bowl of it costs a lot of money - as much as $100. It's one of the most expensive foods in the world.
You really don't want to go near a Komodo dragon or its saliva. These very large lizards live on islands in Indonesia and are very dangerous predators. They're usually bigger, heavier, and stronger than a person. They eat a lot, and they often eat animals that are bigger than them. They kill animals, and sometimes they even kill people. How do they do it? With their really nasty saliva!
The saliva of Komodo dragons is full of bad bacteria. More than 50 kinds of bacteria live in their mouths. But that's not all. Now people think that Komodo dragons also make poison inside their mouths. Bad bacteria + poisonous saliva = trouble!
Chapter 5. What Do You Think?
IS IT SOMETIMES ALL RIGHT TO SPIT? IS IT OK TO PICK YOUR NOSE WHEN NOBODY'S LOOKING?
So, mucus or slime is often a very good thing. We need it to live. It helps us stay healthy, it helps us eat, we can make things with it, and we're even born in it.
But don't forget that mucus can be dangerous. It can be bad for us. It can even kill us. And it's often nasty.
People from different countries have different ideas about mucus. What's OK and not OK in your country?
