We asked for the science questions you didn’t want your name attached to, and now we’re answering them. This time: eye gunk, blackheads, and are ovaries really rolled up testicles?!
First we answered some of the weirdest requests we had (from how birds pee to whether or not fish get thirsty). Now we're moving on to ~bodies~. All questions are pretty much as we received them.
"What actually are blackhead pimples?"
Both blackheads and whiteheads are pores in your skin that have become clogged with sebum and dead skin (yum). The difference is whiteheads are trapped under the skin and blackheads are exposed to the air. That's actually how blackheads end up black – the melanin in sebum reacts with oxygen in the air and turns a dark colour, as you can see in the handy diagram above.
Blausen.com staff / Creative Commons / Via commons.wikimedia.org
"Can you sneeze with your eyes open?"
You can try. You close your eyes when you sneeze because of a reflex: When your brain sends the message to sneeze, part of it tells your eyes to shut. “It is certainly possible to keep your eyes open if you try while you are sneezing… but it requires working against the reflex,” Dr Rachel Vreeman told NBC News in 2013.
And you don't have to worry about your eyes popping out if you manage it. If they were going to pop out, they'd do it whether your eyes were open or not, according to Dr Robert Naclerio, a professor of surgery and section chief of otolaryngology at the University of Chicago Medicine. He told NBC News: "There is no way that keeping your eyelids closed can prevent [your eyes from popping out]. It's not like the muscles are strong enough." (You can decide whether or not that's a good thing...)
Dirima / Getty Images
"My boyfriend keeps telling me girls had testicles at birth but they rolled up inside them and turned into ovaries... true or not true?"
The only truth in this is that ovaries and testicles start life in the same way.
For a little while in the womb, an embryo's gonads are the same whether that embryo is male or female. It's a gene called SRY (found on the Y chromosome) that controls how other genes function and stops these gonads turning into ovaries, putting them on a path to becoming testicles instead.
As always it's not *quite* as simple as SRY being the only gene that can control this switch between ovaries and testes. For example, in experiments on mice, scientists have been able to turn adult ovaries into testes in just three weeks by silencing a different gene, FOXL2, that appears to do the opposite of SRY – it stops gonads becoming testes. (Read this post by Ed Yong for the full story.)
But still, maybe your boyfriend should get a new fun fact.
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