Category Ask the Psychologist

Sometimes they just want to share funny footage (everyone loves a cute-kitty video!), but more often than not, they want your attention. Viral videos grow in viewership like a snowball rolling down a hill. The more people who pass around the videos an share them with friends, the more popular the videos become! Video creators stand to make a few bucks from websites that pay a little moolah for every view. Advertising companies concoct viral videos in an attempt to build buzz around a product or piece of entertainment by tricking people into talking about it online. Next time you see something stupendous, think twice before hyping it. You might be giving someone free advertising!

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From the get-go, messaging-app Twitter was designed to let people share text messages over mobile phones rather than computers. Most phones can display only a limited amount of characters, so Twitter’s designers restricted its messages length to meet those limits.

When Twitter was born in 2006, it was designed to be used via wireless carriers’ text-messaging services. They were (and are) limited to 160 characters. So Twitter’s creators reserved 20 characters for a user name, leaving 140 characters for the post–not yet known as a “tweet”–itself.

At the time, it was a straightforward accommodation of a technical restriction. But the 140-character limit soon became the single most famous thing about the service. A decade later, it remains a daily fact of life for anyone who ever runs out of characters before concluding a tweet.

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Mom warned you that gum doesn’t digest; it just sits in your stomach soaking in a stew of digestive and taking up space. Acids and enzymes in your stomach make short work of gum’s sugars and flavor additives, but its synthetic-rubber base is one tough glob to digest. That doesn’t mean gum just swirls around and around in your belly like a penny in a washing machine. Like clockwork, your stomach empties its contents into the intestine for further digestion. Any gum gobs, corn kernels, or other tough-to-digest treats go along for the ride. It all gets pushed to the colon and passed in your poop, looking much as it did when you ate it. Not that we suggest you go looking.

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Chewing gum is a funny kind of food – the only kind you’re allowed to play with. Go ahead and chew it, snap it, and blow it into bubbles, but whatever you do, don’t swallow it. Gum’s rubbery properties are a product of its ingredients, including synthetic rubber and softeners that keep it from turning into a chalky block in your mouth. Synthetic rubber? Softeners? Yummy! Or not, which is why gum makers add “flavorings” – the closest thing to food in the ingredients list. And like food, these sweeteners mix with saliva in your mouth and sink to your stomach each time you swallow. Eventually, all the sweeteners head south, leaving you with a flavorless lump of softened rubber to spit into the nearest trash can.

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Sugar is made of molecules of sucrose, a compound held together by relatively weak bonds. When the sucrose molecules mix with water, the water molecules surround and break the bonds holding together the sugar molecule. Th sugar is still in the water, of course (which is why the water tastes sweet), but now it’s dissolved into the new sugar-and-water mix, called a “solution.” Hot water dissolves sugar more quickly – and can hold more of it – because the heat spreads its molecules farther apart, making room for more sucrose.

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When a candy maker and a dentist teamed up to invent a new kind of treat in 1899, they dubbed it “fairy floss” for a reason: As soon as their fluffy confection hit the mouth, it seemed to magically disappear like a fairy in the forest. Thirty years later, fairy floss became known by its more popular name, cotton candy, but its magical properties remained. The secret lies in the recipe. Cotton candy is made of sugar heated – or caramelized – in a special machine, colored by food coloring, and spun at high speeds into thin strands. Despite its fluffy appearance, cotton candy is still basically sugar. And like sugar, it dissolves in water – in this case, the saliva in your mouth.

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