PODCAST · kids
Smile with Daniel
by Smile with Daniel
Every night, Daniel asks his mom a question. Why do we call money "bucks"? Why do we get dizzy when we spin? Why do we knock on wood? The answers are always surprising, and a lot more interesting than you'd expect. Smile with Daniel is a short podcast for curious kids and the adults who love them. Real questions. Real answers. No dumbing it down. New episodes every week. Find us @smilewithDaniel everywhere.
Episodes
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Why Is Everyone Racing to Mars?
Download the free "Why Is Everyone Racing to Mars?" worksheet for fun questions, listening challenges, and activities inspired by this episode. Mars has rivers. Or it did. Ancient ones, carved into rock that is now bone dry. Scientists believe Mars was once warmer and wetter, possibly with...
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How Did a Volcano Help Invent the Bicycle?
Download the free "How Did a Volcano Help Invent the Bicycle?" worksheet for fun questions, listening challenges, and activities inspired by this episode. In April 1815 a volcano in Indonesia erupted so violently that people heard the explosion two thousand kilometers away. The following summer…
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Why Is Tesla Named After Nikola Tesla?
In January 1943 a man died alone in a New York hotel room with almost nothing. At that exact moment, electrical systems built partly on his inventions were powering cities across the world. His name was Nikola Tesla. And his story explains why one of the world's most famous electric car companies...
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Why Do We Have Different Time Zones?
Daniel opens with a joke about time zones and the future looking bright. Then he asks the real question. For most of human history, every town kept its own local time based on when the sun was overhead. If you were traveling by foot or horseback, the gradual difference between towns barely...
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What Does Social Media Do to a Kid's Brain?
Daniel wants to know if social media is actually bad for you — or if that is just something adults say. The answer turns out to be more interesting and more complicated than most headlines suggest. Many social media apps are designed to keep you engaged and coming back. Notifications pull you…
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How Do Movies Trick Your Brain?
Daniel knows movies are shown on a screen. He wants to know how his brain sees movement when he is really watching still pictures. The answer is stranger than most people realize. A film is a sequence of still photographs, typically around 24 per second for cinema. When they are shown fast…
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Why Are There 12 Months in a Year?
Daniel notices something. September, October, November, and December sound like they mean seven, eight, nine, and ten. But they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months. He wants to know why. The names are a fossil. The Roman year once started in March. September was the seventh month....
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Why Did Everyone Used to Wear a Hat?
Daniel is looking at old photographs and notices that everyone is wearing a hat. On the street, at the beach, at baseball games. Everyone. He wants to know when that stopped and why. The hat was doing several jobs at once. It offered protection from the weather. It signaled social position,...
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Why Do Crickets Chirp All Night?
Daniel is lying awake listening to crickets and wants to know why they never stop. The short answer is that they are trying to find a mate. But the longer answer is more interesting. Crickets do not make their sound by rubbing their legs together. They rub their wings together in a process called...
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Why Are Police Cars Mostly Black and White?
Daniel assumes police cars have always been black and white everywhere. They have not. And the origin of the ones that are is murkier than most people expect. Black was common on early American cars because it was an inexpensive factory finish. As police departments grew, the problem became...
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Why Don't All Countries Measure Things the Same Way?
Daniel's friend in England measures distance in miles but temperature in Celsius and weight in kilograms. That inconsistency turns out to tell a much bigger story. The metric system was created during the French Revolution to replace a chaotic patchwork of local measurement standards across…
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Why Are Tires Always Black?
Daniel notices that almost every tire he sees is black. Cars. Trucks. Bicycles. Always black. Natural rubber is not black. It is off-white -- milky and pale, the color of latex from a rubber tree. Early car tires in the 1900s were white or light-colored. They also wore out far faster than modern...
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Why Do Coconuts Have Three Holes?
Daniel notices the three dark spots on a coconut. They look like a face. Two eyes and a mouth. They are not just for looking like a face. Those three spots are germination pores -- soft points in the hard inner shell -- and they reveal something about how the coconut fruit was built. Usually only...
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Why Do Pirates Wear Eye Patches?
Daniel assumes pirates wore eye patches because they lost an eye. That is probably part of the answer. But there is a more interesting theory. When you move from bright light into darkness, your eyes need time to adjust. Full dark adaptation can take up to half an hour. Part of what happens...
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Bone vs. Steel: Which Is Actually Stronger?
Daniel assumes steel wins easily. It does -- in one measurement. But the question turns out to be more interesting than a simple winner. Steel has a higher tensile strength than bone. But steel is also roughly four times as dense as cortical bone. When you compare by weight rather than volume…
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How Do Robotaxis Drive Without a Driver?
Daniel sees a video of a Waymo robotaxi driving through San Francisco with nobody in the front seat. He assumes it must be following GPS. It is doing something far more interesting. The car is constantly answering four questions: Where am I? What is around me? What might happen next? What should…
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Six Bricks. 915 Million Combinations. The LEGO Story
Daniel is building with LEGO and starts wondering why it feels so satisfying. The answer turns out to involve extraordinary precision engineering, a Danish carpenter, a fire, and a near-bankruptcy that almost erased one of the most beloved toy brands in history. LEGO started in 1932. Ole Kirk...
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Electric Cars Are Almost 200 Years Old
Daniel asks whether electric cars are going to take over from gasoline cars. Mom asks him a more interesting question. Did he know electric cars were already competing with gasoline cars more than a hundred years ago? He did not. The earliest experimental electric carriages appeared in the 1830s....
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Why Do Some Countries Call It Tea and Some Call It Chai?
Daniel assumes chai is a different drink from tea -- the spiced version with milk. It isn't. Chai and tea are the same word. They both trace back to a single Chinese character -- 茶 -- that means tea. But Chinese has many varieties of speech, and that same character was pronounced differently in...
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Why Are Fire Hydrants Different Colors?
Daniel walks past a green fire hydrant and wonders why it isn't red. The colors are not decoration. They can be information. Fire departments and water systems can use color to tell firefighters important things about a hydrant at a glance. Under a system recommended by the National Fire…
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Why Are They Called Wisdom Teeth?
Daniel assumes wisdom teeth make you smarter. They don't. The name has nothing to do with intelligence. Wisdom teeth are called that because of when they arrive -- somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five, an age historically associated with maturity. The Latin name is dens sapientiae. Tooth…
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Why Do We Call Ships "She"?
Daniel notices that ships are always called she -- her hull, her crew, she sailed. He wants to know why. The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain. But the clues that have survived are each interesting in their own way. There is a theory from language. The Latin word for ship -- navis --...
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Why Are Elephants Afraid of Mice?
Daniel is confident about this one. Elephants are afraid of mice. Everyone knows that. He is wrong -- and the real story is more interesting than the myth. There is no good scientific evidence that elephants have a special fear of mice. What elephants can do is startle at sudden unexpected…
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Why "lb" Has Nothing to Do With the Word "Pound"?
Daniel notices that the abbreviation for pound is lb. There is no L or B in the word pound. He wants to know why. The answer goes back two thousand years to a Latin phrase that got split in half on its way to English. The word pound came from one part. The abbreviation came from the other. They...
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Does Coffee Really Give You Energy? Not Exactly
Daniel watches Mom drink her morning coffee and assumes it gives her energy. It doesn't. Not exactly. Coffee doesn't add energy to your system. What it does is block the signal that tells your brain it's tired. Those are two very different things -- and understanding the difference changes how…
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Why Lightning Cracks and Thunder Rumbles?
Daniel assumes thunder is the sound of clouds crashing together. It isn't. Thunder is the sound of air being ripped apart and snapping back. Lightning superheats the air in its channel to around 30,000 degrees Celsius -- five times hotter than the surface of the sun -- in a fraction of a second....
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Daniel vs Mom: The Ultimate Trivia Challenge
Daniel challenges Mom to a trivia battle. Fifteen questions. No mercy. Play along. This episode is different from every other episode of Smile With Daniel. Instead of Daniel and Mom exploring one topic together, they go head to head -- and you can play along at home. Every question has a pause...
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How Do Scientists Know How Old Dinosaurs Really Are?
Daniel has been watching a dinosaur documentary. The narrator says a fossil is sixty-five million years old. He never stopped to wonder how anyone actually knows that. The fossil does not come with a date on it. And scientists usually do not date the fossil itself -- they date the rock around it....
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How Stars Are Born, and How They Made You
Daniel was looking at the stars and started wondering where they actually came from. The answer starts in the dark, with clouds of gas. And it ends with the iron in his blood. Stars form when enormous clouds of hydrogen and helium collapse under gravity, heat up, and ignite nuclear fusion. That…
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A Shell Is Not a Rock. Here's What It Actually Is
Daniel thinks seashells are just little rocks the ocean makes. They are not. Every shell you have ever picked up on a beach was built by a living animal -- layer by layer, from materials taken from the surrounding seawater. The animal never found it. Never moved into it. It grew it, from scratch,...
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Where Does Ocean Salt Actually Come From?
Daniel always assumed the ocean was just born salty. It wasn't. It became salty. Gradually. Over billions of years. The answer involves rain, rocks, rivers, and a system so well balanced that ocean salinity has been roughly stable for hundreds of millions of years. What you will find in this...
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Why Were Tomatoes Once Called the Wolf's Peach?
Daniel's favorite pizza topping was once called the wolf's peach. And in some parts of Europe, people were suspicious of it for generations. When tomatoes arrived from the Americas in the 1500s, European botanists immediately noticed something troubling. The tomato belonged to the nightshade…
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What Really Makes the Holes in Swiss Cheese?
Daniel wants to know why Swiss cheese has holes in it. The answer involves bacteria, gas bubbles, and a mystery that took scientists over a hundred years to fully solve. The holes -- called eyes by cheesemakers -- form when bacteria inside the cheese produce carbon dioxide during ripening. That…
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Why Did Japan Make a Cat the Boss of a Train Station?
In 2007, a stray calico cat named Tama was officially appointed stationmaster of a struggling Japanese railway station. She wore a tiny custom-made hat. She was paid in cat food. And somehow -- that changed everything. This is the true story of how one cat helped revive a dying railway line,...
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The Q&A Episode: Real Questions From Our Community
You asked. We answered. A little while ago, Daniel and Mom put out a call on Instagram and Facebook for questions from the Smile With Daniel community. The response was extraordinary -- curious kids, thoughtful parents, and loyal followers from all over the world sent in everything from food...
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Why Did Ebola Terrify the World?
Daniel heard someone say the word Ebola at school. The room went quiet. He wants to know why. The answer turns out to be more complicated than most people expect. Because lots of diseases kill people. Measles kills hundreds of thousands every year. Tuberculosis kills over a million. Yet those…
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One in Four Animals Is a Beetle... And Here's Why
Daniel spots a beetle outside and asks why he seems to see them everywhere. The answer is more remarkable than he expected. There are around four hundred thousand known species of beetles -- roughly one in four of all known animal species on Earth. Only several thousand mammal species are known....
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A Deck of Cards. More Arrangements Than Atoms in a Galaxy
Mom asks Daniel how many ways a deck of cards could be arranged before they start playing. He says millions. The answer is about eight followed by sixty-seven zeros. That number -- 52 factorial, written in mathematics as 52 with an exclamation mark -- is what you get when you multiply 52 by 51 by...
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A Diamond is Forever. And That Was the Plan
Daniel wants to know why diamonds are so expensive. The answer has less to do with geology than most people think. Diamonds are not as rare as their price suggests. Gem-quality diamonds are genuinely uncommon, but the gap between what diamonds cost to mine and what they sell for has long been...
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A Merchant's Mistake Changed How the World Makes Tea
Mom asks Daniel how the tea bag was invented. He says some British person, very carefully, with a lot of thought about the perfect cup of tea. He is wrong on almost every count. It was a New York merchant. In 1908. By complete accident. Thomas Sullivan was trying to save money on sending tea...
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Why Do Japanese Kids Clean Their Own Schools?
Mom asks Daniel what he would think if students cleaned their own school every day. Classrooms, hallways, toilets -- all of it. He says that sounds like a punishment. He is almost exactly wrong. In Japan, school cleaning -- o-soji -- is an established part of school life, not an optional activity...
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How Can Birds Change Their Songs in Cities?
Mom asks Daniel if he thinks city birds sound different from birds in the countryside. He says a bird is a bird. They all make the same sounds. He is wrong -- and the science behind why is one of the most quietly remarkable things happening in cities right now. Researchers studying great tits…
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Why Did the Eiffel Tower Almost Never Exist?
Daniel looks at a photo of Paris and says he cannot imagine the city without the Eiffel Tower. Mom tells him it almost wasn't there. When Gustave Eiffel announced plans for his iron tower in 1887, some of the most celebrated writers, artists, and architects in France were furious. They published…
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Antarctica Means Opposite the Bear. There Are No Bears There
Daniel wants to know why there are no polar bears in Antarctica. The answer starts with what the word Antarctica actually means. Opposite the bear. The ancient Greeks had a word for the northern polar region: arktos, meaning bear. Not because of polar bears -- they had never seen one. Because of...
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Before Alarm Clocks, Someone Shot Peas at Your Window
Mom asks Daniel how people woke up for work before alarm clocks existed. He guesses roosters. The sun. Someone banging on the door. That last one. Literally. From roughly the 1800s through the 1940s in industrial Britain and Ireland, there was an entire profession called knocker-uppers. People…
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Could All the Internet Weigh Less Than a Strawberry?
Mom asks Daniel a riddle. If you could put all the information on the internet on a scale -- every photo, video, message, and website -- how much would it weigh? He says tons. Some physicists have estimated it could weigh roughly as much as a strawberry. And the reason why is one of the most...
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The Smell of Rain Has a Name. So Does the Science Behind It
Daniel smells rain coming through the window and asks why. Rain is just water. Water doesn't have a smell. So what is he actually smelling? At least three things. And none of them are the rain itself. The main one has a name: petrichor. Coined in 1964 by two Australian scientists -- Isabel Joy…
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Why Do Dogs Kick After Pooping? It Is Not What You Think!
Mom watches the family dog kick the grass after pooping and asks Daniel why he thinks she does it. He is confident. She is covering it up. Like cats do. He is wrong -- in the best possible way. Dogs kick after pooping not to hide the evidence but to spread it. When a dog scratches the ground…
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Everyone Knows the 5-Second Rule. Almost Nobody Checked
Daniel drops his fruit bar on the floor and picks it up. He invokes the five-second rule. Mom takes it away. The five-second rule says that if you pick up dropped food fast enough, it is safe to eat -- because bacteria need time to transfer from the floor to your food. Get there in under five...
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The Seven Wonders of the World: Who Actually Decided?
Daniel wants to know what the Seven Wonders of the World are. And who decided. The answer is more complicated than he expected. There is no single official list. There are many -- but the two that people usually mean are the ancient Seven Wonders and a modern list announced in 2007. And the…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Every night, Daniel asks his mom a question.
Why do we call money "bucks"? Why do we get dizzy when we spin? Why do we knock on wood?
The answers are always surprising, and a lot more interesting than you'd expect.
Smile with Daniel is a short podcast for curious kids and the adults who love them.
Real questions. Real answers. No dumbing it down.
New episodes every week.
Find us @smilewithDaniel everywhere.
HOSTED BY
Smile with Daniel
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Smile with Daniel have?
Smile with Daniel currently has 93 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Smile with Daniel about?
Every night, Daniel asks his mom a question. Why do we call money "bucks"? Why do we get dizzy when we spin? Why do we knock on wood? The answers are always surprising, and a lot more interesting than you'd expect. Smile with Daniel is a short podcast for curious kids and the adults who love them....
How often does Smile with Daniel release new episodes?
Smile with Daniel has 93 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Smile with Daniel?
You can listen to Smile with Daniel on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Smile with Daniel?
Smile with Daniel is created and hosted by Smile with Daniel.
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