Good Questions: Yogurt, Boat Wrap, Wind
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Every Friday, Heather Brown tackles some of our viewers' burning questions. This week, she'll tell you why yogurt gathers a bit of water on top, what happens to all those winter boat wraps, and why those springtime winds tend to die down at night.
Mary Beth from Chaska asks: What is the water that gathers at the top of yogurt?
"The liquid you see on the top of yogurt is something called whey, so it contains proteins and minerals and calcium, like lactose," said Amanda Liu, marketing manager of Yoplait at General Mills. "It's good for you, so we recommend stirring it into yogurt and enjoying it the way you normally would."
Whey is naturally occurring and comes from the milk used to make the yogurt.
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Now that it's spring and time to get a boat in the water, Gary from Dayton wants to know: What happens to all of the boat wrap?
According to Brita Sailer with the Recycling Association of Minnesota (RAM), it can be recycled, but whether it is depends on where you are and how much plastic is available.
At Tonka Bay Marina, the wrap is taken off the boats, then heated up so it will shrink. All of the wrap is taken to Choice Plastics, a buyer/seller/recycler of plastics in Mound. Many marinas on Lake Minnetonka bring their wrap to Choice Plastics. From there, it's sent off to be recycled into, among other things, boat wrap.
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Spring is an especially windy month, but Rich noticed it seems to settle down at night. Why?
"When the sun comes up it heats the ground, so we get this warmer air with cooler air on top of it, that's an unstable atmosphere," said WCCO Meteorologist Kylie Bearse. "So, what that does is all of the strong winds in the upper atmosphere come right on down."
But, she says, at night, the ground cools down creating a cooler pocket of air near the surface setting up a more stable atmosphere. The winds are still at the upper levels, but they don't make it down to the surface.
