From the brains behind brains on, this is Moment of Um.

Answering those questions that make you go...

I'm Sandin Totten.

Part of what we love to do here is to find out if the things we think are true are actually true.

That's science.

For example, is the moon really made of green cheese?

Science says, nope.

But what if you drop a feather and a hammer at the same time on the moon? Will they fall at the same speed? Science says yes. So here's another question from one of our listeners along these lines.

This is Abigail from Nashville, Tennessee. And my question is, do mice really like cheese? If so, why? In cartoons, we often see a cute mouse being pulled to a wedge of Swiss cheese.

Based on my experience and scientific research, cheese really isn't a mouse's favorite food.

My name is Dr. Kate Pritchett Corning, and I'm a veterinarian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I help scientists here at Harvard take care of their mice.

Mice are granivores, which means that they really prefer grains and seeds to almost any other type of food.

So if you want an ideal food to catch a mouse, you would mix up some corn,

oats, or wheat with some peanut butter. They prefer these things because they have a lot of fat

and protein and finding a lot of calories, a lot of energy in the wild isn't always easy.

But why would someone study what mice like to eat? Well, because if you

want to catch wild mice to study them, you need to have something in your trap that they want

to eat. And sometimes we also need to catch mice because they are being pests and damaging human

food, so we need something that attracts them away from our snacks. Finally, we also study what mice like to eat

because they don't always make good food choices, just like us, and so we can see how certain

types of foods affect things like body fat or development of diabetes or other illnesses.

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