If you know any kids — or remember being one yourself — you might know that they can be… an active bunch.
They tend to do a lot of running around, bouncing off of walls, and just generally trying to get places without always looking where they're going.
Which can mean a lot of scraped knees and elbows.
And sometimes, hydrogen peroxide.
A lot of people use hydrogen peroxide to clean wounds, and it isn't exactly pleasant: in addition to making the scrape hurt even more by activating the receptors that make you feel pain, the wound gets all weird and bubbly.
But the reason it bubbles is also the reason you probably shouldn't be using it to clean wounds — even though hydrogen peroxide is really, really good at killing bacteria.
If anything, it's too good.
Peroxide kills bacteria by attracting the electrons from their cellular membranes, breaking the membranes open.
That fizzing you see?
That's mostly the peroxide reacting with an enzyme inside the bacteria, called catalase, forming water and oxygen gas.
