I am a biologist, and I love to tell my kids about the ways their bodies work, including how fascinating it is that millions of strange little organisms live inside their gut and help with the digestion of their food.
It’s priceless when you later get these questions that show just how much they think about the things we have discussed, and how they try to apply their knowledge-of-the-world-so-far into the new concepts they’ve learned.
Our original conversation about enzyme scissors was a bit longer than a comic easily permits, so let me elaborate:
It’s not exactly like a knife, but there are many different kinds of little molecular machines, that bind to their very own specific bits of food, that add little molecules that persuade parts of the big food molecules to go their separate ways.
I sympathise. How can anything be smaller than a really tight squeeze? Unfathomable. It’s interesting how our perception, which is quite useful for observing phenomena happening at our scale, gets bent over backward and whirled around when we try to apply it to either things that very very big or small (or 
When Eerika Häkkinen was young, she used to carry a “Nuclear, No Thanks” -badge with her wherever she went. Later she began to study chemistry at the University of Helsinki, and thought that majoring in radiochemistry would be a great way to come up with more informed arguments against the technology – but by the time she finished her studies, her outlook on nuclear power, and radioactivity in general, had quite changed.
Thoughtscapism 