SciShow Tangents - Ace Your Chemistry Test Compilation

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

For those of you with finals on the brain, or those of you whose brain can't let go of those finals and they haunt your dreams to this day, Tangents has your back with this compilation stuffed to the brim with essential chemistry knowledge!Episodes in this compilation:S1 E46 - Plastic, original airdate: September 24, 2019S2 E36 - Proteins, original airdate: July 28, 2020S4 E21 - Carbon, original airdate: August 16, 2022S4 E34 - Poison, original airdate: December 6, 2022S4 E38 - Gas, original airdate: January 10, 2023S5 E4 - Glass, original airdate: May 9, 2023Sources for each episode can be found in the descriptions of the original episodes on your preferred podcasting platform.SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

[♪THEME MUSIC PLAYING Ooh, I'm real busy like a bee. Buzz buzz. I don't know. That's great. I loved it. Why is this so menacing? Sam Schultz is also here. G'day mate. Oh, good one. What's your favorite marsupial? There's only like four of them. That's not true.

There's so many marsupials. There's all the mammals. Kangaroo, smaller kangaroo, kind of bigger kangaroo. Koala, and then a bunch of wallabies that all kind of look the same. Do you know the possum is a marsupial? Yeah. What's the one we got? That one's maybe my favorite.

I like that one. I like them. They're cute. I think they're cute. I like that they're cute and then really scary. Both in one package. Yeah, they have terrible insides of their mouths. What's your tagline?

Roast beefy weefy. I don't like it at all Sari Riley is also here. I am. How are you doing? Okay. I'm wearing a vacation shirt today It's time for vacation. Yeah, what's your tagline Sari? Buckle up kids. Oh It's time to go And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline is 100 per saligator. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up amaze

and delight each other with the facts about science. We're playing for glory, and we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks from week to week. So we do what we can to stay on topic, but the podcast is called Tangents, and if your tangent is deemed unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your Hank bucks from week to week. So we do what we can to stay on topic, but the podcast is called Tangents, and if your tangent is deemed unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your Hank bucks. And as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem. This week, it's from me.

Long organic polymers of high molecular weight, massive chains of atoms, twisty, curved, or straight, sometimes created from fossil fuels, sometimes from agriculture. It's a useful and convenient part of our disposable culture. We use it every day. Of course, as Barbie said, life in plastic is fantastic as long as we're not dead. That's the end.

Wow. Is that what Barbie said? Yeah, life in plastic is fantastic. As long as we're not dead? I added that part. Oh, okay. Yeah, because you know, plastics do have their downsides and I don't want them to, I don't know,

I feel like we worry a lot about plastics. It's like the ocean's clogged with plastic. I'm like, oh. It's there but small. Yeah, it's a big ocean. There are bad areas. So it's fine. But there's not like a Texas sized island of plastic, which is the impression I get

sometimes. I thought there was. No. No. Well then what are we worried about? I mean there is the great Pacific garbage path. What's that? It's microplastics mostly.

Yeah. You can't like... That's like a Texas sized area where there's a slightly higher concentration of microplastic in the water. Yeah, well, you know, like it's it's it's you know, how much higher than you would like. Right. But you can't like walk on it. Oh, I thought it was just a like rubber duckies and all kinds of stuff just floating out there.

Well, that's the other thing is that like the the plastic in the ocean is mostly fishing nets. And that's also the most concerning piece of plastic because it's designed to catch fish. But we do have too much plastic, it does last forever, and we should stop drinking out of disposable containers. I agree with you. It seems like people are so close to not doing that anymore, and that's kind of relapsed to me at least.

Which direction were we going where we stopped drinking soda? It seems like people were thinking more about like, don't use plastic water bottles, but now it's like... It's right out. Yeah. Nobody cares anymore.

Except Sarah. Sarah's got your analogy. What's plastic, Sarah? You did a pretty good job defining it in the poem because it is a organic compound that's often a long polymer chain. Okay. We got to unpack some things here. What's an organic compound?

So yeah. So it's a carbon containing compound and they can be synthetic or semi-synthetic. So they can be made from just manmade materials like chemicals, or they can be made from like structural compounds that we find in nature and that we react with one another, like cellulose. Is there any purely natural plastic,

like rubber from rubber trees? This is where the definition gets a little fuzzy for me because I'm not a material scientist. It seems like rubber is not plastic because plastic's main property is plasticity so that it deforms irreversibly. But rubber's main property is elasticity, which means it deforms and then snaps back into its original shape. And so rubbers can be mixed with plastics to form different compounds, but they are two ends of a material science. And now it's time for

TREASURE FAIL. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for us, but only one of those facts is true, and the rest of us have to guess or know which one is the real fact. And if we get it right, we get the Hank Buck. And if not, Sari gets the Hank Buck. Sari, it's time for you to try and fool us.

Okay. Semi-synthetic plastics have been around for a while, like how celluloid film can be traced back to the sugar polymer cellulose from plants. If you can get a substance to polymerize through chemical reactions and have plasticity, you've basically made of plastic. So I guess I am contradicting myself already. So which of these proteins was historically used to make a plastic?

Number one, casein from milk to try and make erasable whiteboards instead of black chalkboards. Okay, gross. Two, hemoglobin from animal blood to make jewelry beads that oxidize to be a deep red hue over time. Ooh.

Or three, convulxin from snake venom to make exceptionally strong but expensive plastics using handguns for decoration and functionality. Whoa, convulxin? Yeah. Ooh. Convulxin. With an X. C-O-N-V-U-L-X-I-N.

That's a terrible one. Sounds like something in snake venom. Definitely in snake venom. Don't put that inside of you. No, venom me. I've heard of that protein in milk. Yeah, that's definitely milk protein. Milk is white.

Milk is white. White boards are also white. Which makes me think it's a lie. That's misleading. The connections, that seems like one of those things where you're just trying to play on my biases, my psychological biases. I guess I'm not sure if the trick is what it was made into or if it exists. Okay.

Hemoglobin turned it, it's just a very complicated protein, hemoglobin. It seems like it would be a difficult thing to polymerize is my main concern with that one. Is it easier to polymerize simple things? Well most polymers are really simple. Well, does hemoglobin have, is that the part that has the iron? Yeah, so hemoglobin is a complex of different proteins,

like four different proteins around the sort of iron-containing part of them. See, again there, that seems like a lie, because then it's like, okay, the hemoglobin's got the iron, and then you make a bead in it, oxidizes like iron does. Wink, wink. Trying to trick me. Yeah, I mean, making snake venom into guns also feels like-

That feels just weird, so it must be true. It feels kind of like the same kind of lie, where it's like, it's white and it's a whiteboard. It's a snake and it's a gun. It's gonna kill you and it's still gonna kill you. Okay, okay. You see? And it's blood and it's blood like object to be.

I'm leaning toward Kason making whiteboards. Me too. I think that one, because I know Kason is like a thing that they tried to make into stuff. I'm gonna go with the snake venom one. He's going with snake venom. I'm gonna go with my own gut.

I'm not gonna listen to these boneheads over here. Even though Samsonny knew the answer. Okay. I'm sorry, Stefan. Sam didn't know the answer. Dang it. And the snake venom one is just the one that I completely made up because I thought it'd be cool. No. Goods and snakes. Yeah. Guts and snakes, guns and snakes.

Like, if you can put venom into anything, what would rich people buy? A fancy gun. Yeah. So, the way that they try to make blood into stuff, into products, like plastic products? So, yeah, there was a thing called haemocytes in 1885, which was apparently animal blood, which they didn't have a use for, mixed with sawdust.

And then this article in whatever old newspaper I found was not very specific. It said some chemicals. And they mushed it together and really squeezed it to make it compact. And they would make like doorknobs out of it. They would make roller skating wheels out of it. Whoa.

Blood knobs. What's this stuff called? Hemocyte, H-E-M-A-C-I-T-E. It was like a tough material. I don't think it would be considered a plastic necessarily depending on what. No, I don't think so. I don't think it had, it was a polymer or anything.

It was just like very squished together wood with blood as a binder. In 2018, apparently someone took 100% cow's blood and also put it under a lot of pressure and dried it out and made it into some sort of compound. So like people have turned blood into solid objects before. Nice. Can I do that?

Can like Catherine and I make blood gems and wear them on each other's fingers? Literal blood diamonds, yes. But milk plastics, totally a thing, which is very weird to me. Still don't believe it. Yeah, it's weird to polymerize a protein, man. Yeah, it was first created in around 1897

and patented in 1899 when a German material scientist or printing press owner, something like that, it was developed as an alternative to blackboards. So they were like, what can we do to make a whiteboard basically? But it didn't end up being good for whiteboards, but it was fairly easy to make

as far as synthetic plastics go at the time. It was easy to color whatever you wanted. And so it became a staple in jewelry and other, it was basically anything you could think of for a cheap plastic at the time. People used it as that, and it became popular when Coco Chanel, I think, used what is called Galilith or casein plastic, that's the name of it,

in an ad, in a clothing ad, and people were like, oh, milk plastic is fashionable Okay, next up. We're gonna take a short break and then it's time for the fact-off Hello and welcome back, Hankbuck Totals for the episode Thus Far. Sarah, you have one. Sam, you have one. Stefan, you have zero. And I have two, because I did a poem. So this is my comeback time.

Well, I guess, sure. Possibly. Yeah, you can come back, because it's time for the fact off, in which two of our panelists, this week's Stefan and Sam, are gonna present me and Sari science facts in an attempt to blow our minds. And our minds are sturdy, so you have to work hard. We each have a Hank Buck to award

the fact that we like the most, but if we hate them both, we can throw them away and burn them in the fire. And to decide who goes first, we're gonna go by who each one of you has the most credit cards on you right now. Ooh, on us right now? I don't carry all of mine with me.

I have a debit card. Does that count? It's just loose in your pocket. That's why. I like to live dangerously. How many you got? Three. Three.

Is one of them a debit card? It's five, including debit cards. Wow! Five? I have two debit cards and I have an Amazon card and a target card and a Costco card. Oh, I see You're loaded down with plastic. I got it. So give me your facts. Let's do it So I think we've talked about before on the show the like different ways that bees are affected by the presence of humans Like what's called any disorder, that kind of thing. But some species of bees, which I didn't know for a long time, are solitary.

So they don't have hives or make a bunch of honey and honeycomb and all that. In those species, each individual female bee has to construct its own nest. And it seems like a lot of the time, they like to find little long, like tube holes to do that in yeah And so some of these species are also leaf cutter bees That have really strong like mandibles that let them cut little sections of leaves out

And then they bring those back to their tube and like line the walls and make a little nest and so in the last ten Years what we've been seeing is that various leaf cutter bees are incorporating pieces of plastic into the nest's construction. So instead of cutting out little bits of leaf, they'll cut out a bit of like a plastic bag or something like that, so it's still like soft and thin pliable plastic, but then they incorporate that into the lining for their nest cells. There was a 2019 report that was the first time

that they'd seen the entire nest constructed out of plastic. They were even stealing little bits of polyurethane-based sealants off of buildings to, like, glue the leaves together. So, like, the caulk between the windows? Mm-hmm. From, like, material to, like, sealant. Like, everything that they were using was plastic-based. And they don't really know if it's good or bad yet. But it could be a sign that they're just really adaptable

and are grabbing whatever's there. And they can make it work. But it could mean that the plants that they normally use for that sort of thing are not around as much. They did say that it didn't seem like the best building material because they found only three cells total in this one nest. And one had a dead larva in it. And one seemed to have worked fine,

and then the other one wasn't finished. So not the best track record there. Also a pretty small sample, but in other papers they had noted that they'd seen bees nesting in straws, and that protected them from parasites because they can't penetrate the straw. But then they also lose most of the larvae to mold because it can't also can't get rid of moisture.

So kind of good and bad. So I should not build a bee nest out of boba tea straws. Because that's what I had that thought. You know, in a pinch, they might be able. I don't know. I'm not going to speak for the bees. I'm not a representative of the bees. Who speaks for the bees? The alliance of bees.

But yeah, so that's the fact, is that they had a 100% plastic bee nest. Wow. Do you think the bees like the plastic? Like there's some bees who think that the plastic is the best? They think that might be one of the possibilities too, is that there's some reason they haven't figured out yet that the bees actually prefer using the plastic. They're like, this is great.

It's super, like it's not rotting. It's like impenetrable and I can do a better seal with this stuff that I can with leaves. Keep those parasites out. They also mentioned that they've seen like birds lining their nests with cigarette butts because it keeps parasites out. Oh my God.

But it probably isn't great for the eggs and stuff in there. Sure. So yeah, I don't know. If they like it or not. I don't know if they like it. Because you don't speak for the bees. I don't speak for the bees. We covered this already.

Stefan, I need you to go interview the bees. Go find them. Speak for the bees. Knock on the bee tubes. I am the Stefan. I speak for the bees. Hello, my name is Stefan. May I interest you in...

In a boba tea straw. Yeah. God, I want a boba tea. Sam, what's your fact? All right. So in America in the 1860s, billiards was a big honkin' deal. Billiards, but like pool in general, I think any form of pool. So there were thousands of pool halls across the country,

but America's foremost billiard ball manufacturer, Phelan and Collinder, had a big problem. Billiard balls were made out of ivory, and the tables and other accessories that were made for billiard balls took into account how ivory moved, how it bounced, how heavy it was. But ivory was incredibly expensive

and they were running out of people who were rich enough to be able to afford a set of billiard balls. They needed to come up with a cheaper solution fast, so they offered $10,000 in cash or $200,000 in today money to anybody who could come up with an alternative to Ivory to use for these balls. So John Wesley Hyatt, who was a photo printer from Albany, and his brother Isaiah, heard about this competition. And it just so happened that John had fairly

recently acquired a patent from a British inventor named Alexander Parks for a waterproofing agent that was made when Parks realized that when a certain kind of developing agent dried, like a hard left behind thing. He had a lot of this stuff sitting around to dry, so they started messing around with it and figured out how to harden it and shape it, and they made their own ivory free pool balls, and they dubbed the thing that they were made out of celluloid. Their new balls had a few problems that prevented them from actually winning the contest though.

Mainly was that they were kind of just really shitty. They were not like ivory. Yeah, they didn't bounce right, they didn't feel right. Nobody who played pool liked them, and the company would not give them the prize money for it. But they still set up a pool supply company and they sold even worse versions of the balls that were just plaster that had a thin layer of the stuff on it. So they're like, you don't like our balls? Fine! We'll show you bad balls. But it seems like a lot of people out west bought them,

but the lack of quality of the balls seems like a small issue compared with another problem, which is that celluloid is super flammable. Ooh, hot balls. Yeah, when the balls would hit together too hard, they would make a little explosion or like catch on fire. That is a problem. Not a huge explosion, but like loud enough that they were getting letters from people out west who owned bars who said that when this would happen, the people in the bars would all draw their guns.

So it wasn't great. Eventually they pivoted celluloid into faux ivory products in general, like combs and buttons for clothes. But they also had the same problem where if you were like in the sun too long and they got too hot Or something like that they were bursting the flames and it killed a few people what? And then eventually of course they started using cellulite celluloid for movie film reels And that would also catch on fire and kill everybody in the theater Okay, that would happen to But it was like good enough though. Yeah, so at the end of the day, it was good enough that it was the first commercially successful

form of plastic. And it also probably kickstarted people trying to find forms of plastic that did not explode. And kill everybody. The Celluloid brothers, did they, were they like commercially successful? I believe so. Like when we started using celluloid film, Uh-huh. Did they were they like commercially successful like when we believe started using celluloid film Like they made money off of that I think celluloid film came after them because I couldn't find anything that linked their company to making that sure but I think Celluloid fashion products were pretty successful and they were like the combs and stuff that like and you have like a thing on your head Uh-huh a barrette that just like you go outside for too long and your head catches on fire Yeah, and that this is a this is a bad thing and did they feel bad? It doesn't seem like anybody really

Human life yeah, it was the 18. Yeah, and I think that their pool supply company was successful even though they were making bad balls Yeah, well I mean if you're making bad balls for way cheaper and the people out west they don't know they've never used an ivory ball Yeah, it's all brand new. Yeah, and they're like and it's great because sometimes they go bow bow bow. It's fun Yeah, and then the it bounces different when there's an explosion You know that's an introduction of a new element So like if you really want the ball to move fast you got to hit it extra hard And then there's an explosion pool That's pool two. Yeah. You gotta add some more features to pool two.

So we've got solitary bees constructing their nests entirely of plastic sometimes, but also more than sometimes partially out of plastic. And we've got Sam with explodey billiard balls from the 1860s that were so bad, no one would use them except that then they went on to be a commercially successful product that occasionally killed people.

Yeah. I'm gonna give my point, my pink buck to Stefan because I didn't know about bees and plastics. And even though we're slowly destroying the earth, I like to think that there are some species out there that could maybe adapt. And so maybe they they won't die of mold at some point, and they'll just be very dry bees in straws. I'm gonna give mine to Sam, because I love weird science history and all of the stupid

little directions we went on the way to getting to where we are now, even if it did make your head catch on fire. Yeah. Yeah. And now it's time to ask the Science Couch. We've got a question to be read to us by Sam for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At Spath73 asks, what exactly is corn plastic? I don't think that corn plastic is any one thing. So, the next question is from the second question, from the third question, from the fourth, 73 asks,

what exactly is corn plastic? I don't think that corn plastic is any one thing. So, you can, you know, once you've got organic compounds, you can polymerize them in various ways. But I think that there is more than one way to turn corn into, like, molecules from corn

into a polymer. And sometimes you do that with the intent for it to be something that's easily... Like, people are like, oh, that must be easier to compost. But like, not if you don't have that as a goal. So it sort of like depends on what you end up doing with it. Is this a thing that like, because we talked about cellulose too, and like, is it a thing about like a property of sugars that because they're... that sugars are made up of these like chains of things that that makes it easier

to make into a plastic, which is a chain of... It has the carbon there. It has a bunch of organic compounds. A cellulose is a polymer, it's a polymer of sugar. But I think a lot of what happens is you break that down and you create great ethanol or something like that, and that's sort of your feedstock for going into the biochemical process.

My other guess is that because cellulose is like a structural polymer of glucose in the way that glycogen is less structural, it just exists as a storage unit, but cellulose gives plant structure, so then it itself is a sturdier compound and then can add functional groups onto it or break it down or reassemble it,

and it'll make something sturdy like plastic. Whereas like if you took glycogen from our bodies, it would be floppy and a mess. Oh, glycogen is trash for... Yes. It's good at one thing. It's a hot take. I don't know.

I don't know if glycogen... Glycogen is fine. It's very good at the one thing it does, which is to store energy for quick availability in our bodies. But yeah, cellulose is very sturdy, very good at being sturdy. And then if you know how to do organic chemistry,

you can do organic chemistry to it. I'm not sure how corn plastic actually happens if you are using the sugar from the corn or if you're using the cellulose from the corn. It might probably both. So the reading that I've done, corn is usually used to make one type of plastic called polylactic acid, which is made from fermented plant starch.

So starch is another sugar polymer. There's cellulose and starch, and those are the two, like, plant sugar polymers. But do you have to ferment it first? So yeah, so starch is the other one. Cellulose is one of the structural plant sugar compounds, starch is the other. And like the fermentation is probably just like the chemical reactions that you need to turn it into the plastic. I don't have specifics about that process. I don't know if it's proprietary or if I'm just like not a chemist. So didn't dig into the research about

that. And you can also make it from other plants besides corn. Like if you find starchy compounds, you can turn it into polylactic acid through this process. And benefits of corn plastic that are like proponents of corn plastic say that it's carbon neutral because it's coming from plants that absorb carbon from the environment and then we're turning it back into plastic that goes,

gets reintroduced into the environment again. So it's like the whole process cycle as a whole rather than just like generating trash. We're taking corn, which would have been trash at some point or like poop and we're turning into plastic that we then throw away. Or in an ideal world, compost to recycle it back. And is this stuff, this polylactic acid, is it compostable?

It is compostable, but what is interesting is that it's only compostable in specific conditions, like under specific conditions. What a Scientific American article looked into, like they talked to people who actually do this kind of composting work, polylactic acid will decompose in a carbon dioxide and water in a controlled composting environment in fewer than 90 days. But what that means is they need to have microbes digesting it, not just worms, not just like a backyard composting thing. It has to reach 140 degrees for 10 consecutive days.

And so it's like biodegradable, but there are only like between 100 and 150 facilities as of the writing time of this article that can compost things in this very specific industrial way to handle food processing waste or compostable waste in this way. And you can't just like compost. You can't just put it in your backyard. Yeah. Yeah.

And like that is also a choice that you have to make, right? So like people have these corn-cut plastics, but if they're thrown into landfills, there's no evidence that they'll degrade any faster than any other type of plastic. So this has to be a very intentional change in the way that people use these single-use plastic objects. And so if you throw a polylactic acid cup into a landfill it's like... Just throw any other plastic cup in the landfill? Yeah and there's no benefit from corn plastic in that way.

What I will also say is apparently, so you can make a bunch of different plastics from corn, but now we like the thing corn plastic is polylactic acid that's sort of like we've decided that that's what we're going gonna call polylactic acid is corn plastic But it is not the only plastic you can make from corn, which is interesting. How many plastics can you make from corn? Well, you can make polyethylene from corn So just normal polyethylene, but it's like from a different feedstock and then you can make like and I think that's true of Various like existing plastics. I guess that makes sense Like if you break down corn enough then you can get

the monomer. Exactly. That you can then polymerize into something. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents where we'll tweet out upcoming topics for our future episodes every week. Thank you to at Bridget McGann at Cockodemonia and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Final thank you to everybody laughing at Cockodemonia here in the studio. It could in the studio. It's poop demon. Final scores, Sari, one, Sam, two, Stefan, one, Hank, two. Yay, I co-win. If you like this show and you want to help us out, you can do that by leaving a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. And also, we'll be looking at iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes. Leave your ideas in our iTunes reviews.

Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. And if you want to read more about any of our topics today, check out SciShowTangents.org to find links to all of our sources, and probably some pictures of blood stuff made out of blood. Thank

you for joining us I've been Hank Green. I've been Ceri Reilly. I've been Stefan Chin. I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the lovely team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, our social media organizer is Victoria Bonjorno, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you! And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. In 2018, a group of Australian scientists had six adults swallow the head of a LEGO

minifigure in order to figure out how long it would take for it to travel through their bodies. So, first they established the participant's standard poop characteristics and habits before eating the LEGO heads and formulated what they called the stool hardness and transit, or SHAT score. Then they took another SHAT score after it was in their bodies and traveling through their digestive systems, and then they measured the amount of time the LEGO heads spent in their subject systems

with the found and retrieved time or the fart score. They found no meaningful changes in the Shat score before and after the eating of the head and determined an average fart score of 1.71 days and they concluded that basically you can eat Lego heads all day long and not suffer any negative repercussions from it. I feel like my fart score would be lower than that. Well. But you know. You probably would have been filtered out of the participants. I'm an outlier. INTRO MUSIC

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chen! What's up? Stefan, what's your tagline? I'm a cabbage. Mm, classy. Sam Schultz is also here today. Sam, what's your coffee order?

My coffee order, black. Well, gosh, black until recently. I started, just drip. I don't drink, I only drink drip. I started putting cream and sugar in it. Now I just do cream, though. Sugar seems too austentatious Oh

Austentatious Wow, that's a that's a big word for the normal way to drink coffee Sam What's your tagline somebody get this freaking duck away from me? Oh? God tell me about it. Sari's here as well. Hi Sari Riley. Hello. Would you describe yourself more as classy or bougie? Hi, Sari Reilly. Hello. Would you describe yourself more as classy or bougie? Mmm... I would say neither. Is that a dichotomy? Is that a thing? No, you could be both.

That's the whole point of the song. Oh, I don't know this song. Oh, it's the TikTok song. I think I'm more ratchet than classy or bougie, probably. Oh, no. You're talking about something I don't know. What song is this? It's Megan Thee Stallion, Savage. Oh, oh, okay. It's real hot on TikTok.

I at least know who that is. Good, I don't actually know who that is, I just am on TikTok a lot. Tari, what's your tagline? Big leaf energy. And I'm Hank Green, my tagline is banana combos. Mm. That sounds really good. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, And Hank Green, my tagline is banana combos. Mmm. That sounds really good.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We play for glory, but we also keep score. So it's not really for glory. It's for the win. And I'm losing. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by previous conversations, we won't be good at that.

So if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your sandbox. The good news is for me, I've given up. So I can tangent as much as I want. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. A workout trope, the protein obsession to grow your muscles into prized possessions,

get swole, drink shakes, get strong, eat beans, load up your body with precious amines. But these little strings are in lots of things, folding and molding every offspring. From development proteins to photopsons and cones in eggs, hair, and meat, hormones in our bones, and lignin in wood that helps it grow strong, but prions, I fear, make things go wrong.

The real puzzle of proteins, both big and small, is that proteins need proteins to exist at all. Chaperonins help fold and proteases break down, but these protein makers and breakers aren't just around. They have to be made, and that's what confounds me when it comes to studying life. It's basically just chance. I'm tired. Good night. Oh no. Oh no.

So our topic for the today is proteins, everyone. Proteins, the thing that makes us all up for the most part. Certainly that make us all function. And I think that there's a fairly specific definition of a protein. I'd love to hear it. I have no idea. This is one of those episodes where I actually studied this in school, so I feel a great

amount of pressure to get it correct because it's a chemistry-biology intersection. So proteins are also known as polypeptides because they are chains of amino acids bonded together. So they're chains of amino acids, which gives them like their primary structure, but then they have secondary and tertiary structures where they fold and twist and have internal bonding, so that they form 3D structures. And protein folding is a huge problem in the field of science. It just like feels magical in some ways.

Like we can predict somewhat how proteins are gonna fold, but not really. And their structure influences their function. So if they fold incorrectly or become unfolded, then it won't work like a protein should. So if we could predict it, we'd be able to stop some things from happening or like make other things happen.

Is that why we want to even try to predict it? It'd be nice to be able to stop some things from happening or like make other things happen? Is that why we want to even try to predict it? It'd be nice to be able to predict it because then if we were to want to create a shape, we could do that. If you want to create a protein to do something specific, then you could be like, oh, I know how this is going to fold up. Also proteins can fold up in different ways.

So like one protein can fold in multiple conformations. And if you make it in a lab, it might fold very differently than if it makes itself or if it is made in your body by your body, by a ribosome. It's a big mess. And like the wild thing about proteins is how effective they are at their jobs. And the creation of them to do the work

that they do is way beyond kind of where we're at right now. We're much better at sort of like finding proteins and like using them to do stuff than we are at creating proteins to do their remarkable work of creating stuff that we still cannot create. Like one of my things that I always go back to is like, we still don't know how to make wood.

Trees do it all day, every day, and they make so much wood. And it is amazing. Like, it's this amazingly useful thing. We have no idea how to make wood. And in fact- We cannot do that. Like, to make proteins, we co-opt the systems of other microorganisms. So a lot of the time we stick a gene,

like we understand genetic material enough to like cut and paste and do things like that with it. But we stick a gene into bacteria and then we're like, you live your life and just generate a bunch of this protein so I can have it because we don't know how to just make that protein in a lab. It's so wild to me. It's like, well, you're gonna do the labor for us

because we just can't figure this puzzle out and it's much easier to just trick you into making it. The chemical systems that happen on earth are so far beyond the chemical systems that we use to create organic compounds. Like actually in a lab, like using organic chemistry rather than using biological systems to create stuff for us,

really makes me feel like we kinda suck at chemistry. Because our bodies are way better at chemistry than we are. So what's it mean? Does it come from proteus, the first something? Yeah, where did protein come from? You're right, Sam. That's basically what come, protose first, and then plus ene, which I did not look up the etymology of

for some reason, maybe thing. Word forming element. That's it. It's just a part of a word. So yeah. Right. It's a word forming element. We turned this thing into a word. Yeah. It was like that it is the first thing. And I think in Greek times it was just used generically because they didn't have a specific understanding of biology. There was just like, there is something that is essential to life and we're going to call

it a proteose or something like that or a protose. And then in 1838, the Dutch chemist Gerhard Molder used the term protein in his paper to refer to specific substances in animals. And then I think from there on, the scientific community started narrowing it down as like, okay, what exactly is a protein? What essential compound are we going to call a protein? And then the rest is history. And now it is time for... CHILDREN'S FAVOR

One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is true. The other two are fakes. The rest of us have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. And if we do, we get a sand buck.

If not, then Stefan will get the sand buck because Stefan has brought the facts today. You can play along at home at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents, but wait, wait until we you've heard all of the facts before you vote. Stefan, what are our three facts? These are three ways of exploring new protein structures. Number one, inspired by Minecraft, a team of researchers created a 3D block based protein game in which players could manipulate proteins using amino acid blocks.

And in 2012, players successfully re-engineered an enzyme that is used in the production of vitamin B6. And by adding 13 amino acids, they made the enzyme 18 times as active. That sounds like something people would do. Number two, a team translated protein sequences into music using a 20-tone musical scale that corresponds to the 20 standard amino acids that form proteins. And a neural network trained on this protein music was then able to quickly generate whole new protein variations that they could create and test the properties of. That's fun. And just play them on a piano.

And then number three. A team trying to create a new futuristic fabric that would be very elastic, but also stronger than some metals, studied whey protein, the stuff that you find in many protein powders, under x-ray light, to discover how the proteins were combining to form fibers.

All right. So our three facts are number one, there is a Minecraft inspired game that was used to re-engineer an enzyme that's used in the production of vitamin B6 and they were able to make it 18 times as active. Or number two, researchers translated protein sequences into music and trained a neural network on that music to generate new protein variations. Or number three, a team tried to create a strong elastic fabric out of whey protein.

Explain this to me, they're using whey protein, which I know as a thing that I can digest because they put it in food, and they turned it into something I can wear? You can wear food. My bad, of course. So a bunch of steaks together. Got a shirt.

Did they re-engineer this somehow? There's a process that involves a lot of pressure, I think, that forms the fibers. Are proteins the ones you can denature? Yep. They probably denature? Yep. They probably denature them. They probably do. That's when you unfold them, basically.

When you cook them up. The denaturing process. Yeah, like frying an egg. So then they get all clumpy with each other. Right. Number two, did the song sound good at all? Well, it is not familiar to listeners of Western music, let's put it that way.

Oh. Oh. Oh. It would be a little bit all over the place because you just have 20 notes and like there's no, I don't know. It's not like any protein has to be next to any other protein like in a sequence or anything, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, so there are repeating patterns in proteins, but yeah, there's no Particular reason why like even what like why we assign them certain numbers But you can make a song out of 20 notes. There's lots of lots of songs. So it's less than 20 notes There's only really 12 notes. They just repeat and I believe anybody in Minecraft could do like literally anything Infinite amount of free time. Yeah, that is the trick. If you can get your science inside of Minecraft, all the children will do it for you.

Yeah. All right, all right. I think I'm gonna go with the weird milk clothes. I'm also gonna go with milk clothes. Oh, gosh. Throwing in on it. Oh. I think I'm gonna go with the Minecraft one.

I have infinite faith in Minecraft players. I also have a lot of faith in Minecraft children, but the correct answer is the protein music. No! Oh, we got it. Stefan runs away with the lead! It's a sweep. At this point, Hank, I think you should just try

to hit zero points by the end of the season. I'm going down. I get ready to hear everything I know! So, yeah, so they translated different aspects of the proteins into different aspects of music. And I think they called it the amino acid scale. I guess, like, the amino acids are physically vibrating at certain frequencies, and so they could translate that into the pitches and then transposed it to within the human range of hearing. at certain frequencies. And so they could translate that into the pitches

and then transposed it to within the human range of hearing. And then the secondary structure of the protein, which I think is, I mean, you could probably correct me, but I think has to do with how it's actually arranged in space, like in physical space, the shape of the proteins. That information was encoded as the volume of the notes and the duration. So some of the researchers were saying, like, they had listened to a bunch of this music and they were starting to be able to be like,

oh, that sounds like an alpha helix or something. Like, I could hear different physical structures. Cool. And as Ceri was mentioning, like, protein structures are really complex and affect how proteins work. So they were trying to use music, something that humans are better at understanding naturally to help try to break down differences

between the proteins and their variations and like protein families and stuff. And they were saying the neural network seems to understand like the code or recipe of how proteins are designed, but they can't like open up the AI and see what's actually going on. So, but it does seem to work. So there is a protein game. I think there is a protein game based on Minecraft, but I don't know anything about that one. But there's another like citizen

science project called Fold It, where the players are trying to fold proteins in different ways. And in 2012, they had the first like crowd sourced redesign of a protein. And it was an enzyme used in Deals Alder reactions. I don't know what that means. But it's apparently used in the production of various things, which includes vitamin B6. And the original creator of that enzyme was like stuck on he needed it to be more potent, but was couldn't figure it out. And so the players of Foldit were able to make it 18 times more effective.

The new futuristic fabric that would be very elastic, but also strong, is just silk. There's a team that's working towards a process that would allow them to artificially produce silk, because right now you just have to use silkworms. But silk is super elastic and super strong. And so being able to produce it or mass produce it in the lab, I guess, would be useful. They took whey protein, or it's like a protein from cows whey. And they knew that if they applied heat and acid to it, they could turn them into these little fibrils.

And so I don't know if that counts as denaturing, but it changes the shape into like some kind of spaghetti. And then they found that different concentrations of the protein in their solution determined the properties of the fibrils, so like different lengths and thicknesses and straightnesses. And they were surprised to find that it was the shorter and thinner ones that turned into a better fiber. They found that the shorter ones were more like maintained a more random orientation and were more curved, and that just helped them lock together with each other more.

So, they're, like, thicker but straighter ones. It's like trying to hold a bunch of spaghetti together, like there's nothing to lock onto, I guess. But they were able to make five millimeters of silk that was of medium quality. Now that they understand this whole process a little bit better, they're gonna try to make better fibers. But I think they're not using whey protein for that.

That was just for this part of the experiment to, like, figure out how it all works. The music one sounded so fake. I'm mad. Yeah, I had also heard recently somebody who was, like, translating like translating like markets into music. And so I thought you were just riffing off of that. Like stock markets? Yeah.

Yes. I don't know what that what good that does except to like freak you out. Yeah. I listened to like the last six months and it was unpleasant. All right. Next up, we're going to take a short break, then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody.

Sam Bucktotals, Hank and Sam coming in with nothing. Sari's got one for the poem. Stefan raked it all in with three points during truth or fail. And now it is time for the fact off where Sam and I have each brought facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. Sari and Stefan each have a Sam Buck to award to the fact that they like the most and decide who's gonna go first. We have a trivia question that is gonna be read

by someone to us. Me. So like we've been talking about, proteins can become thermally unstable and denature or unfold at temperatures outside of the range that cells live. For hyperthermophilic bacteria though, that range is really high. So what is the highest temperature in Celsius that hyperthermophilic bacteria

have been observed to survive without becoming unstable? Now I gotta learn Celsius real quick. I think you know the important number in this situation. What do you mean? One hundred? Yeah. You know, there's the upper limit when water stops existing. It's a hundred.

I'm gonna go first since I've given Sam a hint now. And I'll say, what? Ninety-nine? I don't know why you would think that a hint would help me in any way. How about 120? Wow! The answer is 122 degrees Celsius. No! Which is, by my calculations, 251.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

My God, that was amazing. All right, Sam, you want to go first? Do you want me to? I think I want you to go first. Okay, I will. So we've also talked a little bit about prions during this podcast, and we know what prion diseases are, but just to explain, it's when a protein takes on a shape that is unlike the shape it's supposed to be, but then that protein in that confirmation becomes infectious.

So the prion can then bind to other versions of the same protein, and then they will change to that new bad shape as well. And then they'll bind to more proteins, and then they will change to that new bad shape as well. And then they'll bind to more proteins and then they'll create more prions and then it spreads so that the proteins that are supposed to be one confirmation, like it's like an infectious change in confirmation. This is how mad cow disease works,

a number of other diseases, but it is also sometimes responsible for messing up your wine. So yeast eats sugar. And when they do that, they produce alcohol. And when bacteria consume sugar, they produce acids like lactic acid. Wine makers want wine with alcohol, not with extra acid. But sometimes yeast fermentation can get stuck, and instead, bacteria come in and

consume all the sugar and basically the wine isn't wine. It doesn't taste like wine. It does not taste good. Even if you like the taste of wine, which I don't really, I don't quite get it, but that's neither here nor there. So like the yeast fermentation relies on this process called glucose repression. That's a process that blocks the yeast from consuming anything other than the sugar from the grapes. It keeps it focused on that sugar and moving fast.

And it's especially strong in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is the yeast that we use in almost all brewing and baking. But scientists have found bacteria that can come in during the wine making process and send signals to the yeast that cause prions to replicate in the yeast membrane and those prions block the glucose repression.

And then they cause the yeast to start consuming other stuff besides sugar that slows down the fermentation. And it also opens up this glucose for the bacteria to consume. And so that basically spoils the wine. Now, that sounds like a very crafty thing for bacteria to be able to do. And you'd think maybe like, wouldn't yeast have figured out a way around this? But it turns out that though prions are usually bad, in this case, this might actually be something that yeast evolved to benefit themselves.

So the prion switching in their membrane might be a way for the organisms to like hedge their actually be something that yeast evolved to benefit themselves. So the prion switching in their membrane might be a way for the organisms to hedge their bets and kind of be able to switch back and forth between two different conditions to let them adapt really quickly when food sources change or suddenly there's bacteria in the room so that they might broaden their variety of diets. And it's able to do that by having a change in its membrane that is caused by bacteria, but not something that's permanent, like a genetic adaptation. So in this case, both the yeast and the bacteria can benefit from what they call stuck fermentation. As the yeast start metabolizing less sugar, the wine becomes more habitable to the bacteria and the yeast can start consuming stuff from

more carbon sources. That's great for them, it's bad for us and winemakers, which is why they add sulfur dioxide early in the process often because that kills off the bacteria and prevents stuck fermentation. Oh, they're killing their little friends. That's right. So that they don't give them a weird membrane-bound prion disease that's not actually a disease, it's actually good. Okay, so you say confirmation, is that just like configuration? Is that like a similar?

It's like the shape that the protein takes. So a protein can take several different shapes. And there's all kinds of things that can change protein takes. So a protein can take several different shapes. And there's all kinds of things that can change protein confirmation. So whenever you hear about binding, something binding to a protein, usually that means that that binding changes the confirmation of the protein.

And in the case of like, a taste receptor in your mouth, like sugar binds to the taste receptor protein, that changes the confirmation. And that like opens up some kind of signal into your neural pathways that then gets interpreted as sweet by your brain. So can a protein fold into different folds in the course of its protein lifetime? Yeah, that's what changing confirmation is.

And sometimes it's helpful to the protein's function, it needs to change shape a little bit in order to do what it does, whether it's convey a signal or help break down a compound or have something bind to it. And sometimes it's unhelpful where the change induced in it, some like with prion diseases, breaks it so that it can't do anything that it was supposed to do. Like the shape is weird instead of useful in some way.

And then it can tell its friends to turn into that shape too. Right. So basically that shape binds two other proteins of the same type and causes those proteins to change into that new bad shape. Yeah. What the hell? Yeah. The proteins like give each other hugs

and then they like end up the same shape. There's a lot of stuff going on inside of us, huh? Well, hopefully that's not happening inside of you. Though there is now like thought that this kind of like, prion is just like a name for a protein that self perpetuates its confirmation. Okay. And so it may be like, as in this case, that there are some prions that actually confer benefit,

but we're really used to thinking of them as diseases. So none of this helps us make better wine though. Well, knowing this helps us understand why bad wine happens, though it doesn't really help us make bad wine, because even before we understood why it happens, we knew how to prevent it, which was to kill the bacteria. We just weren't sure why the bacteria

were causing this change in the yeast. It could potentially help us make extremely nasty wine for prank purposes. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Okay, my turn. Like we've probably talked about a million times before,

and I had to ask Ceri a lot of million questions about today while I was writing this. When you get a vaccination, you are being injected with proteins isolated from a disease-causing molecule that activates your immune system and basically helps to like train it to fight the disease without actually having to go through having the disease. Is that right? Yes. having to go through having the disease. That right? So far. Okay. So the concept behind a vaccine for a disease or a bacteria seems pretty straightforward to a dumb guy like me. But researchers have long been looking into a vaccine for cancer, which is a disease that is made up of your own body cells, which is trickier. So this is where I'm going to get out of my depth even more.

Part of your immune system is made up of T and B cells, which are types of white blood cells that attack diseases in different ways. So B cells make antibodies that neutralize viruses and bacterias. And then there are certain T cells that just straight up kill infected cells. Many vaccines trigger B cells, but T cells are the ones that kill cancer. So a cancer vaccine would need to trigger those killer T cells using proteins from the cancers. But the problem is those proteins aren't durable enough to last in the body long enough to activate T cells, which are already harder to activate than B cells are. So cancer vaccines are tough to make and they don't work very often because it will

like disintegrate before it even gets where it's supposed to go. Luckily, we have an unlikely ally in the search for a cancer vaccine and that ally is my greatest foe, the spider. So spider webs are made of strands of incredibly tough and resistant proteins that thanks to the miracles of modern science, we can engineer in a lab in any like kind of microform that we want to. So in 2018, researchers in Germany fused these T cell activating proteins

like cancer vaccines that they're studying for cancer vaccines into microscopic shells made of spider web molecules and then injected them into mice and found that not only were the shells tough enough to convey the proteins through the body safely, they quote, considerably increased T lymphocyte or T cell immune responses. But how considerably that was, was locked behind a paywall. So I couldn't quite figure that out.

So that added spider web toughness also potentially means that we can make more resilient vaccines of all types that can survive in temperatures of up to 212 Fahrenheit. I don't know how much Celsius that is. Meaning that they could be transported far more easily than vaccines we have now that basically need to either be frozen or refrigerated all the time. So, in addition to that, artificial spider web protein strands are being researched for use as artificial muscle fibers and a substrate on which to grow various human tissues like heart tissue and stuff like that.

So thanks to spiders, I guess. Thanks spiders, I guess. Pretty much soon we'll be all spider. All of our organ and plant- I don't want to be any spider. I'm in this finished basement. I'm so scared all the time that a spider's gonna sneak up on me. Sam. Do you wanna live forever?

Cause if you wanna live forever, you're gonna have to be part spider. That's the rules. Oh no, that's such a cursed trade off. I don't know. Maybe the first time you let you just like, succumb and you say, okay, I'm gonna be part spider. Maybe that's the moment when suddenly you see Maybe the first time you let you just like succumb and you say, okay, I'm gonna be part spider.

Maybe that's the moment when suddenly you see your spider brothers as the siblings they are, as a part of your family in that we are all related to the last universal common ancestor and basically are all the same organism. All right, you guys. So now, Sari, Stefan, you have to vote for the one that you like the most.

Was it mine with yeast prions putting a pause on winemaking, but actually helping the yeast all along? Or Sam with spiderweb proteins may be able to help cancer vaccines last long enough in the human body to be effective and also potentially long enough to get to places where they can be used without refrigeration. Three, two, one.

Same. All right, I got one point, you guys. All right, everybody, it's time for Ask the Science Couch. We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at topatochipsis. What is a complete protein? Are there incomplete proteins? Gosh, that's an interesting question.

Do you know anything about it, Hank? Well, I don't know what, if a complete protein is a thing, I don't know about it. There are certainly incomplete proteins. You can make a protein that's not all the way done. I mean, I think it's not like a single protein. I think it's just like a descriptor for foods that contain all the proteins you need

or combinations of foods that contain all the proteins. It's a nutritional category. Yeah, and this is also where my weakness comes in where I'm like, I also initially thought the question was asking about like protein as a singular thing, but this is a nutrition question in disguise, which means Stefan's gonna be good at it. Well, is it about like whether the protein in a plant

or animal contains all of the proteins we need? All of the amino acids we need. That's what I meant, yeah. Like Stefan was saying with his truth or fail, there are 20 standard amino acids involved in protein formation. There's one extra selenocysteine that's kind of weird and it can like be produced in other biological ways,

but it's not like existent in food that we eat, I think. It's a mystery. I'm not gonna address it too much. Selenocysteine exists, so don't at me about that. Uh, mostly that is what I wanted to get out. But there are different categories of amino acids. There are essential amino acids, which can't be made by the human body. There are conditionally essential amino acids, which can sometimes be, but you can also be deficient in them. So like, for example, babies can be deficient in arginine, which causes a

variety of health problems. So like their bodies might not make enough and we have to supplement with it. And then there are non-essential, which your body just makes them out of other compounds inside or by breaking things down. And so a complete protein in nutrition sense means it's just a food that supplies you with all essential amino acids. And I think there are some foods that have it, but then there are some combinations of foods so that's where you get like peanut butter and toast or rice and beans or the

other things that I read on the website. I don't know. Ezekiel bread. This is where Stefan might know more. That might know more. Hummus and pita. Quinoa, I think, is complete. Most meats and eggs are complete proteins, which is why you have to think about the combinations more if you're a vegetarian or vegan.

I can't believe I've never heard of this. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, follow us on Twitter, at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics from upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Velociraptorial, at Vinay Verma, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode.

Sam Buck final scores. Everybody's got one Sam Buck, except for Stefan, who's got three, which means that Stefan has pulled substantially into the lead with 58 Sam bucks. Sari and Sam are at 55 and 54 and I just am gonna not talk about it. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that! First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and also

it just feels good to read them. So thank you for the people who have sent those in. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hofmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto, our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti, and our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon,

so thank you so much to them. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. ["Sonic the Hedgehog Theme"] But one more thing. There's this protein called Sonic Hedgehog that doesn't have anything to do with going fast, but it does have to do with body layout during development. And in fact, if it's mutated, that can cause anorectal malformations, aka butt development problems, and lots of different animals, including mammals. You really need the butt.

You do! It's true. It's one of the main things you need. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hi. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. So as you two know, the world is in a quite a state but one of the main ways it's in a state is because of this little carbon dioxide problem we got going on we took a lot of stuff that use that was created by life and then fossilized and like got

all that energy that the life stored up and chunked it together and then we started burning it and one of the things that that does is it really re-releases all of that carbon dioxide that those things put into themselves to make themselves one way or another. And now it's in the atmosphere. And every day is a little more. And I was thinking, they put it in the soda.

So why don't we put it all in soda and we can have so much bubble water. In one big soda for everyone. How big of a soda do we have to make? It can't be the whole ocean. Why not? I know that for sure. How do you know that? Well, because I just feel it in my bones. Okay. Well, this seems like a math question and I don't know how to answer it, but probably enough soda that it would really like put a dent in people's drinking water, I would imagine. That wouldn't be good, but they could drink the soda.

You could drink carbonated. You don't have to put syrup in the soda. Basically, you're making fizzy water. No, we don't want to do that because like farming sugar beets in sugar cane, that's a lot, or corn is I guess the main way that we get the sugar and the sodas these days. It's pretty heavy industry, so we don't wanna do that either.

We just want bubble water. Put a big soda stream in every water treatment plant that somehow collects the atmospheric carbon and then just, so then everybody has a sparkling tap water. Is that basically what you're saying? Yes, and then the real trick is that you can't burp. Yeah, I was gonna ask what happens to it after it goes in you You have to not burp. Have you seen those videos on tik-taka? There's a challenge of like drink a liter of sprite without burping. It's Fantastic. Have you done it? It's really good.

No, I haven't done it. It looks deeply unpleasant. So we all do it for the show. It's should we start doing TikTok challenges for the show? That's not a terrible idea. OK, you two can slap each other. We got to get viewership somehow.

Yeah, what happens is as you get through it, you discover that you have to burp and then they don't burp. And then about, I don't know, maybe five percent of the time you do sort of projectile vomit sprite. OK, I'll have to cover my computer up with a tarp before I try this next week. A little splash zone poncho for my computer. Yeah. Like the front row at a Gallagher's thing. It's in the splash zone for sure, yeah.

But the rest of the time you just have the most epic burp, and I've never burped the way these people burp, so part of me does want to experience that. Could we make stuff that breathes carbon dioxide besides plants? Could you make a bug do that or something? Well, we got plants and that's really good. People make artificial leaves too, but that just kind of sequesters carbon. We are working on the artificial leaf thing, and I think we're going to keep getting better at it. The plants got to start pulling their weight a little better though.

They're pulling so much of their weight. The plants are doing great, Sam. The seaweed, the trees. All plants listening, try harder. No, they're so tired. They're going as fast as they can and then it's getting hot and they're like, ugh. The little single celled ones, the single celled autotrophs in the oceans doing all that good work, diatoms.

Grow more cells, ya bums. We can't bear. They're doing so much good work, diatoms. Grow more cells, ya bums. We can't bend. Oh man, they got so many, they're doing so much more work than we are. Yeah, you know who's hindering their work? We are, because they try to grow big, and then we're like, mm, your flesh looks good for our construction. Paper and homes. Yeah, so we're gonna freaking kill you.

I think I'll turn you into the stuff I wipe my butt with. How does that sound, Plants? Congratulations on working so hard to counter climate change. No, we gotta get Plants into the marketplace of ideas. Come on, we gotta get Plants after this. Yeah, Plants. Yeah, look, we're never gonna truly respect you until you start having takes on Twitter, Plants.

This is the only path forward for your species. Plants, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You gotta. Your rootstraps. All right. Well, every week you're on Tangents to get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while not staying on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play at the end of the episode. One of you two is going to win, and I hope that whoever it is feels awful good about it now as always We're gonna introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari

I think I've got it in my hair and on the bottom of my shoe It's in my mac and cheese I swear and even there in superglue and shells and bats It's in my mac and cheese, I swear, and even there in superglue. In shells and bats, nylon and grass, in credit cards and parchment sheets, in paint and squash and petroleum gas, in astronauts and big athletes. But it's not table salt or a titanium ring, nor water, nor ice, nor aluminum foil, so that narrows it down from everything to a subset within the Erosian soil. The answer, my friend, if you've had enough,

is one of the elements, atomic number six. You'll find carbon in a lot of stuff, everything living on Earth plus some tricks. So when you talk about chemistry, you talk about us, our weird inventions and squishy bits, microscopic or global, let's discuss and enter this battle of Hank bucks and wits. Wow. Global, let's discuss and enter this battle of Hank Bucks and wits.

Wow. You missed the outtake where Sari said Hank Bucks. Yes. How embarrassing. So the topic for the day is carbon, which look, you can't really play, you can, you can play favorites with the elements. Absolutely you can't really play pro. Yeah, you can you can you can play favorites with with the elements. Absolutely You can and if we are gonna play favorites with the elements It's gonna be a carbon like oxygen also good hydrogen nitrogen good fine, but carbon

Oh my god, all of your favorite foods Carbon all your favorite foods. Yes all foods. All your favorite foods are a subset of all foods. So, finally, we have reached a definable topic. I know! It only took us a hundred something episodes. Do we know what carbon is? Sari, what is carbon?

Yeah, it's a chemical element, has the symbol C. The atomic number is six, which means it has six protons and carbon-12 has six neutrons and six electrons. And it's like neutral, non-charged state. There are other isotopes of carbon, which means the number of neutrons varies in the nucleus. So you can have carbon-13, carbon-14, and that's the stuff that decays.

Yeah. We use for radiocarbon dating. But this is great because like the whole idea of chemistry is we're like, what are elements? It is like, it is defined by the number of protons it has. If it has six protons, it's carbon. It might be a carbon ion, it might be a carbon isotope, but it is carbon.

So we know what carbon is, yay! The easiest definition ever. Thank you chemists for making such a precise borders around the thing element. But why is carbon so great? Why is carbon such a big deal? Why are we not doing an episode on Tungsten right now? Why can it be everything?

I mean, I can answer this question if you can't because this is my whole bag. Yes. But so it's- Lignin fan, paint green, please. Why is carbon so great? Yeah. So carbon, yeah, because of the way that electrons like jiggle with each other around atoms. Carbon has six electrons and the way that the electrons like to jiggle with each other around atoms. Carbon has six electrons, and the way that the electrons

like to jiggle around for physics reasons is that there's like a bunch of different balls where they jiggle inside of called orbitals, and the first jiggle ball gets two and the second one gets six. And so carbon has a total of six, so it's got two in the first one and then four in the second one,

so it wants four more electrons. So it's got two in the first one and then four on the second one. So it wants four more electrons. So it's got four different opportunities to bond to four different things. Sometimes it double bonds. So it can bond to two different things like carbon dioxide is two double bonds to two oxygens. But it just like, because of that, it can do so many different chemistry things.

It's also, so there are other things that have this property where they can bond to four other things, but carbon is like little, and so it doesn't take up very much space. There's also lots of it, but a big piece of it is like it's physically small, which allows it to, you know, create more complicated chemistry. Did it make like a, it's like a scaffolding upon which like everything else? Yes, it's a great scaffolding. Okay. So you can just like imagine carbon bonded to carbon bonded to carbon and that gives you since it's one carbon molecule, one carbon atom bonded to two others, that gives it two more opportunities to do something else.

Oh, okay. So you have this like long chain and it can be, it can be double bonded to an oxygen, it can be bonded to an alcohol, which is an OH group, and something else. It can be bonded to another carbon and then you get carbon split into a bunch of different ways. And you could do anything. You can make giant molecules that you could literally hold in your hand or you can make tiny molecules that are in the air all around us right now. Causing global warming. And making your soda bubbly.

And making your soda bubbly and feeding the plants. Yeah. Sari, where does the word carbon come from? Cause I find elements have excellent etymologies often. This one is, I don't know if you'd call it excellent. It's, it exists. I will. Okay. So we actually knew about carbon

or knew about the idea of carbon as an element before the periodic table was solidified into a thing. Well, as a thing, not an element. As a, yes, as a thing, I guess. As a thing that existed. As a thing that existed as an essential principle, a pure and essential principle is what it was called. Oh, okay.

So in French, it was carbone, which is just carbon with an E. Which might've been pronounced carbon. I'm sure that's how they pronounce it. Yeah, carbone with the emphasis on the bone, which was then anglicized to carbon in 1788 when some French chemists as they were want to be were adopting a bunch of words from French to English for English chemists to take take advantage of. Oh, it was coined in 1787 by Lavoisier, great guy,

as charbone, which kind of makes sense. Sounds like a Pokemon. Yeah, it's cubone, but burnt, which comes from Latin carbonem, which means a coal or a glowing coal or charcoal, which the ash from that is a carbon residue. So it comes from what it is, charcoal, which the ash from that is a carbon residue. So it comes from what it is, which is we burn something, there's like a carbonized layer leftover or dust,

and that's carbon. I thought that was a great analogy. I don't know what you're talking about. Well now it's time for us to play a little game. Are you guys ready for this game that I have for you? Yeah. Yeah. It's called carbon this game that I have for you? Yeah. Yeah. It's called Carbon This or That.

Carbon is a vital ingredient in our world, of course, which means that there are tons of ways to measure and quantify it. There are common things like measuring our carbon footprint, but also less typical things. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's game, This or That Carbon. In each round, I'm going to present you with some way that we've been measuring carbon and then giving you two things to compare and it's up to you to figure out which of the things is bigger. Does it make sense? I hope so. Are you ready?

Yeah, we gotta pick one of two things. 50-50 chance of success. 50-50. So first, we're going to talk about radiocarbon dating, which is a widely used technique that shows up in archaeology and forensics, allowing people to estimate the age of a sample based on the amount of radioactive carbon-14 in it. In 2020, researchers at the University of Glasgow published a paper titled Using Carbon Isotopes to Fight the Rise in Fraudulent Whiskey. According to their calibration curve, which of the following should have more radioactive carbon-14 in it?

A whiskey distilled in 1966 or a whiskey distilled in 1980? Those are both after atomic testing, which I was like, that's gonna be the trick. Does that affect things? Yeah, no. I think there'd be more in the one from 1966 because something is breaking down or something like that. Ah, damn it I think I'm wrong. Okay. I want to keep it though. I also think 1960s

I think it's the older one because I think it but I don't know I feel like the wood has something to do with it Maybe I'm changing my mind. I'm changing my mind to the new one 1960s. You can do that. Yeah, So 1966 for Sarah, and 1984 for Sam. Yes. Yeah. Well, I would have gone with 1966, but I'm about to read you the answer, which I have not read yet. So I'm also in the dark.

When it comes to radiocarbon dating, researchers have been making calibration curves that go back thousands of years, and very broadly, the older a sample is, the less carbon there is due to decay. But in 1955, there was a spike in carbon-14 in the atmosphere because of above-ground bomb testing that lasted until the limited test ban treaty that was signed in 1963. So a whiskey distilled in 1966 would have incorporated more of that carbon-14 than a whiskey distilled in 1980 after much of that carbon would have decayed. This is called the bomb pulse and it's given scientists a more recent curve to fit their samples into in the last century, helping

them study a bunch of stuff and do forensics on things like fraudulent art and dead bodies and even fake whiskey. So yes, whiskey distilled in 1966 should have more carbon-14. So that's a point for CERI. Now, researchers have been developing new materials from carbon, including carbon nanotubes. And of course, they want to make sure that those materials are not toxic. So in 2009, a team of scientists from Brown University decided to see how the fruit fly Drosophila responded to different types of carbon nanoparticles at different points in their life. So which of the following was more toxic? Carbon nanoparticles that were fed to Drosophila larvae or test tubes filled with carbon nanoparticle

powder and then loaded with an adult Drosophila? Oh. Oh. Well, that feels like different. You're drowning the adult one in carbon. Once. And you're giving a little snack to a larva. Yeah.

That's just a snack. That's just a potato chip given to a baby. I'm glad that the Drosophila larva are like, yeah, I'll eat that. I'm a maggot. Yeah. Whatever. Just put it in my mouth. I don't know. Let's try it out.

It's made of carbon. Carbon's good. Yummy. Yeah, I think that I agree with your reasoning, Sari. I think the adult one's breathing in there and being like, no good for him. Yeah. Yeah, I think the adult seems like it would struggle more because carbon also isn't... I can't see it doing something like mutatey or weird in the larva's body, but maybe we'll

find out. Well, you are both correct. It turns out that being fed carbon nanoparticles didn't do much to the larva, and they did just fine physically and reproductively later on in life. Meanwhile, the researchers also put adult flies into test tubes that contained one of four different types of nanoparticles. And while two were fine for the flies, the other two ended up coating the flies and keeping them stuck like they were in some kind of tar pit.

No. And the flies died within six to ten hours. You all right, Sam? Are you sad for the flies? I am sad for the flies. I could use some of that. We have fruit flies in our apartment. Give me those nanotubes.

That's probably a store-bought solution that might be a little more economical, but I don't know. Who knows? So they weren't quite clear on what was actually killing the flies, but the researchers found that the nanoparticles covered the flies and might've been weighing them down while also clogging all of their breathing holes.

That's how insects breathe. They just got a bunch of holes in them. They got holes, I'd imagine, yeah. Yep. That's how the air how insects breathe. It's just got a bunch of holes in them. I'd imagine. Yeah Yep, that's how they saw the air gets in there Uh now the fact that some of the nanoparticles cause problems and others didn't suggest That the form of the nanoparticle itself was important in the final toxicity to the adult fives The experiment also doesn't necessarily say much about how they're gonna affect us because we do not have wings or breathing holes I guess we have we got we have a couple breathing holes, but we can cover them up.

It's kind of strange to have three breathing holes. It's kind of weird we don't have four. I should be able to breathe out of my butt. Actually, you can. Did you hear? Did you hear about this? Oh, I maybe did. Was there a pig that breathed out of his butt or something like that? Yeah, they like put they put they like found that you can help something that is

not able to breathe right at that moment by putting oxygen into its rectum in one way or another. And that actually does that does help keep blood alcohol, blood blood oxygen levels up. OK, so much like the bug, I am also full of holes. The air can just get in there. You're full of breathing holes, yeah. Round number three and our final round. African naked mole rats are cold-blooded, which means that they are not able to regulate their own body temperature. To understand how

these animals move around their homes to control their temperatures, researchers from City University of New York studied their underground layers and found that the different chambers within them have different levels of carbon dioxide. So within a naked mole rat's underground home, which of the following has more CO2? The nest chamber or the toilet chamber? And yes, they have both of those. Naked mole rats are cold-blooded? How did they end up this way? Okay, uh...

They lost their fur and they lost their internal homeostasis. I love it when you name an animal and you're like, what does that look like? Well, it looks like a naked rat mole. Yeah, it looks like a naked rat and it lives underground, so it must be a mole. Put them all together. Yeah, it's a naked mole rat. And it lives in Africa, so put that at the front. Yeah, I just gotta say

We're all so hairless so we're kind of like naked monkey. Naked monkey guys. Naked monkey guys. It's naked and it's a monkey. We look like monkeys, but we also because we like walk around on two legs, we're kinda like birds. So we're like a naked monkey bird.

If other animals call us that, better. More power to them. You'd be like, alright, that makes sense. I deserve it, probably. You can call me whatever you want after what I did to you. When you're sleeping, you to be breathing, of course. When you're pooping you don't really care as much. Maybe they go in there and hold their breath. You gotta hold your breath.

That's how, yeah you go. Yeah. Yeah, but that would make it lower in there. Well anyway. What do you think it's higher? No. They're venting it out of the nesting chamber. They don't care about the poop chamber, so that one has higher. No, they're venting it out of the nesting chamber. They don't care about the poop chamber.

So that one has higher. Yeah, they're getting all that CO2 in the poop hole. Yeah. Okay. I think that they're all sleeping. So you're just breathing out a lot. And I know astronauts sometimes have trouble. If they're not by a vent, they get like a bubble of carbon dioxide around their head

and can asphyxiate, just like a very scary idea that you can just breathe and not realize. And so I think naked mole rats are similar where they're just breathing and not realizing. And then when they get out of the nest, they're like, wow, fresh and don't realize that it's because they've been breathing in and out their old stale air.

Well, Sari is correct. Congratulations. I'm a genius this episode. You're doing great. That's the nest chamber where the queen rat spends much of her time with the breeding male. There's apparently a queen rat. Has the highest concentration of CO2 of all the chambers with around 2.3% of the total atmospheric pressure. In comparison, the toilet chambers are around 0.05, and the food chambers, there's a lot

of chambers, are around a half a percent. The researchers were very interested in this because it seems like the naked mole rats seek out higher carbon dioxide levels, which they realized actually helps protect them from having seizures. They spend around 70% of their lifetime in that nest chamber, and when researchers infused carbon dioxide into certain chambers, they found that the mole rats tended to visit those chambers more often. They like it that way. In addition, the researchers found that when naked mole rats were exposed to hot air with low carbon dioxide levels, the rats would start to hyperventilate and seize.

But they did not do this when the hot air had higher CO2 levels. The researchers hypothesized that because naked mole rats lack the switch that many of us rely on to control electrical activity in the brain, they instead rely on CO2 to prevent seizures. Wild. That is absolutely wild.

What weird little fellows. There's only one way to be a naked mole rat And it's weird. It's a weird way. Yeah It's like they read a book about ants and they were like let's try that Okay Well, Saria congrats on your three points to Sam's one. Next we're gonna take a short break then it'll be time for the fact-off. Alright everybody, get ready for the fact-off! Our panelists have all brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and award them Hank-Bucks

any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a question. Are you ready? Yeah. Who cares? Oh. Not me. Okay.

So carbon cycles through many different reservoirs through our planet, including the crust, the ocean, the soil, the atmosphere. And using models and various other methods, scientists are able to estimate the amount of carbon in these different reservoirs. Around 85.1% of all above-surface carbon is in the deep ocean, making up about 37,000 gigatons. Meanwhile, our atmosphere has a lot less carbon. How many gigatons of carbon are there in the atmosphere? Again, there's 37,000 gigatons in the ocean where there is more. How many gigatons are in the

atmosphere? And that's 85.1. So hypothetically, we should be able to figure out, like, the right answer. Well, you could get close using math Yes, but I don't expect Are you gonna do math? Yeah. Oh Did you get out your phone you do any calculator? I'm writing it down on a piece of paper Wow Oh, I'm gonna assume that it's part us part atmosphere bigger part atmosphere. Maybe like there's also not deep ocean. Yeah. That's shallow ocean atmosphere. Life dirt.

That's about the crash. Dirt also a big deal. Yeah. OK, I'm going to say five thousand gigatons of carbon is in the atmosphere. Oh, I ran out of time to do math. I'm going to say you didn't keep 4,999 Wow, Sam you're the winner. It's 590. Oh a mere 590 tons That's it of carbon that seems like a solvable problem now that we've said it that way somebody get the bottle

The plants are trying really hard I need to apologize to plants. No, I think it actually makes the plant seem a little worse cuz there's not much up there The next I show episode will the thumbnail will say plants are lazy Yeah, we're calling them out. They're ruining everything for us We play so much co2 in the atmosphere and they're like I'm trying I'm I'm full Eat Dinner

So say I'm gonna go first sees the day I'm being brave I'm brave Sam now. Much like wood, silk from silkworms and spiders is very useful, but people suck at making it. Only in the ass of spiders and worms can such a wonder material be made. Silkworm silk has been used in textiles for forever because it's so smooth and nice,

but it's also very strong and can be used in medical applications like sutures and probably other cool Super-sciencey stuff and spider silk as you've probably heard is frequently touted as the wonder material of the future And in fact, we just made a big list show on SciShow about this But to summarize since it's so strong spider silk like one of the main things is that it could have tons of uses in material engineering including for things like bridge cables or of uses in material engineering, including for things like bridge cables or biodegradable plastics.

And while sure, these materials are pretty dang strong already, we are humans and we must tinker. So there have been many things tried to make these silks stronger. We've meddled with the DNA of these animals, we've replicated the silk in ways that make the proteins that give it its strength bigger. We've taken silk after it's been spun and messed with it to add various particles to make it stronger. But in the last several years,

scientists have come up with a much simpler way to produce strong silks than by messing with the building blocks of life. In 2016, a paper was published detailing an improved silkworm silk that was 50% stronger than regular silk, and when exposed to extreme heat, it could conduct electricity like you'd bake it into something that could conduct electricity

Such a silk could be used for tougher sutures components and bio-organic implants powered by the human body and even smart clothes filled with super light electronics And how did the team make this super material? Well, they made silk worms eat carbon nanotubes So carbon and of course are as the name, very tiny tubes of carbon atoms with, I think, the highest tinsel strength of any material we know of. Tinseil? Is it tinseil? Tinsel is what you put on trees. I think it is tinsel though. Okay. They have applications in nanotech because they conduct electricity and they're real strong, but they can also be added to other stuff to make those materials stronger like I think we've talked about on this show how carbon

Nanotubes were found in Damascus steel, which is a famously strong type of steel that we don't really know how to make anymore So anyway inserting nanotubes into silkworm silk has been tried before I think with silk that's already been spun But these scientists just mix some nanotubes with water and sprayed it on leaves and then the worms ate it and crapped out super silk So pretty easy and then another group of scientists did the same thing with spiders in 2017 And got silk that was three times stronger than natural spider silk what which I think what spider silk They said on the same level as like Carbon nanotubes in terms of strength. It became like one of the strongest things we've ever discovered.

So silkworms can make enough silk that making like super silk like this at scale is pretty simple, just as simple as spraying leaves with water. But spiders on the other hand, make way less silk and we're still figuring out how to make spider silk proteins without a spider. But since this process requires a spider to eat the nanotubes and spin it into a web all we've done here

It seems to me is given spiders super webs Which hey, I think that why not I try it out. I don't know see what happens bad There is a concern that they could I don't like walking into a spider web And I wouldn't like walking into one that's made of super-silk even more, I think. Yeah. So you just... they just... like, it's weird to me that you put a nanotube into a silkworm, and that it ends up going... like, it doesn't just poop it out. It ends up going into the silkworm. It does the whole thing.

I would think it would just poop it out. That's great. That's very cool. I'm confident that someday we will have a bunch of spiders that sort of make everything for us. And then aliens will come to our planet and see all of our spiders making everything and they'll go, these guys are weird. Don't mess with those guys. No, they'll be like, wow, that entire planet is run by spiders.

That's weird. We've never seen that before. Almost everything on that planet is a spider or a chicken. And then there's a naked bird guys walking around. Sarah, what do you got for us? So foams are weird and curious part of material science. They're kind of related to- Foams.

Foams, F-O-A-M-S. Okay. I don't enunciate, which is bad in a podcaster. They're kind of related to bubbles, if you listen to that episode of Tangents, but I'd argue that foam is a distinct category of thing in- Yes, you would because you add really strong bubble opinions. People have disagreed with you about your bubble opinions already. Really?

Oh, no. Yeah. Well, I expected that. Like me, for example. Yeah. Yeah. I expected that. So anyway, in engineering uses, for example, foams are often solid materials with pockets

of gas dispersed throughout it. They're useful because they're generally really low weight but strong and have different properties based on the atoms that make up the solid bits. And as far as I can tell, carbon foams aren't everywhere like styrofoams or polyurethane foams but seem like pretty useful things. Carbon is not super explosive because carbon structures have

a really high ignition temperature. They can conduct electricity and depending on how the foam is structured, it can either conduct or insulate from heat. So scientists are excited to use carbon foam for things like aerospace insulation or even in batteries. And the ever-present challenge with new materials is finding ways to manufacture them that are worthwhile to whoever's making them, whether that's quick or cheap or ethical when it comes to labor or environmental impact, lots of different factors. And the main ways that carbon foams have been developed so far involve carbon-rich byproducts like coal tar.

By putting it under a lot of pressure, it'll foam up and then can be stabilized and shaped into the foam that you want. But a 2016 paper described a totally different method to create 3D carbon foam structures that felt extremely like something that we would joke about here, except it's real. To make carbon foam, they baked and then burnt the heck out of a loaf of bread. Pfft! So there are materials and methods section.

So they just, they baked a loaf of bread. So that's the first part. You can't really get a loaf of bread without baking it. Yeah. That was kind of given. It was given. And then they just cooked it. Then they burnt it. Yeah. So the materials and methods section of the paper is literally a recipe for baking bread. Playing with different amounts of yeast and flour and water to make the crumb different.

For example, quote, in a typical process, five grams dry yeast was dissolved in 115 milliliters water by stirring. After completely dissolved, the mixture was poured into 300 grams flour, which was placed into a dough mixer in advance. That's just a bread recipe. That's on the Google how to make sourdough bread. Except instead of eating it, they stuck it in an oven to dry for 18 hours

at 80 degrees Celsius, and then stuck it in a tube furnace with argon gas at 1000 degrees Celsius to carbonize it. Basically, they didn't put oxygen in there to help prevent flames and control the decomposition process to leave a carbon-rich husk behind. It's totally possible if you like leave a pizza

in an oven for way too long, but this way does it quicker and ensures it. And that tasty breadcrumb became the pores of a carbon foam. They tried soaking chunks of their bread in ethanol and setting it on fire and it maintained its shape. So it was heat resistant and they found that this carbon foam shields electromagnetic radiation fairly well, which is also seen as a plus for aerospace uses or other technologies. So it's like... Bread planes.

Are we going to have bread spy planes? Bread planes. Bread planes. I think so. I think we're going to have bread camouflage. Yeah. I'm going to like, we're going to surround our Teslas in bread so the EMPs can't get us.

But that's it. It's light. It's strong. And super burnt bread is now the best thing since sliced bread. These scientists are geniuses. That's the end of my fact. I love it. This is so fun.

Is it crumbly? Like, this is my concern. Like, if I just like squeeze it, does it turn into a bunch of dust? Or is it good? Is it good firm, firm foam? They toasted it up real good. It's firm.

It's like really, really burnt. Did they call it bread, or were they lying to themselves about what they were doing? No, they called it. They called it bread or were they lying to themselves about what they were doing? No, they called it. They called it bread in the paper that it was called multifunctional stiff carbon foam derived from bread. Okay, good, good. So they knew what they were doing.

Multifunctional stiff carbon foam derived from bread. This is fun. I love it. That's really good, Sari. Oh, two high quality facts. I feel like I'm learning so much about and I'm also gaining just an appreciation for the work of scientists and optimism about the future. It's a bread, spider-filled future.

A bread, super-silk future. Oh, well, Ceri came into that one solidly in the lead. Those facts are very equally good. So Ceri is going to run away with the episode. Congratulations, Sam. So, Ceri's gonna run away with the episode. Congratulations, Sam. Wow. I have every faith in you for that you could come back.

And I don't know what kind of deficit you're operating at right now, but it feels like a bit of one. No, I think I'm doing okay. You don't know. I've seen you've gone on some runs this season. Yeah. We were tied, and now I'm ahead by one, I think. Oh, wow, look at that.

So, take it back. Wow. Preconceived notions about me hmm That's not it at all Sam you didn't go to MIT so surely you don't know anything Surely you're bad at game shows Sam Congratulations, Sari now It's time to ask the science couch where we ask a listener question to our virtual

couch of finely honed scientific minds. Sam's dad suggested that since Sari and I are theoretically the Science Couch, that Sam should ask the Science Couch question. So Sam, what's our Science Couch question? Today's question comes from at Ryan Laser who asks, can I eat it? Which I guess means carbon? Yeah. I think the answer is yes, because we've talked about so many times you can eat it.

So if you didn't eat any carbon, you would die. Well, sure. I mean, you could do it for a while. Pretty quick. Yeah. You could spend a day not eating carbon. The same amount of time. I want a carbon cleanse today. Yeah, the same amount of time that you could survive eating nothing. Yeah. It's a necessary ingredient for being alive.

Yes, and it can be dangerous. Like that's the other thing. You can eat it, you need to eat it. You can also just swallow it and it'll pass right through you. So if you eat a diamond, it's just gonna pass right through you. Yeah, that would be fine.

But there's ways to eat carbon where it would be bad for you. Yeah, and there's always a chance like,, I fell down a rabbit hole of diamond dust and there was a lot of anecdotal stuff about grinding up diamonds and then feeding it to people as poison because the shards would cut up your intestines a little bit. There wasn't any, like, there weren't a lot of confirmed deaths. It was more like... You think maybe that just sounds cool?

Yeah. And so people wrote about it? Yeah. Yeah. During the Renaissance, they were like, ha ha ha, my evil plot. I'm going to assassinate someone by grinding up diamond. Lots of cheaper poisons out there. Yeah.

I feel like we know about a bunch of ways to let people kick it. Yeah. Including plenty of other carbon-containing compounds. You got plenty of toxins that are made naturally by plants and animals. Fungi. And you don't want to eat those because those will be bad for you. Yeah, so can I eat it? Sometimes.

If it's food. If it's a pizza, yeah. If it's a... Yeah, if it's a yeah, I don't know can I eat that baked bread? Oh, it was hard hard hard hard so bad You know you have a too much of a toasted piece of toast and it hurts you it'd be sharp Probably it'd be like swallowing a Mr.. Clean Magic eraser probably Like sandpaper I Don't want to do that Okay. Like sandpaper your guts. I don't want to do that. So yes, eat carbon, but not every carbon. Only sometimes.

So yeah. Only sometimes. If you want to ask the Science Cow to your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord, thanks to Emily17 on Discord and at lululow715 and everybody else who asked us questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's so easy to do that. Please do it. First, you can go to our Patreon.

It's patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. There's a bunch of amazing stuff that you get access to and you help us continue making the show. Second, you can leave us a review and let people know how much you like our show. That helps us also know what you like about it. You can tell us what you think we should do differently, like Sans' dad, who gave us a great piece of advice there. Here's into making the podcast. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glicksman.

Our story editor is Alex Villaloe. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzzbezio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trakravarti. Our sound design is of course by Joseph Tuna-Medish, our executive producers are Caitlin Hofmeister and me, Hank Green, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing! Activated charcoal is a super porous form of carbon, where each particle has a huge surface area. So it's really good at adsorption, which is where the surface of one substance sticks to other molecules like poisons in the human gut, dissolved organic substances in water,

or even gas particles in air, including some, quote, odiferous rectal gases, aka stinky fart compounds. So naturally, there are products out there like underwear made of carbon fibers or activated charcoal pads that you can insert into the underwear to help people keep their gassy butts odor free. We could eliminate fart stink from the world and we choose not to. Why? We do.

You got to pay to play. Yeah. Pay to play. Yeah. Pay to play underpants. They should give it to astronauts though. Absolutely. Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's gotta be so stinky in that tin can. But like we said earlier, you can pick a corner and you're like, that's a fart corner. Everybody go over there. It's gonna stay there.

And it's all gonna be in there. It's fine You can close a little bit of a pick up fart into a box and close the lid and that's just your fart box Can you imagine being like the one astronaut with the stinkiest farts and everybody knows it? Yeah Like like there's only so many people up there at any time And so everybody must know what each other's farts smell like. That fart is directly next to your butt. He farted that fart. There's no other way to put it. Yeah.

Hahaha. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hi. And resident every man Sam Schultz. Just hear those sleigh bells ring-a-ling. Jing, jing, jing. Oh, thanks for the reminder.

A prunin'. What are you getting for your partner this Christmas? Oh, I walked into a trap. We're recording this on November 4th and I don't know. Let me hit you with another one then. I just wanted to see James Acaster in Seattle about a month ago. It was absolute delight. He talked a lot about the needs of

the five-year-old version of him that lives inside of him still, and still has a lot of needs that he has to take care of. What if you had a chance, would you buy five year old you for Christmas? This is another trap. I still buy a lot of toys and stuff. Same thing I want now. Yeah. Sarah, you go first. I also buy the toys that I want. Let me go first. Let me go.

Yeah, please go for a hang. Yeah. Because I here's what I do. You know how you can get like slime like kids can get slime and then they'll put their hands and they play with it. Yeah, I want that. But I want like at least five gallons. I think that the amount of slime that you get is like by far not enough.

I want to be able to like sink my whole head into the slime. I want to I want to like put my arms in it. I want to like like a war. I want to go outside and just like be a slime monster. Want to put it over my, you know, five year old little body and run around. Hank, you want to know what? I was going to also say slime or some kind of goo. Because I feel like when you grow up, you're like, if I get the goo, it's just going to get ruined

or it's going to get on my carpet. And then my wife's going to be pissed. When you're five and you've got a wife to worry about, you're going to be slinging slime everywhere. Yeah, I want to like, I want to put slime on me and then get on a bike. Right around the neighborhood. I don't, I think you both could achieve this dream. Get a kiddie pool. Get a lot of like

a big five gallon bucket of Elmer's glue. Yeah. It's true. You could buy a lot of slime on Amazon. You could probably subscribe to slime on Amazon like you can subscribe to bottle caps. Slime of the month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually even have I've got like mutuals on TikTok who are slime makers. So I could DM them and be like, hey, how much I get a bulk slime discount. I'm sure a lot of it's just the packaging process of like getting it into the little can. Let's skip that step. Send me the bucket. The postage on that would be insane, though.

Well, maybe they just put it in their trunk and drive it over. That's a real Santa delivering it on Christmas morning too. So also very exciting for five year old you. It's been tricky for Santa since slime happened because it's so heavy. It's so messy. It gets all over that everything to do with Santa is made of like crushed velvet

and that does not mix well with- That don't come out. That don't come out. He has a lot more outfits now than back in the old day where he just keep re-wearing it. Okay, now I'm picturing five-year-old Sari running around being happy and cute and inquisitive. What does little Sari want? I feel like I would want unlimited time in some sort of insectarium. Like, rent a museum for myself.

Maybe just Biosphere 2. But if it was safe for kids, just running around. You just want Biosphere 2. I think my big dream is a bucket of slime. And Sari's like, I want Biosphere 2. I want to do a poly shore movie. Five year old Sari would just want to run around unattended and. You want a bunch of bugs.

Yeah, I had so many like paper notebooks that I made where I would walk around our yard and like tape sticks and leaves into it. And so if I could just do that, but with more cool stuff than what I could find in our yard, I think I would be happy. I'm so happy for all of our little five-year-old selves. If only we could get out of childhood free of trauma, I'm sure that none of us would be so driven and.

Yeah, that's what they are. We're driven. All right. Every week here on Tangent, we get together to try to one up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will one of them will be crowned the winner.

Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week it's from me. I like to have a drink sometimes when I'm out with my friends, a couple of beers, a couple of shots to celebrate weekends, but another couple shots from there I know I've made a mistake. I'm not having fun anymore. My body needs a break. I've got my uber headed home. It'll be here any minute. The cemeteries are full of folks who didn't know their limit. It's the dose that makes the poison, the quantity that counts.

Anything will kill you if you have the right amount. I like to go on Twitter. It's an easy thing to do. Open it up and see what fresh hell's waiting there for you. But then I close it down and have breakfast with my wife. Playing wordle over coffee is a great part of my life. If I didn't take some breaks, I don't know if I'd be alive.

That much Twitter all day long, could anyone survive? It's the dose that makes the poison, the quantity that counts. Anything will kill you if you have the right amount. The topic for the day is poison. Open the air so whether or not Twitter will still exist by the time this airs. I may have quit by then, that's certainly possible. whether or not Twitter will still exist by the time this airs.

I may have quit by then. That's certainly possible. Or at least scaled back my presence. So poison. Am I right, Sari? It's everything as long as you have enough. I would say that anything can be considered. You can have toxic amounts of anything. I don't know if scientists would look at everything in the anything can be considered, you can have toxic amounts of anything. I don't know if scientists would look at everything in the world and be like,

I would call that a poison. Yeah. Yeah. Would they look at Twitter and be like, I would call that a poison. Probably. Sociologists say yes. What about a specific substance that interferes with the body's ability to do body stuff. So, so toxin is the overall thing. And I think it's like interferes with body stuff at relatively small amounts is is how I would put it is the amount of the thing needed is relatively small, which is what makes it dangerous and toxic as opposed to just like a food that we eat or water that

we drink or Twitter that we scroll on. The difference that a lot of people like to draw between poison and venom is how they enter your body. So toxin is just like if you want to talk about bad things that are out there, things that can harm you in small doses. There's always, you're always accidentally saying poison or venom when you mean venom or poison, but if you say toxin, you're good every time.

Yes, that's my strategy. That's my science communication tip for everyone listening. Whenever I'm a little bit unsure, I use toxin instead. And I'm like, I know that's gonna, no one's gonna call me out for that. I almost texted you guys to be like, should we just call this episode toxin because I'm having a hell of a time We can make this episode in spirit about toxin. This is a sexier word though. Okay, it's poison How's venom compared to poison and then I'm school to ha toxin sucks compared to the okay

compared to poison and sex scale. Venom school too. Toxin sucks compared to the other two. Okay. Toxin's too technical. Toxin's the nerd version. And then you get poisons and venoms. Venom. So poison you eat, if you ingest it, then it's poisonous.

And venom eats you or is injected somewhere into your body, then it's venom. So like a sting, a bite can be venomous, a berry can be poisonous. What if I swallow a bee and it stings my tummy? I was having the same question earlier. If a bee stung inside your tummy, I would still call it a venom because the sting is the method of delivery. If it dissolved in your tummy and then you went, oh, I feel sick, then that's a poison. I got bee poisoning.

And then there was a 2014 paper that I was reading that when you get to like the middle zone of poisons and venoms, there are animals that spray. And so it's like well not quite injecting it it's not a stinger it's not a bite but it's not as passive as poison like you're not necessarily being eaten you're like you have this poison that you create you have this toxin that you create and are halfway active but when it when it sprays on you then that's when it absorbs into your skin or something ultimately there is a line here where it gets fuzzy.

Also, did they name these two things first, and then later they were like, maybe that's kind of the same thing. It feels a little like that to me. It feels a little like we sort of retroactively had to apply definitions to these things. We already got these two really cool words though, so we can't really get rid of either of them. We can't get rid of them. Let's just make up a bullshit definition for one of them. They kind of had a difference from their, from their root words.

So poison comes from Potare, which means to drink. And so poison is very in the, in the potion family. Like you drink something and then it's bad for you and then you're dead. It's like a borrowing from French. So I don't know, Poisson. I don't speak French. Don't that mean fish? You know, one of those words fish.

It does sound like the fish word. Yeah. Be careful, French people. Don't make that mistake. Yeah, Poisson is fish in French. What is poison? Also, they're very similar. It is poison.

It is just spelled the exact same way. Do I know how to pronounce you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me.

I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. I'm not sure if you can hear me. She's always here listening to us podcast live, but only one third of it. Venom comes from Latin venenum, which is poison. So yes, it means something, but then I think it evolved to something that was secreted by an animal or transferred by biting. Venom means poison. Or just maybe probably means toxin. Probably means toxin.

Yeah, probably more accurately. Yeah, they might not have even sort of understood that a venom was a thing. It was like a snake bite. Like the problem wasn't the thing the snake injected in you, it was the snake. Snakes are bad. Things that hurt are like, that's the animal's thing thing Whereas poison is oftentimes something that people do to people. All right. I feel informed on our topic

We're gonna move on now to the quiz portion of our show and that means we're gonna be playing Dead or not dead. I have a special special I'm gonna tell you the name of an animal and you have to imagine that you are that animal. Then I will be offering you something that might sound potentially appetizing to you as said animal. Catch though, it could be poison. It's up to you to decide whether or not

that meal will leave you dead or not dead. I love this. All right, so you are, for this first one, a black headed gross beak, a black-headed grosbeak, a bird found in the Western part of North America. Its song has been described by allaboutbirds.org as like a tipsy robin welcoming spring. So they're having a good time over there.

And you might migrate down to central Mexico when the weather gets cold. I'm offering you an insect that you might run into on your path south that has Distinctive black and orange wings would this leave you dead or not dead? Well black and orange that seems like the don't eat me color But then there's other guys who pretend to do the don't eat me color. So it really is kind of up in the air. I Think dead. I think a gross a gross

Shouldn't be messing with that kind of kind of thing. I think dead. I think a gross, a gross beak shouldn't be messing with that kind of thing. I wouldn't where I want. I need a nice beard. You logic it all out. I would say as a gross beak, I'm, I'm brave. Why am I called a gross beak? Cause you got gross stuff in there in your beak. Yeah, I got gross stuff in there. I think it's actually from French for big, but I'm just... Oh, okay. Well, if I have a big, big beak, I can crunch that bug. I'll crunch it.

So I'm going to say not dead. The answer is not dead because I offered you a monarch butterfly. I know that's not what you were thinking when you heard orange and black insects, but that is what it is, which is poisonous to many animals thanks to its ability to consume another poison, milkweed. Milkweed is the same type of poison that comes from the poison arrow tree, and it can cause cardiac arrest in humans and animals besides humans. These compounds interfere with the sodium potassium pumps in your muscles that messes with your heartbeat. But monarch

butterflies are able to consume milkweed thanks to a set of mutations that enable the sodium pump to function despite the compounds. And it turns out that the black-headed grosbeak also has a similar set of mutations as do several other monarch butterfly consumers, including the Mexican black-eared deer mouse. This mutation is an example of convergent evolution. It comes in handy for the black-headed grosbeak which eats monarch butterflies as it migrates south. Yeah, it would kill you. And it's happened in the in the butterfly and in the bird and in a mouse.

If you ate the if you ate the bird, would you die? Oh, if a human ate a bird that was full, just chock full of butterflies, just like the butterflies, just goosh. But the bird on the bird on its own is not poisonous. No, no. OK. I don't think so. But maybe I haven't tried. Next question. Hey, it's not in my list of.

Yeah, you are a yellow spotted monitor was in the lizard that lives in Australia. You are brown with various light colored spots and you live on the ground, digging holes to nest in. But you're also great at climbing and you can sprint on your hind legs. You have long forked bluish tongue that you use to look for prey by sensing odor molecules. This sounds like a grand old time for you. I'm offering you a large brown wordy toad that was brought to Australia in the 1930s to help control pests on sugarcane farms, but has unsurprisingly spread beyond the farms. Would this leave you dead or not dead? So toads, I feel same way. I understand why this game is so hard because they're the guys that are

poisonous. There are plenty of toads that have the toxic mucus on their outsides. And then there are probably some guys that just pretend to. Or maybe my blue tongue has some sort of anti-toxin, anti-poison antidote. Blue tongue could be a clue. I'm gonna say die, dead. Toads, don't mess with them. They got these big like, they have a Chad type look to them.

They're walking around. Toads or the lizards? The lizards. They're walking around. The lizard. They're walking around. They're like, oh delicious lizard. Oh, and then yeah, they're going to croak. They're going to eat anything in their path and these toads are no good for them. They're dead. The answer is dead. As a monitor lizard, it would take you less than 30 seconds of having that toad in your mouth to die. Well, scientists have reported that 90% of yellow spotted monitors have died in areas that have been taken over by cane toads. That's a bummer.

However, it turns out that smaller juvenile toads are slightly less poisonous to monitor lizards. A fact that scientists decided to use to see if they could teach monitor lizards to not eat cane toads. They presented young cane toads to monitor lizards via a fishing pole. And when the lizard ate the small toads, but they presented young cane toads to monitor lizards via a fishing pole. And when the lizard ate the small toads, they would get a little sick,

but not so much to leave permanent damage. And that appeared to be enough to convince the monitor lizards to not give them a second try. Don't let the guy go tell their friends or something. Well, he's got to hit every one of them. Okay. One at a time. Baby toads. That's a wild way to do it. I would think maybe you could like make a meatloaf that looks like a toad and just like make a taste real bad. But no, they just find the baby ones, put them on a fishing pole and and semi-poison a lizard.

Sorry, a little puppet, a little toad puppet and go, scared the lizard so they run away. Yeah, that's how I do it. Round number three, our final round. You are the African crested rat, scare the lizards so they run away. Yeah. That's how I would do it. Round number three, our final round. You are the African crested rat, roughly the size of a rabbit with black and white fur that makes you look kind of like a scum. Scientists used to think that you lived alone,

but it turns out that you're social and you like to purr at your fellow crested rat friends. I'm offering you the bark of a small tree that has broad leaves and berries that taste sweet but slightly bitter when ripe. Would this leave you dead or not dead? I think we both know the answer to this, don't we? I think we both know. I was going to put on a show for the podcast, Sam. What do you do? Do you know the answer? I thought you were joking. I'm pretty sure this is the thing that makes them poisonous, right? The thing it eats and it grooms itself or something and then the rat is imbued with poison powers.

So he's fine. Is that right? This is definitely the poisonous rodent that exists. It's very metal, it has spikes. It is poisonous. I don't know what gives it its poison though. A lot of times it's insects, like frogs and birds that are poisonous get them from insects, but this one could get it from bark. I just feel like you wrote an episode of SciShow

that I animated about this subject. Is that the case? Probably yes. Yeah, okay. Because then I... Because I've known about this for a while. But then I put that the case? Probably yes. Yeah, okay. Because then I, because I've known about this for a while. But then I put that information where the information goes. Yeah. Which is to the ether. Yeah. The space between the worlds. Then it became a lingering fun fact in my brain where, come time for this episode, I was like, I think I know about a poisonous rodent. Oh shoot, now I'm doubting myself. I think he's okay though. Yeah, the bark, it's fine.

The answer indeed is not dead. In fact, as you were saying, you probably should chew on this bark if you are this rodent, because this is the poison arrow tree, which I mentioned earlier, and it's very toxic to mammals. It can lead to vomiting, difficulty breathing,

and cardiac arrest at high doses. It can also be used as heart medicines at lower doses, but you know what's also poisonous? The fur of the African crested rat. Because the rat likes to chew on this bark. When researchers studied the rat in captivity, they watched them take their spit after chewing and apply it to their fur, coating it in the poison. They hypothesized that the rats are able to tolerate the toxins from the bark because of their four chambered stomachs and all the gut bacteria that can break this stuff down.

And then they just wipe the poison on their bodies. Cool. Also the berries when ripe are not poisonous, only the bark of the tree, not of the rats. Rats, berries, don't mess with. Well, that means that Sam has two points and Sari got all three of those right. Next up, we're gonna take a short break.

Then it will be time for the fact. ["Science Facts"] Hello and welcome back everybody. It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. Throughout history, people have found ways to repurpose poisons into medicine.

Like Botox, for example, which is made from a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. The toxin is responsible for botulism, which is very bad and dangerous, and it targets nerves and can lead to paralysis and death. Clostridium botulinum was discovered towards the end of the 19th century by Professor Emil van Ermengem at the University of Ghent.

A group of Belgian musicians had contracted botulism after performing at a funeral and eating smoked ham. Three of the musicians died and their organs, along with the smoked ham were sent to Ermengem for his bacterial expertise. How many musicians, three of them died, how many got sick with botulism? What? This is not where I thought this question was going to go.

I was going to be like, how few grams of botulism can it be and you still die? No. Give me a number of musicians. How many musicians do you need at a funeral is the real question. I would think three would be plenty. Maybe it was a funeral for a really rich guy and it was like a full orchestra because this was back in the day. But how many hams couldn't have all been bad because it didn't say it.

Just one ham. So how many hams in a full orchestra eat? I think a full orchestra could eat seven hams. So what's seven divided by 50? How many people are in a full orchestra? 50 what's seven divided by? 50. How many people are in a full orchestra? 50. What's seven divided by 50? OK, you could have just said how many people can one ham feed? It would have been a more direct path to the same area.

Like 8, 50 divided by 56 divided by 7. Hank, leave me alone. Sorry, I'm just letting you know. Seven. Its answer is seven. Seven point one four. So how many answer is seven. Seven point one four. So how many musicians got sick? Seven point one four musicians. Three of them died.

One person just got a little bit, little bit. I think Belgian musicians love to smoke ham. So I think everyone is in on the ham. I think. Well, everyone's in on the ham. Okay. Okay. Okay. I think, I think all the ham was bad. I think they were all going ham for the ham.

And then- They put all the ham in a big thing and they mixed it all up so you don't know which ham is which. Yeah, they just had a big ham platter. Everyone was grabbing from who knows what. So I think 20 of them got sick. The answer is 34.

Oh my God. That's horrible. So I don't of them got sick. The answer is 34 So, I don't know how but it was definitely more than one ham unless they were all having very small bites So, yeah, all right so Sarah that means you get to go first or not, whichever you want. I'll go first. I'll dive into the smoked ham abyss. Ants are tidy critters, as we've talked about on this podcast before. Maybe me, I talk about ants a lot, I think, but they can't go to the grocery store

and buy some soap or disinfecting wipes like we can. So instead they have to rely on a hyper local organic cleaning product, poison brood in their own butts. More precisely, the backmost butt segment of an ant's body is called the gaster and certain subfamilies use a multipurpose hole called an acidopore at the tip of their gaster to spray a toxic substance as a weapon or a defense mechanism. And this hole also connects to the anus and the pheromone gland in case you were curious. So three-purpose hole. Scientists have analyzed these poisons and noticed that a major component of them is formic acid, which makes sense because formica is Latin for ant, which can be corrosive to lots of things from human

eyes and skin to bacterial membranes or even rival ants. But they're not just spraying creatures they don't like. This is a multi-purpose poison. The species Lassius neglectus has been observed spraying poison inside their nests or any nest boxes created experimentally, including on their larvae, to kill off pathogens like bacteria or fungi. And no, they are not worried about this disinfectant acid burning their soft fragile little babies because, as a 2018 paper showed, this species larvae are swaddled in silk cocoons that act as protection. Sometimes these ants also suck poison straight into their

mouths from their acidipores and groom the cocoons to remove any pesky fungal spores. And in a 2020 study, another species called Camptonotus floridinus was observed gargling and or swallowing their own poison after eating food or drinking water, basically trying to kill any pathogens before they can fester and multiply in their little tummies across these projects. There are various experimental ways to prevent that ants from spreading their poison to see what happened, such as super gluing parts of their body shut or making them really cold.

So they'd stop moving just a little sad, but whenever the ants couldn't disinfect with their poison, they had lower survival rates. So we think it actually does something. It wasn't just that their butts were super glued shut. That might also go on my survival rate. You know, yeah, your butt and jaw super glued shut, but you never know. We think it's the disinfectant because we use toxic substances to clean all the time. And like even our immune system uses destroying particles sometimes. So it makes sense that plenty of non-human animals do too. And I guess in nature, mildly poisoning yourself is worth it if it means you stay alive longer.

Wow. Windex ants. I got really distracted wondering one question. What is the hole with the most uses the most Is dirty the most? You mean you mean of any of any animal? Yeah Oh, I feel like it's a we're just gonna put that one out there because I don't think we're gonna have an answer to that question That's definitely right. So i'm gonna toss it out to the audience. What's the hole with the most uses? Yes, sam wants to know at size show tangent So I'm gonna toss it out to the audience. What's the hole with the most uses? Yes.

Sam wants to know. At SciShow Tangents on Twitter. Yeah, tell me. Maybe. If Twitter. Oh no. All right, wild. Ceri, that's very weird.

Sam, what do you got? Ceri and Hank, let me teach you a little something about viruses. And if I'm wrong at any point, please tell me, cause this was really hard. When you're a virus, you sort of have to pick whether you're going to go after cells with nuclei or cells without nuclei.

True so far? And you're pretty much locked into that choice. Like you want to infect a bacteria. Well, you, my friend, are a bacteriophage and you aren't going to be able to go after cells with nuclei, like say maybe spider cells. And sometimes when you're a virus multiplying in cells, you tend to pick up things in those cells like DNA.

Like let's say that you're a bacteriophage. You probably got some bacteria DNA floating around in you on account of all the bacteria that you infect, but assumedly you couldn't have any spider DNA, right? Am I right, Omar? Okay. Yeah, if you're a bacteriophage, I know no reason how some spider DNA, right? Yeah. Am I right, Omar? Okay. Yeah, if you're a bacteriophage, I know no reason how some spider DNA in you.

Ah, but what do we do when we assume my friends? You see, in 2016, researchers at Vanderbilt who are sequencing the genome of a bacteriophage called WO found DNA that matches DNA that black widows use to make a toxin in their venom. But what the heck? If these viruses only target bacteria, how did it get spider DNA inside of it?

WO's target is a bacteria called Wolbachia, and Wolbachia infects arthropods like black widows. And when it infects arthropods, it hides inside cell membranes, safe and sound from bacteriophages. And similar to a virus, as a bacteria is doing all that slipping in and out of cells, it's gonna get some junk stuck to it along the way, including DNA from its arthropod hosts.

And as previously mentioned, viruses end up with DNA in them too, and they don't care if that DNA comes from a bacteria or a black widow. So now you've got a bacteriophage with black widow toxin DNA, which is what they found, and is the first time the animal DNA has ever been found in a bacteriophage with black widow toxin DNA, which is what they found and is the first time that animal DNA has ever been found in a bacteriophage. So scientists aren't totally sure if these viruses use the toxin, but the toxin makes holes in cell membranes and these viruses do have to get inside of arthropod cell membranes to get to Wolbachia. So it seems sort of like they do use it.

And in this case, I think the toxin would be considered a poison. Thus validating this as a poison fact, but there's also a bit of a chicken and an egg situation here that scientists are also looking into. Did the bacteriophage get the ability to make cell damaging poison from the spider DNA passed to it from a bacteria or did spiders get the ability to make cell damaging poison from the spider DNA passed to it from a bacteria, or did spiders get the ability to make cell damaging venom from bacteriophage DNA passed to it from a bacteria? Nobody knows, obviously.

But there are only those two options, so it's one of those two and either one is very cool. Yeah. Uh-huh. And WO also contains DNA sequences that are used in animal cells to sense pathogens and trigger cell death and avoid immune responses. So while it's way more likely that this virus has just collected a bunch of junk over the eons, it and other viruses like it might have taught ourselves a lot of tricks that make life

possible. Ceri, I have a question for you which is which way is cooler for it to get this DNA? Is it cooler for the spider to have gotten a toxin from a bacteriophage? Or is it cooler for the bacteriophage to have gotten it from a bacteria that got it from the spider? I think spider from bacteriophage is cooler because spiders were just harmless at one point and then

I like that it got it from the spider because it couldn't get it directly from the spider would have to get it from the Bacteria that right, right, right is wild for genes to just be like we I'll go wherever. Well, now I have to choose which is the we're cooler, weirder fact. And Sarah's got a point is a point ahead already. Will it be ants disinfecting their whole situation with their butt poison, including their insides and their outsides and their nests? Or researchers finding spider DNA in a bacteriophage. But how?

Mmm, these are both very good I think that's air is gonna pull away from this one But only because she came into it with the lead these points those points used to not mean anything. I'm offended that they're a tiebreaker They're really a tiebreaker is what they're there to give us like 400 points arbitrarily for our facts. You've changed well, you got 400 and Sari got 400 and those, she's got 401. Oh, shoot. Okay. Yeah.

Cha-ching. But it gets 400. All right. Now it's time to ask the Science Couch where we've got a listener question for our couch to finally home. Jan Rhett Sammies on Discord and Emily Naidvala on YouTube ask, is there poisonous venom? I mean, if you put it in your blood, if you put it in your interstitial tissues and it's doing damage,

you put it in your tummy, it's very likely to also do damage. I'm sure that there are venoms that aren't poisonous that like you're like in the acidic environment of your stomach They'd be pretty immediately inactivated But there's got to be lots that you wouldn't want to put very much of in you and also as I said in the poem You have enough of anything. It's gonna get you uncomfortable Did that make sense? Sari? How did I do the the message of SciShow tangents is do not drink venom do not eat it Please don't. Just go to one of those like places where they're making anti-venom and they're constantly milking snakes and take a shot.

Don't do that. Don't do that. That's rude. Yeah. But if you want to get really, really technical about it, venom, because it goes into your bloodstream, that's's an easier distribution pathway. So venoms often contain big proteins that can get denatured. And proteins getting denatured is just when there's enough heat or a molecular reaction

for some reason, then they unfold and then they can't do the thing. So a toxic protein would no longer be toxic and mess with your cells and be the poison anymore. Venoms do have different toxicity, whether you inject them or you take them orally. And researchers do look into this, mostly on mice. It's always mice of injecting things versus feeding them to them and to test. And the main thing is that we just don't have, we don't, we don't really test venoms, like eating a lot of different types of venoms, but when we do, there are like a couple things we've learned. And so that's, that's what I found. Um, they, one, one study tested 17 different snake venoms, um, just to see whether you could heat them and denature the proteins and all but five of the 17. So 12 of them after heating lost basically all of their

activity. So they're just boiling. That's just, yeah, that's like eating a steak. And it's just, I wouldn't say that. Say it's like some dirty water, maybe. Not something particularly nutritious either. But there are certain beverages that integrate that integrate venom inside them. So like snake wine is prepared by steeping a whole venomous snake in rice wine. And there has been at least one person who is admitted to the hospital because his blood stopped clotting after drinking snake wine. Other people have emerged from it anecdotally fine. I was looking at lab protocols and it seems like 70% ethanol is the standard cleaning supply for any toxin venom waste.

So I would say if you're making alcohol out of venom, I would make it at least 70% ABV, which I don't think wine is necessarily. I don't think so. You would want like a distilled grain and then submerge your snake in it. And then you can say you've drunk venom. You can make snake ever clear, but you cannot make snake wine. Yeah, but. Sounds like it's going to cause a lot of problems.

It sounds bad. but you cannot make snake wine. Yeah, but- I don't know, it sounds like it's gonna cause a lot of problems. It sounds bad, everything sounds bad, but like high enough concentrations of ethanol might help denature the proteins. Like that's the idea too. Also would take care of any bacteria that might be growing. Yeah. Which I don't like the idea of.

And then the only other fact I have is that tetrodotoxin, which is mostly known for puffer fish. So if you eat poorly prepared puffer fish, where the gland that contains the tetrodotoxin has been severed and leaks into the rest of the flesh, then you will be poisoned. But tetrodotoxin is also used as a venom by other species. And so there are biologically speaking, some species that use the exact same compound as a venom and poison depending on

where you look in the animal kingdom. So yes, even without drinking snake venom, there is poisonous venom out there because they're all toxins. They all fall under the same umbrella and some animals just deliver the same toxin in a different way. Cool. Well, if you want to ask the Science Cows your question, you can follow us on

Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Broken Thumbs on Discord and at RealityMinus3 and everybody else who asked us questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron. You get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. We have a tier where you can get a special in-episode shout out, which is the tier that patron John Pollock subscribed to.

Thank you, John. Thanks, John. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Lixman. Our story editor is Alan Fabillo. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Davopita Bhardhi. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hofmeister and Peter Pan-Green. And of course we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on

the YouTube channel. Thank you and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be seen, but a fire. But one more thing. Goats can eat plants like poison oak without being harmed by the urushiol oils that can cause horrible rashes on humans. And surprisingly, it doesn't seem like researchers know how goats protect themselves, like if there are proteins in their spit that help. But an article from 1992 found that in goats that were only fed poison oak for 10 days, over 90% of the urushiol from the leaves was absorbed or broken down during digestion, leaving less than 9% of it in their poop, and none in their milk or pee. So if you use goats for landscaping, there's probably no need to worry about poison poop,

but don't roll around in it anyway. Please. I mean, that's still like 9%. Seems like it's funny. If it's like exclusively Yerushial eating. Where is it going? It's not in their milk or their pee and you can eat goats. What's going on here?

It's probably turned into different... It's broken down chemically. Okay. Okay. You're not storing it up in some kind of sack or something? That'd be great though. That's how the African crested rat would do it. Yeah.

Have a big Yerushi all sack and it would spray it on predators and I'd have it on my shoulder and I'd get it to do it to people who are rude to me at the grocery store. Yeah, don't let goats and rats meet each other or else they'll start getting ideas. Yeah, they'll whisper to each other. Transfer some genes and we'll all be in lots of trouble. Yeah. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, it's the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green, and joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly.

Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. So how are we feeling about new year's resolutions in the scientific community? Cause I've heard that they're not much. There's no, there's not much that recommends them. I thought you meant like we, as the three of us us how are we feeling about New Year's resolutions For us and our brains in this job

How I feel about it is that the like the evidence suggests that this isn't the way to do it So I'm trying to not even though my brain says you should probably do that Have some have some goals. I think you told me this last year And so last year I didn't make any goals and I had a go bad about it. I kind of felt bad about it all year. Well, don't worry. You would have felt bad when you didn't meet your goals. Yeah. So I guess you just feel bad no matter what you do. We should stop ending little goals. Yeah, I think I might make this is a good idea. I might make some this year. I think super achievable things.

Yeah, that's my general strategy is like whenever I feel a burst of motivation, you know, you know the one. January, it's never it. January, I'm tired, it's cold, I just want to be warm. But like April, that's a good time. October for me, great time. I love the beginning of October for summer. On October resolution. There's kind of that breeze in the air and it's bracing you and you just can be in. Yeah, it's a little bit colder so then I don't feel like I'm hot all the time

and so I can exercise without sweating too, too much. So I recommend resolutions intermittently just when you feel like you can do it. So we need Halloween resolutions. Yes. Turn your favorite holiday into a motivational one also, Sam. What's the smallest thing that can, that still counts as a resolution. So it can't be something I'm already doing, but it has to be like so achievable that I'm definitely going to achieve it. This is what I'm looking for.

I have one. Mine is that whenever I get a haircut, I want to leave the haircutty place with an appointment for my next haircut, which is something that I have heard a lot of people do. But I have never done. I kind of feel like it's way weirder that you don't schedule your next one before you leave. It's like when you leave, they're probably like,

did that guy just leave without scheduling his next one? It's like, why? leave, they're probably like, did that guy just leave without scheduling his lesson? It's like, why? They think I'm so strange. He's like, what a weirdo. He's a YouTuber, right? That's what they say. That explains it. They're like, he comes back, so he didn't hate his haircut, but... I think this is achievable for you. I think you can do this.

I'm just gonna do that. That's the thing that I'm gonna change about my lifestyle, and it's very boring. I think those are the best kinds of resolutions because those are the sustainable changes. Sustainable changes. This is what we're looking for. I'm not trying to revolutionize my life. I'm just trying to make one thing a little easier. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight

each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory, but they're also playing for Hank bucks and one of them will win at the end of the episode. Now as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week it's from me. I'm sorry if this seems icky, but everything's a little bit sticky. Particles they stick together like hooks in a bird's feather.

There's a tiny invisible force tether, describing it's a little bit tricky. Now, different particles stick different amounts, and depending on that, they can stick or bounce, or slide past each other like a basket of balls, and some particles barely stick at all. Sticking, sliding, and bouncing mass is solid, liquid, or finally, gas. With enough energy, it's a no-brainer. They bounce off each other and fill their container. Gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas. I felt like they needed like a last couplet to make, to round out the poem, but I couldn't figure it out. I feel like it was done, but like in terms of the vibe, it wasn't done.

So I just said gas a bunch of times. Forget physics class or whatever. Just listen to that poem. You can skip all of like 10th grade or something. I did it. I did all of 10th grade. I did States of Matter. Plasma, don't even think about it. That's a different thing.

Don't worry about it. It's for TVs only, right? That's right. And blood. That's different stuff, right? Is that two different stuff? The plasma and blood. The plasma and TV. Yeah.

No, TVs are made from blood. That's the secret that big TV doesn't want you to know. That's how they do it so cheaply. They just take people's blood. So the topic of the day is glass. Glass? I hope not. It's gas, which is a state of matter. And I tried to explain using our traditional SciShow

tangents balls in my poem, What Gas Is. But I'm sure that there are some edge cases that are going to mess this up. Sari, what is gas? I didn't want to think about the edge cases, but yes. Good idea. Let's not do it. It's... There are the states of matter, like you said,

solid, liquid, gas, plasma. Yeah. We can dip a little bit into plasma if you want. But basically, gas is generally neutrally charged particles that are far apart balls bouncing off of each other. They're so far apart that in most cases, we can't see them. They're all around us in the atmosphere scattered about. Yeah. And when you see something, so like if you say you see steam or smoke or something, there are gases as part of that, but the steam, like the opaqueness is condensed liquid water,

very, very tiny droplets. So when you see like steam in the shower, you're not really seeing steam. That's little droplets and there's like humidity around. When, like in a power plant where they're using steam, like actual water vapor, just like pure vaporized water to drive turbines, that is entirely invisible and you would only see it as heat. And it is so dangerous that it's a concern that sometimes there can be a steam leak and you can't see it and all it would do is just completely destroy your body. Yeah, so gases are weird if you think about it because I feel like a lot of people would say, oh, I've seen gas, I've seen steam. There are some visible gases. Yeah, there are like light, light yellow. Yeah, like yellow, like a bromine gas is orange.

But for the most part, gases you sense with your other senses. So either the temperature of them, if it's exceptionally hot, you can smell some gases, but not others. So like mercaptan is a gas that gets added to a natural gas pipe because that methane is generally odorless, but then you can smell mercaptan. So you can't see it. You wouldn't be able to smell it, but we add a smelly gas so that you can whiff it. But otherwise, gas is a pretty undetectable or hard to study thing.

Which is really interesting. We know so much about it now. Yeah. It was kind of a long time before we were like, I bet that stuff's the same stuff as the other stuff. That was a big insight for humans. It's weird to stick your hand out of a really fast car and be like, wow, gas can be pretty hard. Like a hurricane force wind, it's just gas. Just gas hitting you.

It's just real fast gas. Yeah, it's fast gas. And so then there's like more of it in a smaller place, kind of, because it's all hitting you. Sure. You said it was a long time before we figured that out. What's a long time? Yeah. So the origin of the word gas comes from the 1650s or so.

Oh wow. There's a Flemish chemist named Jean-Baptiste von Helmont. Nice. Who was an earlier chemist. Definitely not a vampire, don't worry. Yeah, he could have been a vampire hunter, okay? Definitely not a vampire. One of the two.

And instead of studying blood, he was studying gas and he was just like looking at chemical reactions that produce gas. He especially was perplexed by carbon dioxide because he couldn't get it to condense. And so he made up the word gas, he especially was perplexed by carbon dioxide because he couldn't get it to condense. So he made up the word gas probably from the Greek word chaos, meaning empty space. Oh, wow. What? Which is very cool. He's probably influenced by the 16th century physician

and natural philosopher Paracelsus, who chaos to denote spirit things. We just don't understand. There's spirits. And so this chemist was like, well, gas? I don't know. It's a mystery. CB But he didn't really know what gas was, but that's the origin of the thing. BT Yeah. So it was in a book that was published posthumously. And he said this vapor, he wrote this in Latin, I think, this vapor hitherto unknown, I call by a new name, gas. Nice. Like, here's this weird thing. This is weird thing.

I would call it a gas. It's wild. Like we spent, you know, hundreds of thousands of years existing in a soup of particles that we cannot live without, and we didn't think to give it a name until like 400 years ago. So what did we think farts were? What was going on? What do we think was going on there? Yeah, I don't know. Bad air. I think that there was the word air. My guess would be that air, because air was, like Hank said, early medicine was like, bad air is bad for your soul or whatever. And we knew that you had to breathe, and that we were breathing

something. But air was probably separate from the state of matter that is gas, of like a chemical thing that is gas. Yeah. Paracelsus, like anybody who's got a name like Paracelsus, where you're just like, I renamed myself a word. Those people are great. Like Carl Linnaeus. This is the first time I've ever heard of him.

He's just gonna, like, yeah, he's just gonna be like, you know, my name's Carl, but I'm gonna change my last name to Linnaeus, because my whole thing is lineages. Like, will that be fun? Yeah. You're like, I'm going to be Hank Simon. Hank YouTube. It's your ass.

Hank Tube Boy. Mr. Tube Boy, thank you for joining us today. Our keynote speaker today, Mr. Tube Boy. It's Dr. Tube Boy. I changed it. Sam, to answer your question about the word fart, it was apparently one of those imitative words. I know it comes from old English, fjorten, F-E-O-R-T-N, which I guess is what they thought farts sounded like.

Oh, you're making a fjorten out of your butt. So it's a sound word rather than a gas word. That sounds about right. Yeah. The farts are, are they're kind of more about the sound than the smell. Like they're they're definitely of two parts Yeah, the sound is the sound is funny. That is the smell. Yeah, the sound is like fun. Yeah, the smell can be pretty bad So that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week I've got a game.

We're playing a game and it's called Brainstorm. So Brainstorm is a pretty simple game. I'll ask you a question. I'll give you a number for how many possible answers there are to the question and you'll have two minutes, the guests out loud, trying to avoid interrupting each other if you can. You'll get a point for any answer you get correct, and there are no penalties for wrong answers. Round number one, we're going to talk about helium. So helium is used for a bunch of stuff more than just filling balloons, and it can

be used to achieve cold temperatures for scientific applications. It can provide an unreactive environment for manufacturing certain technologies. Helium is great because referring to the poem earlier, it's like the least sticky of the particles. So it stays a gas until very, very low temperatures. To that end, because it is so useful, some countries have national reserves of helium extracted from natural gas.

And the US has one of the largest with helium extracted from plants around the country. In 2022, the US Geological Survey said that there were 15 plants across seven states that extract helium from natural gas to produce crude helium. What are those seven states? Bonus points if you can guess the state

with the largest number of helium plants. Go! Helium plants? I've never heard of one here, so I feel like there isn't one here. There's helium in Texas. That is correct. They have everything out of the ground in Texas.

Great. Nevada. That is not correct. Colorado. That is correct correct. Colorado. That is correct. What? Oklahoma. Correct.

Oh, it goes that way too, eh? What's the one that Bill Clinton used to be the governor of? Arkansas. No. Shoot. Mississippi? No. Alabama? No. Shoot. Mississippi? No.

Alabama? No. Kansas? That's the one, that's the one with the most. Map of US. Oh, Jesus. New Mexico? Yes.

Oh, shoot, that was an obvious one. North Dakota? No. I think that's too far up for helium, in my opinion. Utah? Does Utah have helium? Yes. What about? There's something, oh, it's too far up for helium in my opinion, Utah. Utah have helium. Yes. What about?

Oh, it's all over everybody. You only missed one. You did a great job. You really sort of centered in on the areas where helium comes from quite quickly. You missed Arizona, which was is around those other states. All right. Round number two. This one's a little different.

It's going to be a matching game. One application for noble gases is to make neon signs. You put a noble gas in a tube, apply an electric voltage, and watch the color that forms as atoms bump into each other and excite their electrons. So for the noble gases, neon, helium, krypton, and argon, which each produce the following four colors, green, blue, pink, and red. Go! Oh, I used to know this. Argon, which each produce the following four colors, green, blue, pink and red. Go! Oh, I used to know this. Argon is red. No. Is that right? Oh, no. Helium's blue.

Helium's not blue. Helium's blue. No. Neon is green. No. Oh, no. Neon is red. Yes. Is Helium pink? Yes. Krypton is green. Krypton is green. Krypton is green. Makes sense, like Superman. What's left?

Argon is blue. Argon is blue. Oh wow, Ceri got it right before you. Oh come on, from my perspective we tied. So Ceri got three out of that one. Good job, that was great. That was fun. All right, that was not gonna take two minutes. In round number three, we're gonna talk about lifting gases, which are gases that have a lower

density than the air around them, which lets the gas rise. That property has been very useful in designing various aircrafts like balloons and blimps. The National Aviation Academy describes six lifting gases that have been used to fly aircraft. What are they? Go! Helium. Is helium one of them? Yes. Hydrogen? Yes. Oh, God. I don't know any of this. And Ceri's going to know all of them. Have we used water vapor? Nope.

What's the stuff? Natural gas. What's that made out of? Methane? That's correct. Sam gets that one. I'll let you have that, Sam. Nitrogen gas? No. There's so much of it. I will give a hint that it doesn't necessarily have to be a pure gas. Oh. Carbon dioxide or monoxide, one of those.

No. Both. What's the laughing gas mixture? Ooh, nitrous oxide. Good guess, but no. Tough luck, Sarie. Yeah. I wouldn't do anything dangerous I hope of like like no chlorine, not chlorine gas. Whether it's dangerous or not is does not matter. I don't think that matters. But chlorine is not one of them. There is a dangerous gas or two on this list. I'm running out of my gas knowledge.

Ethylene? Nope. You guys are gonna kick yourselves with one of these. Bidding ding ding, time is up. The one that you're gonna kick yourselves about is hot air. Oh, no. You know the classic gas, air. I told you it could be a mixture.

The classic thing that's inside of almost all current lifting craft. Yeah, there's a whole balloon named after hot air. Oh, no. Yeah. Wow. But, Sari, let's see if we can do it this way. So a gas is going to be lighter if it has, if it's a gas that is a molecule, not an atom,

but it has connected to it light atoms. So hydrogen, but not a hydrocarbon. That already makes you sound very smart. Yeah. Well, hydrogens are, they bond to anything. They're a little, they hang out. They saturate. Nitrogen, ammonia? Got it, there it is.

Wow. Very, very good. Now ammonia, and then the last one was, you weren't gonna get coal gas, which was used for a while, which has got, it's got hydrogen and a bunch of other stuff. You heat up coal and the gas that comes off is lighter than air.

All right, I have no idea what that did for the scores, but hopefully Faith was paying attention. And Sari is at seven and Sam is at six. Very close, you guys. Neck and neck. Not as dumb as I look. Come on. Next up, we're gonna take a short break.

Then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and I will award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. Laughing gas, as we discussed earlier, is nitrous oxide, N2O, a colorless gas that was discovered by Joseph Priestley at the end of the 18th century. But its use as an anesthetic wasn't discovered until later, when an American dentist named Horace Wells attended a demonstration where a volunteer was given the gas only to

injure his leg on some nearby benches without feeling any pain. When Wells realized that nitrous oxide seemed to have been, uh, seemed to have pain killing properties, he decided to put it to the test while having his tooth extracted by another dentist. That's great. I love that. Try it out. Also, I love like, if you're gonna be on nitrous, I'm not surprised that you injured your leg walking down at a science demonstration. But what year did Wells discover that laughing gas could be used as an anesthetic? Could this be like disturbingly late? Could this have been like 1955 or something like that?

Could be. Is that your guess? That's my guess. Okay. I think it's earlier than that. I think it's, oh, we just didn't know a lot about gas. Uh, 1880. 1844. Sarah coming out on top gets to decide who goes first. Oh, I'll go first.

And I will listen with rapt attention as you attempt to blow my mind. The substance that we call natural gas, as we've talked about, is mostly methane, which has the structure CH4 and other hydrocarbons, which are all molecules made of various carbons and hydrogens bonded together. It's one of those straightforward chemical names, which I'm grateful for as a science communicator. And natural gas is used as the fuel for lots of things like heating or cooking in part because it's very flammable. And a big part of why many people still use it

is that a huge infrastructure of pipes and whatnot exists to carry the gas to homes or factories or whatnot. And that got me thinking, it's not easy to capture and control and move around gas. The people who sell farts are probably lying because there is definitely not an airtight seal. So you are mostly paying for an expensive weird jar of normal air. So basically, what I have brought for a fact off today is an abridged history of gas storage and transport, which I think is more exciting than it sounds.

Wow. Oh, Hank Hill's freaking out out there, you know. A lot of gases today are stored in various often metal, often cylindrical containers, I'm oversimplifying a lot, where the gas is squeezed in at a pressure way higher than the standard atmospheric pressure. This saves space, helps with transportation, and is a consequence of having the knowledge and technology to heat and cool and separate lots of different gases and then cram them into these containers.

Before gas cylinders were the vaguely named gas holders, which were mostly large chambers like the size of a farm silo for natural gas or coal gas, which we talked about, which is made when coal is heated in a vacuum, were stored at atmospheric pressure. We didn't figure out squeezing until the 1900s, really. It's tricky.

And from my understanding, there were a lot of these gas holders in Europe and or wherever chemists were. Around the 1800s, when Lavoisier was alive, he developed a desktop device called a gazometre. Yeah, yeah. That's great French. Never try. That's what I do with French. I can do Spanish, not French. He made this gasometer out of glass and some metal bits so that he could produce and weigh gases. And slightly before that, my boy, Jean-Baptiste Van Helmont from the entomology section was just experimenting with gases like carbon dioxide and closed vessels, but not necessarily transporting them around. And what I am most excited to share, but I felt like I needed more scientific and historical

context to make it a fact off is before that in China, somewhere in the 900 to 200 BCE years, people were drilling for both brine because because salt is useful, and natural gas, because fuel is useful. And as far as I can tell from secondary sources, the main way that natural gas was drilled for, stored, and transported was through bamboo stocks, which I guess makes sense. You punch a hole in the earth and then seal up and use that same hollow tube to collect gas and prevent it from mixing with the atmosphere. and then you move it around as best you can to where you need fuel for fire and then you light it on fire etc. Before that all I could find was anecdotal accounts of people finding natural gas reserves because they were

set on fire by lightning or some other environmental phenomenon but not harnessing the gas in any way because it's invisible and hard to fathom, much less control and capture. So all that to say, I'm sure there's more history of gaseous fuel, but it's not readily Googleable so you'll have to just send it to us or go on an adventure yourself. Do we know what exactly they were doing with the bamboo? It was just like, what were they powering? I think using it as fire to boil water to extract the salt from the brine, mainly for heat, I think.

Heat or cooking. So similar things that we use natural gas for today, except instead of an infrastructural system. that we use natural gas for today except instead of a infrastructural system, they just were like, oh, I punched a hole in the ground, have some gas in a tree that I top down and I'm going to bring it wherever I need it. Would you like fill up a wagon with bamboo full of gas? A lot of people described it as using bamboo pipes, but that doesn't make sense to me as like forming a seal or there's nothing to put pressure on.

So I think yes, my impression of it is that you would use it as what later was like a gas holder, like a vessel or a gas cylinder and stop it up some way and then load it onto a cart and then bring it wherever you needed it and then somehow tap into it and let the gas out They had their own little Hank Hill back then Yeah, I'm gonna propane accessories Bring in his wagon around There you go. So here's your bamboo

Well, then what do you got mining is dangerous and coal mining is even more dangerous because coal and the gases that seep out of it are poisonous and explosive. And throughout history, sometimes coal mines would explode or coal miners would drop dead for kind of mysterious reasons. So in the 1890s, a scientist named John Scott Haldane set out to investigate what undetectable thing was killing miners and causing explosions. And he quickly discovered that the culprit to be carbon monoxide. But just knowing what

was causing these accidents wasn't enough because, unfortunately, in addition to being toxic and flammable, carbon monoxide is odorless so you pretty much can't notice it before it is too late. So Haldane started experimenting on himself, hoping to find ways to detect carbon monoxide before it made him pass out and die. And experimenting on himself was something that Haldane was famous for. Like in World War I, he designed the first gas mask while experimenting on himself with gases used in gas warfare. And he pioneered a lot of research into what happens when your body gets too high and too low, like the pressure is too high and too low.

The dude just loved breathing weird stuff and breathing in weird ways. Uh, but anyway, I guess in this case, Haldane couldn't figure out how to detect carbon monoxide before he passed out. So he started experimenting on small animals and eventually he found that canaries were 20 times more sensitive to carbon monoxide than people. So they would pass out in places with low enough carbon monoxide concentration to warn miners that things were getting dangerous so the miners could get out of there.

So based on his findings, miners all over the world started carrying their own personal canaries in cages down into mines with them as like an advanced warning device. And you might think, as I did, mostly because of cartoons, that this was sort of a cruel practice because the canary would drop dead. But John Scott Holdane was, it seems, sort of a bleeding heart when it came to animals. So he tested on them, but he allegedly didn't like to do anything to them that he wouldn't do to himself. And so as part of his canary coal mine discovery, he also invented a sort of comedically

complicated device that you could use to revive passed out canaries. So the contraption was like a steel and glass box with a grate on one side and a little oxygen tank on top. So once your canary friend started to show signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, like it stopped singing or it just like falls off its perch, you could swing the little door closed and like seal it up and turn the oxygen tank on

and bring your little guy back to life. So you can feel sorry for canaries and invent cages to keep them from dying all you want, but that doesn't mean that miners or mining companies will actually use them. And for that matter, a lot of images of canaries and coal mines do show them like in normal cages, but there are also photo evidence of miners actually using these recessive eating cages. And that might seem like a lot of trouble to go through for just a little bird, but there are also accounts of miners being like super into and loving their little canary friends. So I guess it does kind of make sense that you wouldn't want them to die. Canaries were used in coal mines until 1986 when a portable

poison gas detector was introduced to mines, which I thought was just crazy that it took so long to get anything besides a bird. I mean, I guess I knew that there, like it wasn't just a saying, but I didn't realize how institutionalized and like widespread the practice was. I knew they used them cause I think I come from Butte where a lot of mining happened,

but I thought for sure they just croaked and the miners were like, and whatever. But everybody go leave the bird. The birds like, leave without me. But yes, it's a little bird in a little cage. Now I want to know all about this person in this relationship with this canary. Yeah, would they bring him home or was there like a canary keeper at the mine? So many questions.

I bet they brought him home. That would be a cool job. Like a little intern at the mine. You get to be a canary keeper. Yeah. All right. So you are really close coming into this and both of those facts were very good. But for pure ability to make a great TikTok out of it, Sam's going to be the winner of this episode.

Congratulations, Sam! Thank you. I humbly accept. Glad. That would be really weird if you didn't. So now it's time to ask the Science Couch where we got a question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. Napoleon on Discord asks, what makes farts so loud? Great question. An all-time question. An all-time question.

An all-time question. A real everyman kind of question. I feel like I'm not sure. Things that make sounds loud are usually some kind of resonance where, you know, like our face is full of resonance chambers so we can make louder, richer sounds. And, you know, your guitar's got a big resonance chamber in it. Butts don't have resonance chamber. So they can't be that.

Is it vibrating butt cheeks? Yeah. I wonder to what extent. I feel like there's two potential fart noises. There's a noise of the actual cheeks. That makes it like what's happening in that situation is a pressure builds up until the cheeks separate and then the pressure is released and there's no pressure anymore so they slap back together. Yeah. And that happens over and over again because the pressure continues to rebuild every time the cheeks slap back together. But I think that also happens with the anus itself

where the anus kind of can do some slapping. And so I wonder, I don't actually don't know if there's like two different fart noises, like in two different mechanisms, or if they sort of like happen together somehow. Because it seems like the kind of thing that I would have thought about before, but I don't feel like I put a lot of mental energy behind. Sarah nodded during that, which makes me feel good.

As if I was getting something right. So the butt cheeks one, the jury is out. I think most people say no. I think most people say no, butt cheeks don't vibrate fast enough. There's no butt cheek involved. To like this motion that you're going to, your butt cheek, the way that gas comes out,

it's not gonna go more than a little bit. In a cartoon, the butt cheeks are vibrating all over the place, because that's how they show the fart. But in real life, the gas comes out fast enough that the noise isn't coming from the butt cheeks laughing together. This is shocking. I can't believe it.

You heard it here first. Sam's whole vision of the world is changing right now. Yeah. So it's just anus. It's anus. It's all anus, as far as we can tell, where kind of like how like trumpet players use their their mouth or as like an... Yeah, make the bu the buzzing noise, make the vibrations. Your anal sphincter does that little vibration and that noise is affected by the velocity of the gas as you push it out, the volume of gas, and then your natural

personal shape and size of your anal sphincter. Everybody's got a different fart voice, huh? And then your natural personal shape and size of your anus. Everybody's got a different fart voice, huh? Everyone, yeah. It's got a different anus. Much like everyone's got a little different hole on the face, you've got a different hole on the butt. And that changes your resting tone of fart.

Oh, man. And so you can manipulate the sounds of farts by like tightening or releasing. So as you, like anyone has tried to hold in a fart or release it gradually over time and that can change the volume and pitch of a fart because it changes the way that that muscle vibrates. And I don't know if you're trying to have a fart not make noise. What you want is for the pressure to be enough to overcome the tightness of the sphincter and enough to keep it open

and not to have the thing happen where it's opening, like the pressure opens it and then the release of pressure closes it again so that the pressure builds up again. So you, so, and that's a function both of like the pressure and of the looseness or tightness of the sphincter. And so, so those of us who can do a good job, and I do think that like what it makes it seem like it's the butt cheeks is that if you lean off of the, of the thing, you can make it so that the fart noise, but I think that that's

actually loosening, not the butt cheeks, but it's loosening the sphincter. Cause when you're sitting on your butt, you're, you know, that you're, that you're putting pressure on that muscle. I feel like I'm in college right now. Well, yeah. And like, you also have to consider all of what I read is specifically about the sphincter and its vibrations. Like more air coming out at once tend to be louder,

less air coming out, like seeping out, tend to be not from swallowed air, but from intestinally generated air. So those are like the silent but deadly parts. But they're stinkier. They're stinkier, but like louder ones are, like you swallow a lot of air, you drank a soda.

Because I just drank a Coke, yeah. So silent but deadly is scientifically accurate. Is that what you're basically saying? Wow. Yes. But yeah, there's like your pants to think about, other layers that create that pressure for the sound. There's always your pants to think about.

You gotta think about your pants. Please don't forget them. The squeaky chair beneath you that may or may not be causing the fart or if it's just a plasticky chair, is it echoing up? I don't get it. The squeaky chair beneath you that may or may not be causing the fart, or if it's just a plasticky chair, is it echoing up? I don't know. Right. Parts of vibrations. Or does the chair become like a resonance chamber? And I wonder if like the colon,

like a colon full of gas is its own resonance chamber, where that's amplifying some of the sound. That I'm not sure of. Who knows? But there's some, most of that study of like echoing farts comes along with some sort of bow loss of bowel control where like you can't hold in a fart because you can't control the sphincter. And so that usually is like both fart and stool and all kinds of gastro related issues. And so at that point, if you can't hold in a fart

and the air is just coming out, then probably the colon's gonna echo it some more too. Cause it's just like, it's all coming out. I know that there are some younger listeners to SciShow Tangents. And to them, I wanna say, I hope this has been a lot of fun. Your parents are just really working through it right now. Your parents are just really working through it right now.

And also, I hope that you just learned the word stool and that Sari worked really hard to not say the word shart. If you want to ask the Sci and Scout your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week, or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at Yaide and at Liz Does Museums and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, very easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. You can become a patron, get the access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes.

Special thanks to patrons John Pollock and Les Aker. Second, you can move us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, you want to show your love for sideshow tangents? Just tell people about us. Because how else are they going to find out how hearts truly work? Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz.

Sideshow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glickspin. Our story editor is Alex Pillow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Zio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chopra Vardy. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Mendish. Our executive producers are Kailin Hausmeister and me, Hank Green, and of course we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lightened. But one more thing.

Animals make all kinds of noises when they're surprised. And we know of two species of snakes, the Sonoran coral snake and the Western hooknose snake that use a technique called cloacal popping, which is basically farting that's supposed to be scary. The cloaca is a multipurpose hole that... I'm like, our farts that just are scary. That's not the intent? Our farts are terrifying.

They can be. The cloaca is a multipurpose hole that deals with waste and reproduction, so there's some muscle control involved. To make these low, frequent popping noises, these snakes rhythmically contract and release their cloacal sphincter muscles to compress the gas inside them and squeeze it out in sudden bursts, just like a fart we were talking about. And if there's other waste up in there, it might fling out with the expelled gas too. Wow.

Undignified. Undignified. Undignified. Look, there's no dignity in life and death. You're already a snake. You're scary. You don't have to shit and fart. Pop pop. Pop pop! Hahahaha Music Hello and welcome to SciShow

Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Should I pay for a blue checkmark? Absolutely not.

On Twitter. No, no, everyone hates them. Well that's good then because I got one for free for some reason. And then I turned it off by changing my name, but then I kept all of the fun features. Like I get to post really long posts, I get to edit my posts. The show's going to be such a great record of what's happening with Twitter. The whole sort of the things that went down. There's so few people in your position who can experience it from the place that you're experiencing it from, you know?

Yeah. Well, what I didn't like is that when you click the little blue check mark, it said that I had done a thing that I hadn't done. That's not good. And so I private my account. And this is the real story, you guys. It's amazing. Oh. Twitter is so great when it's just the people. You and four million of your closest friends. Who already like me. That's the way to do it.

It's not like a drama-free zone by any stretch of the imagination. But I had in the previous week gotten a tweet sucked into the sort of right-wingosphere. And that always is really uncomfy. And now that doesn't happen because I'm private. If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, you can't. Tough luck, write him a letter, request it. It's tough out here out in the mud on the other side of the fence.

We're just slugging it out. Well, you could go private. That would be bad for us. I wouldn't like that. Yeah, that, yeah. What if I say, oh, you should listen to SciShow Tangents. People wouldn't see that. People need to see that.

People need to see that. That's what it's for. You're the SciShow Tangents number one fan, Sam Schultz. I should say that I did a trivia night the other day for Project for Awesome. And one of the categories was things you might have learned on Tangents. And there was a person who got every single question correct. Wow. Incredible.

Who had listened to every episode of SciShow Tangents multiple times. Ooh. Wow. And it was a total joy. And I was like, there's stuff in that. I didn't remember. Every week here in SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze

and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play and at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week is from me. Outside is great.

I love it. It's Bay. But sometimes you want to keep outside away. And that's what the inside is for. It's so good surrounded by concrete or metal or wood. It keeps out the cold or the damp or the heat. It keeps out the things that have too many feet. But there's one part of out that we often want in. And when we can do it, it's such a huge win. When we're sleeping, we do want to keep out the night. But when we're waking, you have to let in that light. So melt down some sand and some soda and lime and lay it out flat and then wait for a time and then take out that stuff

and put it in your wall and be careful not to hit it with a ball. Because inside is great. But it's best of all when it lets in the things that we want to get in. Beautiful. The topic for the day is glass. Have you ever thrown something through glass that you weren't supposed to? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a baseball and it was in my garage door glass. Classic.

My garage does not have glass windows in it, but in Florida, every garage had like a row of glass windows, which seems so dumb. Yeah, you see right in. It seems more expensive and worse. But I guess it's so that you can see when you got, you know. If there's an alligator in there before you open it. Maybe. That's it.

Yeah, or outside before you're ready to go out. Oh yeah. It can peep. Mm-hmm, there could be an alligator out there. What are other Florida dangers? You could just like avoid your neighbors too, before opening your garage door. That would be my main use, I think, is to be like, oh. Right.

Is anyone out there? I'm not ready to chat right now. So Sarah, what's glass? Glass? Glass puzzles a lot of people. I don't know if you get a lot of glass questions on TikTok. I get some glass questions. I feel like the confusing things about glass are mostly things that were made up

So so glass is a Non crystalline which means that it doesn't have a regular structure So another way of describing that is an amorphous solid most of the glass that there's around us. The main component is Silicon dioxide which is we can take from sand, quartz, melted down and then reformed into a shape that we wanted. There are other types of glass besides silica glass. For example, CDs or DVDs, that really thin layer of glass is also like an amorphous solid substance. It's chalcogenide glass, which is anything in group 16 of the periodic table.

I just figured it was plastic. Yeah, there's a layer of glass over the side with the movie on it. Yeah. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yep. Yep. And so there are other glasses besides silica glasses out there. It's like, it's like cell phone glass, silica glass.

Like obviously they've done something to this glass to make it stronger. Yeah. Over the years. I think it is. I think it's silica glass. And like silica glass can be treated in a lot of different ways as well.

So to make it stronger, it can be tempered, which is like heat treated. There can be additives to it. So in the case of the glass on our phone, I don't know if there's any additives to make it more conductive or help with the thinness of it. I didn't look up cell phone glass, but by and large, the thing that we know how to shape and to

make and the reason why we have sand shortages is the fact that silica glass is everywhere. And I think the reason why people get confused is because they think amorphous solid and they cling on to the word amorphous naturally because some ways that chemists describe amorphous things is that it acts like a liquid. Like a liquid is an amorphous substance which is all the atoms and molecules don't really have kind of an order, they kind of slosh around. And there is like a liquid phase of glassy materials, which is if you watch any glass blowing shows where it's kind of like gooping around. But after you quench it, when you cool it down

to a point where it's solid, the atoms and molecules are locked into place. They're just all over the place. Yeah, they're just all over the place. And so there's this idea that, and I think floating around in science communication spaces, that glass is like a liquid. And so then people think that if there's so much heat on windows, then it will gradually, gradually flow. But

it is a solid and that flowing only happens over the course of like ridiculously, ridiculously long time scales. And one piece of evidence that people bring up for this is that if you look at stained glass windows in medieval times, 13th century, then sometimes glass window panes are thinner at the top and thicker at the bottom. And they're like, ah ha ha, sun has been shining on this window and it has been the liquid nature of the glass has been making it thicker at the bottom. But that is just because of how that glass was made. We didn't have a really good way of making this big even panes of windows that we make

nowadays. And they had to like, basically make a big circle of glass and then cut out rectangles from it. And so they were naturally thicker and thinner spots. And it just makes sense to put the thicker spot at the bottom because it's more sturdy. Stable. So, but is there a time scale on which glass would flow? It would take billions of years to cause nano size alterations to the shape of glass. So that's not, it's not that it doesn't flow.

It's not that it doesn't flow, but for us to notice it, that's our puny human lifetimes. Billions of years for clarity, the whole time life has been around on a substantial portion of the life of the universe is what we're talking about here. And that's just for tiny changes, is that what you said? For nanoscale changes. Yeah, for nanoscale changes. Not even like macroscopic.

Definitely not windows melting. Yeah, I feel like we have done the work of size show tangents. Yeah. Like this thing that you heard about this thing, it's true, but only in the most tiny possible way you could possibly imagine. It makes sense that people would think it's true, but only in the most tiny possible way you could possibly imagine. It makes sense that people would think it's true though, because what Sari said sounds more fake

than that the glass is thicker at the bottom because it flowed down. And also like you look at old windows sometimes and they're like flowy. They look wavy and weird and new ones don't. So I guess it's because they've had time to get wavy, but no, they were always wavy. And you see so much,

like the main times people see glass manufacturing is, I feel like glass blowing, especially with Netflix and glass blowing TV shows. And so they're like, that's goopy. It is goopy. Of course it must like revert back to the goop, but we don't think about the big industrial processes that make the panes of glass

that we use in windows or atriums. This is the first time I've thought about that right now. And it's very different. It's like, we'll talk about it later a little bit as part of your question. I researched it, but it is like fascinating. And I didn't think about it before now either because you think glass is goop and then it's not goop.

Well, a little bit of foreshadowing for later in the show, but, Sarri, do you know where the word glass comes from? So we actually, we're getting to the point in the show where I know just enough etymology to do this segment, but not enough etymology to separate the words that we've already talked about. So glass comes from the same root word as glow, which is kind of like the Proto Indo-European root gel,

G-H-E-L, which means to shine. So glass, instead of being described as a material, glass was described by its property. It was like, oh, that's a shiny thing. And that's probably because natural glasses, like volcanic glasses that appeared, which is like volcanic glass obsidian, or desert glasses in Mesopotamia or like North Syria, Egypt area,

that were formed by asteroids impacting the sand and like heating them up really hot were just shiny. And so people were like, oh, the shiny thing, it's glass. How long have we been doing glass for? That's a good question. At least since like the turn of the, the before common era, common era. The history of glassmaking dates back

to at least 3,600 years ago to Mesopotamia. I just knew that off the top of my head. And I'm like, what? Hey, I remember, I remember. All right, I feel well informed on glass, and that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're gonna play a little game

called Primary Source. Sometimes the most fun thing that you can do with science is learn about how people used to talk about it. And luckily, thanks to the work of archivists and librarians and a lot of other people, it is easier than ever to find examples of texts in their original form so we can experience science in these other words.

So today, in honor of the wonders of the internet, we're trying a new game, it's called Primary Source. I'm going to be reading to you a quote that comes from some kind of article or advertisement whose subject is related to glass. I'll give you three options for what that subject is and you get to guess. Does that make sense? We already know about this game to both. You already cleared it with us. Great, great, great. Round number one, in 1883, the electrical power trade journal called The Electrical World included a segment

originally written by the London correspondent of the Philadelphia Telegraph. The correspondent had written of a growing trend powered by electricity and included the following line. Any color can be got out of glass, and for a tiny peep of light, the smallest battery is necessary. What was the trend they were talking about?

Christmas lights, electric jewelry, or flashing stained glass windows? Oh, electric jewelry. That one makes sense because of the tiny battery thing. What year was it? It was the year 1883. Were the rich people fancy enough to have electric jewelry? That does seem a little bit early to me

to do anything except like have it in your house, I guess. I don't know. Rich people are gonna rich though. It's true. They're gonna fight over blue check marks. They're certainly gonna fight over. Oh, you have a lamp in your house. I have one around my neck and it's not going to be small and dainty.

It's going to be like a big chunk or just like a full light bulb. The tiniest of batteries. Gosh, Christmas lights just feels like tailor-made to trick me. So I'm not going to guess that one. And the stained glass window thing. I think one. And the stained glass window thing. I think it might be the stained glass window thing. I feel like that doesn't like support what is said in the article, but he's a newspaper man. He could be overblown it. I feel like if I was that time in England,

knowing nothing about the socio-historical context, but just making vast assumptions. And you're from Philadelphia. Yeah. And the church would be like, oh, how can we make our windows look a little like, people are over stained glass windows. How can we make them a little more fancy? A little light there. And then this Rube walks by and goes, golly, that's crazy. I think it's the jewelry. I'm going with that one. That's what my heart's telling me. I think it's the same glass. Well, in the 18th and 19th century, electricity inspired a lot of inventions, including a trend in fashion. For example, electric jewelry. On stage, you could find electric headgear illuminating the performers,

and eventually that trend spread to wealthy women in their fancy dresses. The article was published by The Electrical World, which was a thing. And the writer says that in the place of diamonds or rubies, the correct thing now, this is a quote, is to wear a star or brooch illuminated by electricity upon the left shoulder instead of the diadems at first worn at fancy balls.

That's all possible thanks to the batteries, which a dressmaker told that the writer could be expected to make ladies dresses increase in size so that there would be space to secure the battery. Left shoulder is very specific. If you're right shoulder, that's for your little parrot friend. I was definitely picturing like a little necklace with a little battery inside of it.

But no, you got to have a whole thing. You need a special dress to hold it. Round number two. In 1845, the British medical journal, The Lancet, featured an article containing the following quote, Artificial is but a very bad substitute for natural light. Plants reared in a strong artificial light will become green and grow,

but the green is of a pale yellowish hue, and they are sickly looking and diseased. What was this article about? Was it instructions on molding glass for greenhouses, a treaties against the use of glass bulbs, or an argument against attacks on glass. Oh, interesting. Greenhouses make sense,

cause they're like, can't just put a light bulb in a greenhouse. You gotta have a window, big window. What was the middle one? Sorry, I missed it. The middle one was a treaties against the use of glass bulbs. Are they like, it's bad for plants,

and so it's bad for humans? I feel like that's the argument here. If this was part of that treatise, man, like plants, they're sickly, humans would also be sickly. Was the last one attacks on glass, on windows? Mm-hmm, yeah. So maybe that could be like, we need windows, because our plants, our plants need them.

Please stop attacking them. But I think you're right, Sari. I think I'm just going to go with what you said. Oh, I, I think it's the, I think it's the window tax. Oh, I thought you said attacks on windows. Like hiya. Taxing windows. Attacks on windows. A tax on windows. Well, you know, I stand by my logic, but I also stand by my answer. Well, it is indeed true that there have been a number of window taxes.

The first began in England in 1696. There was, ideally, this was going to be a progressive tax. So you were, if you had a bigger house, then you would pay more tax and it would only be charged if you had more than 10 windows. And you wouldn't have 10 windows unless you had a really big house. And so that's only a tax on rich people. Turned out, actually a lot of people

who are in the working class live in buildings with more than 10 windows because they live in apartment buildings And so those big tenement buildings Had to pay higher taxes. So they just started to board up the windows The landlords would board up the windows in their tenement houses. So they didn't have to pay the tax In addition to the window tax the government later added a huge tax on glass in general, which amounted to 300% of its value.

The cumulative effect of these taxes was that people were living in homes without windows, which took a toll on public health that doctors took note of. In 1845, the Lancet article was written to celebrate the end of that tax on glass. The window tax took a few years after that to repeal. In 1850, a motion to repeal the tax failed by three votes. It was finally repealed the next year. Was that just like, oh, the only way we can figure out how to tax rich people is counting windows?

Is that what it was? Yeah, and what, 10? They're like, oh, 10. That's a lot of them. Anything more than 10, yeah. Well, and I have, like, I mean, I have more than 10 windows for sure but like

La di da I have five so I have five see I have seven actually they're small now, but you live in an apartment building So you're I live in an apartment so mine would be boarded up Yeah, my landlord would absolutely board it up and be like no light for you Mm-hmm. All right, round number three. H.A. Ward's Natural Science Establishment was a company based out of Rochester, New York. The company is now known as Ward's Science, and it has a long history of selling various

scientific materials. In 1878, H.A. Ward's Natural Science Establishment published a catalog full of detailed glass creations made by a man named Leopold Blaschka, who included the following caveat in the catalog. In the giving of orders, I must beg for as lengthened a time of delivery as possible, as I make the models with the help of son Rudolf Blaschka alone, it being impossible to employ any other assistant to the manufacturing of them. The prices

are, comparatively speaking, so moderate that I cannot possibly allow any discount. The orders are not sent transport paid, packing, etc. done cheaply. What were Blaschka's glass creations? Were they microscopy slides with maps etched into them, sculptures of invertebrate animals or snow globes of famous scientists at work. This is not the guy who makes the... I mean, the guy and his son was making those sculptures, right? I don't know what you're talking about. I forgot about that. Okay.

Is that this episode? Do I want to sabotage you or not? I know the answer to this. Oh, you do? I know the answer to this. Oh, sure you do? I love these guys. I think that since he said you love them, I think it's the sculptures. Because I was a guy and his son making glass, I couldn't possibly have had it any other time, right? But are you sabotaging me? I don't know. I don't know. Why am I sabotaging you? Should I just guess? He does like very, very beautiful glass sculptures.

He's the one who, his exhibit is at the Harvard Natural History Museum, which if I can ever drag any of you to Boston, I will absolutely drag you to this museum. It is my favorite museum in the world because they do a bunch of like plant glass models and then also invertebrates. And it was very cool because you can't really preserve the shape of a jellyfish or a sea cucumber. You can put them in formaldehyde, but they lose some of the structural components. But his art is so accurate, like pollen grains at 200 times their size so that scientists have a 3D reference instead of a 2D drawing. Okay, well, I guess that's my turn to guess. I guess that one. I think you both got it right.

Zari not playing the cards close to the chest there. No, she got way too excited. You started getting mad at me. I wasn't being that devious. So yeah, for prices between 50 cents and $6.50, which if you had done that, you would have made some good decisions in your life, you could purchase a beautiful glass model of an invertebrate created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. So yeah, they are beautiful and they are on display and you can go and see them. And we should go and see them.

They are incredibly detailed and they would often even add an egg wash to mute the sheen on the sculpture so it would look more like what the animal would look like in the water. How are they looking at them? What did they do? Yeah, I guess they went into the water and looked at them. Yeah, they got into boats. I think they did fishing boats. And so people would ship them fresh specimens. This is so like an Etsy page though. Like, it's like, like you can really tell that like one guy complained about something and he was like, I'll write, I'll, that's publication.

You have to include this paragraph. And it's just like, no, sometimes customers are just angry and you just have to say no. No matter how hard your son works. Yeah, just put him on the customer support part of it. That's the real solution to the problem. All right, you came out of that tied. Mostly because Sari gave it away.

Next up, we're gonna take a short break and then the fact off. INTRO Now, get ready for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they have presented the facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And decide who goes first? I have a trivia question. Fulgurites are glassy tubes or crusts that are formed when lightning strikes sand, melting

the sand and cooling it to form the tube. They're found throughout the world, but they're also rare and sometimes difficult to dig up because they are so fragile. In 1997, researchers at the University of Florida were at camp landing to study lightning when the ground was struck by a bolt. So they went out to excavate the fulgurite to make sure they didn't break it. They had to use a lot of care and a lot of special tools, and they were able to unearth a fulgurite with two branches. How long do you think the longest branch was? I don't know how far down the dirt goes.

That's a good thing to base it on, though. Yeah. Six feet. Six feet under. Six feet under. That's what I was going to guess. Eight feet? The answer is 17 feet! Wow!

That's deep sand! Now the shorter branch was 16 feet. So, there he gets to go first. As we learned in Hank's poem, most of the glass around us from mixing bowls to windows is soda-lime glass, which if you know chemistry speak, tells us what it's made of right in the name. Soda is sodium oxide, lime is calcium oxide, and the glass in this case is silicon dioxide. And a relatively pure mixture of these compounds will give you see-through glass so that you

can see what's outside without letting it in. So even if light gets bounced around a bit as it switches from traveling through air to traveling through glass, the atoms inside aren't absorbing and emitting any particular wavelengths of visible light. To make colored glass, you need to add some extra compounds to it, usually some sort of colored particle or metal oxide that can be distributed throughout the structure of the glass or coated on top. And one of the coolest kinds of colored glass, in my opinion, is dichroic glass. Depending

on the angle that light hits the glass object and then enters your eyeball, you'll see different colors because optics are super weird. And nowadays, most research into dichroic glass has to do with precise filtering for microscopy or spectroscopy sensors or even things like 3D glasses, but it can and has been used for artistic purposes too, even as far back as the 4th century in Rome that we know of. And one of the most famous examples of dichroic Roman glass is a well-preserved carved cup that depicts a scene from Homer's Iliad involving King Lycurgus. If light is shined directly onto the glass cup, so it reflects off the glass and into your eyes, the glass looks pale green. But if light is shined through the glass, the

cup looks reddish pink. It is like very wild how different it looks. And in studies of samples of the glass starting in the 1950s, scientists have learned that there's gold and silver distributed throughout the glass as tiny alloys and as pure nanoparticles. And from what we can deduce, it probably wasn't just by accident in the forge. This was an intentional mixing of these metals to make these colors. There's some evidence that glassmakers knew that adding gold particles could make glass red. That's like cranberry glass nowadays even. They mix in something else but historically if you mix in gold nanoparticles or very

small chunks turns it red. So this might be further experimentation that took the color to a whole new level. In the 1960s researchers even worked with a company called Corning Glassworks to try and replicate this specific dichroic effect. knowing what we know now about optics and nanoparticles, and they couldn't get it exactly the same, which I think is really interesting. So it does seem like dichroism, at least when mixing metals and glass, as opposed to careful coatings, is more art than science. And we have a lot to learn if we want to learn how to control optics in that very, very precise way. So this is like nothing to do with the coating on the glass, which we see

a bunch. It's like you could have a glass that's shiny and then you shine glass through it and you can't see the reflection anymore. But this is like the glass looks a color differently. Yeah. And like there are some inconsistencies within it. They didn't want to shatter the cup, obviously, because they're like, this is this very rare artifact, but found fragments of the base like tucked inside. And so they've like analyzed those fragments. And they're like, even even across these fragments, there is different concentrations of silver and gold nanoparticles. So it looks slightly different. But but that same overall effect of like green versus red light. How do you make a nanoparticle when you're an ancient person?

Just a mortar and pestle? I think so. I think you just grind it. Zeus comes and helps you out. That's how they did it. Yeah, Hephaestus or whatever his name is. A Vulcan hit it with his hammer is like, you're welcome. It's just as dandruff. It just goes like that. Yeah.

It's all ruined for us now because we invented these shampoos. Yeah, our hair care got better and our glass got less cool. Ah, who sacrificed a bottle of seltzer blue to Zeus? Thanks a lot. All right, Sam, what do you got? Okay, this is about something that's been big news and I'm sure it probably won't blow Hank's mind because he's probably read all kinds of articles about it, but it blew my mind and it's about glass.

So let's talk about them glass beads up on the moon that they found. So people for some reason really want to live on the moon. And part of living anywhere is being able to drink water. So a big part of moon research is trying to identify potential sources of water. And lots of experiments have shown that there is water in some form present on a lot of the surface of the moon, from the shadows of craters to the poles. And the fact that water seems to like collect on the poles of the moon even suggests that the moon might have like a water cycle of some sort. But you've seen the moon, there aren't lakes, there aren't rivers,

there aren't even any damn puddles on the moon. So scientists want to know where is this water and how is it traveling around the moon's surface? When China's Chang'e 5 probe returned to Earth from the moon in 2020, it brought with it soil samples from the moon. A lot of it was what you'd expect, moon dirt. But in that moon dirt, there were lots of these little glass beads in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and colors,

which are formed when lunar soil is hit by meteors, which happens all the time. The fact that there were glass beads all over the moon wasn't surprising, because the same thing happens on Earth when it gets hit by meteors. Sand and minerals fuse together into all kinds of glassy blobs called tectites, but the surprising part is yet to come. So by 2022, seemingly everything that Chong'u had brought back from the moon had been looked at carefully, except for some reason, these little glass beads. So eventually a team of scientists took a peek at the beads and what they found was evidence that they contained water. So meteors can have ice on them, but the scientists

don't think that the water and the beads came from a meteor. In fact, and this might not really be related, but earthbound tektites are unique for their relative lack of water compared to other rocks and stuff because of the heat of the impact that forms them. And there isn't any like underground river that the meteors were stirring up or anything like that. So where do they think that the water came from? Partially from the dang Sun. So solar wind is the stream of particles that flies out of the Sun and Earth's magnetosphere, magnetosphere, whatever, blocks us from getting hit by the solar wind but the moon's atmosphere

pretty much sucks ass, so the wind hits the surface where the glass beads are. And one of the things in solar wind is hydrogen atoms, and one of the things in the moon beads is oxygen from lunar soil. So what the scientist thinks happens is a meteor hits the surface and it makes these little glass beads with oxygen in them. And they sit on the surface of the moon and they get bombarded by solar wind and the hydrogen in the wind interacts with the oxygen in the bead and it makes tiny little bits of water. And their evidence supports this hypothesis. The outside of the beads are covered in isotopes of hydrogen matching that in the solar wind and the beads have more water on the outside rims than when you get towards the center. So it seems like the beads on the surface are sweating out teeny bits of water all

the time and as the temperature on the moon changes the water evaporates and travels to the poles, but there might also be tons of these beads underground still holding on to their water, making up a reservoir with possibly hundreds of billions of tons of water. Yeah, it's gotta be tricky to get the water out of them Well, yeah, maybe be a big pain in the ass It's sort of hard for me to get excited about the part where it's like well now humans can go up and drink the water But I do think it's pretty cool that so many weird cosmic flukes work together to make water on the dang moon And imagine all the other crazy stuff that must be going on in space all the time

I want a picture that these glass beads I could like put on a string and make a necklace out of them But I bet they're really small. I think some of them are kind of okay size, but most of them are teeny tiny Yeah, clearly the option is you stick all the glass beads in your mouth and kind of like This sounds like a bad idea You got to really wash them off first and that's be, require a fair amount of water on its own. Maybe just compressed air. You don't want to put lunar regolith in your mouth. Well, you don't know. It seemed to irritate the astronauts.

Oh, right, I forgot about that. Like little shards of sharp stuff. I think they just make them real hot and the water comes out. That's what their idea is. They just gotta scoop it up. I think they just make them real hot and the water comes out. That's what their idea is. They just gotta scoop it up. And then you can put them on a string and have a necklace because that, I do, yeah,

that's very cool. They're not gonna give you any of these Hank, I'm sorry. I mean, eventually it won't be a big deal. Eventually there will be so many of them that like, they'll be three men and nine on eBay. But that's, will I be alive then? No. So it's all about the future.

Okay, I have to choose a winner now. The winner of this week's episode of SciShow Tangents is Ceri Reilly. I love ancient technology, especially if it's unexplained. If there's still any element of unexplained, like they know better than that, you know. All right, that means that it's time to ask the science couch where we've got some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At will the sun card asks, why do glass shower doors sometimes explode? I worry about this all the time, especially tables. I worry about tables exploding. I feel like every glass table explodes eventually. Is that true? Well, I don't think so. And they do it, they seem to do it without cause. So with a glass,

I always thought with like a glass pane that's like part of a shower situation, it's like clamped to the house. And if the house settles or shifts a little bit, it's like tweaking that glass and eventually it's just going to crack it. That's what I've imagined. But that's not what's happening with a table. I don't know the answer to this question. I mean you got there, kind of. Yeah. Basically it's like, it happens less frequently than you probably think. I think it's like the odds of it of a glass thing shattering spontaneously or not even spontaneously for a reason is like less than half of the chance

that you're going to be struck by lightning. No, because it happened in my brother's house. Yeah, it happened at SciShow and our quiz show table exploded, but I guess we spent like a decade hitting that really hard. So... That's very weird. It's like, I've never heard of it happen to anyone in my... Now I do. And I know two things. But it's usually one of three reasons.

One is like structural. Like you both were saying, if there is some sort of crack or instability due to the way that it's clamped or if there's a physical drop on it, glass and usually these thin panes of glass are unstable enough that that crack will propagate throughout it. And specifically with a lot of these furniture glasses, the way that they're made is pretty consistent. So it is a kind of glass called float glass. And this is like where you can get into the weird way that glass is made. They float molten glass on a bed of molten metal of a very low melting point, like tin, which gives the sheet very uniform thickness

and a very flat surface. Then they quench the glass all at once. So it's like flat and smooth and see-through and a huge pain in the side that you want. And then- And does the tin get quenched at the same time? Yes. That seems like it wouldn't work to me, but I guess it does.

It does. And sometimes as part of that process, there are impurities depending on the metal. And so this is why it is the cheapest way to produce large panes of glass, but also is imperfect. And so sometimes there are intrusions into the glass of little flecks of metal, specifically nickel sulfide inclusions in the glass. And that can affect the glass's stability over time. Like these, these inclusions can sometimes grow over time or they just cause an additional stress point in the glass. And so if you have glass that was manufactured slightly less carefully or tested slightly

less for breakage, then there's this higher chance that a shift or bump will then shatter it. In addition to that, most of this float glass after it's made goes through pretty intense heating and cooling to temper the glass. And instead of shattering into big pointy dangerous shards, it'll shatter into smaller flecks. That kind of fragmentation is known as dicing. You can see it with like a windshield glass or you can see it, I don't know, in those videos where a table shatters or other things where instead of having pointy edges, it's all rounded edges.

And I think part of what makes the shattering of like a shower door so dramatic is when tempered glass shatters, it doesn't just do one crack. It like goes. It fragments. Yeah, it doesn't crack ever. It turns into like a million tiny pieces. Yeah. So instead of leaving jagged edges behind,

it becomes these like relatively safe tiny pieces, which is scarier from like a... I'm like looking at it. Yeah. Yeah, like if I see like a crack form in a door, I'm like, oh, boy, cracked that. Whereas if it was just like, and it just like falls down like rain,

it's like, what's happening? But it doesn't chop all your toes off. Yeah, but it's safe. When I was growing up, they made windows just like falls down like rain. It's like, what's happening? But it doesn't chop all your toes off. Yeah, but it's safe. When I was growing up, they made windows, like giant windows out of plate glass that wasn't tempered. And so if you like fell through it, it's like, have a good time at the hospital.

I hope you live. Now you can jump through them all day long. That's right. Great. My favorite. I guess the last little piece of this is that because glass is this amorphous substance, it still has characteristics of a solid, of there are bonds holding things together. And so if one part gets hot and then immediately turns cold, or if one part is hot and one

part is cold, then that can create like thermal shock or stress. And so in the case of shower doors, if you like blast hot water on it, and then all of a sudden blast icy cold water on it, then part of the glass might be expanding slightly and part might be contracting slightly, and that's enough. And so I think that's why maybe shower doors are the most dramatic example,

because there are such extreme temperature changes in that room. Well, I'm glad to know a little bit, though I feel like Ceri read propaganda from the glass manufacturers. I still think a hundred percent of glass tables will explode eventually. Eventually. Yeah, they don't flow anymore. We changed the rules. Now they just explode. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch a work question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord.

Thank you to Cascadia14 on Twitter, David Hurt on YouTube, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and want to help us out, it's so easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents to become a patron and get access to our newsletter and our bonus episodes. And a special thanks to our newsletter and our bonus episodes. And a special thanks to our patron, Lessacre. And don't forget, once we hit 700 patrons, we are going to do a Minions movie

commentary, so go and subscribe. We're going to figure out what those little guys are full of. Spread the word. We have to see the piss. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. It's super helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Ceri Reilly.

And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Faith Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Mbillo. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Divika Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish.

Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and Lee Hank Green. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Across medical literature, most of the time when you read about glass and butts, it has to do with so-called foreign bodies, which is a jargony way of saying that people get a glass object stuck in their rectum and need it surgically removed. Carefully.

However, it can be helpful for doctors to put a very thin piece of glass up your butt, specifically fiber optic instruments that can be used to image your colon or other parts of your body. But hey, this is a butt fact, so we got to do the colon. So yes, glass and butts can be compatible, but you got to make sure it's a technology that's meant to be there. Wonderful. I'm having a colonoscopy soon myself. Well, I'm glad that we could tell you a little bit more about what's going to happen. And I'll say to the doctor, shove that glass up there. It is a whole thing. And you know

that you're not the only butt that thing's been in. Oh, I didn't think about that. Yeah, they clean it really good. They know how to do it. You gotta buy your own and bring it to them from home. Put it in the dishwasher. You gotta get a garden hose and some glass. Aw.