SciShow Tangents - Babies

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

From mighty lions to postal workers, presidents to pelicans, they all have one thing in common: they were once tiny little babies! And so, too, were all the Tangents panelists, who celebrate their humble, squishy, helpless origins this week by talking all things baby!Witness Hank learn about the "I'm baby" meme, thrill as you find out which Pokemon Yung Gravey most exemplifies, and almost puke at our grossest butt fact yet! Is this our best episode ever? Well, according to Hank it is! And he's the CEO of a company!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsto find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, a man who did not open the show flow before this began, so who knows how it's gonna go joining me as always this week is uh our science expert sari reilly hello it's going great you did it good so far and our resident everyman sam schultz who writes the show flows yeah and i'm a little worried now yeah who knows what's gonna happen but this is the thing when you don't know what the future holds everything can go totally off the rails and so what you need is to number the days the days are

numbered we're all dying your days you have a death you have a death counter me too i love that we have sort of all mostly um settled on a calendar that we use that makes absolutely no sense. There's like so many better ways to do it, but we're stuck with this way. And it's it's easier to stick with the way that we have than to incur the costs of changing to a better calendar. Yeah, we argue about daylight savings time. We don't argue about December. No, but we should. We should. It's ridiculous to have a bunch of months that have 30 days,

a bunch of months that have 31 days, and one month that has 28 days. Sometimes. Did some monk do this to us? Is that what happened? That was a lot of people added up there was a period of time this is my favorite calendar trivia there's a period of time when we when we only had 10 months you know like december is currently the names make sense yeah and yeah and

that and that makes no sense that it would be dec and october is the 10th month not making any sense a bunch of nonsense occurred but back before we introduced some of the early months that bumped all those ones later there was winter time when it wasn't a month what it was just like it's winter we'll take a break don't worry about it i would love we'll get back to you when it melts yeah yeah yeah we can't there's nothing to do with this time we don't need to know when to plant. It's very cold. Are you telling me October used to be the eighth month?

Yeah, that's why it's called October. What the fuck? I never thought of that. Yeah, it's September is seven, but it's the ninth month. November is nine, but it's the eleventh month. I thought they were all named after guys. No, that's where july august came in where they were the guys were like i want to be in the calendar yeah oh my god i don't know

anything about anything this is a great thank you for teaching me yeah and monday is named after the moon and thursday is named after thor that's fine acceptable thor's back in the limelight baby we're up we can all get behind thors for some reason yeah absolutely wild anyway these are all things that you know now but you don't need to because what you need to know is what day of the week it is and what day of the month it is and so you have wall calendars and you can buy wall calendars at complexlycalendars.com which i will not shut up about for as long as they are on sale anyway the people at complexly on a various teams so eons bizarre beasts scishow scishow space and journey to the microcosmos have been working on um very thoughtful

well-designed high quality calendars that are going to do the job that you need done by calendars but also we made them very pretty. And we put in a ton of good information because we know you like that good information. Why would you be here otherwise? And also, it helps us continue to make the things that we make, which we love to do. Now, we didn't do a SciShow Tangents calendar, which is a bummer. But if we do in the future,ari what should the theme be well i feel like naturally we need your your ideas are just recycled new ideas so we could do a tangents animal sex calendar

and just do like weird animal the story done. Why would we have any other idea? Oh, that's it. We should have asked you earlier. And then on the last day of every month, we have a butt fact for you. Oh, a little tiny butt fact. It could also be a butt calendar. We should have maybe asked Sari about this a few months ago. I have great ideas.

My rate is $35 an hour. I mean, but you did that in like 35 seconds. so it was sent so that was a free you guys all get my friend no both of those are great oh man i can't wait for the 2024 scishow tangents animal sex calendar i don't know how much how many good animal sex photos we can find. Maybe we should just hire an illustrator. We should get somebody out in the field taking pictures of animals having sex. Yeah. I've seen so many bugs having sex now that I'm gardening regularly.

Yeah. They're always doing that out there. They never stop. No. That's why there's so many. And there's also real calendars you can go buy, too, that exist now. Right. Don't just wait. Well, that's the thing. thing don't just that calendar is not going to help you this year yes you still need a this year calendar yeah yeah i have a wall calendar it's going to run out at

the end of this year so that's right interesting and the ones we're making are nicer than that sarah that's too little yeah this one is like a dollhouse size wall calendar on this background it's right here this isn't like the kind of calendar that like the nature conservancy sends you for free because you donated to them one time no these are high quality made in america beautiful 11 and a half by 11 and a half uh calendars i think you need to rebrand calendars with a more fun name, maybe. Calendarinos. 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 and for Hank Bucks, which I'll 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 from Sari. So I have a question for you both before I do my poem. Do you want a PG-13 rated poem or a G-rated poem? That's a ridiculous question. This is a concerning question. It's an excellent question. No, I mean, like, it's obvious.

The answer is very clear to me. Is it the same poem with words omitted, or is it two different poems? It's, the last stanza is different. Interesting. Give us PG-13 first. Yeah, I want this to be only appropriate for those 13 and older. Yeah. All creatures on Earth, both humongous and small,

with legs and eyeballs, or worm-like that crawl, with spine or not, or flamboyant or drab shark starfish or crab they once were a bab helpless and hapless and careless so young tadpoles in a frog pond with newly formed lungs some families have thousands like larvae for bees but one dolphin calf joins its pod in the seas these These alien creatures show up when we fuck, and through shrewdness or toughness or just plain dumb luck, we feed and raise them and save them from predation,

then kick them out of the nest, be the next generation. The swear scared me a little bit. That's why it's PG-13. You're allowed one fuck pg-13 movies well you just hit two oh i did say two now it's r-rated r-rated podcast so the topic for today's sideshow tangents is babies just for clarity as sari as sari said that one babs also was a threw me for a loop um bab i love that

sari what is a baby it's a baby it's after after it's popped out then it's a baby it's a or of its shell or it's yes of its shell of its uh amniotic sack we use babies colloquially to refer to plant babies or other things but babies are pretty solidly like an animal stage of development okay so after birth after the hatching or the coming out of the the sack the amniotic sack uh then you have an infant or a newborn which is baby and usually in humans for like four weeks you're considered it's a newborn baby four weeks it's considered a newborn for four weeks and then question mark then development and then you're then you for a long time you're not a baby until you're somebody's baby then you're a baby again apparently which is a weird term of endearment you can also nowadays decide that you're a baby i'm baby you know i'm baby you know what i'm talking about yeah i do i'm baby i'm baby you don't know i'm baby

what's you know like when you're an adult and maybe you're laying on a big blanket on the sofa and you say i'm baby i'm like please take care of me. I'm helpless. I'm cute. This is a piece of slang that you have both heard. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's old slang. This is millennial slang that cool kids wouldn't even say.

Will you say, I'm baby, when you need someone to take care of you? I'm baby. Yeah. This is why everybody should be Gen X. It's just easier to not have cringy stuff like that oh no i'm baby yeah that's what you would say i'm baby bring me a hot cocoa yeah or like i'm baby call 9-1-1 i don't know like that's a meme that i've seen

okay yeah it's like you're if you're feeling like you're lazy then that's it that's an i'm baby situation okay i feel caught up now but i really was all the way behind i that is not familiar to me when you were it was probably when you were having a baby then that's what happened yep and then tiktok came back and we skipped right over i'm baby yeah now i'm listening to young gravy all the time i don't even I saw a picture of Young Gravy yesterday. I was like, who the hell is Young Gravy? That's what I, same reaction. I saw a picture of Young Gravy the other day

and I was like, wow. I don't know why that works, but it sure does. Yeah, it got on my news feed. Young Gravy and someone's mom. Yes, and Addison Rae's mom went to the VMAs together. He's baby. He's baby. He is baby.

He is baby. This podcast is not about Young Gravy. I think that it's very, like, definitely we've got a vibe around what a baby is, but it's not entirely clear. And it's never gonna be do we know where the word baby comes from it seems like an old one it is an old one uh it's of uncertain origin like so many of the words but we think it is probably uh like a baby babbling like they just heard the noise that a baby makes so kind of like a pokemon pikachu says pikachu and then they were like ah that's your name i guess uh and so babies went and they were like baby must be a baby yeah

you must be a baby what are you trying to tell me do all pokemon say their own name yes there's some exceptions there's some exceptions and in the game you can talk for instance he can speak full english does he but does he say mewtwo when he like does a move no he would say hi i'm you too and shake your hand he'd probably say like bow to me human also yeah it's pretty oh doesn't sound very nice but mostly yeah they all say i would think that mr mime probably doesn't say anything i think he does he says he says mr mime i think he does that doesn't seem like a missed opportunity also like young gravy and wait he dates whose mom

ash's mom well there's some subtle implication that that ash and mr mime are in love or ash's mom and mr mime are you telling me that mr mime has young gravy energy or that young gravy has mr mime young gravy has mr mime energy mr Young Gravy has Mr. Mime energy. Mr. Mime had Step.Energy before anyone else. Yeah. Okay. This is great. I feel great, everybody. Babies are Pokemon.

Mr. Mime is Young Gravy. And now we're going to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing a baby's truth or fail. So, life is a baby. Seems like it's pretty great. I'm baby. You don't have to worry about things like taxes or adult responsibilities. You just get put down and you stay there and you focus on what matters.

Food and sleep. Except, of course, the world is full of many dangers. The following are three stories of those dangers experienced by babies of various animals, but only one of these stories is true. Which one is it? Are you ready to hear about scary baby life? I guess so. Yeah.

Don't worry. It's not too bad. Story number one, naked mole rats live in colonies that can have up to 300 workers in them. They're like ants, but they're rats. And while researchers used to think that the size of those colonies was the result of lots of inbreeding, they now suspect another factor, kidnapping. Naked mole rat colonies will sometimes invade other naked mole rat colonies and take some of their pups in the process and turn them into workers for their colonies. But it might not be

that one. It might be story number two, which is that the Baltic comb jellyfish reproduced by releasing hundreds of eggs and sperm into the water. The eggs and sperm will then find each other and fertilize and hatch into jellyfish larva. But not all of the larva are meant to live. A fraction of the eggs will hatch into a more simplistic form

that can't develop into a more advanced jellyfish, and it will act as a decoy, luring predators into eating them instead of their siblings that could actually develop into an adult jellyfish. Or it could be story number three. Pandas gestate their babies only for a month, and when they are born, the babies are tiny and underdeveloped for the first days of their life. Their fragile appearance in the first few days

means that they can sometimes just look like they're dead, when in fact they are just sleeping. Sometimes leading parents to accidentally abandon them because they think they are dead. Is it story number one naked mole rat pups get kidnapped for work? Story number two decoy jellyfish babies are offered up to predators to save the rest? Or story number three panda baby jellyfish babies are offered up to predators to save the rest. Or story number three, panda babies accidentally play dead so well that they just get left behind. They're just sleeping.

That's such a panda thing to do. That seems like a panda thing. They are a mess. Yeah, they aren't doing anything right over there. You know, pandas got the nymphs with them. They walk around. They go panda, panda, panda, panda. Yeah, it's really easy to name animals. Yeah, jellyfish just go jelly, panda, panda. Yeah, it's really easy to name animals.

Yeah, jellyfish just go jellyfish. Jellyfish. Jellyfish. And naked mole rats, that was a wild one. They're like, it's naked mole rats. They say a whole sentence. When scientists first discovered naked mole rats and they were like, what should we call these? Naked mole rats. And the naked mole rats looked them directly into the eyes.

Yeah. all these naked mole rats directly into the eyes yeah this one is one where i this is the first time in a long time i felt like all three of them are true i couldn't possibly start to unravel this whole situation but the panda babies one just seems like so real and the naked mole rat one i'm not confident enough in knowing anything about how naked mole rats work to guess that that is right they have we've talked previously i think on this podcast about the fact that naked mole rats have queens right it's like a queen rat mole or i think it's a rat and uh the they have like that that gives birth to all the colonies all the colonies babies and everybody like takes care of her and right um so they are

ant ant like i'm going with decoy jellyfish babies because i think that it seems like a thing they would do poop out some real eggs poop out some fake eggs eat the fake eggs ha ha ha my babies will survive okay here's my new theory pandas don't go far enough away to abandon their babies do they have a big range do they just stay where they are who knows i agree with decoy jellyfish babies oh oh you're still going with sari yeah well this week we were too clever for you both because it was the naked mole rats wow that seems so much meaner than i would attribute to them yeah yeah yeah so so they they have like a colony with lots of workers and the one queen she could produce 30 pups each litter which is wild but while research with captive mole rats found

that sometimes they expand their colony by kidnapping pups from other colonies this pup napping had not been seen in the wild until researchers started following marked uh and tracked mole rats in ken's Maru National Park. The researchers found that colonies would sometimes expand into areas of neighboring colonies, essentially invading those colonies. And the mole rats from the invaded colony would usually retreat into a further part of the nest or just leave altogether, I guess, and hope to find a new home. But as the researchers kept tracking the colonies, they found that there were a few pups from the invaded colonies living amongst their invaders as workers leading them to conclude that the pups

had been kidnapped and put to work this would make the naked mole rats more similar to ants than we even thought because some species of ants will steal larvae and pupa from other species to make them work in their own colonies they They will? Yes, yes. Not like competitors of the same species, but other species of ant. But this behavior in mole rats has only been observed a few times, so we don't know how widespread it is. Jellyfish, this is not what happens, but they do, just as Sari was saying, have a tremendous number of babies.

And, of course, almost all of those babies get sort of eaten up by things. But when there are these sort of like boom and bust cycles, the adult jellyfish seem to do fine. And a 2008 report indicates why, which is that during the busts, the babies will get to a certain size and there won't be anything around for the adult jellyfish to eat. So they will eat the baby jellyfish that have started to succeed. And they'll be like, thank you for collecting your own food for a little while in this messy, difficult moment. Now I'm going to eat you.

They've even done in-laboratory research experiments where they sort of have adults and babies, and the adults just completely eat every single one that is available. Wow. Just like boomers, am I right? Oh, my God. And the panda babies, you are right that pandas give birth to useless little pups and they make lots of mistakes in their lives. But they have never been documented thinking a baby is dead and leaving it behind. The babies are born really, really early and need their moms for basically everything.

They nurse 14 times a day. They need their moms in order to go to the bathroom. Like literally they need to be like stimulated to get their strong enough muscles to poop. Oh no. Yeah. That's really cute. They'd be like shocked into pooping. So they like get their muscles going and then they're like, oh, a little poop came out.

Yeah, you have to surprise them. But yeah, oftentimes panda babies do not have great outcomes but this is not why so congratulations on both of you for being tied next up we're going to take a short break then it'll's time for the fact off. Our panelists have all brought science facts in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have 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. Using data gathered by FiveThirtyEight from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Social Security Administration,

the data journalist Matt Stiles compiled a ranking of the most popular birthdays between the years of 1994 and 2014. The least popular birthday was December 25th. What month and day were the most popular? It's almost my birthday, so I'm going to say September 24th. I'm going to also say there were a lot of kids at my birthday in my classes. Yeah, me too. May 24th. Sam said September 24th, which was remarkably close to the actual day, which is September 9th.

Wow. Congratulations. January, huh? January, huh? People just get... It's cold. Apparently. It's interesting that December 25th is least popular because that indicates not that

that's the least popular day for babies to get born but people are like can you just mark it down as the 26th please like i don't want my baby to be born on christmas yeah you're right try to hold it in till the end of the day or maybe i guess c-sections probably don probably aren't often scheduled on the 25th. That's also true. Big day off. There's a lot of confounding factors here. Yes.

I like that better as the explanation than holding it in. Everybody wait. This one's for Jesus. You can't take that from him. Interestingly, Sam, of the top top 10 birthdays nine of them were in september september birthdays uh very very generally correspond to conception periods around the winter holidays when people maybe have a little bit less to do yeah aren't so stuck in the house uh so it's so that means that sam gets to decide who goes first sam

what do you think i I'll go first. This might just be my own bias, but the 90s felt like a real boom period for classical music and popular culture. Often it was the butt of the joke, shorthand, and stuff like TV shows for out-of-touch elites such as Frasier Crane. But hell, if you could be guaranteed to have a baby Frasier Crane, wouldn't you do it? I mean, he's an extremely popular talk show host, not to mention he has a PhD in psychology and he's a published author.

And his apartment is dope. It's a great apartment. It's a great apartment. Yeah. And he loves his dad. Which brings us to another touchstone of 90s culture. Pregnant people putting big headphones on their bellies to play classical music for their unborn children in the hopes of achieving the Mozart effect, aka having a baby genius. But where did this idea come from?

And did it work? Are all those 90s kids who listen to Mozart in utero regular brainiacs? As for where the idea came from, in 1993, a psychologist named Frances H. Rauscher ran a test at UC Irvine wherein she had college students listen to one of three things while performing tests. Those three things were silence, repetitive study music, which I assume is the lo-fi hip-hop study beats of its time, and some Mozart selections. And what Dr. Rauscher discovered was that after listening to Mozart, students performed better at spatial awareness-based tasks for about 15 minutes, which also sounds kind of ludicrous to me.

I don't really understand how that would work, but I'm not a doctor. You know, small sample size college students. It's good old psychology research. And that was it for the paper, basically. But it was quickly picked up by such lofty publications as the New York Times, which reported that classical music can improve sat scores was the direction it's going to go and what i can only assume was a pop science game of telephone commenced ending with playing music for your baby in the womb makes for one smart baby and even late come parents of children who were already out tried to get in on the act and classical music

being played in daycares was a common occurrence and even in some states a law whoa yeah and like fluoride in the water yeah they had to play one hour of classical music and did it work there have been many studies in the intervening decades and in 2010 the university of vienna performed a meta-analysis of 40 of those studies on the mozart effect and concluded that there is no evidence to support that it's a real thing. I'm shocked. Shocked. There is a bit of evidence that learning music can make kids a little bit smarter. A completely different thing. Entirely unrelated.

I know, I know. I'm going to say it. Listening to music. A 2014 Harvard study put 29 four-year-olds through a year of music lessons and recorded a 2.7 point iq increase on average but that is as you noted not really the same thing at all that's just the closest that we've gotten so far uh and as of 2013 more than 80 percent of americans think that music could improve a child's intelligence which just goes to show you that maybe media outlets could be a little bit more careful with their reporting.

Yeah. What happens? What happens when you put young gravy on the belly? This is the important question. Because Mozart's one thing, and I recognize his genius, but, like, do you get just a six-foot-three dreamboat in a fur coat? I think you get a mr mime the baby comes out first words

okay i like this sam it has a lot going for it i like that people will believe anything and that we need to outline the times in the past when we believed anything because it makes us feel better about now when we currently still believe anything. Yeah. And also gives us a little bit of insight into maybe what to look out for. Sure. Sari, what do you know about babies? Well, like we've said, human babies are pretty helpless when they're born.

They can't really move. Their skulls are squishy and fragile. And basically, they need a lot of caregiving to survive. And if they're born premature, which is before 37 weeks, they're in need of even more specialized care. In the mid-1800s, a French obstetrician named Dr. Stéphane Tarnier is generally considered to be the first doctor to take the idea of an incubator from chicken raising applications and use it to keep premature infants warm and in the late 1800s dr pierre boudin built on that work to figure out other care these infants needed like human contact and nutrition and whatnot in fact in 1896 dr boudin

showcased his work with incubators at berlin's great industrial expositionosition as a Kinderbrutenschtalt, or child hatchery. And he did so with the help of an assistant named Martin Cooney. And Martin Cooney had kind of a mysterious past. He was born as Michael Cohen in Prussia, bluffed a lot when it came to his background, and worked his way into an apprenticeship in the medical field without a real degree, as far as historians have found thus far. So we're off to a great start for a guy working with

medicine and young babies. We're going to get double dubious today. But after that first exhibit, he found his calling in what one historian called quote, vigilante medicine. Oh, no. He became known as.

He snuck around with Mozart tapes and he played them for babies. And he became known as the incubator doctor, creating neonatal intensive care units or NICUs around Europe and the United States for exhibitions, fairs and carnivals through the 1940s. States for exhibitions, fairs, and carnivals through the 1940s. And one of his most famous exhibitions was a more permanent installment at the Coney Island Boardwalk in New York State called the Infantorium, which followed the same business model as the rest of them. There's a business model? There's a business model. What's the business model? He imported the latest French incubators because they had been working on technology the longest

with careful temperature and filtered air regulation he had a paid staff of nurses who lived on site for 24-hour care and many collaborations with american doctors who had medical degrees and accreditation he charged visitors 25 cents each to wander through and see the premature infants being cared for as that was the marvel was it like where was was it outside was it like a storefront it was like on the boardwalk of coney island yeah it was on the boardwalk so it's just like a building that you walk it was like a banana stand yeah you could walk in one and see some sword swallowers and then you walk in another and you see some babies what uh because everyone where did the babies come from well i'm getting there. So the babies came from families, obviously, who had premature babies.

And he didn't charge any of them for this top-notch medical care and didn't discriminate about what babies he took in. Okay. I don't know whether to like this guy or not. That's how I feel, too. As wild as this whole thing is, and he was criticized for being a quack doctor or putting babies in a carnival alongside fire eaters, this free care was really, really important at the time because a lot of the sick or premature infants that came to CUNY were rejected by U.S. hospitals. So in the early 1900s, they didn't have the staff or the equipment for round-the-clock neonatal care. Or when hospitals started acquiring maybe one incubator,

it wasn't as high quality or robust as the ones that he imported. He had the best of the best. He had the best of the best. And they didn't have NICU wings, and it was way too expensive for parents to afford months of care for their children. So Cooney offered a last-ditch effort for survival. And by some estimates, of the 8,000 or so babies that ended up in cooney's care over the years over 6 500 survived they grew up into adults who have in some cases retold their stories

and science communicators like i loved it back there it was great they gave me dr pepper there was a fire juggler some people will come and look at the babies so it was funded by people wanting to look at a little tiny premature baby yes yeah it was fully funded by people paying their quarters and their nickels and dimes to just go look at tiny babies and then that was able to fund a full staff of really high quality medical care at the time and how many of these were there the permanent exhibit was in new york but he did a lot across the u.s there was like one of the chicago's world fair you did it when they're not permanent where did the babies go when it closes back to the families i think he would only take

in a certain amount and then when they were done or if in like the 1500 cases where they died of whatever um or when they were all like stable enough they would just go back to the families like any nicu okay that's well that's very weird he did not have a medical license and the people thought he was a bit quacky yeah but it was good treatment yeah so that was what's weird he's told everyone he had a medical license. It is only recently that historians have tried to dig back and can't find a degree in his name or a thesis in his name anywhere across Europe. American doctors collaborated with him but didn't recognize him formally in a lot of their publications. Because they were like, this guy is clearly doing important obstetrician type work. But also, public organizations are like like this is cruel to the babies

and they're the public why is it cruel to the baby i don't know just because everybody's looking at it's profiting off of them yeah did he wasn't probably yeah he didn't make money yeah he made enough money to be able to continue to like build these exhibitions but did he did he build like a lake house did he like get like a mansion in the heights i don't think so he ended up poor and old which is why he quit when he was like 70 years old uh because he would recoup the cross when there were like disasters at as there were at carnivals but i don't think he ever, like, for example, there was. Wait a second. Okay. As there are at carnivals when they were, I'm terrified.

Do I want to know about the disaster? All 1,500 babies who didn't make it when Coney Island caught on fire. One of them did catch on fire. One of the, but apparently no babies died there. I don't have the article up. It's in the sources. But it was expensive. It was expensive because he just lost all the money and some of the reputation of it. And so when he was 70 years old and he was poor and destitute, he built a little building on the boardwalk and he put his own body into a ventilator.

People paid nickel to come look at him. See an old guy. Hey, look at this old guy. I'm baby. Yeah, he invented I'm baby. He was the first one. Wow. I formally retract my fact.

I mean, yes, Sam, I'm sorry. They're both very good. and they're both in a similar vein um i i and i do kind of want to like i want people to hear the story of most of baby mozart well i'm keeping it in the podcast so oh yeah yeah this is true but maybe it's a um maybe it's a side show i like i i feel like i feel like we need to talk more about like collective delusions yeah that's like because often i willusions. Yeah, that's a good idea. Because often I will be like, oh, no, that's fake, to a thing that is happening right now.

And people are like, how do you know? And I'm like, I've got a vibe. I've heard a lot of these stories before. Say it out loud to yourself. Having a baby listen to music makes us smarter. No. Yeah, no. And particularly one smarter. No. Yeah, no. Doesn't make... And particularly one

Austrian. I hope Mozart was Austrian. Anyway, Sari is the winner of this week's episode of SciShow Tangents. Which means that it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our couch of

finely honed scientific minds. Sam, what's the question asia oh five four three eight one four two asks human baby skulls are just plain weird when they are born yes are there any other species that have strange birth related adaptations to help them have a smoother birth yeah i i would guess yes i think that but i think that human baby skulls are somewhat unusual human head size is a is a somewhat unusual right yeah it seems a little bit like the size of a person's head is limited by like there's like an evolutionary battle between how to get a baby's head out of a person and the size of a baby's head can be.

So it's like, how smart can we be? How big can the hole in a pelvis be? Which is a little upsetting. Yeah, as far as I can tell, I couldn't find anything with the amount of skull squishiness. It seems like a bad idea. Like you wouldn't want a baby to have a squishy skull. Yeah.

And it's like you said, a particularly human thing in just we don't understand a lot about birth canal size, baby size, why our babies are so premature. I don't know. Like why humans need help. We do better than pandas, though. We do better than pandas. We are less. But we need help to deliver babies. Like, you can't super well deliver a baby by yourself.

And that's unusual for other animals, too. Like, they can just pop one out. And they just fall. Like, a giraffe baby just falls all eight feet to the ground and is like, thanks, mom. And just gets up and goes on its way. Yeah. And then it says giraffe giraffe giraffe but the idea of softness to not hurt the baby or the the pregnant animal is a theme among

uh animal babies which babies are soft babies are generally soft or have weird soft bits that you wouldn't would maybe not expect. So a couple that I found, I'm sure there are more, but this is a surprisingly hard thing to Google. And I am not an animal. I'm not a zoologist, but I'm sure people who work with animals regularly have more examples. So in hoofed animals, you see this a lot with pictures of horses because those are one of the most extreme examples. They're called or nicknamed fairy fingers or golden slippers. But really any hoofed animal like pigs or cows have what's called a deciduous hoof capsule. It's also called an eponychium, which is the name for a piece of skin on our fingers too but it's just like a a kind of gooey keratinous structure on top of the hoof so that the hard

keratin of the hoof doesn't puncture the the birth canal i don't kick around that is the worst thing about horses. Yeah. And horses are more extreme. You can find them for pigs or calves or things like that, and they're less extreme. Like boxing gloves for babies. Yeah. And then they dry out within a couple hours and kind of fall off. So they're just there for the birthing process to keep keep everything squishy soft safe and

similarly porcupines or other species with carotidized quills their quills are soft they're there when they're babies they're born with squishy they're born with squishy that seems prudent that then yes that's how i would want it to be, because you don't want to puncture the inside of the birth canal. Just opening the SciShow pitch doc here. How do baby porcupines get born? Any human being would click on that. Yeah. They're also called porcupettes,

which is very cute. Oh. We love it. That's great. Yeah. That's the best thing about porcupines. Well, again, this is fantastic. I got like three SciShow ideas just now.

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It's almost Halloween by the time this airs, but you're not going to want to miss Halloween. You're going to want to trust me on this one. We've got some good surprises for you. Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz.

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Thank you! And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Seagulls are notoriously not picky about what they eat, scavenging everything from living whale skin to ice cream cones. And after observing South American fur seal pups for five years in Chilean Patagonia, I don't like where this is going. researchers found that two species of gulls were to blame for a common butt injury. The gulls accidentally, accidentally, come on,

attacked a bunch of two-month-old baby seals infected with hookworm because their bloody, parasite-ridden diarrhea is apparently a tasty snack. Oh my god. I hear so many science facts, Sam, and I never get a nauseatic response. I look at so many pictures of awful things. That did it. Well, there's a little bit more. That's the first time that's happened to me in a decade.

While they're eating this diarrhea, the gulls get a little too eager, and they end up biting the baby seal's anuses and perineal regions leaving plenty of wounded butts after their feasts it's still affecting me i just think that it's the mix of blood and diarrhea and and worms worms being eaten yeah and like this like secondarily is like the injury to the seal pup but all now it is it a, it is the worst episode of Sideshow. The most undignified thing that a bird has ever done. I believe. What is the worst thing about seagulls? There it is.