SciShow Tangents - Batteries

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. My radiator is going in a loud hiss. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Sam, can you say, baked in a buttery flaky crust? Baked in a buttery flaky crust. No problem.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Baked in a buttery flaky crust i paused you did uh there's a thing on tiktok right now where people are asking their grandparents to say baked in a buttery flaky crust and when i say right now i mean whenever we recorded this episode so it's long gone by now so like you ask your grandparent say baked in a buttery flaky crust and and these are like people whose first language is English and they're like baked in a calorie pakey fussed. And I, like, I'm a mate, like, and I were like, I'm like, so first of all, I'm a little worried about getting older. And so I kind of want to wake up every morning and like, look in the mirror and be like baked

Starting point is 00:01:18 in a buttery flaky crust. And I'm like, all right, I got it. Still got it. Still got it. I got it. Still got it. Still got it. Up and up.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Yeah. But I also think I should go to the doctor and they should get my blood pressure. They should get my pulse oximeter. They should take my temperature. And then they should say, now say baked in a buttery flaky crust. They think that this has diagnostic capabilities. Are there not videos of young people who cannot say it? So like older people often have auditory processing difficulties because they've been hard of hearing for a while.

Starting point is 00:01:45 And those things can go hand in hand. Speaking of which, if you have to wear hearing aids, wear your hearing aids. We love it. Everybody thinks that's normal and great. And a lot of people don't wear hearing aids for a long time when they should. And it can lead to other difficulties. But I want to ask my parents are in town and I'm like, I got to ask them to say baked in a buttery flaky crust just to see like, if maybe we should do some further tests. But what if they can't?

Starting point is 00:02:09 Then you're a burden with that knowledge. It's true. I should also ask my six-year-old. She definitely can't do it. You can really do the age range spectrum. Everyone who is like a middle generation has the societal responsibility now to both ask their children and their parents where did that come from because i've seen that too do you know where i don't know i first saw

Starting point is 00:02:29 people asking their like italian grandmothers and they were very funny trying to say baked in a butter that's not fair though yeah that's that's to be expected but since it was butter it is currently buttery flaky crust season uh i figured i'd ask. Try to get my mom saying it. See what I... I'll come back with the results. Well, the problem is, I think, is our generation is going to keep practicing it. So this is like me... Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Not that I would get pulled over for drunk driving, but I know the alphabet backwards because I thought that was a fun party trick for a seven-year-old to learn or whatever. I didn't know that it was a test you weren't training for drunk driving no that's what i would have assumed but no i just thought that's a cool way to impress your friends and make friends in fact like you just find friends and then impress them you're the kind of person who could tell me all of the states in the country very quickly yep yeah you can also do the kind of person you really want to be friends with yeah right right my real life friends um and podcast co-hosts i know the first three states alabama arkansas and alaska

Starting point is 00:03:36 yeah that's the wrong one i'm alabama alaska arizona arkansas you forgot arizona california to Arizona, Arkansas. You forgot Arizona. California, Colorado, Connecticut. Wow. I'm not shocked. So every week here on SciShow Tangents, we try to get together to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts

Starting point is 00:03:53 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,

Starting point is 00:04:02 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 sam from voltaic pile to double a from humble button to lithium ion batteries helped us get where we are today by providing us with reactions we can rely on imagine if cell phones had to be plugged in the wall our laptops were bound to a power cord why they basically wouldn't be mobile at all then what would we look at when we're bored

Starting point is 00:04:30 and how would clocks run with gears what a joke without batteries we'd not know the time and how would we run our detectors of smoke house fire injuries would undoubtedly climb so i gotta respect batteries and give them their due even though there's something about them that does irk no matter how much reading about them i do i have no fucking idea how they work the topic for the day is batteries which are a way of storing electrons. Pushing them uphill so that they can come back down. Weird. To work on the way.

Starting point is 00:05:09 And somebody thought of this? I mean, I don't know, but I feel like people first made electrons kind of not knowing what they were doing. A lot of early chemistry was just like, what will this reaction do? Does it release energy in some way? Does it store energy in some way? And there was a lot of times where we were figuring out what forms that energy took, whether it's electricity or heat or like a variety of other things.

Starting point is 00:05:34 We're just like, chemistry. We'll figure it out later. If we keep putting things together and putting them in different situations with temperatures and pressures, then eventually some rules will make themselves apparent, which kind of did happen. And I don't know if they became apparent or if people just were like very good at figuring them out. But when it comes to pushing electrons around, that took a long time to figure out. And I do, you're right, Sam, remain kind of confused about what's actually going on. Sam remain kind of confused about what's actually going on.

Starting point is 00:06:11 There's a cathode and an anode and there's a electrolyte and there's wires. Question mark. Anyway, Sarah, what's a battery? I can do those terms. Those I can do, I think in a way that is hopefully understandable, but sometimes I finish these explanations and then Sam goes,

Starting point is 00:06:23 huh? And then I've done a bad job. But yeah, batteries store and release energy and they have these basic components to them. So the two ends of the battery that connect to a wire and that connect to another device are called electrodes. It is the conductive end of the battery. And you have a negative electrode, which is where electrons in a charged battery, there are a lot of electrons. Electrons are negatively charged particles. And so where you have a bunch of them in one place, if you have a bunch of them gathered at one electrode, and that is the negative electrode. It's also called the

Starting point is 00:07:05 anode in lots of cases, because when a battery is powering something else, that's where the current is leaving. That's where the electrons are leaving. And then the other end of the battery is the positive electrode. So it's another conductive end of the battery, but it just has relatively fewer electrons. So with fewer electrons, it is more positively charged relative to the negative electrode. Within the battery, they are separated by the electrolyte, which is a substance. It can be a liquid, it can be a gel, it can be a solid, there can be membranes involved that separates the anode and the cathode. Sometimes the electrolyte acts as that separator, but sometimes there's an extra material separating them so that the electrons

Starting point is 00:07:52 can't go within the battery in many cases from one electrode to another, because that would be a short circuit. Then all the current would happen inside the battery. You wouldn't be able to power another device if the electrons could just rebalance within the battery cell. Instead, the electrolyte allows charged ions to move back and forth to balance things out, basically. When you connect through like a wire, the negative electrode of the battery to like a light bulb to the positive electrode, then that gives a path for the electrons to flow they can't flow within the battery but they can flow like outside around the battery and through the light bulb or whether whatever device you want to power i guess like hank said rolling down the

Starting point is 00:08:37 hill from the the place where there's a ton of electrons going to the place where there aren't so many and there's a lot more room for them to like hang out and be around and they go back in the battery and they go back in the battery yeah but they at both electrodes they're made of different materials oftentimes and so those that's where like all the energy from a battery comes from chemical reactions so at the negative electrode those chemical reactions generate electrons. And at the positive electrode, those chemical reactions take in electrons. So there's just a chemical that has too many electrons, basically, and a chemical that doesn't have enough. And you give those electrons a chance to get from one of those places to the other one, but then you cleverly put something in between

Starting point is 00:09:25 that uses them somehow. What do they do when they go back in the bottom? Do they come back out the other side? So single-use batteries, so the ones that you use for kitchen scales or TV remotes, those are called primary batteries, and they are generally irreversible. So once the chemical reaction happens in the electrodes, once the electrons are spewed out or the electrons are taken back in and the chemicals change, it is really hard to chemically revert it. So now you've made trash. Yes. You can no longer have a current flow.

Starting point is 00:09:58 The electrons like don't, they're back in the device technically, but they are not in a form that we can have more current. But rechargeable batteries or secondary batteries basically have easier or safer reversible chemical reactions. So when you charge a battery, you basically do that backwards where you introduce electrons into the system so that the chemical reactions reverse. At the positive electrode, they spit out electrons and then go back into the negative electrode where they get a bunch more electrons. So they're ready to spew out. They're ready to like redo the process all over again. So basically when you like plug in a computer or a phone, you are smooshing more electrons into the system so much so that everything happens in reverse is my understanding all right uh so battery as far as i know is a the name of a crime uh is that where it got its name

Starting point is 00:10:53 it is like a bunch of guns what really it started from there well it became you basically trace the whole history so the original word was like violence related like that like assault and battery assault is like thinking about hurting someone battery is like punching um assault is not thinking about hurting someone it's saying you're going to hurt someone okay i i don't know i think about hurting people all the time i never tell them assault is the threat yeah and then battery is is the you actually physical action start punching and then that became artillery or like military like weaponry so battery became like the the tools that you use to bombard your enemies we think the sense came from this idea that you like to bombard you have a battery of stuff um when ben franklin first used the word battery in 1749 he had a bunch of like

Starting point is 00:11:55 laden jar capacitors um which are just like jars with foil on the outside uh and inside and and connected with wires you know ben franklin lightning guy doing electricity stuff um and he had a bunch of these jars linked together and he was like wow a battery uh it's like generating power or it's like this powerful thing there's a bunch of them so like ah i have a battery here so he himself said that he's made it up yeah branding genius we know the guy who said who did it we know the guy who did it yeah not only do we know him like we know about him yeah i know things about that guy i've got money with him he's on one of our money wow congratulations also

Starting point is 00:12:35 well i don't think it's a good one i think think he did a bad job, actually. I think that's a stretch. I agree it's a stretch, but I also agree it works. And I don't get confused. I'm not like using a battery and thinking I might use this to hurt someone or this might be a tool someone has given to me to hurt me. You could slingshot it. That would really mess somebody up. Ah, battery battery. You could do it in Battery Park. It'd be battery, battery, battery. You could put ahot it. That would really mess somebody up. Ah, battery battery. You could do it in Battery Park.

Starting point is 00:13:06 It'd be battery, battery, battery. You could put a battery in some batter. Like batter, like beating. Battery, battery. That is also the same root word of like beating things. Battery has Ds. That's, doesn't it? No, batter. They all have Ts.

Starting point is 00:13:20 For a second. They all have Ts. Everybody? They've all got Ts. No, none of them. They're not even with T's. I immediately recognized my error. For a second, I thought that the stuff that cookies are made of had D's.

Starting point is 00:13:35 You're like the baseball guy. A batter batter. That's still T's, though, but it's more T's. There is no double D one, guys. It's all teas it does sound like these but things can be worse and you might say that they are badder yeah

Starting point is 00:13:56 worse battery covered in batter would be a batter batter a batter battery battery yeah so we got totally worked out, everybody. We figured it out 100%. And now it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. Batteries, with a T, are an incredible example of human ingenuity and everything that we've learned when it comes to chemistry.

Starting point is 00:14:18 But nature has also built many of its own useful materials. And scientists have been looking at biology as a potential source when it comes to new types of batteries. So today we're going to play secret ingredient where I tell you about some kind of battery that scientists have made. But I leave out one of the biological ingredients that made the battery possible and you got four options and it's up to you to guess which the secret ingredient is. Round number one. In the 2010s, the U.S. Department of Defense funded a number of projects that looked at using animals with implantable battery-powered circuits for various applications. Inevitably, that led scientists to explore whether they could use an animal's own metabolic processes as a battery. Which of these four animals was the animal that has been converted

Starting point is 00:15:06 into a living battery? Is it an eel, a wombat, a snail, or a shrimp? That was none of them that I was guessing. Shrimps kind of look like batteries. Hard on the outside, squishy on the inside. Salty, I feel like a battery. A battery's got to be kind of salty, right? I think it's a shrimp. I think you could just put a shrimp right in your Game Boy and you could get to town. Yeah, you do want one that's the right size. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:33 It's the right shape and size. They even have wires coming out of their faces. Shrimp. You got the big wires there. But you know what doesn't have big wires sticking out of them? The battery. You just put that in the device. That's true. You don't have big wires sticking out of them the battery you just put that in the device that's true you don't want big wires yeah sari what what do you think they turn into a battery i feel like electric eel they kind of already work like batteries their electric

Starting point is 00:15:57 organ feels straightforward sam's shaking his head like i'm too easy. Sam's very distracting. He's like, absolutely not. It's too easy. It cannot be eel. I think they phoned it in. I think it's eel. That's what I'd do if I was trying to make an electric animal. I'd start with an electric animal. Sam, did you pick one? Yeah, shrimp.

Starting point is 00:16:15 Shrimp, obviously. Shrimp's the battery. What? So the fact, okay, all right, it's hard. It's hard on the outside. It's got to be a shrimp. It's a snail, everybody. It's the snail. It's the snail. So that one's a win for me. They've actually tried this out with a few animals, including cockroaches.

Starting point is 00:16:31 And in 2012, a group published their work creating a biofuel cell out of snails. They implanted carbon nanotube electrodes in the snail, and the electrodes worked with the sugar and oxygen circulating inside of the snail's hemolymph to make electricity if you're wondering the snail made less electricity than a single triple a battery which i mean how much less yeah that seems like quite a lot and you know shrimp have hemolymph too so they're one step away from making a shrimp battery, Sam. Yeah. And when somebody does it, will retroactively give me a point. I'd use one of those big old banana slugs.

Starting point is 00:17:11 They look like a AA battery. You could really get a lot of life out of one of those, I bet. They look like a AA bat. Aren't they huge? They're like six inches long, a banana slug. Yeah, that's like a quadruple A battery. Just shove one in one of them big. No, it gets smaller

Starting point is 00:17:28 when it gets a double A, then triple A is smaller so it would be a single A and then half an A. A half an A battery. The banana slug. Alright, round two. Most commercial rechargeable batteries are lithium ion batteries. They're generally made with graphite serving as the anode

Starting point is 00:17:44 but in 2016, scientists wanted to see if they could improve on lithium ion batteries by replacing graphite with a plentiful material found in nature. Which of the following materials did they use to design a better battery? Was it grass, tree bark, guano, or pollen? Guano's precious. I feel like it's not guano and pollen that seems i think that's hard to get pollen yeah right i often feel as if i need there to be less do you park outside does that sound like the opinion of a man with a garage i think it's hard to get on a hard to get on a a big scale you know on a commercial scale tree bark though that though. That's everywhere. Who needs it? There's plenty of tree bark.

Starting point is 00:18:25 It's true. And they strip it off of trees to make the wood. So they have it sitting around. Grass. You mow your lawn. There's a lot of grass. Yeah, but no one's going around

Starting point is 00:18:35 getting that. Boring. Sam likes to pick an answer and stick with it. Even if he's interrogated on it, he's like no i'm done shrimp look like batteries there's a lot of tree bark in the world yeah a tree bark does feel right to me too and now i sound like a copycat but i think it's because like if i had to pick a material

Starting point is 00:18:56 that felt most similar to graphite to me of like layered complicated like we don't quite understand but it's deposited in interesting like complex layers yeah sort of porous that feels right to me but it's not it's not tree bark it's pollen it's i tried to save you sam but you wouldn't let me so it's all this is all about the microstructures so if you've ever seen a pollen grain with like under like an electron microscope, you will see that they are wild looking shapes. So researchers wanted to see if they could use the microstructures in pollen as a better form of energy storage compared to graphite. And to see how well that would work, they sampled two sources of pollen, honeybees and cattails. I like, I don't know, I would just go straight to the source and not have to bother a bee, but that's just me. They heated the pollen to very hot, over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit

Starting point is 00:19:50 in an argon chamber, and then reheated it again to a lower temperature so that pores would form within the carbon structures. And the pores allowed for more energy storage. And the researchers were able to use the pollen to create a battery, and the cattail pollen was able to store more energy storage. And the researchers were able to use the pollen to create a battery, and the cattail pollen was able to store more energy than the bee pollen. Though it wasn't bee pollen, it was pollen found on bees. From a bee that they stole from a bee. Yeah, the bees didn't make it. And that could be due to the bees collect pollen from lots of different plants,

Starting point is 00:20:21 so the pollen itself was irregular compared to a more uniform cattail pollen, which again is just another good reason to not steal all your pollen from bees. Yeah, they're probably really grumpy. All right, round number three. Lithium is a limited metal in the world, so scientists have been working on creating alternatives like a sodium ion battery. But because sodium ions are larger than lithium, scientists have also had to work on redesigning the battery anode. This year, researchers announced that they were able to create a sodium ion battery using a material

Starting point is 00:20:54 often found in our food. Which of these materials did they use? 1. Crab shells 2. Chicken bones 3. Orange peels or D. Honey. Yeah, I did switch Orange peels. Or D. Honey. Yeah, I did switch to letters there at the end. Well, didn't we do a crab battery one?

Starting point is 00:21:14 I think it might be my crab battery. Is it the crab battery? Have we caught the bokeh in a little accident here? Or is she tricking us, maybe? She heard the other episode and was like, I don't know, Cravattery? I forgot about Cravattery. I think it's a question. I think it's Cravattery.

Starting point is 00:21:30 The classic Cravattery is my answer. It's Cravattery to Crabier and... This time it's personal. Batterier. Crabier and loving it. Crab, batter. Crabbery and batterier. You were right, it's the Crab battery and battery. You were right.

Starting point is 00:21:46 It's the crab shells. Look, there's only so many facts. They, yeah. So if you remember this, they, you, they heated crab shells up a bunch and then mixed them with either tin sulfide or iron sulfide. And the scientists were also exploring uses using chitins from crab shells as an electrolyte for other batteries. However, I should quickly point out that all of these answers,

Starting point is 00:22:12 while not technically correct, have been used in other battery-related applications. Oh, so we're all right all the time, it turns out. That's right. That's right. And that means that y'all have come out of the game with a tie. Tie ball game.

Starting point is 00:22:28 Thanks to Cravattery121. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with our Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. Now get ready for the fact. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award them Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The Oxford Electric Bell is a device housed at the University of Oxford that contains a metal sphere that swings back and forth between two bells.

Starting point is 00:23:15 The batteries powering this device are called dry piles, an early form of electric battery that uses disks made of various materials coated in sulfur. early form of electric battery that uses discs made of various materials coated in sulfur. Unfortunately, there are no notes remaining to describe what the dry piles are made from, but they have proven to be incredibly durable and are still running today. How long have the Oxford Electric Bell's batteries been running? Okay. Infinite, infinite mystery battery, basically. Infinite so far. It will be finite, I think.

Starting point is 00:23:49 Yeah, Sari won't allow such nonsense. Eventually, the universe will end, Sam. Okay. It would be a bigger deal if it was everyone would know about this freaking Oxford electric bell. We'd be plugged into the power grids. We'd all be, all our phones would be Oxford electric bell phones. Is Oxford in England? Yes. Is it?

Starting point is 00:24:08 So that means it could be really old. Yeah, but we're a little bit constrained by when the first battery was, I think. Sam isn't. Oldest battery, oldest English person, same age. I think it's been running for 175 years. That's good. That's a great guess. That's completely legitimate in the range.

Starting point is 00:24:34 I think it's like 1800s is where I'm aiming for. Let's do 200 years ago. You guys were both very close. Well done. Sam was closer. It was 183 years. Good job, Sam, with your British knowledge.

Starting point is 00:24:53 Yeah. You can go and you can look at YouTube videos of it by just searching for Oxford Electric Bell. It's also called the Clarendon Dry Pile. That sounds like a little poopy. Yeah. Are you suffering from dry pile? Yeah. The charge is so low now that the bell is barely audible.

Starting point is 00:25:16 And at some point, the bell will go quiet. We just don't know when. Are we going to cut it open and look at the dry piles to figure out what's going to happen? Once that happens, maybe. But we won't be able to actually cut it open after the bell rings its last bell because that's actually the day that the world ends.

Starting point is 00:25:35 Oh, shit. Anyway, Sam, you get to go first. Alright, well, one thing we haven't mentioned so far in all of our battery talk is how perfectly swallowable most household batteries are small cylindrical cold you know you thought about the forbidden satisfaction to be had from swallowing a double a battery don't eat a battery or one of those you could eat shrimp shrimp like batteries. They're like the batteries of the food.

Starting point is 00:26:07 Or one of those little watch batteries. It's like the ultimate sweet tart. But we're adults and we can have such flights of fancy without actually eating batteries. Children, on the other hand, according to pediatricians, every year something like 2,500 of those little knuckleheads swallow a battery. And the reality of eating a battery is way less fun than the fantasy of eating one, a battery inside of you exposed to saliva can cause a reaction called water electrolysis, which is when electricity breaks water down into oxygen and hydrogen inside of your body, and you don't want a lot of hydrogen inside of your body. Plus, they're just made out of really bad stuff.

Starting point is 00:26:41 So eating batteries is no good, and there are ways to prevent it, like by making the batteries taste bitter. But a team of scientists in Milan took another approach. If kids are going to eat batteries, why not make batteries you can eat? Then they can mow down on a big bowl of batteries and be totally fine. So maybe their actual reason had to do with creating safe batteries for implants and sustainability but they definitely mentioned child safety when unveiling their edible battery earlier in 2023 take a cathode made of stuff found in almonds an anode made of riboflavin and activated charcoal and a water-based electrolyte throw in some nori and a bit of beeswax and yum yum you got one tasty battery and it's rechargeable too the battery was inspired by living things that use redox cofactors

Starting point is 00:27:27 to create energy and there's no chance that my dumb ass was going to be able to figure out what redox cofactors were i also as a former chemist don't love those two words together only science like papers come up when you search that term so it was forbidden to me maybe one of you can tell me what that is when my fact is over but the researchers intend this proof of concept battery to show that a future where we create power with safer materials is possible though it's not exactly here yet because this battery operates at 48 micro amperes for 10 minutes oh yeah which seems to be enough to power an led light for 10 minutes which i guess is fine another thing about it that kind of sucks though is that these researchers said you weren't supposed to eat it on purpose

Starting point is 00:28:10 but good luck stopping me the minute i see one of these things is going straight in my mouth uh the team is working as a lucky charm that's why they call them that yeah the team is also working on cracking edible transistors that would allow them to build fully edible electronics that can do complicated stuff inside of the body, like monitor the pH of your stomach. But someday, maybe they will make an entire tiger electronics game that you can eat when you're done playing. This is the promise of the future. I do want to eat a hot dog that has a computer in it. Or is a computer. Just an AI hot dog that has a computer in it. Or is a computer. Just a whole computer hot dog.

Starting point is 00:28:47 Just an AI hot dog that you know is experiencing pain from being eaten. I was thinking like a spy device. Like, oh, I have my secret message and then I don't want to get caught. What if it experienced pleasure from being eaten instead? Which would be worse? Thank you, Papa. Thank you, Papa, for eating me. Thank you for eating me, Daddy.

Starting point is 00:29:18 Your bowels look great. Papa, I would definitely prefer it to not have any emotions To have neither of those If that's an option Just be neutral about being eaten, please, hot dog Wow Okay Have you guys ever licked a button battery?

Starting point is 00:29:39 No, I've always wanted to lick a battery, but I'm too scared I've licked a D battery before Like one of the square ones? Yeah, I've licked a 9 a battery, but I'm too scared. I've looked a D battery before. I've always wanted to do that. Yeah, I've looked a nine volt to just see if it was charged. What's it do? It zizzles your tongue. I don't know if it does like water electrolysis to it, and that's what zizzles. But it feels.

Starting point is 00:29:57 You feel it. It feels like a feeling. And it tastes like metallic-y too a little bit. All right. Weird. But I think if you're going to create much charge, no matter what, it's going to be a problem to eat it. So you have to solve that problem some other way.

Starting point is 00:30:12 I guess that makes sense. Part of the reason why that's edible is that it's just not enough charge to cause much damage. Be very careful with button batteries, everybody. Don't need any battery. Don't need batteries. Don't need batteries. You know, I didn't realize a theme of this episode was going to be don't eat batteries.

Starting point is 00:30:31 It's because everybody wants to do it so bad. We're just going to have to deny ourselves the pleasure. Well, my fact also has to do relatedly with eating batteries. So let's go. with eating batteries. So let's go. So if I saw a store-bought pack of batteries in a lab, I would assume they're for a graphing calculator or a flashlight or any number of random office supplies, or I guess a curious scientist who wants to taste a bitterint. A lot of these single-use batteries from AAAs to D-cells can discharge around 1.5 volts of electrical energy. Not all of them, but in general that

Starting point is 00:31:05 voltage works for small electronics. But these kinds of batteries were also the key to the first ever published experiments that demonstrated how the platypus can use its bill to detect electricity. And this was a big deal because it's the first time electroreception was reported in a mammal or anything non-fish, non-amphibian. So to give a sense of the research timeline, scientists figured out that fish like sharks could sense electric fields in the water around 1958 or 1960. So my vague guess is that a lot of the weird electricity-related biology focus was on them for a while. But around 1983 or 1984, biology researchers noticed some pores in the bill skin of platypuses that looked oddly

Starting point is 00:31:46 similar to the mucus-filled electroreceptive pores on fish skin. And then in a paper published in 1986, a joint Australian-German team studied platypus behavior using some very fun, in my science expert opinion, methodology. So they had four platypus subjects and a pool that was three meters in diameter and filled with tap water up to 40 centimeters deep for them to swim around in. And I think they tested one platypus at a time because they described that when a platypus was hungry, it basically circled the bottom of the pool, touching the edge with one leg with its eyes, ear canals, and nostrils all closed and kind of like sweeping its bill back and forth to search for traces of food to eat uh and my favorite of the experiments they conducted involved putting three

Starting point is 00:32:30 objects at the bottom of the pool each space 10 centimeters from the other two a charged 1.5 volt alkaline battery a dead battery and a dead shrimp tail and that last one is food uh but basically a battery but they knew they knew it's not a mystery that shrimp are basically batteries shrimp are basically batteries because platypuses eat regularly aquatic stuff like larvae worms shrimp and crayfish but when the platypuses were swimming around in these conditions they they, quote, established a clear preference for the active battery and tried to chomp it. Don't eat the battery. Don't eat the battery. But they tried to because they were trying to detect electricity, electric field, and the battery was the only one with the field.

Starting point is 00:33:18 So the methodology wasn't as spelled out as modern papers. So I don't know statistically how many times they tried this to establish preference, but they did it enough that a great picture of a platypus chomp was on the cover of volume 319 of Nature when this study was published. They also did measure that the platypuses seemed to detect electric fields from these batteries at distances when the fields were around 300 microvolts to 2 millivolts per centimeter. And then they measured the really slight electric field that's generated from the muscular tail flicks of a living freshwater shrimp, which range from around 0.2 to 1 millivolt per centimeter. And that fits right into the battery range they tried to jump. So when shrimp are freaking out and wiggling in muddy water,

Starting point is 00:34:06 that actually helps platypuses find them as they're poking their bills around. It's around the same electric field as a 1.5 volt battery. To a platypus, there's no distinction between a battery and a shrimp. Wow. I'm about as smart as one platypus.

Starting point is 00:34:21 That's what we want. Yeah, I'm probably like a pretty smart platypus, but... You're a very smart platypus. That's what it was. Yeah, I'm probably like a pretty smart platypus, but... You're a very smart platypus, Sam. You would be the smartest platypus in the history of platypuses. Okay, okay. So now it is my choice and my responsibility and privilege to decide

Starting point is 00:34:40 which of these science facts is better. Is it the platypus and the shrimp and the battery? Or is it the edible battery so I can have a sentient hot dog that enjoys being eaten and seeing my entire insides? Or possibly

Starting point is 00:34:56 a tiger electronics game. It's Sari! It's Sari. Yay! Totally. That's deserved. You teed me up though, Sam. I really had to add a lot of extra stuff about eating batteries to make my fact long enough. So that's fine. And you guys were tied going into it. So Sari is the winner of the episode.

Starting point is 00:35:15 Congratulations. And now it is time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got a listener question for our couch of finally home scientific minds the vortex on discord and at coveox and at cj mck za on youtube ask what battery technology looks the most promising for grid scale storage i mean tech like i actually know the answer to this question it's probably going to be different from sari's answer because i have an opinion oh okay that's exciting for me i did less research than normal hoping that you would have an opinion and or knowledge about this because it's eco geek territory it is very much my is my scene um so i i would say not chemical i so like most batteries you think of are storing through chemical means. But like we have started to use the word battery

Starting point is 00:36:09 for other ways of storing energy. Like you got gravity batteries where you just lift a very heavy thing up when you have extra power and then you let that very heavy thing fall when you need to get the power back. It's not gonna be gravity batteries. But I think it might very well be thermal batteries,

Starting point is 00:36:26 which heat up usually through resistance. So you run an electric current through something and it's not a good conductor. And so instead of conducting that electricity, it just gets hot. You heat up a big block of something and then when you need to get that heat out or the energy that you put in out,

Starting point is 00:36:44 you either run water over it and it creates steam and that runs a turbine turbine or you actually this is a weird one. It gets so hot that it glows, right? There's like thousands of degrees Fahrenheit sometimes. So you actually you can capture the photons that come off of it with solar panels. That was wild. i didn't know that was an option or you can have the photons like go and shine on a pipe full of water and that that water will vaporize because the photons are so high energy that seems to be the most promising option right now um and it because it's like a lot of this is about like just a just how do you do it

Starting point is 00:37:28 cheaply so like you want really cheap materials and available materials so like stuff that's around so the the one that i was reading about recently is graphite based or carbon um and carbon is a very common industrial material you could build a lot of these things without it being even a tiny fraction of the total carbon consumption, which mostly is coming to like steel and applications like that right now. And that just seems right now better than chemical batteries, which are also, I think, going to be important. kind of hold energy for longer and take in more and also can be useful for applications that just need heat, which is kind of an important thing in decarbonization right now. Cause there are a lot of things that we just burn natural gas for, and that's really cheap, just burning natural gas to like boil off the orange juice. So you can have orange juice concentrate or for concrete manufacturing or steel or whatever.

Starting point is 00:38:25 So to find a way to turn renewables into just heat and to be able to use that heat industrially, but then also to be able to, if you need to convert that into electricity is great and could help us with the sort of incoming problem, which is that we've got too much electricity sometimes and not enough other times but almost like so much too much electricity that's becoming a problem for the places in the u.s at least where there's the best opportunity for renewables like wind and solar like we aren't building them anymore because during the times when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining we're like creating too

Starting point is 00:39:05 much power like there's we're satisfying 100 of demand in those areas so you need for the next step in this process we're going to need this power storage so right now is there no no power storage oh yeah there's power storage okay there's some thermal online but there's a lot of chemical online it's remarkably efficient to store it as heat, and it is cheap. The materials are much less expensive than trying to create these fancier batteries. Even though most chemical storage isn't like a very fancy lithium-ion battery that you'd find in your phone. It's usually simpler battery chemistry. lithium ion battery that you'd find in your phone. It's simpler, usually simpler battery chemistry. Yeah. And a lot of the current storage system, in my understanding, coming from this, I haven't

Starting point is 00:39:50 been learning about this for decades, is pumped storage, like hydroelectricity. So pumping water up into reservoirs and then having them power turbines or converting that again into electricity. power turbines or converting that again into electricity and that's super that's super cheap it's basically a pump some kind of usually oftentimes a pre-existing hydroelectric situation so you don't have to build the dam but that's kind of terrain dependent like you need the right situation in order to be able to build it uh what else you got sarah anything not as good as that i i did so i did some research into what like electrochemical batteries are out there for grid scale yeah am i right that it's mostly more like simpler chemistries than lithium ion yeah there is like it feels like everyone is on the lithium ion train of like lithium ion everything in the way that, and I think part of that is marketing.

Starting point is 00:40:50 And to some extent, Elon Musk being like, I'm going to make my Teslas run on lithium-ion, and then I'm going to make lithium-ion power storage. Right, yeah. If you've got home power storage, that's often lithium-ion, yeah. and lithium ion. Yeah. Yeah. And so there is some degree of like battery storage power plants that are made with lithium ion batteries, but they are orders of magnitude less than like pumped storage power plants that exist right now. I think like you said, Hank, the cheaper, easier batteries, like lead acid batteries, which are a type of rechargeable battery that was invented a while ago, like 1859. As batteries were starting to become a thing, lead-acid batteries started to exist. And they're often what are in cars or powered wheelchairs or

Starting point is 00:41:39 things like that. You can have liquid lead-acid with like sulfuric acid inside as the electrolyte, or you can have gel versions. And lead acid batteries are fairly common in like grid scale battery storage attempts. There are some molten salt batteries, which are very weird, where you basically like solidify the electrolyte and then you need to melt it or or something like make it a liquid again in order to discharge the battery so you store an energy and that the idea is that you can you can keep it for longer by making it solid so their ions move around less they still gradually diffuse because there are always a little bit of wiggles going on like even even a solid thing is still moving slightly and

Starting point is 00:42:27 then there's another like that i think gets lumped in with electrochemical batteries because it works similarly but isn't quite the same um but it isn't quite as as far away as these like thermo storages is called a flow battery or a redox flow battery. So bringing back that term, Sam. These are like big tanks of liquid, right? Yeah, they're so weird. So basically, this idea of redox is oxidation reduction reactions, which basically are just reactions that involve the transfer of electrons from one thing to another. And a redox cofactor would be a molecule that

Starting point is 00:43:06 would work together with an enzyme to do a redox reaction, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, yeah. I think that is right. I think that's what that is, yeah. So basically something that makes the redox reaction go faster or more efficiently or with a higher probability of it happening. Flow batteries are just, yeah, two big tanks. And each tank holds a giant amount of liquid electrolyte. And one is positively charged and one is negatively charged. And each tank contains atoms or molecules that are primed to react to either release or to store electrons and so they pump these

Starting point is 00:43:47 these electrolytes into a place that's separated by a membrane where where the reaction actually happens but until you until you need them to react you just store them in the big tanks and then when you need the energy again you you mix them together and then you just have to and then you just make bigger and bigger tanks yeah and so that's why it's like cheap easy because if if you can make a big tank then you can make a redox flow battery basically my favorite battery technology is um putting everybody's thermostats on uh a sort of like unified thingy. And then knowing when there's a lot of extra electricity, you like turn everybody's air conditioners on and then you turn them off when

Starting point is 00:44:32 there's not, you're like, okay, it's going to be a hot day. We're going to turn everybody's air conditioners on. They're going to store that cool air inside of the house for the rest of the day. And we're not going to have the air conditioner on in the nighttime.

Starting point is 00:44:44 And I'm like, I like this. I like like this idea that's a cute idea what that counts as a battery kind of you're like storing energy you don't get to capture it back but yeah call it a virtual power plant which is fun i want to do a size show on virtual power plants someday collective action as battery well and like it also is just like good because like those times when 100% of electricity is being provided by renewables, it just becomes very cheap

Starting point is 00:45:11 to do anything during those moments. So anything you could do with the electricity you have when the electricity is basically free becomes a good idea. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter

Starting point is 00:45:23 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 at YoJo Musical on Twitter and at Robin Great Banks 9051 on YouTube. And everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's so easy to do that. And you should. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents.

Starting point is 00:45:47 Become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. Shout out to patron Les Aker for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and it helps other people find us. 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.

Starting point is 00:46:08 And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert, who has just joined our team. Hello, Jess. Jess is in the room right now. Hello. Hello. Thank you for producing SciShow Tangents. I'm so happy to be here.

Starting point is 00:46:22 I'm still going to be around everybody. Don't worry about it. Yes. Thanks, Julie. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor so happy to be here. I'm still going to be around everybody. Don't worry about it. Yeah, same story. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio.

Starting point is 00:46:34 Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trucker-Vardy. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Menish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney 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 lighted But one more thing. In a paper published in September 2013, a team of engineers created what they called a microbial battery. They used a cathode made of silver oxide and used an anode coated with exoelectrogenic bacteria,

Starting point is 00:47:20 which are microbes that eat stuff and then spew electrons outside of their cell body. The liquid electrolyte of the battery doubled as a food source for those bacteria. So to see if they could make it work, they first tested a glucose solution. After that, though, they tested an electrolyte of wastewater from the sewage pipes of Escondido Village at Stanford University, which is presumably the grad student housing where the researchers lived. This microbial battery was capable of extracting roughly 22% of the energy stored in the organic sewage waste,

Starting point is 00:47:54 aka grad student poop, which is on par with the energy efficiency of some solar cells. But it doesn't look like they've done follow-up studies since then, so maybe they just flushed this idea down the drain in favor of others not so shitty batteries boo we gotta do it 2013 we could just have our our sewer pipes filled with electronic generating thingies why not sentient hot dogs sentient hot dogs were the sewer pipes all along and they're like i love it down here, father. Thank you for the poo.

SciShow Tangents - Batteries

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