SciShow Tangents - Best of 2024 Compilation

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

One year passes, another is just around the bend, so let's look back on the top 6 Tangents episodes of 2024!! From intriguing topics to spooky mystery guests, this compilation truly summarizes a wild, wonderful year for Tangents. We hope you enjoy reminiscing with us, and we look forward to all that's ahead! Original episodes: 6. Feathers - airdate March 19, 20245. Glue - airdate May 14, 20244. Cheese - airdate February 6, 2024 3. Garbage - airdate March 5, 2024 2. Roller Coasters - airdate September 17, 2024 1. Caves - airdate October 1, 2024 Sources 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! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to 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! A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!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

INTRO Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green, and joining this week as always is Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary and champion of Curse Boba, Ceri Riley! A lot more epithets. I didn't know I was champion. And also our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Someday I'll get another honorific. What do I have to do? Become a wolf.

A resident every man and wolfman. If only, Hank. Way to hit upon one of my greatest wishes and regrets of all time that I can't be. Your hair is looking sort of wolfman today. Yeah, Rachel didn't cut my hair in a long time. I'm going through it, you know? By going through it, do you mean slowly turning into a wolfman wolf man by going through the change as they called it in my family? Excuse me

You didn't get the talk about the change Sam the last day of my life when I'm a hundred years old I'll be like my transformation will be complete. I'll be like finally Yeah, it's it's a slow transformation, but like at all it only appears all together when you finally are complete Yeah, the last day of my life when I'm 100 years old Yeah Much like a Pokemon evolution like that's out where I reach level 100 and I have high friendship And it's nighttime and I'm holding the right stone. Yeah, that's it Then you'll start glowing and your dream will come true. So when Pikachu's level 100

He's 100 years old. Is that what you're implying? There's a lot of old guys out there and then you'll be like a very old wolf man And you'll try to rip the throat from a rabbit and the rabbit will just be like I'm faster than you old man Yeah, what are you doing, bud? Yeah, give me a snowball right at your nose. I eat a carrot in front of you, like, hit me. Yeah. So if you could be any cryptid.

Genuinely, I'd be a vampire. I have no problem with being a vampire. I could stay up all night, sleep all day. Would you just feed on rats like vampire Lestat in the sewers of Paris? There's so many deer around here. It would be easy. They just hang out in my yard. I would just be like the Twilight Boys.

They ate deer, right? Exactly. Yeah. Be like, what's up? No nods in the room. No nods. I know more about Twilight than everyone in the room. I said exactly because I know precisely that you're correct. I watched the movie. That's and I think I did read the first book, actually. My dad read the books before they were cool,

because he was like, I like vampires. He was really into vampire diaries and things like that. And a local Pacific Northwest author, I might as well support her. And then he was like, I don't think this is a good book, but I'm going to keep reading them to support a local author. And then they got huge and he was like, hmm, I don't think this is a good book, but I'm going to keep reading them to support a local author.

And then they got huge. And he was like, well. Maybe he told a friend who told who told two friends and they told two friends, you know, I brought them to my school because of that, because like he bought a copy and I was like, this is fine. And then I, but I didn't, I didn't participate in the fandom aspect of it. Like other people from my school took road trips to Forks, Washington, because it was, it's like far-ish,

but not too far. People would like to do Forks trips. Yeah, totally. Oh man, I've been alive a long time, you guys. I think on this topic, I think if I was a cryptid, I'd be a Stephanie Meyer, because it feels like it comes with a lot of money. Oh, you wanna be a rich cryptid.

You could be a leprechaun or something. Yeah, yeah, what kind of cryptids? Goblins got their own special gold, but I don't think you can spend it. Dragons have hoards. But is a dragon encrypted? Are these some of these aren't cryptids? I feel I, you know, it's I think that we can be loose. As we found here on Sideshow Tangents, defining things is very messy.

No one really knows. It's just a guy that you see out of the corner of your eye. That's encrypted You know, I have a new conspiracy theory. I have to tell you about real quick that Apple has increased the how easy it is to trip Siri because that never used to happen to me. And now every time I say your name it happens to me. It goes hello What do you need? Are you bringing that up cuz series probably a cryptic? She's probably the closest to a real-world and ghost or something? Yeah Yeah, yeah, Siri and board apes. Those are the two

Well, I don't want to be either of those I want to be a swamp monster I saw not minding my own business in the water sometimes emerge Just like Shrek, just like this. Get out of here. I'm podcasting. I want to be Stephanie Meyer and I think that Sam wants to be... I'm just going to be a vampire. What a boring answer in retrospect. Every week here on SciShook, Dan, just 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 these two goons will be the winner. Now as always we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Ceri. Hope is the thing with feathers, poetically at least. But actually, these delicate fans are just weird growths of beast. Beta keratins twisted and packed into interlocking barbs for fluffy warmth or a mighty flap or neon mating garb. The diversity of plumage outcompetes that of all birds. So thank you, evolution, for never not being absurd. The topic for the day is feathers, specifically feathers. Can I guess that this one has an extremely easy to define?

There is no question about what a feather is. I'm going to defy Sam's guess and say that actually probably there is a place where it gets fuzzy. I also thought it would be simple, But feather scientists are sitting on the biggest, like, deep rabbit hole of what even is a feather. There are so many different kinds of feathers. They're super weird. And when you start thinking about them too hard, you get grossed out.

Or at least this is my experience. Okay. It is weird that they sort of like get oozed out of the skin. Yeah. Like, they are skin growths. My experience. Okay. It is weird that they sort of like get oozed out of the skin. Yeah. Like they are skin growths. And I guess everything, like hair is technically a skin growth and scales are technically a skin growth.

But they are, according to some sources, like one of the most complex skin structures, like part of the integumentary system. So like the outer protection on vertebrates. They are one of the integumentary system. So like the outer protection on vertebrates, they are one of the most complex structures. Your skin is that the integumentary system? Yeah, so like skin, nails, hooves, scales, but like feathers compared to something like skin, which is very complex that has pores and whatnot, or compared to something like skin, which is very complex, it has pores and whatnot, or compared to something like scales, which have kind of like a relatively uniform structure all around, there are so many different types of feathers that can form.

If you picture a feather that comes to mind, that is probably a wing or a tail feather, like that smooth-shaped, they are specialized for flight, either for like pushing air or for steering mid-flight. And they have a clear central shaft and these sticky outy parts are called barbs or barbules. And they are aligned and usually intertwined. But then you get into so many different types. There are like these feathers called contour feathers that start getting a little fluffier,

that kind of give birds their shape. They're down feathers, which are the stuff beneath that, that help keep birds warm. But then you get into things like phylloplumes, which are short feathers with just like a couple barbs at the end, and they work like whiskers for birds. Like they are feathers that work like whiskers for birds. Like they are feathers that work like whiskers.

Why not? There are bristles, which are just feathers without the side bits. And just- Just a stick? Just a stick sticking out of the bird. What is, who has those? It's a feather hair.

Yeah, halfway between feather hair. Or there are feathers that have all kinds of weird designs like tail feathers that are mostly stick But then at the end they have a weird fan or a swirl or a twirl. These are all feathers There's no nobody saying that is and isn't a feather Yeah, no one's saying that that isn't a feather, but like you think about them as weird skin growths And how do they form like that? Where it gets weird biologically, keratin-wise,

and maybe this is me overthinking it now, is like trying to define what makes a feather from that. It's like, oh, it's a structure made of this protein, and it looks weird, but it can look weird in a hundred different ways. What is the protein it's made of? Keratin. So it's just like hair.

It's just another keratinous structure. And so at what point is it not a hair anymore? Is there like a biochemical difference or is it just because it looks a certain way? Because like famously, birds do not have hair. Only mammals have hair. And so, but like, why? What's the thing that, do we just have, does it turn out that we have feathers? Or did the human bird, like, last common ancestor, what did that thing have? Oh. Did it have hair or feathers?

Did feathers turn into hair? Actually, I don't know. I think they were independent. I think they, because they are feather follicles and there are hair follicles, but I think those are convergent evolution. I think there are slightly different forms of keratin in found in reptiles, birds, claws, scales, beaks, shells, feathers. But then it gets still fuzzy a little bit of what these growths are.

It seems like what was before feathers and hairs with scales. Scales were first. And then like that was the biochemical ancestor anyway of both feathers and hairs. And some birds feathers look kind of like hair. If you look up a kiwi, it's shaggy little guy. A little baby chick. That looks like it just has hair all over it. Little fuzzy fella. Oh man. You guys, I did not realize how distantly birds and people are related.

Was it like a worm or something? Yeah, like we're like, it's basically we're as the same distance from alligators. And how distant is that though? Is that like talking worm territory or? No, I mean, I had a spine. I had a vertebra. Okay. Yeah.

It was bone territory. Yeah, okay. Bone territory. I actually, now that I hear all of this, I feel like, Hey, feathers are pretty specific thing. I agree. Sarah's trying to convince us not, but trying to inject some drama. Yeah, maybe that's it.

I'm bringing my myself to this definition. You're always trying to start shit, Sarah. So this word I bet is old as heck because people have been using these things for a long time. Yeah. And I couldn't find anything really interesting about it because we just pointed it out, because birds have been around and we were like, well, that's a feather. So it comes from the old English word feather, which is of Germanic origin from the German

fetter. Oh. And then somewhere in between that, I cannot find the linguistic link, but the root is from Latin pena, which means feather, and then is also the root word that led to pen because a quill pen. Because they are the same thing for a long time. Yep. You had it on birds, and then you plucked it out, and then you wrote a little poem.

You wrote a little song for your neighbor Nobody writes songs for their neighbors anymore. Yeah back in the day people were writing odes Yeah, we're writing epic poems Show up in your neighbor's house and you just like Hannah is like somebody once told me the world Okay, now it's gonna be time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week we're going to be playing a game called Torf. It's truth or fail? In 1996, paleontologists discovered dinosaur fossils with some surprising things on them.

They were feathers. And since that discovery, paleontologists have continued finding more examples of feathery dinosaurs. Most of them seem to belong to meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods. And the more examples we find, the more questions scientists have about how and why feathers evolved in dinosaurs. So today, our Truth or Fail is all about dinosaur feathers. I will present you three tales, but only one of them is true.

It's up to you to figure out which is the true story. Are you ready? Yes. Yes. Story number one. When scientists peered into a sample of amber from Spain, they found a bunch of downy dinosaur feathers packed together densely. The dinosaur that gave rise to the feathers is unknown. But what was more interesting to scientists was what they found buried inside—larval molts belonging to an ancestor of modern-day feather and skin-eating

beetles called dermestids. Or it might be story number two. Feathers may have evolved since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but that does not mean that we can't use them to evolve our modern-day technologies, like badminton shuttlecocks. A badminton company has developed a new shuttlecock whose nylon feathers are inspired by the short feathery fibers found on Dylon paradoxus, a predator related to T. rex with the promise that these feathers will make a more aerodynamic birdie. Or maybe is fact number three. After paleontologists identified dinosaur fossils with feathers

similar to modern aquatic birds, scientists wanted to see how their feathers might have evolved and led to the modern-day aquatic bird feather. So they constructed robot ducks decorated with synthetic feathers inspired by the fossilized feathers and found that these feathers were not as efficient at releasing water compared to duck feathers. So either at story number one, dinosaurs may have had to contend with feather eating beetles, story number two, badminton company created a dinosaur birdie, or story number three, scientists built a robo duck with dinosaur feathers.

Ah, when researching feathers, all you find is scientists thought this about dinosaur feathers, scientists thought that about dinosaur feathers. So I saw a version of all these stories I didn't read any of them, so I have no idea, but I know that that they all are something I don't think the shuttlecock going could be right because why would you pick something old from before feathers were any good? That would to be aerodynamic. That's my only thought who's to say that just cuz it's old doesn't mean it's good Some of the best things in life are old like kisses. I'm a zoomer

See when I look at your literal gray hairs 14 so when I was a zoomer I did have gray hairs. Okay, that's not how generations work. But yeah Yeah, we just become each generation, right? To be fair, every old person, I'm pretty sure will be a boomer for the rest of history. I think that will be interesting to see if they just start calling people boomers after the boomers are gone. The age into boomer, that is a permanent age of humanity now. As soon as you start griping about not singing your neighbor's songs, you boomer immediately.

Yeah, boomer. Uh-oh. That's it. Nobody writes me poems anymore. Yeah. They don't make shuttlecocks like they used to back in the dino day. I also am skeptical about that. I know that they make them with feathers and it's something to do with, you only want feathers

from one wing so they spiral good or something like that. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. So this is an extrapolation of just the fact that shuttlecocks exist perhaps. And are made of feathers, yes. The other two though, I know they're always finding everything in amber. Everything's in amber.

Yeah. Because it's a good preservation method. Something died, something dropped a feather. And bugs love hanging out on trees. So they're always getting trapped in there. The problem is, is I have very bad paleontology knowledge. So I don't like the Spain part is throwing me because I feel like a lot of these amber specimens are usually like East Asia, but

dinosaurs are all over the continents and the continents have rearranged. So, you know. I think I saw a version of the robot duck thing that was not this story, but something about ducks doing something else. So I don't think it's that one. I do think it's maybe the amber one because that that just seems right to me. I That one also rings the most true to me. I'm not going to metagame. I'm too tired to metagame. I think it's the amber one too. I'm going to go with my instinct.

Two amber votes? Yes, two amber, two furious. Yes, I am amber. I'm walking in for amber. All right. Dylon paradoxus is a small relative of Tyrannosaurus rex reaching two meters long and some fossils show that the dinosaur is likely covered in a fluffy layer of proto-feathers,

but no one's ever tried to make badminton birdies with them. Additionally, scientists in South Korea recently built a robotic dinosaur to test out a theory about how their feathers may have been used to flush out prey. So that's cool, but nobody ever built a Robo duck with dinosaur feathers. It's true, they're besteds. Also called skin beetles were found in fossilized amber along with some dinosaur fluff.

You guys are both correct. Hooray. Do you like the part where I made you think over and over again that you failed? Yeah, that was a fun way to present it. Yeah, a lot of twists and turns. Apparently we can't conclude much about whether or not the mystery dinosaur the feathers came from

would have had beetles as a pest. According to the scientists involved in the study, the larva weren't feeding on the living feathers and didn't have the structures and modern germestids that they used to irritate the skins of their hosts. So they think the beetles probably were not causing the dinosaurs much harm. Sounds lovely. That's nice.

Birds do look really creepy if they have like some sort of feather parasite and lose a patch of it. They need their feathers for sure. They need their feathers to be cute, to be wholesome. And then as soon as those are gone, it's like, Oh, I see how you are an avian dinosaur. Humans are really the only animal that looks good naked. And then as soon as those are gone, it's like, oh, I see how you are an avian dinosaur Humans are really the only animal that looks good naked. I Yeah, you see a hairless cat, you're like, nope, hairless bears.

Very bad. Yeah. Really, really scary. So bad. I don't know what are what other naked animals we got out there? I mean, really hairless cats are the closest to being acceptable and they're pretty far from acceptable. So I think I think you're right. Naked more sheep. Not good. A sheep shaved looks good. A completely think you're right. Naked mole rats, not good. A sheep shaved looks good. A completely hairless sheep,

I think would maybe just look kind of normal, I guess. Yeah, naked mole rats don't have any hair and they look very bad. Hippos, whales, whales. Pretty good. Whales look great naked. And dolphins. Whales are dolphins.

Dolphins are whales. Well, okay. Not to me. Not to me. I have somebody ask me recently, they're like, what's the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise? And I looked it up and I was like, absolutely nothing. Like, there are two different things. We call some things dolphins and some things porpoises.

But taxonomically, no sense to what we call one. So I think we should just call all of them whales. And that's where I'm sticking to it. Because I don't want to say cetacean. People are gonna think I'm terrible. I agree with you, I think you're right. But you gotta have at least another adjective. You gotta have big whale, fun whale.

Happy whale, mean whale. Well no, then within that you say blue whale. Blue whale and dolphin. But when you say no, then within that you say blue whale, blue whale, and dolphin. But when you say both, you are saying whale. Dolphin is whale. From now on, this is science law. But if you want to, if you're talking about dolphin, then you say, what you say? I think happy, fun whale was my dolphin.

A fun whale. Look at that naked fun whale. Yeah. Look at that naked fun whale. It sure does look good. She's looking pretty good over there. Man, it looks like he could have a good time, if you know what I mean. A hairy dolphin would be really disturbing too. Hairy dolphin! Hairy dolphin! I think all the animals around us have the appropriate amount of covering when they are healthy. Yeah

Somehow yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah somehow. I like the idea except for naked mole rats They really that did not as the wrong call I love the idea that like dolphins would like swim and like they like a super sleek Hair to sort of like flowing behind them, but then when they dry off on land after a little bit It's just like a big fro. Yeah. I like that, too. Oh, like super fluffy, curly hairs. Yeah. Next, we're going to take a short break. Then it'll be time for the fact off.

All right. Welcome back, everybody. Now get ready for the fact. Our panelists have all 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 I will award them Hank bucks anyway I see fit. And I could do that just out of malice. We don't even have to be playing a game. You could just call us one day and say you get 100 Hank bucks. Sarah, you lose 100 Hank bucks. I'm a cruel master, but I I'm in charge. So whatever I say goes anyway, you lose a hundred ink books. I'm a cruel master, but I'm in charge, so whatever I say goes.

Anyway, you want to do some trivia question to decide who goes first? I guess. You're making the rules now. Sam and I are monkeys dancing. I don't have it open right now. Trivia question, you guys, to decide who goes first. Outkast famously commanded us all to shake it like a polaroid picture, but maybe he should have told us to shake it like a peacock trying to attract a peahen.

In 2016, scientists published the results of a study on how peacocks rattle their train to convey their interests and merits to a potential mate. I don't know if that's the actual word for a peacock's tail feathers. I feel like maybe it is. But the question is, how many times per second does the peacock shake their tail feathers? I was so distracted by the fact that you said Outkast was a singular person that I didn't even hear the question. So I'll say I'll say 14.

Outkast is a bunch of people. Outkast is a big boy in Andre 3000. Oh, wow. Andre 3000 specifically sang that song that you were referring to. I'm, I'm learning every day. Wow. Okay. I was just as distracted by the completely different part of the

sentence, which is that it's peacocks and pea hens, which makes sense for the genders of the birds. Yeah, a female peacock is a pea hen. Baby peacocks are called pee-bee-bees. Wow, sciences and nature are both amazing. So I think, well, yeah, PBBs cannot shake their tail feathers because they are not sexually mature and so they do not have their beautiful tail feathers. I think it's going to be like, I think it's fast. I think it's like 40, 40 shakes per second.

Baby peacocks are actually, there is a name, they're called peachics. Oh, yours is better. It makes more sense. Yeah, but PBB is better petition for PBB. PBB. We had 14 and 46. Is that what you had? Yeah. Oh, gosh, this is close, actually. Sam, you are closer.

It's 26. Well, so that not far off either of you. That's much more than I would have guessed That's a lot of shaky shaky. That is not how fast I go when outcast sings For second see I miss that part. That's really fast Yeah, no, I shake my Polaroid picture far slower than a peak. I could probably do it like four times a second I don't know. Yeah, maybe. No, I think like maybe one. That's like really more like a little more than one.

It's impossible to count one second and also shake your butt at the same time. So one of the professors. Yeah, yeah, I can't know. Aren't you focused on the butt shake? You can only count the shakes. Yeah. Neither of you are trying to shake your butt right now. I'm currently shaking my butt entirely as of a very still upper body.

You have good movement isolation. That's what I always say about you, Sam. Yeah. So this is all we got to move on. Sam goes first. Humans love eating chicken. They love it so much that in 2020, 73 billion chickens were slaughtered for meat worldwide compared to 332 million cattle, which is bonkers, right? Chickens are much smaller. Well, yeah, that's my next point, Hank. A chicken is one 100th the meat of one cow. But I do think that the math still works out to that. People are wild about chicken meat,

right? That's still like whatever whatever 332 million times 100 is, it's still less than 73 billion. Yeah. Yep. So, okay, but when you slaughter and prepare chickens to be eaten, you are left with a bunch of, you guessed it, feathers. 10% of a chicken's weight is its feathers. So that's a lot of feathers per chicken.

And you can't turn feathers into leather, even though they rhyme, like you could with slaughtered cat They just end up getting thrown away or even worse Incinerated and as feathers break down or burn they release sulfur dioxide Which can cause stuff like acid rain and among other bad things So chicken feathers are sort of a big bad problem that you don't really think about all that often. That's right. Science, however, is on the case. And one of their proposed solutions? What if we just ate feathers? I don't like this solution.

Chicken feathers, like fingernails and hair, like you mentioned, are pretty much made entirely of the protein keratin. And proteins can be good food if you can digest them and digesting but however digesting keratin is pretty hard. I'm just picturing like me with just like white feathers and also like Hank's saying who wants to eat feathers but scientists don't let things like that stop them do they? Right. In, a team of researchers from Lund University in Sweden published a paper identifying a strain of bacteria that is able to break the keratin in chicken feathers down into amino acids, which can then be eaten and digested by animals. These bacteria were isolated by one of the researchers on his parents' chicken farm,

and I couldn't find more info about that. Wow. So you found the bacteria like eating feathers on the feather farm. You find like a melty feather Wow. But it's like... So you found the bacteria like eating feathers on the feather farm. You find like a melty feather and go like something's going on here. Anyway, this particular process I think breaks the feathers down into just like mush and then that mush gets added into animal feed but there are other people... You feed it back to the chickens. Probably, unfortunately, yeah. But there are other people out there that are messing around with similar processes.

And in 2020, an art student worked with scientists using something very akin to this process, that instead turned the feathers into something with a more meat-like color and texture. Did you say an art student? Uh-huh. Okay. I think he was getting a lot of help from scientists, but it wasn't our student. This feather meat was then made into a series, This is where the art student part comes in, into a series of fine dining type dishes as sort of a proof of concept of what we could be doing with our food waste. This feather

meat mimics real meat in many ways. Well, not real meat, just meat, but it is better meat mimics meat in many ways, but is reported to be entirely devoid of flavor, which is cool and also unnerving. Yeah, that sounds right. I guess it makes sense for like liquefied fingernails wouldn't taste as large. As a small aside, there are other less immediately viscerally unpleasant things that people are figuring out to do with chicken feathers, like repurposing the keratin into semi-permeable membranes that can be used in stuff like batteries

But you don't eat except for the one batteries that I talked about that you do Yeah, also that I did used to put them in my mouth because they were in the freezer And I liked them being cold in my mouth the batteries Yeah, we got the batteries in the freezer goes supposed to keep them to like like alive longer that true So anyway, here's my finale all this research could also set us up for a future where we collect all of our hair and fingernail Clippings for some microbes on them, and then it's a dinnertime baby Sam. That's such a good fact I hate it so much is the other pictures? There's pictures and they're really gross. It's so bad. It just looks like mushy looking chicken feathers.

Oh my god. Like the future where you just like put a couple of tablespoons of feather dust into your curry cause you need the protein. I'm not looking forward to mush and the you would definitely feed it back to the birds. But like is that weird?

I don't know. I like, I could, I'd eat my hair if I could. It's better, I feel like it's better than feeding them chicken meat. That's a weird thing to say, Hank, but I totally agree with you. I would also eat my own hair if I could. Like I would eat human hair.

What I'm saying, I'd eat human hair way before I'd eat human meat. Totally. I don't think, I think if somebody presented me something that tasted perfectly fine or like nothing and said, I made that out of liquefied human hair, I guess I don't know what my reaction would be as I say it out loud. Not that I've gotten this far down this sentence.

I'm not comfortable exactly finishing it. I think if it tasted like a chicken nugget, even if it was made from human hair, I'd be like, oh, I'm going to eat this now. Absolutely. It tastes like a chicken nugget and I like chicken nuggets. from human hair. Yeah. I'd be like, oh, I'm going to eat this now. It tastes like a chicken nugget. And I like chicken nuggets. This is my whole attitude towards fake meats. Also, if it tastes as good as a chicken nugget, I'm eating it.

I don't care what it's made of. I mean, and I've been and I've been guaranteed that it's not going to hurt me. That's not do that. It is digestible and will not injure me. Yeah, I Sam that's nuts. How how recently did they do this to feathers? 2020 is when the art student did his thing. And I think 2017 was when the first paper came out and those researchers now. Oh, they like have a company that makes microbes that break

down all kinds of stuff including feathers kind of on a on a large scale level you know I'm I want to sign up I want to eat the feather mush and that we can get some what do you said that they were like in Europe somewhere yeah Sweden all right I'm going to Sweden sounds great I mean they can mail you some I bet yeah I want to go Sweden. Okay All right, sorry you have quite a hill to climb here I am really astounded by this feather protein mush It's an uphill losing battle, but I'll do my best The namakwa Sandgrouse is a very cute little bird that lives in the dry deserts and savannas of the southern part of the African continent, like around Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa.

And somebody on the Citizen Science website, eBird, really has it out for them because they are described as, quote, a dumpy, short-legged, pigeon-like bird that shuffles awkwardly on the ground and flies in a fast and direct manner singly or in groups, which feels a little like bullying to be honest. Dumpy is not a descriptor of science stuff. They do kind of look like pigeons, but with pointy tails. Looks can be deceiving because adult male sandgrouse have a very special adaptation hiding underneath that dumpiness.

They can soak up water using their tummy feathers and fly it back to their babies to drink. The first formal paper describing how these feathers worked was published in July 1967 by Tom Cade and Gordon McLean, estimating that male sandgrouse could soak up around 25 milliliters of water, which is around 15% of their body weight. And even with evaporation, they estimated that the sandgrass could still deliver a good amount of that, like 10 to 18 milliliters, to their nests around 10 to 30 kilometers away. So flying quite a distance in the dry desert, still have water. And in April 2023,

Lorna Gibson and Jochen Mueller did a more detailed analysis on the structure of these feathers using modern microscopy tools to see what was going on. Basically, what they found was that these belly feathers have two separate parts. There's an outer part with straight barbs, like the feather offshoots from the central shaft. Then the inner part, closest to their flesh has a tight coiled structure. So when they get wet, the tightly coiled part unwinds becomes like straighter featherier and provides a lot of surface area for water molecules to grab onto and kind of like form

this, I don't know, in the way that water bunches up through capillary action and surface tension form this lump of water. And each feather basically becomes a separate tube sponge structure holding onto water on their bellies. And it's like not a coincidence. These males go into the water and they shimmy around for like five minutes and soak up water. And it's specifically the males because they looked at the tummy feather region in females as well. And it's smaller and the feathers aren't structured to hold as much based on the same absorption tests of just like putting water on the feathers, which is weird on its own. And then they mentioned at the very end of the paper, because I think modern papers, they're like, what's the point of this? I think they wanted to look into it because it was really weird. but it may also help us design some like water soaking or capturing technologies

inspired by these tummies. It's like a camelback but it's a bird belly. Yeah we can create a competing company to camelback who needs camelback water. Bird front it's called bird front. Bird front. It's called bird front. Bird front. Yeah. And you can have each, it's both on at the same time, and then you'll be real hydrated.

If I had one of these birds and I squeezed it, the water come out. You'd have a little drink, I think. Neither of these papers did say how the chicks suck the water out of their tummies. I assume that they just kind of... They just get in there. Yeah, exactly like that. But yeah, I imagine that you'd be able to skoosh it out. You too, as a human, it wouldn't be very much water. It's a lot of water for

a baby bird, but 10 milliliters of water is not very much. I do like the idea of just being in the desert and just like, where like No water at all and I find a bird and I was like licking a bird Who's the survivalist guy Bear Grylls Bear Grylls always out there licking birds. Yeah, yeah slurping down a bird So I have to choose between chicken feathers being a source of pollution, but maybe they're a source of nutrition or chicken feathers being a source of pollution, but maybe they're a source of nutrition or Sari and the male sand grouse belly feathers soaking up water like a sponge to feed to that will kill. That's really cute That's more cute. It's pretty cute, but it's not as fascinating. It's not as fascinating as a bowl full of feather gruel I think I'm on a hot streak. I think I'm winning this season. Sam, you were trouncing me this season.

Honestly, sometimes I feel bad about it. Wow. Sam's figured out the calculus. The magic formula, yeah. Maybe it's just that Sarah has too many epaulettes. What's it called? Yeah, I've got too many epaulettes. They're all called? Yeah, yeah, I've got too many of them. They're all over me They're hiding my eyes. They're hiding my ears

Way down my brain epithets. Yeah, and then I'm a fraud I worked so hard to get them and then gave up completely Sam's bringing his a game this season That's right And now it's time for ask the science couch where we ask the listener question to our virtual couch of finally honed scientific minds. Sky on Discord asks, do feathers grow entirely within the skin and then come out as a whole? Or do they get extruded like hairs? And when you put it that way, it kind of gross, isn't it? I think they get extruded like hairs. I guess they come out all twisted up. And then they go poof. Yeah. Yeah, that's the question. That is it. And that's the answer.

Yeah, they they do get extruded. And so the like a hair, the tip is the oldest part and the base is the newest part. But unlike a hair, there's more stuff going on. The outermost layer of a developing feather that is being extruded from a feather follicle is a sheath that disintegrates later to let the feathers pop out. And then the middle layer within that sheath is all the keratin filaments. So the stuff that will form the central bit called the rachis and then the barbs. They're all made of the same material, just compacted in different ways. Where like the barbules are the most feathery

and then the barbs are less. And then the rachis is like the toughest little bit. And then within that is the pulp, which is like yucky to think about that there's pulp inside feather, but it's gotta be there because it's gotta grow, which is like fiber blasts and blood vessels and all the stuff providing.

Yeah. And it goes all the way up the stick. It goes all the way up the stick. Yep. And it's in there the whole time? It's in there during development. And then as the sheath, the feather sheath disintegrates, and then the feather fans outward to let the barbules and the barbs fan out,

then also the pulp gets disintegrated and will slough away to allow the central vein of the feather to open up. Which also makes sense because you need them to be light so that you can fly and whatnot. But it is very weird to think about and you can kind of see it. So there are two types of, I guess it's a spectrum, but there are two main categories of birds of all organisms when they're babies. There are atricial organisms and there are precocial organisms.

Atricial organisms are ones that are helpless when they pop out of their egg or the womb or whatever. Babies, human babies are atricial. Any sort of naked baby bird, parrots, pelicans, things like that, they're just fleshy, they're pink, they can't do a damn thing. They can't protect themselves. They can't walk around or feed themselves or fly or whatnot. Those are often really interesting to look at because you

see these like feather spikes come out, but then the precocial birds and the chicks, those are the ones that tend to grow feathers within the egg still. And so they do all this like weird growth. And those are like chickens where they come out already pre-fuzzy. Okay. And are more able to like walk around and eat. And they're not fully fledged. They're not like full giant feathers.

I think there's one group of birds that I don't have the name of right now that does come out like almost fully adult from the egg. It's like super precocial, but... I was picturing like a little hawk catching out of an egg and just going, PYONG! It is a weird, it's like a ground bird. I think it's kind of like a turkey and it buries its eggs in mounds of dirt.

And then they just like emerge from the dirt mound. Like little adult men. This is I know this is weird, but the turkey gives birth to men. Human men. Little ones, little human. They're called megapode birds. I think megapode. Oh, yeah. And they put it on top of the rotting compost to keep it warm That's smart. Too smart. That's how you make a human man

You take some rotting compost a little sand insulation put some baseballs in there and a man pops out Baseballs are just man eggs. Don't tell Ken Griffey Jr. Alright, that makes sense. Thank you, Starry. If you want to ask the Science Catcher your questions, you can follow us on Twitter and on threads 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 Bucky's Revenge on YouTube, AtJCB on Twitter, 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 really easy to do that. First, you can get to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents, become a patron, get access to our Discord and our bonus episodes and our commentaries of movies. Shout out to patron Les Aker for their support. Second, you can use a review wherever you listen. That's helpful and 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 Schulz.

SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Kempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazile. Our editorial assistant is Tabukka Charmer-Bardy. Our sound design is by Joseph Munamadish. 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! One of the most dramatic ways that birds lose feathers is through a fright molt, when they're stressed, like when they're almost eaten. And to understand a little bit more about fright molts, in a 2006 study, researchers

measured the force needed to remove feathers from around 70 bird species, specifically from the breast, the back, and the rump. They found that, on average, the butt feathers were pulled or fell out most easily, especially in solitary prey species that are known to have a, quote, high frequency of fear screams, according to around 15 years of audio data anyway. So if you see a bird flying around without a tail, it might look pretty silly, but also that poor little guy has probably been through some recent horrors. My butt! My butt fell off.

My butt fell off. And as not the scientists, though they did also do that. Hello, welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week is, as always, is science expert and Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, the incredible Sam Schultz.

I don't deserve the incredible. Who wrote the incredible? I'm just a man. Did he write incredible? Or did Sam write it? Do you think I would write that about myself? I don't know. Sometimes you're like, I like, I'd like to be recognized.

To feel a little bit like Bruce Banner. Yes. The incredible. Yeah. Bruce Banner was the incredible one, Sarah. Have you ever read a comic book in your life? Yeah, I, I got it right this time. The Hulk was incredible.

In comparison, Bruce Banner, not incredible. All right, there's something I'd like to ask you too. If when you got exposed to gamma radiation, you became a giant green monster, when you got angry, what would your name be? What would the superlative before Hulk be? Because we'd all be Hulks, obviously. But the Incredible Hulk is taken.

So what kind of Hulk would you be? Hmm. I don't know enough words. I think Sam might be the adorable Hulk. Oh, I would like to be the adorable Hulk. Just a little guy. Who's a big guy. I'll still fight you, but come on. Is Just a little guy who's a big guy. I'll still fight you, but come on. Is this a little guy who's a big guy? That's what it says in big bold letters on the cover of my comic book.

I think that I could go somewhere with that. I guess I'm just naming all of you because I think Sarah would be the amicable Hulk. Oh, yes. Yeah, I'd be like, oh, I'm so sorry. Sarah would never even turn into the Hulk, because she'd be like, I understand why you feel that way, villain. I'm not able to be angry. The incapable Hulk. The incapable Hulk.

Just normal. Just a normal girl. That's what her comic would say. Hank, what would you be? I don't know, you guys. I gave away all the good ones. I'm really bad at this. I wish I wasn't. That adjectives?

Yeah. Well, yeah, he's one to end up with something that ends in able, which there's a lot of, because I don't think I'd be like the forgettable Hulk. No, opposite of that. Going to rhyme zone. For able? Yeah. I don't think I'd be like the forgettable Hulk. No, no opposite of that gunner. I'm zone for evil How about the insufferable Hulk? That might be right he tweeted one too many times Okay every week

Be meaner to me every week you said it about yourself. I know, but then you said you all agreed with me. We're supposed to say no, no, Hank. No, no. You are the, um, the applaudable hoax. Every week here on SciJour Tange, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic and failing. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play and then one of them at the end of the episode will win and get to have that for

the rest of the week. But before we get to all of that, we got to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. When you have two things to stick together, like a jacket and patch or a cup and a feather, you begin with the question, what tools should I use? A needle and thread or some nails and screws? Wrap them with rope and tie some knots?

Weld them together with that blow torch you bought. There's staples or buttonholes, or perhaps you might choose a tape sticker bottle of mighty fine glues. Take a rock and a stick and some sap from a tree, then you've got an axe and can chop through debris. Or mix flour and water and you've got a way to mache some paper or whatever they say. And of course there's that aisle of the hardware store with rubber cement and epoxy galore. Adhesives that you can squeeze or spray, each with a purpose, like joining rubber to clay.

So if you want to avoid a big sticky mess, please read the label and be careful, I guess. Wow. Maché some paper, really good. So the topic for this week is glue. But before we dive in, we're going to take a short break, and then we'll be back to figure out what is even glue? ["What Is Even Glue?" theme music plays.] All right, we're back. Sarari, what is even glue? Oh gosh, you know, it feels like such a catch all to me that it's just like, well, it's not even, you know, worth defining.

No one's even trying. Yeah. Well, it's like sticky, but you use it for stickiness. Because some things are sticky, but aren't glue. Yeah. Because they're just snails. But I think you could use a snail as glue, but a snail's not always glue. You know what I'm saying? It's the application of the thing that makes it glue.

I think that's pretty good. Like, you use it, you want to stick things together. And what do you use to stick those things together? Probably glue is what it is. I mean, there's other ways. You could weld. But when you're welding, aren't you there's other ways you could weld. But when you're welding, aren't you using actually like melting something into a goo that then dries into hardness. So is that is that the is the glue?

Is there a momentary glue there is solder glue? I don't know. It's solder. Solder is just lead, right? Solder is how it's spelled. Solder. Yeah, that's right. Low melting alloy. I think solder is solder. Okay whatever. And glue is the rest of the sticky stuff.

I agree but I don't know why. I don't know why solder is because like if you gave me a glue and you said you in order to get this glue to work you have to heat it up almost as if it is a hot glue that comes out of a hot glue gun then I wouldn't say no that's just plastic I'd say that's glue. A soldering iron is a hot glue that comes out of a hot glue gun. And I wouldn't say, no, that's just plastic. I'd say that's glue. A soldering iron is a hot glue gun. A soldering iron is a hot glue gun with metal that comes out of it. Yeah, welders are just crafting.

Yeah, I mean, glues can be a lot of things. If you look back in history, so nowadays, we've got lots of different glues that are a lot of plastic-based, but there's glue on tape and sticky notes, like that's a kind of glue. Those are just like pressure sensitive glues. I guess the more general term for glue is adhesive.

So if you see the word adhesive, it's also a glue probably. That opens it up to a lot of stuff I feel like maybe doesn't count. Like I wouldn't have thought to look up for this episode, such as tape. But tape has glue on it. I guess tape has glue on it Which is the plasticky part on the outside that isn't sticky so the non sticky plastic Glue, but the sticky plastic is glue and I think glue has something to do So we did an episode on sticky things where I basically just talked about glue in the definition episode on sticky things, where I basically just talked about glue in the definition section,

because the sciency part, if you want to start getting into the chemistry, which we also don't really know about glue, but the main things to know are adhesion and cohesion. The two he's, they come up in all kinds of sticky conversations. So adhesion is when you stick two different things together. So if you were gluing a patch to a jean jacket, you want the glue to stick to the patch, you want the glue to stick to the jean, and that helps adhere the surfaces together. And then there's cohesion, which is the same thing sticking together. So you want the glue molecules to stay stuck to themselves. You don't want them to, I don't know, slip past each other. You need them to clump together, harden up, get sticky. And so when glue doesn't work, it's usually a failure of one of those points. It's either a failure of adhesion, the glue peels away from the surface you're trying to stick it to. It's a failure of cohesion, which means the glue molecules didn't set up properly.

So the glue is just like still runny or sticky or a substrate failure. Like the jacket melts when you put glue on it because you didn't read the label. And then you put the bad glue on the jacket. Have we ever been in a situation where the glue succeeded in holding the thing in place, but the thing that was being held in place itself just ripped away? As I've done that, but I've done that with wall. I've ripped, oh, I've ripped big chunks out of the SciShow studio walls before. Whoopsie.

Yeah, I believe that. Sometimes the glue is stronger than the thing holding the glue. For example, also, anytime I've ever gotten superglue on my fingers. Glue is really one of the things that you encounter the most often in your day-to-day life that's like, this makes sense that it's sticky and it sticks to stuff and then somebody asks you why it does it and then you're like, oh gosh. Because it's sticky. I don't know. And then it gets kind of scary. Stickiness is almost as weird as like magnets. It's like, wait a second. You mean I can touch

this and then I have to keep touching it? Yeah, for a long, long time. Can't stop? It boils down to electricity and weird little forces. It shouldn't though. It's honey. Yeah, there's all kinds of little forces are going on at that level. It's either the glue is seeping into like the pores on your skin and then the glue molecules are bonding to each other and then they're mixing in with your skin and then the glue molecules are bonding to each other and

then they're mixing in with your skin molecules a little bit and everything. If you think about it too hard, it gets stressful. Does it actually bond to my skin? Like actual like kind of sharing electrons a little bit? I think it is less common in like household adhesives. Like the Elmer's glue is not bonding to your skin and whatnot. But I think when you get to more industrial strength glues that are designed to bond to materials, then yes, it's actually integrating.

I mean, super glue feels like it is bonded to my skin. Super glue becomes sticky and cures due to a reaction with water molecules. So when it is exposed to air, there's water vapor in the air and your skin is moist. And so I bet it is reacting to the water molecules in your skin. So in that way, yes, because you have water in you. Yeah, it's probably getting into the water that's just on the other side of the skin. Yeah. Or like like very surface level water, which makes it very sticky. That's right.

Almost one might say super sticky. Yeah, I feel like I know roughly what glue is now. Do we know where the word came from? Because it's a it's a good one. I agree. It is a great, great, great one. It's a good one. It is one of those that has stuck around for a while. It comes from the old French glue, which...

There you go. There you go. Still there, which meant glue. Or specifically, bird lime, which is a way that people used to catch birds. So they used to like mush up mist sensual berries or other plant sappy things and spread them on the branches of trees and the birds and then birds would get stuck and then you could presumably eat them for meat collect them for feathers and it's been used in various forms there isn't one recipe for

bird lime it's just glue that you use to trap birds on trees in cultures around the world. I had no idea about bird. I mean, it makes sense that when there's food flying around, you just make something sticky and be like, that's mine now. Like the way that we do with flies, but not for food. One time I had a spider trap in my basement and I put it there, and this was an old house, and I came back like six months later and it was just pure spider. So I was like one of those sticky, thick, stuck to it spider traps.

And I picked it up and I was like, oh my God, this is terrible. And then I like, but I was like, but I kind of, I didn't want to look at them. So I like kind of got close to it. And then one of the spiders lunged at me. No, Hank. It was like, I kind of got close to it and one of the spiders lunged at me. No, Hank.

It was like, huh. There. Yeah, there is the evil God who's trapped us here. Only a spider would be like, there is God. Let's let's get him. I truly saw you as a cruel, sufferable Hulk and when I can take him. There's that insufferable Hulk himself. He could totally take me.

But before we had the word glue, we had Latin glutinum, which is also related to gluten. So that's where we got that word, which is just any sort of like sticky glue stuff from plants or other things. But the Greek word for glue was kala, which we see in collagen, which is the structural protein in connective tissue. So we got the word gluten and glutinous from Latin and we got the word collagen from Greek. But they were all referring back to glue. We had sticky stuff and we needed words to describe it and they stuck around because glue is a good word got sticky stuff from day one there's sticky stuff everywhere since we

were talking we knew that stuff was sticky which makes sense because even even if we don't still don't understand the science we can still go around touching things and say hey we understand the science well enough to be like that's sticky yeah i feel informed and so now it must be time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week we're going to be playing a little bit of secret ingredient. Humans have been making glue out of all sorts of materials, which is a testament to both how sticky nature can be and how creative humans are when it comes to trying to get things to stick together. So today we're going to highlight a few of those ingenious glue recipes.

I'll describe some kind of glue past or present minus one key ingredient. You'll have three possible options to choose from. It's up to you to guess what the secret ingredient is. Are you ready? Glue. Are you a glue Pokemon now? That's how I say yes now, glue. In 2022, researchers published their results designing an adhesive material that could

be used in a variety of surfaces, including metal, plastic, glass, even biological tissue. This glue involves using water to activate fibers from a source found in nature, which allowed scientists to then shape the fibers into sticky structures for different adhesive purposes. But what was the source of those fibers? Was it pumpkin or mistletoe or eggs? Do eggs have fibers? I never looked at an egg and was like, that's got fibers in it.

Does everything have, does everything sticky have fibers? They have polymers. They have protein. What's a fiber? You eat fiber like in plant fibers. It's like a roughage. Fiber molecularly, biochemically is a carbohydrate. It's like a sugar.

You said the mistletoe thing already. Mistletoe pumpkin both have fiber. Pumpkin, stringy and goo mistletoe thing already. Mistletoe pumpkin both have fiber. Yeah, okay. Pumpkin stringy and gooey. That's right. Mistletoe, I think they used it for capturing birds. So does that mean this is a trick or does that mean that you just

overlapped a little bit here? I don't know. I guess I'll go with pumpkin. They're one of the stickier things, I think, that you could grow on the ground. I don't love the way I feel after carving a pumpkin. Uh-uh. I'm gonna overthink it. Okay, I'm gonna go with mistletoe to try not to overthink it.

I bet it's just an egg. That was the correct instinct, Sari. Oh, no. That was good. I mean, you knew about the mistletoe thing. That's true. This is amazing. So mistletoe uses... It's a parasitic plant, so it uses the substance, a sticky substance called viscine, or vissin, that surrounds the seeds to do some stickiness. And when birds eat mistletoe berries, they excrete the seeds along with the sticky viscine,

which can then get stuck to the trees and branches where the mistletoe can germinate. Researchers can make up to two meters of these viscine fibers and the stiffness of the fibers changes with the humidity. More humidity the fibers become more self-adhesive. So researchers developed a way to process wet viscine fibers and stretch them into either a film or into 3D structures, creating an adhesive structure that could potentially be used to like even seal up wounds. Hmm, cool. And bird poops on your wound and it closes up. Is that how it works?

Don't put bird poop in your wounds. We're not doctors here at Social Tamp. But I don't think that's allowed. Round number two. Sometimes taking inspiration from nature leads researchers to actually improving upon it. For example, another group of scientists in that same year, 2022, developed an adhesive inspired by protein produced by a particular animal. But instead of just copying the protein directly, the researchers added smaller units of the protein to a synthetic polymer and found that it actually performed better as an adhesive compared to the original protein.

But what animal was it? Was it mussels or frogs or barnacles? None of those. I was thinking spider. Yeah. But I guess there are a lot of sticky animals. They're always doing stuff with spiders when you search for glue news. A lot of spider stuff.

I think I did see some mussel stuff too though, so I'm going to say mussels. I feel like there's news about all of this stuff. Oh, but they're not the ones that stick to stuff. Do muscles stick to stuff? Yeah. They attach themselves to like an underwater pillar, like a dock. Barnacles do too. Okay. There was an episode of Tangents where I talked about frogs that glued themselves to each other to have sex. It was like early, early Tangents.

Yeah. But I think that was a couple years ago. So, old news, not 2022. I'm over... I'm gonna go Barnacle. So old news, not 2022. I'm over it. I'm going to go barnacle. I'm going to go barnacle. Well, muscles stick to rocks using a strong adhesive protein that's found in their foot

and a number of researchers have been looking at muscle slime to figure out ways to turn it into adhesive for various applications. This is also true for barnacles, but in this case, this was a muscle thing. So the proteins found in the muscle slime, they have these long linear chains of amino acids that belong to a broader class of sequences called tandem repeat proteins, basically made of repeats of a given amino acid sequence. Other sticky materials like spider silk are also tandem repeat proteins. And while scientists know the sequence of these proteins, recreating their overall structure can be super complicated.

So this group of scientists decided to look instead at something called protein-like polymers. Instead of trying to reconstruct the original protein out of the repeating units, they took individual units and added them to that synthetic polymer and tested how good it was. And it was even stronger than the muscle proteins. Wow. Like every animal in the world is really good at making sticky goop. How come? I don't know if every animal. We like all rule at it. Yeah, I mean in general one thing you can say is that we're pretty goopy.

Every single one of us is goopy. That's what unites us all and across this planet. I think this is the new memento mori. It's memento goopy. That's what unites us all and the crosses planet. I think this is the new memento mori. It's memento goopy. Memento goopy. Remember we all goop. That's the more positive one. You don't have to die first before that. Yeah, you just get to, yeah.

But you do have to be goop the whole time. Inside, inside me I have lots of goop. So that is not a problem. It's weird to be a big goop, you guys. Do you ever feel like it's both sort of an element of freedom from all of the stress of day-to-day life, but also just a terrible weight of its own to carry around? That we're just a bunch of goop that has anxiety? I mostly think it's really bad because it's always trying to come out of you.

Right. The goop in particular would be great if you could just I don't want anybody to see it. I would like the goop to just give me one freaking day of my life, please, to live and not be goopy. And I'm just barely held together by like my bones and the structural tissue in here. Otherwise, take those out. Full goo. Yeah, full goo. Just yeah, not even like composed like a slug. I don't have that tightness in me

without my bones. I would be a mess. You don't have that tightness of a slug, you know, really considered one of the tighter animals. Yeah, you look at a slug and you're like, damn, that's a tiny animal. Yeah All right round number three while the previous two rounds might have you thinking that 2022 was some particularly good year for glue The truth is that humans have been making glue for a long time and in China researchers have been studying old bricks

including one from a 2000-year-old tomb, from various locations to understand how they were made. Some of these very strong bricks were made by mixing sand and lime, which came from heated limestone, with a particular substance that glued everything together. What was the secret ingredient? Was it sticky rice, bamboo, or volcanic ash? Is this one we've done? Have we talked about this before, Sari? I think it might be. You were trying to act so normal. Her face was like... Uncharacteristically.

I did not have a good poker face at all. You're about five pixels on my computer screen right now and you're the size of a postage stamp and you still are like, sir, he's lying to me right now. If I remember correctly, and you're about to answer before me to totally give it away, I know that's what you're about to do. Wasn't it the answer is sticky rice? I think if I'm remembering correctly We just talked about goo a lot I mean like eventually we're gonna have to forget all of the stuff that we learned in this podcast, right? This is a greatest hits episode

So yeah sticky rice, isn't that cool? It's the thing is that it's so cool It is really that is extremely cool. I who thought oh, let's take your food and put it in food can be sticky, too It's sticky. So it makes for good brick binders Thanks to something called amylopectin, which is a polymer with these long branching chains. It probably helped to grip onto other surfaces and components inside of the brick. It makes sense. It's almost like putting rebar inside of concrete.

You have this other thing that is providing structure in a different way, and that means that it can then be strong in a different way. Though I will say that volcanic ash was a popular ingredient in concrete in other countries, but it was not readily available for use in China to all the people out there who hadn't known about the sticky rice and maybe were thinking about volcanic ash. All right. Well, it's a tie ball game, everybody. We're going to take a little short break right now, and then we'll be back. For the tiebreaker, it's going tie ball game, everybody. We're gonna take a little short break right now, and then we'll be back.

For the tiebreaker, it's gonna be the fact-off. ["The Fact-Off Theme"] Welcome back, everybody. Now 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 have presented their facts, I will judge the most mind-blowing one and give it the wind. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question.

This year, Sotheby's put up a letter known as the May 2 Penny Black for auction. One of its notable features was its stamp, known as the Penny Black. The stamp featured an image of Queen Victoria, and on its back was gum arabic, which helped stick the stamp to the envelope, making the Penny Black the first adhesive stamp to be used in a public postage system. In what year was this letter sent? When did mail happen? When did, when we were like... You're gonna have to guess. I feel like a lot of these social services kind of happened later than you think they would.

I don't remember what's making me think that, but a previous episode of Tangents, I was like, Whoa, that didn't happen until then. And I can't remember what it was. But maybe like, do you think Shakespeare was mailing stuff? Not with a stamp, not with a postage stamp. Yeah, that was a system. There was a person just like hiring children on the street probably. It doesn't matter because I don't know what year Shakespeare is from.

I think it happened in 1850. I think early 1900. I think like 19, right before the World War. So 1910 or so. Indeed, it was 1840, Sam. Before this, the postage system worked by having the postage people arrive with the mail and say, here's your mail, here's how much it costs to get it. And a lot of times people will be like, no.

And that was a lot of extra trouble that they weren't getting paid for to not deliver the mail. And so they were like, now the person sending the mail should pay for it. And that way, the person receiving it just gets it for free, which I mean, I guess it does make more sense, but also like, I'm the one getting the thing. Yeah, but you could really ruin somebody's life by mailing them so much stuff, don't you think? Just like I have to keep saying, no, there was this thing. I don't know if it still exists, but when I was a kid you could get

stuff COD. Cash on delivery. Cash on delivery. Yeah, I feel like I lived through the like no cash on delivery at the end of like infomercials and stuff age. So that must have been when people were putting their foot down. I remember I sent something, I sent a Magic the Gathering card cash on delivery once when I was, I would sell Magic the Gathering card cash on delivery once when I was I would sell

Magic cards on Compuserve. What a cool story That's a word for it Sam. What a cool sentence you just said Extraordinarily hip and not at all nerdy sentence that that was. And also that means that you get to go first. All right. Gluing stuff together is typically a one way process. Things aren't glued together, then you put glue on them and you mush them into each other. Then they are glued together for all of time sometimes.

And that's handy in some ways. Like for instance, if you just really need two things to be stuck together and are pretty sure that you're never going to change your mind about that. But where is the glue for us indecisive people or for those of us who feel a lot of pressure when we're making a collage in a digital world where nothing is permanent? We demand a glue that isn't permanent either. Luckily for us, a team of researchers out of Japan's National Institute for Material Science developed just such a glue in 2023. This glue isn't very glue like under normal circumstances. It's not

sticky. It doesn't dry when exposed to air. Two things you don't really want in your glue. But this non sticky goop has a special ingredient, cafeic acid. I think that's how you say that a compound found in a lot of plants including coffee beans and alright now this is chemistry, which I actually did get a D in in Caffeic acid contains within it acrylic is that a possibility and under certain circumstances It can take on the properties of acrylic as in it can become

Quite plasticky and the certain circumstances that make cafeic acid plasticky is exposure to a specific wavelength of UV light. So back to this glue that is not sticky, when it is time for it to do its thing and get sticky and stick stuff together, it is painted onto the objects to be stuck together, hit with UV radiation and it instantly hardens

into an insoluble insoluble plasticy substance and bonds those objects together. And the bond that makes us really strong, too. In one test, they used it to suspend a 40 kilogram weight for three days straight. And it showed no signs of breaking. And then they used it to seal cracks in some pipes. And then they pumped high pressure water through the pipes. So that didn't break break and it's waterproof.

And I haven't forgotten about the thesis statement of my fact, which is that indecisive people need an indecisive glue. Well, if you expose the glue and it's hardened state to a different wavelength of UV light, it reverts back to non-sticky goop form, which can then be collected and used again later, hit with the UV light, turned hard again. So right now, this glue is being put to the test in various applications, but one day, if this is ever available to consumers, the agony and anxiety of gluing something to something else will be no more. That's very interesting. Some people will know that like gel nail polish is

this way where it hardens under UV light. So that's the same thing. It's like causing it to pull it like the UV radiation is causing it to polymerize. But like the idea of a different wavelength of UV light undoing it also to me seems dangerous. Like is there none of that UV light around? Would it have to be in the shade?

That would be bad I guess. I guess you just wouldn't build like really important things with this glue. Because it'd be pretty easy to sabot, I guess. I guess you just wouldn't build really important things with this glue. Yeah. Because it would be pretty easy to sabotage, I suppose. To have the right wavelength. I don't know. There's lots of UV light. I couldn't find any article that even tried to explain how this worked.

But how would it work? I get how the polymerization would happen. You need to have certain sites on the monomers, you know, the individual blocks of the polymer. You need to have like some site that would like lose an electron because it got hit the UV light and then it's like primed to bind to the same site or a similar site on the other side of the of another nearby monomer. Mm hmm. Oh, like breaking that bond is, I guess, like UV light is very high energy.

Like it does. It can fly. It gives you like sunburns and stuff. But like I am surprised that that is possible. And it's very cool. I just hope that the people from Flex Tape get their hands on it so they can make extra good infomercials. And that's what I was thinking, too. I need a guy screaming at me about this glue. When you when you guys are in high school, did you like chemistry? Were you like, I'm good at this and I'm good at doing it.

Or was that later? I liked it in high school. Yeah, I was a big nerd. In between selling my Magic the Gathering cards, I'm compuserve. I was balancing reactions doing stoichiometry. So yeah, like I would do things. I would like learn chemistry jokes on the internet for fun or things like that.

I hate you so much. How did we end up on a podcast together? You would have bullied me in high school, Sam, I think. I think you would have been like. No, I think Sam would have tried to get you to come out and you wouldn't have come out. That's true. I was friends with a lot of people who I helped them with their homework and then they made me marginally cooler.

That was a great time. We were, yeah, there was like, we had a ring where it was like, some of us were good at science, some of us were good at history, and we'd all just like, pass our homework around before. That doesn't sound like helping each other with your homework so much as just copying each other's homework. Well, I didn't get any better at science, so I guess you're right. All right, Sarah, what do you got?

So when we were talking about the etymology of glue, I mentioned an animal-based substance called collagen, which is from the Greek word for glue, kala, which is a common protein that gives us strength and structure in a variety of our tissues, like your skin or bones or tendons. And it was named because it makes good glue. So some of the science couch questions that we didn't choose asked about horse glue, which I can talk a little bit about here. One of the most common types of animal glue or was

because you don't see it very much anymore is hide glue or bone glue which is made from rendering out the collagen out of animals like horses or cattle or rabbits really much like the birds that you're catching on the tree. Anything that's around you they die and then you turn them into glue. Gelatin is rendered collagen also which is why Jell-O isn't vegan, but there are plant-based alternatives to it. And you can make other types of animal glue as well. Hoof glue or horn glue, where the protein, the structural protein inside is keratin instead of collagen. And if you really don't want to waste any animal parts, you can also make blood albumin glue, where historically they would dry out all the solids from blood,

so the cells and the proteins and whatnot. You can mix that powder with water and either calcium oxide, which is lime or sodium hydroxide, which is caustic soda to make a slurry. And then you use heat and pressure to get those blood proteins to coagulate and harden. And that makes a pretty strong and fairly water resistant glue. I don't know why this has given me such a hard time, but I hate this. I'm so normal about it, which may be again, brain, weird kid to the max of the three of us. But basically, this this like blood glue was a precursor to synthetic resins and it was fairly abundant because blood was otherwise a waste product from slaughterhouses

and places like that. Oh, I always think of this was made from human blood. That makes way more sense. Oh yeah, animals. As far as I know, I'm sure someone made human glue, but I don't wanna think too hard about it. Yeah, well, look, blood, you can give up a certain amount, but you're right. We have a ton of blood available, not like humans, not in our bodies, but like as the razors of livestock.

Yes, as species who raise other animals. I found two main historical uses for blood glue that felt worth mentioning. Before we had plastics, like the thermosetting resin bakelite, which was patented in 1907. We've talked about it on the podcast before and used for things like billiard balls or bracelets or things like that. A French guy named Francois Charles LePage, patented what he called bois de c' which means hardened wood in 1856 and basically what he did, he took animal blood plus sawdust and then a heated pressure mold

to produce dense glossy items like picture frames or combs or plaques with people's faces etched into them or whatever he can dream up. So instead of using like wood frames or combs or plaques with people's faces etched into them or whatever he can dream up. So instead of using like wood glue or epoxy resin like we would nowadays, he just used blood glue for his arts and crafts, which is very weird. That's cool. Was this very, was this similar to Bakelite? It was like the precursor to it. So I don't know if it directly inspired it, but yes, similar in that it was a thermo setting, like it needed heat and pressure to then harden and solidify into this glossy shape. It looked kind of similar except for darker red-brown.

Then the other main use for blood glue, I could find that it was used from at least World War I, so the 1910s, to the 1930s or so, but possibly longer. It was used to make plywood that was relatively water resistant for all kinds of construction of boats or airplanes or other structures, because that those plant glues or resins weren't as waterproof and this heat compressed blood was. In an age of the problems of microplastics, let's bring it on back. And I found some of this blood plastic. And it looks pretty good. Yeah. There was a bunch of doorknobs and I'm back! And I found some of this blood plastic and it looks pretty good!

Yeah! There's a bunch of doorknobs and I'm like, man, if I had a blood plastic doorknob I think I'd be the most popular kid in town! Everything we own will be blood red which is kinda cool in a way Super good! Plastic vampires!

I think this is fine! You don't have microplastics anymore. You have microblood and that just degrades. Microblood's fine. Everybody knows that. That's it. That's all I got. I don't think we use blood glue or many animal glues anymore on industrial scales because plastic is cheaper

in the way that plastic has overtaken many industries. We still use animal parts for gelatin. Yes, we still use animal parts for gelatin. And I'm sure there are people who still make animal glues. Like I don't want to rule it out completely. There's people who use every piece of the animal, et cetera. But I don't know. I don't know about blood glue.

I never heard of, I never thought about it before. It seems hard. Like it seems like you'd need specific equipment. That's a lot of pressure to have to squeeze these objects together. Oh yeah, I want some now. I do, too. I hated this and now I'm really into it.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely looks like a bunch of stuff Dracula would have in his house. Yeah, for sure. Take a little nibble of his thorn off. That'd be the problem. He'd lick it every once in a while. He'd lick it all the time. It'd be a regular Hansel and Gretel house.

Yeah, it's like this. It's like those videos where like something in the room is made of chocolate. So for is this cake? Well, now I'm in trouble because I have to choose between these two very good facts. We've got blood glue, also making objects pre plastic and also a reversible glue that uses UV light for the indecisive and anxious. I think I'm going to give it to Ceri because I got brought on the whole journey.

I hated it and then I loved it. I think that's a better fact overall. When the person who brings this back says, I learned about this on a podcast, Sideshow Tangents, and they're winning the Nobel Prize for saving the world, then this will all have been worth it. You know what I want really bad is like blood glue, like vinyl record or like even even like just the case of a cassette tape. And you can like listen to some like Nordic death metal on it.

Uh huh. That'd be so good. And the thing is, is any you do it with a doctor. We're not doctors. A musician could theoretically. I don't know how much blood you need, but you could like donate, extract some of your blood over time. Yeah. Mix it with some sawdust and press your vinyl records with your own blood, which is very wild to think about.

The ultimate marketing campaign, instead of owning a piece of your hair, you can be like, this is made with my blood. I think that I would use, I would like purchase fewer plastic bottles if I had to make everyone out of my blood. This is really a personal responsibility coming back around. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask a listener question to our couch

of finely honed scientific minds. At Matthew Gaydos on Twitter asked, why doesn't it stick inside of the bottle? What a stupid question! Matthew, as a friend of ours, so glues are activated by a bunch of different things. So we talked about some of the things that can be activated. UV light, water. Oftentimes there's a solvent that is evaporating and inside of the bottle, the concentration of the solvent is so high that it can't evaporate anymore. The pressure of the solvent inside of the bottle is keeping it in solution.

This is like my bag. Inside of the bottle is different from outside of the bottle is the main thing to know. Did I miss anything, Zari? No, I think I just have more details, but that's basically it. The glue manufacturers want it to not stick inside the bottle. And so they've designed the inside of the bottle and they've designed the glue chemicals to not be sticky there in many cases. And there are there are different kinds of glues, like you mentioned.

The main buckets that I kind of mentally sort them in, there's like non-curing glues. So there's glues that stay sticky basically, which are sticky notes, tape, things like that, where if you unstick them and re-stick them, they'll still adhere. The only way that they'll stop kind of is if they have too much junk on them, if it's dirty. So there's too much stuff stuck to them already

for them to stick to something else. You could even clean them off and they would be sticky again. And so those kind of stickies, they're non-curing, they don't lock into place when they polymerize. Then there's curing that doesn't involve a complex chemical reaction. So a lot of like craft or hobby glues, like Elmer's glue is just water plus the polymer.

And when the water evaporates out, the polymer locks into place. And so then that becomes like the glue sticking in place. Or there are, like Hank said, other solvents that are in the glue. So rubber cement, you apply it to both surfaces. You let it like flash off, which basically means you let the solvents evaporate

and then you smoosh the glue together. Wow. And then the smoosh the glue together. Wow. And then the glue coheres to itself, that's the cohesion of it. And then there's reactive curing, which are the glues that are in two separate chambers, kind of, a lot of two-part glues are this like reaction curing,

where if you just put half of that glue on a surface, it'll never lock up. It'll never stick the two objects together. You need that chemical reaction to form the polymers that form the sticky stuff. And so that glue, the reactive curing glues, will never stick inside the bottle because they're designed not to. Whereas those non-reactive curing, if they evaporate in some way, like super glue, like we mentioned, you need water vapor. So there's no water vapor inside the bottle, but there is outside the bottle.

Once you have a half empty bottle, it might start sticking at the inside of the bottle because then the outside's inside the bottle. And you can't have that if you want your glue to remain liquidy. That's why they sell very small bottles of super glue that are basically single use. Yeah.

Which maybe we wouldn't do if we had to build them out of our blood. We would find a way. Yeah, so basically the like super glue is a reactive glue, but they don't have to have the separate chamber because the stuff that would be in the separate chamber is in the environment. Yes.

And there's some weird glues. Another person in the discord asked about thread lock adhesives or thread lockers, which you put on like a bolt And then you screw the bolt into a nut and then it sticks and those are Don't need oxygen to react. They need the metals to react So specifically those thread lockers say don't use with plastic because it'll dissolve plastic but when those

those are I think they're made of acrylic some sort of acrylic compound they cure when in contact with metal because metal has all these extra electrons around is reactive in certain ways and those glues polymerize when they're in contact with metal without oxygen which is like very weird so there's glues for all kinds of situations and that's why a lot of glues, like there are all purpose glues, but a lot of glues are for gluing specific things. Like Elmer's glue is good for paper

because the paper allows the water to evaporate, but it's not so good if you are gluing two like rubbery things together because then the water has nowhere to go. You said glue a lot of times. I did. I heard myself say it and then I saw you laughing. Yeah.

And then I just kept going. I don't know. Well, if you want to ask the Science Council your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents or check out our YouTube community tab where we will send out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon

and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to the space say on Discord, at RSTurtleness on YouTube, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and want to help us out, you can do that in a bunch of ways. Number one, go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron. Get access to our bonus episodes and our Minions movie commentary, which, come on. And cars too, and cars too. Also the cars commentary, you can find out what's inside the cars.

The powers are fun. We kinda do and it's scary. It's not, it's upsetting. Shout out to Patreon-less Acre for their support in particular. Thank you. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen, that's super helpful and helps us know what you think about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell the 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 Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Lixman.

Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazile. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chocolatardi, our sound design is by Joseph Toulamedish, 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. INTRO But one more thing! Sometimes, because of an infection or injury, a very small tube called a fistula can form inside of your body where it does not belong, like in your lungs or blood vessels or even your

anus, causing leaks that you definitely don't want. One way that doctors try to seal up anal fistulas is with fibrin glue, which is a two-part biological adhesive made of two molecules involved in wound healing and clotting. Basically, after treating the infection, doctors squeezed the glue inside the anal fistula to seal it up and let your body heal. I'm very glad that's a thing. I didn't just find out now, but I was upset the first time I found out what a fistula was. It didn't sound like what it was. Yeah, it sounds like it would be a lump or like an infected lump or something. But it is a hole where it doesn't belong, which is very weird and upsetting to think about. While the back can happen.

Your body can just do that. That your body can break in that way. I feel like it like on construction, maybe that could happen. Like you could be born with a problem like that. But once I'm set, like I'm built, I shouldn't develop new tubes. We're just goo. We're just goo. And we can sometimes get punctured, I guess. But from the inside.

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 in Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi.

I have a question for you guys. Okay. Tell me the name of your pet and then the name that you ended up calling your pet. Oh, Leloo and Leloo. I don't, I don't mess around with those alternate names. You don't have like a Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo Loo L We used to call her that more often than we do now. She's just Lelou now. She's transcended that reference. And it's really just Lelou. But I understand the compulsion. My brother's name is Will, and we call him Wilbur.

And sometimes we call him Birdman, because it's Wilbur turned into Bird, turned into Birdman. Okay, so you don't have a story for your bet, but you do for your brother. More accurate, yeah. LAUGHING Our cat's name is Inky, which is also something that you just say. You don't have a story for your bet, but you do for your brother. More accurate, yeah. Our cat's name is Inky, which is also something that you just say, and it has the same cadence as Leeloo,

but we call her so many different things. Stinko, Bug, Bean. We have a subset of nicknames when she's being a gremlin in particular ways. Sometimes we call her Grim for gremlin, for short. Sometimes we call her Dennis when she's being a menace. Sometimes we call her Marvin when she's starving. Oh, no, no, no. And so she's got so many names, but they change depending on her behavior.

She earns a title almost. She's almost a different animal. Yeah, at all moments of the day. Whether we, when she's being great, oh Inky, you're being so cute. When she's being a grim, Stinko. Stinko menace. Yeah.

Stinko the grim. Stinko the grim is over there. I have two cats. I have, we have our new cat Chester, who already, he's gone from Chester to Chester cheese, to just cheese. I think maybe it was Chester cheetah first. Was Chester to Chester Cheese to just Cheese. I think maybe it was Chester Cheetah first. It was Chester to Chester Cheetah to Chester Cheese.

And now just Cheese. We call him... Mostly we call him Cheese. At this point. Which is not really a cat name. And then we have Gummy Bear, who is... We went from Gummy... We call him Gum and Gummy and gumball and gums. And when one day we came home from something

and my son opened the door, because gummy bear is always there when you open the door when you're coming home, just sitting there and Orin said, the expected gums. And so we call him the expected gums. That's really good. The expected gums and cheese sounds like the best like buddy cartoon characters. Yeah.

Catherine also walked by Gummy Bear this morning and he was like hanging his arm off the cat tower like cats do. And Catherine looked at Gummy Bear and said, piggy dipping, ham hock, ding dong, which are all things that we say when he does that. We call it piggy dippin, which is a reference to an online video. And then ham hawk came from us and then ding dong was our old cat when she would hang her tail off the tower. We'd pull on it and go ding dong until we just had to say ding dong and she would lift

her tail up without us having to touch it. She didn't want it to happen. And I was like, did you just say piggy dip in a ham hock ding dong? Trouble is. I was like, I didn't think you were there. We call that chicken wing behavior. Can't seem so good. 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, the currency in this podcast, which I have not mentioned outside of this intro for at least over a year according to EVE. Hank bucks! It has become quite abstract, I think. Yeah. We'll be awarded as we play it at the end of the episode. One of them will be crowned the winner. So as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem,

this week from Sarah. Usually foods are pretty cut and dry. A potato's a potato, a fry's a fry. And you get kind of weird in the noodle zone. Or a chocolate versus a blueberry scone. But usually you sort of know what you're eating, except for cheese, which can be quite deceiving. You might get a gooey processed square

that melts on toasty bread, or a hard grainy slice from a big old wheel that weighs seven times your head, a soft stringy lump that's stretched from curds, or a pillowy thickened whey, or a funky cube that reeks of feet or has ribbons of blue-gray. Then there's sprays in cans or shredded blends or neon dust to try,

unless we forget the cheese in quotes with nary a dairy inside. But it'd behoove us all to learn a few names of the hundreds or thousands vying for fame to help us with confidence say yes please when presented with a board of mystery cheese. Cheese! Beautiful. It's the topic of the day, like my cat. And you've already let slip that it's not easy to define what a cheese is. I thought you were going to tell us that a lot of those things weren't technically cheeses,

but they are all indeed cheeses. It's not actually that hard to name what a cheese is. Is easy cheese cheese? I think it's a cheese product. Cheese whiz has dairy in it? I think usually I think a lot of the processed cheeses, so spreadable cheese, cheese whiz whatnot. What we used to call in college, regular cheese, which was Kraft American singles.

Usually there's some sort of well, I guess it depends. There's some sort of cheese percentage of it, just less than buying a hunk of cheese. So it's like, you take some cheddar and then you add a bunch of additives to make it more spreadable, sprayable, dustable. Or flappable. I mean, calling it American cheese is the greatest insult our nation has ever

received Also all of the other nations too. Like we call it American cheese. That means South America They have to some extent must feel responsible, which they definitely are not didn't have anything to do with it That's United States cheese I didn't have anything to do with it. That's United States cheese. Where was it invented? It was definitely invented in America. It was invented in a laboratory at Kraft headquarters.

James Willcraft patented the method. It was probably some guy and then he was like, I invented this. Yeah, this is really the cheese that built a billion dollar corporation right here. He was Canadian. Canadian cheese. This is the biggest news that has ever been discovered on SciShow Tangent.

Is he Canadian? Canada is North America. That's true. But we all know that's not what you mean. We all know what they mean. Yeah. That's true. But we all know what you mean. We all know what they mean. Yeah. Yeah, he immigrated to Buffalo, New York in 1902 from Ontario, Canada.

Famous American Canadian craft cheese man. It's actually first name is craft is last name is Cheeseman. Anyway, sorry, what's cheese? You know, it. The thing is, weird milk, what's cheese? You know, the thing is... Weird milk. Weird milk. Basically, a cheese describes the process of making cheese. And so you take a milk product, milk, cream, skim milk, buttermilk, some combination, coagulate

it with some sort of coagulating agent. In some cases, that is an acid. So like paneer cheese is by adding an acid to milk. A lot of times it is enzymes that we add to it. Some of the original cheese is made using rennet, which is a substance within the stomachs of ruminant babies. So like baby cows, baby sheep, baby goats. Wild. Are they okay when we get it from them? I think they're probably not. Oh, no. Okay.

We eat their meat and then we use their stomachs. But the reason they have it is because milk usually goes through your system pretty quick, but they have natural coagulants so that when they drink milk from their parents and get it in their tummies, it coagulates so it lasts longer and they can extract more nutrients from it because that's like the whole thing that ruminants do is have stuff hang around in their stomachs for a while.

And so at some point, humans probably stored milk in a stomach as a sack because it's also in like nature's handbag is a stomach when it's outside the body. And then it started coagulating. And then if you remove the liquid or you can remove some portion of the liquid and compress the solid stuff,

then the solid stuff is technically cheese. At that point, that's cheese. That point it's cheese. Even if there's some whey mixed in, like cottage cheese is a mixture of curds and whey. Cottage cheese. If you, if you gopped a group of cottage cheese and I didn't know what that was and I ate it,

I would not say that's cheese. Yeah, you might be in the, looking in the yogurt family, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I get, I can see it. Like it tastes cheesy, but I, like, I don't know. I feel like a cheese needs to hold its shape. And that's why cheese is so tricky to pin down. It's like there's soft, soft cheeses, hard cheeses, spready cheeses, stinky cheeses, sweet cheeses.

I feel like that's actually kind of a pretty specific definition. As long as you'll take out the things that have quotation marks around it Then cheese cheese products have cheese in them and cheese is a thing that is like the solids left over after coagulation or whatever you called it But then I don't know I see now I'm poking holes in my own I fell down such a rabbit hole trying to define cheese is tofu cheese? Because it's made from soy milk, coagulated, and then pressed. That's not milk.

We know what we mean when we say milk. That's milk with quotation marks around it. I think I agree with Hank though, in that this is not a complicated or a tricky definition at all. It just comes in different flavors, you know? I think Sarah's very brave for having brought his tofu cheese into the conversation. Yeah, it's not. There's a whole section at the grocery store where all the cheese goes.

So that makes it pretty easy to figure it out. Well, that actually, because I am going to completely make the case that Kraft Canadian cheese is not cheese. What the heck? It's got... It's not made in the way that Sarah said, huh? It's got cheese in it, just like my sandwich does. Like, pizza isn't cheese. And so Kraft Canadian cheese is not cheese. This is right. You're right.

I'm so mad about it being Canadian. It just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like he earned it. It doesn't feel like we earned it.'t feel like we earned it just feels like this feels bad It's misattribution. Mm-hmm And I think if it was called Canadian cheese everybody would treat it nicer and be more respectful of it in my opinion Maybe it would treat us nicer and be more respectful of us than that too. It would be the most polite cheese Be a little bit kinder as it goes down with the grilled cheese.

I bet it probably has less lactose than most cheese, so maybe it is a little bit of a kinder cheese. Kinder on the old belly. So where did the word cheese come from? So the word cheese comes from the Latin word caseus, which is where the word casein comes from. Oh, not caseo. Oh yeah, and caseo, and all these words. which is where the word casein comes from. And not queso.

Yeah, and queso and all these words. Like, quesen is the proteins that are found in mammalian milk. That is like about 80% of the proteins in cow's milk. So, etymologically, it makes sense. But it also gave rise to the words cheese. I think they were basically pronounced the same way in Old English. But before the Latin, the linguists are duking it out with each other. Some of them think that it comes from a Proto-Indo-European root

of quat to ferment or to become sour. And another person is like, there's no way Latin has Q sounds in it. So there's no way we could have dropped the Q to turn it into cheese from there. So, I don't know. I'm not painting it very dramatically, but in the article... You built it up a lot more than it turned out to be for sure. Yeah. And I guess in linguist terms, this is pretty much of a dig of no etymology can be found, which does not require some poorly founded assumptions, which I think was the person who thinks it's unknown making a dig at the fermentation. Brutal fatality. That is the trick with all of these words that we made up.

We stinky cheese people or not stinky cheese people? What are we thinking? I'm not a stinky cheese person, though. I am not a stinky cheese man. I am a mild lad. I don't like spice. I don't like flavor. I'm a big time stinky cheese man. I've realized recently that my favorite cuisine is like what Wario or the Grinch would eat where it's like very garlic heavy, very tangy, vinegar, that kind of just nasty flavors. I love it so much. I think that growing up to be I

Mean gargamel is a very unhappy man To be a happy gargamel, you know, it doesn't want to kill smurfs for a living Well, yeah, why can't I just be warrior or the Grinch? They both are happy. I don't know if Wario is happy I think he's very happy. He seems happy. He's always smiling. He seems happy but like angry about it. Yeah You could be happy and angry happy isn't the opposite of angry. Yep. That's right Yeah, he's like a gleeful gleeful. He's a gleeful gargamel Anyway, that's not the thing that we're gonna do for our game show today instead of that We're gonna be playing the secret ingredient. Of course we are. It's cheese day. One of the incredible things about cheese

is how many variations we have come upon with the same basic premise. Over time, that ingenuity means that seemingly unusual ingredients like fungi, mites, and maggots have become part of long-standing traditions in the world of cheese. So today, we're going to be highlighting some of the strange ingredients of cheese in a game of secret ingredient. I will describe a type of cheese to you but I will leave out one of the ingredients that makes the cheese what it is. I'll give you three options for what the secret ingredient is and it's up to you to figure out which one it is. You actually get multiple choice this secret ingredient which is gonna make it less

difficult. Are you ready? Yes. Our first cheese on the menu is Cornish Yarg, a cheese based on a 17th century recipe that's real. I didn't make it up. That was rediscovered and adapted by a group of cheese makers in Cornwall. This semi-hard cheese is made from cow's milk and has a distinct mushroom flavor. But what's particularly notable is a very local ingredient that is used to make its rind, which not only acts as the rind itself, but also provides the mushroom flavor and enzymes needed to mature the cheese. What is the secret ingredient? Is it A. lichen that grows on the Cornish cliffside,

B. stinging nettles from the Cornish countryside, or C, sand taken from Cornish beaches? Lichen seems the most mushroomy, doesn't it? But... Yeah, yeah, lichen's got fungi in it. So this is like in the rind, or the whole rind is made out of this? Or you don't know?

I think that the rind is made out of this. Okay, okay. And sand. I'm just gonna go with sand, because that sounds like a cool story that I'd like to hear. I don't know why that would taste like mushrooms. I would avoid the rind of a cheese that was rinded in sand, that's for sure. That's true, and yeah. Sometimes you sample the rind and that would be a big mistake. I would be mad if I didn't go with the obvious one. I think it's lichen.

I think you can pat that into a basket-ish shape and pour in cheese. Well, Cornish yarg is named for Alan Gray. Do you know why or how? You just said a lot of words. I'll get to the answer, but first, it's named for Alan Gray. How is Cornish yarg named for Alan Gray?

Oh! Backwards yarg is backwards of gray is Cornish yarg named for Alan Gray? Oh, backwards. Yarg is backwards of Gray. Backwards yarg. So he found an old book called The English Housewife, and it contained instructions on various tasks, including how to make a number of cheeses. One of the recipes included a cheese matured on a bed of stinging nettles,

though there weren't a lot of specifics on how to make this cheese. And Gray started testing out different versions of the recipe and created Cornish Yarg, eventually selling his recipe to another farmer that further tinkered with the recipe. Because of course we got to give everybody credit for the invention of this cheese. The nettles did end up being an important part of the recipe and cheese makers who've worked on it have tested out different aspects of the nettles, like how much should be used and how to wrap the mold, not the fungus mold, but the mold that is molded inside of.

The nettles keep the cheese protected in a breathable coating that allows for specific molds to get attracted into the cheese, and the nettles are also gathered from the Cornwall countryside in the summer and then cleaned and frozen so that they could be used throughout the year. And the cheese is in the nettles for about five weeks while it matures. I think my problem there was that I had no idea what stinging nettles were. I was picturing like burrs, you know, like, no, like, like, like, like the things that get stuck on your shirt, like when you walk past a specific plant, you know

It's just like yeah, it's a leafy plant, but they do it is very stingy. I hate them They make you real puffy looking it looks like in 2022 the BBC reported that the most expensive cheese in the world is pure a Siberian cheese Named after named after Pierre in loop It sounds like I'm making it up! Named after Pierre Eloup. No. It's the Siberian cheese that became famous when the tennis player Novak Djokovic reportedly bought the entire stock from the one farm that produces it.

The color was yellowish, and the BBC reporter sent to try it so that it tasted sweet, clean and mild. According to Cheese.com, Puel sells for about $576 per pound, a heavy price that results from the fact that the source of milk is not particularly bountiful. What animal produces milk for Puel? Is it yak, donkey, or deer? Oh, well deer are always running all over the place around. You can't pin them down to milk them. So I think there wouldn't be a lot of deer milk and that's my guess. Is a deer. I think yak just stand there and let you milk it. I'm going to guess donkey because it kind of sounds like mule.

As a luxury item, you say this is made of the finest deer milk. You You know a rich person's gonna be like, don't mind if I do. Donkey milk? Shrek really skyrocketed donkey fame though, I feel like. For the rich and famous? Yeah. He's a tastemaker. Yeah. Which donkey is this from precisely?

The one that made babies with a dragon or a regular donkey? Very luxurious, only one rare dragon donkey. Yeah. Expensive cheese. Actual answer, dragon, no, donkey, you're correct. Huh. What? Uh, the recipe is a secret, but one of the few things we know about it

is that it's made using the milk from Balkan donkeys, which is a tough ingredient because while it takes about 25 liters of their milk to make one kilogram of the cheese, a female donkoli will only make around 300 milliliters of milk per day. On top of the low milk yield that comes from working with donkeys, donkey's milk is tough to use for cheese because it has a low amount of casein. So to use their milk for the cheese, it needs to be mixed with goat's milk. Cheese is 60% donkey milk and 40% goat's milk.

Ah, this cheese doesn't sound very exciting to me. Seems like it's only expensive because that one guy bought it all. Well, here's what it makes me think. I want to eat like every cheese. I want to eat cheese made from every mammal's milk. And people. Hmm. All right. Every cheese. I want to eat cheese made from every mammals milk and kept people All right Once you get done with all the rest of them, don't you think you'll be like, I guess I have to write

I guess it's time working on my blog and it's like I don't have to both That's fun. All right, so someone has a point now, and that person is Sari. Next question! Emmental, that's a normal cheese I've heard of, is a popular Swiss cheese made from cow's milk that's often found in fondue and cheese plates. There are different varieties of Emmental, and the flavor itself can change based on how long you age it. And sometimes what matters is not just what you put in the cheese or how long it's aged, but what the cheese is surrounded by.

In 2018, a Swiss cheesemaker wanted to test a theory he had about Emmental aging, so he collaborated with the University of the Arts in Bern on his theory. What did they do to the cheese's surroundings as the cheese matured? A. They kept the cheese in rooms painted different colors. B. They aged the cheese in containers with different fabric interiors. Or C. They played different genres of music to the cheese. Well, I feel like the colors would do absolutely nothing. Light on the cheese, unless there's like something that was really photosensitive in it. Fabric? You're touching the cheese. Unless there's like something that was really photosensitive in it.

Fabric? You're touching the cheese. So any sort of stuff could get in there. That seems too obvious kind of though. Oh, yeah, cuz you're just like dunking it. Like maybe a cheese recipe would already say, gotta use this fabric and everybody would just be like whatever. Makes sense to me. Speaking of fabric in food, did you know that the this is becoming a widely known fact now, which is amazing.

First pink lemonade was made pink by putting into the lemonade a circus performers tights. Is that true? Why? I feel like I read it somewhere in like one of those hundred fact books that I now know not to bring up Yeah, trivia knowledge from that one turns out to have been accurate the person who made pink lemonade not to be trusted I'm gonna go with the music one. I think I music feel compelled

I think I'm also gonna go with the music. It feels like an art student thing to do. Well, Swiss cheese maker, Beat Wampler, his name is Beat Wampler, and his collaborators at the university ran their experiment using nine 22-pound wheels of cheese, which were kept for six months in their own wooden crates in a cheese cellar, and each cheese was hooked up to a mini-transducer which sends sound waves directly into the cheese. From there the cheese was stuck listening to a 24-hour loop of one song. The group tried out music from different genres. They had the Magic Flute from Mozart, they had Stairway to Heaven from Led Zeppelin, they had Monolith from Yellow. I don't know what that is.

I don't know that one. They got jazz. They played some hip hop. They played at a tribe called Quest. And they played techno by Vril, which I'm sure is an artist of electronic music. As controls, there was a cheese left to listen to silence, which I now feel bad for for some reason. That's a cheese, yeah, and three cheeses that were

stuck listening to a tone that was either high, medium, or low frequency. The idea is that the sound waves like traveled through the cheese bodies, and the only test of this experiment really focused on were taste tests. They gave it to food technologists and a panel of culinary experts to judge in a blind taste test, and in general, the hip-hop's cheese seem to have the strongest flavors. Wow. That's a perfect name for a guy who's playing music to cheese, specifically. Beat.

His first name's Beat, right? His first name's Beat, and his last name is Whompher, which sounds like the noise that comes out of the speaker when you're listening to Vril. Through a bunch of cheese. Yeah. I'd try some out, but I don't think that it would be worth it. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then the fact off. Alright, everybody, welcome back.

Ceres in the lead with two to Sam's one. Now 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 have presented their facts, I will judge them and award my Hank Box anywhere I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a their facts. I will judge them and award my Hank Box anywhere I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The Washington State University Creamery produces a canned white cheddar cheese called Cougar Gold, which has been around since the 1940s.

I love cheese names. Every one of them sounds made up. It was produced to send troops overseas. Creating a canned cheese was a challenge because the bacteria inside cheese produced carbon dioxide, which would explode the cans. So the inventors of cougar gold were able to assemble a new bacteria culture that produced less CO2. The result is a cheese that could be stored for quite a while.

In 2010, the parents of a former Washington State University alumna called the creamery to let them know that they were driving through with a can of cougar gold that might have been one of the oldest unopened cans at the time. How old was that can of cheese? 55 years. What's the maximum amount? Like, so like 70, just as old. What's the maximum amount like so like 70 just as old? It was the first can that rolled off like the canning thing Well, you know, it's gonna sound less impressive now that I've set it all up a 22 23 If they called me I'd say throw it away

That cheese is from the 90s or something is that right? Yeah, no it's from the 2000s It's from the 2000s. I don't care about this cheese. It was in 2010 That's the year I was born so I'd say bringing you the cheese actually this is exciting cheese Do you guys know about cup of cheese? No. Or you fart in your hand, and then you put it on someone's face and you say cup of cheese I didn't like that Don't say stuff like that. The first time I ever saw someone do cup of cheese in real life, I was like, that's the best thing I've ever seen.

That's disgusting. And I was a grown man. I was like 30 years old. If you ever do that to me, I'm never talking to you again. Oh, I would never do it to a person, but I did watch Lee Newton do it to Joe Bereta and I was very happy. So yeah, the cheese was stamped October 9th, 1987, and the can of cheese had been given to the couple

by their daughter, and they had just kept it around, thinking that they would one day have that cheese. We all have that can of cheese. Absolutely. Well, you don't see us calling the factory and saying, I got such old beans. Yeah, the cheese was opened, which seems like a bad decision, and it was a little more dry than it usually would be. But overall, it still tasted pretty good, according to the people who put it in their literal human mouths.

Yeah, weird day. All right, that means that Sarah gets to go first. That was a long question. So humans experience a whole range of emotions and one of the trickier parts of being a neuroscientist or psychologist is studying the bad feeling ones, like pain or anger or disgust. You wanna make sure people consent to being made uncomfortable

and some of these sensations can veer on being dangerous. Our understanding of disgust, for example, is that it's a distancing response, where you feel nauseated or your body might be trying to protect itself from a toxin or a potential infection or something you're allergic to. So it's not the most ideal or ethical research methodology to study disgust by exposing subjects to like moldy Tupperware or sewage. And it's hard to find something that's both easy to access and universally disgusting because people have all different cultural contexts. But there is a food that is both polarizing and completely safe as long as you're not eating a 23-year-old can of

it, which is cheese. And part of that is because cheese comes in so many different varieties, including ones with really strong odors and funky flavors that people either love or love to hate. So there was a study published in October 2016 called the Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese, an FMRI study, where researchers conducted several different experiments on cheese and disgust. Their main one was comparing the brains of people who liked cheese and people who didn't and who were disgusted by it as they smelled it and looked at pictures of cheese. So they got 15 participants who liked cheese, didn't have to love it, just like it. 15 participants who didn't like cheese or were disgusted by it and made sure that their noses were working and they weren't sick at the time of their study. It does not seem like they asked

whether any of these participants were lactose intolerant or not, at least that I could find in their methodology. It would have been a question that I might have asked, but maybe they did. They just didn't write about it or I missed it. While their brains were getting scanned using fMRI, which is functional magnetic resonance imaging, which basically measures how blood is moving in your brain, and it's a pretty standard technique to estimate which regions are active at a certain time. They had people smell 12 different things. Six different cheeses, so blue cheese, cheddar cheese, goat cheese, Gruyere, Parmesan, and tomé. That's the only one I haven't heard of. And six non-cheese foods, cucumber, fennel, mushroom, pâté, peanut, and pizza.

Seems like a very broad cross- section of non-cheese foods. And what they found is that what they called the anti-cheese people had stronger activation in some parts of the basal ganglia region of the brain than the pro-cheese people. Specifically, these regions called the globulus pallidus and the substantia nigra. And these regions are usually associated with

reward pathways. And so what's weird is they seem like they're also involved in these anti-reward disgust behaviors as well. So the same regions that are saying, yes, you want this, are also saying even more strongly, no, you don't want this. And then plus the ventral pallidum, which is a brain region that helps us process and move forward with behaviors that were motivated to do, was significantly less active in the people who were disgusted by cheese than those who liked it. So the desire to want or eat or act was somehow suppressed in their brains when they smelled or looked at a picture of cheese. They were like, well, so there aren't

any like sweeping conclusions here because it's a small study. But I like this idea that like it's hard to ethically study disgust. And so how do you do it? Right. Cheese. Cheese. Stink them up with some cheese. Brain studies are always so weird because it's like, can't I tell you why I don't want the cheese?

Like, no, you can't. You have no idea. We need to put you in a very expensive machine and figure out where the blood is in your brain while you're smelling cheese. And then those regions are only we only know what they do because of other studies where they had people look at other things that they liked or didn't like. Yeah. And so we're all just guessing.

I'll just I'll just probably. Yeah. So there's definitely, there is plenty of insight to be gleaned by being the actual thing experiencing the sensation. Cause I think that when I smell a cheese that I don't like the smell of, it's because it smells like things I wouldn't want to put in my mouth. Like feet. Sometimes it smells like feet. That's okay. Sometimes it's... yeah. But that is true. Sometimes it smells like feet and I'm like, that smells like feet, but that's okay. And then sometimes it smells like feet and I'm like, that smells like feet, but too much. Wrong kind of feet. Too stinky a feet. That's true. Every cheese has a little bit of funk.

Except for Kraft Canadian cheese. It just has that glossy texture of silly putty. Sam, what do you got for me? Emeryville, California, home to companies such as Pixar, Clif Bar, and Pete's Coffee. This booming city nestled in California's Silicon Valley is a modern economic powerhouse. But this isn't the first time that Emeryville's been a modern booming economic powerhouse. Being situated on San Francisco Bay and filled with train yards, Emeryville became a manufacturing center like starting from when it first was founded.

Paint, car, and train parts, rubber, canning, it was all in Emeryville, baby. But being a manufacturing center comes with some ugly side effects, chief among them being industrial waste. Corporations tend not to be the best stewards of the land, especially in the early 20th century when most of this manufacturing was happening, so that waste would end up dumped in the ocean or on the ground, either accidentally, intentionally, or maybe a little bit of both. So by the 70s, manufacturing was moving out of the US,

and mostly all that was left in Emeryville was empty buildings and various toxic wastes that manufacturing left behind. So much so that a Slate article I read while researching this said that green goo would sometimes seep out of the ground when people were building stuff in Emeryville on construction sites. They'd dig, green goo would come out. So in the 80s, the EPA moved in and started spending money to clean stuff up either through superfund sites or grants to smaller programs. And one of those smaller programs is where cheese enters the picture. But first I got to talk about chrome plating, which is a process

that I don't entirely understand, where a metal object is placed in a solution of chromium, which is a hard, rust-proof, shiny element, to plate that object in chromium, thus making the object hard, shiny, and rust-proof. The type of chromium used in electroplating is called hexavalent chromium, which is really water-soluble, but it's also a dangerous carcinogen and really good at seeping into groundwater, which makes it a high priority chemical for the EPA when it comes to clean

and stuff up. And in Emeryville, there was a parcel of land that used to be home to a chrome plating factory. And even though there weren't any major reported spills of hexavalent chromium from the factory, the soil was still rotten with the stuff and it was seeping into the groundwater, which is not good. In 2004, a project was funded to clean the land and three solutions were proposed. The first was to wait for the chromium to break down, which would take like forever, I think.

The second was to dig up and incinerate all of the contaminated dirt, which was crazy expensive. And the third was to pump 15,000 gallons of cheese whey into the ground. And the cheese was the answer. So while hexavalent chromium is super soluble, trivalent chromium is not because of electrons, I think, or something. So the more electrons that are available to chromium, the more likely it is to take its trivalent form, which are more stable and less toxic and soluble than hexavalent. And something with a whole lot of electrons

to give, apparently, is organic soil matter created by the life processes of soil-dwelling bacteria. So, just like probiotic yogurt helps the bacteria in your belly, the cheese whey, which was pumped into the ground via several wells, helped bacteria in your belly. The cheese way, which was pumped into the ground via several wells helped bacteria in this contaminated soil flourish, poop, and breathe and not do all that stuff to make organic compounds that expedited the trivalentization of the chromium. And really, I think they could have pumped any pumpable food into the ground, probably like yogurt or whatever, like, you know, like your belly. But cheese whey was picked because it was really cheap, and there was a place really close that was making lots of cheese whey,

so they said, why not? However, much to my extreme frustration, I couldn't actually find a newer article than 2004, basically, about this and how it worked out. But this is a process that's used in other soil remediation efforts, where it's reduced hazardous chemicals by up to 90% in three months.

But if you are somebody who pumped cheese into the ground in Emeryville, California in 2004, please contact us and tell us if it worked. I love that. How do they get the cheese in the ground? They just had a big tank and they drilled a bunch of holes and they put the hoses in it and they pumped it into the ground. And I want to see it so bad. I was going to say,

you said that it was because of electrons and I was going to say, well, that you could say that up for everything, but Ceres kind of like, I was like, you probably said that for serious fact, but then I was like, not really, like MRIs are one of the few things that's actually about protons.

Oh. Just like electrons aren't that involved in MRIs, which is wild, very unusual. But ultimately, if I'm going to choose and I have to, I got to go with just pumping a bunch of cheese into the ground. Hank, will you send me around to super fun sites all over the world or all over the country? Oh, that would be an amazing show. I can be super fun Sam. I can say wow. Super fun Sam.

Yeah. Did you say super fun? No, I didn't say super fun. Unfortunately, you really thought. Unfortunately. All right, well, I'm gonna give Sam, I'll say five Hank bucks for that and Sari, I'll give three. Are we tied?

I think you win, Sam. Oh, you're right, I had one from the first game. And that means that it's time to ask the Science Couch where we ask a listener question to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. Red Locker on Discord asked, what makes cheese addictive to humans? Is it some part of the cheese itself or my own developing sense of self-control? I mean, I think that the thing that makes cheese addictive is the fact that it's got sugar and fat and salt and That's what we want We want sugar and fat and salt but that is there something special about cheese that makes it that this

Questions referring to or is that just anything? I don't know there's there's the ongoing conversation about addictiveness and food but you kind of can't like Probably shouldn't be talking about food as addictive, but certainly you can, you can develop a thing where you are, have an unhealthy relationship. And also there is a thing where there are certain foods that we eat more than we otherwise would because of their flavor mostly, like because of the things that they're made up of and you can sort of design a food to be the right mix of salty, fat and sweet.

And you're like, I ate a bag of Doritos just now and I loved it. So I think the root of this question or the root of a lot of the is cheese addictive phrasing, there was a bunch of like popular science articles that came out around the year 2015 because there was a study published called which foods may be addictive, the roles of processing fat content and glycemic load. So the study came in two parts. One where they surveyed 120 undergraduates at the University

of Michigan and two, they found 398 participants on Mechanical Turk, which is the Amazon product, where you can get paid like 50 cents, five cents, whatever, for answering the question. They basically gave these people surveys about what foods made them feel like they couldn't stop eating or like they regretted it afterwards. And they mapped those feelings onto like food, quote unquote, food addiction. Like Hank was saying, that's not really the most accurate way to describe it. Like addiction is a very specific set of criteria when it comes to certain drugs or toxins, like alcohol or things like that, that psychologically you become dependent on. Food need it to survive like you need to eat.

Yeah and see you get cravings for things and maybe there's like complicated emotions around certain foods and this is why I think we talk about it is addiction you have the same a lot like the reward pathways. But I think that it's mostly like, we need to like, you don't wanna talk about food addiction because food is necessary and is like, and is a normal part of life, unlike, you know, cigarettes or alcohol or gambling or something. And the findings from the study, as they hypothesize, which is like, highly processed foods with added fat,

refined carbohydrates, additional salt appeared to be most associated with these like behavioral indicators. So like the top ranked foods, one through nine were chocolate, ice cream, french fries, pizza, cookie, singular, chips, floral, cake, popcorn, buttered, cheeseburger. And that was like, great foods. And so a lot of like articles were like, oh, cheese. Cheese is Canadian cheese singles.

Canadian crumpet singles. Are all these things. Are these highly processed foods. And so you're addicted to cheese. But that's not what the study was saying. And it's kind of a classic case of, especially in the nutrition space, I think people like to make sweeping conclusions about what other people should or shouldn't eat. Like a subset of this, the rabbit hole that I fell down, is this idea that casein, that milk protein

that is like 80% of the proteins in cow's milk, when you metabolize casein, and there's several different types of casein, but specifically, like one of them that's found in cow's milk turns into a compound called casomorphin. Casomorphins are a class of compound that fall into the category of opioids. Because it's an opioid, then of course people make that connection almost immediately of opioid addiction. The problem is the opioid system in your body exists as it is, like neurotransmitters, your brain naturally makes our opioids

that enable communication between your neurons, help your body communicate things like pain or pleasure or memory or like the movements of your digestive system, contractions and like constipation or diarrhea, like all of those are opioids. And so it makes sense that a digested compound from milk, which is also something that's in the human body, would then interact with the opioid system because you have to digest the food.

And there's a wave of people who are in the nutrition space who are like, we're going to try and link caseomorphins or there's evidence that caseomorphins are linked to diabetes and heart attacks and too much eating cheese or dairy products in general. Whereas the reviews, I found one from 2009 from the European Food Safety Authority and one from 2023 from a Sao Paulo, New Zealand team where they're just like, we don't know. We haven't studied caseomorphin in humans and one from 2023 from like a Sao Paulo, New Zealand team where they're just like, we don't know. Like we haven't studied caseomorphin in humans enough.

And like, sure, if you isolate a bunch of it and inject it into animals, then it will, you might see signs of addictive behaviors or like weird biological effects, but that's because it's such a wildly high concentration and injected directly into the bloodstream. But we don't know how it interacts in humans. And also the people who are having digestive problems

because of it or health problems because of it might just be lactose intolerant. Let's consider that maybe. One thing I have learned about human bodies doing research on cancer is that we are really good, really good at processing chemicals in our bodies and like dealing with them way better than I think most people assume. Even like obvious carcinogens like uranium in the air, like our bodies are fairly good at dealing with.

And I'm like, if we can do that. Not that there's a lot of uranium in the air. I mean people who are like downwind of accidents and disasters. Yeah, boy. Everything's fine. Superfund Sam, inhaling all that uranium. Yeah. I'll be okay when I'm out there on the job site.

If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, follow us on Twitter and on threads at SciShow Tangents where we will be sending out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Sid, just a guy, on Discord, at Solock Homes on YouTube, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you liked this show and want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our Discord and bonus episodes, maybe our minions commentary, which might be being released quite soon. If it hasn't even already, I don't know when this episode's gonna be possible. Also, shout out to patron Les Ager for their support. Second, you can lose 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 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 Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazile. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakracardi. Our sound designer is Joseph Tunamedish, our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green, and we couldn't make any of this, of course, 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! All around us, there are tiny, sometimes microscopic arachnids called mites, and certain species munch on the moldy rinds of aged wheels of cheese,

like parmesan or the fungal veins in blue cheese. And you know you have an infestation of mites when you find dust around your cheese with the buildup of their exoskeletons, dead bodies, and of course, poop. So in many cases, cheese makers try to protect their food from these pests. But at least two types of cheese are actually intentionally aged with a colony of mites the French cheese Mimolette and the German cheese middle bin casa, which translates to mite cheese That's the German way of naming stuff These cheeses have a characteristic lemon like flavor and that comes from a compound that is secreted by the mites From their abdominal glands at least the flavor isn't from their poop

But realistically you're probably gonna be eating some of that too. Yeah, you're probably always eating. I'm probably there right now Yeah, it's not true that you eat a bunch of spiders every year But it is true that you eat a bunch of mites every year. Like, it just seems like they're going to get in there. Spiders George is actually eating mites. It's actually about arachnids this whole time. There's no... It turns out... Yeah, spiders, spiders Gare gets a lot of mites, but so do you.

He just needs a normal amount. 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 and Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman luminary, Sarah Riley. Hello. And our resident every man, Sam Schultz. Hello. You guys, I have an important question

and it is the only kind of question that a resident every man and an education luminary can answer. If you were a bean, what kind of bean would you be? And do not give me a basic answer. Uh oh, that last part was scary. What does that mean? What does that mean?

Yeah, what is a basic bean? I just don't want to hear coffee. I don't want to hear coffee bean. I wouldn't have said that. That was nowhere. That wasn't even in my top 10. I think it was a little black bean, you know? You think you'd be...

That's a pretty basic answer. I know, but I love black beans so much. And also there's something about a black bean that just looks so brave to me. They're just like, here I am. I'm going to try my best to make you have a delicious dinner. That's great. I love that. Sherry, top that one. Okay. Top black bean. My first thought was that I'm a chickpea. That's the type of bean, right?

It's a garbanzo bean. Yeah garbanzo bean like kind of lumpy Make good hummus Skin a Classic party a little off-putty. Maybe take back the part where I said Saria had weird skin I mean, it's true. I got weird skin. I can't figure it out. We all got weird skin. It's just like constantly our cells are dying to make a membrane that coats our body and protects us from the outside. Keeps the wetting. We also, as humans, put stuff on our skin all the time. We got to protect our pasty skin from the sun. We got to moisturize all these things. We do that to garbanzo beans too the sun. We got to moisturize all these things.

We do that to garbanzo beans too. Yeah. Is that what you're saying? We keep on moisturizing that strange goo. The strange goo seems like you could put it on your face and it would make you look young. Yeah, garbanzo goo. They're like the... Well, all the beans have goo, but I feel like garbanzo goo is a little slimier.

Our new skincare line, Bean Goo. Bean. Put it on your face. Actually, that's a great brand name. I don't know what Bean Goo is, but I know it should exist. Hank, what kind of bean are you? Uh, I mean, I want to be like a barbecue baked bean, but I know that that's not like a kind of bean.

What kind of bean is that in there? Is it like a navy bean? White beans? They're not pinto. They're not black. I knew you were going to say that, and I think that's a perfectly acceptable answer I think you can be a barbecue baked bean then your barbecue But you knew either is that most baked the most basic answer because you predicted it You have a Furby that looks like it's made out of barbecue baked beans I looked I looked it up the baked beans barbecue baked beans are made out of a kind of bean called

faciolis vulgaris, which is literally called the white common bean. OK, that's the most basic bean on the planet. I mean, if there's anything you can say about me, it's that I'm white and common. The white common bean. But you're just a little bit weird. And that's where the barbecue baked part comes in. Yeah, yeah. But like with some spice thrown in, but not too much spice. And by spice, I mostly mean sugar.

A lot of gooey sugar. Yeah, I'm a gooey bean, though. I'm like one thing I know about me as a bean. I'm absolutely dripping. And none of us really pick dry beans. I don't know if people really eat dry beans though. Yeah, you do. You gotta make them wet first. I think. I don't think there's any like beans you just crunch.

Yeah, they gotta be cooked first and then you can probably buy like soybean, like edamame that have been puffed up, freeze-dried. That's not wet necessarily. You're eating that one just straight up. I guess they're, yeah. Well, you could only eat fresh beans. Yeah, I guess that's true. How can we do a thing where we eat fresh black beans?

Is that possible? I feel like it can. Where the hell do they come from? A bush? They'll grow in pods. They come from the pods! Every week here at SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic.

Our panelists are playing for glory, and they're also playing for some imaginary unit of currency that is entirely made up and we mostly don't mention. But when you have more of them, you win the game now as always we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional Science poem this week from me One man's trash is another man's treasure one man's waste is another man's leisure one man's gross is another man's pleasure But a lot of times trash is just trash a bunch of atoms that had a use once But now it seems no one wants. Maybe somewhere someone would take it, inspired to make something with it and make it, but

that person cannot be found. We're out of luck, it's in the truck, and we'll bury it in the ground. Unless, perhaps, we can close the loop, work together as a group, and melt down the metal, the glass, and plastic, and make something new and fantastic. But maybe that's too complex. We're out of luck. It's in the truck, especially when that costs less. Garbage, the topic for the day is garbage.

Cute, but extremely grim poem. It's not that grim. Look, I feel like, and maybe we'll get into this episode, but like the environmental problem that we over focus on the most is that we bury a lot of trash in the ground I once read that you could turn up you could bury all of the world's trash in a landfill the size of London Which is big but like not as big as I would have guessed that's wild Yeah What like I am often struck by the horror of how many like coke bottles humanity has thrown away throughout all of human history.

It's like an infinite impossible amount. But yeah, I guess I'm not worried about it anymore. Bearing them in the ground is by far the preferable solution to letting them just sort of like float around and end up in the rivers and oceans and land. Sari, though, what's garbage? So, the stuff that ends up in the truck is generally, the fancy word for that is called municipal solid waste, which is colloquially known as trash or garbage, which is just like anything that humans use and then throw away. Anything from, I don't know, the box that your bean furby came in to grass clippings to like food scraps or old newspapers or used batteries or whatever that comes from any building that we're in. You can throw these batteries in the trash. Are you not supposed to do that?

Depends on the battery. I shouldn't have rented it because that's a separate can of water. But yeah. I think a lot of batteries can be recycled, but a lot of batteries also need to be disposed of more properly. Like, you don't want to put lithium ion battery in a garbage trash compactor, right, because it might burn the trash in there. And so that's where it gets kind of the definition gets a little tricky because then there's

electronic waste or like liquid or gaseous wastes or bodily waste products. Oh, well, my tea is not garbage. Thank you very much. But one weird thing that I found, I think most people in modern day English agree that garbage and trash and rubbish and refuse and waste are all kind of interchangeable. But those used to be kind of separate terms where the word garbage originally was a cooking word.

So it used to mean giblets or like the waste part of a chicken specifically as you cleaned it. What? The head or the feet. That's very specific. And a garbager in Anglo-Norman dialects in Middle English was a kitchen servant who would pluck and clean poultry. And so the garbager would get rid of the garbage. Would the garbager maybe have like a special use for the garbage? Like the garbager would be like, thanks, thanks. I threw all of these away, but actually is taking them home to make special soup.

I think maybe I'd definitely if I was a middle English servant, I would totally boil some chicken feet. Yeah, get some gravy going. Yeah, they probably did. And there was probably a recipe for garbage at some point where it was like, take all the the awful or awful that no one else. I was in when I was in Rochester, New York. There was a dish called the garbage plate specifically, and I had it.

And correct. I mean, I'm not saying that it's trash, but I'm saying like, that's the right name for what I got. It was delicious, but it was definitely a garbage plate. It was, it was mostly unidentifiable, I think probably ground beef with a set of seasonings that were far outside of my experience. Wow. Says the barbecue baked bean. Yeah. So was trash a specific thing too?

So what's weird about this is once you go further back than Middle English, we have no idea where any of these words came from. They're all like origin uncertain, origin disputed, but somewhere around Middle English, we just had all these different words for different things. So garbage was like food, food, trash. Rubbish was like dry stuff, whether it's like building rubble or boxes or bottles or tin cans or whatnot. And again, in this like mystery, people are like, maybe rubbish is related to rubble, but that word also has an uncertain origin. So I don't know, they

could just refer to the same thing. Trash. there is one obscure possible origin. There is a text from 1763 where trash refers to an old worn out shoe. What? Like he had worn his shoes into trashes. But we don't know where it came from, from the 16th century onwards. Someone just started using the word trash. And everybody else said, yeah, that's right, that's right, it's trash. And then waste has a little, goes back a little bit further, but more in the sense of wastelands,

like desolate regions. And so like waste meaning to damage or destroy or to be empty or desolate. Waste is the most serious trash word of all of them. That's the scary one. The other ones can be a little cute, but waste, toxic waste. Yeah, rubbish I think is specifically very like, hmm. I feel like it's British too. Definitely.

All British trash is rubbish for sure. Yeah, rubbish in the bin. Just put it in the rubbish bin. We're in America. We got our slot trash garbage. But garbage and garbage. Yeah. Trash can is way, way worse than a rubbish bin. Rubbish bin is adorable.

Trash can trash where monsters live. I'm the trash man. Sounds vaguely threatening when you say it that way. I'm the trash man. They're all really fun words to say though. Garbage. Trash. Garbage. Waste. Refuse. Dregs. Well, now we know so much about trash.

And we all, I feel like, had a fairly good idea. Look, we've got two types of garbage. We've got the type that you can turn into something useful, and you've got the type that you can't. And those are... We don't have time to think about chicken necks anymore. We've got the wet garbage, the dry garbage. That means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show.

Packed into our garbage is the full breadth of human experience. So it only makes sense that as we dive into the weird world of garbage, we'll find a whole array of strange words. So today, in honor of our trash vocabulary, we're going to play the scientific definition. I will present you with some kind of word associated with trash. And then you have to come up with an idea of what you think that word actually represents. And whoever comes closest, according to my judgment, will win a point. associated with trash and then you have to come up with an idea of what you think that word actually

Represents and whoever comes closest according to my judgment will win a point or a hank buck or whatever it is that we've got a Hank sent you guys are playing for Hank sense today Inflations run wild I've got hyper and maybe it's deflation now a whole a hank sent sentence worth a hank buck. Hey, we're in the money. We're 100 times richer than we were before. I've heard the deflation is very bad though. So whatever else is going on in the size show tangents economy is terrible.

But this is good. That bubbles gonna pop. That's I feel like what people say all the time about economies. The size show tangents bubble is ready to pop. And by pop, I mean tell your friends about us. The first word that you have to tell me what it means is Neptune balls. That could be anything. It sounds like Orbeez.

But I'll tell you that it has something to do with trash. It does sound like Orbeez. I mean, tell you that it has something to do with trash. It does sound like Orbeez. I mean, could something that comes out of a fish be trash? Neptune balls are something that comes out of a shark that just gloops. It just gloops onto the beach and it's no good for anybody to look at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's a pearl made from when a shark eats plastic and it forms in the shark's belly and then they puke it out.

And in the middle, there's a rubber duck, but all around it, it's just like shark goo. Yeah, it's shark. You ball. That's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's Neptune's problem. Not not a land god. I'm going to say it's like when Walt Disney was coming up with the like future zone of the park. Love this. I feel like in the way that Epcot was supposed to be the future technology, he was trying to invent the next stage of trash can and came up with a spherical vessel

called the Neptune ball. And it was really functionally no different. Maybe it had a pneumatic tube or something like that, but it was just a vessel. Yeah, it had a pneumatic tube for sure. Yeah. Yeah, Disney and his Neptune balls. What an insane guess that was. Both of your guesses were top tier and unhinged,

and I loved it. And Sam's is by far closer. All right. Incredible. So that you get one Hank sent. Neptune balls are bundles of seagrass that trap plastic in the Mediterranean sea. Oh no.

The species Poseidonia oceana has long leaves and they can form meadows, but the shed leaves can bundle together with dead rhizomes of the plant and those bundles end up washing ashore as Neptune balls. Between 2018 and 2019, researchers did a bunch of research on Neptune balls and loose leafs of this plant. They found 600 bits of plastic per kilogram in the loose leaf balls and the Neptune balls

had around 1500 bits per kilogram. So seagrasses might be providing a way to take plastic garbage out of the Mediterranean Sea. Oh good, okay. That's actually good news. I take back my- Because you get the Neptune ball and you can just take it and turn, put it in, put it buried deep in the ground. Throw it in the trash can.

Number two! Can you tell me what a laser broom is? Oh. Well, isn't that obvious? Yeah, maybe. A laser broom cleans the big old circle that we shoot the atoms through. What is that thing? The thing under France that we're all over. The Large Hadron Collider.

Okay, okay. The laser broom, they shoot it through, sweep out all the dust. Particles. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, that is in the same vein. I think it's something that's on like the International Space Station or something. And you got asteroids or like the tiny ones, the little rubble.

And sometimes you just need that to be gone so your sensors are clear. And you got laser brooms for that. You throw it off with the laser broom. Yeah. Sari, that's definitely closer. You get a hankson. The laser broom is an idea to clear out space debris

using lasers. It's been explored since at least the 1990s and various proposals have been put out there to advance the idea. A relatively simple shoot lasers at space debris so that the debris won't collide with satellites. Now the laser isn't meant to vaporize the debris entirely. That might actually just create smaller bits of debris that would cause even more problems. Instead the goal is to hit a little bit of the debris so that a little bit vaporizes, and it does it enough to like give it some drag so that it can fly through these Earth's atmosphere and then burn up.

So you have to like hit it in the right spot so that its vaporization will like shoot it in the right direction. That sounds hard. Decelerate it. How do you know where to shoot it? Well, there's a lot of challenges. Like for example figuring out how to deploy the lasers So basing them on earth would be cheap, but it's hard to target things up in space with ground-based lasers That's not great when you're trying to make sure you don't hit things with lasers And there is a fear that a laser broom could then be like once you got it up there used as a weapon So we don't like it's just like no, we're just putting lasers in space for cleanup. It's just space lasers for good.

And then it's like, actually, space lasers. It's boring science stuff you wouldn't understand. Don't worry about it. That's it. It's called a broom, guys. Guys, it's called a broom. Have you ever seen anyone hurt someone else with a broom? And then flash forward to SciShow Tangents

and like, in like 2000 years, and Sarai in 2000 years is like, well, we, brooms used to be the word we use for things that swept the floor, but then in the 2020s... But now it's... it converted and now it's what we call our most devastating weapon. All right, your final word is wish cycling. Oh Sounds like it's gonna really be dark to me for some reason It involves the corpses of very small bugs somehow, okay They fall in In a hole

Then some more then little baby bugs are born are laid on their corpses, that's okay, that's the wish part So there's a big hole full of dead bugs. With eggs on them. And then maybe bugs are born there. Yep, wish cycling. I was hoping that that extra time to think would get me something good. Wish cycling is when you have a piece of trash that you love so much. It's like one of those things, it's one of those objects that you don't want to get rid of and that your dad probably would be like, no, it's still good.

It'll have a use again in 30 years. Except this was in like the Victorian age. It was like a swap meet of really old people who had their garbage stored up, the hoarders of the Victorian era. Yeah, who then did a swap meet where they were like, I love this, it's gonna be good someday and they'll trade it. Yeah, and they just like looked at each other's trash and they were like, actually that's trash. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that's a great idea to just like bring your stuff that you can't let go of to other people who will say,

I'll keep this forever. And then you all just take each other's stuff and throw it in the garbage. That is smart. Well, I'd say that Sari was closer on that one. Neither of you got it particularly close, but it does at least involve trash and wishing. We're cycling is the tendency for people to put things in the recycling bin in the hopes that it would get recycled and that it's recyclable without actually knowing if it is or even

like thinking it probably isn't recyclable. So you toss it in there being like, I'm a good person, I guess, but it's actually a problem. So Rebecca Allman tried to trace the origins of wish cycling and the first occasion she could find was a 2015 article, The Word, by Eric Roper about the recycling industry where wish cycling was creating a strain on recycling programs. The term started out as a way to refer to a consumer behavior but Altman found that over time wish cycling also became a way to refer to a systems level issue where even items that are labeled as recyclable will not end up

being recycled because the systems are not there and there's not demand for that product. So we say recyclable, but it's not recyclable. This is the case with a lot of plastics. It's very hard, it turns out, to recycle plastic. and plastic isn't one thing. I think it's easy in the like paper Metal plastic I think metals look different enough or we have more shared vocabulary around Copper versus lead versus other things but plastic we call everything call everything plastic. And it all looks like plastic. It's very hard to tell the difference chemically. Yeah, but like on a molecular level, you can't recycle some because of the way that it formed

or because of the way those bonds break and reform with various levels of stability. And I think that's harder to get across in a science-y communication way. Whereas aluminum, you just heat it up and all of the plastic and paint that's on the aluminum just burns off when you get the metal back.

Well, what the hell are we gonna do? I don't know, man. I think probably use less single use plastics. I would say that's like the seems to be the thing to do. I think that the problem is not that we aren't recycling it effectively. I think the problem is that it is too easy to use at once. See, it was dark.

I knew it was gonna be dark. That one is, you were right that it was dark, but you did not get the point for that one anyway, because it wasn't so dark as to be a grave of gnats with a bunch of bug eggs in it. A bug hole. A bug hole. A bug hole.

Yeah, actually there is a word for that. It's called a bug hole, Sam. As you well know. Shoot. All right, Sari's got two to Sam's one. 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 in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank sense anyway I see fit. To decide who goes first though, I got a trivia question. The French word for garbage is, as far as I can tell, Poo Bell. That's your best accent yet. I'm going to guess that it's not pronounced exactly like that.

The name refers to Eugene Poo Bell, an administrator in Paris who decided that landlords in Paris were required to install receptacles for their tenants' trash. In what year did this ordinance go into effect? It's named after a guy. It's a guy! That sucks. That sucks really bad. He's the trash man.

Mr. Poo Bell. I'm the trash man. He's the trash man. They called him Mr. Poo Bell. Gosh, I don't even know. 18... I'm the trash man. The trash man. Mr. Poo bell. Gosh, I don't even know. 1810.

I don't know. I don't know either. I was going to guess like 1915, like late. OK, I think. Ceri is closer. It was 1883, which definitely that's closer to Sarri than to Sam. Absolutely. Which seems I agree that seems late. It is hard to remember.

That we're all on a path and. OK. And a hundred years before I was born, they didn't have trash cans in the French language. That's a little weird. There wasn't a word for trash can because they were like, where do you put the trash? Not in the trash can. You put it outside. You put it in the ravine.

You put it in the river. You put it in the ravine. You put it in the river. We're all on a path, you guys. And I'm happy to be as far down the path as we are down the path. And we will continue getting further down the path. Sari, you get to go first. So humans throw away a lot of food waste into our poo bells and everything. So I think there are probably anecdotes across all kinds of communities from all kinds of people about some local critter digging through and eating garbage. And sometimes scientists decide to

do research on it. From what I could tell from a press release, Dr. Barbara Klump, who's a behavioral ecologist, saw a video of a sulfur-crested cockatoo opening up a plastic garbage bin in an Australian suburb, like one of those gray rectangular ones with a flip-top lid so it can be picked up and dumped into a truck. And she was like, that's weird. Or more precisely, I thought it was such an interesting and unique behavior, which is press release code for that's weird. That's weird. And started collecting data from people who live near Sydney or Walingong, Australia.

So this team used an online survey over 2018 and 2019 to ask if anyone had seen these cockatoos in action. And after going through almost 1400 reports across almost 500 suburbs, they honed in on 338 reports from 44 suburbs that described the specific garbage bin opening behavior they were looking for. After mapping these accounts and doing some statistical analyses, they think it's likely that this behavior spread via social learning from around three suburbs before 2018 to 44 total reported by late 2019.

In other words, these cockatoos are social creatures. So they think that these birds are teaching each other and or their offspring how to get the good garbage bread. And in addition to the citizen science they had on the ground work too. They identified four garbage bin opening hotspots is what they called them. In summer-ish 2019, June through August, the researchers marked 486 cockatoos with dyes and took biological information like their sex, age, weight, and feather samples. And then during August 4th through 23rd, 2019, four teams of two researchers went to these hotspots on every garbage pickup day to try and film as many cockaties as possible. They got 160 full garbage bin opening clips, including some of these marked birds. This allowed them to compare the garbage bin opening techniques between

birds. So seeing if one bird would repeat its behavior or comparing between different birds across different areas. They broke all those behaviors down into what they called elements that formed a sequence. So an element is like holding their head upside down or using their foot and their bill at the same time. And it turns out that geographically distant cockatoos had less similar opening sequences, basically indicating that they are garbage subcultures as they're teaching each other, and they have different techniques spread by region. And this was published in July 2021. And then they published a September 2022 study about the ways that humans are trying to like thwart cockatoos from opening garbage bins and the cockatoos are learning to like push off bricks. But they're stuck by sticks or other things like that. So this is just this research groups thing now.

And I love it. It's very good. Let them eat garbage. Look at them. They're trying so hard. It looks so cute opening it. I just count, but think like if one could talk and we were like, wow, you can open a garbage can, that's amazing.

It would be like, uh, yeah, whatever. Yeah. My mom taught me yeah can they tell if the if the garbage flipping birds are happier and healthier than their non garbage flipping counterparts yet they usually are stronger because it's hard to flip a garbage lid they're working out yeah they're more often like the males and the more dominant males in the in the little bird society. So going out to your nine to five flipping garbage

lids. It just looks so satisfying to be able to flip that big lid. There's like a children's book story here somewhere. Like the first garbage flipping bird who was like, I saw a person do that. And I think my neck is that strong. I think it's like Ratatouille, but just garbage. Just garbage bird. Cockatoos. Yeah.

That's not really that similar to Ratatouille. Uh-huh. What they don't say is that actually the cockatoos are underneath the human's hats and they're making them lift the lids themselves. All the garbagemen start wearing big chefs hats. Everybody's like, what? Why are you doing that?

Really big though. Yeah, really tall. Really big and only in one suburb though, because it's got to be like one group of cockatoos that figured it out. For now. Yeah. For now. Soon the garbage men will be wearing giant chefs hats the world's over. We're on a path. Yeah. For now. Soon, the garbage men will be wearing giant chef's hats.

The world's over. We're on a path! Yeah. Started with the poo bells. Then it'll be the cockatoos taking over. Trash problems fixed, man. We just need more cockatoos. And we need to train them to eat plastic.

Sam, what have you got? Sometimes in life, you pick the causes that you stand up for, and sometimes those causes pick you. In my case, somewhere along the way, I became inextricably linked with the plight of the hermit crab. I really only just mentioned them like one time in my whole entire life. No more than anybody mentions anything. But now just for some reason, every now and then, it comes back up. I'm hermit crab guy. So I spent a few years trying to reject this responsibility

that was placed upon my shoulders because frankly, I don't really think about hermit crabs all that often, but in the last few months, I've changed my tune. A few episodes back, I learned that microplastics can mess up the decision-making skills of hermit crabs. And this week I discovered another article covering something equally as heartbreaking that has led me to decide that it is my fate to stand up for these little dudes. I'm all in on the hermit crabs now.

So a 2024 study out of the University of Warsaw has identified instances of members of 10 out of the 16 known species of terrestrial hermit crabs using plastic trash as shells instead of the traditional shell. So this doesn't mean that a majority of hermit crabs are doing this, but individuals in most of the species of hermit crabs that we know about, spread all over the world, have been seen using trash cells. So the team gathered this research using something that they called iEcology, which basically means that they combed through

a few hundred pictures, or maybe a few thousand, pictures of hermit crabs uploaded to places like Google Images and YouTube and iNaturalist, and they found 386 pictures of crabs in trash cells and then determined the species of what those crabs were and where in the world they were. And though this wasn't traditional fieldwork, it really helped to shed some light on the scope of this problem. So previous scientific literature, at least according to these researchers, had turned up only two terrestrial species using trash cells and

found examples of only 10 total crabs doing it. So they didn't look into the reason that hermit crabs are doing this too much, but they did provide some possible explanations. Like hermit crabs with more novel shells have more success when finding a mate is one of them. Other research has found that plastic smells like food to hermit crabs, which I think we've also talked about. So hermit crabs might just want to live in a house, you know, it smells like some tasty food all the time.

And another possibility is that there just aren't as many sea creatures that make the kind of shells that hermit crabs need due to climate change, which is sad. But it's also possible that the hermit crabs are being very smart and not being victims of humans dumping trash in the ocean. So plastic is pretty strong and it doesn't weigh as much as a shell does. So it might be beneficial for them to pick up plastic shell or because they're so this one's kind of sad because there's so much trash on the beaches all around the world. It might even be the best camouflage is to just look like a piece of trash

because a predator isn't going to pick up like a toothpaste cap and think, oh, there's going to be food in here. They'll think that's a piece of trash. But that is, in my opinion, I think sort of optimistic because I'd again like to mention that microplastics have been found to impact hermit crab decision-making And there are pictures in this in this paper and these guys don't look like they're making the best choices in my opinion They're just crazy They're really crammed in some pretty weird places. Yeah, I like to think here's what I like to think I like to think that before plastics,

these hermit crabs would never find a shell. And so they're like the losers of the bunch. And but like otherwise, like in a normal world, they just die. But in this world, they get at least something that really leads me nicely to my next little point, which is that even though these pictures are cute, and kind of a sad way, beach trash does have a really negative impact on hermit crabs because a 2019 study of one specific island's hermit crab population found that half a million hermit crabs just on this island got stuck and died inside of garbage every year. So not so good for them. So now we know it's a worldwide issue. And the next step I think is what they were talking about was a worldwide census of hermit crab shells

to figure out just, you know, how screwed these guys are. So, sorry again, hermit crabs. You guys think that we could help them do a worldwide census of hermit crabs? Well, no, because we live in Montana. Say, or you may be, because- Well, no, I don't think that we would do it. I think that we would ask people.

Oh! We would help people be citizens, scientists for hermit crabs. And Sam Schultzz you could be like the main hermit crab influencer And you could take your mantle you could get on a literal hermit crab sized horse or possibly a horse sized hermit crab Into battle and it'd be the champion for the hermit crabs and get the citizen science going people are gonna Go to the beaches. They're gonna take the pictures, they're gonna upload them to hermitcrabsam.com. We're gonna fix this. This is my life's calling. We just figured it out live on the radio.

You're gonna be on like a parade float? Yeah, a parade float that's got a hermit crab, not the size of a horse, but the size of a horse that's the size of a big elephant Size of a horse that's the size of an elephant I think I got that one perfect the first try feel like you're really focusing on a strange part of this All about the mode of transportation And then the rest is up to you Sam. Okay. Well, I like this. I think this is going to be, uh, my new life's purpose. So that should probably means I should probably win the round. The fact off, huh?

Pretty big day for me. Uh, let's see. I have to decide between our two facts. We had sulfur crested cockato cockatoos open in garbage cans because of social learning. And we got hermit crabs using plastic trash as shells. And it's a little adorable, but also deeply sad. Sam, I'm gonna give it to you. You know, I think we have to.

Even though Ceri was ahead coming into it, I think we have to give it to Sam because he is the true champion of the hermit crab. And now it's time to ask the science Couch where we ask a question to our couch of finally honed scientific minds. Moony Riot on Twitter asked, is there any environmentally friendly way to convert garbage into energy? And then Sid, just a guy on Discord, asked similarly, I've seen a great deal of positive information about using trash to generate power. Why does the public at large seem so opposed to this process? I mean, it's trickier than just burning fuel. So like methane is

One chemical and so you can you know exactly what's gonna come out of the smokestack You can scrub it you can you know, you like it's it's a fairly clean burning fuel trash has a bunch of stuff trash It's got all those phosphorus and that nitrogen and all this stuff that's in food waste and trees and etc now the good thing is that it's carbon neutral, so Everything like most of the stuff that you're gonna burn was like grown So like the flammable things are like banana peels and trees and yard waste and stuff. So all that stuff took carbon out of the atmosphere

and we're just putting it back in. It would get back in just by normal decay. But it does make it go away. And I think the people are opposed to it because it can add pollutants to the air nearby them. I think that's the big concern. And that is hard to avoid because it is a dirtier fuel. It's just got like, it's more chemicals, more atoms,

more kinds of atoms all mixed together getting hot and creating compounds that are not the ones that you want it to create. How does that align with reality, Sari? Yeah I think so waste to energy plants are what they're generally called are the places where we burn municipal solid wastes and different countries do it a different amount. But yeah, for basically for that reason, you can have various amounts of sorting before you burn it. You can have various amounts of post-processing afterwards to make it safer, like the ash and the smoke and whatnot that

you then have to dispose of somewhere. And I don't know about public opinion, but I think it's such a thorny issue because it's the intersection of so many different things of like governmental policy and taxes and the available space you have. So like the US has a lot of landfills because we have a lot of available space. And so it's cheaper and easier to like, prep a giant hole in the ground with aligning to prevent the garbage juice, which is called leachate from seeping into the groundwater. Forget about garbage juice. That's an important part too. So so dealing with the garbage juice by sealing it in

and then monitoring the gases that come off of it and either using them, like that's another way to do it is like harnessing that landfill gas, which is usually a combination of methane and carbon dioxide and turning that into fuel as opposed to just like letting it leak into the atmosphere. But in the US, we have a lot of space for landfills and so countries where there isn't

that space to build big pits and do processing that way, then it's cheaper or more incentivized to figure out other ways to turn waste into energy. So it's like no matter what country system you look at, it's it's based on all these various pressures. And like any anything that we're looking at for, I guess, a more environmentally friendly way, there's these like gasification that people are getting more interested in, which is instead of combustion, so like burning, burning the fuel, which is in this case garbage, turns it into ash

and it provides heat, which heats water into steam and then that steam turns a turbine, which is like fairly common to how we generate electricity. But the gasification heats up the waste product and then turns it into a combustible gas. So then the gas produced is the fuel itself and then some solid off product. But the problem with that is it hasn't been done a lot and so people are nervous to invest in that technology. It also takes a lot of energy to heat something up without setting it on fire and to have chemical reagents that allow those Everything that's in garbage to be broken down into this like new fuel

And so it's just like I think the energy into energy out ratios where you you like ideally want To put less energy in then you're getting out to make it a favorable process makes it tricky But it's just like it's a very like complicated issue complicated issue is why it's hard to get people behind it. Yeah, it's not easy. But I think in a lot of situations, it just ends up being, oh, maybe more trouble than it's worth. I again, I'm not super worried about the burying of the trash. So maybe I should be more worried about it because the trash has a bunch of bad stuff in it that you don't want leaching into the groundwater. But at the same time, you don't want to burn that

stuff because then it's going to be in the atmosphere. So you only burn the trash that's not going to be toxic to burn. Can't win with this stuff, huh? You know, we got solar panels, we got wind turbines, maybe we're going to get some good geothermal. I love the Earth's energy. It's got so much of it. It's right below our feet by right below I mean pretty far down, but it's The way you're wiggling your fingers is very super villain ass kank We're gonna put a big thing on top of the volcano and we're gonna use it to power our space laser and we're just gonna call it a broom. I'm gonna carve my name into the moon.

Well that's nice. They'll stop calling it the moon they'll call it Hank. It's a full Hank tonight. If you want to ask the Science Cow to your question you can follow us on Twitter and on threads at SciShow Tangents, where we'll send 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 CodySmileyLAT on Twitter, the Space Say on Discord, and everybody else who asked us your question for this episode.

If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents, become a patron, get access to things like our Discord and our bonus episodes. Shout out to patron Les Aker for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful and it helps us from 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. Sajou Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Wixman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Buzile. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tumamettish.

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. Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, a mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Gulls are notoriously not picky about what they eat, and a 2017 study used citizen science data to estimate that 1.4 million gulls are chowing down in landfills across North America and then roosting at nearby bodies of water. The researchers also estimated that each year these gulls poop around

39,000 kilograms of phosphorus and 240,000 kilograms of nitrogen where they roost, which are important nutrients, but an overload of them in one place can cause algal blooms that harm animal life. On the other hand, these gulls also prevent about a teragram of methane emissions from landfills each year because of all the carbon and the garbage that they eat. So for better or worse, human garbage dumps

are a big part of the nutrient cycle and we're just starting to quantify how. That's fascinating. We need more seagulls and birds. Birds are the answer to all of this. Yeah, we don't, you don't want, the seagulls are like, why cockatoos, take a break. Just all of this. Yeah, we don't they you don't the seagulls are like why cockatoos take a break Just come over here. Yeah

These are they dump them out. It's already open over here. Yeah. Yeah Stay locked forever. I bet Australian landfills do have a bunch of cockatoos at them. Yeah, they probably do Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangent. Since the lately competitive science knowledge showcase, I'm your host Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert and Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman Sam Schultz is here. Hello. We've also everyman Sam Schultz is here. Hello.

We've also got a special guest. He's the host of the podcast Lateral and a legendary YouTuber who's been seemingly to every place. It's Tom Scott! Hi Hank. Hi Sari. Hi Sam. How are you all doing?

I'm great. Where are you right now? I mean, I never give away my location in a... No, I'm in the lateral studio. Like, of course I'm in the lateral studio, guys. That's great. But I kind of wish you were like inside of the torpedo tube of a nuclear submarine. That's a destined thing.

That's 100% a destined from smarter everyday thing. I was recently on lateral and it was such a blast. And people should listen to that episode because we had a very good time. I listened to it, which I always feel is very sort of a little bit navel gazey to be like, let's see how my jokes went. But it was very fun. It's such a good idea for a podcast too.

Now I sort of like look at the world through the lens of lateral. I'm always like, what could I say to people and they would not believe and would have no idea why? Let's just do it. I mean, we're going to do a little mini episode of lateral at the top. Oh, OK. OK. All right. All right. You have your question ready. I have my thing. I have my thing.

I want you people to know about it. So during English history, this was, I don't know, sometime hundreds of years ago, everyone, especially in the lower classes, had a particular Bible verse memorized, everyone. Why? And you're asking why not which one? No, you don't need to know which one doesn't actually matter, interestingly. OK, so maybe for some kind of legal reason. Maybe.

Oh, that's a good jump ahead. That's lovely. Sorry, I'm getting podcast confusion here. Sam was sick, but actually is just really, really good at lateral thinking. So he was the clinch hitter of our team. Is there a really common phrase or a really common turn of phrase that is just a verse from the Bible? No, no, no. They had to learn a specific Bible verse.

Okay. But he said it is a letter, really. Right? What did you say, Sam? Law related? Yeah, something like someone's going to come ask you, do you know so-and-so? And you have to, you have to know it. Yeah, because I was thinking schooling or something that's drilled into you. No, no, no, no. It was organically taught by people to each other for a reason,

for a legal reason. So like the government didn't really want you to know it. Oh, OK. So was it something that you could it's not like get out of jail free card, but it literally get out of jail free card. OK. OK. In fact, it's better than that. So so during this period of time, and I didn't do the research that I would have done. That's OK. Normally on lateral, we give the guests like a full sheet of A4 with a lot of background notes. And so I'm going to plug here, by the way. Thank you.

There is a book coming out. We have a book coming out soon, and it has the background notes for some questions. And some brand new ones in there as well. I figured I'd get the plug in. Carry on. So, because our intros are not long, you guys have done a very good job of uncovering the reality of the situation. There was a time in English law where pretty much every crime was punished by death.

And this became a problem because people did crimes all the time. Are you sure that's not like an episode from season one of Star Trek The Next Generation? Because I'm pretty sure that's an episode from season one of Star Trek The Next Generation. Yeah. So, yes. Very similarly. And the King didn't like that they constantly had to kill people. And so they had to create loopholes. And the first one was, okay, if you have anything to do with the church, then like there's a loophole where people who are priests or who work for the church, they don't have to get

put to death because they have some other thing going on. And then that loophole got extended to just anyone who could quote a Bible verse. And so everybody in London taught each other this same Bible verse. And so they'd get up there on their first offense. They could just quote the Bible verse and then they could be given a different sentence other than death. That is wonderful. You're right. That would have made a very good lateral question.

Thank you for sharing it here as a demonstration of what the show is. I'm really happy with that. It's so fun. Sorry. If you guys thought we were going to have a different conversation than that, we're not because that took up the time that the conversation at the top usually takes. Every week around SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one up, amaze and delight each other with science facts while trying to be this podcast and not another one. But failing sometimes.

Our panelists, there are three of them. They're playing for glory and also for Hank bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be the winner. But first, we must, as always, introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week, delivered with a traditional science poem this week, delivered by legendary Tom Scott. There once was a man from Kilbride who took out his phone on a ride. He was thrown out and banned because it slipped from his hand and knocked out the person behind.

I was trying to figure out how to, you know, bring my cultural heritage and everything like that into a part. It turns out limericks. Just limericks. So the topic for the day is roller coasters. And this is apparently a thing that actually occurred, I assume. But we will talk about that before we dive in. We must take a short break and then we will be back to define and discuss roller coasters. Hello, everyone, we're back. At what point does it go from being a train to a roller coaster?

Incline. I'm some kind of grading, I would imagine. Yeah. I mean, arguably when it doesn't have an engine or power on board. Oh, that's a good one. Interesting. When it's given all its power externally at the start or maybe a couple of times during the ride? Interesting. There aren't any roller coasters that have onboard power. There are, but they are specifically defined as powered roller coasters. And they have the power in the roller coaster, not in the track? Yeah, like little kiddie rides like mine trains, things like that.

Sure. But also, there are also trains that have external power. Yeah, there's a trolley, a train. Mostly gravity? Yeah, powered by potential energy. A roller coaster is simply a train that goes nowhere. Well, some of them do go somewhere. It's true, there are roller coasters that just go down a hill. No.

I genuinely think the definition is, with occasional rare exception, that it gets its power from potential energy that is then converted into kinetic, and back and forth, and back and forth until friction takes over. Yeah. What do you think, Sarah?

You did research, probably. Yeah, I mean, this is basically the conclusion of my research. I would also say based on location, you can maybe contain it. If a roller coaster was placed in the middle of a field or if it was very, very large and span the country, then you'd get the lines blurry. But usually we find roller coasters in specific places like amusement parks or theme parks. And there are other elements, whether it is the thrill of the ride or the thematic elements of the ride.

So those are the difference between those two of it. Does it fit into the fantasy land section of Disney World? Or is it intended to bring you to a place where you can eat a corn dog and try not to throw it up while you are enjoying yourself? That's interesting because like they're like there is a blurriness there because Space Mountain is a roller coaster. But like Splash Mountain isn't because it's mostly like an animatronic ride with a little drop to the end.

It's a log flume ride, Hank. Oh, also, it's a log flume. Just you get what I mean. You're floating. Yeah, roller coasteraster is a subset of amusement ride. I think you've got to have some form of track there. I like the idea that a rollercoaster is a thing that both rolls and coasts. Oh, yeah. Because that's the thing about not having power, is that you're coasting.

Is that where that came from? It is, I think, where it came. So the history of roller coasters, people say that the oldest iteration of a roller coaster pre what we would consider a roller coaster are the ice slides constructed in the 1600s in Russia. So this is around the period of Catherine the Great. They would build these giant slides and these wooden ramps, I guess. You couldn't slide down them

without getting seriously hurt without the ice, but they would pour water on them. It would solidify into ice and then people would climb a ladder, sit on a sled and slide down them. And would they get seriously hurt then or? Yeah. But you wouldn't get a splinter in your butt.

There are still quite a few languages that have the word for rollercoaster as Russian Mountain or maybe a traditional older word for it. I think French has Montagne-Rousse or something close. Again, my pronunciation is going to be off. That's fun. I assume the Académie Française at some point has just been angry about the phrase Les Rollercoaster and insisted on the old one. We do not accept this potential.

No idea, but I can believe it. It doesn't sound nice. So I mean, like this is different from sledding or just riding on your butt down an icy hill because it was a whole like they I'm sure they started there and then they were like, let's build a thing. Yes. And then it had it has I guess, gravity element. We built the thing and then gravity

is the reason why you were sledding down, which is, I guess, the same thing as sledding down a hill. But then in the 1700s and early 1800s, like 1817 or so, then engineers built roller coasters in France. So France was, maybe that's why they have such strong feelings about the word for roller coasters, but they took it from Russia, brought it to France and there were wheels attached to carriages and those wheels were locked onto tracks. So that is, you can't like fly off the tracks. There's some amount of securing the cart to the track and

guide rails to keep them on course and higher speeds. And so those are sort of like the first adjacent to modern roller coasters. And then in the 1870s in America, that was where the first sort of like gravity ride came into existence, but it was a mining railway. So it was a track for mine carts that converted potential energy into kinetic energy to move ore along. And then we stopped using it for mining. We stopped using it for coal. And then some miners had too much fun. And we were like, maybe we can make money by charging people a couple cents to propel

themselves down. The miners are coming to propel themselves down instead. They love it so much. I didn't. I did an episode of Citation Needed on that a long time ago. Was that the flip-flap railway or something like that? Or was that just a different name? Maybe it was a nickname. I have the the March Chunk.

That's it. The March Chunk Switchback Railway. That's it. We went on a tangent at one point. I knew I'd talked about that at some point. Yeah. So that was in Pennsylvania. And then the first time the word roller coaster was in printed material, according to the

Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1883 in the Chicago Tribune, saying, a curious structure is now in the course of construction. It will be known as the roller coaster and the objects claimed for it are health and amusement. And they were talking. Yeah. What are we doing? How's it helping?

We're not dying on the ice slide. Keep your blood flowing. Yeah, yeah. We're not falling. I mean, I just looked at a picture of one of these Russian mountains and I'll tell you what, they were not for health. By 1883, they were trying to convince each other that building a roller coaster on the

corner of a Chicago street would be good for your health. And that was a circular gravity rail railway. So a track that looped had hills and valleys and the cart would, you'd probably have to drag it up to some point of the top of the hill to get that potential energy and then you could let it go, let it swirl around. And then they really took off at Coney Island in 1884 when Lamarcus Thompson designed a coaster called the Switchback Gravity Pleasure Railway. So maybe that's for health too.

Like I guess the word pleasure kind of had a different set of connotations. Yeah, it's not one of those, what are they, like the Love Canal caves or whatever. Tunnel of Love. Just to be clear, tunnel of love and love canal. Very different definitions there. Those are two very different things. So all that to say, there was at some point where we transitioned from sled on ice to wheeled thing on railroad tracks. And at some point there were rollers that propelled them across and then at some point

it was wheels. But that is where the roller coaster came into play. This has just reminded me of a patent that was never made real. You'll have to forgive me, this is coming from the depths of my memory, someone will have to look up the details of this. But there was a Victorian era inventor who had the idea that trains should just have like a bit of track on a long slope at the front, so that rather than trains having to, you know, pull over to the side to let something else pass on single road, they could just kind of go at each other and, you know, 10, 20 miles an hour, one would just ride up the other train, go over the top, come down the bottom. And the reason it

stuck in my head is that it was some phrase in the advertising or the patent that said it would combine the thrill of travel with the joy of a switchback. Now, I'm not sure how much suddenly, you know, being hoisted into the air on your commute would work for that. I do like the idea. It would be thrilling. I imagine my morning commute and the amount of times I pass another train and I'm always like, whoa,

because I sit by the window and see it. But instead I fly up. Like maybe more frightening, you're the train on the bottom and suddenly it's like. Yeah, who gets, who bottoms on the train? On the two trains rolling over each other. On the train. It's true. I think I think sometimes they switch.

You know, they can do both. They can go both ways. I feel like I have a good understanding of what roller coasters are, which means that it is time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. By some estimates, there are 5,300 roller coasters operating worldwide today. And we had to do estimates because some of them are probably weird mine cart things. Some of these roller coasters take their job of scaring the hell out of you more seriously than others.

I'm going to introduce you to a few record-setting roller coasters, and you're going to have to guess exactly how extreme they are. Everyone got your seat belts on? It's time to learn about some weirdo roller coasters. The Tower of Terror at Gold Reef City in Johannesburg lives up to its name with a 50-meter drop that has reportedly produced the highest g-force of any roller coaster on Earth,

though I don't know if we can call Tower of Terror's roller coasters. Tower of Terror is a genuine roller coaster. This is not like the one in the Disney parks. This has the same name. Oh, I got it. It's one of these. It is a genuine swoopy roller coaster, not a drop tower. Of course Tom knows that.

So has it produced 4.5G, 6.3G, or 8.6G? Humans could survive any of those. I didn't say could. I didn't say we're guaranteed to. Could, but we'd be more or less, less and less okay the higher the number. How much does Space Shuttle do? The Space Shuttle does about three, but that's three continuously for a long time. And there are standards documents from various governments

on how long a ride can sustain various amounts of G-force. So a very brief peak can actually be quite high, but if you're sustaining longer than half a second, longer than a second, longer than five seconds, it really needs to come down. What were the options, the G options? 4.5, 6.3 or 8.6. Space shuttle's easy. I could do a space or 8.6. Space shuttle is easy.

I could do a space shuttle, no problem. Get me in there. I don't think yet. I don't think the G is actually the main problem with getting on a space shuttle. It's all the other training. So I thought, yeah, it's all the figuring out how to fly a space shuttle parts. I'm really annoyed by this question because I thought you were going to ask, like, what's the record it set?

I was like, oh, that is that is the highest G for. So now you've asked me the exact number. No, yeah, I know. And I have a hunch, but I'm not certain. Okay, well, we'll have you go last because you know vastly more things than most people. I picked the middle one. I picked the middle one.

Whatever that number was, that's the one I picked. Yeah, I was also gonna go for the 6.3, because I think in my research for this episode, 6 seemed like a bad number. Like, we try and make loops go under 6. And so the fact that this has a moment where you experience 6 point something that feels like, ooh, it's danger. It's terrifying even. Yeah, that's where I am.

I'm definitely ruling out eight. That's injury inducing. 4.5 seems like there's a few coasters in the world that will hit that briefly. So if it's the extreme one that's out there, and as I remember, it's one that is a bit non-standard, I feel like a brief spike at six at the bottom of what I think, if I remember this rightly, is a beyond vertical drop

sounds about right. That's that is correct. That is what that is. All of the things that Tom just said including the answer are correct. So I should I should fill in some details here that I was terrified and had a full-on phobia of roller coasters until about three years ago. And I did a video for my second channel which was getting over that fear. And unfortunately it has turned into a little bit of an obsession. To the point where I've been on quite a lot now. I also have strong opinions on them and I won't go on many of them.

Roller coaster nerds are a bit like train nerds. Which isn't really a compliment. won't go on many of them. Roller coaster nerds are a bit like train nerds, which isn't really a compliment. Well, it's also, roller coasters are a bit like trains, so it makes sense. Yeah. But the wonderful thing is they have all been categorized on various places.

I can look up if I'm going to a park, and if it's tagged with rattle and head banging and discomfort, I just don't go on it. Yeah. Like a lot of the roller coaster nerds will just go on every single ride because they can to get like to tick it off the list and say they've done it. I can look at a ride and go, no, that will hurt. That's not what I'm saying. I am old enough now that that is something I'm going to regret.

So do you go around the world riding roller coasters? No, but if I'm in a new place, I will look and see what's in the area. What's your favourite one you've ever been on? It's probably one called Zadra, which is in a park called Energielandia in Poland. And it is one of a brand new generation of coasters put together by a company called Rocky Mountain Construction, who have basically reinvented what it is possible to do with, like, wood and steel. And it's like being... It's like doing aerobatics in a fighter jet. Like, what I want from a roller coaster is not to get terrified.

I don't want to be scared, I don't want to be just crushed in my seat. I want to feel like I'm flying. I want to feel like I'm doing aerobatics in a plane, without all the expense of doing aerobatics in a plane. Sure. Yeah. Question number two, until it mysteriously closed in January of 2024. Uh oh.

That's all we have on the information. Can I write down a guess here? You can just tell me what your guess is. Okay, this is the trouble with doing something that is basically my specialist subject now. You don't even know what the question is though, so you might be writing down something I'm about to sell you. But there's only one coaster that mysteriously closed in January 2024. It's the Formula Rossa at Ferrari World in Dubai. Yes, it is.

We got an instant fact check from Tom. Yep. It was the world's fastest roller coaster reaching 240 kilometers per hour. Oh, now I'm in trouble, Hank. Now I've run out of things that I know about that coaster. Ha ha ha ha ha! Or just under 150 miles per hour. How long did it take to achieve that pant-soiling speed?

Was it 3.2 seconds, 4.9 seconds, or 5.8 seconds? Those are all the same to me. Those are all the same to me. Those are all the same. I did an episode of Let's Learn Everything, and again, we talked about speed and we talked about acceleration and how fast you can go. And the thing about Formula Rossa is that while it hits that speed, it is not the fastest accelerating. But where it sits in those numbers, not a clue. I mean, it's 5.8.

I'll go with 5.8. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'll go with 5.8 too. All right. Everybody's got to guess this. Can't all have the same score at the end of this, but okay. Regardless of what the answer is, it doesn't change the results at all, because you've all guessed the same thing.

But you are in fact all wrong. It was 4.9 seconds. And it uses, rather than that hill gravity thing, it sits on a flat track and is flung forward by a hydraulic system underneath. A catch car under the track was attached to a cable that could be pulled rapidly by a winch powered by hydraulic pumps powered by compressed nitrogen gas. That seems like the kind of thing that maybe if it starts to stop working perfectly, you'd close it down.

It might close mysteriously. Yeah, there are a few coasters of that model in the world, and there are reliability problems. Which is not what you want. No, these days if they're building a launch thing, they'll use like electromagnetic motors or something like that. Generally. Yeah, that's that's the one that they have at California Adventure, which is very exciting. There aren't many hydraulic launch ones.

Yeah, it's like it's the it's the thing that shoots the planes off of the aircraft carriers. But for me, and us at it in California, for a lot less money. All right. Our last question, the TMNT shell razor at American Dream in New Jersey holds the record for the steepest drop of any roller coaster hurling riders at an angle more extreme than straight down. So is that. I'm going to I'm going to write my answer down for this one.

Sorry. OK. You bring a protractor along with you on your roller coaster ride. Okay, you bring a protractor along with you on your roller coaster ride So no, but There are a lot of roller coaster claims that are questionable Sure sure like a lot of the places say we have the the tallest are measuring Maybe not from the same place as others some that say they're the fastest Well, yeah, if they turned up to 100%, it's a completely empty car, which they don't do because it's not as safe. There's many things where, like, actually, is that?

Has anyone checked it? Did they just claim it? I feel like you got to fact check a rollercoaster called the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Shell Razor in New Jersey. This has also been mysteriously not operating for a long time as well. Oh, damn. Well, I'm glad they're taking safety seriously. Have you written down your answer, Tom? Yes, yes, I have. OK, is it 101.5 degrees, 115.5 degrees or 121.5 degrees

as opposed to just 90 degrees? Sam, what are your Teenage Mutant, like, vibes giving you of this? Is it like a TMNT Easter egg? They drop in. Yeah. Yeah. So date of birth, they they'd be dropping straight down, a straight down 90 straight down to 90. So this is more than straight down. Oh, it's more than straight down.

They wouldn't take such a risk, actually. So this is bad. Um, the middle one. Okay, good for you. Oh, I'm gonna guess the smallest one. It is 121.5. It is 121.5. It is correct.

I actually misremembered, I've written down 122.5. It was somewhere in that zone. No, you're penalized. That's fair. Honestly, that was such a dick move that honestly I'm 100% okay with that. So this begs the question, is that a hill or is that an inversion at that point? And of course, there's no official answer and so of the enthusiasts argued and decided that an inversion begins at 135 degrees which is halfway between 90 and 180 as the dividing line between the two So it is officially still a hill even though it is also inverted. I don't know about that

That doesn't sound right to me. Well, you know, you're not in the space. I don't think you can call it steep if it's not a little bit upside down. You'd have to be on the other side of it for it to be steep, I think. I mean, the idea, though, is that that does create that weightlessness where you are pulling away from the vehicle you are inside of. But Tom came out of that one unsurprisingly in the lead, though somewhat surprisingly not that far in the lead.

So we're going to have to take a short break and then we'll be back for the fact off and we will find out how we do. [♪ music playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, chimes playing, ch Hello, welcome back. Now get ready for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to me. Isary and Tom have in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will decide which was the more mind blowing fact and award Hank bucks any way I see fit. But first we have to decide who goes first with a trivia question. Here it is. If you've ever been scared to ride a roller coaster and been egged on by someone by saying, it's not really that dangerous, just feels dangerous.

Are they actually telling the truth? Well, that's up to you to guess. How many people are killed in roller coaster related accidents annually in the US? OK. All right. I've got an answer. Oh, I have no two. I'm going to say 0.5., I've got an answer. I have no... Two? I'm going to say 0.5. Can I try two?

Yeah, sure. I'm going to guess one. I wonder if we've all anchored really low here. It turns out that actually people keep wandering into the unsafe areas and that counts. And people have heart attacks that are unrelated to the coaster safety. Yeah. I wonder if we've all anchored this too low. It's thousands.

Thousands. No, it's not. It's four. It's four, which was, you know, you were anchoring low in terms of percentage-wise. There are many things, of course, that are deadlier than roller coasters. You've got fireworks around 10 deaths a year, lightning around 20 deaths per year, skydiving around 21 deaths per year. So you could use that to sort of judge the level of and this is, of course, not per

per capita. I think there are a lot more roller coaster riders than skydivers over the last year. And so you have to kind of consider. I'm not sure if this is counting all amusement park rides or roller coasters only specifically, but there's always like fair rides. There's always some accidents that happen. But I imagine driving to the amusement park is several magnitudes more dangerous than riding the roller coaster.

Yeah, there is definitely a lot more safety precautions on a roller coaster than on you while you're driving a car. But that means that Sari gets to go first. So most of us, and I guess I meant the audience when I was writing this question, but I guess also us hosting the podcast, have probably felt out of breath at some point, maybe after some vigorous exercise,

or when you get sick and all stuffed up, or allergies, or asthma, or even mental health conditions, like anxiety or having a panic attack. But because there are so many potential causes to this kind of breathlessness feeling from muscle constriction around the lungs to nuanced psychological factors, treating it isn't always straightforward. Sometimes, for example, people with conditions like asthma may not report difficulty breathing during an asthma attack when their lungs are measurably functioning less well because they're just used to less air coming in. Or the opposite might happen. They might feel breathless when their lung

function is measurably the same as what it always is because of stress or other emotions. So a 2006 study from Dutch researchers wanted to better understand the effects of stress on breathlessness using roller coasters. They took 25 young women with severe asthma who used inhaled corticosteroids daily to treat it and 15 young women without asthma to ride a roller coaster and see what happened. They made sure in pre-surveys that everyone liked roller coasters, so no phobias here, and had ridden them before, like knew what to expect, and what they found was really interesting. So for the participants without asthma, their measured lung function

was the same before and after riding the roller coaster twice in a row. So they made sure they really got the roller coaster experience when on a couple rides. But these participants, they had a peak feeling of breathlessness right after getting off, along with feelings like dizziness, nausea, and heart pounding, all of that rush from riding a roller coaster. They felt breathless. It was kicking in as they got off. But for the participants with severe asthma, their breathlessness was higher right before riding the roller coaster and lower afterward. They felt more confident breathing after the roller

coaster, even though the lung function of almost half of them was worse after riding the roller coaster. So in other words, even though their breathing was physically harder after riding the roller coaster, for some of these women, and they still felt dizzy or nauseated. They felt emotionally like they could breathe easier in these reported studies. Maybe because that rush of joy of riding a roller coaster helps them feel better or at least took their mind off of thinking about their asthma and thinking about having trouble breathing.

So the takeaway here is not quite rollercoasters help with your asthma. You should ride them. It's more like doing things you enjoy and your emotional state may have a bigger effect on your perception of your breathing, your perception of your asthma symptoms and can help literally help you breathe a little easier. So they didn't design the study specifically where they were like, this is a potential treatment. They went and being like, this is a way that we will uncover more information. And then we're like, actually, it helped.

Yes. Yeah, they went in the the technical jargon that they used was the effects of positive and negative stress on asthma and dypsonia, which is the medical term for breathlessness. Did they identify which roller coaster it was in the paper? Because I feel like there's a big difference in how you feel between something like Space Mountain, where you are just indoors, can't see where you're going, it's designed to scare you and disorient you, versus one of those big swoopy feel-like-you're-flying mega coasters that just kind of take you over hills and sweep you through?

I did not see it in the paper in the methods section. It all took place in the Netherlands and they were university students, I assume from their department as it is wanted to be. The paper is titled Rollercoaster Asthma When Positive Emotional Stress Interfers with Dipstnia Perception. asthma when positive emotional stress interferes with dypsonia perception. So we can write the authors of the paper and say, which roller coaster Tom Scott needs to write it. That is blatantly some students who are like, can we can we expense? Yeah, I mean, students all over the country, if you're listening now, test every disease, just everything. Just we got to get, we got to get whatever you've got. Test out amusement parks on how you feel afterward. And somebody will fund that for you. With the exception of neck back injuries,

I'm just reading the warning sign there. I'm just reading the warning sign. All right, Tom, what do you got for us? I have a very similar fact. And the first part of this, Hank, you may know, because it turns out you did a SciShow video on this many years ago. I think I already know what it is, but hit me. Okay, what do you think the opening one is?

Is it the kidney stone coaster? It's the kidney stone one! Yes. Yeah, you were saying test all the other ailments. They tested kidney stones. How much of this can you remember? Yeah, I believe it was Thunder Mountain at Disneyland. And I believe that it was, that like, there is like literally a certain area of the coaster specifically that can reorient a kidney stone to make it easier to pass.

You have a much better memory for your videos than I do for mine. Well, it's a great fact. It's just a great fact. It's a great fact. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, it was the Magic Kingdom, so it was East Coast Disneyland, but they're very close. And yes, there is a study titled Validation of a Functional Pylocalisial Renal Model let's be honest, I didn't know how to pronounce that, for the evaluation of renal calculi passage

while riding a roller coaster. Basically, are you gonna dislodge kidney stones by riding a coaster? And this came from a lot of anecdotal evidence. Actually, people were riding this and going, well, yeah, and then a little bit later, I went and I passed a stone, which is incredibly painful. Like that is not a magical experience you're having there.

But it is good to have it out and not in there anymore, growing more and bigger. That is not my main fact. My main fact is that that was what came out of it in the press. Like they won an Ig Nobel Prize for this study. The press was like, ride roller coasters, it'll help with kidney stones. Except it seems to be ride Big Thunder Mountain in the back of the coaster, and you'll dislodge kidney stones. Like, there's like a dose-dependent response, depending on where you are in the coaster. Yes! This is my fact.

Because I pulled up the tables that they had in the original study. And in the front of the coaster, one out of eight rides, one out of eight rides, two out of eight rides, for the various sizes of kidney stone. By the way, terrifying thing in here, I read this as like 64mm kidney stone. I was like, what? That is terrible. No, it's volume. It's 64 cubic millimeters. It is about a 4 mil diameter kidney stone. That's a big stone. It's not an operation stone. Front of the coaster, that would be what? Four out of 24. Back of the coaster, eight out of 12, seven out of 12, eight out of 12, so we're talking three quarters in the back of the coaster, one quarter in the front. Did they put people in the middle?

They didn't. They, I think, managed 20 rides on this. And to be clear, this is not people. This is a synthetic kidney that they have tested out sort of transparent stuff. So they have repeatability, so they can place the stones in various points and test in various things. There is a quote in an interview with them back from 2016, and this is not in the paper, quote, we tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith's rock and roller coaster and both failed. Yeah. Wow. And I think that's a massive clue that no one's picked up on. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Like these are not the same things. Like coasters are different

from each other, obviously. But the fact that like the fact that like the front versus the back matters is bonkers. But it really does. If you're riding a coaster in the front, then you get far less what's called airtime or ejector time. If you're in the front of a coaster going over a hill, you're already a little bit of the way down the hill by the time it starts accelerating the balance tips over. So you kind of fall down and you get less of that kind of jump out of your seat.

You're not getting yanked down. So you're like, just like tipping where the people at the back are getting yanked. Yeah. But not only are you getting yanked down the hill, you're getting yanked over the hill. So there is a very strong sudden pull downwards if you're in the back. Now those two other coasters, they're both indoors and they are... Someone I know described them as being like a hug from gravity. You don't get much of that floaty sensation in them. You're just kind of pushed into your seat and jerked about all the time. And it's into a loop and it's tight and it's a lot. But it's all kind of crushed into your seat gravity.

Whereas Big Thunder Mountain, that has airtime, that has hills, that has that kind of floaty feel. And I cannot believe no one else has gone in and studied this. I really seems like worth doing and not like also not that expensive. Like you actually should do like you're not going to double blind this, unfortunately, because you know what you're on. Yeah, but but it does like there's plenty of people with kidney stones that like live in Orlando. You know, if you were in other countries, maybe you would go and get them professionally

removed with with ultrasound or something like that. Yeah. But this is the US and there's a lot of people that without good health care. Yeah. And also you're going to be maybe like it's an excuse to take your family out with ultrasound or something like that. But this is the US and there's a lot of people there without good health care. And also you're going to be, maybe like, it's an excuse to take your family out and be like, this is going to be like, we'll get the double benefit. This could be a package they sell. You get some fast passes to ride Big Thunder Mountain.

And then after, like they could maybe do like a little ultrasound therapy right beforehand and then put you on to increase the response rate. And then they could keep your kidney stone, put it on a wall. Yeah, there'll be like a whole rack of them. Yeah. Just pebble-dash a building, it'll be fine. I did find a response to that initial article, which is evaluation of renal calculi passage while

riding a roller coaster, which is Michael Bailey, PhD, who points out that actually while riding a rollercoaster, which is Michael Bailey, PhD, who points out that actually, there is just an ultrasonic thing that can do this. They're working on it right now, that if you want to create that sort of movement and vibration, you can tune ultrasonic waves to actually move kidney stones that way. And it's probably a lot better way of doing it. But also, we don't know, because no one has done the study. And this is my fact. This is the conclusion of all this. Yes, it's not just that it is go on a roller coaster, it'll help with kidney stones.

It is the position you ride. It is the type of coaster. So I would love someone to go out there with a similar kind of arrangement. Some faith, honestly, I'm tempted to do this. Just get like a fanny pack with this inside that you can hide from security. Actually, we're going to ride this coaster and this coaster and we are going to take an accelerometer, which they didn't do. They just took the front and back and took it as anecdotal evidence, which

is a great initial study. But this is like eight years ago, and I cannot find any follow-up studies. Because no one's going to fund that study, right? Why not? No one with an ethics department in a university is going to go, actually yes, we are going to pay this researcher to go to multiple theme parks over multiple days and do all the work required this. When actually, what we should be funding is checking with ultrasound of like professional clinical equipment in a professional setting.

I guess. But I would love someone to actually figure out is there an optimal like G-force. I just love the idea of taking the ultrasound machine and like you use the ultrasound machine to give like the Big Thunder Mountain protocol where it does to the kidney stone the Big Thunder Mountain protocol where it does to the kidney stone what Big Thunder Mountain does. But like, so like the kidney stone gets to ride on a roller

coaster, but like you can stay in Cleveland. This is, this is the other thing about different types of Gs on roller coasters. I avoid roller coasters with rattle. And there's kind of a few, definitely you can have the big G4 stuff, the big swoopy stuff. And you can have the kind of medium level where actually it's designed to throw you about a bit and feel like you're going around tight corners like a wild mouse coaster. But then you also have the ones where the tracks just really rattly and it's unpleasant.

It feels like you're going over bumps in a car and you get a headache and I hate those. But like, which of these is better? Yeah. Is it that you're- Because it's not about what Tom likes? It's about what the kids experience. Right. So I would love to do that study. My fact is not that rollercoasters help with kidney stones, because that's not true.

It is that some specific seats in Big Thunder Mountain help with kidney stones. And we should really figure out why. Well, you came into it in the lead and you've also with that you've been you've also been like tirelessly advocating for the quality of your fact. It was a real pain. It felt like I can't keep going on people's podcasts and acting like a dick. Hank, I really think you're setting me up as the bad guy here. And I just, I have to apologize.

No, much like Iron Chef, everyone is rooting for me to lose, because I guess it's doing such like fantastic, wonderful thing. You like, you found a research study within a paper. I presented a paper that exists and I feel like there's a concrete difference between those two things. I was gonna say the slightest bit of pressure on Sari could also get her to say, ah, my facts sucked. So. Oh, no. Not that it even did. She would just say that it did.

So we've got Sari Riley better than Bobby Flay is what my show notes now say. And Tom Tyrell is fact quality advocate. And Tom, tireless fact quality advocate. The kidney fact is objectively, I think, more mind blowing, just that the roller coaster could be a medical treatment. And maybe they are tied in any case. Tom comes out on top. Congratulations, Tom. And now it is time to ask the science couch where we ask our question to our couch of

finally, it used to be actual couch Tom we used to record this in a building Finally hodent scientific minds Sam What's our question at the perfect bot Steve for nine one six on YouTube asked? What is the roller coaster feeling you get in your stomach? Did it evolve specifically or is it just a consequence of a different feeling that was only discovered when we started moving way faster than normal? We recently went over kind of we went over kind of like a like a pretty big like little hill in the

car. And my son said, I felt that in my balls. And he's right. Like, no one says that because it's really awkward. But yes, if you have the equipment for that, that's kind of where you're feeling. I guess they're floating around down there, aren't they? Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I have a strong opinion on this because I was scared of that feeling specifically. That is the thing that...

Part of it was like the click of the lift hill, everything that goes with roller coasters. But the feeling it was the click of the lift hill, everything that goes with rollercoasters, but the feeling I was specifically scared of was that drop, that going over a hump in a car feeling where the world drops out. And I hate to say this, but that feeling is fear. Is it just fear? That feeling is not an inherent part of your body's response to falling. That feeling is fear.

And I know that for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't get that anymore. I still get that feeling if I go over a bump and I'm surprised by falling. I still get that on an indoor coaster if I am surprised by a drop and I didn't know it was going to happen. And I can still get that on a coaster I haven't ridden before, if it does something surprising. I can still get that, oh, yeah, you feel it in your balls. But if I can see the bottom of the coaster, and it's like something I've been on before,

I don't feel that. And the counter argument to that is I once got that exact feeling while, you know, indoor parachuting or indoor skydiving, where there's just a giant fan underneath. Yeah, I was in that and I could see the fan underneath. Because this was not one of those tubes in a wind tunnel. It was just a big old fan underneath you somewhere in New Zealand. And as that fan spun up and I realized there was nothing between me and it, but the net, I got a little bit of that feeling.

I was like, why do I feel that? I'm not floating yet. And it is just fear. And I know that there are going to be people arguing with me about that because they have different... I'm going off lived experience here. It's fear. I mean, it's also the feeling you get when you have a dream that you fall.

So I guess that makes sense. As far as I know, it's not a reaction to falling. It is a reaction to being afraid of falling and your brain going, grab a branch. Right, right. It's not a feeling you get when you are afraid. It's a feeling you get when you are afraid of falling. Or you are like it's a specific falling fear feeling.

Although I don't know, maybe none of us have ever been afraid enough to get that feeling in other situations. Maybe that is, you turn the corner and there is a saber-toothed tiger in front of you, maybe you get that exact feeling. I have been lucky enough never to have that, either in the specific case or the general case. But maybe it is just fear. Sarah, did your research align here? Yeah. So I have had similar feelings and maybe it's because I have like a diagnosed anxiety, depression, mental illness flavors of it. It is not the same quality as roller coaster drop, but I've definitely had similar intensity of stomach drop feelings in situations that I am dreading

or situations where I feel like I've made a humongous mistake instead of like, I don't know, a normal level of this is bad. It's like, oh, I can physically feel something is wrong in the way that I like break out in hives and have very physical reactions to emotional responses. I think people's bodies do different things. I would say yes, fear and yes, maybe it is a signal, like fear is one way, but it is a way for your body to signal that something is wrong and you are potentially in danger and we have a lot of those. So it could be somewhat influenced by physical things. So I think there are articles out there. There was like a 2012 article, an interview with

a surgeon that said how your organs are suspended by different ligaments and are attached to the nervous system, especially the enteric nervous system with different connections. And when you have airtime on a roller coaster, when you're in that free fall, your organs kind of like gloop around in you and are in positions that they're not normally in when they're sitting flat. And I don't think the sensation is you feeling your organs moving because they're kind of sloshing around. You're just like a bag of blood and goop.

It's not like astronauts get that feeling all the time or anything like it. Yeah, but it's your body saying, this isn't normal. Like, I don't expect it to be this way, which is how you can condition yourself to it. Once you expect a drop or once you're familiar with that feeling, you can tell your body like, oh, actually, I'm not in danger. Your body can or your brain can process to some degree. I'm not in danger. I don't need this warning sign.

And therefore, it's probably okay. But there's a lot we don't understand about the enteric nervous system and the specific this gut brain interaction. But we have a lot of sensations that are tied to emotions like fear or anxiety or whatnot in your stomach, like butterflies in your stomach or I don't know, this stomach drop feeling. And there's a lot we don't understand, I think, about microbiomes and hormones and all the signaling that goes on not only to constrict and relax your digestive system to make sure food can make its way through, but also the ways that that interacts with other things like stress poops,

like or stress constipation on the other thing. Everyone is a little bit different, I think, and that's all tied together with all these other feelings. It's almost like evolution was like, where should we make these people feel this? And it was like, the most vulnerable spot. Or, you know, there's also like, What the most vulnerable spot, right? Or, you know, there's also like that. It is often the case that evolution is like, let's just pick whatever is available and that the sort of Vegas nerve, like all of that stuff is just sort of very like a it's kind of a brute force nerves like the the the nervous innervations of the face are just tremendously complex and fine tuned so that you can feel very delicately and also move very delicately

so we can talk and emote and stuff. Whereas it's really kind of brute force in the abdomen. It's just like not a lot of nerves covering a lot of area, which is why a lot of things feel the same, like diarrhea cramps can feel the same as getting kicked in the nuts. And so it's just sort of like all doing one job. And it feels a little bit like, oh, well, like we've got this here doing that. And so if we wanted to create a fear response, it would be sort of use the brute force area of the nervous system that's not being used for much else.

And it's a really unhelpful bit of advice for people who want to go on rollercoaster and want to get over the fear. All you have to do is not be afraid and it'll feel fine. That's not helpful. Well, it seems to. Yeah, I guess, like, do it over and over again. Exposure therapy. Also, scream into it like genuinely helps. Genuinely. I don't think I don't think my wife would appreciate that on a car ride, though. No, absolutely not.

But it turns out that if I'm if I'm on a new coach and it's big and I'm a little bit afraid, the difference between me going, meh, and me going, come on, let's have it as we go down the hill, actually makes a difference. Wow. I just, yeah, that makes me want to get a beer with you. Come on. I do go very British at moments like that. Yeah. And now for our listeners on Patreon, we're answering a bonus science couch question. Sam, what do we got?

At MaxRBMC on YouTube and at Lee Flitter on Twitter, that's a fun to say, asked, why was I fine with them as a teen, them being roller coasters, but by my 30s got very sick on them. If you want to hear the answer to that question as well as enjoy all new episodes totally ad free head over to our patreon That's patreon.com slash SciShow tangents at our $8 a month tier you get new episodes ad free and extended Shenanigans as we answer a bonus science couch question every episode You'll also get a link to join our private discord server and maybe also some more goodies in the future Who knows also all of our old goodies are all there already for you to enjoy. Our patrons are the best and we are very grateful for their support. If you want to ask the Science

Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents or check out our YouTube community tab where we'll send out topics for upcoming episodes every week or join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Chris P on Discord, at Savim S on Twitter, and everybody else who asked us questions for this episode. Tom, thank you so much. Tell us more about the Lateral book. Yep. The tie-in book to Lateral, which is the podcast that Hank has guested on and which I do every week, is coming out towards the end of this year. Lateralcast.com for the book pre-order. Also just search Lateral wherever you get your podcasts.

And there are weekly episodes, including ones that Hank has been on. It's such a cool, weird, fun idea for a podcast. It feels very British. Yes, yes it does. I kind of recommend never coming up with a podcast format that needs three different guests an episode and a load of research? Yeah, yeah. It also feels very Tom Scott in that way, where it was like more focused on like the goodness of the idea than the implementability of the idea.

I think that's a compliment. I'm not sure. That's the meanest thing I've ever heard you say. It's not mean. It's not mean. It is. It is about a man who is focused on quality. Tom, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Also, I appreciate every time we get to hang out here. So much fun. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. First, you can go to Patreon dot com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron

and get access to those new extended ad free episodes and our discord. Shout out to patron less Aker for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful. Helps us know what you like about the show and helps other people 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. I've been Sam Schultz. And I've been Tom Scott.

SciShow Tangents is created by all of us, except for Tom, and produced by Jeff Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Alex Billo. Today's game was written by Daniel Kramiski.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we could not 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. There's a Danish candy company called Bonbon, with product names that translate to seagull droppings, ant piss, or dog farts. So naturally, they created a theme park called Bonbonland with equally rude attractions.

The oldest roller coaster in the park opened in 1993, and its translated name is the Farting Dog Switchback. It's not especially big or thrilling, as it reached a top speed of 30kmph on a track that is 4.5 metres, 15 feet tall at most. But you do get to ride past a statue of a cartoon dog defecating while being serenaded with farts and barks playing through speakers. What are they doing over there?

Why are they doing that? It was on my list of things to film and, you know, for some reason I never got round to it. Never got round to it. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the frightly competitive science knowledge scream case. I'm your ghost Hank Gangrene and joining me this week, as always, is mad scientist Scary Riley. Hello. I devoured Sam. Both of them. The clone to the clone. Yum, yum, yum, yum.

The old calendar on the wall says it's Halloween time once more. And as you know, here at Sashio Tangents, we love to get to the Halloween spirit. And this year is no different. October is spooky month, and we have invited some ghoulish guests over to Tangents Manor to join us this month. In fact, I think I hear one of them approaching the door now. Why, it's mystery guest Brennan Lee Mulligan, dropout host, dropout writer, performer, and just amazing storyteller of all kinds of stories.

Oh my gosh. And my friend Brennan, hello. Hello. I am the surprise guest. I have come to your door to haunt the SciShow with a poem, which is either for me to recite now or later, depending on great whatever works best for you. I love that we started out and you were the very first thing you were was loud. I just it's very on-brand. And you were the very first thing you were was loud. I just it's very on brand.

That could be a personal issue or the gain on my microphone. Let me know once again what's better for you. Did you because I did end up at a friend group of people pleasers who had no one no one cares at all how they feel, but they only want to make someone else in the room feel better. And so no one can ever decide what restaurant to go to because no one has an opinion because that would be too much for the group. What's nice is I feel like I have combined that people-pleasing instinct with an East Coast bluntness, which means that from time to time, I'll be like,

hey, what would work best for you? How can I be of service? What can I do? And someone will be like, do what makes you happy. And I'll be like, motherfucker, what do you think I'm doing right now? Do you think I don't get it? Do you think I don't get it?

I can't get happy unless you're happy. So I am very much looking out for number one right now. Can I curse on this show? I already did. We can certainly bleep you if we need to. So I am happy at a lot of places if people are like, we're going out to dinner. Where would you like to go? I'd be like, anywhere is great.

But what's off the table? What's the deal breaker? What is the restaurant that's just too spooky for your colon to handle? You know, I have an iron stomach and a metabolism like a furnace. However, gustatorially, I will not, there are certain things I will not indulge. And the big one is going to a chain for a type of cuisine that the place I'm in is known for outside of chains. Like you're not going to the Olive Garden in Italy.

Yes, I'm not going to go to the Olive Garden in Tuscany. That's that's a big bright red line for me. Food wise. For me, it's anything spicy. Like if someone if someone says the only food available is spicy food here. We're going somewhere. It's spicy wing night. They don't even make the normal ones. Then I will go but I will not eat the food. Again, the people pleasing. I'll show up want to be with my friends. I need that that good for my heart attitude, but otherwise my butt will explode. Like I will pay for it later.

It will be bad in the mouth, bad in the tummy, bad in the butt, all bad. No nourishment, no enjoyment out of it. I can't handle it. I wasn't built for this. I'm so sorry. Yes. I just want some potatoes.

That is in fact what my mom, who is Malaysian, would cook spicy curry for the rest of my family who would enjoy a flavorful curry, Malaysian curry full of like, I don't know, all kinds of spices. And what would Sari get? A boiled potato on the side on a little plate until I would grow up and have a more fortified stomach and eat the spicy food. But it never happened.

So I would just get my boiled potato throughout childhood. It was both your Malaysian and Irish roots. Really clashing and not a beautiful way. Yeah, but my sister loves spice. Great, they really split it between siblings, I think, where I got none of that. My grandfather was told by his doctor that he needed to start eating more fish and less red meat.

And so he would always take us to a restaurant called Shoney's whereupon he would get fish and chips, which I don't think is what his doctor meant by fish. But I hated Shoney's so much because we would always be we would always be at Shoney's and it felt like a mistake of a place. It felt like it was like you like we had intentionally created a restaurant that was the worst we could do. And this is like my 12 year old palate when I would have been perfectly happy with a tortilla with mayonnaise on it. There was a Shoney's that I went to with my grandma in Tennessee, and it was really wild because it was something where it was like,

there would be like a pomp and circumstance and a gravitas. Yes. Put on your nice shirt. It made you think it was supposed to be good. Hey, we're going to Shonys. And then we would get there, and I would be like, this is for all intents and purposes,

a Southern Denny's. You know what I'm saying? Like this is a, this is a debt. You've taken me to a Denny's, you've hoodwinked me into going to a Denny's and it would be wild because it would be like the, I don't know, it was like something reversed. It was like the fact that this is a chain makes it special, which is the opposite in like the Northeast where you'd go like, no, the chains are, like you wanna go to the greasy spoon diner

that is not part of a chain. That's where magic lives. That's actually the special place. What are we gonna make a big deal out of going to Perkins? Give me a break. Give me a break. I'm sure I'm gonna make a lot of enemies with our Shonies opinions because

probably lots of people out there really love their Shonies. But it was just it was not for me and also made me feel awkward that my grandfather was trying to take care of his heart condition by eating fried fish sandwiches. Every week here on SciShow Tangents we get together to try to unnerve disgust and horrify each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for, which we will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of us will be crowned the King of Halloween. Now as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science

poem. It's from Brennan. Are you ready for a terrifying epic poem? Bear not know. I don't think so. This is my best, my best Vincent Price. There once was a man subterranean who said, how does one tell the terrain is in if it's naturally formed and by sun never warmed than a cavern or cave you are staying in. How many limericks you getting on this show, huh?

Yes, there's been limericks. Hank is usually the maker of limerick. Yeah, I often go limerick because I'm panicked. And but that, that I mean to rain he's in a thank you thank you the topic of the day is caves Brennan wanted to talk about caves and so we're gonna talk about caves but before we dive in we're going to take a short break and then be back to define what the heck cave is Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it opening in the ground. Yeah, you can go inside. There's a guy in there

You can go you can go inside. Wait, what's the last one? There's always a man in there Really zeroed in on the part that I was not worried about you can go in them and I'm like There's a man in there. There was I was referring to the man in the limerick who is who is in there. There's a man in there. Well, I was referring to the man in the limerick who was in there. Yeah. Parentheses, there's a man in there sometimes. Just someone in an enormous like howl caverns and being like, I don't think this is a cave. I don't see a man in here.

Where's the cave man? You've heard of cave man, haven't you? That's what that is. That's him, That's him. I like the idea that it's like spread in the Brandon Sanderson universe where there's a cave, and then as soon as there's a cave, a man manifests inside of it, and he is the caveman. And that is how caves work. And no one knows about this. It's a very important scientific fact that is well misunderstood. It's still a cave if I can't get in it.

Certainly. So this is where I think the geologists just simply don't care. I think they they love when people love a rock. And so they're just like, call it what you want. Call it a cave. Call it a cavern. As long as it's naturally formed. And there are lots of different processes by which an opening can form in a rock. But if a human makes it, then we have all kinds of names for that. You have a mine, you have a quarry, you have well, you just have straight up holes. But if it is an opening in a rock that you can't fit in, that you can just stick

your hand in, probably just a hole, not a cave. But if you can if you can walk inside, if you become a man in a cave or a woman in a cave or a non-binary person in a cave, then you're like, hey, this is a cave. OK. But but if I could fit in it, but no one can get in it, is it still a cave? Like you can't get to it. It's it's like sealed off. Oh, it's sealed off. Does it become a cave the moment we dig down into it

and are like, and we're in it, then it's a cave. I think you would say it was still like an underground cavern, but yes, I think typically caves have an opening. I really like the idea that like the language literally changes the moment a human steps foot inside of it. What would it be called prior to human contact? It's a cavern.

Wait, a cavern is an is is a cave that has not known the touch of man. I think I think a cavern is both a cave and a cavern. So it's like it's an inclusive category. Cavern has caves in it, but it's bigger than caves. Gotcha. And I'm just talking out of my butt, but I like it anyway. I feel like if geologists don't care, we do. And so we get to figure it out on our own. Anecdotally, I love when scientists fully don't care.

I love when scientists are like, hey, man, you need to learn like a hundred times more about this to even know why this is a conversation we can't. It's the great Stephen Jay Gould quote about I've been studying fish for, you know, decades and I've come to the conclusion there's no such thing as fish, which is like my favorite. That's the best. And I'm now I'm looking if there is such thing as caves. Because I know that there's several times there have been caves that you just happen

upon when you're like mining for one thing or another. And I like the idea that like it's not a cave until a person gets in there. There are caves that have been sealed. So like one of my favorite caves is the mobile cave. I hope this is not in the game. But it is a cave in Romania that was sealed off for a while. And by a while, I mean, 5.5 million years. So a long while.

And there's a whole cave ecosystem of organisms that existed without the light. And then we reopened it up. And so when it was sealed and there were animals living in it, there were not men living in it, but there were stuff living in it. And I still think it was their cave. And then we opened it and just called it a cave. But what what was it? They probably had their own non language name for it at some point.

I don't know what would a little shrimp call a cave if it was blind and living in the dark with all his friends. You have to be able to use words for the cavern to turn into a cave. That's and they can't. Wow. It doesn't have to be a person, but it has to turn into a cave. And they can't. Wow. It doesn't have to be a person, but it has to be a language user. So if you put a dolphin in a cave, maybe. There are a lot of sea caves, which I have to.

It doesn't have to be full of air, it can be full of water, for sure. I love that. Of the topics that I was interested in talking about, I was really interested in talking about this one, because I think caves are a great meeting point between science and I'm a humanities guy. And so there's a lot of caves have a mythic significance. There's a symbology to them. People can't stop people cannot stop talking about caves. The people

want caves. They love them. They love what's going on in them. There's magic associated with them and they can't get enough. So I love it. And to me, it doesn't seem like they should happen, because one of the things I know about the ground is that it's solid, full of stuff. It's full of solids. I've been I've touched it. I've dug in it.

I've been in the ground like the idea that it just like occasionally is full of nothing, that's like that's not supposed to be how that is. And so they seem magical. It's like when there's an earthquake and like the whole world moves. I'm like, nah, that's not how that's supposed to work. The earth is solid. The earth stays in the same place. But this is like a less scary version of that because it's static and I, and it's there all of the time and you can know about it. But just like a big hole where nothing is, why didn't that get filled up by something? Sari, you mentioned that there are many processes

by which caves are created. And I agree with Hank's point, that it flies in the face of God's law that caves could exist. And are there some processes that are like the most common and are there some really weird edge cases of like, what's the strangest way a cave gets made? There's like one cave where you're like, yeah, that cave, your guess is as good as mine. That should not exist. Oh, that that I'm not sure.

I think scientists are pretty good at least guessing. That I'm not sure. I think scientists are pretty good at at least guessing. Yeah, here's one. If if if an animal big enough dies and gets buried and then it rots and then it's just a big animal shaped cave, it's like a dinosaur brontosaurus cave. This is I'm making this up. Or it's a blue whale cave. Or it's just the inside of a blue whale.

You just walk in there and you're like, I don't know, this thing's kind of made of the earth. And so why isn't that not a cave? But I know that's all I've got. But what are the normal ways for caves to get made? Most of caves are solution caves or what they're called solution caves, which is when water dissolves rock in some way. There's a lot of rocks, limestone, gypsum, salts that are easily dissolvable by moving water, by flowing water, by water,

even sitting still and just eroding away at it slowly. And so those are most of the caves that we see. A lot of the labyrinthine caves that we see are made from water. The ones I see on TikTok where the guy is making a mistake. Yes, yeah. Sea caves like this too, it's just ocean water instead of like groundwater, stuff underground. There are lava tube caves. Those are the fastest forming kind of caves where some lava flow cools and forms this outer shell,

but then the inside is still molten and it drains out in a different way. And so then you get this whole tube of lava rock and there are tectonic caves. So we've got the tectonic plates shifting around. Sometimes they just shift away from each other and create an opening in the earth. That one feels like the most oops kind of cave where it wasn't there. And then all of a sudden there's a gaping maw in the earth. Aaron Powell What's wild to me about that is the idea of a vacuum. The idea that like tectonic plates would separate and Could create air pockets without that air

Coming from somewhere, you know what I mean? Like it was like if it moved away It would have to be there's a collapse. So the structure really what's going on probably there's what there's water There's almost there's a lot of water down there And so probably the water takes that space, would be my guess. And then the air takes the water space from over the water. And then eventually the water drains away or something. Yeah, those lava tube caves are incredibly freaky. I love it. When you see people walking in a big cavern with like stalactites

and stalagmites, you're like, yes, this is exactly where you should be. Venture into the earth and gain hidden knowledge. And you see someone in a lava tube cave and you are like, there is only one piece of knowledge here and you don't want it. Get out. This is a bad cave. Get out of the lava cave. We have to figure out where the word cave comes from, but I did just get reminded of my favorite geological fact, which is that ice is a rock.

And so would just a hole like a a big old hole in a glacier, would that be a kind of lava cave? Oh, I think it would be kind of cave. There's lots of glacier caves. That's a glacier ice cave, yeah. And then if the glacier was surrounded by rock, and then the glacier melted, that would also be a cave. That's true.

You could have a cave within a cave at that point. Yeah, you could. But I assume all of these words are related, cavity, cave. There's another one that I thought of that I forgot. But yes, they are all related. Very straightforward etymology this time. There's the Latin cavern, and that became the French cav, which means cellar. And then we borrowed that and we said, let's call it cave. Let's change the a sound and call it a cave instead. So we didn't have like a word for caves.

We just had like a word for an empty space, just like a like a cavity in something. The word cav, that same root word, forms cavalry because the very first horses came out of holes in the ground. Sorry, that's why. That's because it's because of all the holes in a horse. Yeah, horses have a ton of holes in their mouth, but it's just a lot of holes in horses. Yeah, for sure. You know, the seven secret holes in the horse.

The seven secret horse holes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got you. The old cavalrymen had to memorize before you were given your spear. They don't tell you about the last one until you until the last day of training. Until you pass the test and then you know the secret horse hole. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that we're passing on great knowledge to the people of the world. And now that I feel like I know what a cave is, maybe less than I did before. But anyway, that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show.

Our first sinister game is called Deep Trouble. Because caving involves such very safe activities as crawling on your stomach across jagged rocks and rappelling hundreds of meters into the darkness, it might surprise you to learn that caves can be dangerous. And some of them are more hazardous than others. The following holes in the ground have made a variety of most dangerous caves list. I'm going to give you the cave's

name and a little information about it, and your job is to identify the thing that makes it uniquely horrifying. Number one. The Optimus Nica Cave in Ukraine is one of the longest in the world, with 264 kilometers explored so far. But why is it so dangerous? Is it because the air pressure reaches four atmospheres deep in the cave? Or because the walls are made of gypsum and frequently collapse? Or because of massive underground springs that flood the cave without warning?

A, B, or C? I think Optimus Prime is at the very end and he is ready to crush you. He turns into a bad guy when he's in the bottom of the cave. That's where he sleeps. The AllSpark is back there. I am going to say C. I think it's springs. I think springs. That is a spring.

Yes. It's a dangerous cave thing. Optimitia. Optimitia. That sounds like it's going to squish you. I'm going to keep with squish. I'm going to say A, air pressure. Air pressure. In fact, you are both incorrect.

Although the name of the cave means optimistic, that's not how I'm left feeling about your chances if you go exploring down there. Most of the cave is gypsum, which is one of the softest minerals, measuring at just a two on the Mohs hardness scale. And I know that we are always all thinking about the Mohs hardness scale. That means big chunks of it can collapse with the slightest vibration, which it doesn't tend to experience because usually people leave it alone. But then we were like, no, I can't.

Can I just say the thought that I cannot think of a more stereotypically Russophone thing than there's a cave that has a type of rock that kills you and everyone in that region agrees that what kills you is optimism. You know what I'm saying? Like, oh my God, he died because the rock fell on him. No, he died because he believed in himself. That is wild. That is a wild thing to name that cave. I mean, there's an awful lot, just in like human culture generally, there's an awful

lot of death because you believed too hard. I just feel like in America we would be be like, this is we named this cave dangerous. This is a dangerous cave. Yeah. And then being like, we named this cave after the cultural mistake you made by going into it. That's the most. The cave isn't dangerous. You're an idiot. Yeah, it's your fault.

The cave is doing exactly what it should be doing. The cave can kill no one if there's no one in it. That's very easy to avoid. If I describe for you an animal which can only bite you, if you walk into its mouth, that is not a dangerous animal. You understand? The animal is not the problem. Question number two. Plura Cave in Norway stretches approximately 3,000 meters long and is full of gorgeous

marble carved out by highly alkaline calcareous water created by long-dead marine organisms. Why should you avoid it on your next trip to Norway? A. Because you have to dive a half a kilometer through an ice cold pond just to gain entrance to the cave. B. Three meter long stalactites frequently fall from the ceiling of the main gallery. Or C. Decomposing organic compounds have made the air almost entirely carbon dioxide. I'm going to pick C because it's the most fun if it's true. Now you know how to play our games. It's Norway. You're going there's fjords and it's cold. I'm going to say it's the dot.

Spelunkers do all kinds of things. They would only find this by doing some diving and then popping up and finding a cave. A fair amount of that. Well, the answer is indeed A, and it is even longer to swim out. While the main room of the cave is in the center is dry. It's almost a full kilometer swim from there to the exit. And multiple people have died trying to make the full trip. But it remains a popular cave diving spot. No, don't. If you say the sentence, multiple people have died on the way out. Why? Why is that popular?

Why? I don't know Mount Everest exists. You could just stay in there, I guess. You could go in because apparently people don't die on the way in. So just stay. Start a little start a little community in there. Have you all seen the videos of the wild sub aquatic caves in South America where the water density changes partway through?

So you go underwater twice? Yeah, there's like there's like an underwater water. No, that's weird. It's awesome. Yeah. Weird hyper hyper salinity. It's awesome. Yeah, weird hyper, hyper salinity. That's so sick. Super dense. So it like sits down there.

Very cool. And it kind of is like flowing. It's like you see it's like a new water. You're like underwater and you're like, look, double water. And then you're like, and then if you go down there, that's definitely how you meet like an ancient serpent god, which I keep bringing this back to. But that's I really do think that's how caves work. I'm so I'm so surprised that that's how you feel about caves. Hidden knowledge in the earth.

All right. We've got another cave for us to talk about. We've got Voryavkina Cave in Georgia, the country, not the state. It's the deepest cave in the world, at 2,222 meters. It's a type of cave formation called a glaciocarst, meaning that it was carved by glacial activity. Why should you visit Georgia's other natural wonders instead? Is it A, because sulfur from the rock makes the cave's air toxic with hydrogen sulfide. B, millions of bats live in the cave, some carrying viruses that have yet to be studied. Or C, the temperature can reach a bone chilling

four degrees Celsius. B, millions of bats. Also on brand, sea serpent bats. I'm gonna guess very cold. It's probably very cold and very high pressure in that deep hole. The answer was that it's just really cold. Although there are several things about this cave that make it uninviting. The temperature is at the top of the list.

While most caves have cool temperatures that don't fluctuate much, Verovkina carries the tradition of its glacial forebear being downright frigid. Though honestly, I would go there before any of the other caves on our list. I still like to think there's millions of bats in there, and I don't and I stand by picking what to me would make the world more whimsical with each answer. Yeah, no, that is the whole point. You are not expected to know the answers. I'll tell you that.

And who knows? There could be bats. If it's the deepest cave in the world, dig deeper. Find those bats. Find those bats. You don't know. Find those bats. Well, Sari, that means that you got two points to Brennan's none. But do I have whimsy?

Who knows? But do you have? You have. You do. I've seen you have whimsy. Thanks, Hank. I appreciate that. Next up, we're going to take a short break. And then Sam, who is sadly not here, has made another devious game for us.

Welcome back, everybody. If our players have not been horrified enough, they're going to be horrified. Now our next game is even more awful. It's the gauntlet. We're doing a gauntlet. Sam is making us do a gauntlet from the grave. The gauntlet is the ultimate game of science, knowledge, strategy, and treachery.

It's like a haunted house of facts and information, and no one knows what's going on when you're inside of it. In the gauntlet, you and your opponent will face a series of six questions of decreasing difficulty. I will alternate asking each of you the questions from six to one, and when asked a question, you may choose to answer or to pass. This is like the Cones of Dunshire of trivia games.

It's about the cones. If you choose to answer, a correct answer gets you the amount of points equal to the question's number, but an incorrect answer loses you those same points. So question six is six points, five is five, and so on. If you answer incorrectly, your opponent will have the opportunity to steal, and if they answer correctly, they get the points, but if they answer incorrectly, they do not lose the points. If you pass, your opponent gets asked the next question, which is slightly less difficult.

After we have gone through all the questions, the passes are asked again and cannot be skipped a second time. On the second pass through the questions, no points are lost and there is no stealing. And a warning, questions and answers to later questions may contain clues to the answers of earlier ones. Now prepare to enter the Gauntlet Caves edition. Brennan, you will go first. Number six, in 2017, an underwater cave was discovered in Madagascar that was full of the bones

of hundreds of kinds of what animal? Whales. Well, he's gonna go for it and get negative six points, everybody. Great. That was not right. You said you have to answer right away, right? No. OK, I love the gauntlet, though, because it makes you you never know what's going on. I actually I'm feeling good. I'm feeling optimistic or whatever that word was.

Let's keep going. OK. Sari, do you get to try and steal if he gets it wrong? Yes. Do I steal now? Do I have to go fast? You can try. No, I mean, great. That's also wrong. But now, you get another question. And this question is number five.

In 2007, archaeologists discovered the oldest known winery in a cave in Armenia within a thousand years. In what year do you think the researchers think this winery in a cave in Armenia. Within a thousand years, in what year do you think the researchers think this winery was built? Pass. I don't know anything about time. Brennan, question number four. For some cave-dwelling creatures, there isn't really a lot to do, and nobody exemplifies this better than a particular cave-dwelling animal in Bosnia and Herzegovina that was observed sitting in the exact same spot for seven years.

What kind of animal was it? Here's a hint. Oh, sorry. Hint. Yes, keep going. Sorry. I didn't know there was a hint. Give me the hint.

Here's a hint. It's not a great hint, but it's a hint. You don't have to be Sherlock to figure it out. Whale. hint, but it's a hint. You don't have to be Sherlock to figure it out. Wail. Don't. Brennan's not making it. No, stop. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Hold on. You don't have to be Sherlock to figure it out. John Watson. That's a good, that's a good guess. It's still, still incorrect. It's the caveman. It's the caveman. It's, you said Bosnia Herzegovina.

So immediately my head went to Axolotl, but that's not where those live. So I don't know. No, no, but not a terrible, not a terrible vibe for a cave dwelling animal. They definitely, there are plenty of amphibians in caves. Sari gets to try and steal now. What do you think it might have been? Yeah. You get to try and steal Brennan's.

Sari should also get four guesses because I guessed whale twice and then John Watson and then John Watson and then Axel Odo kind of sneakily. OK, so I'm guessing. Whale whale, Irene Adler and... A fish? Can I do I have to be more specific, a cave fish? I can I can tell you that it's not a fish.

Well, then I got it wrong, because that was my real guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I blew my first three guesses. And then we did. So far, we've got cave whale four times in total. It's got to be the answer at some point. That's maybe by process of elimination. Is that how the gauntlet works? Yeah, no, we'll get there.

All right. Number three. Can you get a point? Now when you can answer, we can get the answer. Do we learn either of those? We don't know what it was in Madagascar either. I thought we'd go through again. We don't go through again if you both guess? We can go through again.

Let's just do more guesses. We can get some whale back. I'm not coming on SciShow to believe with the same fatigue and air of ignorance. I'm not coming here to walk stunned in days through a life of no answers to hard questions like I do every day of my life. For God's sake, tell me the still animal

hiding in the cave in Bosnia. No, you won't get there. Okay. You won't get there. Sari. Yes. We will run through the questions again and the answers will be known.

The question is. That's a pre-question answer, sorry, sorry. Yes. We will run through the questions again and the answers will be no. The question is. No, you didn't, I've got a pre-question answer. Sorry, sorry. The question is, Devil's Hole is a fairly unassuming looking geothermal pool in Nevada, but beneath the surface of the water is a cavern that's at least 400 feet deep, though its actual bottom has never been seen by human eyes.

Devil Hole is the only habitat of what critically endangered fish species. This is the first one I actually know the answer to. Is it the... Bony-eared assfish? Is that the guy? Is that where he lives? No, no, no. My buddy, my pal.

It's not the bony-eared assfish, though that's a great fish. I love him. Brennan, would you like to try and steal? Yes, I would. Whales are not fish. Oh, yes. That's why and steal? Yes, I would. Whales are not fish. Oh, yes. That's why your question is kind of confusing me. I think can I challenge?

Can I challenge and say that whales are not technically fish and so therefore the whales that are hiding in Devil's Hole would not be considered an endangered fish species? Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, that's my challenge. All right, you're wrong. But you can. You do get a chance to answer number two. OK, maybe maybe there's a there's a potential opportunity here. You might already know about the stockpiles of government owned cheese,

totaling about 300 million pounds stored and converted limestone mines. But do you know in which state the majority of these stockpiles are in? That's not easy. There's a one in 50 chance, though, I guess. I think these are in the United Kingdom. Right. You said 50 states. Name a US state that might have a lot of cheese in a mine. All right. I'm going to say Wisconsin. Oh, that was a great guess.

But no, Sarah, you want to try and steal another state? No. Oh, do you know? Because we have a friend that lives in the state. It's in the cave with the cheese. Yeah, she's the cheese. She's the cave woman, right? Like the platonic ideal of a cave woman.

No, it's Missouri. Question is Missouri. We got points, everybody. We've got points. Still deep in the negative, but yes, we got some some movement up and down. If it had been in the UK, I would have said it was in Wales. That's not a state. No. I mean, I guess it is a state in the broader geopolitical sense.

Yes, yes. All right, Brennan, you know, I think Sarah gets this one, too, because she just stole. In 2000, miners in Mexico discovered a cave full of the giant version of this geological formation that you might be used to seeing in alternative healing stores. A crystal? That's right. Okay. Yes.

Giant crystals. Are you gonna make me name a rock? Quartzite? No. Suitable for cleansing the auras of giant lemurs, these crystals measure up to 36 feet in length and weigh up to 55 tons. Put that on your windowsill, get some good dreams.

There you go. That's right. All right, and now I'm going to, going back through and then we find out, cause we're going through the second pass. So number six, to Brennan, in 2017 an underwater cave was discovered in Madagascar full of the bones of what kind of animal?

Fish? No, hint, I just said it. Oh, you just said lemurs, Lemurs. What kind of lemurs? Ring-tailed? No, no. The crystals were big, so the lemurs were. Bigger. Yeah, they're big giant lemurs.

Giant lemurs, giant lemurs. Enormous, enormous lemurs. Huge. Several different species of giant lemur were found in the cave, some as large as gorillas. How they got in that cave is a mystery. The bones don't show a lot of evidence that the animals were eaten. So it's just full of intact dead giant lemurs. Maybe they fell in there.

Maybe they just decided that was their burial ground. We don't know. Well done, Brennan. You got those six points back. don't know. Well done, Brennan. You got those six points back. Sari, in 2007, archaeologists discovered the oldest known winery in a cave in Armenia with a thousand years. What do you think? When you think that was built?

There's no penalty anymore. There's no penalty anymore. I wasn't listening to the questions close enough. I want to say, make a fool of myself because I still didn't learn time, 800 common era. Incorrect. It was sometime between 4,100 and 4,000 BC. So these are old caves.

They found a clay basin that they think the ancient inventors stomped grapes in and a vat, possibly, that was used for fermentation. Also cups, grapevines, grape seeds. They also found the oldest known shoe in the same cave complex. Oldest shoe. I guess we had to have a little shoe.

And there it is. It was a wine stompin shoe, probably. That is an old shoe. They don't make them like that anymore. No, I don't think my shoes are going to be here six thousand years from now. Brennan, we are back to this weird cave animal in Bosnia and Herzegovina that was observed sitting in the same spot for seven years. You don't have to be Sherlock to figure it out, but you kind of do.

And is it this thing where some other question you gave a hint about what this was? No, maybe there was supposed to be, but I missed it if there was. You probably have never even heard of this kind of animal, which will make it harder. You need to be Sherlock to figure it out. OK. And it's in a cave. And it's not the it's not the fish from the devil's hole question. Is it a devil? It's the devil. Devil himself.

He was very still. He doesn't have much to do these days because we're all such good people. In fact, it was an old. have you ever heard of an old? I have not heard of an old What the hell is an old they are blind cave salamanders? they have no predators where they live and they only made every 12 years so they don't have to do much but wait around and Just wait for like a shrimp or snail to swim past them and And the seven year old is a bit of an outlier, but in that same cave, most of the old only moved about 32 feet

over the course of a decade. If you imagine an axolotl, an old is like, it's demonic, because it's like the mirror image that you see when you're scared. Yeah, yes. I mean, it looks so much like an axolotl. I feel like we should have given it to him, but.

I mean, I'll tell you what this dude looks like. It looked like a sperm with four little bitty legs. Yeah. No, it does look very sperm-y. But everywhere where the axolotl is like cuddly and round, it's long. It's long and pointy. It's the naturally demonic shape.

Long, no eyes. OK, back to Sari. Where do you do know anything about this fish that lives in Devil's Hole? OK, a rare fish. Devil's Hole deep. Is it a kind of salmon? That'd be weird. No, no, it would be weird.

I thought of the weirdest possible fish. A migratory fish that lives in a single case. OK, well, if you phrase it like that, I sound a little bit dumb. Bunch of salmon down there being like, I tell you, we got turned around. This is maybe there's a little salty second water at the bottom. And that's how they go up and down and up and down. That is, they go up and down to the between the two waters.

That could be the migration. The Devil's Hole pupfish is a one inch long fish. That's one of the first species protected by the Endangered Species Act in 2013, their population hit an all time low of 35. They are doing much better these days because they have hit a 25 year population high of 191. Way to go, pupfish.

Doing it in there. They're little cuties, look at these guys. I wanna go visit them. I've always wanted to go visit the Devil's Hole Pupfish. They're like it in there. They're little cuties. Look at these guys. I wanna go visit them. I've always wanted to go visit the Devil's Hole pupfish. They're like a beautiful blue. They're like a little gem-like blue fish and they just hang out in a hole. And they're extremely sensitive.

Like the water level of the cave goes up and down and it's like, they're about to go extinct. Like that's, I mean, it's tired water. We don't even know how they got there. It's really wild, the Darwinian, the thing he said about, you know, like the misunderstanding of survival of the fittest, which was the idea of like animals getting like jacked and scary when really what fittest means is to their environment.

Yeah. And you look at like these little pup fish or an old, it's like all these different strategies to survive. And it's like you have these powerful apex predators. And then you have a salamander being like, I'm going to go where nothing's happening and stop moving. Like, oh, that is a really sad way to get ahead. But it's going to work. Congratulations on your 32 feet traveled per decade. Well, we've got our final episode count of Brennan has negative six.

Sari has two. That's what the gauntlet will do to us. Sari got nothing out of all of that, and Brennan managed to get the less than nothing. Congratulations. The king of Halloween. I always feel bad when we beat our guests. Yeah, but it's Brennan. So I just met him. I'm a people pleaser.

I just met a guy. Take the crown. Take the crown. It's great. Honestly, I don't deserve it. And I had a ball and that's what counts. And ultimately, the important thing is I guessed whale as many times as I wanted. Yeah. And maybe you could have been right one of those times.

But now it's time for Ask the Science Couch where we ask a question to our couch of razor-sharp spooky tiffy mines. Sari, what do we got? MaxRBMC on YouTube asked, why are caves good environments to mature cheese in Kava wine? Here's my guess. Very stable. That's it.

Just like temperature, humidity, all the things stay the same. Yeah, I mean, it's basically that it's temperature, humidity, light. Those are the three things that you want to control when it comes to maturing cheese, maturing wine and the cave naturally controls all three of those things pretty well because it's sheltered from all the rest of the chaotic atmosphere, doing all the things, changing temperature, changing water content, changing light. So they're shielded. And I feel like we just found them at some point.

Wine and cheese are some of the earlier foods that humans have crafted in our history. I really love that. That like so many of our best foods were like, what if we let it spoil, but like in a really specific way? Like, I like it when it gets gross, but not too gross. Fermentation. That's the there's a lot of places like that, like aged meat. All of it. So much of the flavor of meat comes from you don't want it fresh. Exactly. You want a little you get a little funky. Yeah, you need a couple chemical

reactions but you need the right ones and it's just the the cooler temperatures the okay level of humidity do the right ones if you have too much light i think those are usually when the chemical reactions start getting bad you start splitting molecules that take a long time to form i found a word called light strike. So if you expose your wine to too much light, like sunlight, UV radiation, you get light strike where there are off aromas. I once did that to a bottle of Diet Coke. I left it on my porch and it got light strike and it changed color. It was it was like tea color instead of coke color.

And then I opened it and it smelled not like it should have. But it was like a completely unopened, like it hadn't I hadn't been exposed to the air at all. Just just photons. There was a just a glass of like unsweetened iced tea that was left on a shelf in my like childhood home. And then some plants got moved inside on that day randomly, and for like a year, that tea was just in the sun, and the sort of like, Sucian universe ecosystem

that existed in that glass when that plant got moved was one of the most sort of gasp inducing, it was like, the sun, and then you kind of realize to yourself, like, oh, is this what's been happening on this planet? Is this, I guess this sort of rock is a glass that was left in the sun for a couple billion years. You maybe invented a new kind of kombucha.

Yes, we didn't drink it. It looked it looked probably completely solid. So to drink it would have been a real task. That would be optimistic, they may say in Russia. Optimistish, yeah. And now for our listeners on Patreon, we're answering a bonus Science Scout question. Sari, what's the second question? Hale on Discord and iScoot69 on Twitter asked,

Do we know if there are caves on other planets? How would we figure out if there could be exo caves? If you want to hear the answer to that question, which was largely philosophical, as well as enjoy all of the episodes totally ad free, head over to Patreon. That's patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents at our $8 a month tier. You get new episodes ad free and extended shenanigans as we answer a bonus science couch question every episode.

You'll also get a link to our private Discord server and maybe also some more goodies in the future. Who knows? Our patrons are the best and we're so grateful for their support of the show. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents. Check out our YouTube community tab where we'll send out topics for upcoming episodes every week or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at FellFireFerret and at OrbitingWombat on Twitter. Also, everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode.

Brendan, thank you so much for joining us. What are you working on right now? You can find me at Dropout TV, where I am the creator and GM for Dimension 20. And we have a bunch of amazing seasons on the way. You can find me GMing for worlds beyond number the actual play podcast that I do with Lou Wilson, a brea eingar, Eric Ishii. You can find me performing on a bunch of great shows on dropout game changer,

make some noise, a bunch of other stuff. And we're gonna we are touring. So we have a show coming up at Madison Square Garden January, which is going to be awesome. So what a hoot, what a joy, a privilege and an honor. And so there's a bunch of stuff coming up. Thank you so much, Brennan. 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. Special shout out to patron Les Aker for their support. Secondly, 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 Brennan Lee Mulligan. Tune in next time for another spooky mystery guest. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is E. Schmidt. Our editor, Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio.

Our editorial assistants are Kabuki Trapper Vardy and Alex Bilwell. Today's games are written by Daniel Kamisky and Sam Schultz. Our sound design is by Joseph Tudemettish. 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 coffin to be filled, but a jack-o-lantern to be lightened. But one more thing. Different human cultures have created art inside caves all over the

world, including the limestone caves on Mona Island, which is about halfway between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. A 2017 research paper analyzed Mona Island cave art pieces that we think were created sometime between the 11th and 15th centuries by indigenous Caribbean peoples. Most of the art was actually subtractive carvings into the once gooey creamy mineral precipitate called moon milk that see certain limestone cave walls. But other art pieces were painted on using pigments made of charcoal, ochre or bat guano mixed with plant compounds. That's a fact, baby. So the but fact is just that there's poop in it.

I thought they were going to draw more butts. They could have drawn butts with the poop. Who knows? I would have drawn butts. If it was me, I would have drawn butts.