SciShow Tangents - Blue

Starting point is 00:00:00 hello and welcome to size show tangents the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase i'm your host tank green and joining me this week as always is science expert sary riley hello and our resident everyman sam schultz hello i have an important question to ask um and and it's a question that i've begun to interface with as we enter into, you know, the sort of, you know, 200,000th century of humans. How big is too big for a sandwich? Oh. I think that too big for a sandwich is more than twice as much as I can eat in a sitting. But up to twice as much as I can eat in a sitting is a perfect size for a sandwich

Starting point is 00:00:46 because I love a moment where I'm like, you know, I'm half done with this sandwich, but I'm done with this sandwich because future me gets a whole sandwich. I think the shelf life of a sandwich, that is a rewarding feeling. But then when you come back to the sandwich, it's not as good as it was the first time.

Starting point is 00:01:04 It's just like too goopy. so i think a sandwich is perfectly sized when it's exactly the right size to eat in one sitting a little little too much more and you're like oh on my belly but i have so much good sandwich in there there's a there is an intermediate bad sandwich size in there where where it's it's just a little bit bigger than i can eat in one sitting that's the worst size for a sandwich that i like that i like is when you're like it's a little bit bigger than you can eat because then you eat too much and then you're like i was a bad bad boy you like a little tummy ache and then you have a little nap and then you're like ah now i'm back to perfect sandwich level

Starting point is 00:01:47 well i think and maybe this this is me growing up on the scooby-doo cartoons i think a comically big sandwich is just fine as big as it can get if you have a giant piece of bread and a lot of toppings and can make a really big sandwich all you need is a couple more friends or the ability to dislocate your jaw like shaggy and scooby-doo to just like yeah shove it in have your head expand to the size of the sandwich and then swallow it that's basically what i do to a jimmy's sandwich just go in whole. It sucks when a sandwich is too big. Vertically, yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:29 So I don't know why we're doing it. This is only for aesthetic reasons that we do this. And it's been a huge step backward. So I guess too big for me. Length doesn't matter. You could have the longest sandwich in the world and I'd be happy

Starting point is 00:02:42 because you just find more people to share it with. You slice it up. Everyone has a chunk of a baguette. But you're right about height. It has to be narrow enough that if you compress it down, you can bite without scraping your mouth. The whole thing. Because I hate a mouth scrape.

Starting point is 00:02:59 Oh, the bread can't be too sharp also. That's true. The bread cannot be too sharp because I've got baby mouth, and I do not like it when my soft palate gets scratched by a really hard bread. Yeah, whereas I'm like a 43-year-old, so it's just leather in there. I can eat anything. I'm just having Cap'n Crunch dry. Every week here on SciShow Tangents,

Starting point is 00:03:24 we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic our panelists are playing for glory and for hank bucks which i will be awarding as we play and at the end of the episode one of them will be crowned the winner now as always we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from sam for the first time in a long time i've written myself into an embarrassing position where i'm gonna have to sing a song yeah wait i'm loading up oh oh god i'm so excited listen up here's a story about a little color that's known as blue and it's not red it's not yellow it's another color called blue if you look inside and outside blue the sky there's a blue robin egg and a blue peacock and some things are just blue out there

Starting point is 00:04:16 like sapphires and some bodies of water because sometimes things are just blue. Here we go. They're blue, something's blue with the sky. And there are probably blue flies. Blue when you say goodbye. And you can have blue eyes. And if you need to know why. Some things are blue cause of dye. There's also blueberry pie.

Starting point is 00:04:43 They're blue, something's blue with the sky. And there are probably blue flies. Blue when you say goodbye. And you can have blue eyes. that's all i'm doing the topic for today is blue, the color blue, and also possibly the emotion blue. And Sari, I bet scientists just went ahead and defined what blue was. Yeah. Much like the green episode, we got the blue. As we work through the colors, we'll have a definition for all of them. And everyone waffles a little bit on what exactly the cutoffs are between colors. But roughly speaking, blue light, the color blue, has wavelengths between about 450 and 495 nanometers and frequencies between around 620 and 670 hertz. So in the spectrum of visible light,

Starting point is 00:05:48 the wavelength slash frequency that falls between those ranges is the color blue. And it is a subjectively experienced also experience. Yeah. I don't know what blue is like for you, but I'm guessing it's roughly the same as what blue is like for me. I think it's got to be exactly the same, right?

Starting point is 00:06:14 I don't know. We don't know, Sam. We've never had one person go inside another person, so we can't know. My blue could be orange. You'd be like, Oh my God, Hank thinks that pumpkins smell like tuna. But then how would they make scented candles that smelled correctly?

Starting point is 00:06:30 It's about the experience. It's like, I just love tuna smell the way that you love pumpkin smell. Okay, whatever. But you're right. Probably everybody seems the same blue. It probably comes down to like the subtle differences, like how some people are better at those color tests than others of like range all these hues in order from like whatever the RGB code is along a spectrum. And there's a lot of pseudoscience about the color blue. At some point, the BBC in a documentary presented an experiment that never happened, which is that a Namibian tribe called the Himba, they claimed that this tribe of people is completely unable to distinguish what Western society calls blue and green shades that seem like quite distinct. And it was just completely made up.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Really, it was like a reaction time experiment where they had a color wheel with different shades of blue and green. And the participants in the study had to pick out which one was different of, I don't know, like 10 squares. Nine of them were the same one of them was different and it was a little greener a little bluer and the reaction time was faster when it was all shades of green than when a shade of blue was introduced but it's not that they couldn't tell it apart altogether then there's that thing about like blue wasn't always real like ancient greeks couldn't see blue or something like that you know i'm talking about i think that's kind of what sari is talking about where there's like if you don't have the language for it do you see it or do you just like call it because there's there are things like that

Starting point is 00:08:13 where there there are two things that are close together and in like one language it's called they just like call everything yellow even if it's orange um because they don't have orange but but they can still tell the difference between the colors. But Sarah, is there any evidence that you actually kind of start to see different if you have more language around color? Not that I can detect. And like,

Starting point is 00:08:36 maybe that's the experience, like the reaction time you can see, you can notice differences better if you have the language to describe it. But like you said, in a lot of pre-modern languages, words for green and blue were fairly interchangeable where sky, ocean, grass were all the same-ish word because they fell into that part of the color spectrum and greenish blue. And a lot of the pop psychology examples of i think this is called linguistic determinism so like it's getting at this idea that if you have language that is more

Starting point is 00:09:14 precise and you have to notice the differences between things then your brain might be a little bit different but my understanding is that uh you can notice the differences between things like even though we don't we call everything snow or like we start to get to like slush at some point we can still with more adjectives and with more time and attention tell different types of snow like when it's good skiing snow and when it's good snowball throwing snow and when it's like gross and muddy and yucky and things like that even if we just call all those things snow and even though we call a lot of different things blue we still know that the sky is a different color than the deep ocean which is a different color than a butterfly wing which is a different color than a flower do we know where the word blue came from? Because it's great.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Blue. It's a fun one. All the color words, they really nailed all the color words. Good, I think. A little on the fence about orange. I like orange. It's a sort of ridiculous thing to make me do. With your mouth?

Starting point is 00:10:20 Yeah, it's just like, do you have to tell me what color a basketball is and I have to say, what color a basketball is and i have to i have to say orange i think that's a little bit your fault because you could say blue really really bad too if you wanted to blue that's fun yeah okay orange that's kind of fun sounds like you're honking a big truck but blue is weird of the color words in english because it is the only color word that didn't carry over from old english to modern english in old english blue was haywin with various different spellings but around the time of the norman conquest when the french got involved they were like we've got this word blue and

Starting point is 00:11:17 it does sound very french it had a lot of different meanings and this is i think where some of that color discussion of like blue didn't mean blue uh where the word blue blue uh in french it sounds the same to my little dumb brain um can mean like discolored or like bruised it can mean dark like a dark ocean or it can also mean like golden or fair-haired or things like that like luminous um so there are a lot of meanings encapsulated by this one word and then over time i think we just specified that it's like okay blue blue is this particular color doesn't mean just shiny things or dark things it means the thing in between green and purple on the color spectrum what why why was it so many things yeah i don't know ask the french middle french i guess the anglo-normans the norman conquest dead french people yeah practice your necromancy gosh there's so there's so many questions

Starting point is 00:12:22 there's that scene in the dungeons and dragons movie where they're getting people up from the dead and they're asking them questions about to find the mcguffin or whatever and i'm like that looks fun but like if you could do this can you do it to like dinosaurs i want to ask a dinosaur ten three. It's like at the Natural History Museum doing necromancy on dinosaurs. Oh, somebody write this short story. Yeah. Sue the T-Rex ready to ask, but you only get five. This is just night at the museum, guys.

Starting point is 00:12:54 They already made this. No, I feel like dark. Because yeah, in order to bring, it's a life for a life. So to ask the question, you do have to murder someone. Squish a little bug. Squish a little bug. Squish a little bug. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Thanks for saving me, Sam. All right. And now that we understand that fairly well, we're going to enter the quiz portion of our show. So when you think of worms, you probably conjure up images of wiggly little pink worms digging through soil. But it turns out that worms have interesting relationships with the color blue. it turns out that worms have interesting relationships with the color blue. So for today's Truth or Fail Express, we're going to be digging into the truth of worms and blue. And I'm going to tell you some blue wormy tale, and it's up to you to figure out whether or not I'm telling the truth. Story number one. If you ever wanted to see a worm glow blue,

Starting point is 00:13:42 simply waiting for the popular lab model C. elegans to die and then shining ultraviolet light on it will do the trick. Gut granules will shine blue as the membranes that encase them break open, letting them spill from the intestine and through the rest of the worm's body. Blue gut granules.

Starting point is 00:14:00 Is it true or false? I've heard a lot of this story before, I think. But I feel like I've heard Deboki talk about, because she talks about these freaking worms all the dang time. That's Deboki, just worm, worm, worms. That's also the entire institution of biology. Can't have to shut up about these worms. I think it's true. Okay, Sam thinks it's true.

Starting point is 00:14:23 I think it's false. I think it's a different worm i think as much as c elegans is talked about but oh we only know we're about one worm that's it all other worms as mysterious as old french people so they weren't sure for a long time why they uh glow blue under uv light when they're dying uh but because they under UV light when they're dying, because they only do this when they're dying. One hypothesis was that there was a waste product that was found in aging mammalian cells, but it wasn't clear why it would show up in C. elegans. But in 2013, researchers found the source of the blue was actually a molecule called anthranilic acid, which is found in the worm's guts and as the worm dies

Starting point is 00:15:05 the organelles burst open and release this acid which then diffuses through the body and they become special blue glowers uh but only only in their last in their last moments it's their ghost it's their soul leaving their body all right story two. Another way to make a worm glow blue is to threaten a marine parchment tube worm so that it makes its patented glowing blue mucus that can glow for several days. When scientists investigated how the mucus is able to last so long, they found iron complexes that are able to power the blue light. That's amazing. That's very cool. I don't know why that's amazing. So I'm going to say it's false.

Starting point is 00:15:50 Sounds like that seems boring and I don't know why anyone would care about mucus that glows for days. Iron compounds. It's like a battery. I think it's true. I think this is probably one of those geothermal weird guys. And so they just want to make a little metabolic processes for power. And in 2020, researchers reported the mucus was powering itself with an

Starting point is 00:16:31 iron storage protein called ferritin, which releases iron ions when it's stimulated with the blue light, which can then make the mucus make even more blue light, creating a very long lasting blue glow, which is so freaking cool. So congratulations, Sari. I don't know if these are the ones that live at the hydrothermal vents though. I don't think so. Little known fact, they also have a little blue house with a blue window.

Starting point is 00:16:56 And the streets and trees are blue as well. And they have a blue Corvette. Every one of them gets their own small blue Corvette. They're a very advanced civilization down there. Advanced civilization. Our final story is of C. elegans. Again, because they don't have eyes, and they also don't even seem to have cells that are capable of detecting light.

Starting point is 00:17:16 And yet, they are able to avoid the color blue, a skill that they put to use in avoiding toxins produced by mats of blue bacteria. True or false? Again, I feel like I've heard Deboki tell most of this story about something that wasn't this. So I'm going to say this is false. They don't have eyes and they can avoid something, but it's not that. I want to say it's true. I know there's like cyan bacteria, algal blue mats, which I think is close enough to blue to count.

Starting point is 00:17:48 So I'm going to say true. Well, indeed, it was true. They were all true. Wow, triple true. What the heck? Can't game it. Sometimes we'll have all of them be the same. So a bacteria pseudomonas, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:18:02 I think that should be your new microcosmos hosting strategy that show is so good except for that part it's like i don't know man microcosmos is hilarious to host because sometimes the things we are saying we're like the only people who have ever in public said the word. That happens on social a lot too. Makes sense. And it's just like, I don't know. The hosts are like, what do I say? It's like, you can, you, no one's ever even tried.

Starting point is 00:18:32 You're defining the pronunciation of this word right now. Like I'll ask and they'll be like, I don't know. I've only ever seen her written down. And I'm like, but you study this organism. And they're like, yeah. We don't call, we don't say its name out loud. We don't talk about it that way. We don't talk. Science, we don't call, we don't say its name out loud. We don't talk about it that way. We don't talk.

Starting point is 00:18:48 Science, we don't talk. Yeah. What do you think? We're on the phone with each other? So this bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, sure, produces a toxin that the worms want to stay away from. And it's also that the bacteria is a bright blue color. In 2021, researchers reported that if they turned off the lights, C. elegans were slower to run away from the dangerous bacteria than if the lights were on, almost as if they could see the bright blue bacteria, which was surprising given that these worms don't have eyes or even opsin receptor genes that could help them visualize blue based on anything that we know. So the researchers tried various combinations of putting the worms against the bacteria and the light and dark and against mutated versions of the bacteria that are beige, but still toxic. And they found that when the worms faced off against the beige bacteria, the lights didn't affect how fast the worms ran away from the danger.

Starting point is 00:19:48 So even though it's not the toxin they were sensing, it's like it's the color somehow. They also found that the worms avoided the isolated toxin when it was mixed with blue pigment. So based on the results, researchers hypothesized that the worms were somehow detecting the ratio of blue to amber light and avoiding the toxic bacteria. And while researchers found two genes that might be involved in this behavior, the exact mechanism of how the worms are identifying blue and responding to it is unclear. And that is exciting. They see with not anything that we've seen before. No eye. They can see, but we don't know how. That means anything could be seeing.

Starting point is 00:20:20 No eye. They can see, but we don't know how. That means anything could be seeing. This is when people talk about like alien life that operates in a totally different way from us that we can't even fathom. This is it. It's like, how are you detecting blue? We only know so many ways.

Starting point is 00:20:37 Whenever I hear about some weird fact like this about C. elegans, it reminds me that there is some weird fact about like that, about every organism. It was, we just like, we know so much about C. elegans and that's, but only because they're good at living in the lab and they're fun to study. And we studied them a lot. And it took us a long time to figure out that one thing about them too. Yeah. We were just like, well, they're running away from blue stuff, but they don't have eyes. So listen up, Here's the story.

Starting point is 00:21:06 We're going to go take a break. We'll be back for the fact of. All right, we're back. Sari has two points. Sam has one. And we're going to figure out who's the winner with the fact off. So each of you guys got a fact to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after the facts are presented, I will judge and I will award the Hank Bucks any way I see fit. To decide who goes first, though,

Starting point is 00:21:49 I have a trivia question. In 2009, an Oregon State University graduate student named Andrew Smith was working on developing a new electronic material. Instead, he accidentally created a blue pigment that has since become known as Oregon blue, mass blue for the professor whose lab the pigment was found in, or Yinmin blue. This last name is based on three of the elements that make up the pigment, yttrium, indium, and manganese. But there's one more element in Yinmin blue that's not credited in the name. What is the atomic number of that forgotten element? And we'll get you by who's closer. What is the atomic number of anything?

Starting point is 00:22:31 But it's going to be between a one and a hundred. I'll just tell you that. And it's not going to be one or two. It's not going to be one or two. And it's not going to be, it's probably not going to be above like 70. Very unlikely. Yeah. Yeah. You don't, you're not, it's not going to be super like 70 very unlikely yeah yeah you don't you're not it's not going to be super weirdly radioactive yeah it's not going to be like the one of the new nobelium or whatever it's not going to be one of the ones that only exists for a microsecond before yeah

Starting point is 00:22:58 like we found out how to stabilize it guys and it's in this blue pigment blue yeah uh that would not be the story that people would write if yeah they would not we wouldn't care about the blue pigment if we could stabilize one of the you guys are friggin dorks uh what's like that is the point i'm gonna guess first and i'm gonna say 30 okay. Okay. I want to say 36. I don't know. I don't remember the periodic table well enough anymore. It wouldn't have helped. I don't think it's oxygen.

Starting point is 00:23:34 It turns out. So it's magnesium oxide is tagged on to the end there. Wasn't worth mentioning though. No, well, that's not. I mean, kind of. Yeah. So just doing its little job and it's eight. So same as the winner. Yeah, it's just doing its little job. And it's eight. So same as the winner.

Starting point is 00:23:46 Do you want to know more about Yin Min Blue? I would love to. It was the first inorganic blue pigment created in more than 200 years. The last one was cobalt pigment. It's very stable and non-toxic. In comparison, cobalt can be poisonous in large quantities, and it also can fade. In 2017, Crayola created a new blue crayon inspired by the pigment, though it didn't actually use any of it. The color it replaced was dandelion yellow, and it's called Blutiful.

Starting point is 00:24:14 The EPA approved Yinmin Blue for use in industrial coatings and plastics in 2017 and for consumer use in 2020. So, exciting. We've got more blues in the world, y'all. Great discovery, Andrew Smith. It's so blue. You should look it up. That's the bluest dang blue I've ever seen. This bowl full of it is almost upsettingly blue.

Starting point is 00:24:34 Do you want to eat it? Because I kind of do. I know it would be very bad for me because it's so metal. Well, apparently it's non-toxic. It must be very stable. I kind of want to rub it on myself but then you could join the blue man group we could join we could be the new blue men group but just yin min the yin min we're the yin min the yin min yeah

Starting point is 00:24:55 we're the yin min men group and we don't play drums though we just sort of make jokes yeah yeah we just all get up on stage they don't talk at all we talk a lot yeah that's the difference we get really tired halfway through because it's just a lot to be up there for that it's just a lot we record at four o'clock yeah yeah i don't know i don't know why i don't know how we expect ourselves to do this anyway sam you get to go first. When you injure your spine, one of the really nasty initial side effects is that the area around your spine swells up, which can cut off blood, kill cells and mess up a neurological function even more than the spine injury already did. You can do things like give patients steroid injections to curb the swelling, but it doesn't really seem like it works all that well. So basically, spinal damage is bad, but then it swells up and it kills cells and makes things worse. And there's

Starting point is 00:25:49 really not that much that anybody can do about it. And the reason for that swelling is because your body releases a bunch of ATP, a chemical that I vaguely remember from high school biology that I guess gives cells energy. It's the powerhouse of the cell, right? Okay, anyway, it's the powerhouse of the cell right okay anyway yeah there's so much atp at the site of a spine injury that the cells there get stressed out and die because they just have too much energy and i guess that makes everything swell up i'm not really sure how swelling works but i guess maybe like a dead bunch of dead cells makes stuff swell up anyway atp is the culprit but the team of researchers had a thought if you could block the the ATP cell receptors in the damaged area, maybe the cells wouldn't die and the swelling wouldn't be so bad. So they fired up the old lab equipment and they did some tests and guess what? It worked.

Starting point is 00:26:34 They injected oxidized ATP into test rats and it stopped the swelling, which is great. But what's not great is that for, I think, a variety of reasons, oxidized ATP injections can be used in real world human medical applications. And one of those reasons is the whole injection part. So according to the researchers, doctors don't really like to inject things straight into damaged spines. So their idea worked, but it was not practical. But then they thought it might be practical if they could find an ATP blocking compound that could be delivered intravenously. And that's where blue comes in. So there's this blue dye called Brilliant Blue G that's already used in medical contexts, primarily used in eye surgeries, but it also just happens to block ATP.

Starting point is 00:27:17 And it also happens to be like the exact same compound as blue dye number one, which is a food coloring that makes all of our favorite blue foods like blue m&ms and blue jello and blue gatorade make small blue so i sort of wonder if doctors were like we can't just say that we're using blue food coloring so we gotta think of another name for this stuff and then they decided to call it brilliant blue g instead of blue dye number one so anyway this stuff is really cheap and even better. It crosses the blood brain barrier. So it could stop all kinds of nasty brain and spine based swelling. So the team injected some blue dye into rats with spinal cord injuries and the rats that got the injections fared far better than the rest.

Starting point is 00:27:56 It didn't up to the point that the injected rats could walk with injuries that totally debilitated the non-injected rats. And there is one side effect though. And that the blue blue dye is a blue dye so at the places that it ends up being injected turn blue and if you're a tiny little rat then you're going to turn into a blue rat for a little while oh my gosh they're very blue they got these blue little ears and their blue little nose but they're feeling way better they're just blue this seems. It seems wild that this chemical,

Starting point is 00:28:26 so it's given intravenously for, for the therapy. And apparently we can eat it without it affecting our ATP at all. I assume, uh, I got going to have blue Gatorade without having to worry about its bioactivity, which you would think we would have tested for. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:42 It's a giant molecule. Like it looks like a big old honker. My first thought upon seeing it is, I wouldn't want to eat this. You'd probably eat it today. Do you eat a blue aluminum? It's possible. No, but I would like to. I did drink Gatorade today, but it was not blue.

Starting point is 00:28:56 I think we'd know by now if something bad happened because of it. And if blue Gatorade cures spinal cord injuries, that's a pretty cool fact. Yeah. All right. That is a pretty cool fact. Yeah. All right. That is very weird, Sam. Sari, what do you have for us? So there's this really lovely grayish pale blue pigment called blue ochre or Vivianite blue, named because it comes from the mineral Vivianite. And it was historically used in art from various cultures, including indigenous peoples from the northwest coast of the United States or in the 12th and 13th century in Europe. Artists used it as well. And like many natural

Starting point is 00:29:31 pigments, Vivianite was mostly used by people who could find and harvest the mineral nearby. And this is where the fact off kicks in because Vivianite forms under really specific conditions. When something dies and the phosphate in its bones or teeth or cells or whatnot react with iron in a damp environment so chemically speaking vivianite is a hydrated ferrous phosphate mineral and casually speaking it's a crystal crust that forms on wet dead things and turns blue when it touches air and oxidizes and if you start poking around archaeological literature, you start seeing these blue Vivianite crystals in all kinds of papers. It's been found on human remains in crusty patches or discolored blotches

Starting point is 00:30:14 from the lungs and skin of the Iceman Ötzi, the oldest known human mummy of a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BCE, who lived between 3350 and 3105 BCE to the bones of US soldiers who died in a plane crash in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. It's also been found on lots of animal parts from the skin of a 36,000-year-old mummified Alaska step bison nicknamed Blue Babe

Starting point is 00:30:38 because its skin was blue to clam shells and mammoth tusks and all other kinds of biological things. And it's even been found in crusting pieces of decaying wood or other organic stuff because phosphorus is really important for life, in bogs or ponds or other watery shores that are near deposits of iron, either naturally occurring ores or from human-made stuff like weapons or armor. And on top of being a cool pigment for its rarity and association with dead things, Vivianite can both help and hinder research in different ways, which I thought was

Starting point is 00:31:09 weird as I started digging into this. At least one paper blamed it for contaminating DNA amplification and analysis when samples were taken from human skeletons because it binds up phosphorus, while others used its presence to glean more context about the environment in which something died, because it'll be like moist and boggy or whatnot. So blue finds lots of ways to show up in nature, if not in life, then in whatever comes next. Wow, this is weird. So when I googled it, I saw these like beautiful, big, structured crystals. But when it's showing up on decaying matter it's like little little pieces of vivianite but it but it it happens a lot with decaying organic matter yes organic matter i think so i think the the name for vivianite came from just this like uk guy who found it in a cave and probably found one of the bigger crystals but it had been known

Starting point is 00:32:06 as a substance as like a blue substance and a pigment so i don't know how much people actually uh like gathered the pigment itself from dead or decaying things versus finding stones of it and grinding it up but i think it's a mix of of both if I had to take a gander. That's so interesting. And they found it on Etsy. Etsy? I don't know how to say it. Etsy? It's like the O with the umlaut.

Starting point is 00:32:35 Etsy. Not Etsy. Not the online marketplace. Could probably get some Vivianite on Etsy as well. See, that was a bit of a branding problem that we've created with that particular mummified body. So I have to choose between absolutely mind-blowing blue Gatorade injected into the spinal cord injuries of rats. And absolutely mind-blowing minerals that selectively grow on decaying organic matter. Sari's already in the lead.

Starting point is 00:33:09 I'm going to have to consider all those facts all at once. All those little pieces of data and just put them into my little calculator brain. Decide who wins the episode of Sci-Fi. I would love to look into your head and see if you're actually thinking about any of this at all. Or if you're just saying you're thinking about it.

Starting point is 00:33:26 I'm thinking about it. You're just thinking about your song. Math equations. Blueberry pie. Babu, babu bee, babu pie. You know, I'm going to get, I think, I think that the, I think that the Sam fact is so weird. I think it's at least plus one weirder than Sari's fact. I was on a cold streak too.

Starting point is 00:33:46 I needed this. Sam can get the episode. Thank you. And I'd also like to dig a little deeper into it and see where we are with this research.

Starting point is 00:33:55 Because I think it could make a pretty good TikTok. Yeah. All right. And now it's time to ask the science couch we've got a listener question

Starting point is 00:34:01 for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. James on Discord asks, is there any truth to the supposed notion that blue is a more ideal color for social media platforms or streaming services to brand themselves with? I mean, it's got to be. Because a lot of them are blue. For one, there's just too many that are blue. And two, I think that we like blue. I uh it's just it i think that we like blue i think it's i think

Starting point is 00:34:27 it's non-threatening like netflix is red and that one instagram is like uh is like is like kind of red purple pink yellow now yeah they're trying to have it always threads is just black and white the hot new social media the sites lighten the world on fire experience threads yeah that might no longer exist that everyone's ignoring it could be gone by now yeah because we record well in advance um sari though is gonna have a much better information on this because i'm just vibing here yeah i mean you're vibing in the correct direction. I think that's your observation of social media at play. And honestly, I think a lot of marketing researchers are also vibing because the research here is, from what I can tell, thin. A lot of websites that say blue is a great color or blue is a super popular color are usually pointing to one of two

Starting point is 00:35:25 studies from what I can tell. There is a YouGov survey conducted in 2014 in a total of 10 countries, the US, Britain, Germany, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, guessing around a thousand respondents per country, and found that blue was the favorite color of people in all those countries um between 23 percent was the lowest in indonesia and 33 percent in great britain was the highest uh liked blue the most out of all the colors listed in the survey um and then the second one was a 2003 undergraduate thesis by a kid named Joe Halleck. What do you mean a kid? We just want to be clear.

Starting point is 00:36:09 If you are under the age of 22, you're a baby, little baby. I just think it's funny that everyone is pointing to this undergraduate thesis from this guy who's now a grown man and probably doesn't think about, I did not look him up.

Starting point is 00:36:26 So I apologize, Joe, if you're a fan of the podcast and are still like really into color psychology, but your website, great, great transparency on where you got your data and everything. His initial hope was to get 500 responses across the world.

Starting point is 00:36:41 When he closed the survey, he only had 232 results and nearly 80% were from the USA. Um, and he asked people to associate, uh, colors with different words. And so, um, be like, what color do we associate with trust? What color do you associate with bravery? What color do you associate with,? What color do you associate with, et cetera? Things like that. And so blue was the top answer for trust, security, reliability, and dependability. It was the second top for high quality or high technology with black taking the top for that. And he also found that blue was the favorite color of 43% of everyone that he surveyed.

Starting point is 00:37:29 And so a lot of people point to these things and are like, people love blue. But I don't know. It's hard to survey a large amount of people. Yeah. And I also feel like there's just like a weird, like, do you know? Do you even know what you implicitly associate with trust? Like, if you ask me, am I right about how I feel? I'm more likely to be right than wrong, but I'm also not, I wouldn't be shocked if I ended up being wrong. I don't know. Yeah. People don't introspect into their biases as much. The other bit,

Starting point is 00:37:57 there's a 2011 marketing paper called Exciting Red and Competent Blue, The Importance of Color in Marketing. That found that blue is linked to the idea of competence. And specifically, they used a brand personality scale from 1997. So there's this idea in marketing of assigning people personality attributes to a brand. And so the, this acres scale includes characteristics like sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, and tried to assign some combinations of those traits to various brands. And so this 2011 paper used the scale that became very popularized, I think because it's pretty pithy. And then generally found when they tested fake logos of various colors and then asked people to assign these five attributes and the subcategories of them to them, that blue was associated with competence.

Starting point is 00:38:58 And then also when they had desaturated logos of brands that already exist then they found like reinforcing evidence so that was interesting because it actually has to do with logos and people's gut reactions to those logos both familiar and unfamiliar but again just like big asterisk on any of these things of like what are people feeling how do we quantify this uh this brand personality scales from 1997 and we've done a lot of psychology since then the whole internet has happened since then we've seen looked at apps and stuff and like the two most blue apps are facebook and twitter and those are the least competent apps in my opinion so yeah because they don't have to be competent because you think they are because they're blue. Whereas Pinterest has to really focus on trying to look competent because everybody just implicitly, they're very brave.

Starting point is 00:39:52 Yeah, very exciting Pinterest. Very exciting and brave. So if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will 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 SpaceHikes, at Nicolese1, 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 real easy to do that. First, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron, get access to our newsletter and our bonus episodes and don't forget once we hit 700 patrons we're gonna do

Starting point is 00:40:30 our minions movie commentary whoa guess how many patrons we have right now 699 we have 666 we got the nasty evil number we need at least one more patron to To join, not to quit, even though both would work, but join only. Either way. So please subscribe because we are tantalizingly close to discovering what's really inside all those mingos. Is it piss? Yes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show.

Starting point is 00:41:02 And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just don't tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glitzman.

Starting point is 00:41:17 Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bizzio. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakrabarty. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna Medish. 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 salt is great at dehydrating meats and just as great at preserving human poop. In a 2021 paper, researchers analyzed the DNA and proteins

Starting point is 00:42:07 in four old poop samples from the Hallstatt salt mines in Austria, one from the Bronze Age, two from the Iron Age, and one from the Baroque period. One of those poops, which was estimated to be 2,700 years old, had an abundance of fungal proteins from two specific organisms, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is brewer's yeast used in beers, and Penicillium roqueforti, which is the mold that gives- Oh, there it is. I was like, if nothing about this is blue. Where's the blue? Well, it's there.

Starting point is 00:42:41 And the mold that gives blue cheese is their color and funk. So this is the first molecular evidence for humans making and eating blue cheese in Iron Age Europe. We found it in food. That's a long time ago. Why are they crapping in salt mines so much? What's going on there? Because they got to mine the salt. You go where you are.

Starting point is 00:42:59 I guess so. Especially if you had a lot of cheese. And that's like... You drank a lot of beer. You had a lot of cheese and that's like, you drank a lot of beer. You had a lot of cheese. And you, you know, you,

Starting point is 00:43:11 you don't want to miss the opportunity. You know, if you hold it, you could miss your chance.

SciShow Tangents - Blue

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