SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 21

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on December 1, 2022 titled "November Bonus Episode."Original Patreon description: Our sound engineer Tuna joins the bonus pod this week as we rapid fire answer some of your burning questions. These answers are probably right...SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents!And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

Hello and welcome to the SciShow Tangents bonus podcast, the Sam Sarian Tuna edition. Hi Tuna. Hi, it's nice to be here. This is our engineer, Tuna. Can I call you an engineer? Are you an engineer in this capacity? I mean, I don't have a problem with it. I know that there are people on the internet

that get very upset about that. Okay. Because you have to take the, whatever it's the IA. Just lie and say you did. Just lie and say you did. Yeah. Tuna did all that. Totally. You have to take the whatever it's like. You did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All that. Totally. Totally. He did all that junk. Tuna's our engineer. I mean, I did go to engineering school. So, he does drive a train to work every day. So, he's an engineer.

Okay. I know. Building bridges is kind of my thing. Yeah. So, anyway, this month, I thought we would try out a version of something that I do with Hank over on the Patreon podcast for the SciShow YouTube channel. Over there we have an email inbox where patrons can send us questions and episode ideas and some of those ideas get turned into episodes of SciShow, but a lot of them, like thousands and thousands of them don't. But instead of just letting those ideas and questions languish in digital purgatory, Hank and I have been going through the spreadsheet of thousands of questions

and answering them rapid fire style. Not even looking into them at all, not even doing any research. Well, here on Tangents each week, we ask for listener questions for Ask the Science Couch, and Sarai picks some that she would like to answer, and then we help her narrow it down from there. But that leaves a lot of unanswered questions similar to on the SciShow Patreon. So this month I thought we would try rapid fire replying to some of those questions with a little bit of a disclaimer. We didn't research a ton but Sarie cheated and she researches everything. So she does kind of know the answer to some of these.

Well, I didn't research them before this. So I researched them at the time they were asked. So in many cases, many months ago. So how good is my memory? Probably pretty bad. I'm just going to be guessing. But I will feel more anxious about it than Hank will. So if we see one sure of anything, Wikipedia it. And if we don't know something, we're just going to skip it. Sarah will just say, I don't know this answer. And we will move on to the next one.

So we'll go through in order of old episodes that we've done, I thought. We would just clump them together based on that. So the first question is from the episode Skin. And the question is, how did we discover the Botox ordeal? It just seems odd that we think it good to inject something like botulism into our dermis. And I was asked by or at organic bypass on Twitter. I got a guess.

I'm thinking like, you know how like the botulism that makes the cans poof up in the store, right? What if somebody saw that and was like, ah, old people. My cans could use some proof. What are old people but a can ready to be puffed up? Right, like you got those little wrinkles on the side of the can, you got those wrinkles everywhere the old people.

I think you're onto something there, Tuna. Sari, is it the can thing that Tuna said? I don't think so, but I don't remember why. I think we knew that it affected muscles in some way. Like the botulism toxin could paralyze muscles somehow. And it was initially used for eyes, I think. So like when your eyes are cross-eyed or you have a lazy eye, then that's because muscle control in your eyes is a little bit weird. So they can sometimes

strengthen that by putting a patch over one eye. So you have to depend on the lazy eye to correct it in some way. Or doctors thought you could inject this toxin in, paralyze the muscles temporarily, and then it would straighten it out. I don't know. And then when they injected it into people's eyes, they, like, you commonly have wrinkles around your eyes, like little bruised feet. And then all of a sudden... Their eyes got sexy. Their eyes got, yeah, their eyes got sexy and youthful. And they were like, huh, maybe, maybe just maybe, we can use this for more wrinkles. And so it started as like a medical treatment

with related to muscles. And then they were like, actually, we can make big, big money on this and use it. Are they just, they're not just injecting you a straight up botulism, are they? Hopefully we can make big money on this and use it. They're not just injecting you straight up botulism, are they? Is it an extract of botulism? Yeah, so they're not infecting you with a bacteria. They've taken the toxin, which is a muscle, for a paralyzer and then injecting it in.

I think we do use it for other medical treatments too. I think there's some exploration of botulism toxin in migraines because we don't really understand those and like muscle stuff. I think like bladder muscle troubles. So we have isolated it for various medical reasons and then also to inject it into your little filler in your cheeks.

To make grandma be looking good. I don't know good. The bladder stuff and the other thing you said, like also both problems that approach with aging. It's all helping grandma. It's all for grandma. And you know, old people are notoriously sweaty, so you got to inject them with all that toxin to stop them from

leaking around like a slug. Oh no. Our next question is from the episode Bubbles and it's from Sida on Discord and they ask, are there circumstances where a bubble on its own is not a sphere or half sphere? I would think maybe in like a different dimension that could be possible. That's yeah, I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense to me because it's about like everything being even from a center, right? I think that yes, by our current laws of physics, so I'm assuming like a soap bubble, as opposed to like those are the bubbles that are freestanding instead of a bubble in water. You can create an outline of a bubble. So like you can have a square bubble wand, but then once that soap is blown into the sphere, then it will, I think because of the way attractive forces work

and there's a lot of surface tension and the most energetically favorable shape is a sphere. Whereas like a cube or pyramid, there's more surface area, like the surface area to volume ratio is thrown off in some way that makes it less like harder to get those those firm edges in nature without some sort of energy input or a molecular structure that's going to freeze it that way. Ooh, so like a bubble skeleton. Yeah, yeah. And I think people have used bubble skeletons, basically like mixing other stuff into soap to try and make it less spherical. But I think they have only gotten to various forms of blobby. Like making a hard edge, making a hard edge bubble skeleton is beyond our capacities thus

far. What would be the advantage to making a different shape to bubble? I have no idea. Is this cool as hell? Like why not? So you can make balloon animals but out of bubbles. I feel like you're the scientist who did that and then you show your friends and they go, huh, cool bubble.

I imagine there's something to do with like, surfactants is the group of chemicals that like make up soap and make up other things. And so I imagine that that is where this research is coming in, not just to make cool bubbles. Next is also from Bubbles. What was the first carbonated drink and where did that idea come from? It is a really weird idea, I guess, if you think about it. Why do we like the fizzy so much? I know that.

Probably something fermented, right? But even beer is not as fizzy and delightful as like a soda. No, but like, I bet once you see itzy and delightful as like a soda. No, but like I bet once you see it bubbling and you're like, ooh, what if more of that? Yes, what if more bubbles? Right. Yeah, and what if those bubbles were square? So the first carbonated drink

was probably like sparkling water because they love that in Europe and Europe's been around for a long time. So it's probably a very long time ago in Europe. That's my guess. I'm gonna stick with my original answer of carbon or of fermented. I would guess tuna gets the points. And I say this without having a basis also.

Just because beer has gone really far back in human history, right? Even just accidental beer of leaving stuff out in the environment. It's pretty easy to make accidental beer. Yeah. And then yeast introduces carbon dioxide and yes, beer can go flat, but there's just a little bit of fizz in there and yeast is everywhere in the environment. So I imagine that people were making accidental beer in more places. But you're right Sam, in that some people might have had access to carbonated water,

because there's naturally carbonated water. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, so there are mineral waters, which are, I don't know, you've been, we've all been to natural hot springs and mineral waters. And so those exist, but sometimes those waters are also carbonated where calcium carbonate rocks or other like gas gets infused into the water.

It's like a soda stream, but in nature. So you're sitting in a hot spring and it's bubbly. Yeah. And you taste it and it's like hmm, it's a little fizzy. That sounds nice. Yeah. I don't know when they started commercializing it. I probably like when we started commercializing beer and industry, industry, industry. So Victorian era.

I don't know. This is the first drinkable manmade glass of carbonated water was created by Englishman Dr. Joseph Priestley in 1767. So there's your answer. All right. Well, the next question is coral reefs from the episode coral reefs. Oh, this is a good one. Are there non-marine coral or land animals that look or behave the same as coral? And that was from icon discord That couldn't be could there is like a like in coral s. Mm-hmm. That's a good one

Oh, I still don't fully understand coral as like a thing, but also no It's tough because it's like a little guy But it then makes a house and then all the other little houses connect to it. Is that basically? The long and short of it I mean, I want to say like a bee is almost like coral because they make they're making their houses. Any guy who makes a house is like a coral. Yeah. Yeah. I think you both got different pieces of the coral.

So it's the coral makes the little house excretes calcium carbonate and has a little polyp at the tip. And that's where it feeds. Tuna got at the symbiosis where the corals can't survive necessarily just eating things. They also have symbiotic relationships with bacteria and help photosynthesize and that's with lichen where, what is it? It's a fungus, an algae.

A plant, a fungus and something else. There's three things going on. Bacteria I think, yeah, there's three things going on. Bacteria, I think. Yeah, there's three of them. So coral's two, I think, but also uses the same cyanobacteria or algae, I think, to something photosynthetic. Cnidarians, of which coral is one, like those little polypy structures, don't really exist well on land because they're so gooey.

Tough out there for a gooey guy. Yeah, and I can't imagine a lot of symbiotic relationships between a gooey guy and like a photosynthetic thing. All those things are marine organisms. It feels like even the photosynthetic slug. Yeah, once you're out of the water, your goo just goes flat, or you become like a little snail or slug.

You go from being a gooey guy to a crunchy guy. Yeah, that's not good. And not many, like a termite, I guess, like if you go back towards Hymenoptera, then you start getting the forming, like excreting things, forming a nest in which you live, but they still move so much more. Like there's no benefit to being anchored in one spot as an animal on land because with water, the nutrients come to you. Everything's constantly moving and on land you got air blowing past you. But even like, you gotta chase them down. That's so

infrequent and it's so. Or go find a flower or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And like spiders are the closest, I think. Like there are some animals that sit in wait and try to collect. So there's like the spiders that live in a colony. So maybe they are the closest thing to a coral.

Maybe, yeah. Sometimes that's why we don't answer these questions on the show, is because Saria will say, well, no, I could say more, but that's pretty much the long and short of it. Which maybe will be the case with the next question from the episode, babies. Why do babies, especially newborn babies, have that smell? That is in scare quotes, the fresh baby smell. And that's from you too.

Smell babies. Oh, sorry. Excuse me. Let me finish please. Yes, I have. I've smelled the baby before they smell. They smell like a milky dryer sheet or something. That's what I always think.

It's just like milky, but milky I say, is like a forward smell to it, maybe. I gotta say, I don't think I've ever intentionally smelled a child. You don't know of like the, like, get a whiff of a newborn baby kind of thing? I've heard of that, but like, but also I feel like there's so many smells happening with a newborn baby anyway. It's like, well, is that like the new diapers? Is that the new sheets? Or like the detergent from the...

Yeah, like... But if you get right in on the head, you can smell a little whiff of something, you know? Not much for infant huffing over here. Let's go find a baby, Tuna, let's get out there. Pure pressure. Sam, you're just saying this because you know I'll do it if you pressure me.

Just like you'll drink anything. You'll smell anything. Just try it once, dude. Come on. I haven't smelled a baby. I haven't given birth. I haven't been around a newborn baby. So I anecdotally don't have evidence of it.

Okay, so many gangs up on me for not sniffing a baby. But Sari, you should have had my back on that. Yeah, I'm just a rude dude. I make fun of people, I guess, at every opportunity. But yeah, so it has been reported often enough that I want to say there is something going on. There's a lot of chemistry and psychology of surrounding pregnancy and birth

that we don't quite understand. And it's hard to study newborn babies and newborn parents because they don't stay newborn for very long. The time is a tickin' and you're kind of busy with other things like parenting your new child. But there's a guess that it might be some of just the goo that comes off the baby. The vernis, I think, which is like that.

There's like a white waxy coating on the baby in the uterus that kind of sticks around when it gets, giving birth is such a messy process. Yeah, well, that sounds like something you'd say about a baby bird, but humans do that? Yeah. That's fucked up. I like it.

And so it like absorbs. Tuna wishes he had his vernic still. Yeah. Can I buy that? This is a little buffer. Tuna can't smell the baby's smell because he still smells like a baby. It's just his normal smell.

He's smelling all the time. Just a big baby. So yeah, so maybe there's stuff like that or volatile organic compounds, which are the ones that vaporize in air really easily in amniotic fluid that might like linger around the baby for the first couple days. But then after that, we like there's still this scent that new parents report, especially if like, like you said, Sam, you sniff really close to the head and it's like, that's

the baby. It's different than baby powder or diapers or anything. Um, and it might be something psychologically that we are adapted to smell in a young thing and, uh, any, every report of it, um, says that smells like good or comforting or sweet. So it could be something that gears us evolutionarily to be like, ah, this is a good thing. Like not only is it cute. Toxoplasmosis. Yeah. I must protect the small, nice smelling thing.

And even though it also makes a bunch of bad smells like poop, I guess, but underlying that all is the good baby smell. Well I suppose that answers the question. So here's another one. Do they cry while in the womb? And that was from DonjangDK on Twitter. I'm gonna guess no because I feel like the viscosity of amniotic fluid versus air is going to be prohibitive. But I think also sound travels super well through water because it's denser.

And so I guess I don't know what the density of amniotic fluid is. But I know that it's very loud for babies. Like my friend, when he had a kid, he read a thing where like the first few weeks out of the womb, if they're like freaking out, it helps to go right at their face because it simulates that experience of like you're inside of a person like cryo pod hearing like of everything going. Weird. What the hell?

I guess that makes sense. Yeah, I figure my guess yell and so damn noisy in there. Baby ain't even gonna try. Yeah, I feel like that. That checks out with what I know. I mean, babies don't have developed, like I don't think tear ducts develop until after birth, maybe. What?

I'm not positive, but they're like, like in the way that your skull isn't complete, there are things that are not fully developed. Like you should when you're- That even pops out some assembly required? Yeah, even the way, even the way like your palette works or something is different, right? Like like to make so like there's not like all the tubes aren't connected in your head

So you can breastfeed and breathe at the same time, but then like that closes up Do you know I'm talking about like you wrote a size show about this area like somebody Sometimes the bones on the top of the head got a fuse. Is that a thing? Yes. Yeah. Because your head squishes. You got to go through the whole, you know. Oh man.

Yeah. I'm so glad I'm not one of those anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So there are a bunch of little things. The breastfeeding one sounds similar because you don't like, you know, we can snort, no, we can get milk stuck up our nose or something. I put you don't want that to happen to a baby and they would get it all the freaking time and panic

and not know what to do. So there are all kinds of adaptations. So baby underdeveloped can't do part parts of the things of crying. They're obviously not breathing air, like you said, Tuna, they're in like surrounded by fluid. Yeah. They can move around, which is like you can feel a baby kick. So there's some movement, but I don't think there would be an emotional reason to cry or any characteristics that we would describe as crying. Like I, there's probably some preliminary facial expressions just from the sake of move, like moving around, but I can't imagine that a baby would yell. I feel like we would have heard of it. If someone had been like, Oh, my baby's yelling, he's crying in there. Yeah.

But we hear kicking. We, we hear about kicking and not about crying. Let's skip ahead to the poison episode a little bit more recent. Oh, it hasn't even come out yet. A little sneak peek for you guys, actually. That comes out next month. Have there been documented cases of people being resistant to specific poisons? That's asked by Broken Thumbs on Discord and Jose Gallegos on YouTube. People being resistant is... Well, I've heard about Rasputin, right? I think Rasputin is a myth.

He drank a little bit of poison and then he was very powerful. Oh, you hear a little bit like people take a little sip every day, a little bit more, a little bit more, and then they're immune to poison. Is that a thing you can do? I mean, I've heard of people doing that, but I feel like that's a very cartoony way of trying to get around the problem. Well, that sucks if that's not true, because that's so cool. Yeah, I think, I feel like, so there's poison and venom, and this is what we get into in the episode.

Poison is something that you eat, and venom is something that gets injected into you. So straight to the bloodstream. I think more of the stories you hear about people building up a resistance have to do with venom because you're training your immune system, basically, to be like, don't let this thing do the bad thing in my blood.

So there's people who are like, I'm gonna get bitten by a snake a million times and then I will not be, I'll be immune to a snake bite. Yeah. I think, so if you think of poison, it's something that gets metabolized and you are trying to accustom your body to metabolizing it. The most common example I can think of is like ethanol.

So drinking beer, drinking wine, ethanol is technically a poison. It gets filtered out by your liver. So over time, like ethanol has less of an effect on your body. And so then you need to drink more alcohol in order to have it have an effect. But your liver keeps getting damaged. So it's like you're kind of building up a resistance to poison in that the ethanol doesn't affect your brain and your like your blood alcohol content, the similar level of ethanol in your blood has less of an effect on your brain or I don't know, it feels different, but you're still getting the damage from it.

So like half resistant. And there's a weird historical example that I haven't been able to sneak into a Tangents episode. There's like some people that ate arsenic, but there is the Eastern European city of Styria. This is a lot of word of mouth and this is why it hasn't made it to a normal tangents episode, because a bunch of doctors who have traveled through this have observed these people eating a white mineral in very small doses. It is arsenic, presumably. I don't remember the reasoning why, but they, they like built up a resistance

to arsenic by eating small grains of it every day. And then these doctors have reportedly like have anecdotes or written stories of when these people don't eat a little bit of arsenic every day, then they suffer from symptoms of withdrawal. So similar to an alcoholic or someone who has like really, really high tolerance of alcohol weaning off of that and then having symptoms of withdrawal because your body starts depending on or expecting that chemical in your body. These arsenic eaters of Styria were eating quantities of arsenic that were higher than

lethal for the average person and probably doing something negative to their bodies. But when they didn't eat that, then they were suffering from symptoms of withdrawal. So I don't know, it's a double-edged sword. Don't, I don't know. It's cool in a movie. Don't eat poison is my recommendation. We have never done intense biological, biochemical studies on these people. I don't know if they even exist anymore because this is a historical thing. How many people died versus kept eating it? How many people like reported eating it versus not. So it's a big question mark.

It's funny that Scientific American puts all their old articles on their website, like their new articles, because the one about arsenic eaters is from like 1876 and I was reading it and I was like, it just looks like all the other ones. And it's like, arsenic eaters are generally strong and healthy persons,

courageous, pugnacious, and of strong sexual dispositions. I was like, what the fuck are you? Oh, you're an old timey guy. I see why. Yeah. Right. Well, thanks for being smart for us, Harry. Yeah, I try my best. OK, nothing is guaranteed. I tried. I have like 20 tabs open of me trying to Google things quickly.

Panicking while we're... Yeah. Well, Hank just says, probably this, next question please. So you gotta be more like Hank and spread disinformation. Yeah. I didn't know you did this. This is fun. I would say invite me, but I got a bill for it.

I'm legally prohibited. You're not part of SciShow, unfortunately. I would say invite me, but I got a bill for it. Legally prohibited. You're not a part of SciShow, unfortunately. Yeah, that would be disingenuous. Yeah. Well, we can keep doing this if you'd like to, and then more people would get their questions answered. And you don't even have to do a bunch of research,

because you can just make it up. You know? That's the problem with you. I do answer questions in the newsletter. I know. That's the problem with you, is you're always like, but I have to research. And then it's like, oh, come on. I want my information to be correct.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's the end of this one and we'll see you later. Thanks for being a patron. Yes. Thank you so much for being a patron. We can only do what we do because of you. And thank you also for sending us your questions all the time.

That also is vital to the show and it makes the series job easier too. If we get a tons of questions. Okay. Thank you. Bye. Say bye you two. Bye. Say bye you two. Bye!