SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 25

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on March 18, 2023 titled "Bonus Tangents!"Original Patreon description: It's the bonus Patreon podcasts for patrons on Patreon that support us over here!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 extra special Patreon bonus thingy for just for our Patreon patrons. I'm Hank Green, one of the many hosts of SciShow Tangents. And joining this week as always is science expert, Sari Riley. Oi oi oi oi oi. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Auga, auga. That's the whims that you get with her Patreon.

That's really, yeah, no. I mean, if you guys could come up with something that good every time, we'd be a big deal. I don't think so. This is our safe space where we can workshop the bad, get it all out of our system. It's really nice to see both of you. Sari and I saw each other in real life at South by Southwest EDU,

which we went to and then we left before the good parts. My question to you is, how cool did I look on those scooters? Austin has so many electric scooters and I did not see. Well, I did see you in person, I never saw you on a scooter. On a scooter? Everybody else in town did because I was everywhere. You were scooting all over the place? Yeah, they got those electric scooters on every street corner. You walk out of your hotel, you boop the booper, and then you're at a taco place five minutes later. It's amazing. Was it fun? Was it scary? Did you almost get run over by a big truck?

A little scary. It was kind of dead for some reason. I think the part of it is just because it was the EDU part of South by Southwest, which is quite small in comparison to the rest of it. And yeah, I scooted up and down the streets and I'd stop at every stoplight and look at my phone to make sure that I wasn't lost. But other than that, it felt pretty safe. And there was an infinite number of scooters available it seemed to me. What felt like more scooters than people could ever use. But I'm sure when South by the main event started,

they were all being used to scoot around to various events and parties and whatnot. The weirdest thing that I've never seen before is that they Saran wrapped all the pillars and like phone boxes or electric converters or bike racks. So that when people- Even like handrails? Yeah. Yeah. Like any surface that you could put a sticker on, up to like 10 feet tall, so that when

people inevitably put stickers on, they could rip them off, presumably, like clean them up at the end of the week. Yeah, at the end of South by Southwest, they can pull down all of that. Because it's like two weeks of people trying to promote their startups, you know. Notorious sticker kind of conference, I suppose. Lots of swag being given out that is stickers and stuff. trying to promote their startups, you know. Notorious sticker kind of conference, I suppose. Lots of swag being given out that is stickers and stuff. Yeah, and when we arrived,

there was like no stickers on any of that stuff. And by the time we were gone three or four days later, the stickers were starting to show up. I was like, oh, I see. They were just like two stickers, yeah. The EDU people are not as sticker happy. They're not as disrespectful to public. Yeah, none of the stickers I saw was for EDU stuff.

It was like people pre-gaming. They were getting ready. They were like Axios Austin was one of the ones. This is the first sticker they'll see. Yeah. Did you put a sticker on anything Hank? No, just regular graffiti. You went around doing Hankler fishes.

Hankler fishes all over every, every private piece of private property I could find that wasn't Saran wrapped. fish is all over every piece of private property I could find that wasn't Saran wrapped. And then I also just figured out how to poke the scooters in the right place so they'd catch on fire. And that as well. But you're all avoiding the question, which is how cool did I look on that scooter? Probably you looked really cool. If I had seen you on the scooter, I would have really cool. If I had seen you on the scooter, I would have razzed you publicly. I'd be like, who's that nerd? Yeah. If I had seen you on the scooter, I would have gone, whoa, cool. Look at, he's on a scooter. That's what I would have said. That's a very Montana reaction. Look at that scooter. Wow.

reaction. Look at that scooter. Wow. I just had a had lunch with like a seventh generation Montana and it was at the ramen bar which she'd never been to and they they said that there was dragon fruit in the dish and she was like dragon what? And they're like dragon fruit and she was like does it come from a dragon? And I was like, all right, tone it down. Be a little less Montana for a second. You know, we can't help it. We can't help it. We don't have any fruit here at all, I don't think. Yeah, you just have you like some rocks and beaut, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And you can you eat raw wheat. We just have wheat. Yeah, exactly. Crunch, crunch, crunch. We have bread. Wheaten eggs. Yeah. We're having trouble pooping here. So every week on SciShow Tangents, we ask our audience for science couch questions. And every week we get a lot of them. And actually, in fact, more than we can answer. So we don want, but we don't want good questions to go to waste. So every month we answer some of those questions that didn't make it on the show, lightning round style.

Are we gonna be able to be quick? Probably not. That's not our expertise, but we'll try. It's your expertise, Hank, I think, but Sari's never done anything quick in her entire life. Wow. She just knows too much. That's a problem. Yeah, I know.

No, I just can't stop. I can't shut up, Sam, is what you're saying. And that's fair also. I ramble. I think it's great. But anyway, here's a question. At Yaidi asks, how do you seclude and capture a specific type of gas? In other words, how do we get just helium into a container?

Really great question. I never thought of. Yeah, I know the answer to this question. Even even though I didn't do any research on it because I'm because this is my this is my area of expertise. This is the stuff I know about. Can I guess? Can I guess that it's not dissimilar from how you separate metals out from each other? Different heats or something maybe?

It's actually quite, different heats is very good. Different densities. It's not different densities mostly. With gases, it's much more like how we separate liquids from each other because they have different boiling points. So if you want to get ethanol out of beer and make a barley wine or even stronger like some kind of you know liquor you because ethanol has a different boiling point than water you can start to boil the ethanol it'll travel up a chamber and then you cool

that gas off and it's mostly just the ethanol up there will also be some water so you can do it more more and more times to purify it and it's mostly just the ethanol out there will also be some water. So you can do it more and more times to purify it. That's how you separate ethanol out from water to make a distilled spirit. Use a still. You could do that too with gas, as long as you can get them cold enough because everything eventually becomes a liquid, even helium, which is the thing that becomes a liquid at the at the lowest temperature and so you can Can you can condense out all of the things that would be in and I'm not actually sure if this is how they do that

I like natural gas plants But if you condense out all the stuff that would get cold and turn into a liquid you can pump the gas Portion off and have that be your helium because it condenses at the lowest temperature. I think of any substance that exists. Did I get that mostly right, Sari? Yeah, I talked too much. So I don't have anything to add. So if you do that with air, if you condense air into a liquid, you can boil it and the first thing that boils, what's the first thing that's going to boil?

It's either the nitrogen or the oxygen. I'm not actually sure. I guess the nitrogen would boil off first. And so you could capture just the nitrogen and then the oxygen would start boiling and you could capture just the oxygen and then the carbon dioxide would eventually sublime. It wouldn't actually boil if it's at standard pressure. And then the water would be the last thing that would boil. Do liquid versions of these gases just look like water or do they look weird somehow?

I think oxygen is a little bit blue. Liquid oxygen is a little bit blue and liquid nitrogen, I think, is purely clear. But it doesn't look like water because if it's in around where you can live and breathe, it's going to be like lots of wispy stuff coming off of it. So it will be clearly not. But if you were in like a negative 200 degree room, it would just look like water. But it wouldn't, I think would pour a little differently. Like it's not as viscous. Have you seen liquid nitrogen?

So they use it sometimes to make ice cream or do like cold experiments. Yeah. And usually demonstrations. And so like that is nitrogen gas as part of the atmosphere that has turned into a liquid. And so you can see it vaporizing as it comes in contact, but it's like, I don't know, different, slightly different characteristic than water. Like you can tell that when they're pouring it, it's like, that's not quite water. Yeah. And it probably has a different, you know, it has a different density and also

like the way that it interacts with stuff is very weird. If you pour it on a warm floor, it will dance because it's boiling wherever it's touching things. I love it when I know the answer. Well, Sam told me explicitly not to research them, right? I'm supposed to just kind of know or guess. Well, these are the questions. So for everybody, I think I said this last month maybe, when Sarie sends us an email of questions to pick for the Science Couch segment. She sends us like five, other people would say fully researched answers to the questions. So she's done a massive amount of work already

and already knows the answer. And I just simply say, Sari, please try less. Don't do any more research. You already did some. Yeah. The only other thing I know about this is that people are trying,

because this is very complicated to separate gases in this way. It's a lot of energy. Like cooling things down extremely cold is not easy necessarily or having the various chambers where you can separate out fractions of gases. So a big push in material science is to try to find other ways to do it. And one way is through adsorption, which is like the attracting gas molecules to the surface of something else. In my understanding of this, which was brief reading, there are these things called zeolites, which are just like little sponge materials that they make.

They don't look like sponges. They look like little hard rocks consisting of like silicon because it binds a lot and other things. And then they're trying to get gas molecules to bond to that. And then they shift them to another chamber and then let the gas go somehow.

So using other forms of chemical reactions. Yeah, that's actually more how like how metals are usually purified is that you get them to stick to something and then you take that something and pull it out and then you take it out of that something. So oftentimes in solution like a acidic solution to pull tiny pieces of gold out of rocks. But that makes sense to me and it would be whatever the material is would selectively bind to a specific gas. And then you could pull it out and be like, this is now full of oxygen. Do something to it and it'll come out.

The next question is from at Rowan Etro who asks, is it true that your body gets colder when we sleep? Oh, it's got to be true, right? That's gotta be true. It's cause everything slows down, is that why? Well, I feel like I've read that a bunch of times. I don't, and yeah, I will just assume that your metabolism goes down, so you're burning fewer things, but I don't know. You're also under a blanket. I don't know why, but I know that that is true.

Yeah, I think that's how scientists feel too. And you as a scientist just summed it up of like, we don't understand circadian rhythms. Like that's why there's so much research into them. And people who prefer to be night owls versus wake up early and things like that. And there's some evidence that a thermoregulation, which is basically how your body regulates its own temperature. People who have measured this in sleep studies think that your body can drop up to one degree Celsius, which doesn't sound like a lot, but is the difference between normal temperature and a fever in some cases. So it is fairly significant chilliness-wise. cases. So it is fairly significant chilliness-wise. And it's something to do with your core body temperature just dropping, maybe because your metabolism is down and so you're just not

generating this much heat, but maybe because it could help something with your other cells, just like sync up. If your body temperature, which is with the wiggles in your body, decrease all of a sudden, then anything that is synthesizing or readjusting or whatever can use that as a cue to sync up their chemical reactions and get you ready for your waking hours when you got to do a lot more. It's just like very, very barely on the spectrum of torpor and hibernation, where it's like the tiniest little bit of of torpor where it's just burn less energy than you would otherwise, but not don't go crazy with it.

Still got to still got to get a lot done when you're sleeping as a person. And so that's why if you wake up in the middle of the night, you might be chilly or sweaty or other things. Cause like your body's changing temperatures. I had a dream last night that I caught a thief, but like I thought they were gonna be there. And so I like snuck around the back because I talked to them and they were like, I'm not gonna steal anything, I promise.

And I was like, okay. And then I went around the back of the house and I snuck in the back as they were walking out with my table, it was a table. And I was like, I, and then I went around the back of the house and I snuck in the back as they were walking out with my table. It was a table and I was like, I I told I thought that you were going and they were like darn it. You caught me and that was how it went. That's nice. This is good an interaction with the thief as you could hope for. I've had a lot of I've been having Like back-to-back anxiety dreams this week. It's been a lot. So what's what what do we do now?

Well now Hank it is time for America's favorite Patreon bonus podcast segment, Sam and Faith's Every Person Science Corner. So if you've been listening to the Patreon podcast for the past couple months, you'll know that Faith and I have been undertaking our own scientific research in the form of audience polls. But why? Well, why does anybody do science? Probably in an effort to understand better our role in this infinite mystery-filled cosmos or some crap like that. Anyway, Research Assistant AP Faith, what is this one's poll? Thanks Research Master Producer Sam.

Wow. Okay. Well, I just realized it just says Sam and Faith's Every Person Science Corner. If I'm the research assistant, then what does that make Sam? You must be the research master, the PI's principal investigator. If I play my cards right, I'll be Dr. Sam, huh? So a while back in some form of media that I don't remember, Hank told us about his friends who named their dog also Hank, media that I don't remember. Hank told us about his friends who named their dog also Hank. Which is probably confusing and awkward. And so we decided to poll our audience and

you made fun of us last time for our science research only having like 15 responses. So this time we got 562 responses. So that's like so much. Oh, that's too many. It's like the most math I've ever done in this job. Okay, so the question that we asked was, have you or would you ever name a pet the same name as someone that you know well enough that that person will almost definitely meet that pet at some point in your lives? And the answers we provided were A, was yes, but only if that name was Hank because Hank is arguably a better pet name than a human name.

B, no, but I might be upset at my friend for having the perfect name for my pet. C, yes, it's kind of like a compliment. Or D, nah, there's plenty of good names out there. No, I will say, Faith wrote the answers this time a little bit more editorializing than I would be comfortable with. That's great. Definitely. Absolutely. Those are the only four categories a person could fit in, for sure. And I'm rooting heartily for D, because it can't be that a thing that comes up that often. You don't have that many friends. That's true. You don't have that many pets in your life either to meet and be like, this dog is a Julia for sure. And I don't care that my friend's name is Julia.

This dog has to be named Julia and nothing else will do. Like just by by pure Random odds it mostly wouldn't happen because there's a lot of names and there aren't that many dogs in your life There's a lot of real freaks out there But over the course of the life of every animal that you've ever had you meet a lot of people. It's true You're right. What are your what are your predictions on what the answers are, both Sari and Hank? I'm going, Dee is gonna be number one.

I also think that Dee, I name pets generally, both like my virtual pets and whatever, after foods or objects. And I've definitely talked about this on the podcast. I would not name a human after a food or an object. And sometimes my non-binary friends choose that quite a bit. I know a kale now and lots of other objects named people but I feel like that's a newer wave of things so I think plenty of good names, non-human names out there. What do you think number two

would be though? I think B, I would be upset with my friend for having a perfect name for my pet. Maybe number two? I don't know. Yeah, I think that it's, I think it is D, C, B, A. I think it's D, B, A, C because I think there are enough people who are like, haha, that one says Hank that they just clicked it. Yeah. That's a good point.

We'll see. All right. What are the results? I will say, okay, so we did this over Discord, YouTube and Twitter. And because of character limits, the answers varied slightly. Oh, come on. This is science. This is as science as it gets. So you're correct.

The highest one at 49% was D. Nah, there's lots of names out there, which was, that one was pretty consistent over our different platforms in that the answer is because of it. Right. Yeah. And then, so in second was actually A. Yes, but only if that name was Hank. And I think part of what influenced this was that on Twitter, you can't put very many characters in the polls. So on Twitter, the poll was A, yes, only if it's Hank. And that's no more context than that. A, yes, only if it's Hank. I will name my

pet Hank no matter what. And then B and C were, B was 7% and C was 9%. And you might be thinking, if you're really super good at math, hey, 31 plus seven plus nine plus 49 doesn't equal 100%. And you would be right, because on YouTube, 7% of the votes went to the answer C, results. Oh, gotcha. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's good to have that. Yeah. If you can. That sounds like it was a lot of work, Faith, doing it across platforms like that. She only started doing it about 10 minutes before we started recording, I think. I had to have the most accurate results. It was a lot of frantic math, okay? Look, I'm working towards that honorary PhD.

And look, we forgot to post it until this morning. Mistakes were made. Someday we'll have the perfect sample, though. But 500's not too shabby. I think that bodes well for sure. There are a couple other people that said one of the answers should have been yes, because I think it would be hilarious.

That's true. That would be really funny. Especially if you had like a little like bug or something and you were like, this is my lizard, Greg. I don't know if I brought it up the last time. My parents' dog is named Hank. Oh my God! Yeah. They bought him like last year and every time they just start out a story, they're like,

oh, Hank was out chasing a squirrel. And I'm like, my boss was chasing a squirrel? Like I didn't know you watched vlogbrothers. So my answer is yeah, if it's funny, because like I, every time we have a conversation, I have a mental image of my boss doing something exceptionally bizarre for a human to do. So yeah, I like that answer. Also I will say that if you name your lizard after a friend, that's fine because you never call out your lizard's name all the time.

Like you do with a dog. You got to get a roach that's named Hank. That's fine, because you're never talking to the roach. It's not whereas if I'm at my friend's house and that friend, that dog's name is Hank. They're saying Hank all the time. Well, everybody, thank you so much for joining us for this SciShow Tangents Patreon Patreon Patreon recording. That's we say it like Monday, Monday, Monday. That's why I said it three times.

And and how we learned so much, I feel like. And Sari said Sari said boy, boy, boy, boy. Yeah, that was my favorite part. Beak Darley, that was like the fourth word said in the whole thing. Kind of just turn it off. Yeah, yeah. So, you're ahead. So thank you so much for your support. We endeavored to continue making wonderful Tangents episodes. We've got some cool ones coming up quite soon. Goodbye!

Bye!