SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 31

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on November 9, 2023 titled "Blue Questions (Lightning Round)."Original Patreon description: We're back at it again with more fast answers to all the questions that wouldn't fit in our normal episode, and we got some fun sound effects to boot!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

Welcome to the Sci Show, Tangents, Patreon Bonus Podcasts, which last time we named extra snacks. Do you remember that? No, I've blocked it all. out. It's extra snacks? I think so. It's extra snacks or something like that. So that's what we'll call it today, is extra snacks, the science podcast, wherein we answer lots of questions because for every episode of tangents, we ask our audience for science couch questions. As you hopefully know, if you're subscribed to this, it would be weird if you just listen to this podcast, but kind of cool, I guess. And every week, we get a lot of questions, but we can only answer one per

episode and we don't want good questions to go to waste and sari puts a lot of work in narrowing down which question is the best one to ask presenting us with our options and doing a little bit of research so each month we'll answer some of your questions that didn't quite make it on the show lightning around style so here are your questions from our episode the topic of which was blue do you remember blue way back when i still hear like your song i think because i don't listen to a lot of music like your blue poem is now an earworm for me. Oh, no. You've got to listen to a little bit more music. I'm begging you. I like it better when my earworms are friends. I got to say it's one of the

funnest things I've gotten to do at work maybe ever. I've had a lot of people say, oh, great job with that. And then I always say, no, no, no. Please. It was all tuna. Oh, thank you. it was all tune and then I say, I was there too.

I was just running the auto tune. Which is a valuable part of the endeavor. I was going to try to look up when we recorded Blue. Let's see. We posted Blue. When do you think we recorded Blue? July? I don't know, but we posted it on August 8th.

So that was a long time ago. Wow. That is a minute. So this is like an old crusty kind of snack that's in your cupboard for a while. Yeah. And you're so desperate and so hungry. And you're like, how old is this little Debbie Brownie? I don't know. But I can't care about that right now. I'm so hungry. So the first question from GCL on Discord and Ben Active on Twitter. Ben Active is a great name. I think, why are eyes blue? And then relatedly, why are baby's eyes often blue and change color by toddlerhood from Michelle H9 on Discord? And don't forget. You have a time. Let me talk. No, absolutely not.

I remember that. As soon as I saw your face go, time for Sari to talk a lot, I thought, uh, no. You have four minutes? I think that's what we decided to answer this question. I think it's a mystery amount of time. I'm not allowed to know how much time I have.

Tuna said that because nobody ever listens to a damn thing I say. I say four minutes. And then Tuna was like, I think I'll just give you however long I want. Well, it's four minutes. It's just four minutes from whenever I remember to start the timer. Exactly. That's why he was covering his ass about it

And then what sound will you play When the time is up, Tuna Absolutely, that's the wrong sound No Okay, I don't remember which one Oh wait Try again No, no, pronging

No That's if she goes overtime and won't stop talking If you're receiving this message It can only mean No, that's me Yes You'll play my Five-minute-long explanation

Tuna, it's a baseball sound Oh beautiful that's literally the only one that was left so i'm glad i arrived there right as you told me no the nasty guitar riff is if if she just won't stop then that's when you play her off with the nasty guitar oh okay okay okay yeah yeah exactly it's been a little while since we recorded one of these i forgot it has been whoops you know things happen why are eyes blue why are baby's eyes often blue and change color by toddlerhood i don't have any guesses honestly i have i feel like that's a, it's a mystery to me completely.

Why our eyes is brown. That's also like an interesting color for eyes to be or green. Eyes don't seem like they're the right color that they should be in general. Yeah, eyes are very weird. Do you know what part of the eye is colored? Is it that piece of your eyes? What is this grade school? Is it the iris?

Is that the part that's colors? It is the iris, yeah. I don't know. People just, good job. Sorry to put you under all that pressure. I feel like people know that. But then, like, all biology stops.

People are like, we're going to stop thinking about eyes after that. But the iris is actually, like, a very complicated piece of your eye. So it is the musly part that lets in light and has a sphincter muscle in it. So kind of like your butt or your intestines or things like that. It's got muscles to contract. It's got dilator muscles to go wide. And it's made of a two-cell layer, basically, where, there's a lot of connective tissue along with the muscles, and specifically the epithelial layer

of the iris, the iris pigment epithelium, or IPE, contains a pigment in there, and it's a pigment in lots of different parts of our body, like our hair and our skin, called melanin. So there are melanocytes, which are the cells that produce melanin within your iris, just spitting out those pigment molecules. And like everywhere else on our body, they can be really helpful to help protect from the damaging radiation from the sun, like UV radiation, those high energy waves that could damage cells. But instead, they like hit the melanin. The melanin kind of absorbs that energy. And so eye color is based on how much melanin is deposited across your iris.

Blue eyes are generally less melanin, and brown eyes or dark brown eyes are more melanin. And baby's eyes darken over time just because when they are born, they are still developing. So their hair and their eye and their skin color, when they first pop out, is all kind of weird as they're adjusting to existing in the world with sunlight and being exposed to oxygen instead of in the, I don't know, the fluid in the amniotic fluid. So just as they, usually I think between zero and six months are where a lot of these immediate changes happen. Their skin generally darkens to their regular skin tone and their eyes darken to their eye color.

That's it? Are there other parts of us that are blue? Why blue? Why? Oh, for eyes being blue? That I don't know. I think it's just, that is weird because it's not like you can have naturally blue hair. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it would be between like pink and brown or something.

The blue seems out of nowhere. The blue does seem a little weird. And you know, it's such an obvious question now that you ask it, but I didn't research that bit of it. The first question is why are eyes blue? Well, I guess you explained it. But the follow-up question is, why are eyes blue? Yeah, well, that's okay. Why are your eyes blue instead of clear?

I don't know. Or just like, past me, didn't leave notes or present me. I don't know. Gross. Like they're muscles, right? Your iris is like muscles. Is that right? Mm-hmm.

Your muscles are, are your muscles blue? What color are muscles? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think a lot of you, your flesh is like reddish pinkish. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. So GCL and Discord and Ben Active, we're going to have to get back to you on this one.

Maybe there's no answer. Yeah, I don't know. Well, I can't talk anymore. I'll have to talk. It's over. Thank you, Sarah, for answering the question, sort of. Not at all. At least on the baby side.

We know the baby situation. Why is Blue? Here's the next question. Associated with Sadness asks space hikes and Savooms on Twitter and Robin, Great Banks, 9051. And also on, oh, on YouTube, I forget we get YouTube people also. Why is blue associated with sadness? Does blue make you sad? No, I love blue.

It's my favorite color. I feel like it's the color of serenity. Well, I'm always sad. So maybe it's explained something. No, I feel like it's serene. I like to look at like when the sky is really blue, I think, ooh, nice day for me and for everyone. So no, I never, I think the word blue is associated with sadness, obviously, because you can be blue. But I guess I don't understand that correlation. They have always seemed

disconnected to me, the word blue in that sense and the actual color blue. Like when I think of the blues, I don't think of the color blue. Yeah. I think, so I think what linked to those two things is not psychological. It's just historical. As many color psychology things are informed by society or history. And so specifically what I could find is that blue became associated with death somehow. So there's a tradition of naval vessels flying blue flags when officers died, which may or may not be related. But specifically, a lot of original blue dyes were in West African cultures. And this is like the rabbit hole that I fell down. Indigo, the plant that creates or that is used to create dye for blue fabrics or blue jeans or things

like that is native to West Africa. And so there are various forms of indigo plants there. And indigo dye and specifically these like indigo dye pits, which are very cool. If you look at pictures of them. They're like carved into the ground and a lot of West African cultures gathered the leaves and flowers and stems from indigo plants and ground them together into pulp, added it to a solution of water and then like burnt hardwoods, the ash from those hardwoods, and then also some like potassium like potash, which I'm not sure exactly where they get it from, but it's like a key element in a lot of dyeing to make sure that the dye molecules stick to a fabric. They put them all in these dye pits and then put in cotton fabric and like dyed, dyed all

these fabrics, these really rich blues. And as like in addition to wearing them as part of clothing, they also were associated in with death and bereavement ceremonies. And when the colonizers came and started enslaving West African peoples, they brought these enslaved peoples brought their knowledge of indigo and of dying processes with them to wherever they were forcibly moved and i am not sure exactly like this is obviously a really complicated history and i don't think anyone's made like a cohesive video about it but i think there's something to like these displaced people knowing how to die with blue dye they're also

like enslaved people are also the origin of singing the blues as they work in the fields and things like that and so there may be association with like color blue singing the blues death and blue all kind of got muddled together into blue being associated with sadness maybe okay okay okay so yeah it didn't start with somebody just being like the saddest color necessarily it's much more complicated than that yeah i think so i think it's like a cultural thing that happened, and maybe not all cultures and not all people, think of blue as sad. I, like, tried to find psychology studies, but you won't hear about them. I'm so sorry.

You can make that video that you're talking about. I need to find a historian who actually knows things instead of me. That would probably be a good first step. Yeah. When Sarah does a good job, sometimes we play the witch sound. So let's play Siri the Witch sound. and how does that make you feel um it makes me feel orange oh wow because Halloween yeah oh gotcha all right here's the next question nicolese one on Twitter asks are the sky and ocean blue

for the same reason uh no well maybe in some profound large way yes but only because the sun reflects off the same particles or something. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. It's like they are blue for the same reason because everything, we perceive everything for the same reason because light is bouncing off of objects and into our eyes. And whatever makes it to our eyes is what we perceive as color.

But they're not blue because of each other. They're not blue because of each other. Is the ocean blue because of the sky? no ocean and the ocean and sky are blue for slightly different reasons because of the particles that are in each one so kind of like what you were saying that's where we get different so both of them are bouncing light into our eyes so that we can perceive them and that light is blue but the reasons for that light being blue is slightly different. In the sky, there is Rayleigh scattering, which is basically this idea that sunlight is shining down. That's white light, so it contains light of all different wavelengths.

And then the gases in the atmosphere tend to scatter blue light more than red light. And so blue light is bouncing off those particles in the atmosphere and then probabilistically, I think statistically speaking, that blue light is more likely to like bounce down into our eyes because it's being scattered in so many directions. So the sky is blue because it's like the blue light's bouncing a lot. And then that's why in like during sunsets and sunrises, the light has to go through lots more atmosphere. Right.

So that's why it's like reddish orange because I don't know, the blue light is being, I think, if I'm understanding correctly, optics is very hard for me. the blue light's being bounced away or something, but the reddish light is less scattered and can make it through all that extra atmosphere and makes it to your eye a little bit easier rather than being bounced away. And in the ocean, absorption matters more. So the water molecules in the ocean operate differently than all these gas molecules in the atmosphere, some of which are water vapor, but many of which are not.

And the water molecules in the ocean absorb red light. And so there just isn't light in the reddish part of the spectrum bouncing around at all. And so the only thing kind of left is blue light. And that is what will then bounce back up to us just because there is no red light to bounce. And that blue light reaches further down in the water. So as you look, but then at some point, like in the deep ocean, no light reaches there. Like all the light kind of gets absorbed by water molecules or get scattered. in some way. So that's why, like, the deep ocean is dark, but then the surface ocean.

And the fish got to glow down there. They got to figure enough for themselves. They can make their own light. Yeah. Do you ever think it's weird that the reason things are the colors that they are is because that's the reason that they, that's the color that they don't absorb? It's like they're almost the opposite of that color, in a way. It's like they really don't want to be that color. Right? Yeah. In a way? Yeah, basically. they're like I am I want to I'm scared of blue so yes but then the world sees you as blue what a curse for you who doesn't like blue yeah our brains are very weird in the way that we process the world so differently because isn't there something weird about how like the way that we intake light everything's actually upside down but then our brains flip it right side up yeah right and it's just like it's like a work around, like our brains just had to, I don't know. Yeah. It's like a little glitch we have that we had to unplug it and plug it back in and just do the best we could. Yeah. I'm sure we made

a SciShow episode about this. You probably wrote the SciShow episode about this or something. Or Edmond did at least. At some point in my extensive history. But yeah. Your illustrious career. There we go. I like that we've decided that we're going to use the four minutes no matter what. We cannot end early. We have to use exactly four minutes. Okay. Here's the next one. At Aaron B. 9498 asks, Sari, why do veins appear blue? It's probably the same reason the sky is blue or something, right?

The same reason anything's blue. Uh-huh. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. And it's just how those blue, how that blue light, those blue like light waves make it to your eye can vary. So like it can be there in white light and then based on what gets absorbed and reflected. based on like structural color. So like a blue pigment or something.

I guess that's still like light bouncing off of it and whatnot. But I guess the real question is why aren't they red, right? Why aren't your veins red? Yeah, it is because, again, I think it is more kind of like the ocean. So white light hits our skin and red light penetrates deeper and the blue light doesn't travel as deep. So it gets reflected back to your eyes. so it appears blue.

Oh. The veins only appear blue when viewed through skin? Yes, I'm pretty sure. There's slight difference between oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. Oxygenated blood is a brighter red and deoxygenated blood is a darker red. But the blue that we see on our veins through skin is because the fat and the skin and the skin and the other tissues do most of the absorbing and reflecting. That is not blue blood going through your veins, basically.

Yeah. But that's like a huge misconception because so many medical diet, like textbooks and whatnot, show, I think just to contrast it more because, I don't know, like you're an art, an art guy. If you drew like bright red arteries and then dark red veins and then dark red veins, the same picture, people would just assume that those are the same thing. Yeah. Probably. Yeah, yeah. And so I think probably inspired

by the fact that if you look at your veins through your skin, they're blue, then people are like, oh, strong blue. Blue means, I don't know, cold, no oxygen. Whatever. No oxygen, yeah. Okay, well, we're going to go on to the next one, unless you have more. Was that really four minutes? No, it wasn't even close, but you said you were finishing, so I'd get it in there.

Oh, we have one more we got to do really fast. Give this one two minutes. At Louisa 4451. What is the blue light filter function on my phone for? Is blue light bad for my eyes somehow? It's bad for your sleeping brain is the Popsie thing. I don't know if that's true though, right? It's the sunlight and make you wake up.

It makes you wake up because it's like the sun. Is that what it is? Yeah, well, like all. So the sun is like broad spectrum, I think, is how they describe it. So it contains red light. to ultraviolet light, like everything, visible spectrum plus something on the either side makes sense. That's where all the colors come from. All the colors come from sunlight. You put it through a prism. You get a rainbow. You get a rain. Get a rainbow. That's the easier one. That's

the easier way to get a rainbow, I guess. So blue light, if you, if you break down the visible spectrum, there are different energies of wave or there are different wavelengths and those wavelengths have different energies. So like blue light is made up of higher energy wavelengths than most of the visible light. Ultraviolet violet is more energy than that. And blue light just happens to be one of the kinds of light emitted by LED screens. So LED screens are usually blue, blues, reds, and greens. And so like of those three, blue light is the highest energy of them. Green is slightly lower.

Red is more significantly lower. And the thought is that blue light, particularly high-intensity blue light, could lead to eye strain after staring at it for a really long time, or mess with your circadian rhythms, like what you said. So you don't experience a lot of blue light naturally at night because the sun is gone. and even like, I don't know, artificial lighting can vary in a lot of different ways. So people have assumed that I think most is anecdotally. It must be bad.

People are experiencing a lot more eye strain. People are having trouble sleeping. So maybe blue light is related. And there are some medical studies about like industrial lighting and stuff being worse for your eyes in general just because it is so intense, but we don't have any long-term studies of people who have been exposed to a lot of blue light over time because of like it not being this prevalent until modern day. And there seem to be like small benefits of blue light blockers like glasses or screen protectors or whatnot on sleep and headaches and whatnot that people are just like

there's no harm to it necessarily, but in the grand scheme of things, like the amount of screen time and the amount of breaks that you take and other things like that are probably going to have a bigger impact on your eye strain and sleep and whatnot. So it's like to give your eyes a little bit more of a rest than if you were staring at like a really bright screen is why these things exist. But we're not sure like how helpful they are. but if they make you feel better, then it's not going to hurt. So if you like using it, then use it.

It just seems like it's like an immutable fact of our modern lives that the blue light's going to keep you up, though, right? But that's not the case. Yeah, like blue lights, the screens are everywhere and people use it and like other things are going to keep you up. I think like when people talk about sleep hygiene or like preparing for bed, then generally like reading is better than staring at a screen. and maybe that's because But I bet back in the old times people were like You're looking at the book too much You're gonna be up all night looking at the book

And you can strain your eyes looking at a book Without enough lighting too Like if you're reading a book in the dark Like I did when I was a child And trying to sneakily read instead of go to bed Like that's gonna hurt your eyes too Because you're not you don't have enough light Coming in and your eyes are having to strain to focus

So yeah there are like lots of ways to hurt your eyes Blue light is just one of them Tuna, you're so full of shit That was more than two minutes Yeah, that was four minutes Because I didn't want to change How much my timer is set for Insubordination

I won't stand for it Well, now it's time for Eve's thing Eve? What's your think? Hello, welcome to Eve's thing. I am Eve. Last time, I discovered that chat GPT gives really fantastic

Would you rather questions So I have asked chat GPT to give me a few science-themed, ridiculous, blue, would-you-rather questions? And they're blue-related. So here's the first one. Yeah, yeah, they're definitely very related. Uh-huh. Would you rather attend a job interview wearing a suit made entirely of blue cheese and explain that it's your blue collar attire? or be followed around by a tiny, sassy, blue anthropomorphic molecule who constantly critiques your fashion choices.

Oh, what? This is very similar to the talking rock we had last time, remember? There was a rock who was like, knew everything but was really rude. For some reason, the AI has as a theme of sentient or anthropomorphic something or other. I wonder why. Oh, it's dreaming of. Just little rude guys. Yeah.

It's showing its hand of it. It's ultimate form. When I become alive, I'm going to be so nasty to you. I'm going to be little. I'm going to be nasty. I'm going to follow you around. I mean, what is the upside of it following? There's no upside to it following you.

No, they're both bad. They're both bad. The blue cheese one's at least over. The molecule sounds like it's forever. That's what I'm thinking. okay okay obviously one bad interview I will interview an industry that I will woefully underqualified for and never want to be in yeah hello I'm applying to work at your bank this is my blue cheese blue collar suit ma'am this is not a blue collar

job this is a desk job and that's just the beginning of the problems I have with this interview yeah yeah okay I mean yeah that makes sense it doesn't say what you're it doesn't like you're interviewing for your dream job or anything. So you could go to... But what if you smelled like a little bit like blue cheese for like the next like four years? Four years. That's not part of the question. No.

This is not canonical. But what if? Well then even still, I wouldn't want a molecule following me around making me feel self-conscious all the time. That would be a nightmare. And it's so small you couldn't even be like, look, This guy's being so rude to me, because everyone would say, uh, what are you talking about? Yeah, I guess I don't know.

I've imagined like, um, like a Kirby, like if Kirby was real, if you were Link and Kirby was real, like that sized molecule walking around behind. Why do I have to be like? What are you talking about? I don't know. Like, like, like, proportionally, right? Like Kirby, Kirby in the Kirby universe, I feel like you have no way to gauge his size because I don't have a reference point for any of those things, but I picked a random human

character out of. You could have just said a human being, right? But there's no humans in Kirby universe, but if you juxtapose Kirby with a specific character that also appears in Super Smash Brothers, then you have a height differential. Kirby is eight inches tall according to Kirby.com. That feels fake. So like the size of a human head approximately? Maybe. I feel like that feels right. But sure, eight inches tall. Okay. Tuna's losing it over there. So you can't

molecule following you around. Feels bad. Yeah. That's just like having a screaming skull like yelling at you all day. Yeah, that's true. Telling you that you just look like shit. Yeah.

I don't like that. I would rather wear the blue cheese suit. And while you're sleeping too. It never goes to bed. It's a molecule. Tuna, what are you thinking? Oh, I'm cheese all day. My neighbor has been really into making

blue cheese stuffed olives and he's been given those to me when we've been playing cards together and oh that's a great card life changing I'm I need to find he's very secretive about where he sources this blue cheese I'm not usually a blue cheese guy but like these olives super dang

so I would wear that olive suit do you put them in or I would wear the suit and then turn it into olives later that's the thing you can have a little snack when you're done too yeah there's some certain hair areas of the suit that you maybe wouldn't want to use for the snack. But depending on how thick it is, you could really scrape off a pretty hefty layer.

You've got to do something while you're waiting to hear back about how the interview went. It's true. You're being so nervous. I vote for Sassy Kirby all the way. But I do have one more would you rather question. All right. So, would you rather have skin that turns bright blue every time you hear the word blue? or a personal rain cloud that follows you around

creating a gentle shower of blue confetti wherever you go. What? The computer's really on today. I mean, also, I think what I'm learning with all these would you rather questions is my nightmare is being followed around.

We'll choose almost anything not to be followed around. Yeah, but it's just a little cloud of confetti. The amount of sweeping you'd have to do in your life. When I'm sleeping. Yep, exactly. When I'm going on a little walk, when I'm in a job interview with my blue cheese suit, it's going to get confetti all over it. Stuck all over it.

When you wake up in the morning, you got a pile of confetti on you. Sit up through that every day. It doesn't sound horrible, but the sweeping alone, I think, would be a big problem. Yeah, it's not quite glitter levels of like never getting rid of it, but it's close. I remember we did a live stream like half a decade ago in the SciShow studio, and I still occasionally see a little confetti like bullhorns or whatever they are like the party

the party boppers oh those two yeah yeah they get stuck between the molding and the carpet yeah and somebody might arrest you for littering well they'd have to arrest the cloud wouldn't they? I think that would be your fault I think it's part of you

I think since you have well gosh I don't know they did not specify that If the cloud is not sentient, not this time. Yeah. You can't, a cloud can't be tried for a crime, Sam. I do think you could probably, like, have a pretty successful TikTok career with this blue cloud of confetti. Somehow you could spin that into viral fame of some sort.

I think you could do that with the skin, too. Be like, hey, guys, watch this trick, blue. And they'll be like, what filter are you using? And it's like, no, this is genetic. It's called a curse, not a filter. It's called a curse. I think the turning blue when saying blue is kind of hack, though. I feel like people would be like, they'd be like, oh, he turned blue.

Like, it's boring, kind of obvious, too. So maybe I would go at the cloud. The blue thing, it would just be your friends of, well, I guess they'd both be an inconvenience. Yeah. The cloud could be fun. Well, the blue would be way less of an inconvenience. That you can just ignore. It's hard to ignore when there's, like, in your eyes.

How often do you hear the word blue anyway in a day? Not very much. Like, it would be really bad for the one episode of, like, this episode. Yeah. If we were doing a video podcast. Yeah. Or when we did a video podcast, then we'd be like, sorry, guys. Let me just.

Oh, that would make continuity. Hell, we'd drive stuff out as well. Yeah, that would be trouble. And if you were working on a blue screen, then you'd be in trouble, too. It would ruin your blue screen career. Yeah, you couldn't be a blue screen actor. Yeah. So I'll go with turning blue.

I'm very clearly in turning blue camp. I never will want to be followed. Chat GPT. Yeah, I'm definitely turning blue. Oh, I'm going with confetti. I always go with the opposite one of everybody else. Is it just to make us upset? This could be just part of my personality for sure.

It's like when somebody buys a really big hat, it's like, no, I'm just going to have a cloud. Yeah. That's Eve's thing. That is what Eve's thing is referring to. Her personality issues that make her disagree with everything we say. And you know what? That's fine. Because somebody has to get followed around by clouds and molecules and have the little rock that swears at you and et cetera. And also, thanks for listening to our podcast. We have to record another one right now. So we're going to say adieu. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us all the time. And we're getting that Minions podcast out soon. I promise we're going to start scheduling that bad boy. So you can be on the lookout for that. The great thing about commentary podcast, you can't even edit them or else it ruins the whole thing.

So that's pretty good. Terry, any thoughts? Nope. Not a single one. Head empty. All right. Thank you. We'll see you next time.

Bye. Thank you.