SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 6

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on August 31, 2021 titled "Poopoopeepeepedia Episode 6."Original Patreon description: Alternative name to this podcast that keeps changing: Hank's Hangover Corner! Poor guy was too hungover to be properly stumped but we hope you enjoy Hank's humble brag about his famous friends and their mysterious hangover cures.SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! 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

I have a hangover. Oh no. I drink one and a half beers. Oh, you didn't even finish? Not even two. You pour the rest of it down the sink or something? Well, no. It was a growler, so I had the last of it, was the last beer.

So I don't know if it was a half a beer or three quarters or what, but I felt very good at the time, and now I don't feel good. Was it an IPA? It was an IPA. Those will get your ass every time with a hangover. Especially if you're old. They sneak up on you. And especially if you have a medicine that incapacitates your liver.

Oh, yeah, that ought to do it, too. My doctor's never like, got to watch out for drinking too much. It's just like, oh, yeah, your hangovers will be real bad. And I'm like, is there more to it than that? It feels like there should be more to it than that. But no. But yeah, actually, we're trying to get me on a different medication right now,

but my insurance company said no. So that's the current situation. It's great that a doctor can be like, have a really long conversation with their patient in which the patient finally comes to terms of the fact that they need to get on a new medication that's gonna be a little bit less convenient for them, but longterm better for their health outcomes.

And then the insurance company is like, actually, we decided as the experts in the room, we're going to send you a letter letting you know that no, you shouldn't do that. Anyway, SciShow Tangents is supported by patrons on Patreon. And we are extremely grateful for that. And we make a special Patreon only podcast. It's called Poopy Pee Pee Pedia. It's where we talk about ulcerative colitis and hangovers and I don't know, pee as well.

But Sam, what is it actual, I didn't even look at the show notes. I'm sure there was an intro I was supposed to read. Not really. You know what, I had a big month. So I didn't have a lot of time to do anything fun. Okay, well here's what our show notes says. It says, I'm joined as always by science expert, Sari Riley.

Hello. And our resident W man, Sam Schultz. Hi. Why'd I take you off guard so much, Sari? I don't understand. I don't know. I was not, I've been here. I've been chatting about ulcerative colitis.

I was really deep in thought about how I'm trying to get health insurance now, like state-sponsored health insurance. And I keep calling, being like, is there anything I can do? My antidepressants are running out faster and faster. I'm just going to be really sad one day and not have the energy to call, because that's how that works. So I was lost in thought about my medical care situation. I can see how that would be distracting.

Oh my God. This month, apparently we're going to talk about the American health care system. Yeah, let's do it. We're not going to try and top Poopy Peepypedia. We're just going to go back to the basics and answer some good old non-human waste related Patreon patron questions.

Sam, I have heard that you have collected questions and Sari and I have no idea. No, Sari knows. We've not done any research. Oh, Sari knows the answer. I knew I was at 4 p.m. last night. Okay. Whew. I was worried because I did take a quick peek and I was like, I do not know the answer to

some of these. Oh no, Sari took care of it. Kind of. Awesome. I'm so excited to find out about- One of the questions on here I left a comment that was like, I don't know. I think it's this. Is it the last one? Because that's the one I want to know the answer to. Yeah, it is the last one. Oh, okay. Well, we'll ask it. Maybe somebody will help us answer it.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Do you guys have any hangover cures? I've had so far I've tried coffee. No, my whole life I've gotten horrible beer hangovers only from beer I can drink whiskey and stuff and like feel pretty good the next day but beer especially like an IPA just fucks me up and They're like on get rid of a bowl. I want And this is gonna say I'm gonna tell that story because it's gonna sound like bragging.

No, please do. Okay. Just for us, your friends. I once was in Los Angeles. Oh wow. And. Oh wow. Bragg much? Big man in town.

And I was gonna go play beer and board games, which is a YouTube channel where they drink beer and play board games, and they drink quite a lot. That's kind of the schtick. And I was like, I'm gonna have a super bad hangover. And I was over, before, I was over at Will Wheaton's house and I was telling him about this because he watches the show.

Star Trek, man? Yeah, Star Trek, Will Wheaton. And he was like, let me give you. And then he opened up his cabinet and it was like full of pills. Oh, it was just like vitamin supplements to the all the way to the roof. And he was like, I'll give you this. This will be good. This and he just gave me a bag. And he was like, take all of these, like take these before and take these

after and take these the next morning. And I did not feel that bad. Wow. Mr. Wheaton, tell us what next morning. And I did not feel that bad. Wow, Mr. Wheaton, tell us what you did. You don't remember what they were? You know, no idea. They were so many different things. That sounds like the most LA experience I could think of

is like you are at a slightly more famous friend's house and then they give you a bunch of mystery nutrition things and you're like, does it work? But like they've been learning about it for months and months and months. Does it work? I don't know. Yeah, LA, very, very slightly famous mystery nutrition.

Yeah. Is that basically the tagline of the town? I just sleep, but you're obviously awake and doing things. Yeah, you can't sleep. Yeah, I have to do stuff. But I wanna answer one of these questions. Sam asked me a question. Brie Ash asks, Hank, specifically, I'd assume,

what's your best Pelican fact? Ah, it rotates. I like that there's a species of Pelican that grows a horn, which is just like, are you joking? A bird horn? Where? On their head? On their beaks, they grow beak horns, the males do, to like show off, and then after breeding season,

it just falls off like an antler. What the hell? Yeah, it's just like a carotidness bump on their beak. Very weird, just to show how virile and successful they are. Look at all the extra keratin I have. Yeah, look at that, I got so much keratin. I can make you the richest Pelican woman on earth. But I recently, and I haven't actually got to the bottom of this one because it's not entirely clear.

Pelicans are mouth breathers. They don't have nose holes. They don't have Nairs. N-A-R-E-S. Is that what a nose hole science word is? I think that that's a specifically a bird thing. Okay. But maybe not. Nairs. The nostrils.

Never mind. Everything's nostrils. Yeah. So like birds definitely don't have noses because they have beaks, but they have nairs because they have nose holes. But pelicans don't have nose holes because it would probably be bad if you're diving really fast into water to have your nose holes out. But they do have, they do have like holes under their beaks that are not nostrils.

They don't breathe through them. The only thing that they do is secrete salt because pelicans are ocean feeders and so they salt accumulates inside of them and so they have these like, their nostrils have evolved into just like salt secretion organs, which is cool. But they don't breathe, like the way that we do, we think like you breathe through your mouth, then you breathe through the hole at the back of your mouth where like food goes in.

But pelicans have a food hole, and then their breathe hole is in the roof of their mouth. Oh. So it's like very separate holes. So they're like at the top of the like where our sort of soft pout would be, they have hole and I, I, this is my favorite Pelican fact because I also have one of those holes that connects my sinuses to the roof of my mouth, which is not the uncommon thing for people to have. And it, depending on like the sort of state of my body,

sometimes it sort of swells closed and sometimes it's open. Sometimes like super open, I can just like suck air right out of my nostril. I'm gonna see if I can make a noise with it for you. No, it's too closed right now. No, sorry. This is so weird. I've never heard of this hole before.

Is it like, can you get water in your nose through your mouth then? It's basically, for me, it's basically like closed over unless I start sucking and then like, it's like a flap of skin is over it. So it's not like stuff can go up through it. But some people have pretty big ones and can actually have to get surgically corrected.

And I used to think that I would be able to breathe through my, I would be able to breathe underwater. When I was a kid, I thought I could breathe underwater because I could suck air through, but I didn't, like where was the air, where I think the air was coming from. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. When did you discover you had this hole?

I'm like, could I have one? I don't think, I think I would have known by now. Just close your mouth and pull your tongue down and see if any air comes into your mouth. Nope. When it's a free-flowing, probably I'm all inflamed because of my hangover, but I'm free-flowing I gotta make a video about it where I suck some air and you can hear it make a little whistle noise.

Whoa. Weird. That's cool. So can pelicans not choke? A pelican could choke if it got stuff in that hole. But it couldn't choke the way that we would. So we sort of just imagine that it's all sort of one thing back there. And like, what a dumb way to do it.

Yeah. But obviously, like, it'd be very bad for a pelican to have that situation because they have to do a lot of work down at the end of the throat there. Yeah, they got some weird mouth stuff going on. I, what, wait, does, do your lungs come off of, how does your air get into your lungs? So the air hole is in front of the swallow hole. Okay, okay, okay.

I can remember my high school diagrams now. You got a little flap, it's called the epiglottis that covers it up so that you don't get food in there all the time. But when you breathe, it can like open. But sometimes it doesn't do so well. And then you end up like drinking your water and then coughing.

Yeah. I feel like my epiglottis has gotten softer as I've gotten older and more often I just swallow, like a normal swallow and a little bit of water is like, hey, I'm in your esophagus. And I'm like, I didn't want that to happen. I'm not getting betterophagus. And I'm like, I didn't want that to happen. I'm not getting better at this as I age.

I'm getting worse at swallowing. Oh dear. I think I'm getting better. And I think it's because I'm putting less pressure on myself because I would consistently I love it. Like swallow water. Maybe that's my problem.

Bad. Whenever I had to be quiet. Movie theaters, classrooms. Anytime where it would draw an inorganic amount of attention to myself, which is like my worst nightmare, then I would end up coughing really loudly. And now I just don't really care as much and I've been drinking water better. That's amazing. So I'm so happy for you.

Thank you. I am too. With this newfound self-confidence and better drinking skills. Yeah, you're so in touch with yourself too that you know that. That's beautiful. I know nothing about myself. No, I'd like to not introspect at all

for fear of what I would find. You ready for another question? Yeah. Rachel Holmes asks, are there any animals that are known to be evolving or changing behavior rapidly to match pace with the forces of climate change? I mean, the first thought that I had, evolution is a weird thing. It doesn't just happen sort of in the textbook way. One of the things that happens

is you have closely related species who can have fertile offspring and then sort of like that can feed into a kind of new species or a changed version. And that's happening with polar bears and grizzly bears, where grizzly bears are going more north and they're breeding with polar bear populations and that is creating a kind of polar bear that is different from both grizzly bears and polar bears that has a little bit of grizzly bear in it that maybe will be part of how polar bears continue to exist in the future if things go poorly. What the hell? Yeah, so like that's a sort of like a way that evolution happens rapidly is where you have gene transfusions from other closely related species. That can suddenly be nearer to each other than they had been able to before? Yeah, or like a polar bear's traditional,

like where they live, is now becoming acceptable habitat to another species. And so that also might be the way that polar bears go extinct is that they just sort of like get absorbed into grizzlies. You also have to think about climate change, not only as getting hotter, but also like giant temperature swings.

So more natural disasters and more fluctuations of like a heat wave followed by a cold snap. And those are the things that researchers in this field are most worried about where adaptation generally occurs alongside gradual environmental change. And so like we've been talking about, as an environment gradually gets warmer,

then grizzly bears can move into polar bear territory and start mating. But then all of a sudden, if it gets cold again, for whatever reason, or if there is, like, an, I don't know, like an ice storm, then the grizzly bears are gonna die. And they're not ready to, like, withstand that effect of climate change. Yeah, I mean, well, in general, like, this is not how... This isn't the way that evolution

happens. This is the way that mass extinctions happen. Changes this fast are mass extinction bait. You know, but the other way that evolution happens, and this is like, I'm not advocating for this, nor do I think that this is probably the most likely outcome because I think that there are some good ways to face this problem. But if there is a real mass extinction, like on the level of the other half dozen that we've had on Earth, the other way that evolution happens is in response to mass extinctions, where you have all of these available ecological niches that used to be full, but there was a mass extinction. And so now you have a whole other sort of range of ways

to solve those problems that you wouldn't have gotten before because those niches were full. But that's a very, that's not like a thousand year problem. That's like a, that's the thing that happens over tens of millions of years. And for clarity, tens of millions of years sounds like a long time. It's longer than you think. Like basically, I'm saying the Earth will heal, but it will heal on a scale that is unknowable to us.

Oh, okay, okay. Like over a time frame that is deeply inhuman in its length. Emily M. asks, why were dinosaurs so big? I heard it's cause of oxygen or something, right? There was some kind of oxygen situation. There was a period where there were really big insects and insects could get bigger because of oxygen. I'm not sure if that was a factor in that.

One thing you gotta know about why dinosaurs were so big is that question we need to answer isn't why were dinosaurs so big, it's why were the big dinosaurs so big? Because there's lots of dinosaurs that were totally normal sized and just like chickens and even like little old little lizard bird things that were not big.

But why were the big dinosaurs so big? I actually am not sure why big dinosaurs were bigger than the land animals we have today. And that was a great role play of a scientist, a dinosaur scientist, answering this question. So, congratulations, you get the part. Basically, scientists stare at, specifically, the sauropod dinosaurs, so like that's like your brontosaurus, et cetera, the herbivorous ones, the ones that eat plants, specifically of the Jurassic period and some into the Cretaceous period.

Were the largest terrestrial animals ever, like bigger than any other land animal that we've seen. And we don't really know. And so they're a bunch of guesses though. And that's the information I can supply is a bunch of guesses. That's great news. Getting that giant keeps them from being eaten because you can't swallow them whole. So like if you just get big, then it was evolutionarily favorable, even though it

took a lot of energy because you couldn't get chomped as easy. You were too big and bulky. Number two, you can reach more food. The climate at the time, which is warm with high carbon dioxide levels, so there was a lot of planty stuff around. And so these giant herbivorous dinosaurs might've filled the ecological niche of the tall guys. Like I got, someone's got to eat the tall branches. From what we understand about their stomachs, they didn't chew really as much and just like

swallowed branches and leaves and twigs. And so they like sucked in a lot of food very quickly. And so their stomachs needed to be more efficient in digestion. And so that might have driven physiological shifts for larger bodies because you've got all these like giant twigs in you and need to break that down inside rather than outside. Like you can focus on the chewing innovation so much as like get it into the body trunk

and then wander around slowly for a while. Is that like, like cows are so big because they got so many stomachs to do all their stuff? I don't know. Maybe. They're big. But like, there wasn't grass. So, part of why cows, I think, are successful is because there are lots of fields of grass

to munch on and there wasn't a lot of grass, don't think in the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. Trees and bushes and stuff so like bigger chunkier plants. And so I imagine that like there was like co-evolution between these big predators like the Tyrannosaurus and the big sauropods. Like because now like there's nothing that can eat an elephant. You know, if you're a full grown elephant, that's it. Like a rhinoceros, nope, you can't eat that.

But if there was a Tyrannosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus could take down an elephant. So, maybe there was some kind of arms race going on there. Yeah, that's entirely possible. And especially with like their bone structure being relatively similar in that dinosaurs were working off of the same template for lack of a better word of like you have hollow bones.

And so you can grow big because as long as your body mass can be supported by the skeletal structure underneath it and the muscles. So then it's just like possible to grow big. That isn't necessarily an explanation of like why they got big, but it's part of all these discussions because it's like, how did they get so big? Whereas like for mammals with mammalian temperature

regulation, especially like elephants are about as big as you can go, giraffes, et cetera. But we don't think dinosaurs had the really high metabolic rates of mammals and birds because like the nutrition wasn't there and because it would have been way too much energy for a giant body size like that. So scientists also think it's because they took that energy that they got from took that energy that they got from eating and put it into growth instead of body temperature. So like, if there's a finite number, finite amount of energy, like we grow some

from baby to adult and like other mammals grow some, but dinosaurs grow so much, like a sauropod baby might've been like duck sized and then to become the mega fauna that it was, just like so much growth. But if they were somewhere in between being, what are the two words, warm and cold blooded, which I don't like using, but like... SIDDHARTHA Ectothermic and endothermic. KSK Yeah, those ones. They're somewhere between

being ectothermic and endothermic. Like they mostly relied on their environment, but when they needed a little boost, they used some of that energy. Then they could use the energy they gained from eating to just focus on growth instead of regulating body temperature and the way that current megafauna regulate their body temperatures quite a bit with their metabolisms and with their energy intake. We gotta go back in time and ask them, hey, why are you so big?

Yeah. Good job, Sam. You should go. You should build that time machine. And then figure it out and become the most famous dinosaur scientist of our time. Of any time ever. Of any time, yeah. That's the main thing that a time machine can guarantee you. Yeah. I'm not satisfied with being the greatest scientist of this time. What about all the other times? The other day I had the saddest thought I've ever had, I think in retrospect,

where I was like, if I had a time machine, I could go to work five times at the same exact time and do all my work at once, and then I could have the rest of my life to be free. But why would I have to go to work? I could rob banks and stuff probably. See, I'm... You're dreaming so small. Why? What could I do? You could like go back and gather gold before the gold rush was a thing and then just say hold on to it. Just buy Bitcoin. Sports betting, Bitcoin.

I could have done the GameStop thing when it was like exactly the right time to sell all that stock. You could pick the winning lottery numbers before you just know them. Okay, well I'll call you up when I invent my time machine and say, what kind of griffs can I pull with this thing?

I've just been going to work five times at the same exact time. I know, but that's the main thing that we're trying to solve for. I know. Do we... was that the last question? No, there's one more question, the one that we don't have the answer to, that we need to ask everybody else the question.

Oh, yes. Okay, that's why we need to do it. I was just gonna skip it, but hell. I want to... I'm fascinated by this question, and I don't know how to answer it. I could... I can take a stab at it, but... Yeah. Naomi Williams asks, Can sound waves break the same way that waves of water do? What would it sound like?

That, my first thought was nah, and then I was like, well, I mean they're waves and if like they hit, so like a wave of water is constrained on one side, in a way that a sound wave usually isn't, and the bottom side, and in open ocean, it's kind of not. But then as the shore gets closer and the wave gets shallower, it forces an interaction between the trough

and the peak of the wave. But isn't that what the same exact thing sound is doing? It's being pushed back forward by the sound behind it. Yeah, but there isn't a thing below it, you know? Oh, okay. And that makes it so that one part of the wave is traveling faster than the other part of the wave, and that's what causes a break, I'm pretty sure.

Maybe I don't know what a break is. Well, it's like, so you got the wave is just like a sine wave where it goes up and down and up and down and really smooth normal. That would be like an open ocean wave. So the top is just hitting air, but the bottom starts to hit the ground, you know, the sand. That bottom part slows down because it's hitting

stuff and the top part keeps going and that causes the wave to, like, the whole thing to slow down until the top, like, falls on top of the wave. And so the question is, how would you make that happen to a sound wave? And I do, and my first thought was like, nah, because there's no, but like there are, there's lots of sound waves running through a lot of different stuff. And if that did happen, what would it sound like? I don't know. It's probably like staticky and weird, but I want to know. Like, is it possible? I don't know. Did that, any of that make sense, Sari?

Yeah, that's, that's kind of like what I was thinking. I think that like the phenomenon of waves breaking to me, and maybe this is like, I've already said multiple times that physics is not my strong suit, but the phenomena of waves breaking has to do with the fact that water interacts with different mediums very differently. Like being in itself, it can do the wave,

like the wave can propagate. In air, it'll propagate one way, and then the ground is like a physical barrier that changes the flow of it. Sound waves don't, like they do change in different mediums, but not as drastically. I can't imagine what circumstances would cause like part of a wave to travel faster than another,

because like that's not how. Well, yeah. Like air. I mean, you can see that, that, but the problem is like, so like there are things through which sound travels at different speeds. So water and air would be a fine example. So like, if you somehow made a sound

that was going both into water and air, they would be going different speeds, but those waves wouldn't be interacting with each other. The part that's in the water moving differently than the part that's in the air doesn't affect the part that's in the air moving differently than the part that's in the air doesn't affect the part that's in the air in the same way that a water wave was, because water wave is made of mass in a different way

rather than just compression. Yeah, and so like that makes me think that, like because sound waves can undergo compression and expansion and like addition and subtraction in ways that water waves don't as easily because there's like that mass component to it, then it would just sound like a louder sound or a quieter sound or like a garbled sound

or like a mixture of a couple. Different pieces of wavelengths taken out a little bit. It's gonna get to you at different speeds, that kind of thing. Yeah, rather than like a boom or anything. Yeah, but I bet like somebody who knows a lot about acoustics would be like, oh, there is an analogous phenomenon.

Yeah. And it's not exactly a sound wave crashing, but in this situation, there is a way that a wave can do a thing that makes, and I want them to write me that email. Tuna, do you know anything? I mean, I think you guys mostly. Tuna, do you know anything? I mean, I think you guys mostly have it as far as I know.

The different mediums I think is the key. Cause when you talk about sound is just a pressure wave and not necessarily like a physical water wave. And I don't know enough about water waves to say like, oh, is there something happening in the water that's not happening in the air above it? For all the media that we experience, sound just sort of, like it'll change speeds,

like you were talking about, like sound travels way faster in water, but it's just like, oh, that pressure wave is gonna propagate, and like, if it hits something, it tends to like bounce and scatter and cancel things out, and so you start like losing frequencies. The closest thing I can think of is that, which like the diffusion kind of stuff

that you set up in a sound studio to make so that you're not getting like super clean reflections. You're getting like tiny things bouncing all around and canceling out, but that's not quite the same. Yeah, I mean, the difference is like a wave of water is a wave of something in something else. So when we see a water wave, that's a wave of water in air because we're seeing it in air.

But a sound wave is a wave of pressure in itself. Like a sound wave is not a wave of something in something else, it's just a wave in something. A sound wave is just compression of air or compression of molecules. So it's not like a wave of something in something else, it's just a wave of itself. I feel like I made that more complicated,

but I did make it more correct. That is the only way I know how to say what I'm trying to say. Yes, yeah, I think water waves are a particularly weird thing. And yeah, maybe we should maybe like we think of water waves as the normal wave, but they're the weird one. They're the weird one. Yeah. They're like the wave that doesn't make compared to all the other waves that

exist, like sound waves and anything like light spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. Water waves are the weird ones because we can actually see them, see them, but they're big. And they're sticky or something. Do they do that because it's all stuck together? They're kissing, like we said in the water episode. The water molecules are kissing. Yeah.

I think you could get waves in molecules that aren't kissing too, probably. Right? Right? Right? I'm just trying to think of liquids that don't have hydrogen bonds and it feels like they'd still have waves. Yeah. But anyway. If you throw a rock in a pool of, I don't know.

Liquid methane. Yeah. You probably get waves. Weird, everybody. Well, we didn't have a good answer for that last one, and we didn't have a good answer for my hangover or Ceri's healthcare problem. No. Health insurance, man. for that last one, but and we didn't have a good answer for my hangover or Sari's health care problem.

Health insurance, man. That is what I do. Kate, did you? Nah, we can talk about it later. Thank you everyone for your support. We'll be back next month with another Patreon only podcast of Poopy Peepipedia or Q and Bidet or whatever this one was. Or Hank's Hangover Corner.

Hank's Hangover Corner, or Stump Hank, which we may be doing next time, because Sam has hinted that that might be the thing that happens. And yeah, so we really appreciate it, and we can't wait to be back with more Tangents soon. We're actually recording later today. Yeah. Goodbye!