SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 8

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on October 29, 2021 titled "Tangents ~BOOOOnus~ Pod Episode 8: Spooky Scary Science."Original Patreon description: Why do we get the creepy crawlies? Why do phobias exist? Why is my milk wriggling?!? I'd avoid eating anything around minute 18:30 if I were you...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

INTRO MUSIC Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's a bonus episode. I'm Hank Green and joining me, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly, and and our resident everyman Sam Schultz. This month, obviously, we've been talking about scary science because it's Halloween. We're going to be answering your creepiest, crawliest science questions and Sam and Sari are going to tell a couple of science horror stories. I'm not going to because Sam's in the emailmini was like, can you get together a science horror story? And I said, maybe. And then the answer was actually no.

No, I just sent it to you as a, what's it called? A politeness. If you wanted to write a science horror story, you are more than welcome to at all times. So is it a science horror story that you wrote or is it a horror story from the world of science? Yeah, it's basically a fact off, but it kind of scary. Yeah, it's kind of scary

And also it wasn't really quite good enough to be a fact off. So Yeah, yeah, not quite sciencey enough, but a little bit mysterious. I know what I would have done now that i'm thinking about it well, maybe Give it a try. Isn't there like a isn't there like a slab of uranium that killed like two Leading scientists in a separate occasions? Haunted uranium. The death core. The death core.

Wow, that's a good one. That's mine. That was a good one. Look up the Wikipedia article for the death core and imagine Hank is speaking to you. This is my new podcast. I just read random Wikipedia pages. OK, we're going to start out with a science question from a patron. Robin Weaver asks, why do you sometimes get that creepy crawly feeling on your skin?

It's like some kind of phantom bug is cruising around your body. I don't know. I often, I've been asked a number of times, what is like itching molecularly? I know that this is only peripherally related to your question, Robin, but I've spent enough time sort of like looking at what itching is molecularly to have a little bit of an idea of it.

And what it has outlined to me is that it must be extremely important that we itch, but only the ones you don't notice, only the little ones. Because like the big ones that are annoying, like that's not productive, that's counterproductive. Now I'm actually causing myself harm because I've been bitten by something and like I can't sleep and I'm like rubbing myself raw.

And you can't say, brain, turn off mosquito by itch. Please, please. I don't need to know about this anymore, yeah. Yeah, but it must be important to be able to scratch all the little itches that we have. And now that I'm talking about it, you probably are feeling some. Yeah, my head's itchy now.

You're thinking about it. So I don't know about the biological importance. Everything that I was reading about it, like I guess there had to have been some reason it came about. And maybe there's a reason, a positive reason of like, it helps us in some way. Most of the rationale I found was that it was just like a little, like a blip in your nervous system because our bodies are so carefully balanced that if something goes wrong, even in a little bit of a way, then you get an itchy sensation.

And so, from what I was reading... Are you talking about the creepy crawlies or just itches in general? Creepy crawlies. Okay, you're talking about the creepy crawlies. But those are also itchy, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. Like less so than what you're describing. It is like a mosquito bite.

Yeah, it's funny because I feel like I have had the creepy crawlies, but I don't, I can't like reproduce the sensation in my mind. I can't like think of what it's like. I'm having the same problem. Like I know every time I see a spider for like an hour, I'm like, ooh, he's on my back. But I can't picture what that feels like.

But it's just like, it's like a blip cascading through your nervous system? Kind of. So the medical term is parasthesia and it encompasses a lot of those feelings that you like can't quite pinpoint, but you know it when you feel it. So like any sort of prickling or numbness or tingling or crawling or itching around your body. So like pins and needles or like a limb falling asleep, falls under the category of paresthesia.

And so does like the creepy crawlies. And so does like a shiver that just goes randomly through your body without the wind making it colder. Yeah, pee shivers. Well, that's pee causing it. That's your vagus nerve involved. We know the cause of pee shivers. It's right there in the name.

Yeah, we named it that way, but it's not P peristhesia, it's just whatever. I think people are extrapolating from a couple of different places. So one pins and needles is if you put pressure on a nerve or blood vessel for too long, that like circulation gets messed up.

And so like your nervous system isn't getting the, or your muscles or like that whole region of your body isn't getting the nutrients it needs, the oxygen it needs. And so it kind of like shuts down and gets tingly. And so it's possible that just like moving through the body if communication gets cut off in some way, could be tingly.

There's also chronic paresthesia. So if you like are persistently feeling creepy crawlies or prickling or numbness, it could be a sign of like serious nerve damage to your central nervous system or brain or spinal cord. But in the case of like to get serious and scale it back to the goof. So in some instances, it might be like a real thing that was itching on your skin. So whether it's like something very, very minor, like static electricity causing your hair to move or a light breeze or just having like dry skin can cause creepy crawlies along with itching. And once you've like habituated that region of your body to feel that way,

your nervous system is just like, ah, I'm being a little wonky now. Or you're thinking about it. Like I think there are psychological, as we'll talk about in this episode, there are like psychological links to physical behavior. So like in the way that when I get anxiety, I get hives on my skin.

Like if I'm stressed out, I get hives. And so I think for some people, if you're like scared of spiders and you're thinking about spiders, then that could cause that sensation across your body because something in your brain is like, well, we gotta be alert now. And then your nervous system is like hypersensitive for some reason. And you're feeling the thing that is not there. I thought of the time I get them the most.

It's when I'm running up the stairs and it's dark behind me, you know? Oh, yeah! And I think it's my back skin preparing for the knife plunging into it. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. That seems right. I also get this when I witness someone else being hurt. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Like I feel like I like my body just has like feels.

Yeah. Like I'm going to experience a feeling now. When I see like neck based slashing, my neck is just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Neck based slashing? Yeah. Like when like in a movie, like when someone gets their throat cut or something. Oh, in a movie. Then I'm just like, blah, not really. I was like, blah, not real. You know, all the net base slashing,

all the streets of Missoula. I guess I assumed that you were seeing fake people getting hurt, but you are seeing real people getting hurt. Yeah, like somebody, like Orin falls off the swing or like somebody like hits their, like I like witness a toe stubbing, you know? Yeah, sympathetic. Sari, now that we have vague answers to just like,

it turns out our bodies are fricking weird. Do you have a spooky story for us? I do. Let's take a trek into the Himalayas to around 5,000 meters or 16,400 feet above sea level. Converting from Mexico to Imperial is very spooky. Ooh, scary, yeah. We're in the Uttarakhand state of India

and arrive at a medium-ish sized lake tucked in the rocky paths. It's a little late in the year, but still autumn and it's been relatively warm. So instead of being frozen over, this lake contains liquid water and something else that's pretty hard to overlook. Skeletal remains from over 300 different humans However, this lake contains liquid water and something else that's pretty hard to overlook. Skeletal remains from over 300 different humans with bits of flesh or hair preserved in the frigid air. This is Roopkund, initially named as a small reservoir for its clear turquoise water, and

now it has spookier nicknames like Mystery Lake or the much more harrowing Skeleton Lake. What's the mystery? That there's a bunch of skeletons? Just a bunch of the dead people. Just a bunch of dead people. Yeah. I'm about to say, my next sentence starts with, as with any mystery. Oh, we don't know why there's skeletons in it?

Okay, continue. Yeah, this lake is great. I know about, it's going to get weirder before it gets less weird. So as with any mystery, there have been lots of arbitrary guesses about where these bones came from. Remains of soldiers, of refugees, of a king's court, of entertainers, of a forgotten disease. But those are just speculation. From research though, a couple explanations have bubbled to the top.

According to research done around 2004, spurred by a National Geographic documentary, many of the skeletons dated back to around 850 CE plus or minus 30 years, and their skulls were found to have dramatic head injuries. According to folklore in the area, at one point a goddess was so enraged at visitors to her mountain sanctuary that she flung massive hailstones at them. And that's what these researchers concluded too, that these people died from a suddenly severe hailstorm that smashed into their unprotected skulls. However, as with all good mysteries, that isn't the end of the story.

Because a more recent study published in August 2019 did some more radiocarbon dating and genetic tests on fragments of 38 of the skeletons and found that they're from all over the world, at least three genetically distinct groups. So 23 of the skeletons displayed a mishmash of South Asian genetic markers and dated to times around 600 to 900 CE, spread out enough that they were probably distinct groups of people that went there and died.

This is the thing, that there wasn't like one group that got hailed on. There's a bunch of, they just like, people kept dying there. What, they see the bones and they're like, yeah, this should be fine. We don't know. Then one of them had more Southeast Asian genetic markers and dated to around 1600 to 1900 CE. So like a thousand years after those 23 got there. And then 14 had Eastern Mediterranean genetic markers like from around the island of Crete and also dated from around 1600 to 1900 CE. So it looked like this group all died together.

So not only are they from different regions of the world but from different time periods and in different groups of moving people, yet they all ended up dead and decaying in this glacial lake together. And it's possible that many more subgroups of people met their doom in around this lake. And how they died is an open question.

Ooh. How big is this lake? Sam, you have to understand it is tiny and it is on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere What are they doing? Going going to die over and over again like hi. Oh, man. It doesn't look like there's any good reason to go up there It's at the top of the mountain, right? Well, I guess it's not at the top top not as a top top but pretty tall Yeah, really high.

It's still in the Himalayas, which is, you know, pretty mountainy. It is not on a pass. There are easier ways to get anywhere. There's easier ways to get a big hole knocked in your head. I think the only paths that cross through it are more recently made because people wanted to go investigate it,

or like, I think there's some cultural path that goes by it. But I think at the time that all these people died, there was nothing. Like, they just decided to go into these mountains for some reason that we don't know. Here's a picture with tons of people around it. They're all gonna be skeletons. Get out of there. I guess you like, if you get there, maybe you're just like, we're out of food, we're out of water. We have to stay here by the lake.

And then it's like, well, we could keep moving. It's like, no, there's no water nearby. We have to stay here by the lake and then it's like well We could keep moving is like no, there's no water nearby We got to stay here and then you die it but there's but there's there's rivers right down here guys Just walk down the hill They did not have Google Earth. So they did not yeah Well, I'm bad better than Google Earth. They actually understood how adventuring worked Presumably to get to the top of this mountain. Not so good, apparently. If you went from the island of Crete to this mountain,

presumably you know all about transportation. Yeah. Boat, on land. Think you know how to find some water. Yeah. So weird. Well, that was pretty spooky, Sari, I gotta admit. I have another question from a patron.

It's from FletchOnFire who asks, why are phobias a thing? Why do individuals get scared by different things? This is a great question and very weird now that I'm thinking about it. I guess we have to have a diversity of human experience. It would be no fun if we were all scared of the same things. And thus we're all exactly the same. But yeah, it is interesting that there are specific and it is often not like cause-based. Like if you had like a bad experience with a spider, I get that, but oftentimes there's just some people who are like extra afraid of snakes

from the beginning. Is it genetic? Can you be genetically afraid of stuff? Possibly, yeah. So it's a combination, this is the thing about scary things, you gotta bring into psychology, and once you start thinking about the brain, we know so little about our brains.

But it's probably some combination of genetics and environmental factors, so nature and nurture. So far we haven't found like a phobia gene, where if you have it turned on, then you're extra scared of something and then you roll a D100 and you figure out what you're scared of. But it's probably like some weird combination

of like how you process emotions and how you take in stimuli and how those relate to your parasympathetic nervous system and like cause a response in your body. I know it's not just experience because I found a snake skin one day and I was like, Oren, come here, my five-year-old. And I was like, come over here.

And I was like, do you see anything interesting? And he was like looking around and then you saw it and he like freaked out. Oh no. Which and I'm like dude thought he saw a snake for the first time and he's freaking out because snakes like it wasn't even moving it was a snake skin. His ancient brain was like no. I was like that's that sound that seems like a thing that's full of full of death. Yeah and that's like the roots of the genetics.

And I guess we don't know how they've evolved to the point that they are, but anxiety or fear is useful. Like it's reacting to a threat in the environment. So if that was a poisonous snake, then Orin's little bean brain would have protected him. Would have run away and then not gotten bitten and not died. And then he'd get- And you'd be dead as hell, Hank. Yeah, yeah.

Look at this snake skin, ow! It was attached to a snake. And also back it up, my son's head is gigantic. Sorry, large melon head. His large melon head would have been protected. But phobias fall into this category of when anxiety becomes unhelpful in one of multiple ways. Either the response gets overblown, instead of being nervous about embarrassing yourself in a public situation, like projectile vomiting before

public speaking, or maybe persistent, like we're talking about, despite not being dangerous. So like being afraid of a snakeskin, even though that has no, like there is no actual snake, or if you fell down the stairs once, like then being afraid of all stairs forever, to the point where it's interfering with your life or not seen as like a rational danger response. Besides like the big shrug of genetics

and like a particularly traumatic event, it's also important to talk about, like, the social environmental factors, where, like, so many people are scared of sharks because of Shark Week. And because of the movie Jaws. Like, we are so impressionable. So if, like, your dad or your favorite TV dad

is scared of ham, then you TV dad is scared of ham. Then you too may be scared of ham. Yeah, no, absolutely. If some TikToker I follow starts telling me that a ham phobia is possible, I am much more likely to develop a ham phobia than before I knew that was even possible. Huh, okay. And that's where I find all my favorite TV dads these days. So we don't know, basically.

Yeah, that was like a lot of words to say we don't know, but here's the guesses. The human mind is very weird, but it is definitely a thing that that is the case, that some people are more afraid of some things, and we don't know why. In the way that you can connect anything back to a scientific explanation, like you can connect any phobia to an inherent fear

of something, whether it's like something that could kill you or something gross or something like surprising. Because we're humans, the number of things that we generate are finite and can all be interrelated anyway. So we're all just scared of the same things, maybe. Wow. Right. Well, there's only a certain number of things. But ultimately, we are all afraid of physical harm and emotional harm. That's basically it.

So that's why you're afraid. Basically it. So that's why you're afraid. And there's good reasons to be afraid of those things because physical harm can totally end you and emotional harm kind of can too because we need each other. Yeah, it's not a walk in the park either. So Sam, do you have a spooky story for us? Yeah, well, Ceri's spooky story was like a like a spooky mystery ghost story. Mine's a little bit more like a gross out evil dead story, I would say.

OK. In a way, it's not particularly spooky, but it ends in a fun little poem. So wait for that. When the U.S. was mostly an agrarian society, getting highly perishable things like bread and milk to people was not a huge problem. Everyone had like a cow in their backyard, for instance. But by the late 1800s, people moved to cities where there was decidedly less cows, and getting fresh food to people became more of a complicated and expensive affair. So food manufacturers turned to lots of weird and dangerous tricks and preservation methods

to preserve things for longer and save money so they wouldn't have to throw as much stuff out. Plus, there were just lots of fun new chemicals to play around with back then, I think. So there was like bread filled with chalk, for instance, so they can make more bread. There was a beer with strychnine in it because I think it made it taste fun,

is the best I can figure out. It's just a little bit. Yeah. It's super tasty. Now don't drink a lot of this. But one of the most infamous of all of the foods was milk. So I will talk just for a second about how gross milk was before I get to my fun poem. In any given bottle of milk at the time, you would find your basic bacteria colonies, but also there were bugs, blood, plaster.

There's a family in Indianapolis who reported having wriggling milk. Like they looked in the bottle and it was wriggling and then they sent it off and upon further investigation, it was full of worms because the dairy was going out and like filling the bottles up with water from a pond just so they could have more. Oh my god, watering it down with pond water. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to remember these things so that we can recognize how good, how good things are. Well, this wasn't even that long ago. How, when was the wriggling milk? Like 1901. Jesus, yes.

Things are so good now. They were just being nasty, though. We knew, we knew you shouldn't put pond water in your milk. Yeah, we knew that, but it was still happening. Yeah. So also dairies would add pureed calf brains to bottles of milk because it gave it like a frothy top. I need to unknow that.

So it looked like it was like fresh out of the cow, but really it was not fresh out of the cow and had baby cow brains in it. All these nasty foods were poisoning people and making people sick. With diseases like in milk, there was scarlet fever milk, there was typhoid milk, there was diphtheria milk, and people and children were dying. Instead of oat milk and almond milk, those are the flavors you forget? Yeah. Another way that dairies were keeping milk fresh was by adding a chemical more at home in the mortuary than the grocery store, formaldehyde.

And some health officials actually thought formaldehyde's antibacterial properties made it a pretty good additive. So they endorsed this usage. I mean, if it's formaldehyde or diphtheria, yeah. Yeah, that's true. I will take formaldehyde. It's usage, but there was, you could put like two drops in per bottle of milk, but there was no regulation on it.

So companies were, dairies were adding tons of it, and they were using fun marketing names for formaldehyde, like Preservaline was what they would call it. And it was like, keeps your milk fresh forever. So anyway, around the same time, beginning in 1902, the chief chemist of the US Bureau of Chemistry, is that still a thing? Gotta be still a thing, right?

In Washington DC had assembled the Poison Squad, a team made up of mostly poor college students. The Poison Squad would dress in fancy clothes and hold dinner parties where there would be like press at these taking pictures. And they would eat food laced with popular food additives at the time, like borax and wood shaving and formaldehyde, and then they would measure their vitals and record any kind of side effects.

And they were basically like a PR stunt super team to try to get food additive regulations passed. And they were something of a public sensation, I think, and they even had their own theme song, which is the only reason I'm talking about this at all. A precursor to the science film and here it is. Oh, we're the merriest herd of hulks that ever the world has seen. We don't shy off from your rough on rats or even from Paris green. We're on the hunt for a toxic dope that's certain to kill sans fail. But tis a tricky elusive thing and knows we are on its trail.

For all the things that could kill, we've downed in many a gruesome wad. And still we're gaining a pound a day, for we are the Poison Squad. On Prussic Acid, we break our fast, we lunch on morphine stew, we dine with a matchhead consomme, drink carbolic acid brew.

Corrosive sublimate tones us up like laudanum, ketchup rare, while Tyro, toxicon, condiments are wholesome as mountain air. Thus all the deadlies we double dare to put us beneath the sod. We're death immune and we're proud as proud. Hooray for the Poison Squad!" Wow, the Poison Squad! So after five years of this, one of them died. Okay. And it was kind of suspicious.

It was allegedly from tuberculosis, but the guy's family was like, dude was pretty sick because he'd been eating a lot of poison. So they disbanded. He got a cough and died, but he had been eating a lot of poison. So they disbanded the poison squad. And with the evidence that they gathered, along with public pressure from several women's organizations, that was more it, I think, than the Poison Squad info. They led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which made it so companies

had to put on their label what was in their product. They couldn't put formaldehyde in it anymore and all that other crap. Good. Do you know what the Bureau of Chemistry became? The FDA maybe? That is correct. Okay, okay. And it became the Food and Drug Administration.

Food and drug, that's very chemistry. Both chemicals. Those are always everything else. Yeah. Both chemicals. Those are the two classifications of chemical actually. Yeah, there's food and drug chemical. Well, that makes sense, because this law covered food and cosmetics.

So. Right. Yeah. I mean, like, I mean, everything has some impact on the body and that's what a drug is, right? So like. Eat a book. That's the drug basically. Yeah. Gotta put the ingredients of the book on the back of the book.

Yeah. You eat a stop sign, that will impact your body. That's a drug. It's true. You seem to have indicated that you wrote a poem to the Poison Squad theme. What do you... No, no. They wrote their own poem. I thought you were saying that that was...

Oh, okay. That was their poem. I thought that that poem was a prelude to another poem. No, I'm not gonna write two poems. I was shocked. They already wrote the best poem of all poems. I can't have one of that. Is there like an audio version of it that we can hear?

What, you just listened to one. Well, yeah, but you wanted some. With music, with music, with the sickly voices of these men bellowing it out and then coughing and puking from all the poison they were eating. We're death immune, one of us did die. Yeah, they had to maybe make up a new theme song

after that happened. I can't find the Poison Squad poem. How did you find it? I made it all up, I lied. You were actually the great-great-grandson of the Poison Squad member. He was written in a diary that you found covered in blood. Yeah. Here's a link straight to the poem.

And I think another poem about them underneath it. Weebly.com. Oh, love Weebly website. The most reliable source on the planet. Well, I found it on a different article, but it just linked to the full poem here. I know the people who made this website. You do? You do? Yeah.

The Wimbly website or whatever? The Weebly website. The Weebly website, yeah. Well, cause I was like, I have only seen Weebly websites in this obscure competition that I competed in high school. It's called National History Day, where there's a topic.

So one of mine was conflict and compromise in history. And so you pick something. And one was innovation in history. And so my friend Abby and I did a project about the marine chronometer. Abby Orler? Abby Orler is four years, four or five years younger than me. And I helped mentor her and Grace, not on this project,

but in like seniors helping freshmen kind of thing. That's so weird! Yeah, and so they were both my camp councilees for school, for health. And everyone in my school competed in National History Day. It was a requirement of eighth grade history class. And so I was like, I wonder if this is an NHG website. And it totally is. Senior Division...

It not just totally is. Like, you know the people. You know these two individual actual people. That is very weird. Weird, weird. I can't believe that that just happened. Yeah. But we all now have to go grocery shopping and do the other things. That's what I have to do. What do you guys have to do? I have to work for 10 more minutes.

Oh, okay. Sam's got to do 10 more minutes of work. What are you going to go do, Sari? Oh, I've got to... Just crack open a cold one? Yeah. Oh. We do have, Sylvia bought Dunkin' Donuts beer. Dunkin' Donuts branded beer, and it looks disgusting. Is it festive?

Yes, there's like a pumpkin flavor and a maple flavor. One of them is like matcha blueberry, which sounds- Ew. Combined with Dunkin' Donut and beer, too many things in one can. Drinking Dunkin' Donuts and beer. Too many things in one can. Drinking Dunkin' Donuts beer in Boston is like the most Boston thing you could do. Put it all down in one place. All you got to do is what's a, oh, I forget.

I can't, I couldn't come up with another Boston thing. Walk that trail, the freedom trail. You can watch the freedom trail. Boston baked beans. Swear at somebody. Go see the Sox. Go see the Red Sox. Yeah, grind up some four-wheeler clovers and stick them in your beer.

Yeah. Irish. Go to a weird old graveyard too. You could do that. And then froth up a cow brain and put it on top. Yeah. And get swept away in a big molasses explosion. Oh yeah.

Yeah, there it is. Uh-huh, uh-huh. That's very Boston of you. Okay, thank you all for being patrons of SciShow Tangents. It's a joy to watch as the show reaches more people, which it has been lately. I was just looking at our analytics today. So thank you for telling people about us. Yeah. Because I assume that's the thing that's doing it. So if you've told

people about us, thank you very much for that. If you haven't told people about us, shame, shame on you. Shame. Ding ding. And I, and I'm just very pleased to have this job. So thank you. Oh, I love this job. This is my favorite thing. Don't tell my new job. But I like this one. Congrats on the new job, by the way, Sari. Sari got a new job, everyone.

I did get a new job. Making video games for children, which I love. That sounds pretty good. All right. Thank you, Patreon patrons. Thank you, Sari and Tuna, and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. All right, thank you Patreon patrons. Thank you Sam, Sari, and Tuna, and we'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye.