SciShow Tangents - Bubbles

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

Kids Month floats on as we talk about possibly our lightest subject ever: bubbles! Pop in to learn what makes a simple soapy membrane so fascinating to kid and adult like! If you know a kid who loves science, have we go the show for you! It's called SciShow Kids, and it has all the great, rigorously-researched content you expect from SciShow, but for kids! Plus, it has puppets! Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/scishowkids!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsto find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley, Tom Mosner, Daisy Whitfield, and Allison Owen for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Deboki: @okidoki_boki[Trivia Question]Perfect bubble wand perimeterhttps://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2018/august/researchers-uncover-the-science-behind-blowing-bubbles.htmlhttps://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/theres-now-an-even-more-precise-recipe-for-blowing-the-perfect-bubble/[Fact Off]Tadpole bubble-sucking to breathehttps://www.instagram.com/p/B9AO801nrJI/https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200226130510.htmMicroscopic “rockets” propelled by a bubble and sound waveshttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/634184https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax3084http://brennen.caltech.edu/fluidbook/multiphase/Bubbleordroplettranslation/bjerknesforces.pdf[Ask the Science Couch]Air bubbles in needles (unintentional or intentional)https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/air-embolism/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734897/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542192/https://starship.org.nz/guidelines/agitated-saline-bubble-study-for-the-detection-of-an-intrapulmonary-or/https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/what-is-a-bubble-study[Butt One More Thing]Polymers in laxatives make big soap bubbleshttps://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/physicists-discover-why-this-bubble-solution-makes-monster-bubbles​https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/physicists-determine-the-optimal-soap-recipe-for-blowing-gigantic-bubbles/https://journals.aps.org/prfluids/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.5.013304

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangent, slightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And also our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Today, as we are recording, this is the day that they released the majority of the first five images from the James Webb Space Telescope. They gave us one yesterday as well, but then they gave us a bunch today. That's been my whole day. I've just been looking at pretty pictures,

thinking about my space in the universe, and communicating science. Sam and Sari, after this day, I have to ask you, do you think we matter? Oh. We're making content, which means we matter more than most people. Oh, wow.

This will be around. This will be around until the end. This will be around until podcasts get turned off. Yeah. Somebody flips a big switch. Somebody, somebody's like, look,

there's good stuff on here, but there's also a lot of bad stuff on here. I think it's probably until we figure out like sort of what's going on. Like, let's just take it all away. Yeah. The last guy to leave Apple HQ will be like, oh, forgot to turn off the podcast. His name is Robert. Robert Apple, the 27th.

I don't know. I try not to think about it too much. Watching that, like you made a TikTok where it's like gravitational lensing, a telescope pointed at a telescope. We're seeing the beginning of time. And I think my brain just prevents me from thinking about that too deeply, which is probably fine. Yeah, there's probably and there's probably truth in that instinct somewhere. I don't know what the truth of that instinct is, but I bet it's there somewhere. somewhere. I don't know what the truth of that instinct is, but I bet it's there somewhere. Sari, when you stare up at a million galaxies in the space of a grain of sand, do you think?

The grain of sand thing was really a chilling part of it though. Yeah. I think at this point in my life as a human and as a science communicator, there are so many things that make my brain do that. Like the probability that we're even alive, the fact that I'm not touching myself and I'm not touching anyone else, even when I am. There's space between all of your atoms. Yeah. I mean, we probably learned something about like ants on this podcast that made me feel the same kind of horror. Yeah. Just as insignificant. So it hasn't reduced my capability to feel that awe, but it's just like a wall of jars in my brain of like,

that's the awe wall. And so I guess we have to still matter. Yeah. This is where I keep all of the things that remind me that I am a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust. I don't have a good answer for this, of course, but I did realize during this week talking about, you know, this sort of vastness of the universe that it's very big in size, but it's very it's very it's very finite in time. It's very finite in time. And a stat that made me realize this real hard is that it took about one-fifth of the life of the universe for single-celled organisms to evolve into multi-celled organisms on Earth.

That was one-fifth of the life of the universe. Whoa. Where there was life on this planet, but there wasn't yet multi-celled life. That's nuts. Life on Earth has been around for a lot of the universe. Yeah. Not most, but like 30%. That's shocking. I would have guessed.

It is shocking. 1%. Yeah. And we already seen to the end of it. Boring. We already know what's all the way out there. Yeah. We've seen, well, we've seen to the beginning of it.

We haven't seen to the end of it. In fact, we're a baby universe. We have not that long 13.7 billion years long time but we're going to be around for way longer than that will it be as interesting as it is right now probably not for definitely not for the whole time but it'll be here it's not going anywhere you're talking about like the heat death time is that when it will be even after heat death the universe will still exist there will be particles okay yeah there, and even after heat death, the universe will still exist. There will be particles. Okay. Yeah, there's stuff. Always stuff. Always stuff. It doesn't go anywhere. That's the

whole thing about matter and energy. Alright, let's give you a quick rundown on what's going on here. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play.

And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. For the whole month of July, we're going to be celebrating a special time. We're going to celebrate in the childlike wonder

present in science with a bunch of topics inspired by the sort of things that kids love. Dinosaurs, spaceships, things like that. It's Kids Month, but that does not mean

that you should enjoy tangents with kids necessarily, as we may swear and talk about horrible things. But something you can enjoy with your kids is our sister show. It's SciShow Kids on YouTube. Sam and Tuna were making SciShow Kids moments ago. Outside. It was 100 degrees outside and we were making the dang show. SciShow Kids is like SciShow, but for early elementary kids. It's hosted by Jesse Knutson Castaneda, who you may know from her channel Animal Wonders and Anthony Brown and Squeaks the Robot Rat.

It's wonderful. It's absolute delight. It's very popular with the kiddos. Oren loves it. And you should definitely check it out. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me, Hank Green. I have to say I was recently asked to perform a totally ludicrous task. On a day when the web surmounted the Hubble, I was told to write a poem about bubbles. Oh, come on. This is a wine poem. 10,000 galaxies and a grain of sand, a stellar nursery in the palm of my hand,

the southern ring nebula's deep detail, the palm of my hand, the Southern Ring nebula's deep detail, the subject of poems that couldn't fail. That wouldn't have been any troubles. But instead, I was told to write about bubbles. Pop, pop, pop, pop. They got air inside, slightly higher in pressure than the air outside. Pop, pop, pop. Their membranes are thin.

And yet for a time, they hold that air in until they don't. Pop, pop, pop, pop. Bubble, air in until they don't pop pop pop pop bubble bubble bubble pop pop pop congratulations to the JWST team but SciShow Tangents must stay on theme I didn't know like two months ago

that today was going to be the day we were supposed to record this two weeks ago before I got a lot of COVID in me. That was maybe my favorite poem ever. The maniacal energy. Pop, pop, pop, pop. So the topic for the day of our first episode of Kids Month is...

No, this is our third episode of Kids Month. Our third episode of Kids Fun is Bubbles, which is a thing that kids love. I can confirm that as a parent of a five-year-old who, I mean, it's been years since his first exposure to Bubbles. He's still super into it. Sometimes you don't see a bubble for a while and then you do see a bubble and you're like, whoa, okay. Yeah, that's a thing. for a while and then you do see a bubble and you're like whoa okay now I know it so Sari what is a bubble and then I have a follow up question that I hopefully

have an answer to even though I don't have a definite answer to but first what is a bubble did I get it right in my maniacal spite bubble used colloquially is all over the place you've got metaphorical bubbles which I'm not even going to get into but Bubble used colloquially is all over the place.

You've got metaphorical bubbles, which I'm not even going to get into, but there's air bubbles within molten glass sculptures or things like that. I'm going to say for the purposes of this podcast, unless one of our facts fits into that category, not going to consider that a bubble. I think bubble is gas inside a film or a liquid, like air bubbles and water or bubbles, carbon dioxide bubbles and soda or soap bubbles that are floating around. And those, those count as bubbles. So you got to have a liquid and a gas. Yes.

Together. And it's got, and So you got to have a liquid and a gas. Yes, together. And it's got to be temporary? I guess it doesn't have to be temporary because you have a permanent bubble. Yeah, I think maybe you can have a permanent bubble. If you worked hard enough to make the bubble, then maybe. But I don't think, I wouldn't call bubble wrap, even though it's called bubble wrap. I wouldn't say that's a bubble because the plastic is too solid to count as a bubble. Sure, sure, sure.

Do I have bubbles in me? When there's just like air in my intestines, is that a me bubble at that point? Where I am just a very thick membrane around a little bit of gas. No, because you're not liquid. Much like a... I'm largely liquid. You're largely liquid? Aren't the bubbles in a liquid?

I think that the bubbles are just... I mean, yeah, there certainly are. In fact, this is a thing I know about intestinal gas. When you have gas, a lot of why you have gas is not that there's gas in your intestines, which is totally normal and you always have gas in your intestines. It's because it's like foamed up. And so it's hard to pass that gas through your intestinal system because it's got a bunch of liquid incorporated in it.

So when you take like Gas-X, x what gas x does is it breaks bubbles and so it like combines all those bubbles together into one big bubble that you can fart out more easily that's amazing i didn't know that foam foam is bubble i would say so then yes so i then i do have bubbles because i got gas x needs to pop my bubbles yeah so we i do have bubbles in me me, but only when they're in some like a foam situation. Yes. And you can have like a tiny, tiny bubble, like all the little tiny bubbles that make up my cappuccino foam. Definitely a bubble. Yeah, I think that's definitely a bubble.

I think foam definitely a bubble, whether it's seafoam, cappuccino foam. But not styrofoam. Not styrofoam because I think that's solid. It's like when you inject air into something and then it solidifies, it's briefly a bubble and then it's a cavity. You can't be a bubble if you can't pop it. I think I disagree, but I'm not going to elucidate

as to why I disagree. I think everything you're saying is wrong. Me or Hank? I won't be taking any questions. You, Sari, but I won't be taking any questions as to why. So you think there can be a bubble in glass? Oh, yeah. You think there can be a bubble in bubble wrap?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think that's all bubbles, but that's just one man's opinion. Yeah. That's right. What's the etymology of bubble? Because it sounds like it would be amazing.

This one is very fun. It's of echoic origin, which I don't think we've had before in an etymology section before, which basically is a fancy way of saying it is a word that was come up with probably because it sounds like the thing it's describing. So bubble comes from, it like imitates the sound of bubbling and bubble is a form of like verbal and babble. And all of them,

people listened to running water and we're like, what's that bubble bubble bubble and we're like that's the word i guess they kind of nailed it too didn't they yeah i know they could have messed it up i feel like sometimes you interpret sounds really differently as someone who has written a lot of pronunciation guides for hard to pronounce words sometimes i write something that it's obviously like an ah, and then whoever's reading the script says a, yeah, or a-ee. And I'm like, well, that's another way to interpret that. But bubble, whatever collective of people were listening to bubbling rivers or bubbling water

really nailed it. And it's interesting because like it bubbles sat like bubbling and burbling and babbling all sort of sound like rivers, but a bubble also kind of looks like the way the word bubble sounds. And I look at a bubble. I'm like, that was like a bubble. Yes. Like if I, if you said the word bubble to me and then you showed me like five things

and one of them was a bubble, I'd pick the bubble. Oh, too bad. You can't forget all words. All right. We need a hypnotist to make me forget the word bubble. I was going to say, you just need a child who hasn't learned the word bubble yet. This is now going to be the part of the podcast

where we're going to do the game show. Are you all ready for the game? It's like you haven't done this for two weeks. Yeah, it's like I've forgotten all about it. Okay, so we're going to play a little bit. This is not going to be hard to remember how it goes because it's going to be a Bubbles Truth or Fist. We've all made bubbles, whether we're using soap or gum

or some other substance. Does gum count, Sari? Yeah, Sari, does gum count? It's kind of a liquid. It's kind of a liquid. It's kind of a liquid. It's poppable. But humans are not the only creatures that love bubbles. Plenty of animals make bubbles as

an adaptation that lets them thrive in their environment. The following are three stories of animal bubble making, but only one of them is true. Which one is it? Is it fact number one? One group of water diving lizards is able to breathe underwater because they form a bubble around their snout that they can breathe in and out of. Or it could be fact number two.

Orcas blow bubbles underwater to lure birds in, tricking them into thinking there's a tasty fishy meal and getting it to fly close enough for the orca to grab the bird instead. Or it could be fact number three, sea turtles use bubbles to communicate with each other. With female sea turtles, blowing bubbles is a signal to male turtles that they are interested in creating the next generation of sea turtles. So it could be fact number one, water diving lizards create a bubble around their head to breathe. Or orcas, fact number two, orcas bait birds with bubbles. Or fact number three, sea turtles signal mating season with bubbles. I think before on Tangent, Sam talked about a star-nosed mole doing something similar of like blowing an air bubble.

It can catch the bubbles in its star nose and suck them back in. Yeah. Or something. i don't remember listen i'll find whatever episode it is and link it but it's a bubble and it's breathing in water but i think it's to sniff the water oh it's to sniff the water that's what it is yeah i think no worms i think i think they like blow it out and then suck it back in but so on one hand that could be a great basis for this if it was a lie on the other hand i can imagine another animal also blowing a bubble if one animal can figure it out accidentally through

all the chances of evolution another one might too and be a little bit better guys out there blowing bubbles huh yeah how much air does a lizard need and how much air does a bubble have that's what i want well a lizard doesn't need air, but I think it would need less air than us because they are- Very tiny. Don't have the same, well, certainly, but also per unit of organism, I think they'd need less than us because- Oh, interesting. Their metabolism works differently. The second one sounds so familiar, though.

Going bubbles to catch birds? Yeah. Yeah, I'd try that if I was a killer whale for sure. Do birds look for bubbles to eat fish? I don't, I'd try that if I was a killer whale for sure. Do birds look for bubbles to eat fish? I don't know how birds find fish. I don't really either. I feel like fish

would make bubbles. Do fish make bubbles? That's a great point. Well, they might like churn up the surface. Yeah. I've had fish. They make little bubbles.

And then there are some fish that use bubbles for communication. It's true. There are? Yeah, we did it as a butt fact once. Oh, some fish that use bubbles for communication like it's true yeah we did it as a butt fact once oh the ones that have bubbles out they fart bubbles yes and uh what's the last one again romance flirting bubbles between turtles this seems like something i would have heard of before i think if turtles if we were if we knew that turtles could talk to each other like that well it might just be like a mating display.

Like, I don't know. You do your big tail feather. You just blow some bubbles. Like, look how much air I can hold in my lungs. I'm evolutionarily fit. And then you blow your bubbles and you're like, wow. I want my babies to blow bubbles that much big also. Or maybe it's like, I don't even need all this extra air.

Blow them out of your nose showing off yeah I think it's a toss-up between all three I have no idea I'm gonna just go with the first one because I never picked the first one so I think it's the lizard reading okay I wanted you to go first because only one of these is one that I was told not to research further into for my facts. And that is the lizard who blows a bubble. Good thing that doesn't actually matter to me at all. You both got it right. Well done. Yeah.

This I've seen video of this on, on Twitter a while back. I saw it's really quite cool. In fact, the, the bubble doesn't just cling to their face. It actually covers kind of their entire body, which allows it to do some amount of oxygen exchange with the water. So as it's breathing in and out, obviously carbon dioxide concentration is going up

inside of the bubble, oxygen concentration is going down. But because there's a lot of surface area to this bubble, it's able to diffuse some of the carbon dioxide and have some oxygen come into the bubble now this is not enough that they get to live underwater forever but it is enough that they can stay underwater for up to 16 minutes at a time so scientists at binghamton university set up a gopro underwater to watch a costa rican species of anolioli as they dived underwater and actually used an oxygen sensor to monitor the oxygen in the bubbles. And they found that over time it went down like it was a scuba tank that they got to carry around with themselves. How do they make the bubble all around their whole body?

Are they kind of like slimy? Their skin is super hydrophobic. So it just happens naturally. Cool. Was there anything true about the other two? Humpback whales, not orcas, do use bubbles to trap their food, but they don't use it to lure food in. They use those bubble nets. Right.

We talked about that before too. Yeah. The fish will sort of run away from the bubbles and stay in the middle and then they'll come up through the big bubble net and just chow down. And sea turtles, no. In fact, if your turtle is making bubbles with its nose, if you have a pet turtle, that might be a sign of a respiratory infection. But beluga whales do blow a lot of bubbles, and we've observed them in captivity using bubbles to communicate in various ways.

We've also observed them in the wild blowing bubbles, but we don't know why they do it or what they're trying to say to each other. That would be such a nice way to communicate. I wish I could blow a bubble just right here, you know? Well, thanks for making a podcast with me, bubble. Yeah. All right, next up, we're going to take a short break,

and then it will be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Get ready for the fact. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit with a special emphasis on which one I think will make the best TikTok. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Here it is. Is there anything more satisfying than blowing the perfect bubble? Probably not much. So plenty of scientists have tried to crack the perfect bubble code, experimenting with the soapy recipe, the size of the bubble wand, and the speed with which the bubbles are blown. In 2018, a team of mathematicians from NYU ran experiments using

oil film suspended in flowing water and allowed them to easily control the various parameters they were testing. From their results, they found that the optimal bubble forming happens when you blow consistently at 6.9 centimeters per second for a specific wand perimeter. What do you think is the optimal perimeter of the wand? What's a perfect bubble? What is it? Just the best, the best one. Too small and they pop too easy, I think. Optimal bubble forming is all I got.

So give it to me in inches. How many inches do you think it is? I just did centimeters. Centimeters is also fine if you want to be all fancy. Two inches. Two many inches do you think it is? I just did centimeters. Centimeters is also fine if you want to be all fancy. Two inches. Two inches from Sam. 11 centimeters. That's going to be a win for Sam Schultz.

It was 1.5 inches. I work on a kid's show. Come on, I know my bubbles. Sam, that means that you get to decide who goes first. Ah, heck. I think I'll just go first. In honor of Kids Month today, I'm going to talk about one of the most iconic animal kids of all, tadpoles.

So tadpoles, as you may know, are the larval form of amphibians like frogs or salamanders consisting basically of a head and a tail and being, this is important, very tiny, also important for this story, they live in water. So while doing some research on salamanders in 2019, scientists noticed a side effect of the tadpoles' tininess and living in waterness. Tadpoles, they were observing, were unable to break the surface tension of the water from beneath. They just bounced right off of it. And since these were amphibian scientists, they knew a thing or two about how tadpoles breathe.

So tadpoles have gills, but those gills don't generally provide all the oxygen that a tadpole needs to live. So tadpoles also have lungs. So when they're big enough, tadpoles will lunge out of the water like a little tiny whale and take a gulp of air. But these guys are too tiny to break the water.

So the first thought that the scientists had was that the gills provided enough oxygen for a little tadpoles. But there was a clue left behind whenever the tadpoles bounced off the water surface that made the scientists think that maybe something else was going on. And that clue was that a little bubble would come out of the tadpole whenever they would bounce off.

So they set up high speed cameras to see what was going on. And what they ended up discovering was a whole new type of breathing style they named bubble sucking. So basically the tadpoles will put their little lips up against the bottom surface. What do you call that? The bottom surface of the water, open their mouth. Then the surface kind of droops down into their mouth and they close their mouth really fast and they pinch off a little bubble and it has air inside of it from above the surface of the water. And then they exhale the used up air in their lungs, which mixes with the fresh air. And then they breathe that mixture back down and they end up with more fresh air, but they also end up with more air in their lungs and they can hold. So then they have to burp out a tiny little bubble of leftover air. And that was the bubble that the scientists saw

coming out whenever they'd bounce off the top. And they do all of this in three tenths of leftover air. And that was the bubble that the scientists saw coming out whenever they'd bounce off the top. And they do all of this in three tenths of a second. But how, if tadpoles are so tiny, did the scientists see all this happening? It was pretty easy because tadpoles are basically see-through, especially when you shine a bright light through them. So they would just watch the bubble go right in.

And there's like videos of this that I don't think I can use, but if you look for it, you'll find it. And it's extremely cute. So the researchers also looked at some other tiny water-dwelling creatures like snails and found that they bubble suck too and i think this is cool but what i really think is wild is that the researchers kind of found this accidentally while researching something else and discovered that no one else had really thought to like care about how tadpoles breathe, except them. And then they're just like, oh, we discovered a new type of breathing. Where you suck in water in your mouth.

You bite it off of the roof of the. You bite the air out of. Yeah. Out of our world. Yeah. Out of their world. Yeah. You gotta do it.

And then you mix it with the air that's already in your lungs and then you burp it out. That's what you gotta do when you're a little guy. when you're a little bubble sucker oh wow wow it's very slow very slow-mo and they're very see-through and then he's gonna swim away and then oh what a cute oh it's a great bubble um you gotta go look at that you You got to look at that. It's from it's from Popular Sciences Instagram. Holy moly. That's great. Nope. That's mine now.

Thank you. Oh, Sam, that's an adorable fact. They're really cute little guys, aren't they? That makes it look like the water is like maple syrup. Uh huh. It would be scary to be that small in water. Oh, man. Tadpoles, I do not think have a great have great odds.

No, they were actually the scientists were studying things that eat tadpoles. So which is probably a lot of things. It's the circle of life. Sari, what do you have to compete with this entirely new method of breathing where tadpoles take a bite out of our world? I will. Oh, I like how you phrase that. That's going to be the Carl Sagan quote of this episode. I like how you phrased that. That's going to be the Carl Sagan quote of this episode. So rockets, speaking of space, are propelled by ejecting stuff out the back, which pushes them in the other direction. It's a great butt fact already. I don't think any space rockets that I could find use bubbles as propulsion, but you can definitely get some lift in a model rocket with the right bubbly or foamy fuel,

even like dropping Mentos into Diet Coke. And now scientists are also exploring microscopic frontiers with sort of rockets, basically tiny particles that can be propelled in tiny 3D landscapes. This feels very magic school bus to me because the goal is to propel these little vessels around the human body to do things like precisely deliver drug particles or image certain tissues.

And one problem with making tiny microscopic rockets is it's hard to find chemicals that work in the body of the vessel as fuel that also won't be toxic to the human body. You don't want to put in bad stuff as you are using this small medical technology. But a study published in October 2019 showcases a new design for a mini rocket that they more precisely call a micro swimmer. The base structure is sort of a round cup or looks kind of like a bullet casing to me, made of layers of gold, nickel and a polymer spacer. And it was coated in a thin hydrophobic layer like the lizard. So when it was plopped into a watery fluid, an air bubble formed inside the cup. So it's basically a bubble with a shield that's around 10 microns by 5 microns in size. So on

the same scale as a speck of dust. And to make it move, they need two things. First, a steady ultrasonic acoustic field that's at the same resonant frequency as the bubble to basically turn it on and make it wiggle around as a little motor and then second they need a magnetic field that they can change to push the bubble rocket in different directions and steer around wherever you want it to go like the inside of arnold and i don't understand the specific math of it but this movement is largely thanks to the burkness forces uh which is a real thing that's you made that up no there's a guy it's it's it's look it's complicated but it's the burkness

the thing is is if you google burkness forces it's like a pusher how do i and how would i do that sari type in b-j-i-r-k b as in bubble jerk as in what you're being to me n-e-s okay got it yeah burkness force uh and if you look it up then they're a push or pull exerted on bubbles when there's a sound wave involved so this is like

a known thing it feels so specific to me but there was a guy who really liked the interaction of sound waves

and bubbles um his name was Wilhelm Bjergnes yeah I almost made Sam spit I almost got Sam to spit.

I was just thinking about how he's like the first guy who liked that. So then he got it named after him. Yeah, you got to get into something really weird. I know. And then you get to have your own force. Yeah. It's called Bjerknesting yourself. Or he was just like, hmm, what can I get named after me?

What does it, hmm? Bubbles and vibrations. Sure. Yeah. So you can continue, but i have questions yes uh i might not be able to answer them but what is extra cool is that these little micro swimmers are big enough to resist the random jostling of brownian motion which happens at like nanoscale so they won't get just pushed around randomly and you can control them pretty precisely. And they're sturdy enough

that they can push other particles around as they're propelled. And there's something in the press release about like sucking in particles like a tractor beam too. I didn't get that far. I tried to read the paper. I couldn't understand it.

So now, obviously, all we need is a shrink ray and then we can make biology class really fun and exciting the end okay so uh so they're moving this around with the burkness force which is like a bubble interacting with sound waves but also magnetically yes and i don't know it seems like the burkness force gets activated in some way by generating a constant acoustic field. So like that's what turned to my understanding makes the bubble able to be moved. And they just tune the acoustic like the sound waves to the resonant frequency of the bubble.

So it vibrates in place instead of being pushed in a direction. in place instead of being pushed in a direction. And then when the magnetic field is applied, it's like just the barest little change that allows for that precise movement. But I don't know how magnetic fields and sound waves interact, but there's something there. Well, I don't think that they should. They seem to be different mediums to me. It's a whole different world, the electromagnetic and the physical.

Well, then maybe it's because of the metal in it. I don't know. This is where I don't fully understand it. You'd have to ask Bjorknus. We gotta get him on the horn. Oh, he's not with us anymore. He was born in 1906, so I'm guessing. Well, maybe these bubbles helped him

keep around for a while. He was 89 when he, well, we missed him by a pretty long shot. No, yeah, actually that's when he first published. Yeah, he's from 1862. He was born in 1862. Alright, well, we're going to have to dive deeper on Wilhelm Bjorknes, but first

I have to decide who is going to win the cute tadpole or is it a little tadpole that lives inside my body and is controlled by a number of mysterious forces. I say he's the winner of the episode.

What? How are you going to make a TikTok out of that? I don't know. Little rockets. He's got space on the brain. There's a freaking video on my thing.

There are videos of mine too. It looks like a dot moving around. You're right, Sam. Maybe yours would make a better TikTok. I don't know. It's done now though. Yeah. I realize I'm in the dark now.

Yeah. Why is it so dark, Sari? I turned off the lights to try and be less sweaty. Should I turn it on or will that mess with the content? It's too late now. It's done now. Yeah. The episode's over. I turned off the lights to try and be less sweaty. Should I turn it on or will that mess with the continuity? It's too late now. It's done now. Yeah.

The episode's over. I have been looking at your screen being like, does she know? Well, I just looked around me and was like, oh, I can't see. Well, it is nighttime here. Yeah. So congratulations, Sari.

And that means it's time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for our finally honed couch of scientific minds.'s from at darker matter who asks air bubbles in needles real threat or movie myth um i mean so here's my take on this you definitely don't want to fill up your vein with air uh so that would be a real threat. But I think probably most needles have ways of getting around this. What I know for sure is I've been in the doctor's office and there's been bubbles in the needle and I haven't died. Yeah. I feel like I've seen the same thing.

That's all I got. Sari. Yep. Yeah. So asterisk, asterisk, not a doctor. This is not a medical advice podcast, but I think there, so the danger that people talk about

with air in needles is like an embolism. And an embolism is any sort of like blockage in your blood vessels specifically. So it can be, you can have like pulmonary embolisms because of globs of fat getting stuck up in there. But then also there are air or gas embolisms where like a bubble of gas interrupts the flow of blood. That can lead to the flow of blood getting messed up and not making it to your lungs or brain, et cetera, and that can cause low oxygen levels in an organ, and that's why it's dangerous. But needles that inject intravenously,

so into your veins, aren't often big enough to have enough air inside to cause an embolism, an air gas embolism. So it has happened before. So you're saying there's a chance. There's a chance i don't love that there's a chance but most of the time these air embolisms when they rarely happen are during like surgery or medical procedures when you're opened up or you've got like an IV bag being connected and air collects in it or like other situations where a large amount of air can suddenly get into your muscles. You have to put a lot of air in there for it to matter. Otherwise,

this is going to dissolve into the blood. Yeah. Your blood handles gases all the time. Your body handles gases all the time. My body handles gases all the time. What's super weird is that sometimes it can be intentional. Like doctors will put bubbles in your veins intentionally, which means it's not deadly. Unless they're a murderer. Unless they're a murderer.

That's true. Okay. I did not consider the doctor-murderer Venn diagram. But during what's called an echocardiogram technician is like looking at the structures of your heart, basically. So using ultrasound and then visualizing the inside of your heart. And sometimes in order to see how your blood flows, they would do what's called a bubble study. your blood flows, they would do what's called a bubble study. And they take a saline solution mixed with some air to create tiny bubbles, inject it into your vein, and then watch as it goes into your heart to see how your heart is pumping blood from chamber to chamber, because it's easy to see

like bubbles as a marker in your body. So little tiny bubbles, no problem. Doctors put them in you So little tiny bubbles, no problem. Doctors put them in you and it's totally fine. You go and ask. Yeah, you go and ask. Walk into the hospital, say, give me some bubbles. Yeah, give me the bubbles. It's like 20 bucks. It's lots of fun.

Yeah, that's the hot new trend for rich people. Go get your bubbles. It's what the Gen Zers are all doing. It's Tide Pods and bubble injection. Well, that was fascinating. Thank you for the question, Darker Matter. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents,

where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at GreatPretendingJustRun21 on Discord and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that. You can go to our Patreon at Patreon dot com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron where you can get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Tell people about us. Thanks, Sam. Thank you for joining us. I've been

Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly in a cave. I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Emma Douster. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And we couldn't make any of this, of course, without our patrons on Patreon.

Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted But one more thing. Blowing huge soap bubbles isn't just a fun hobby. It's the subject of a real physics research paper published in 2020. By adding different kinds of long polymers to help strengthen the thin, stretchy bubble films, they were able to blow a bubble with a volume of around 100 cubic meters. Is that big? Yeah, that's big. It's pretty big. like a meter is like three feet oh okay specifically the most helpful additives were polyethylene oxide and

guar gum both of which can relieve constipation by making poops smoother and softer there's the butt part maybe if you farted out of you could fart out a three foot bubble maybe