SciShow Tangents - Cancer

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

Living things are so full of complicated systems of cells and DNA, that things are bound to go wrong. And sometimes when things go wrong, cancer is the result. Today on Tangents we talk about the causes, health impacts, and potential cures (both real and fake) of cancer. Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Norman Bakerhttps://historycollection.co/norman-baker-man-claimed-cure-cancer/Cow Warhttps://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3298&context=iowastate_veterinarianAnimal Testes Transplanthttps://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3p73/early-body-hacking-when-men-got-goat-testicle-grafts-to-boost-their-sex-driveThe Philosophy of Success Bookhttps://archive.org/details/Law_Of_Success_in_16_Lessons[Fact Off]Turtle fossil bone cancer:https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/02/ridiculously-rare-cancer-found-fossil-leg-turtle-triassic-paleontology/https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/article-abstract/2723578Parasite-human cancer transmission:https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p1104-parasite-tumors.htmlhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tapeworm-spreads-deadly-cancer-to-human/https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190325110313.htm[Ask the Science Couch]General:https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/infectious-agents/hpv-and-cancerhttps://www.popsci.com/transmissible-cancers-animals/Tasmanian devil:https://www.tcg.vet.cam.ac.uk/about/DFTDhttps://www.nature.com/articles/onc2009350https://elifesciences.org/articles/35314Clams:https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00243-3https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18599[Butt One More Thing]Farts & cancer:https://time.com/2976464/scientists-say-smelling-farts-might-prevent-cancer/https://pubs.rsc.org/En/content/articlelanding/2014/md/c3md00323j#!divAbstract

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I am joined by Stefan Chen. I'm here. What's your tagline? Oh, I'm a meat popsicle. Ooh, delicious. Sam Schultz is also in the house.

Hello. What's your tagline? Why does Stefan always get to go first? You do the show notes, Sam. You can change it if you want. And on the science couch here with me is Sari Riley. Hello. What's your tagline?

Scratchy Throat, Scratchy Dreams. My name's Hank Green, and my tagline is Progressive Rock from 1992. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, and we're also keeping score, though, and awarding Hank bucks. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging previous conversations we won't be great at that so if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy we'll force you to give up a hank buck so tangent with care now as always we introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from sari riley twas brillig and the sundry cells did copy and split in the bod all tranquil were the ebbs and swells, Though DNA is often flawed.

Beware the cancer cells, my son, The genes that break, the ones undying. Beware the metastasis and shun, The endless multiplying. And in unsuspecting thought they stood, The cancer cells, a tumor inflamed, As drugs hurtled through the flowing blood, And hit other organs as they came.

One-two, one-two, and through and through, The supplements and surgery attacked. They left it dead, the disease unspread, blood and hit other organs as they came one two one two and through and through the supplements and surgery attacked they left it dead the disease unspread and the immune system sprung back and has thus slain the cancer cells the malignant tumor is no more oh frab just a clue calais one more day of surviving the war twas brillig and the sundry cells did copy and split in the bod all tranquil where the ebbs and swells the dna is often flawed oh my god what's happening was that like what yeah what's that based on uh there's like that was like shakespearean jabberwocky from alice in wonderland i love by lewis carroll and me so

sari what's cancer it's a lot of diseases that all have... It's a lot of diseases? Yeah. So it's like any disease where there are abnormal cells through some mutation, they divide out of control. And then a lot of times,

like the bad cancers, you can have a benign tumor where it just kind of divides. And then you can have a malignant tumor where, I don't know, the cells take on other properties so they can invade other tissues because usually our tissues are pretty segmented

like your lungs stay where your lungs should be and your blood stays in your bloodstream and everything like that but cancer cells lose some of the signaling proteins that would keep them in a spot so they can sometimes spread throughout your body that's metastasis or like invade other tissues and proliferate and cause tumors all over the place. That's like why it's so hard to like cure. It's just runaway cell division, but everywhere that it... Caused by so many different things. Thousands of different mutations can cause cancer, and each one of those mutations do a different thing. And sometimes, you know, in order for a cell to become cancer, it has to mutate in like

three or four different specific ways. But once that happens, that cell just grows and grows and grows and grows. So what makes a carcinogen carcinogenic? If you smoke, is it because you're like harming your lungs and it's healing? And the more that it has to go through that, the more likely there is for one of these things to pop up like one of these wrong cells or whatever there's some idea that is it like the two mechanisms i think one is when you irritate tissue it has to re it has to regrow itself a lot more and so you just have more chances for a bad one to show up and then there's mutagenic properties that are like things that mess with the

DNA and that DNA messing ends up creating a potential mutation that allows the cell to divide sort of in an uncontrolled way. So that's why like UV rays from the sun are considered a carcinogen because they mess with your DNA. That's what creates sunburns, like damages the cells in that way. But in damaging the DNA, it activates a repair pathway. Sometimes it's repaired poorly or stays broken in some way, and that can potentially cause a cancerous mutation. So all DNA damage doesn't lead to cancer, but the more DNA damage you have, the more likely it is that cancer is going to happen. And the wild thing is that the sun doesn't actually cause the burning and blistering and redness. What that is is the DNA in those cells got damaged, and those cells are killing themselves.

Because they're like, I'm too damaged. I shouldn't be allowed to exist. And that's what causes all this inflammation. And that's a weird thing about cancer, too, is a lot of times in cancerous cells, that mechanism is broken. So apoptosis is cell death. But cancer cells, even though they are old and have been dividing for a really long time, oftentimes, and they should be killed off by your body, they aren't. They have some mechanism inside them that stops apoptosis and keeps them living way past, which also makes them hard to kill because normally

our cells have an expiration date, but cancerous cells don't. I think we get it roughly. It's weird because I feel like we all thought we knew what cancer was and now we're not sure anymore, which is sort of what this part of the podcast is about. But now, it's time to move on to Truth or Fail. where one of our panelists has prepared three science facts for your education and enjoyment

but only one of those facts is real the other panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact if you do you get a hank buck if you're tricked i will get your hank buck because i'm the one that's doing it this week. So... Can I just say that you are within three points of me score-wise. Oh, so if I get all the points and you don't get any. Yeah. All right. You guys, I have a bit of background here I would like to take you through.

There is a huge history of fake cancer stuff in the world. And I want to talk to you about two hoaxers who worked together and were related to each other. So in the 1920s, Harry Hoxie began marketing his quack hoxie therapy. It almost sounds like it's got the word hoax in it. I don't like, it's so obvious. So he claimed that his great-grandfather had discovered the cure for cancer

while watching a horse cure its own cancer by eating certain uh kinds of wild plants in like an order and so this it had like clover and prickly ash and buckhorn and alfalfa and licorice and potassium iodide all mixed together the horse knew it had cancer the horse was like ow my cancer i should eat these things i mean this is how it's always like appeal to nature kind of stuff it's like yeah and and somebody in the past had the cure and then they wanted to cover it up um so he was reviewed by the fda like it was a big deal like lots of people believed in this stuff it was reviewed by

the fda the national cancer institute for decades people were taking this stuff and like found no evidence of any effect but like his whole thing was sort of based on like that the government was trying to cover up the real cure for cancer. In some cases, he wasn't even it wasn't even clear that he was treating people who had cancer. He would like take people in and be like, you've got cancer and then give them pills and be like, you don't have cancer anymore. Like an FDA inspector actually went to the clinic and was told he had cancer when he knew that he didn't. Like an FDA inspector actually went to the clinic and was told he had cancer when he knew that he didn't. So for 40 years he was doing this. By the 1960s, the government had managed to shut down his clinics and prevent the pills from being sold in the U.S.

So one of Hoxie's partners, because of course, was Norman Baker. And you won't be shocked to find that he was a radio personality at sort of the beginning of radio. And we didn't know what to do with it. And so people were misusing it a lot. He was out of Muscatine, Iowa. And he had a show on KT&T, Know the Naked Truth. That's my radio DJ voice. In the 1930s, he used the station to advertise Norman's Baker Institute,

which was all about fake cancer cures. And the two worked together until the law swept in and they turned on each other, which is great. I love it so much. But no enterprising radio personality turned medical nonprofessional would just let their work end there. Baker went on to start a second hospital offering sham cancer cures in Arkansas, operating out of what is now the Crescent Hotel, which is billed as one of the most haunted hotels in America.

They recently found a bunch of weird random bottles with medical samples lying around in that hotel, so that's cool. But specializing is for suckers, and Baker had a diverse medical portfolio. So the following are stories of questionable medical integrity in the 20th century, but only one of them is about Norman Baker. Number one, not content with curing cancer, Baker decided to branch out into fomenting a war. In 1929, the Iowa General Assembly mandated that cattle be tested for tuberculosis. That's good. But Baker was an unqualified medical professional with no veterinary experience and a radio station. So he did what came naturally. He took to the airwaves and broadcast the real conspiracy that the government was trying to give tuberculosis to a bunch of cows. Oh, no.

With their fears stoked, the farmers resorted to clubs and pitchforks and mud to prevent their cows from being tested, leading to martial law being declared in Iowa. Or, not content with curing cancer, Baker decided to branch out into animal organ transplants. Not content with curing cancer, Baker decided to branch out into animal organ transplants. One day, while talking with a male patient who was having libido troubles, the patient joked that his roosters never had this trouble. And Baker decided that that was, in fact, 100% definitely the medical thing. So he transplanted rooster testes into the patient. Nine months later, the man's wife gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Cooper, presumably from chicken coop. Baker would go on to perform this procedure 16,000 times, claiming it could cure anything from acne to high blood pressure.

Did they have their old testes in them, too? Yeah, they got both. They didn't, like, switch them out. They didn't get teeny, teeny, tiny ones. He put the rooster testies in there, too. Or number three, not content with curing cancer, Baker decided it was high time to help others help themselves. Claiming that he had advised presidents and interviewed the likes of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison,

Baker used their supposed conversation to found his own philosophy of success, which he turned into a book called The Philosophy of Success. The only evidence that he might have met any of these people is actually just a photograph that he took with Nikola Tesla that he may have orchestrated by telling Tesla that he wanted to give him a medal. It was easy to trick Nikola Tesla.

He really likes a medal. Yeah. So the facts are he fomented a farmer war by saying that the government was giving their cows tuberculosis. He put rooster testes inside of people. Or he wrote a book called The Philosophy of Success based on interviews that he probably never had. I feel like I've heard about putting monkey balls into people's balls to like try to make them more

alpha or something. I don't know. I don't remember exactly. Or just have better sex drive. I don't know. This is like a long journey of stories. It's like all those riddles where it's like, these people got on and off the bus. Who's the bus driver?

The cow thing seems very plausible and seems very tied into his career as a radio person. That's what I was going to say. It seems easiest to foment madness about cow tuberculosis. He doesn't have to do anything. He just has to sit there and talk about it. But what's to gain from that, I guess? what's the gain from any of the just lying well people are giving you money to put little rooster balls in them people are giving you money to buy your

books maybe he's selling some kind of anti-tuberculosis medication for cattle was he no okay no no no you just want to see what you can do with this new medium yeah i've got radio and i want to listen and i want to affect them i just want to be the donald trump of 1930s radio he gets fame i'm gonna go with the rooster balls rooster balls for sam rooster balls stefan's going rooster balls two on balls I'm all in baby I'm gonna go with the book of interviews because it seems like

kind of low key kind of boring he would make it up yeah what the hell is wrong with all of you you spent the whole time

saying the true one was true and then no one went with it the tuberculosis one the tuberculosis cat I don't that one I didn't think was true. I thought it was true, but then I was like, gotta go safer. Yeah, no.

They called it the Iowa Cow War. It had a name. It was a big enough deal that it had a name. So it turns out that tuberculosis can potentially be transmitted to humans through cow milk. So the government was like really serious about this. And when they were like, no, like pitchforks and like throwing mud at veterinarians and like they had to call in the frickin army. But what's in it for him?

Just some trouble making? Just being a wacko. I let you talk me out of it, Sam. I'm sorry. No, that's okay. It's my own dang fault. Look what we've done with the internet now. We have all these like

conspiracy theories it's run rampant it's wild like it was great to like research conspiracy theories in the 1930s because like at least we're not extra idiots like every time a new medium comes around people are like lying to it and people will listen yeah so we're at that stage of the internet right now tell Tell me about the balls. So, the balls, there is a real thing. It's not Norman Baker, John R. Brinkley, and it was goat balls, not chicken balls. And it was, like, actually 16,000 times, including, like, fairly well-known people. The owner of the Los Angeles Times had goat balls transplanted into him.

So people were super fooled by this guy. And he had a radio station. He had basically the same path. Had a radio station, got shut down, and then had to leave America to restart his radio station in Mexico, which is also what this other guy did. They had the exact same life trajectory. Were they friends? They must have known each other i guess it also makes sense that well-known people would get this goat ball transplant because like those are the only people buying goop that's so expensive yeah like the diamond face yeah the jade vagina eggs you only need like five people to buy your diamond vagina eggs to make a good profit.

And then the interview book was true, except that it was Napoleon Hill. And the book was called The Law of Success. And he claimed to have interviews with not Tesla, but Edison and a bunch of other people. Was he going to give Edison a medal? Yeah. He makes sense as somebody who would want a medal. Would you show up if someone said? Yes, absolutely.

How do you have to finish this up? It would be so easy to trick me. Oh, boy. Sorry, everybody. And sorry, Sam. I'm coming for you. That's all right. You've passed me now.

Or we're tied. We're tied now. We're tied now. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it's time for the Fact Off. Welcome back. Hank Buck Total. Sari has one, which is a shared point with Lewis Carroll.

I have two. No, I have three. Sam has zero and Stefan has zero. But now it's time for you guys to try to get some points. One or two. I don't think that you can catch up with me. And now it's time for the fact off. Stefan and Sam are going to try to blow our minds with science facts.

And we, Sari and I, will choose which science fact has blown our mind the most and give it a hank buck. And we're going to decide who goes first by who's closest to being a cancer in astrology signs, which I've looked up on the internet. Okay. What is? It's June to July. March. March, April, May, June, July. That's pretty close.

June, July. August, September. It's also pretty close. God, you're like equidistant. I'm a Libra. Does that help? No.

Not at all. At the end of March. You're the end of March? End of March and the end of September. September. Yeah. Oh, okay.

So yeah, Stefan goes first. And if not, who the fuck cares? Who cares? People on Twitter? Astrology isn't real. Cancer does not tend to appear in the fossil record that often because it affects soft tissues mostly. But there are bone cancers, and occasionally we do find fossil bones that have cancer.

And we've actually found a fair number of dinosaur bones with cancer so like way way back side note until recently we've only found those tumors in duck build dinosaurs which is weird and like one of the researchers was like maybe it's because they eat conifers and conifers have a bunch of carcinogenic compounds in them apparently do we find more duck build dinosaurs than other kind of dinosaurs no i don't think so yeah he also thought maybe they just lived a really long time and so had more time to get cancer but in any case in a paper published this year they have what appears to be the oldest bone cancer that we found at least in an amniote which is animals that lay eggs on land or keep the eggs inside.

So I think there's an older one in fish. This was found in a 240 million year old ancient turtle from the Triassic. I'm going to try to say it. Papocellus rosinae? Yeah, because it's the dad of the rosy shelled turtle. That's exactly right.

Actually, well, so the first word, that means grandfather turtle. Oh! You're right. That was kind of close. So I guess back then, like, they didn't have shells, but they had the, like, expanded rib cage that we see in turtles. So they look more like an eight-inch long lizard. They're just big, flat lizards. Yeah, basically.

And they discovered 20 of this species in a German quarry, and that was published in 2015. And then someone noticed, like, oh, one of these bones has kind of a weird growth going on. So they, like, did, like, a micro-CT scan, and that allowed them to rule out other causes of bone growth. And then they basically diagnosed it as a periosteal osteosarcoma. And it looks very similar to that version of bone cancer that we see in humans. So it was a malignant tumor. And a lot of the tumors that we found in dinosaur bones were benign. So this is like kind of unique in that way as well. And just kind of weird that like disease has not changed that much.

In a lot of ways, like ultimately, tetrapods are all pretty similar. And, you know, like bones are pretty similar now as they were then. Like obviously our body shapes are very different, but like bones are kind of the same.

And so if there's something that's going to go wrong to cause a bone to become cancerous, it probably would happen still. Yeah, that's wild. And Grandpa Turtle. Is cancer something that is just like a permanent side effect of having cell growth? Or could we evolve out of having it?

I don't think that we could evolve out of having cancer. Because something is bound to go wrong eventually. And like cells multiply. And if they don't, then you don't live yeah thank you stefan i love your grandpa turtle sam what is your fact i was picturing with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and like a trucker hat on i got cancer yeah okay so in 2015 a man in columbia went to the doctor after experiencing a fever and cough for like a few months. The doctors found tumors in his lungs. And when they looked at the biopsies of these tumors,

they made an even more shocking discovery. The cells of the tumor were not human cells. So they couldn't figure out what the cells were in Columbia. And they sent the cells to the CDC, who eventually after a few months found DNA from a fairly common species of tapeworm. And they hypothesized that the guy who was HIV positive and wasn't on meds at the time had a tapeworm that got to grow way more than a tapeworm normally would. And the tapeworm got old enough to develop cancer.

And that cancer somehow, question mark, seeped into his lungs and started growing. Probably it started growing because it had the same mechanism in it that the tapeworm have that would make it dodge the human immune system. Once they figured this out, they started to work on ways to cure him. But he died three days after they figured out what the cancer was from. And that was the only case ever in recorded history in 2013. And then as of 2015, doctors aren't sure if drugs to treat tapeworms would have worked or if treatments normally used to treat cancer would have worked

or if they would have had to think of something totally different, but they've never been able to find it again. So they don't know. It seems like the kind of thing that wouldn't happen very often. As discussed, it's probably pretty unusual for a tapeworm to get cancer and then extra unusual for a tapeworm to get cancer while it's inside a person and then extra unusual for a tapeworm to get cancer while it's inside a person whose immune system is super compromised and then right extra unusual for all that to happen and also for it to

like be able to dodge the immune system and like feed off of the circulatory system of the human somehow, integrate with it, and it'd have to be attached to the human system. One thing it said was that the cells were 10 times smaller than human cells. Sure, yeah. So did it just get in there or what? I don't know. And I assume the tapeworm was dead,

or else they would have mentioned the tapeworm, I think. Yeah, it doesn't sound like it's just a cancerous tapeworm in there. It sounds like it's a guy with... Yeah, he had it in his lymph nodes, too. So it had travel. Oh, the tapeworm cancer metastasized? Well, yeah, tapeworms don't exist in your lungs. That's, of course.

Oh, yeah. I just thought it was in his lungs. He breathed in a tapeworm. I mean, maybe. Maybe he went down the wrong pipe. Anything's possible. So, Sari and I have to choose from a grandpa turtle that got bone cancer, is the oldest known cancer at 240 million years of an amniote,

bone cancer in a turtle, or a man in Columbia had a tumor that were made of non-human cells, tapeworm cancer. I mean, Sam. I mean, yeah, Sam's got that one. I can feel the mind blow happening. She's thinking. I know. I feel like, Sam, I'm sorry, Stephan.

That's fine. It is a medical marvel. My mind was also blown. That's wild. Congratulations, Sam. I caught up with you, and now you're ahead again. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch. Sam's got a question from our audience to our couch of finely honed scientific minds.

And it's related kind of to my thing. Omaha Programmer asks, what makes Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease a contagious cancer? I think that I know the answer to this, which is that the cancer itself isn't contagious, but there is a virus or something that creates mutations that cause the same cancer once you get the virus which is we also have those in humans hpv is the big one oh yeah okay we do have those in humans but that's not how

tasmanian devil face kids oh can i guess can i guess maybe tasman don't say it like that i'm gonna get right maybe tasmanian devils are all very genetically similar? Does that have something to do with it? That makes sense because it's a really small population. That makes sense, Sari. The cancer is genetically similar, but even though the Tasmanian devils are not. Oh, Stefan. Is it the same cancer?

It's just one instance of this cancer that's now spread around? Yes. Wow. Okay, so it really is contagious cancer. Sorry, back off. Yeah, no. It's wild. And I think for a while, scientists did think it was a virus because that made more sense.

We've seen HPV. We've seen hepatitis B and C, I think, cause liver cancer oftentimes. We're familiar with virus messing with DNA causing cancer. But in Tasmanian devils, this face cancer is one of, like, three-ish instances of cancer that's transmitted by physically exchanging cells. So the Tasmanian devils bite each other and, like, fight over food. And then they get cell chunks inside them. And those cells then proliferate and cause more face cancer when we've studied these tumors like these facial tumors we have

found that they have an almost identical genotype which is like the chromosome arrangement and so they think that it's the cells from one tasmanian devil cancer that just keep getting passed throughout a population. So like it happened one time and all of those cancers are the same cancer. Yeah. That's terrifying because that could happen to me. Yeah, we haven't found it in humans yet. Don't bite Tasmanian devils.

There are two different strains of devil facial tumor cells, I guess. The first one that we found, the one that's decimated a lot of the population, is missing something called the major histocompatibility complex, which is something on the outside of cells. And the easiest way to explain it is it's like a signal to your immune system about what this cell is. So a lot of different cells have an MHC. So your immune system can go up to a cell and interact with the MHC and be like, that's part of me, or that's not part of me, or that's part of me, but it's infected weirdly. Or it's in the wrong spot.

Yeah. And so because this tumor cell doesn't have very much of an MHC, then it can slip by the immune system, which is how they think. Does it just think it's nothing? Yeah. Or like it doesn't register as foreign. Is that why if I took somebody else's tumor and like injected those cells into me that I would not get cancer from that? Is it because of the MHC?

Yeah, the MHC is like a big reason. And like organ transplants, it's why those are so hard because our bodies are so good at recognizing foreign objects if you have like a strong immune system. Yeah, your body would be like, that cell is not from me and I'm going to go ahead and get rid of it. so good at recognizing foreign objects if you have like a strong your body would be like that

cell is not from me and i'm going to go ahead and get rid of it i'm not going to take a chance on this thanks body but then there's a second strain of devil facial tumor cells that has mhc molecules and we're not entirely sure how it slipped like these are still incomplete understandings but it seems to be progressing over time to express fewer of them. So there's something to do with these cells slipping under the radar and then just latching on, proliferating, and then being passed on. There's a similar thing in dogs called canine transmissible venereal tumor, which is like genital area stuff.

So as they're like making sex. Your hands do so many things. Dog fuck, I know. Anyway, they get... Yeah, sexually transmitted cancer. That's wild. That is weird. And then also soft shell clams

can get some sort of cancer, like a physical cancer of hemolymph. And so they like squirt it out into the water and these cancer cells like drift through the water and infect large populations. And so all these small discoveries are making scientists think that this this phenomenon that they thought was so rare and nearly impossible, which is like transmission of cancer, is like more widespread in nature than we thought.

I've learned so much today, you guys. If you want to ask the science couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, and we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Salji Busta at RandomName2029, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Final Hank Buck scores,

Sari, 1, Stefan, 0, Sam, 2, and Hank, 3! Good job. Hey, thanks. I really appreciate your support. If you like this show and you want to help us out, Two, and Hank, Three. Good job. Hey, thanks. I really appreciate your support. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. And you can also let us know what you like about the show.

We'll be looking at iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes if you want to leave any topic ideas in there. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, tell people about us. I'm trying to make that happen. Yeah, we're so used to zoning out during this part. Then your arms shoot up.

If you want to read more about any of today's topics, you can check out SciShowTangents.org for links to all of our sources. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Shin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz,

who also edits a lot of these episodes with Hiroko Matsushima. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this 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. In 2014, a study published in the journal Medicinal Chemistry Communications led to a bunch of click-baity headlines like smelling farts may prevent cancer or how farts cure disease. But it was actually very specifically about how there's less hydrogen sulfide available when we're sick.

And hydrogen sulfide is like a compound that makes rotten eggs smell that way and farts sometimes smell smelly and mitochondria need it to function and so they were just suggesting it may be worth looking into like some drug vaguely to help but there are a bunch of headlines that were just like farts are gonna save us all