SciShow Tangents - Ceri's Favorite Things

Starting point is 00:00:00 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'm joined by stefan chadney what's your tagline a muscular crepuscular god that was terrible sam jolts is also here with us today sam describe the perfect date god i haven't been on a date in like 11 years. So it was probably, I mean, it must have been the last date I went on with Rachel. So that was 11 years ago. It must have been perfect. Look at me now.

Starting point is 00:00:54 And what's your tagline, Sam? One year later, and I still think I'd be a great Santa. Sari Riley is also here with us today sary who's the best scientist oh i don't know he's fishing for a hank he wants you to say hank the guy who hasn't been inside of a lab except to make a video in 20 years can i cop out and say scientists collective are the best scientists? I love it. Yes. I'm against hero narratives right now.

Starting point is 00:01:28 That's my thing. As far as science communication goes. I'm like, no, no. Talk about all the people who helped or generalize it. Don't mention the one person. There are no individual scientists. We owe all science together. And when we tried to be individual scientists, we were alchemists and we sucked at it.

Starting point is 00:01:45 We were like, don't show anybody your notebooks! Don't peer review anything! Just lie a bunch! What's your tagline? That's no place for a tree. You got a problem with a tree? And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline is oil-a-vitriol.

Starting point is 00:02:02 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, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but if you go off on a tangent, which you may very well, if the rest of the team deems your tangent not worthy,

Starting point is 00:02:18 we'll force you to give up one of your sandbox, which I feel like hasn't happened in like four months. It's the end of the year right now, which means that it is also the end of season two of Tangents. So this month, we're celebrating science and friendship and the end of the season with episodes about each of our hosts.

Starting point is 00:02:33 The topic for each episode in December will be one of us and everyone will be presenting facts about some of that person's favorite things. And in the last episode of the year, we will announce the season's winner and the new name for our Tangents currency. And in the last episode of the year, we will announce the season's winner and the new name for our Tangents currency. And as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem, This Week with Sari. This week's about me and this poem is too.

Starting point is 00:02:56 I should be an expert, so I guess I'll push through. In short bios past, I say I like these, rain, beagles, cartoons, video games, and green tea. And I guess that's true if I did construe the prompt as my interests in words one or two. But brains are complex, and with all due respect, I'll flex my introspection and really dissect what my favorite things are. Version two. I love stories of weirdos who don't quite fit in, from fossil-gathering maidens to cephalopod skin. I love stories of growth and plants and persistence of Antarctic forests and the mere existence of humans who are so sad and so brave,

Starting point is 00:03:29 working together to research and stave off disease and injustice and the unsung work of collectives. Those stories, not one arrogant jerk. I guess what I love most are the strange and the kind, the intersections between art and the mind, the little magics with science at their core.

Starting point is 00:03:44 Okay, I'm a softie and just excited to learn more. So let's say the topic for today is Sari, and Sari likes SciShow tangents. Yeah. Which is great. So Sari, who are you? Well, I'm 26. I'm a Gemini. And I was going to ask you what your name means. Yeah, it's less fun that I'd have to do it for myself because then I'm not surprised.

Starting point is 00:04:18 But my name is Sari, which is short for Siridwen, which, as everyone has told me, is pronounced incorrectly. That's how my parents did it. So the etymology of it, it's a Welsh name that's classically pronounced Ceridwen, and it is the name of a sorceress or goddess in Welsh legend. There are two options for the first half of it. The Cerid means bent or Syrd means poetry combined with Ven for woman or Gwen for white or fair or blessed. And I got my name because my dad saw a statue of this goddess on the Cornell University campus and was like, man, doing my PhD sucks. This statue is mildly comforting. I'm going to name a daughter after it. And he imbued you with so much dorky energy.

Starting point is 00:05:06 Yeah. Have you seen this statue in person? When I was a baby, I also helped. When my dad was a TA, according to legend, a.k.a. his story, I used to eat McDonald's in the back of the class and help run the slide projector. And so I was on campus with him a lot as a baby slash toddler. And there's a picture of me with it, but I don't remember it because that's before. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Memories are lasting. Well, Sari, I'm excited to present some things that you like. My thing is about nothing you mentioned. So hopefully you actually like this thing. My thing's about one of the things you mentioned before. You said you don't like those things anymore. Oh, I like those things still. still okay that means it's time for truth where i have three science facts to present to each of the rest of y'all but only one of those facts is real the rest of you have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact if you get it

Starting point is 00:06:02 right you get a sandbuck if not then i will get your sandbuck and my truth or fail fact is about gardens and plants and stuff do you like gardens and plants and stuff i do yeah okay good is that a new like it's a new like yeah this is the first apartment i guess that i've moved into that actually has a yard and space for a garden so i spend a lot of time outside well it is the year 2020 where we have to spend a lot of time outside in whatever way we can without being near other people. Gardening is a great one. So gardens are good for growing things, vegetables, whatever Sari is working on, but also you can grow a whole botanical garden for people to just come and visit and learn things about plants and nature and conservation. Sometimes in that process, botanical gardens get to try out some of the latest, greatest new technologies.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And recently at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, they installed a thing that took inspiration directly from nature. And it is one of these three things. Which one is it? Is it? Number one, the garden strung a cable between two trees and then set a sloth inspired robot on it. And the robot will crawl across the strings and collect data on environmental conditions like temperature and humidity to help monitor the environment of the of the place. And the robot is designed to move very slowly to conserve energy, just like a sloth does

Starting point is 00:07:25 as it goes about its day. Also, they made it resemble a sloth. So they just built it so that it will look like a sloth so that the kids at the botanical garden will say like, oh, that's cute. Tell me about it. Or is that a lie? And it's fact number two, where the garden deployed a series of tiny inchworm like devices called hygro bots in their greenhouses. Hygro bots will move around, but only when humidity changes. So when the humidity changes, the device will bend and unbend like an inchworm that will sort of like flop it around the surface of the botanical garden. And the reason that they do this is that they have little test strips that change color when a fungus is detected. And this is a fungus that they have to be careful about having inside of the botanical garden. So whenever workers are walking

Starting point is 00:08:16 around, they can just sort of like glance and see one of these little bots that's flopping around and see if the fungus has been detected. Or maybe that one's the lie and this one's the true one. Fact number three, the garden created a fake garden made up of fake miniature replicas of the garden that the little kids can go climb around on and learn about the different species in the garden and around the world. But they aren't just any fake trees. They're loaded with piezoelectric

Starting point is 00:08:45 crystals which create an electric charge when mechanical forces are applied and so as the children climb around on them uh that energy is then used to power lights near the mini garden so all that happy play gets converted into electricity or maybe that one's the lie you never know which one is it so you either have your sloth-inspired environmental data-gathering robot, or fact number two, inchworm-inspired fungus-sensing robots, or fact number three,

Starting point is 00:09:14 replica plants that generate electricity from being played upon. Oh, the sloth one seems like way more trouble than its order. Yeah. It doesn't go very far, so it could just be hanging and do the same job probably.

Starting point is 00:09:26 I mean, I guess the string could cross the whole thing, but it does seem more elaborate than necessary. I'm trying to think of like an employee describing to a visitor what the robot does. And if they were describing it to me

Starting point is 00:09:38 at the end of it, I'd be like, oh, okay. And then I'd move on. It would be a thing where I would be like oh thank you so much and then as soon as i walked away i would turn to whoever i was at the botanical garden with and be like i don't understand why they just don't stick it in a tree like that seems like it'd be so much better yeah i'll feel really bad if this is the real one but the inchworms seem cute and useful but my issue with that one people could and would steal them right i don't know i well i mean maybe if they look they look

Starting point is 00:10:14 enough like inchworms then you don't steal an inchworm true but also i feel like botanical gardens have a fairly well-defined path and and then there's always like someone, like a staff member hiding behind a bush nearby. So if you do something wrong, they're like, eh? That's a good point. I see you. And if you have so many of them, you wouldn't be worried about them disappearing. Like if a kid took one of your worms,

Starting point is 00:10:38 you probably wouldn't notice. Yeah, I think the idea behind hygroscopic or like these hygrobot type things is that they're really cheap to make. Okay. Sort of dump them around. And the last one seems too pleasant to be real. Just that they would create a play place for kids.

Starting point is 00:10:55 Is that what's pleasant about it? I don't know. And that they'd use the energy from their youthful exuberance to power little lights. I guess I just don't really get that one. You want kids to understand that like energy comes from somewhere, right? Yeah. So it's a demonstration more than anything else. Obviously, this isn't saving a tremendous amount of power.

Starting point is 00:11:14 Right. In general, this is the case with piezoelectrics, where it's like, this sounds really cool. And then you're like, actually, turns out that in order to do any of the useful things that we are all doing right now with power, you need a lot more than you're going to get by jingling a jangle. Like at the mall, you have a kid's play place because you want to leave the kids with one of the parents and the other parent can go to American Eagle or whatever. At the botanical garden, they could be enthralled by the sloth, the climbing across.

Starting point is 00:11:47 Oh, there's so much to do. They don't need a place. Right. Yeah. Stefan is speaking like a true on owner of a job. Like, like this never bad to have someplace for them to go.

Starting point is 00:12:00 Okay. Turn their energy into a little bit of electricity. Yeah. Kids love looking at trees and reading plaques. Yeah. Alright, it's time to go to twitter.com slash scishowtangents where you can find these three facts and vote

Starting point is 00:12:13 on the one that you think is the true fact before we find out what the rest of these clowns thought. So go vote now and now tell me what you think is the true fact. Well, I'm going to go with the slots because i just don't believe the other two are practical oh okay i can't picture the play place and i don't i think the worms would be gone in the in a day i'm gonna go with the worms because same reasoning

Starting point is 00:12:35 i think the other two are impractical i like the worms the best that seems the most realistic to me i'm waffling between that and the play place but i'm gonna go with the worms well stephan it didn't matter either way because both of those were fake oh no the sloth i can't believe you got it sam i thought i totally had all of you this is the most boring one so it's yeah so here's why the sloth isn't boring so they're doing this inside of the botanical garden but the hope is that they can string even longer ones in the real world and then you can have this really low power robot that will send you data not just on like one area of the forest but around the forest it's a bit of a uh a pilot project to do it internally where they can control it and

Starting point is 00:13:23 stuff it's surprisingly large, which makes me think that there's more going on in it than I would initially think, but I guess they have to have ways of communicating the information, batteries to store energy. There's actually just a sloth inside. We've recently discovered, fairly recently,

Starting point is 00:13:40 that the slow movement of a sloth is a survival strategy so that they just don't use a lot of energy and that would actually work for a robot as well like you just don't move very much and you don't need as much battery power you didn't say it had big googly eyes and had a adorable face it's also solar powered it's also solar powered so it has little solar panels on its butt so that it can keep its batteries charged. Wow.

Starting point is 00:14:06 What a great robot. Self-sufficient. Well, we've turned all the way around on it now. Everybody except Sari thinks it's a great robot. Yeah, it's fine. I think after seeing it, I wouldn't make my catty comment to my botanical garden walking partner. I'd be like, that's fine. At least they made it cute.

Starting point is 00:14:23 Was the worms real in any way both of those things are real so there is a there there are ways to like make things that can sort of like you know move around a little bit due to changing humidity and then also there is test strips for testing fungus in plant populations which they do need to do in environments like this but you can't it's not just exposure. You have to grind up leaves and make them wet and do a whole scientific procedure on them. You can't just tap

Starting point is 00:14:51 against them and be like, that one's got fungus, that one doesn't. You'd need wet worm robots. Basically, they'd need to eat up the plant and pass it through them and test for the fungus, which, hey, maybe that's coming. And then there is an example of a piezoelectric playground in Belgrade, which is more like an architecture project than a playground.

Starting point is 00:15:13 And there are also lots of other sort of like pilot projects in piezoelectric stuff that, as I said, it turns out to not produce very much electricity. Could you like put it in a in cement on a street or something and generate tons of electricity? They're expensive. So per unit of electricity created, you just have to make a lot of them. Well, we'll find some other way to make children useful.

Starting point is 00:15:37 Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sandbug, Total, Sari, and Sam are tied with one. I'm in the lead with two, and Stefan is pulling up in the rear with zero. But it's time for Stefan to try to make his comeback, because it's time for the fact-off.

Starting point is 00:16:13 Two panelists have brought science facts to resent to the others in an attempt to blow our minds. And the presentees each have a Sandbug to award to the fact that we like the most. To decide who's going to go first, we have a trivia question. As we know from her ultimately very popular tweet, Asperapist, Sari loves plant puns, apparently. How many plant puns do you love, Sari? Just that one, or are there more? There's an example in this question that I would not call myself a plant

Starting point is 00:16:36 pun lover, but according to my tattoo, yes. There is a tattoo of a fig. It's labeled Fig 1 because it's a figure of a fig. So that is another good plant pun. And if you tattooed it, it's pretty, you've kind of got yourself stuck with this. I'm sorry. And Sari loves to garden.

Starting point is 00:16:54 And the fig is one of the earliest known instances of agriculture. By how many years do scientists believe that fig crops predate those of wheat and rye oh no 10 000 why not fruit seems easier to grow than a wheat to me maybe you wouldn't even look at a wheat and think i'm gonna try to grow that so it's true you just like look at some grass and you're like that is not food and you look at a fig and you're like, that is not food. And you look at a fig and you're like, yeah, I see that. That's food. Yum, yum. I will say more like, God, maybe it's even longer than that.

Starting point is 00:17:33 No, I'll say 5,000 years. I don't know. It was 1,000 years. Not that far. But look, agriculture, that's a long time. 1,000 years ago, what did we have? What was going on in 1020? They didn't have blue jeans, I'll tell you that. Oh, that's true. Definitely true. Stefan, you go first. All right. So one of the mysteries of the brain is how we categorize visual information and why it appears in the same place in everyone's brain, just like why brain

Starting point is 00:18:03 regions stay pretty consistent. And so my first intuition on that would be that the brain learns sort of like a neural network would, like you have these, you see things and based on the physical features of the things that you see, you see enough trees and then you learn what a tree looks like and that's how you figure it out. But the leading theory is something called eccentricity bias. And it's basically when your brain is developing, when you're very young, the wiring in the visual cortex is more influenced by where the object appears in your visual field. So whether it's

Starting point is 00:18:37 more centrally located or if it appears more in the peripheral, and how much of the visual field it takes up. Normally to test between these theories, you'd take young children, or I know they've also done this with monkeys, and you teach them to recognize new categories of objects and see how their brains react. But it's super important when you're doing that to keep the way that the images are presented very consistent so that they're taking up the same part of the visual field. They're about the same size and you have to repeat the exposure a lot to get the brain to actually respond during development. So one researcher was thinking about this and realized that his lifelong experience playing Pokemon might offer the perfect experimental condition for this

Starting point is 00:19:21 because people who started playing Pokemon in the 90s with the red and the blue games, everyone's playing on the Game Boy, so they're all looking at a small screen that you're holding about a foot away from your face, and everyone's looking at these little black and white creatures and learning to differentiate them. So you have a really repeatable experience,

Starting point is 00:19:40 and now all these people are adults and you can test their brains. And for hardcore players, you get a lot of the repeated exposure that you need. So they recruited 11 people who had played a bunch as a child starting from age five to eight, and then also they still played as an adult, I think, and then 11 people who had never played the game. And they put them in fMRI scanners as they were showing them groups of images from different categories. So like faces, words, Pokemon, and hallways. Four classic objects. The four big categories of things.

Starting point is 00:20:17 So not surprisingly, in the Pokemon players, there was a brain region that responded much more strongly to Pokemon than any of the other image categories. And that preference did not show up in the non-players. And the brain region is the occipitotemporal sulcus. And in the non-players, it instead was responding to animals, cartoons, or words, which sort of makes sense. Like there's some overlap there. Pokemon are cartoon animals that say words.

Starting point is 00:20:44 Yeah, that say words. I guess, yeah, they don don't look like words though but you know some do do they yeah yeah there's a pokemon that looks like everything unknown i like little letters oh yeah so shoving up your ass i'm not one of these experts i wouldn't have qualified so this brain region is part of a larger region called the ventral temporal cortex which is thought to be responsible for visual categorization and the they found that the pokemon region was closer to the one that lights up for faces which are we because we are social focus on faces a lot those also tend to be centrally located in our visual field. And that region is further from the one that distinguishes hallways, which we have a region

Starting point is 00:21:31 for hallways apparently. But we normally aren't focusing on the hallway. We take that in more peripherally. It's like another piece of evidence that seems to validate the current leading hypothesis that the placement in the visual field is very important to how our visual cortex develops and learns to categorize information. And it also teaches us that even though most of this wiring happens when we're infants, you can still impact it much later by having extensive visual experience with a particular thing. But they also pointed out that you shouldn't be worried

Starting point is 00:22:07 if your children are playing a lot of Pokemon or, I guess, other video games because all the people they recruited as the Pokemon experts, they all have PhDs, so they're all doing okay. Yeah. Of course. There we are, always testing the same population of people over and over again. This is the problem with a lot of psychology studies. So I like this because it explains a thing

Starting point is 00:22:31 that I experience, which is that when I first start looking at something, like say the first time I was like, I'm gonna do a little bird watching. Initially, like it's telling one bird from another is like, I have no idea. And then slowly it slowly, my brain starts to create new ways of categorizing things. And then I'm like, how did I ever get those two things mixed up?

Starting point is 00:22:53 Same thing with the voices of McElroy brothers. Once upon a time, I couldn't even tell Griffin and Justin apart. And now I can't imagine a world in which I don't understand the difference between Justin and Travis. And they actually sound quite similar. I also love that the brain is like, well, we're going to have to use one of the areas of the brain for this. Which is it? The one that's good for cartoons and animals. Yeah. This is an old study from 2005, I think, but they did research that was like looking at how we have single neurons in our brains that get very specifically associated with like people that we encounter frequently. In this study, I think they were studying like they were looking at people who were fans of the show The Friends.

Starting point is 00:23:41 The Friends. The Friends. The show about The Friends, you know. friends the friends the friends about the friends called friends i think uh but uh i want to i want to know more about the show the friends yeah it's got it's got rass and Rothschild. They love each other. We were on a pork. Well, this has gone off the rails. But in that study, they were looking at neurons that fired for these people that were all like, I think it was the same neuron in all these people that was associated with Jennifer Aniston. And in one person, it fired for Lisa Kudrow also. Wow, everybody had a Jennifer Aniston. And in one person, it fired for Lisa Kudrow also.

Starting point is 00:24:25 Wow, everybody had a Jennifer Aniston. Yeah. I certainly don't. I don't think I could tell you what Jennifer Aniston looked like. Oh, that's awesome. I want to be friends with the person whose Jennifer Aniston neuron is Lisa Kudrow. That person seems cool to me.

Starting point is 00:24:42 I like them. Maybe it's Jennifer Anistoniston she can't have her okay we got to move on because sam also has a science fact it's always bad when you have a raucous time with the first one i have to go okay well anyway here i go as climate change continues to worsen and polar bear populations shrink it becomes increasingly important to develop breeding programs for polar bears in captivity but there is a pretty big problem with that. And that's that polar bears, much like pandas, are very awful at captive breeding for a whole ton of reasons. So one reason is that polar bears mate in the spring, but they delay their pregnancy and they don't start

Starting point is 00:25:19 gestation until they go into hibernation four to seven months later. Another problem is that since gestation takes place during hibernation, zoos with possibly pregnant polar bears have to spend a ton of money to provide a ton of specialized care, including complete isolation for the polar bear and constant monitoring to give it any potential pregnancy the best possible chance of success. The third issue, and one that pandas also have, is that polar bears that have mated will exhibit signs of pregnancy like weight gain and increased hormone levels even if they aren't pregnant, which is known as pseudopregnancy. So the increase in hormones, and this is the key thing,

Starting point is 00:25:54 during this period makes it basically impossible to perform an accurate non-invasive pregnancy test. You can apparently form an invasive pregnancy test in the form of an ultrasound on a polar bear, but they have really small uteruses and they hate being touched. So it doesn't seem like people you can apparently form an invasive pregnancy test in the form of an ultrasound on a polar bear but they have really small uteruses and they hate being touched so it doesn't seem like people often so basically what the end result of this is that you're waiting around for months every time your polar bears mate giving a specialized care with no idea if it worked not to mention that to even get polar bears to mate in the first place you probably had to ship your polar bear off somewhere or ship a polar bear to you to mate. And if they're pregnant, most likely you're just going to end up with two cubs after

Starting point is 00:26:28 all of that work. So it's not a very streamlined process, but there is one, and this is the interest part, non-traditional, highly accurate test developed in 2013 that zoos have begun turning to in order to figure out if their bears are pregnant, a beagle named Elvis. Researchers at the Cincinnatiincinnati zoo center for conservation and research of endangered wildlife trained elvis using poop samples from bears that they knew had had been pregnant and had babies and then those that had had pseudo pregnancies and after a few months he was identifying polar bear pregnancies with 97 accuracy so the next year 2014 the zoo began taking new samples from potentially pregnant

Starting point is 00:27:06 bears and his success rate as far as i could tell stayed the same he can only detect pregnancies that are pretty far along so researchers are trying to narrow down exactly what hormone or blend of hormones he's smelling so they can turn it into a test that they can do sooner because even after all these years it seems like they have no idea what he's smelling in this poop that lets them know if the polar bears i love it so do you have to ship your poop off to elvis yeah you have to you have to freeze dry it and ship it to the cincinnati zoo and and they just decided to train this dog because like we know how to train dogs to sniff for stuff i think somebody yeah somebody at the zoo was thinking about bomb sniffing dogs. And then they thought, eh, maybe we could try this out.

Starting point is 00:27:48 There were other dogs they tried to train, but they all scrubbed out. Only Elvis made it. How did they get enough samples of pregnant polar bear poop for Elvis to be trained if it's so rare? I don't know for sure, but I would guess because they've been trying to figure out a polar bear pregnancy test for so long, they have like a catalog of pregnant polar bears to see if they could identify what could help you figure it out faster. All right.

Starting point is 00:28:15 I love both of these facts. And I don't know which one to pick. Me neither. They're both so good. You did so good for me. They are both very good. I'm so giddy by both of these facts. Three, two, one, Stefan.

Starting point is 00:28:28 Oh. I actually hadn't decided until I said it. It's the brain, man. I feel like my brain is alive in a way that I am not. My consciousness and my brain feel so separate to me. And I'm just like, you're just doing this thing all on your own. And I do not have any control over you. i don't have that thought about my brain i think about that with my the skin cells on my arm for some reason because i can see my arms all the time and i'm

Starting point is 00:28:55 like you know those are completely different skin cells than they were like i don't know two weeks ago i just saw a picture of me from like six or seven years ago and I had the thought, I still have those underwear, but I do not have that body anymore. Did your Hank Green neuron categorize it correctly? Younger me.

Starting point is 00:29:20 Oh lord, well, that means that it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This one is from at frogbythebog. And frogbythebog asks Sari to invent a new organ for humans. They demand it. Yeah, not even an ask.

Starting point is 00:29:44 But I took this challenge to heart. The heart is an organ, for example. But an organ, just so we're all on the same page, is a group of specialized tissues that performs a specific function for the organism. So like a sea sponge doesn't have tissues or organs. It's just like generalized cells that can respond to physical stimuli, but there aren't like eyes or ears or a brain or a digestive tract. And the hydra is like slightly more complicated. It has an endoderm and an ectoderm. So like two layers of tissue, but it doesn't have organ level specialization. But like our organs are like the heart and the brain and the lungs, etc.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Plants have like their roots and leaves are organs so things like that oh i never thought about plant organs i didn't either and so here are some of my rejected organs hair follicles but they photosynthesize so they're useful i call it leaf hair i gizzard for extra food when you want another piece of cake and don't want anyone else in your family to have it, but you are too full to eat it. And so you can just like a bird, save that food for later. Skin 2. It has a lot of melanocytes, kind of like those radiation resistant mushrooms, so that we're radiation resistant. So those were my rejected ideas. And so what I would like to propose is an organ that's kind of like tucked between your lungs that basically functions as an internal oxygen tank where blood flows through it regularly. And the key, the new protein called

Starting point is 00:31:11 either ultraglobin, omniglobin, or vitaglobin that kicks in in near-death situations when you need oxygen to sustain your brain. So you just have this like organ that has a lot of bound oxygen that you accumulate over your life. You can't have a bunch of near-death experiences in a row. But when you really like if you just swim a little bit too deep and need a burst of oxygen or if you are like lightheaded or whatever, I don't know, you like hyperventilate a little bit, then your body's like, oh, we've got it. This organ's got it. That seems really useful. Because, like, when you go into, like,

Starting point is 00:31:48 fight or flight, too, like, you'd get a dump of adrenaline or whatever, you could probably use some extra oxygen in that moment, too, and, like, you know, run away from the tiger.

Starting point is 00:31:58 It's like NOS in Fast and the Furious. You, like, push it on everybody. The NOS kicks in, and you can run, like, three times faster. Don like push it on everybody. The knives kick in and you can run like three times faster. Don't hit it too early though.

Starting point is 00:32:10 Rookie mistake. Yeah. You don't want to do that. Sari is either definitely in charge or definitely not in charge of like germline engineering. We're learning

Starting point is 00:32:22 to either give you power or to never give you power. Yeah. I don't know which one it would be either. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to The Busy Little Bee and Melody Rainpod

Starting point is 00:32:38 and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. We've got a tie for this episode. It's me and Sam coming in with two points and Sari and Stefan with one each, which means that headed into the final stretch, Stefan is still substantially ahead with only Sari in striking distance, but it's going to be a difficult challenge

Starting point is 00:32:59 for you to get there. Stefan has to basically get no points for the rest of the season. I might have to lose points. Yeah, I think you'd have to tangent some. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show.

Starting point is 00:33:14 And also other people get to find out what you like about the show. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stephen Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and

Starting point is 00:33:31 Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled,

Starting point is 00:33:48 but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. When it comes to bleaching and dyeing hair, we've turned to all sorts of chemicals over the years. Fortunately, we've come a long way from the ancient Romans. So we found many recipes for hair dyes in Roman ruins, and they've told us that ancient Romans would sit out in the sun after coating their hair with various lifting agents to bleach their hair, basically.

Starting point is 00:34:26 And those lifting agents include things that are pleasant, like white wine and honey. But they also include things that are not so pleasant, like a blend of sulfur, quicklime, and pigeon poop that could potentially give you really bad chemical burns or just poison you to death if you had it in too long or on incorrectly. But did it make their hair? Did it bleach their hair? Yeah, I'm sure it worked. Probably worked great. I don't know. Sari, would that work, you think?

Starting point is 00:34:49 I don't know. If you quick-climbed your hair? I have not quick-climbed my hair. I've bleached my hair, and I thought I was dying for a little bit. I was like, is my scalp going to burn off? Because it is like a very weird, tingly, hot feeling.

Starting point is 00:35:01 Very exothermic reaction. So I could believe it, but I could also, I stuck with it for fashion. So I could see the ancient Romans doing that too.

SciShow Tangents - Ceri's Favorite Things

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