SciShow Tangents - Cold

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Jack frost ain't just nipping at our noses where we live, he's basically biting them off! Ouch! So we thought we'd learn a little about what "cold" even is, and you may not be too surprised to hear that the answer is way, way more complicated than you'd think. Bundle up and take a listen!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/SciShowTangents to 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 and Tom Mosner 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 Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]Coldest temperature - Bremen drop tower heighthttps://www.livescience.com/coldest-temperature-ever[Fact Off]Freeze dried potato made by the Altiplanohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJrOJg2a-_Yhttps://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210715-chuno-the-andean-secret-to-making-potatoes-last-decadeshttps://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/chunos-potatoes-feetCaloric reflex/vestibular testhttps://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003429.htmhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/caloric-vestibular-testhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10863/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4325576/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident every expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. I was just thinking about a calzone that I had when I was nine, and how the grocery store that made those calzones closed down. I don't remember what it was called.

I remember exactly where it was on Corrine Drive in Orlando, Florida. It was like a strip mall grocery store that was very small and had like eight aisles. And I have dreams, literal dreams. I dream about this grocery store and I can think about that calzone and taste it now. I can taste it in my brain right now and I want to eat it so bad. Is there a food that you will never get to eat again that you miss a great deal? I think about this all the time. There is a sandwich place in Butte called Paul Bunyan's and they made the best long sandwiches. What do you call those? Submarine sandwiches with just like, they were so trashy and they had so much mayonnaise on them, but they were so freaking delicious.

And they went out of business over the pandemic and that's it. We're never going to have it again. They had that kind of like soup that like you get off the truck, you know, the Cisco soup or whatever that everybody has. But they just they're super special somehow. You can't recreate that amount of mayonnaise. It's just not something that can be done. It's not cost efficient to put that much mayonnaise on your sandwiches at home. I have loved and lost so many foods. So I'm familiar with that. But my greatest loss across my lifetime is the Costco mixed berry pie

once upon a time. In addition to pumpkin pie, apple apple pie peach pie costco had a mixed berry pie with filling made from i think similar if not the same goo that they use for their mixed berry yogurt swirls so like whole strawberries really sugary, lots of different berries, purpley blue goop in pie form. And it was the best pie in the world. And I have looked for it for now over a decade of my life. And they just discontinued it at one point because I guess I was the only person who ever ate it. Well, maybe we can do something about that one. They still have what they need.

I think it's more likely we can do something about Sam's. That person is still alive. Yes. They know. Yeah. Paul Bunyan. He knows how to make that sandwich. Like the recipes in someone's head.

This man who made the calzones in Orlando, Florida in 1989 is probably dead, but definitely unreachable. Yeah. And there's something to the mass production of Costco products that they have to really reboot a whole system for this mix. But you're a daughter of Kirkland. They would listen to you. Yeah. Don't you think?

I would cry, I think, genuinely, because I have looked for it every time. No joke. Every time I go to Costco, I walk through the baked goods section and glance at the pies and I scrutinize them. Sometimes I lift them up just to make sure. Wow. If you work at Costco, get in touch with us. We're on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, at least for now. You can also, while you're there, let us know what your loved and lost food is because we've all got to have one of those once you reach a certain age anyway.

I'm really hungry now. I haven't eaten dinner. My stomach's starting to growl on my way through that. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts

while trying to stay on topic and failing. 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. Who's ahead right now? Sam has 12. I have 18.

Ooh. Pretty close. It's definitely catchable. It's catchable. And as always, we are now going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sam. It's one of nature's cruelest jokes that cold air sinks and warm air rises because as I sit in my basement talking to you folks, It's one of nature's cruelest jokes that cold air sinks and warm air rises. Because as I sit in my basement talking to you folks, I can feel the atoms my body comprises.

Begin to slow to a frigid crawl. The tips of my ears and nose go first. I wish I thought to bring a shawl. I think as my cells begin to freeze and burst. It's nice down here in summer months. A reprieve from the oppressive August heat. But now I'm feeling like a dunce as I podcast with icicles forming on my feet. If things were swapped and warm air sank, I'd be feeling a lot better this afternoon. And here's a fun idea, Sari and Hank.

People would have to float around in cold air balloons. But alas, thermodynamics is what it is in this dimension in which I reside. Now, quick, let's get on with the science pub quiz. So freezing down here won't be how I died. It's cold in my studio, too. I got to turn off the little heater when I make the podcast. And so it just gets colder and colder and colder every moment I'm making content. I'm in shorts.

I'm very warm. So the topic for the day is cold. I'm making content. I'm in shorts. I'm very warm. Wow. So the topic for the day is cold, which is a who knows what cold is. I guess it's relative. It's all relative, Sari. What's cold? This is a little bit easier because we've already done an episode on heat. So I can point people back to that one.

Look, we need as many listens as we can get if you ever find yourself loving scishow tangents and thinking ah but there's no new ones there's old ones you know what else you don't even have to listen to them you could just set them to play and then just walk away sam just wants you to game the system yeah for those who who haven't clicked away from this episode to go listen to that one temperature is weird because it is a quantity that represents how hot or cold something is it is the how we describe thermal energy in matter and hotness and coldness is molecular or atomic wiggles, is how we've described it before on this podcast. So if you are wiggling around a lot,

it's heat. If you're wiggling around less, then it's cold. And generally, heat energy will transfer from warmer substances to cooler substances. So the things that are wiggling faster will bump into the things wiggling slower and speed them up a little bit. This is very confusing, and it's why when we were first discovering heat, we thought there was a substance we could mark. So in the way that you pour water from one cup to another, we thought there was a thing that was heat. We thought caloric was the substance of heat,

and we transferred caloric from one thing to another. And that's how. Just like a made up idea. They're like, something's got to be flowing around. It seems like it's flowing. We're going to name it. And it's pouring from one thing into the other. Yes.

And the caloric is the heat. And then the frigoric is the cold. Oh, wow. So you have hot liquid and cold liquid flowing back and forth. And you can have different proportions of caloric and frigoric. Frigoric? Yeah, that's the word. Oh, my God.

I want that tattooed on my body. Frigoric. Yeah, you can have caloric and frigoric as knuckle tattoos on each one. Who do you want to get slugged by? Caloric or frigoric? By fists. That's their names. But yeah, but it's not that.

That would make so much, that would be so easy, but instead it's wiggles. So caloric and frigoric do not exist. Instead, temperature is just a quantity and a thing that we have to grasp that when we touch an ice cube, the wiggles from our hand are going into that ice cube.

And so it feels cold to us. And that could have been true of caloric as well. You didn't really need frigoric. It's just caloric could be like less and more. This is the thing. Cold doesn't exist. There's just less hot. Until there's no hot.

That's the coldest thing is no hot. And everything else is just more and less hot because it's all wiggles why is cold stuff uh more dense i feel like i should know that there's less wiggles so the if the if the molecules are moving where they bounce against each other and they push each other around like a concert if nobody's moshing there's no space between all the people but if there's moshing there's no space between all the people but if there's moshing there's a lot of space between the people because they bounce off each other as a rock and roll guy i can understand that

and that's why absolute zero is mathematically like you can you can think about absolute zero as a con as a as a concept but realistically we cannot make everything stop on a atomic like quark boson etc level we can cool things down quite a lot make them super super slow but not stopped really what cold is is when it feels cold so So if it's below the comfortable temperature that humans kind of evolved to be most comfortable at, you start to feel cold. And then you get colder and colder as it gets colder. Yes, it's very subjective. Cold is a human experience, how we define and perceive it. Which is fine. All right, Sarah, do you know where the word cold comes from? Do you have anything about that? That seems like a caveman one, right? Yeah. Yeah, the Proto-Indo-European root is gel from Latin gelare, which means to freeze, and is also the root of chill or cool, gelatinous, jelly, glacier, all those good words um and then we just in in old english dialects

and old germanic dialects we just got to cold called calder and then kept it it worked it worked well enough it had a good mouthfeel called i like Yeah. I like that one. I like called more than cold. Called. You're like, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's how I feel. Well, that means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show this week. We're going to be playing The Gauntlet.

Welcome back to The Gauntlet, the ultimate game of science, knowledge, strategy, and treachery. Hank doesn't know about The Gauntlet. No, you haven't heard the episode with it in. It's Sam's game. In The Gauntlet, Sam and Sari, you will be facing a series of eight questions of decreasing difficulty asked by me. I will be directing the questions to you in order from eight to one, asking just one of you at a time, and you can choose to either answer or pass. If your answer is correct, you will be given points, the same number of points as the question's number. So question eight gets you eight points, seven gets you seven points, and so on. If you are wrong, you will lose that amount of points, and your opponent can steal for that same point. But if they are wrong, they don't lose any

points. If you pass, your opponent will get asked the next question, which is a little less difficult. After we've gone through all the questions, we will revisit the past questions. Only this time, they cannot be skipped. We're slightly changing the rules this time. In the second round, if you get the answer wrong, your opponent can steal from you. And remember, if you pay attention to all the questions, you might get some clues to help you with those difficult questions. So get ready for the Gauntlet Ice Age Edition. The gauntlet is confusing, you guys. No, the gauntlet makes perfect sense, Hank.

The gauntlet's the most perfect game ever invented by humans. So who gets to go first? I don't know how that works. game ever invented by humans. So, who gets to go first? I don't know how that works. Whose birthday is next? Sari's, I think. Yeah, mine's May 24th. Sari goes first. It's question number eight, our most difficult question.

Scientists have identified several factors that can drive the onset of an ice age, including tectonic activity, changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration, and changes in solar emission. Another cause are changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun, which changes how much solar radiation reaches the Earth. These changes happen in cycles named for the scientist who described them. What are the cycles called?

Pass. I have no idea. Hank looks like he thinks you should know. You're right. I just wear it on my face, I guess. I'm sorry. All right. Sam, question number seven. Around 20,000 years ago, glaciers reached their largest extent during the Ice Age during a period called the Last Glacial Maximum.

How much colder was the Last Glacial Maximum compared to the average temperature of the 20th century? This feels like a number I've heard before, but I'm going to pass. All right. It's question number six. Sorry. The Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovic calculated the expected number of years between Ice Ages based on his hypothesis that Ice Ages could be the result of cyclical changes in the earth's orbit his calculated value would end up matching the length of time between the ice ages about how long were the intervals that he calculated the last glacial maximum was 20 000 years ago so i'm gonna say you're gonna go for it yeah i'm gonna go for it i'm gonna say 30 000? I'm not going to let that one slide. Sam, you want to try and steal? 40,000 years?

Oh, no! Sam got it! It's 41,000 years, but that's close enough. I knew it. This is how the last game went, too. Deboki creamed me in it. All right. The most recent Ice Age came during the Pleistocene era.

The phrase Pleistocene was created by the scientist Charles Lyell in 1839 based on two Greek words. What does the word Pleistocene translate to? Uh-oh. Man. I find that much more difficult than the first question. I bet Sari knows. She's got to know. Pleistocene means... I don't know. I'm going to pass.

Question number four. Milankovitch and subsequent research found that ice ages that occurred between one and three million years ago happened in 41,000 year intervals. However, during the Pleistocene era, there was an abrupt shift for the amount of time between ice ages lengthened to 100,000 years. To study what might have caused this change, researchers studied a 2.7 million year old ice core from Antarctica for what atmospheric gas? Carbon dioxide?

That's correct! Okay. I'm either going to make a fool of myself or I know this. So Sarah gets four points. The main surprise there was that there was less carbon dioxide than expected in the ice core. One of the possible explanations for that sudden flip between 41,000 year intervals and 100,000 year intervals, it was because there was a decline in overall carbon dioxide, but the amount of CO2 in the sample was similar to amounts after the flip. There's probably something else going on there.

Question number three. In 2014, researchers sent the remains of a bee pupa that was wrapped up in leaves through a micro CT scanner so that they could assemble a 3D model of the animal. And radiocarbon dating suggested that it had been alive around 23,000 to 40,000 years ago, making it an Ice Age bee. The bee was originally found in 1970 in this famous Los Angeles site. What location was it?

Oh, I hope it's the La Brea Tar Pits. The Tar Tar Pits it was! Good job. Ice Age bee is a crossover between the bee movie and the movie Ice Age. Ice Age, yeah. Ice Age B. Okay. An important step in the discovery, Sari, of the Ice Ages by the 18th and 19th century scientists was the understanding that there had once been gigantic animals that went extinct at one end of what we know as the Pleistocene era.

One scientist who contributed to this understanding was Georges Cuvier, scientist who contributed to this understanding was Georges Cuvier, who argued in a 1798 paper that mammoth fossils belonged to a distinct species by comparing them to what extant animal? Elephants? That's correct. Yeah, now we're getting to the dumb guy questions. I like these ones. I like this. Yeah, I'm ready to be tricked. Some people thought the mammoth fossils were remains from elephants brought to Italy by Hannibal. Or they might be fossils belonging to extant animals we just hadn't found yet.

Cuvier would go on to report the prior existence of large mammals like giant ground sloths and mastodons, which is said to have been the start of modern vertebrate paleontology. Very cool. And our final question. Between the early 14th century and the midology very cool and our final question between the uh early 14th century and the mid-18th century earth went through the little ice age where temperature is dropped by as much as two degrees celsius this drop is not quite as steep as other ice age where temperatures were like maybe triple that uh compared to the 20th century but still at

a large effect on society it's thought to have made better wood for what musical instrument, constructed by Antonio Stradivari. We just did a SciShow episode about this. Violin. Violin is correct. I think there was a clue in that one, but I'm too stupid to have known what it is. Oh, no. All right.

Question number eight. back to it uh so what were those uh those cycles called that were named after the scientists who discovered them milankovitch that is correct milankovitch cycles you said his name so many times and then he said sometimes like milankovitch yeah i kind of forgot i was supposed to be paying attention to the names of a cycle. And then halfway through, I was like, it's got to be it. It's not Cuvier. Sam, how much colder was the 20,000 years ago last glacial maximum? Yeah, it was like three times less than whatever you said, more than the Little Ice Age.

But I don't remember what that was. 24. Nope. S sari can you steal well the little ice age was two degrees so three times two degrees is six degrees it was three times two sam don't both laugh at me the gauntlet all right now do we know what Pleistocene means? I almost gave you a clue, but then I didn't. Can anybody? Whose chance was that? Is it new?

Like the new Ice Age? New Age something? It's close to that. That's not close enough to count, though. I was going to say someone with tooth involved. So no, I don't know. Tooth time. Is it tooth time?

Tooth o'clock somewhere. It is most recent is what Pleistocene means. From pleio, superlative for poly, which means much. So, it's most. And scene is for new, Latinized from the Greek word kynos. So what does that bring us to? I'm going to look at this and Sari's got 10 points

and Sam's got four. Redemption. Humiliating defeat. Did you like the gauntlet, Hank? I did like the gauntlet. It was a little confusing. Is it the best game ever invented by humans? It's the best game ever invented by humans? The best game ever invented by humans.

So much happening. And now we're going to take a short break. Welcome back, everybody. welcome back everybody it's time for the fact off our panelists have brought in science facts 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 thinking specifically about whether they're going to make a good tick tock to who goes first, though, I have a trivia question. In 2021, scientists were able to create the coldest temperature measured in a lab, which was 38 trillionths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. They did this by trapping a cloud of rubidium atoms inside a magnetized vacuum chamber and cooling it down to two billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Then they took a vacuum chamber to the top of the european space agency's bremen drop tower a microgravity research facility and then they dropped the container rapidly turning the magnetic field on and off and measured the atom's motion as they slowed further you know the the thing i can imagine dropping the thing off a tower yeah apparently they had to be in in uh in zero gravity to uh to get really cold how far down is the drop from the bremen tower i don't know how tall a mile is uh that's what i'm trying to gauge i mean it's a thousand meters how many feet is that? Like 3,000 feet.

I'm going to guess like 70 feet. You're going to guess like 70 feet? Yeah. That's not far enough. Sam is closer. The answer is about 480 feet. I don't think anyone's ever built anything as tall as the thing that you said, like ever. That's probably true.

It's pretty high up. It's pretty tall. The answer is the drop itself is 330 feet. The tower itself is a little taller than that. But either way, Sam comes out on top. Yes, because I understand the basics of physics or how tall people can build stuff. Don't trust me to build a building.

I don't even want to. Keep the blueprints away from me. I don't want to either. The world's tallest building is 828 meters. Oh, well, that's a lot closer than I thought. That's more realistic than I thought. I thought it was going to be like 500 meters. It's wild to think that a bunch of scientists in Germany would build a larger building than the Burj Khalifa.

It'd be easier to dig a hole, I feel like. But whatever. All right, Sam, what do you got? Astronaut ice cream, MREs, instant coffee, all of these space age innovations were made possible with the process known as freeze drying. So freeze drying is based on the process

of sublimation or a phase change from solid to gas while skipping over liquid. And in a freeze drying machine, you put whatever water filled thing you want to preserve in a vacuum chamber with a freezer in it, basically. So the first thing is that the thing to be freeze dried is frozen and freezing the water separates it out molecularly from all the food molecules. Then the vacuum chamber lowers the pressure a little and heat is applied to the frozen thing. That lowered pressure means that water turned straight into vapor and escapes the frozen thing.

And when you're done, you got some real crispy, crunchy macaroni and cheese or something to bring on your rocket ship with you. So freeze drying was formally invented in 1890 and didn't really start catching on until World War II when it was used to preserve penicillin and plasma. And then it really took off when the space race started.

But why freeze dry? And how did it help us go into space? Simply put water is both gross and heavy. It's full of bacteria that can mess up food. And a big bag of sloppy beef stew would really weigh down a soldier or a spaceship. So freeze dry something. And all that pesky water is gone until you're ready to mix it back in and eat the thing. Or not just crunch it.

Just crunch that beef stroganoff. crunch it just have some there's water inside your body yeah yeah so like i said freeze drying is a pretty modern space age product process which is why it may surprise you to learn that the actual earliest evidence of freeze drying dates back thousands of years to ancient people of the south american region known as the alta plano in the alta plano which includes parts of Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, there is a traditional freeze-dried potato foodstuff called chuno that has helped people survive harsh conditions and even helped empires spread throughout history.

So here's how it works. First, you got to grow some potatoes. Then, after you've harvested your potatoes, you spread them out on a flat piece of land outside for three days in late fall when the nights are freezing, but the days are still warm. And because Altiplano's elevation is roughly 3,650 meters, it's got low enough air pressure for at least some of the water to sublimate on its way out of the potatoes. So after three days, you got some dried up tiny potatoes, but they aren't all the way dry. So you got to have yourself a potato stomping party. The potatoes are placed in basins

and then friends and family gather around to stomp the dry potatoes, sort of like stomping the juice out of grapes. And after that, the potatoes are put back in the field for two more weeks to fully mummify. So in the end, the potatoes areifth their original size and very light and to eat them they're boiled for five minutes and they turn into what is described as a soft and bitter food that can be eaten as a snack or part of a meal so the people of this region have been doing this for a super long time way longer than world war ii or the space race like incan soldiers ate chuno and some historians think that it may have been instrumental in helping the incan empire establish itself because they could carry all this food around and feed their army but the incan empire was a scant 600 years ago and there are some samples of chino that were

found in peru that could be 5 000 years old so before i wrap up i wanted to do a quick round of are you going to eat that so would you eat five would you eat chino first of all i would i'm dying to try this yes definitely yes love a potato would you eat five? Would you eat chuno? First of all, I would. I'm dying to try this. Yes, definitely. Yes. Love a potato. Would you eat a 5,000 year old potato? I probably would if I was allowed to.

Like, I think that I think that for science, I want to preserve it and not turn it into more me. But you can have one little bite. If there was a lot and somebody was like, we're like, this is important. We want you to do this this is the right decision absolutely i was reading an interview with somebody who had 20 year old chuno that their parents made and their parents were dead but they still had this chuno that they could eat and i think did eat maybe there's a calzone somewhere like there could be a reserved

like in somebody's cupboard buried in the florida everglades waiting for you like bog butter yeah all right sarah what you got lots of little things can go wrong with our nervous system so it's important for medical professionals to have ways to check whether different nerves are working like by checking reflexes your body's automatic response to certain kinds of stimuli for example tapping the patellar tendon below your kneecap to see if your leg kicks up. And a reflex that I just learned about is the caloric reflex test, also known as the vestibular caloric stimulation or some other arrangement of those words. And you can use it to check whether your brainstem and balance-related nerves in your ear are doing okay. It's very weird. You might have already heard of it, but I definitely haven't. So this reflex was discovered when an Austrian

neurologist named Robert Baranay was treating some ear infections. And in the early 1900s, standard protocol was to wash out the ear canal with some water. He noticed that flushing out a patient's ear with cold or icy water, like around 30 degrees Celsius, 86 degrees Fahrenheit or below, would cause their eyes to involuntarily wiggle away from the ear. And hot water, like around 44 degrees Celsius or 111 degrees Fahrenheit, would cause their eyes to wiggle towards the ear. What? And this eye wiggle is technically called nystagmus.

And today, the mnemonic for this reflex is cows. What? What the hell? Yeah, just see. Well, you gotta know what it's supposed to do. So if it goes wrong. Oh, does it go wrong sometimes? Yeah. So if it seems strange to me and presumably barony, but who knows that your eyes would wiggle by putting cold or hot water in your ears. But it makes sense in the context of how your body balances itself. I don't think so. So there are three semicircular canals inside your ear filled with a fluid called endo-limb. And the movement of that fluid sends signals to your brain about spatial awareness and focusing your vision on the same spot even as your head moves around.

So like as you move, you can stare at the same thing because your eyes are moving and know that your head is wiggling. I'm doing it right now. And the horizontal or lateral semicircular canal specifically corresponds to any adjustments from turning your head side to side. So like if you just turned left and right. The same direction as this caloric reflex mysticness. So what's happening is that the hot water in your ear causes endolymph in the horizontal semicircular canal to rise. And cold water causes that endolymph to sink. And your nerves interpret that as a head movement

and automatically shift your eyes to match cold water in your ear makes your head is moving in a particular direction which is like very very weird so weird can i do this to myself how cold does the water have to be 30 degrees or something no 30 yeah just colder than your body so like around 30 degrees or below you can just use ice water i think yes i've wanted to try this on myself i'm not going to recommend that tangents listeners do it just right don't do it to you you don't want to stick anything bigger than smaller than your elbow in your ear but i'm going to uh yes i think you could do it for the TikTok. I think you have to, in fact. You're like, Catherine, I need you to irrigate me.

Documenting this got Barony a 1914 Nobel Prize and the caloric reflux test is now used to help diagnose neurological or balance-related diseases because if your eyes don't follow the cow's mnemonic, something might be biologically off with your balanced vestibular nervous system. That's wild. It's such a reminder that I'm just a bag of meat making many, many more completely out of my control decisions than I think. Cool.

decisions than i think cool well i think that sari maybe pulled away with this episode uh it's not that these weren't both good facts it's that you came in with a deficit sam yeah i suppose so that's what it is are you gonna do this to yourself i don't know for sure i'm gonna i'm gonna look it up i'm gonna check and see how how deep i need to get it into my ear that's my head is pretty shallow okay great it's the external auditory canal that's it i think you can do it with hot hot or cold air too so you might just need katherine to blow into your ear that's not gonna be go on they'll get those views i don't need those views uh now it's time to ask the science couch where we ask a question to our couch of finally honed scientific minds kelly on discord asks why am i perpetually cold i am also perpetually cold uh i my guess is because you're not warm. But I know that there are differences in people's experience of this and that it can be both physiological and psychological.

But probably Sarah is going to know a lot more than me. You know, you named the two big buckets. I mean, that's like a lot of... Yeah, I don't know if there's much else to do. A human experience? It's probably both physiological. Yeah, if you want to sound really smart at a cocktail party. You know, it's probably both physiological and psychological.

You're uncovering my secret tricks. I already knew them. They're my tricks too. How else would I answer all these questions and pretend to be a science expert yep um but the physiological aspects of of feeling cold and being sensing temperature and like your core body temperature are how your blood circulates uh your body mass and layers of fat and and like other heat conserving pieces of your body and how sweaty or moist your skin is or can be because like if if you're sweaty then that is going to

evaporate and cause a chill it's hard to tease apart these various factors, but people have looked at age related to it. So like as you age, your skin changes consistency, like you not only get wrinklier, but you tend to sweat less because of change in activity and also just everything that's going on with skin. with skin. So there's some sense that old people get colder or like

are more susceptible to temperature changes because they've got less circulation going on to bring the heat to different places. There's some evidence of like mental health being related to your core body temperature and that's very, uh complicated so i don't

want to say too many sweeping statements but uh anxiety can definitely relate to sweat which can make you colder um there have been some studies that uh depression and bipolar disorder in heat can get worse. So like you either run hotter and or in heat, those symptoms of those conditions can get exacerbated. It makes sense from a neurochemical perspective, because if something affects your hypothalamus, that's like what controls your core body temperature, then your whole body's going to feel different. And so it's possible that anything that affects your body temperature is also going to kind of affect your brain. Anything that affects your brain is also going to kind of affect your body temperature. And then the other psychological aspects of it are just like what,

whether you're used to. So humans are really, really good at getting accustomed to certain temperatures. It's why after a long winter, then a 40 degree day feels like shorts weather. Real nice. Or after a hot summer, then going into a 70 degree room feels chilly and cool because it's relative to what you've been experiencing. And to some extent you can control what you experience because our minds are very, very powerful. There's this very weird, cool study about self-objectification, which is like how important you perceive your appearance to be. And so specifically it was about women going out in skimpy outfits and their

perception of cold. And if they had a higher self objectification, like we're more concerned with their personal appearance, they had lower reports of feeling cold because there's like this psychological element of this is what I've got to do to look good and I am doing that. And so therefore I am not feeling chilly when I'm going out and looking like this. But you're basically saying that I'm cold all the time because I'm very wet or I have bad self-esteem. Is that what you said? No. Your circulation might be off. You might not

have a lot of body fat to insulate you. Or you might be moist. That one sounds pretty right. We got to the bottom of it, Sam. You're just a little bit wetter than average. 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. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at Scribe of Stories, Cody Smiley 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, it's easy to do that. First, you can go to Patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron. Get access to things like our newsletter, our bonus episodes. And we have a tier where you can get a special in-episode shout-out,

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I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glixman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bazaio.

Our editorial assistant is the bookie Chuck Berardi. 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, But one more thing. When it's colder than around 55 degrees Fahrenheit or 13 degrees Celsius, it's not really safe for honeybees to be outside. They get sluggish, struggle to fly, and can freeze to death. But unlike some species, honeybees don't hibernate over the winter.

They hunker in their hive and eat honey to survive. To keep everything clean and disease-free, they don't poop inside their home. Instead, as soon as the weather gets slightly warmer, they go on a short cleansing flight where they fly outside the hive and let all their sticky yellow poop go at once. Do they all do it at the same time? I don't know. I think they just go whenever. Maybe if it's warm enough.

But otherwise, if you just really got to go, then you're going to go first. Be like, it's warm enough. I got a full butt. I like the idea that like the first warm day of the year. Like if we lived on like a different planet with different setup. Yeah. That everybody just knows to stay inside. That's when the bees are shitting everywhere.

Yeah. Yeah.