SciShow Tangents - Communication with Vanessa Hill

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

Birds singing, dogs barking, computers sending and receiving data, you reading this description: at the end of the day, it’s all communication. This week, we sit down with Vanessa Hill, host of the YouTube channel Braincraft, and do a little communicating about communication!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 more Vanessa Hill, check out BrainCraft: https://www.youtube.com/user/braincraftvideoAnd if you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Languages & ecological risk:Evolved antenna:https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/1244h/1244%20(Hornby).pdfhttp://www.genetic-programming.org/gecco2004hc/lohn-paper.pdfhttps://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st5/ABOUT/about-index.phpPicture of ST5 antenna: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st5/TECHNOLOGY/antenna.htmlEvolution of antenna: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/2-Sequence-of-evolved-antennas-leading-up-to-antenna-ST5-331427_fig2_226537559[Ask the Science Couch]Animal communication: http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test1materials/Animalchart.htmhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/08/22/chirps-whistles-clicks-do-any-animals-have-a-true-language/?utm_term=.1e218b9e7f00http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/spackled/2009readings/Slobodchikoff%202009.PDFhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1834009/http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150512-birds-hold-the-key-to-language  [Butt One More Thing]FRTs:https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2003/11/farting-fish-keep-touchhttps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsbl.2003.0107

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 we have a special guest on the science couch. It's host of BrainCraft on YouTube, Vanessa Hill. Hello there. What a joy it's been today to have you on every podcast I produce. It's wonderful to be here and everywhere, all at once. People will know how long it is before these things come out now.

It makes people appreciate the work that goes into them. Yeah, I guess so. I don't think anybody ever appreciates me everybody write nice things to sam on twitter yeah he's the sweetest sam bought me some honey and some tea bags which i'm actually eating both of them right now drinking them yeah don't eat tea bags well you kind of eat the honey but it dissolves in the tea right yeah so is that eating or drinking you're you are perfect for this podcast so you are you're a youtuber your show is brain craft that's true tell me about your show so my show is about psychology i aim to look at science or bring science to your real life to help you personally and professionally develop does that sound appealing or do people not like personal development

i need resistance to that do i need a better elevator what's wrong with me how can you be better is how i like to look at it how can you use science to better your life okay so we have some episodes coming up on uh situations where you should apologize, how to construct an apology, how to stop overthinking, how to get in touch with your feelings, all that fun stuff. And what's your tagline? Should we just come up with that right now? Yeah.

That's how it works. It's not that I don't have one. It's just that perhaps it could be better. What is it? Science for life. Science for life. That's a it works. It's not that I don't have one. It's just that perhaps it could be better. What is it? Science for Life. Science for Life. That's a good tagline. It's probably a pharmaceutical company's tagline, but I'm just telling.

Sari Riley is also here. Hello. It's good to see you. Sari, what's your tagline? Vitamin D-licious. Stefan's here, too. Hi. How are you?

Good. What's your tagline? I'll take it well done. Sam Schultz is here, too. Hi. How are you? Good. What's your tagline? I'll take it well done. Sam Schultz is here too. Hi. Everyone's favorite and everyone always appreciates him and our current winner, leader, Sam Schultz. What's your tagline? I just ate a lot of food.

Is that a good tagline? We're all just going to be highly entertained. This is post-launch. We usually do it later than this. That's true. If you notice a difference, I'm sure that's what it is. Yeah. I'm feeling peppy.

And I'm Hank Green. Long, slow blinks is my tagline. Does everybody at home close your eyes and give us some long, slow blinks? That's how you're supposed to smile at your cat. Yeah, that's true. That's how I do it. Catherine told me that. Why?

Because that's how cats say they love you. It's true, Sari. Don't prove it wrong, okay? Don't look. I don't want to know. It makes my cat fall asleep, which I think is really funny. Aw, because he knows he's safe. Yeah, I guess so.

I think I just trick her into doing it back, and then once her eyes are closed, she's like... That's what it would do to me. I feel like whenever I fell asleep during class, which is not a lot, but a medium amount. It would start with long, slow blinks. And you're like, this blink can be a little bit longer than the last one. That's fine. And then finally we have our last blink.

Oh boy. Every week on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks. Sam is currently the winner. Do you want to know how many points I have? How many points do you have, Sam? I have 42 points. Ooh.

Stefan has 35 points. What? Hank has 39 points. Ooh, I'm coming up. I'm not really doing this in any order. Sari, I am doing it in this order, has 34 points. Ooh, yeah. Solidly last. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by our previous conversations,

we will not be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your Hank bucks. So tangent with care. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sam. I'm going to take you on a journey backwards through time. Wow. Please follow me on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter

for updates on my life and what I had for dinner. Hey, you should shoot me a text on your sweet new flip phone. A smiley emoticon makes your feelings known. Using dial-up modem and electronic mail, I can sing cat pics worldwide. Look at this one's cute tail. Away from the phone,

ha, I don't sweat it one bit. With this beeper on my belt, I'm really hot shit. Operator, hello. Could you please put me through? I'd like to speak with my mother in Kalamazoo. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dash, dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dot. I hope my Morse code is right. That train will crash if it's not. I'll write you a letter. If I can find your address, it'll be delivered in six months by Pony Express. Using ink and a quill and parchment on a big scroll, I'll write down for posterity all I feel in my soul.

Hey look, fellow cave person, I invented a thing. Check out my mouth. It makes sounds. I think I'll call it talking. I sit by the fire and paint on the cave wall. A mammoth I killed by that big waterfall. The end. I feel like talking happened before painting. You think so?

I think so. I feel like probably. We meant sounds at least. The Morse code part was delightful. Thank you. Somebody I don't mean to criticize but well actually yeah I was thinking somebody was going to press some things into clay maybe.

That was one I edited out for time. Probably the right call. Sari, what is communication? I think it's just the exchange of information in some way. From one person to another? But I guess I can communicate within my body, too, right? Yeah, because you have hormones and chemical signals that communicate within your body. Yeah.

There's like... Like my foot is telling me that it hurts right now. That's communication for sure. It's communicating with me. Does computer-to-computer communication count? Of course. I think so, yeah, of course. Like that's how telephones and...

Well, if there's no humans, what if it's just computers talking to each other? I think that's still communication. It's still an exchange of information. Oh, it feels pretty actually definable. Yeah. We usually don't get there, but I feel like we got there today. I think communication is a broad enough word.

And then we use it in a bunch of different applications, like outside of science, too. And I think all those applications also apply within the scientific umbrella. So they're all fair game for the podcast. Okay. And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts, but only one of those facts is real. The other panelists have to try to figure out by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. If they do, they get a Hank Buck. If they're tricked, the presenter gets the Hank Buck. Our presenter today is Vanessa Hill from BrainCraft. Thank you, Hank. Before we get into our facts, we have a little backstory.

Okay. I'm not calling this a tangent because it's crucial to the facts. Well, we'll be the judge of that. Wow. So we're going to travel back almost 100 years to the year 1927. No one was alive back then. And we're going to talk about talking. I mean, that's what we're doing today with communication, right? Talking about talking. There was a study, one of the first studies on voice perception that was conducted over BBC Radio.

So at this point, BBC Radio was only five years old or five years new, I suppose. This medium that everyone is listening to was very recent. And this British psychologist named Tom Hathaway-Pair, Dr. Pair, he conducted this study. So he wanted to discover what goes on in the mind of listeners to see how they perceived the voices that they're hearing. So he recruited nine people, which is a pretty small sample size for a study. And they read on air a passage from the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. This was actually Dickens' first novel, bonus fact for you all. Then this happened over three nights and listeners were asked to cut out a form from a newspaper, the Radio Times, and fill it out describing their first impressions

of the people who were reading to them and send it to this psychologist dr pear now this really captured some of the public imagination at the time and nearly 5 000 people filled out this form and sent it in which is a great sample that's great yeah so the true or false here is which of these was a real observation that a respondent made okay first of all the reporter sounded confused and like she didn't know why she was on the radio i should say he has suffered considerably and is very sympathetic i would imagine him as being tall and cadaverous round-shered, with a long neck and protruding chin. Wow, that's very specific. Like a monster.

Rounded cadaver. Cadaverous. He felt like my friend. That's very podcast observation right there. Those are the three things? Three things. So the people reading it was the smaller sample size of people? They weren't like professional radio people?

No, they were all one. One of them was actually the daughter of Dr. Pair. One of them was a minister. And they were just nine people from all walks of life. And then did the people then read the people's opinions about them? Because that would have been like the first internet comment. They said I the cadaverous one because it seems very hard to make up i feel like that maybe it's like a quote from something

i shouldn't be helping you but maybe it's's about Frankenstein or something. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. I cracked it. What was the first one? The reporter sounded confused and like she didn't know why she was on the radio. I'm going with that one as the joke. I mean, isn't that always how we feel? I'm sticking with cadaverous.

I'm going to go with the friend one. The friend? I also want to go with the friend one. Okay, we've spread it out nice and even Okay, everyone has locked in their guess The true one here is

I should say he has suffered considerably and is very sympathetic I would imagine him as being tall and cadaverous, round-shouldered with a long neck and protruding chin. I mean, I guess if you've just listened to the radio for the first time, you're like, I don't know how to hear a voice without thinking about a body. What did they say in the beginning had happened to him?

Like, he has suffered very greatly? It's like such a sad biography. Do you know which person that was they were talking about? I don't know the person they were talking about, but that is just someone's voice. I mean, they weren't speaking about themselves or anything. They were just reading a passage from a novel. And that was a thread with all of these responses is that people gave really highly detailed descriptions of the people that they'd heard and provided these full backstories people used to have like creative time well i want to create a backstory for a voice i heard i i think

i think there's a few parts to this our voices are very suggestive and our brain like human yeah like there's all these bits of information in your voice from um your accent be it the country you come from or like the socioeconomic class that you come from within that um your pitch how educated you are by your diction and word choice and things like that and i think that people form these really detailed pictures of you from what you sound like. And then I think as kind of TV came on the scene, also by what people looked like as well. And our brains always fill in the blanks, right? When we know some things about people, we kind of just guess around that.

But the most interesting thing is that on YouTube, almost 100 years later, people do come up with these detailed backstories and opinions of YouTubers. And then they tell us. Yeah. I imagine that happens all the time with podcasters too, like the same thing where... Yeah, you put a picture in your head. I remember when I was growing up listening to like the morning show in Orlando, Florida, and then I saw them for the first time, like a picture, and I was like, oh, no, definitely not. There's an anime character that everybody on Twitter always says I sound like from Kingdom Hearts, the video game. That's what I sound like, apparently.

Roxas from Kingdom Hearts. I'm not familiar with him, so I don't know. People just imagine that character sitting in your chair right now. I'm a little cartoon boy. I want to know what people picture the rest of us as. I guess, Hank, your face is all over the internet but for the rest of us submit your fan art to scishowtangents

at gmail.com is that correct? I just made it up at scishowtangents you can just add scishowtangents fan art would be great I don't know if like coming up with what we look like seems cruel but look up pictures of us or just go on itunes leave your review except for don't review the podcast just tell people what we look like what you think we look like

based on our voices that would be fun who sounds the most cadaverous yeah i want to know we can do a poll so I got it right but you ended up with three points out of that I am taking off I'm in the lead now it's time for a short break and then the fact off Welcome back. Hank Buck totals. Sarah, you have nothing.

Vanessa, you got three. Woo-hoo. I've got one. Sam's got one. And Stefan is also tied for last. Welcome to the bottom. Welcome. Well, now it's time for you

to face off in the fact-off, where two of our panelists bring science facts to present to the rest in an attempt to blow our minds. We each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact that we like the most, and the person who's going to go first is the person who most recently said a word. Which one was it?

I think it was Stefan. Yeah, probably. It was. You bantered back and forth, but then Stefan finished. Ooh the last word. Yeah. So if you look at a map of the globe and how languages are diversified around the world, there's kind of a pattern to how much language diversity there is in specific regions. And that pattern is that as you get closer to the equator, there's more diversity. Why that is has kind of been a mystery in linguistics. There's kind of two main ideas to why this might happen. One is that geographic features like mountain ranges isolate populations.

And because they're isolated, they develop different languages. The other idea is called ecological risk. And so that idea is basically that smaller societies are more self-sufficient in areas with longer growing seasons. Sure. And then in other areas, like more northern and southern latitudes, like because you don't know how much rainfall there is, because there's like wide variations in temperature between seasons, that you have to have a wider geographic range of like social connections and be able to communicate across those. You have to work together more with close by groups of people. Yeah. And so there's less language diversity. To test like the isolation theory, they were looking at like how much variance there was in altitude, how rough the landscape was, how many rivers there were. And then to test the ecological risk side of it,

they're looking at annual temperature, rainfall, how much the temperature varies, how much the rainfall varies, and the overall productivity of the region and the length of the growing season. And so through a bunch of statistical analysis, their results suggest that the year-round predictability of conditions for growth is the key driver of language diversity. So basically, climate is the thing, not isolation.

Right, and not just climate knowledge is like good weather, but like predictable weather. Predictable, yeah. I wonder if there's a mass of a group of people that you need to form a new dialect. You know, like if there's more people living around the equator because of the climate and the stability and stuff like that if people get to like 5 000 or 50 000 at that point are they like you know what we're our own region now and we're making up our own language like i wonder how that plays into it it's interesting because like the way that language diversifies is is like fairly random and it's sort of like analogous to natural selection in that way.

That like most of this language mutation isn't about being better or worse it's just different and then like eventually it's not compatible and so they're not the same species anymore and I used air quotes there. And I guess like as a society gets to a certain size you can

start to other part of that society i don't know if that would be a factor there but definitely we see like sort of micro language changes when when people get marginalized they sort of start to adopt their own language to separate themselves and you know have their own identity there's also just more chance for variation like random mutations of someone's gonna misspeak and say a weird word and then everyone else is gonna be like i like that one it's called phonetic convergence just that we have some fancy words to throw around yeah um well i remembered uh reading something about it recently so i have just found

like the paragraph of the scientific paper that it came from but phonetic convergence describes the phenomenon of you aligning your acoustic phonetic pronunciation of speech over a period of spoken interaction often outside your conscious awareness right so it's kind of what it's called like when um people move to another country and they start to pick up intonations and words and things of other accents so like on twitter a lot of times i feel like words will spread like people will start typing like other people or like somebody will be on the scene and he'll or they'll like type in some new weird way or constructs it into some weird way that everybody else will start to copy? Is that the same thing?

I suppose. I mean, I think that that term has come from like psycholinguistics, you know, and is about spoken language. And that kind of online language phenomenon is too new to have a lot of research about it. But I feel like it's the same. I actually had this interaction last week with someone who is my age but not an internet person where someone asked if I wanted cream in a herbal tea at a restaurant.

I was like, no, it's fine, thank you. And then as soon as they walked away I said, what a monster. Who would put cream in herbal tea? But I think calling someone a monster for a really silly reason is something that you would do on Twitter. And it's kind of like an internet language thing. And my cousin was just like, that's so mean. I just asked if you wanted cream. Sari, what do you have for us?

So Stefan talked about language on Earth. I'm going to talk about communication to space. A lot of wireless communication, like satellites or cell phones, depend on a key piece of technology, the antenna. So there are a lot of physics that go into antennas. But in general, an electric signal can be an input to the antenna, which then radiates electromagnetic energy, that's transmission, or it can pick up electromagnetic energy and convert that into an electric signal, that's reception. And so a lot goes into antenna design, like the type of metal, the length, and the shape, which can all affect how well it transmits and receives

particular signals, like if you want to target certain chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is often the case when you're doing satellite communication. You want to target different points. And so this becomes an extremely complicated and time-consuming engineering challenge. And from what I've read, it involves, like, you need a lot of specialized knowledge about an understanding of physics and math and a lot of just trial and error and building an antenna, seeing how well it works, building another one. Recently, computer simulations have made this way, way easier. So specifically, I want to talk about evolved antennas, which are designed by what's called an evolutionary algorithm, because I have to bring biology into technology because

that's my comfort zone. So they're inspired by the process of natural selection. And they're incorporating random mutations, essentially like different antenna designs, passing down successful characteristics, and selecting for the ones that work best in a simulation. And so it's like virtual survival of the fittest. And evolved antennas end up looking really wonky and counterintuitive to our eyes. To me, it's like a kid crunched up a paperclip, sort of. But they work well, and they've been used in space. So, for example, a 2006 NASA mission called Space Technology 5

was meant to help us understand more about the Earth's magnetosphere and test new gadgets. And aboard each spacecraft, they used two communication antennas. One was human-designed by a specialist, and one was an involved antenna designed for the X-band of electromagnetic frequencies. And what was really interesting about this mission is that the details were changed, so the ideal orbits of the spacecraft were altered, and that involved presumably a lot more work for the human engineers, but they could just update a couple other parameters within their computer simulation. And then the antennas evolved again to create another ideal design. And it designed

prototypes super quickly. And they performed just as well as the ones designed by a human contractor. So it's like a very fast way to design weird antennas. I wonder if there's other, what did you call the evolutionary algorithms? Yeah. Because like it seems like it might be easier to do it with this kind of a piece of technology because you're really only optimizing for a single thing, like its ability to transmit whatever frequency you need to transmit. I have seen, I mean, there are evolutionary algorithms in computer code even now, like some machine learning is based on that kind of stuff where you try and you see what things work best.

Could it make the perfect chair or something if we gave it a chance to? That's like artificial intelligence, what we're trying to trend's like if we give a bunch of parameters to a computer and it can run through so many more iterations than a human can can we create the coolest thing the perfect chair the perfect dress the like the most attractive human face whatever best poem about communication yeah well i already nailed it. Not really necessary. And that's like where the ethical issues come in too.

So if you like have a computer saying what's best then that will influence culture and it'll go back and forth. I don't know. I have a great job.

And also if you have a computer that can write a really great poem then you can't unplug it anymore. Oh no. Because then it's alive.

It's just a person. Yeah. It's creating art so it's alive. It's just a person. Yeah. It's creating art, so it's alive. For clarity, in my opinion, many computer algorithms are already alive. In the same way that bacteria and bugs are alive. I feel like we're, in my lifetime, going to create a car that is a freaking person. And I'm going to feel so bad about it. Your car is going to shame you for trading it in for the newer model?

It's not going to feel so bad about it. Your car is going to shame you for like trading it in for the newer model. It's not going to shame me. It's either going to like express to me what a terrible thing this is to do to a sentient entity. Or it's going to like plot my demise. It's going to be adoption facilities of old cars. You can plug it into a thing and it will think it's still a car. Like in that episode of Star Trek where they trick Moriarty into thinking he's in the universe, but he's really just still on a computer. Which is pretty fucked up.

But you could just trick your car into thinking it's still a car and that you're still there. This isn't a problem. It's called car cubes. And it's just cubes you plug your car into and it has a great time. And if you unplug it, then you're a murderer. And someday cars will take over

and they'll plug all the car cubes back into real cars and they'll be like, Vroom vroom, motherfucker! They're all doomed. Oh no. Apocalypse. Do I have the power to downvote this tangent? No! Yeah, you do.

Yeah, you can dock whoever started it points. I don't know. I think it was Hive. Yeah, let's take his point. Take his point. Take his point. All right. We got to give our points away, you guys. So we have Stefan's fact that stability leads to greater language diversity near the equator.

And we've got Sari with evolved antennas that were used evolutionary computer algorithms to make antennas that are just as good but way weirder than the ones that we designed. I think I'm going to go with Stefan. I like that thought of why languages happen and things like that spread, yeah. I think they were both really cool facts, but the warm weather and varied languages just seem sexier to me than the wonky antennas. Sounds like a true psychologist.

I'm going to go with Sari because evolution is the best way to make things. It's just that it takes forever. The language is diversified in a very similar way. You already gave it away. It's okay. Two points is enough. I want to sweep it. So now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask listener questions

to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At Diana DePeach asks, are there any animals whose communication methods have come close to what scientists would consider language? There is a species of singing mouse that is native to the Costa Rican cloud forest. You're making that up. I am not.

That's a video game. That has a really unique song. And they have been studied a lot. I actually interviewed a scientist at NYU about it a couple of months ago because they're studying how these mice communicate. So I guess the songs are the language that they use, but they practice turn-taking in conversation, which only happens in a handful of species, humans included. So they're trying to isolate or find the area of their brain

that is responsible for them waiting until someone has finished talking or singing and then interjecting. And it's really precise. Like you have hundreds of muscles that you use in your mouth when you talk. And it's about half of a blink, like I think a fifth of a second, the time that you need to work all those muscles and like interject to perfectly converse with someone. And these mice do it in a perfect way. What other animals are there that might have language? Anything?

Animal communication could come in lots of forms. So there's chemical pheromones, like we were talking about. There's visual cues. There's touch of each other. There are things like the bee, waggle dances, electric signals, things like that. When it comes to communication that is analogous to language auditory cues so like animals that make sounds like vocalizations yeah vocalizations yeah yeah vocalization specifically so not even i don't know there's bugs that rub their body parts on each

other and make really loud screeching noises but but that's less like language. When linguists are thinking about language, the units of language are called signs, whether it's like a word or a phrase or a sentence in our language. But for an animal, it seems like that would be a call or a bird song or a mouse song or something like that. Animal communication is a very complicated field of study, so it's really hard to summarize it in this question. But there are key differences between the ways that humans use signs and the way that animals use signs. And so, like, for example, human signs, like our words, one word can mean multiple things. And with animals, oftentimes, one sign means just one thing. It's like a one-to-one correlation but one key thing that it seems like linguists and scientists are looking into is the the fact of learning so like

learning a language as opposed to being born with knowledge of the calls or things like that a few animals can seem to learn communication from older animals or from other species. And birds is the most studied, I think, when it comes to animals and the evolution of language in humans, because birds can learn new sounds from others. So like young birds in some species can learn from older birds. They can learn across species. And birdsong are just so complicated that they have their own syntax. They have their own, like the order of sounds in birdsong matters for communicating a message. In some bird species, we found similar brain structures and like genetic markers that are associated with speech. And so it seems like if you look across the animal kingdom,

a lot of evolutionary biologists are focusing in on birds to try and understand how language evolved in humans probably for very similar reasons as these singing mice of like here here are these animals that are behaving in a similar way in a similarly complicated way now i'm just thinking about what would have happened if birds had been the human-like species it's hard to do all the stuff we do when you got wings. They really needed just another set of hands, and it would have gone real good for the birds, I feel like. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter, at SciShowTangents,

where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Tamar Ziri, and I'm going to take a nap, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Hank Buck, final scores. Sarah, you've got one point. Sam, you've got one point. Stefan, you are second place with two. Vanessa, you're number one.

Oh, my God. Beginner's luck. If you like this show and you want to help us out, you can do that by leaving us a review wherever you listen. That'll help us know what you like about the show. You can tweet out your favorite moment, which might also just be telling Sam that he's appreciated. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us.

If you want to find out more about what Vanessa is up to, you can find her at youtube.com slash braincraft. What's your Twitter? My Twitter is Nessie Hill, N-A-S-S-Y. If you want to read more about any of today's topics, you can check out scishowtangents.org to find our show notes and also pictures of weird antennas.

Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Stefan Chin. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Vanessa Hill. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios.

It's created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz and Caitlin Hoffmeister. 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 there are fish that communicate with something called fast repetitive ticks and these are little noises that they make to signal to each other that maybe a predator is coming by or some other thing to be aware of.

And this noise is created when small amounts of gas are passed through their cloacas. And they make a little fart noise. And that's why they're called FRTs. I think they just sound like clicks. But maybe they wanted to call them farts. What do you mean? Of course they wanted to call them farts. Do you mean of course they wanted to call it she thinks it was an accident that the acronym is farts