SciShow Tangents - Crystals with Tyler Thrasher

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

In a universe of chaos, one scrappy form of highly-ordered solid matter dares to be different: crystals! And crystal expert Tyler Thrasher is here to tell us all we need to know about them!Want more Tyler Thrasher (and who wouldn't?!)? Check out https://tylerthrasher.com to learn more about his myriad of other projects!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

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. Our resident everyman, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert Sari Reilly. Hello. Our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. And this week, we have a special guest, artist, botanist, photographer, and self-described

mad scientist. It's Tyler Thrasher! What up? Tyler, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm doing really great. I'm in Chicago right now for an art show. It was a good show, having some time off with the family. So I'm doing great. Doing really great. I'm in Chicago right now for an art show. It was a good show. Having some time off with the family. So I'm doing really great. Thanks for having me. Tyler, if you don't know, does a number of things.

But he's maybe most famous for diagnosing what's wrong with your plant. Which usually is you. He's not particularly kind about it. You are the reason your plant died. So, Tyler, what's the most common way I killed my plant? I mean, here's the thing. It always comes down to, like, a couple things. Like, you're not watering enough.

You're not, okay, you're not paying attention. That's the thing that always comes down to. It sounds mean. No, it sounds very – that's true of almost everything that goes wrong in my life. Yeah. And it's very simple. Just pay attention, take some notes, and then hopefully you're one step better than you were yesterday. I think it's simple.

I think it's an easy fix. You're saying that I have to think about the plant? It's a plant. They do it on their own outside all the time. Yeah, but once you bring them indoors, then all of a sudden you're responsible for it. You took them away from the one thing they knew, the outdoors. That's true. Oh, my God.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird that us as a whole separate animal is like like we're going to take this whole other living organism, move it clear across the globe and try to grow them in little terracotta pots where they don't belong. We're a weird, weird species. Oh, very weird. Well, it worked really good for like cats and dogs, you know? Yeah, it took some time though. We had to work hard at that to turn dogs into dogs.

And think a lot about them that's true yeah also i will say you think more about your dog than your plant yeah plants will poop all over your floor and barf and stuff yeah if i engaged as much with my cat as my plants i would have a big problem yeah there's yeah the stakes are a little higher with the pet. Yeah. I once found a ficus in Rattlesnake Creek here in Missoula, Montana. And I thought to myself, I will save this ficus in a Montana creek. A ficus, tropical plant. It was Montana out there. I pulled it in.

It was a little icy. And I put it in my bathtub. And I was convinced that I would save this ficus. I think really I was in school at the time and I think I needed something to write about for class. I think it was ultimately what it came down to. Tyler, can you alleviate my guilt at having failed at this task? No. No, that's your task. No. Okay. can i can i can one-up you um so it happens we

we just plants die and we you know completely against our best efforts we're trying to maintain a living organism that's very complex um and we're going to kill a lot of plants. Plants, I mean, they die all the time. And to one up you, I had someone give me a plant that was about 40 years old and it had survived two growers. It was a conifidum obcordellum, which is a very, very intriguing, tricky succulent to grow. And I killed it within the first month of having this plant that outlived two of its growers. Oh, it's not that the growers gave up, but literally the people died. They died. Wow.

They died. I mean, if it's going to go one way or the other, I'd prefer you survive. Yeah, fair enough. So, yeah, I mean, I'm haunted by two old botanists at least, so I think you'll be okay.

So every week here on SciShow Tangents we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory, but they're also playing for Hank bucks, which will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode,

one of us will be crowned the winner. Now, because we have a special guest, we're going to have two games. I will be playing along with our panelists. And as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week.

It's from Tyler. I made a little haiku about crystals. Just a little, little haiku about crystals. Just a little haiku. Okay. To restrain chaos in a universe so wild to be a crystal. That was a nice haiku. That's all you need, really. That's legit.

That's legit. Snaps. Made you think about the object. Made you think about yourself. And the universe. And yourself that's like the universe the universe so the universe area don't forget sorry i missed it so in addition to doing plant stuff tyler also grows crystals on bugs because it's cool and so our topic for the day is crystals and it really does seem like they are order coming from nothing.

We know that the universe does not find order on its own. So there's something deeper going on, of course. Entropy wants to entropy no matter what. But crystals seem to be fighting against this. So there must be something going on. They're very cool. I love them very much. You know, being in a cold place is nice because you get to find them all the time. Found a bunch at the river recently where it looked like snow had fallen, but in fact, just it had grown on the ground and it was spiky. I loved it. But Sari, can you tell me what a crystal is?

Yeah. Yeah. So the way that they fight against entropy is that molecules and atoms and ions are all seeking for little pockets of stability. Like, aren't we all? And a crystal or a crystalline solid is a material where those atoms or molecules are arranged in a very ordered microscopic structure, oftentimes because they've had the time and space to do it or because there are just so many of them packed together that it is easiest. I'm going to use easiest as like a chemical wiggly word for them to assemble. They're falling downhill into it, you know? Yeah. That's sort of, it's like just, it's assemble. They're falling downhill into it, you know? Yeah. That's sort of,

it's like just, it's cozy. You're locking together. It's energetically more favorable, if you want to use the more technical words, for them to lock into this regular patterned structure. So like we talk about something is a crystal, something is amorphous uh like glass is amorphous where the the faces are wibbly and and rounded and all the molecules are kind of partying in there as opposed to a crystal where everyone is in a row in their designated cubby spot bonded to the others they're at work stock still partying they're at work yeah and materials can fall within these two extremes on this on the scale so something can be more crystalline which is more ordered or something to be more amorphous which is more disordered so like the big crystals that you see the really pretty ones with surface faces that are aligned to the internal symmetry and that are sheared along those faces.

So if you take a piece of pure calcite and break it along a face, then you're going to get a rhomboid shape, a rhombus type shape. And no matter how many times you break it, it will always break along those same lines of symmetry. And it feels like in order to do that, you would need like the same thing over and over again. But in fact, crystals can form with mixtures of different things. Like a ruby, I think, is like one thing with some other things in it. And regularly, though, which is very cool.

Well, I mean, even think like quartz, where you have all these different variations, one thing with some other things in it and regularly though which is very cool well i mean even think like quartz where you have all these different variations like amethyst and citrine and you get all these like in a lab setting you'd call them contaminants but that's what gives them their beautiful colors are these like added right minerals like you know cobalts and chromium um iron uh stuff like that. I believe you. I could have said anything. That seems right. And what is quartz?

What's the root element? Silica. Okay. Silicon dioxide. Oh, so it's not an element. It's a molecule. Yeah, so it's a molecule. And what's also really interesting, like you're talking about amorphous structures. One of my favorite mineraloids slash amorphous structures is opal. And opal and quartz and glass, they all have a lot of the same components. components but you know you have one that's crystalline and one that's amorphous um and they have two very distinctly different appearances and interactions with light um and durability

so even with very similar roots like their base atoms and molecules i mean you could get just a wide range of materials that we ooh and ah at and wear around our bodies and where does crystal come from the word the word crystal the word as opposed to what uh sorry let's come from the ground yes they come from the dirt the word also we just un unburied it the first crystals that we really started being fascinated with were quartz um like the ones that Tyler was mentioning. The quartz that is uncontaminated, I guess, is almost like a pure translucent whitish sheen. And so it looks almost like ice in that way. Ice crystals are also crystals, to be clear.

But then quartz was like harder ice in some way. And so in Greek, they took the word cryos, which means frost, and then came up with the word crystallos, which means crystal or ice. And then we kind of extrapolated from there so quartz was the first crystal i think that we called a crystal because it it looked similar enough and we're like what is this extra extra hard ice that's not even cold yeah yeah i love that thought process that really works for me yeah and then and then they were like you know like how you put ice on your muscles to make them feel better put crystals on places. Just do that.

It's got to be a thing, right? And then you get going on the town trail. Oh, man, that is a wormhole. Well, we can play a game now. And that means it's time for us to move on to the quiz portion of our show this week we're going to be playing a little truth or fail hosted by me one of the popular the less scientific images surrounding crystals is that of a crystal ball the mystical sphere that can reveal more about you in the past and the present in the future crystal balls uh may not really work but crystals have been very very useful for scientists to understand things about

how our world works. The following are three stories of scientific discoveries rooted in crystals, but only one of them is true. Story number one, humans, even ancient migratory ones, have always needed to take pit stops to relieve themselves. So researchers studying the movement of ancient groups across Southern Europe have started to look for large crystals that would have originated with human urine to identify caves that they should investigate further. Or it could be story number two. There are plenty of good reasons to go to Iceland, but for scientists who crystallize proteins so that they can understand their structures, the best reason might be that a salt naturally found in Iceland's Blue Lagoon has been found to accelerate the crystallization process. Or it might be story

number three. Volcano eruptions are difficult to predict, but scientists studying Mount Etna have analyzed crystals that grow inside of the magma, and they found a way to use their structure to help us predict volcanic eruptions in the future. It has to be one of those three, even though they all seem pretty outlandish. So did researchers use pea crystals to find evidence of ancient humans? Does Iceland have salts that speed up the crystallization of proteins? Or do scientists use crystals and magma to predict volcanic eruptions? Oh, shit. Okay. Or do scientists use crystals and magma to predict volcanic eruptions?

Oh, shit. Okay. You're not supposed to know, by the way. That's an important part of this. There's no way anyone... So I have been to Iceland. I have been to Iceland, but that does not help me at all in this situation. How are your proteins feeling? Yeah, did you feel like it sped up the crystallization within you?

It can't be the pee, right? Why can't it be the pee? That's the one that I feel like maybe is the most, I feel drawn to the pee. To the pee? That's a lot of pee, my dude. They don't have to be big crystals. Just little crystals. If everyone peed on the same rock, like if you had 50 friends, how many friends would

you need to pee on the same rock for it to be like, oh, a lot of pee just like a slag mite of crystal but my follow-up question is like how do we know that i mean what's left over for us to analyze and say this is human pee yeah but you know like why couldn't it be that's a point for sure but i don't know our peas got to be a little different if this was happening then there'd be pea crystals everywhere because every animal's pee would be turned into and their diets were so much better like is their pee how distant is their pee from our pee i don't like you judging my diet tyler my pee thanks god corn dog particles in his pee i think the part of pee that crystallizes if i had to take a gander at it is the urea because i think that's like what organic chemists early on crystallized and we're like i can i i'm

crystallizing urea with i'm not a kidney i crystallized it i did chemistry sounds like they're having a lot of fun doing it too they're having a great time okay i think it's the mag i think it's the volcanoes those are hot crystals i kind of think it is too i mean at the rate of crystallization, I mean, couldn't you check ongoing deposits and then see what crystals had tarnished or which ones were larger? And I mean, if this volcano erupts frequently, I mean, you could check different crystal deposits and gauge the period between the crystal deposits and go, oh, this is the time in between different little crystal deposits i don't know is is mount etna active is it an active volcano can you tell us that yes it is i believe you tyler that was very persuasive i believe me yeah would there be a special salt that could

speed up crystallization does Does that even sound like... I think that sounds so fake to me that I'm just writing it right off. There's too many people in the Blue Lagoon. Yeah, it's sweat. It's human sweat. Or it's pee. Or pee. Yeah.

Okay, I'm going to go for pee crystals just to switch it up just to diversify our our guesses and because i think i want to know you gotta be wrong though i'm going with volcano i think all right that just that just rings true to me yeah and tyler's already locked in like he was he was locked in five minutes ago he was very certain yeah yeah so there is a compound in pee that is not urine. That means I'm wrong. That crystallizes. It's called struvite. And it turns into crystals and specifically in low oxygen areas, which is not what caves are.

And researchers have been studying struvite because it may be able to act as a slow release fertilizer for seagrass. So that's not the one. okay okay the first the first but the first protein crystals were described by biologists in the 19th century and they were of worm and fish hemoglobin and protein crystallization has gone on to be very important in helping scientists purify and study all sorts of important proteins. But the salts of Iceland's Blue Lagoon do not have any relevance to protein crystallization. You all call that one no problem. So congratulations to Tyler and Sam. Mount Etna is indeed a very active volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and researchers studying it

have been using a type of crystal found in the magma called antichrists to see if they can figure out signs that an eruption is going to happen soon. While we know that new magma entering into a volcano reservoir

usually happens before an eruption, the complex routes that move magma around make it really hard to predict exactly if and when a volcanic eruption will happen. So antichrists are crystals found in magma, but whose origins are actually in much older magma than the magma they've been found in. Over time, they grow different layers that reflect the magma that surrounds them. So by studying the structure of the antichrists with lasers, researchers can understand more

about the volcano's history. For example, old Antichrist cores form a rim around the crystal when they are carried to the surface of fresh magma. And using the thickness of those rims and other features of the crystal, researchers are learning more about the timing between new

batches of magma showing up and then the subsequent eruption afterward. It was pretty cool. So they have a little history of where they've been inside of magma chambers. It's like a pocket of time is what it is. It's like time ordered. That's pretty cool. It's like tree rings, but magma.

And if you want to look it up,'s a n t e c h r y s t s it took me three tries and i got antichrist multiple times i'm still getting the antichrist even when i search it the way you said i'll find it later yeah i don't think that they're like uh i don't think that they look like good and fun to own one unless you know about it i think otherwise you're like that looks like kind of a boring little rock which is kind of one of the best things where people are like why do you have that boring little rock in such a prized place and i'm like it shows the history of the vault magma movements through all the chambers of Mount Etna.

They're gone by the time you got that far into your system. They're back getting another piece of cheese. Thank you very much. Yeah. All right. Sam and Tyler have won. Sari is headed into the next round with nothing. We're going to take a shorter break, though,

and then it'll be time for a game from Sam. Welcome back, everybody. Time to play another game for us. But I don't know what it is. But Sam Schultz does. Thanks for that great introduction. That was amazing. Researching crystal facts is really hard.

Google pretty much only shows you healing crystals and a lot of other crystal science is. And now i feel embarrassed saying this kind of boring so i really rolled up my sleeves to the bottom of the barrel to make a game that i call are you roasting on crystals excuse me let me say the name of my game it's called okay hit it salty sweet or sand so if you link it it's one of those three flavors yeah that would have been better i guess than what i came up with of all crystals salt sugar and sand are probably the most accessible there's probably sand sugar or salt in the room with you right now and on top of that heck they all kind of look the same so in this sort of this or that style game possibly the worst game in

tangents history i will present you with the fact and you will tell me whether salt sugar or sand are the main character of the fact if you get it you get a point if none of you get it i get maybe like let's say three points okay okay okay sanders three points okay okay here's a softball for you the game of golf as we know it dates back to at least 1470 the game of golf as we know it dates back to at least 1457 but reusable golf tees uh as we know them on the other hand have only been around since 1892 when the perfectum was invented. And the perfectum was like a proto-tee. It has a metal spike with some rubber nubs on it that would hold your ball.

But people still had to keep their ball from rolling away in those intervening 400-ish years. So which crystalline grain would golfers pour on the ground to make a little makeshift tea for themselves? Salt, sugar, or sand? It's gotta be it's gotta be sand gosh you'd think so wouldn't you your response almost changed my answer yeah he was that was very convincing sam

we cannot overthink this i will not overthink this after overthinking the piss question. So I'm going to say it's sand. It's got to be. No, you're not wasting good old salt or sugar. Why would you even have it? Drop some chips on the ground, then golf? No. What was the time frame we're talking about here? Between 1457 and 1892.

I'm thinking like tea parties, you know, like, I think they took the little sugar cubes and crushed it up and just sprinkled that down in there. Because who's walking off with a little baggie of sand, you know? I fully support you in your incorrect guess. I don't think I'm going to say it.

I mean, it's obviously got to be sand. If it's sugar cubes, just stack two of them up. And then you get a T. It's sand, obviously. In the earliest days of golf, golfers would kind of just dig a hole in the ground and get all the mud and make it into a little pyramid and put the ball on top of it. But digging holes all over golf courses is not a good idea so golf courses started providing crates of wet sand that golfers could clump up and make a little tea for their ball but then by by 1922 we had the tea as we know it now and in the meantime there are some other

that took a long time yeah it's really hard to figure out i guess i don't know and then you had like sandy fingers for the rest like and sand all over the golf course. What do you do? Yeah, it's a mess. Okay, ready for this one? Number two. Ice skating is a beloved wintertime activity, but sometimes people want to skate when it's not cold out too, or they don't live next to a suitably frozen body of water.

And that's where indoor ice rinks come in. The first of these ice rinks, named the Glaciarium, was opened in London in 1844. However, it wasn't filled with frozen water, but a proprietary concoction made out of piglard. And which of these grains of crystal, salt, sugar, or sand? Piglard? It wasn't ice? I don't even think it was cold.

It was just butter? My goodness, this does not mesh with my understanding of chemistry i think you can make a flat surface out of either sugar or salt but because there are those salt bricks that they cook fish on like those big pink salt things i think you can make a surface and then butter it up and then people can slip slap slip and slide around oh shit and have a good time so salt is my guess i my brain rebels at the idea of sugared lard so much that i'm gonna say salt yeah was this during war times uh this was in 1844 so i don't know yeah Yeah. No, I don't think so.

I'm just thinking you wouldn't use sugar. I feel like you would save sugar for the tubes. I think it's salt. My answer is salt. We're all going with salt. So Sam's got a good chance here. Damn it, it's salt. It's salt.

So this place had a floor covered with salt and pig fat mixture, which was apparently just hard and slippery enough to skate on somehow. It wasn't frozen because they didn't have large scale refrigeration back then. But the place smelled so bad that it closed within a year of opening. People would just be like, sicked out. Makes sense. You fall down, you can get a little lick on the floor. A little snack.

Oh, man. I'm looking at the Glaciarium and they're all dressed like in their fancy fancies. Skating around. So you get home and you're like, your fancy dress smells like that. Well, number three. In 2018,

about 650 goats were airlifted out of Olympic National Park after they started getting dangerously close to campsites and trails in search of which little crystal that they had become addicted to. Sugar, salt, or sand. That's salt.

It's gotta be salt. They crave that mineral. There was a whole meme about this. Remember Tumblr? I was so online during this period of my life. Yeah, but they can get salt any old place, huh? I think it's sugar. Sugar is horribly addictive.

I mean, it's probably one of the most addictive substances we all consume. I think it's sugar. I definitely have a problem. Right. We came to our conclusions quickly, Sam. The answer is salt. And it is, in fact, salt from human urine. So sometimes when you're hiking,

you got to take a whiz and that whiz is full of salt. And goats, as Sari said, crave that mineral. So they travel far and wide naturally to lick salty rock deposits. But why climb up the side of a sheer rock wall

to lick a rock when you can go to the trails where humans are peeing all over the place and lick the ground where the pee was? Sounds like a pretty good plan, except the goats started to get a little too rowdy and they would dig bigeing all over the place and lick the ground where the pee was. Sounds like a pretty good plan, except the goats started to get a little too rowdy

and they would dig big holes all over the place trying to get more of that sweet piss. And these holes weren't great for the landscape. So in 2018, their behavior had gotten so out of hand that the goat population in Olympic National Park was reduced by blindfolding and airlifting groups of goats to other parts of the Washington wilderness. Oh my gosh. It all comes back to pee i don't know if they blindfolded them because they didn't want to see where they were going or because they'd be scared or what but i think they'd be scared i think that's probably it i'm i'm mostly like can we just like blindfold everybody's pee holes instead like come on people make everybody wear a diaper when they're hiking. We have a real problem here as humans.

Yeah. Yeah. You're causing a problem. Oh, I'm going to call diapers a pee-pee blindfold now. I mean, you call it a pee-hole blindfold. A pee-hole. A urethral blindfold. Jesus. All right.

Here's my last one. I'll put you out of your misery. Way back in ancient times, there were some interesting ideas about how to cure ailments. Like, for instance, a certain type of medicine for treating broken bones was made out of the corpses of humans who willfully ate only and then were buried in a solution of which of these tiny little crystals? You got to pickle that boy. You got to make him into jerky. You gotta pickle that boy. You gotta make him into jerky. You wouldn't survive very long. I guess that's not the point.

I'll guess you just eat a bunch of chips. Eat a bunch of pickles and then you get pickled. Or you could eat a bunch of candy and get candied. A la Willy Wonka. Just what happened to Augustus Gloop. I want to say sugar because we haven't had a sugar yet. So I don't know. Has there been no sugar?

I don't think there's been any sugar. I think you could keep someone alive longer if you feed them sugar and then turn them into a lollipop. So I'm going to say that, sugar. I don't like metagaming so i'm gonna stick with my original answer because i think that salt was more around all right this one's kind of a stretch and i deeply apologize but what i'm referring to here is millified man a medicine documented in ancient greek and chinese literature that was made out of the dead bodies of people generally holy men who towards the end of their lives ate only honey until they died then they had their bodies placed in a coffin full of honey until they basically became candy cadavers and then they were sold as medicine honey is of course made of sugar i think

realistically speaking we know that some cultures did embalm their dead with honey but it seems a little up in the air whether or not this was an actual medicine anybody used, or maybe if it worked or not, because who knows? Maybe it could fix your broken bones. Yeah, no, it doesn't work. Oh, okay. That's a lot of honey. That is a lot of honey.

That's a lot of honey. It's huge. It must have been very valuable to get a little bit of this powdered honey man. Yeah. People had a lot more free time to hang out with bees back then too so that's true that's true that's true and also like you're gonna eat the honey one way or the other you might as well put a little dead guy in it all right that's the end of my game that one's very weird did you like it yeah it was a good it was a good game sam we have ended up

somehow in the bizarre situation of a three-way tie where me tyler and sari have all come out on top of one person you worked so hard on this game sam and to do to reward you we crushed you oh there's a there's a trivia tiebreaker one of the big leaps in watchmaking technology was the first use of quartz crystals in the design these watches work by using a small piece of quartz as a tuning fork so that as an electric current passes through the crystal, the frequency of the quartz's vibrations gets converted very accurately into time. One of the early quartz timepieces was the Seiko Crystal Chronometer QC951, which ended up being

used in the Olympics to time longer races. In what year was the crystal chronometer's Olympics debut? races in what year was the crystal chronometer's olympics debut oh my god i have no idea it could be literally any time after electricity yeah well i don't even know when electricity was hank i'm not good at i'm also a little iffy it was spread out it wasn't all at once everybody says i'm gonna throw my number out there and just trust that the universe is guiding me on this. That's right. Yes. I just feel like a lot of crazy shit happened in the 20s. 1921 feels like just a good year for some crazy crystal timekeeping shit to happen.

Going by Seiko Crystal Chronometer QC951, that sounds like something that an ad executive did in 1964. I'm going to go earlier. I think this was an innovator who knew modern branding before it was a thing. And it was the 1870s. Oh, I have no idea what the answer is. It just got pasted in. Did I say 1964? Yeah. Did I get it on the nose oh my god

advertising marketing to a t that's wild yeah i mean it also had to be some point after which j had industrialized and was once again so but anyway let's not make fun of Sari so the answer was 1964 the answer was 1964 which is I knew that it was an Olympics year I did the math

to check if it was an Olympics year but other than that cool well I guess I win and now it's time to ask the science couch we've got a listener question for our uh couch of finely honed scientific minds sam what do we got no one on youtube asks why do quartz watches claim to be more accurate what is it about crystals that make them special in electromagnetism? Ooh, well, it's cool that we had to do the bonus trivia question. We actually got to talk about that some because otherwise I would have literally said that it's like how you get like less friction in the watch or something. I have no idea.

I learned that in real time just now. What do we got? Yeah. I learned that in real time just now. Sari, what do we got? Yeah. So even mechanical watches use crystals, just not as the timekeeping piece. A mechanical watch uses a mechanism. There are a lot of different pieces. That's why there are horologists.

I'm not one of those. I would love to be though. There's some great YouTube channels where they take apart watches and put them back together. And when I had COVID covet i watched so many the repair shop is one of my favorite netflix shows it's just a bunch of old people that come together and have their special anyway uh so a mechanical watch works with you wind a mainspr spring and that has a bunch of like a series of gears and other little pieces in it and the the part that ticks and sets the the timing of the watch makes the seconds pass is called the escapement and the escapement is uh the moving component of the watch and it's what you hear tick inside of it uh like a wristwatch as opposed to a grandfather

clock because that's the pendulum um and it sometimes uses jewels like rubies or sapphires to reduce wear and tear or absorb shock because over time with temperature changes with with just inevitable friction the escapement and the way that it moves is going to get a little bit jammed up and the timekeeping aspect of it is going to get thrown off a little bit. And the difference between quartz watches and mechanical watches is the fact that there's a little quartz crystal in it and the specific property that quartz has, other crystals have it too, but quartz is just very plentiful, very cheap. We've been able to study it a lot and know exactly how to cut it in specific shapes. Quartz has a property called piezoelectricity.

So if you squeeze a quartz crystal, then it generates a very small um potential difference it produces a voltage on the surface relative to the inside and so if you apply an electric current to quartz then it will deform shape so like it goes both ways if you so like if you squish it it produces electricity so if you give it electricity it like unsquishes it squishes or bends yeah yeah and so extremely weird very cool um it was first observed by pierre and jacques curie in the 1880s um but because the voltage was so low we didn't have a practical application for it. But then wristwatches are so small. We were like, what if we incorporate into an electronic component?

And quartz crystals, as opposed to a metal escapement, are less affected by things like temperature and wear over time. So they are more accurate over longer periods of time as long as you don't have like you cut it right and there aren't impurities that would affect the resonant frequency of that quartz you said uh inevitable friction and i thought that's a cool book title that i think that's a cool book title that is one we know. That there is no frictionless system. That everything is always a little bit hard. At least. This is a sexy, sexy book.

No. No. Difficult. Everything is always a little bit difficult. Inevitable friction. I i like it if you want to ask the science couch your question you can follow us on twitter at scishow tangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week or you can join the scishow tangents patreon and

ask us on our discord thank you to cryptid and james on discord and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode thank you tyler if we want to see more of what you're up to, what, what's the, what's the top five things we should do? Yeah, look, I mean,

I'm on Instagram, um, or you can go to Tyler thrasher.com. Um, I grow crystals on bugs. I also synthesize and grow opals in my lab. Um, I will make fun of your dying plants.

Um, it's all love. It's all good. Um, um, I also do some dungeons and dragons and, my lab um i will make fun of your dying plants um it's all love it's all good um um i also do some dungeons and dragons and um yeah i don't know i like to explore caves so if you're into any of those things then check me out online um and thank you guys for having me this has been a hilarious blast like my cheeks hurt. This has been great. That's great.

Thank you so much for being here. It was a super pleasure to have you. If you like this show, people listening out there and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can go to patrion.com slash size show tangents, become a patron, get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes.

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Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. And I'm Tyler Thrasher. SciShow Tantrums, created by all of us and produced by our invisible 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 Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And of course, 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. Makeup manufacturers can use guanine crystals, also known as pearl essence, to make shimmery goose. And the molecule guanine, which we now know is one of the nucleotide bases that make up our DNA, was first extracted from bird poop. That's how it got its name, from guano. This linguistic connection led to the myth that sparkly makeup was made from poop.

And while some animals, like mites, do poop out crystalline guanine, the guanine that ends up in makeup is usually extracted from fish scales instead. So it's not, it's not. I just assumed it was. I honestly was, we'll use anything. I always thought it was poop. I thought it was poop this whole time. I would wear poop makeup.

I think that would be an appeal to me. You know, it's sanitary. Like by that point, at that point. Because we know it's sanitary. That's an interesting sentence, Sari. At the point where you've extracted a guanine crystal, it's gone through so much molecular... I'm not just going to smear poop on my face,

but guanine crystals derived from bat guano, that would be a selling point. Look at this bat poop makeup. I could see Sari at a house party. Me specifically. Do you know? I i'm gonna start the new multi-level marketing scheme but with poop makeup i would invest in that you should do that