SciShow Tangents - Ears

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

In the world of podcasting, one organ reigns supreme: the ear. This week, we give thanks to the orifice that allows us to enjoy SciShow Tangents and that also helps us balance for some reason!Also this week, the world premier of Sam's new game! It's a real corker! Also you will be required to visualize an entire cob of corn, so you better start practicing now.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: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links: [Hear Ye Hear Ye]Toadfish Calls courtesy of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: https://www.birds.cornell.edu/homehttps://www.chesapeakebay.net/S=0/fieldguide/critter/oyster_toadfishSun Sonificationhttps://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/sounds-of-the-sunWhistler-waveshttps://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-listens-in-as-electrons-whistle-while-they-workJupiter Bowshockhttps://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-juno-spacecraft-enters-jupiters-magnetic-field[Fact Off]19th Century hearing devices Pictures here: http://beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/did/19thcent/index.htmhttps://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/26/technology/hearing-aids-smaller-and-smarter.htmlhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/773357/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2582694/Cheetah ears & vestibular organhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/cheetah-inner-ear-speed-hunting-spd/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20198-3[Ask the Science Couch]Hearing losshttps://www.cdc.gov/nceh/hearing_loss/how_does_loud_noise_cause_hearing_loss.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11122/https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hearing-loss/symptoms-causes/syc-20373072https://stanmed.stanford.edu/listening/scientists-hope-cure-hearing-loss-studying-birds.htmlhttps://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Psych289/Biotutorials/17/cochlea.shtmlhttps://www.nidcd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/Content%20Images/presbycusis.pdfhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQEaiZ2j9oc

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's that lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring three people who are friends with each other. At this point well i work on size show and i work on size show too and sari doesn't so it's not really fair to say but this week as always i'm joined by just my two friends sam schultz hello can you take your phone out and then open up a open up your your emoji keyboard and tell me what your most used emoji is. Oh, I think it's going to be the side eye emoji. Yeah, number one.

The little eyes that are peeking off to the side. Oh, yeah. Why do you like that? Because something's sus? Yeah. To me, it's like I'm telling a secret is one way. Something sus is one way. I'm about to get in trouble.

It's a lot of different things to me. Well, my one is the the guy who's showing all of his teeth he's like oh grimacy guy yeah just grimace guy like ah sorry i said that or we're both afraid of getting in trouble and what's your tagline enchantment under the sea lovely sari r, hello. How are you? Hello. I'm doing okay. Would you rather go and be like a space explorer or like an ocean explorer under the ocean?

Ocean, absolutely. Space seems very like I'm dedicating my life to going to the middle of nowhere and then maybe not coming back and with questionable medical conditions. Ocean, at least I can come back to the surface of the earth fairly easily. Yeah, it feels like, yeah. and then maybe not coming back and with questionable medical conditions. Ocean, at least I can come back to the surface of the earth fairly easily. Yeah, it feels like, yeah, ocean, it's like you're not gonna be down there for more than a day, probably not more than a few hours.

You can see some little guys while you're down there too. Yeah, that's true. There's life in the ocean and space is, as far as we know, pretty dead. If you see a little guy in space, then that's more concerning. Well, it's a big,

it's pretty big deal though. Yeah, that's true. You'll be very- Either a pretty big deal or you were experiencing a hallucination. Oh yeah, that too. It's also something you should tell someone about immediately.

Sari, what's your tagline? Appropriately grungy. Ah, well, that's a very January 2021 mood, isn't it? And I'm Hank Green and my tagline? Appropriately grungy. Ah, well, that's the that's a very January 2021 mood, isn't it? And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is he uses a little too much hair product, doesn't he? Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try

to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts without always staying 100% on topic. We're playing for glory. We're also keeping score and awarding chin coins from week to week, named after the illustrious and gone by Stefan Chin.

Just like we did last week, we're bringing in a new season of Tangents, or maybe a pre-season by trying out some new games each week. In January, one of us is going to bring a new game to the show, and if we like it, it may end up in the regular rotation. But first, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me.

Things that are near, you hear with your ear. Things that are far, you hear them too. A cartilaginous flap without peer, detecting the sound waves arriving at you. But did you know the organ your ear conceals does not actually hear? No, it feels. Mechanoreceptors are nerves that feel touch. They sense pressure and it doesn't have to be much. Just tiny tappings, a breath

on the skin, a tympanic membrane touched by the wind. Whether whispered song or roaring buses, sounds are actually just tiny touches. Oh, that was a nice one. That's what we do here at SciShow Tangents. We touch your ears very softly and words appear in your mind.

So our topic for the day is ears. Ears, yeah. Sari, what's an ear? Well, it is an organ found in animals that has evolved to perceive sounds. And I couldn't really figure out more specific than that. Like where the line between like a tympanic membrane. So like on frog bodies, there's a membrane. They have like a middle ear, but not an outer ear structure.

And it's membrane that senses the tiny touches and conveys it to their brain. Is that an ear? Probably. I feel like it's an ear. Yeah. Well, this is the thing. Because I say, if I was going to ask you to touch your ear, you would touch the flappy thing on the outside.

But the ear is actually, I think it includes the entire thing up to the nerve that carries the sound impulse away, the entire structure. And so not everybody's going to have all that same ear, not every species, but they're going to have something that detects sound and carries it to the nervous system. Does pretty much everything have that? Something that detects sound? Nah. Okay.

I think most vertebrates do and most insects do and like other sort of invertebrates can sense sound. I think like mollusks can sense sound in some way and worms can. But then once you get into like the blobbier creatures, then it gets a little bit more questionable. So like jellies, they have an organ of balance called a statocyst, which is related to the organ of balance that we have in our inner ear and many mammals have in their inner ear. Like it's related, like it was the structure evolved from a common structure? Yes, I think so. Wow. That's wild. We've been balancing for a long time. I guess you got to do that. Yeah. To like move around in a coordinated way, you've got to balance. So they've got a, they've got like like a balancing organ but they don't have like an ear they just have that piece of what is now our so

if i if i yell at a jellyfish it will not know i'm doing can they detect vibrations are they all in here is there well that's that is a whole other thing yeah like some microorganisms can definitely detect vibrations and i guess that's like they are just full body ear yeah they're in ear so you either have an ear or you are an ear yeah or you don't have an ear and aren't in here also right like a sponge i imagine a sponge would be but who knows no i think they're earless they're on my list of of ear list things i have sponges and placa zoa wow so not you know not that many things and where did the word ear come from? Are we still doing that?

Yeah. That's my favorite part of the whole show. Well, I hate to disappoint you, Sam, but ears are one of those things where they've just been on us. And we pointed to it and we were like, ear. Oh, darn. And then it's been ear ever since. So now it's time for one of our mystery games. So Sam has a thing for us us i'm very curious to find it

out and have you named your game because i didn't do that yeah yeah proud of you so since this week's topic is ears i thought it would be appropriate to introduce a sound based game that i like to call hear ye hear ye okay you weren't impressed with it i thought it was charming. So first I'll tell you a little bit about what this edition of Hear Ye, Hear Ye is about, and then I'll explain how the game works. So space is the inky black emptiness that surrounds us, stretching out into infinity, filled with mysteries obscured by distance, time, and the fundamental forces of our universe.

It could be a realm of infinite possibility filled with strange life and beautiful sights we will never see or even imagine. It could be an endless graveyard where dead planets and dying stars perform a meaningless ballet until the end of time. Toadfish are a family of bottom-feeding fish found worldwide in fresh brackish and saltwater that use their swim bladders to sing mating songs

so loud that they can clearly be heard above the surface of the water. So people have taken audio recordings of both space-bound phenomena and toadfish songs. And to me, they sounded basically the same. So in this edition of Hear Ye, Hear Ye, I'm going to play you an audio track and then ask you to decide if you're hearing a sound from outer space or the singing of a toadfish. And here's how the scoring works. Thought about this for a long time. If you get it right, you get two points.

For each that you get wrong, I get one point. This is what I missed with my game, is that there were no opportunities for me to get points. I was very careful to include many opportunities for me to get points. I learned from you. All right. Here is sound number one. Ooh. Do you think that is outer space or a toadfish?

Are we counting down? Yeah, let's count down so we don't influence each other. Three, two, one, Toadfish. Sound number one, just to get you oriented, was the song of a Toadfish. Oh, no. Then I'll give you a Toadfish fast fact. Male Toadfish build nests and attract females by singing these songs. The females lay their eggs and then take off, and they leave the male to guard the nest,

and it guards the nest for about a month until the eggs hatch. Then the baby Toadfish are literally attached to the nest by like an umbilical cord or something like that. So the male still hangs out for like three more weeks until they develop enough to detach. Then they follow him around and hide behind him to stay safe. So he takes care of them for like three or four months or something. And he's like the best dad in the fish kingdom.

Sound number two. Here it is. A little creepy. I'm a little creeped out. Three, two, one. Space. It's got to be space, right? It's space.

Okay. That's got to be space. So what you just heard was the sound of vibrations and radiation emitted by the sun's atmosphere gathered by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, then turned into something that the human ear can hear. So scientists use these sonifications as another piece of data to help them discern when things like solar flares and coronal mass ejections happen. So I got no points and you guys each got two points. Sound number three. Here it is. That feels like a definitely an either one to me.

I think that's a space. That was my gut also. I thought they have all been space. So that is my bias in here. But it sounded regular enough, like a stop and a start, that maybe a toadfish wouldn't do like that abruptly. I don't know.

There was just something about the quality of the noise that seemed less organic to me. What do we got, Sam? That's exactly what I wanted you to think. No! That was a toadfish. Here's exactly what I wanted you to think. No! That was a toadfish. Here's another toadfish fast fact. Some species of toadfish can survive outside of water for up

to 24 hours and are able to traverse short stretches of land using their fins. Same here. Alright, sound number four. Here it is. What? That's an alien noise. That's very different from the last one. I'll tell you that.

That can't be space. Why not? I don't know. There's too many of them. I could see it being like objects. And by objects, I mean like solar particles bouncing into something going. Sure, yeah. I don't know.

Yeah, you're right. Both the Toadfish ones have been more low. Lower pitched. But I feel like he's trying to trick me, so I'm going to go Toadfish. Okay, I'll go Toadfish too. They're having a rave under the sea. Toadfish rave! You guys are so stupid.

That was space. No, my God! Under the sea. Toadfish rave! You guys are so stupid. That was space. No! My God! Earth's magnetic field is apparently filled with plasma waves. When these waves travel through certain areas of cold, dense plasma, the waves have a high-frequency pattern, and these are known as whistler waves because when pitched down to the human range of hearing,

they sound like what you just heard. These were recorded by NASA's Van Allen probes, and I don't know what they do with this information but oh no sam you're doing very well sound number five please if you would oh it's wet it sounds like it sounds like a toadfish in a frying pan it sounds like a goose being sizzled it's a trick question is a goose being sizzled. It's a trick question. Is a goose being sizzled?

Oh, I got to go toadfish again. I'll go toadfish, but I'm afraid that this is like a weirdest, like this is like an astronaut cooking an egg on the ISS or something like that. An egg with a live goose in it. What is it, Sam? That one was too wet to not be a toadfish. I thought the wet would throw you off, but it is a toadfish. So here's another piece of toadfish trivia.

In the 80s, residents of houseboats in Sausalito, California, reported hearing a droning hum loud enough to keep them up at night. Speculation ran wild, with some people even believing that they were hearing the sound of a Soviet submarine that was sneaking around off the coast. Eventually, it was discovered by an aquarium nearby to be the mating call of the toadfish resonating through the holes of their houseboats. Sound number six. That was also very wet. Or did I put two wet ones close to each other for this exact reason? I think this is another toadfish. I think Sam's trying to reverse psychology us.

I'm going to go space. Oh, no. Okay. That one was a toadfish. Yes. Fuck. Toadfish fact. Toadfish have sharp spines on their dorsal fins and gills for self-defense,

and in one subfamily, these spines are hollow and filled with venom. Okay, here's the last one. Sound number seven. Go. I mean... That's space. That's space. Yeah, that's like the screaming of eternal souls.

What? Yeah, yeah. It's space where all the souls are. of eternal souls also what? yeah yeah it's space where all the souls are I mean that just sounded it sounded like

the soundtrack of a science fiction movie like I feel like that sound effect could have been used in 2001 A Space Odyssey you're both going with space? yes

going with space okay it was space baby you got it oh good you really talked that one up being space so

that was the sound of NASA's probe Juno entering Jupiter's magnetosphere No space, baby. You got it. Oh, good. You really talked that one up being space. That was the sound of NASA's probe Juno entering Jupiter's magnetosphere in 2016. So what you're hearing is basically the turbulence caused by solar wind hitting the magnetosphere and then the probe crossing between that threshold. And NASA thinks it can use information gathered from this event to figure out some things about the internal structure of Jupiter. So that was hear ye, hear ye. The game is over now. I loved it.

That was really fun. That was so good. I need to thank the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for providing me with the Toadfish song recordings. So thank you. Their website's in the episode notes, so you should go check it out. They have tons of weird recordings of stuff not just birds

no not just birds they got fish hopefully they know that toadfish ain't birds there's two animals in their name that aren't birds

and they aren't birds the scores of that Sari and I came out tied with eight points a piece and Sam got six oh I lost? you did even though you had

every chance to do better than that we stumped ya I thought I was riding high on the hog I thought I was doing really good I lost? You did, even though you had every chance to do better than that. Oh, no. We stumped you. I thought I was riding high on the hog. I thought I was doing really good. Now it's time for us to take a short break, and then we can do the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sari has eight points.

Sam has six. And I, because I guess I got a point for my poem. Oh, we don't do points for poems anymore. Oh, damn it. Unpaid labor. You're doing it for exposure, Hank. anymore. Oh, damn it. Unpaid labor. You're doing it for exposure, Hank. And now it's time for the fact-off, where

Sari and I have both brought a fact to present to Sam, and Sam gets to award us however many points he sees fit based on how much he likes our facts, is the current version of the rules of this game. Well, I came up with an amount of points that complimented

my game, so I think that should be fair. If I came up with an amount of points that complemented my game. So I think that should be fair. If I pick you, you get three points. And to decide who goes first, Sam, do you have a question for us? I do. About how many kernels are there on an average ear of corn? Ah. Oh, dear. 722.

Wow. I'm going to say maybe like 15 times 30. 15 times 30? That's like such a huge number. Yeah, that's like in the thousands, right? No, it's 450.

Oh. Oh. I can't do mental math. It's 150 times 3. Got to move those zeros around. Well, the correct answer is 800. I can't do mental math. It's 150 times three. Got to move those zeros around. Well, the correct answer is 800. Alarmingly close, Sari.

Good job. Did you picture an ear of corn and then like work your way up or what's going on there? I pictured an ear of corn and then I was like, 2000 sounds like too many. And then I just picked a number less than 2,000. Wow, I had a whole system and I failed. I bet there's like 30 across and 15 around. Alright, so Sarah gets to pick who goes first.

I just looked it up and it is actually 16 around. I created a corn in my mind and I counted it and it was 16 and then I rounded down to 15 just to do the math better, but I was right. I counted my mind and I counted it and it was 16 and then I rounded down to 50 just to do the math better but I was right I counted my mind corn correctly your mind corn is the perfect average corn in girth but not in length anyway um I'll take my corn victory and go first. Okay. So like we were talking about, your outer ear is the most obvious part of yourself that is ear,

and it exists to amplify and funnel sound waves down your ear canal. So that's why if you cup your hand behind your ear, you can hear things a little bit louder. So the first hearing devices were just a mechanical version of the outer ear, like your trumpets that helped funnel more sound waves into the ear canal. And with a growing understanding of ear anatomy, people were finding more innovative ways to amplify sound before any use of electronics or audio processing technology. And I find that really fascinating.

So here are three different hearing devices in the 19th century that were designed to be concealed. I just want to mention that I'm not part of the deaf or hard of hearing community, so I find these inventions cool because I like focusing on like the science of how they were created, and I'm trying not to inject feelings about hearing aids or like romanticize them in any way because that's a complicated discussion and not one for me to take up space in. So all that being said, one are hair accessories. So they took the idea of the ear trumpet and miniaturized them

by building them into hands-free accessories that you wear on your head area. For example, there were headbands with spiral seashells over the ears that amplified sound, a hollow headband with a slot so the sound was funneled into the top of your head down to your ears, or even a beard band that operated on similar principles with a slot that it just went from your beard upward. And in my mind, it's kind of like combining, I don't understand instruments very well, but like the acoustic principles of like guitars have a hole cut in them to amplify sound. But you just have like a chamber that you then attach to your head somewhere that amplifies sound and brings it to your ears. Number two are acoustic chairs, which took the idea of the ear trumpet and created a much bigger and more elegant and fancy device.

So they were expensive and mostly used by royalty. and more elegant and fancy device. So they were expensive and mostly used by royalty. For example, King John VI of Portugal, his chair had hollowed out arms that ended with lion sculptures that he could rest his hands on with gaping open mouths that also led into hidden tubes.

So when people knelt in front of him to speak, as you do for a king, their voices were fed through the lion tubes, amplified through structures hidden in the seat of the chair and emitted by his head in the back. So we could hear them really good. And then number three, which is the wildest to me, we started to understand ear anatomy and hearing better when human dissections became more accepted in the 16th to 17th century. So we also realized that sound waves were carried from the outer ear through the middle ear to the inner ear with bones. Your membrane, your eardrum,

taps on the bones, and then that brings those tiny touches to the cochlea, which is your inner ear, which then transmits the signal to your brain. And so they realized also that sound waves could be carried to the inner ear by vibrating other headphones. So there were these bone conduction fans, like the Rhodes Audiphone or the Dentaphone, which were made of stiff material, and the user was supposed to bite down on the end of it to help amplify sound through their teeth and jaw.

So you could fan yourself with it sometimes, but then otherwise you could nibble on it a little little bit and then it'd help you hear better. There is apparently a gain of around 30 decibels, which is like, according to what I read, hearing someone from two feet away instead of 64 feet away. How do modern hearing aids work? A lot of electronics, like it started out as an analog system where it was just like a microphone picking up sound and then bringing it to your ear and now there are digital systems in which like the audio is processed and then there are implants which can like bypass the ear system

and go to the brain depending on where the damage is i thought maybe they are vibrating bones too i think modern hearing aid companies have also looked into vibrations through bone or like sending vibrations through your jawbone or other places in your skull instead of the three little ear bones. But I don't know too much about latest innovations or breakthroughs. Well, in other ear news, cheetahs are very, very fast. Trust me, I'll get there. So they got lots of adaptations that make them very fast they got their long legs and their springy bodies they've got lots of muscles

and very they're very strong but also it's their ears because moving very fast requires you know moving your legs very fast but also lots of coordination so you have to be able to maintain balance and keep your head and neck and eyes all stable, which is hard to do when, like, I'm just sitting here at my desk, but it's even harder when you're moving at 29 meters per second. So a lot of animals have a whole system in our inner ears called the vestibular system that helps us maintain balance, and it's made up of a thing called the bony labyrinth, which contains tubes called the semicircular canals,

and as fluid moves through those canals, they stimulate hair cells, and those create a mechanical signal that's translated into an electrical signal in the brain. So we can figure out how our bodies are oriented in relationship to gravity. So scientists decided to see how the vestibular system in cheetahs compared to other cats by taking 3D scans of different skulls they had on hand. In addition to modern-day cheetahs compared to other cats by taking 3D scans of different skulls they had on hand. In addition to modern-day cheetahs, these samples included the clouded leopard, the domestic cat, and a cheetah species that went extinct 126,000 years ago. And when comparing the skulls, the scientists found that modern-day cheetahs had both a distinct shape and a relative volume

that corresponded with the inner ear being more sensitive to head motion. So they think that the structure helps the cheetah maintain stability in what it sees and how its body is positioned, even as it chases down prey at very high speeds with lots of twists and turns and sudden movements. Moreover, the extinct cheetah didn't have the larger vestibular system, which makes this development probably a relatively recent one. And maybe if you'd had better inner ear, you wouldn't have gone so extinct. I never thought about how you need your ears to go fast, but it's true.

My vestibular system gets messed up when I go on a roller coaster. I feel dizzy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe cheetahs will be better at that. We should put a cheetah on a roller coaster. Please. And this year.

Start writing grants. For science. We should put a cheetah on a roller coaster. Please. And this year. For science. We need to get that extinct cheetah and the alive cheetah, put them on a roller coaster together. Yeah. So we need cloning. Money for cloning. Yeah. We need to do some de-extinction work and we need all of Space Mountain for me for several weeks.

And two cheetahs. So, Sam, you've got hearing devices of the past concealed as hair accessories, furniture, and hand fans, or you got me with modern cheetahs with specialized inner ears that help them keep balance while chasing down their prey. Ugh, I was gonna pick Sari

until we started talking about roller coasters and that was real fun. No. I feel horrible about my decision. I'm going to pick Hank. I feel great about your decision. So, Hank, you get three points. I got three points?

Yeah. I only needed one. All right, it's time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our couch. One listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific mind it's from at holiday eyes i like the idea of like you just got like specialized for the holidays pop them in i know i know prolonged exposure to loud noises can cause hearing damage whoops but what's the actual mechanism that causes the hearing loss and why do higher frequencies go first? I don't actually know.

I assume that the hair cells are delicate, but I don't know why higher frequencies go first. Yeah, it has to do with hair cells. So Hank did a really good job explaining the idea of sound waves causing pressure and like physical motion on these things called hair cells which then change that into electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve which sends the signal to your brain and hair cells are actually like a very weird shape the bottom part is like a solid chunk like like an oval like you'd imagine a cell with a nucleus in it but then the top part is a bunch of cilia, specifically stereocilia, which are groups of these like slender tubes that stick out. You see them on drawings of like bacteria because cilia are sometimes used for movement, but they're also like on the inside

of your intestine. They're like the little lumpy bumps. And that's why they're called hair cells. They have nothing to do with hair follicles. They're just like, ooh, these like cilia bunched together in bundles look kind of like a little hair. Those are what receive and move because of the changing pressure of sound waves. And all these hair cells are in a structure called the cochlea, which is named because it's spirally like a snail shell, but it's the size of a pea. So it's very tiny snail shell and there's fluid inside of it that all the hair cells are in. So they're not just getting like pushed in the air by the waves. The fluid is moving and they're waving back and forth like seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. And when the sound waves are too loud, and so the pressure waves are too strong,

and the vibrations are too intense, then you can damage the hair cells. You can either damage the cilia or the base of the cells through normal cell damage things. If you skinned your knee, I think it would be similar of just too much wiggling back and forth of these hair cells. And to our knowledge, there isn't a way for humans to regenerate it. There are some animals that have populations of progenitor cells in their ears that can regenerate them in the way that we can create more red blood cells. But we just can't make more hair cells. So once they're beat up, once they're damaged, we have no way of repairing them. That can happen through loud noises, which then limits your capacity to take sound waves and change them into electrical signals, which means your hearing

goes down. Or there's this thing called presbycusis, which is just like the loss of hearing due to age. And that's just like your cells getting older and dying because you're getting old. And then as far as like the frequency of it, the cochlea is arranged in a really interesting way. So if you imagine the spiral swirling inward like a snail shell, the stuff towards the opening of the snail shell are the highest frequency detecting hair cells. And then as you get spiral inward and closer to the center of it, those are the lower frequency sensing hair cells. And in my understanding, the waves have to propagate through the fluid past all the high frequency to get to

the low frequency. And so the high frequency hair cells get the most rough and tumble whenever you're hearing any type of sound. And so that's why your high frequency hearing goes first, just because of like the structure of the cochlea and how different hair cells receive sound waves as mechanical motion. It makes so much more sense when they're like waves that are actually smacking something inside of your ear. If you want to ask a question to the Science Couch, you can follow us on Twitter, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode.

Final scores, Sari has eight, Sam has six, and I come out on top with 11, which means the Chincoin season totals as of the moment are me with one, Sam with one and Sari with none. Maybe. Pre-season. Or this may in fact all be pre-season.

Yeah. If you like this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. You can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode or tell us how you feel about the new games we're trying out. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, 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's a fish called the bony-eared ass fish. That's it? That's mostly it. That's mostly the whole fact. There's ears and there's ass.

It's an ear-ass fact. Yeah. And we don't actually know why it's called the bony-eared-ass fish. We think it's possibly because its scientific name is Acanthonus armatus. And we're not sure where acanthonus came from. Because acanthos means prickly, which makes sense because it's a prickly fish. And the onus, we're not sure, but maybe people thought that it was a cognate with the Latin word for donkey. But like they were wrong about that.

And so they called it an ass fish. Even though it doesn't look like a donkey at all or a butt. Maybe they just really wanted to goof on this fish. They didn't like the look of him. The bony eared ass fish also holds the record for the smallest brain to body weight ratio of all vertebrates. This fish sucks so bad.