SciShow Tangents - Earth, Wind, and Fire Compilation

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

Nature never ceases to amaze...well, us at least. We here at Tangents are big fans of planet Earth and all the incredible stuff that happens here. We get our hands dirty and our minds informed in these episodes all about the elements!Episodes in this compilation:S1 E9 - Ice and Snow, original airdate: January 8, 2019S1 E52 - Fire, original airdate: November 5, 2019S3 E14 - Dirt, original airdate: May 4, 2021S3 E27 - Water, original airdate: August 24, 2021S3 E36 - Heat, original airdate: November 2, 2021Sources for each episode can be found in the descriptions of the original episodes on your preferred podcasting platform.SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

INTRO MUSIC Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive, novice showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Today we've got with us, as always, Stefan Chin, producer of SciShow. How you doing Stefan? What's your tagline? Uh, habanero dreaming. Oh, that's a really good one. We're also joined by producer of SciShow Kids, Sam Schultz.

Hello. It's definitely made me forget my tagline. That's a great tagline. And also script editor, Sari Reilly. Check out these hot glue guns. And I'm Hank Green, peanut missile. So to introduce this podcast for you, every week we gather together, try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts.

We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks. So we do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging from previous conversations with this group, we will not be great at that. So if somebody goes on a tangent, we can decide whether or not that tangent was worth it, and then we can take one of the Hank bucks away, basically.

The rules are in flux. Don't worry too much about it. Now, as always, we're gonna introduce the topic with the traditional science poem, and this week it's me. I had a very hard time writing my poem. I'm just, I'm prefacing that because I'm not super proud of it. Sometimes your brain just isn't in the right spot, but you have to do it,

and so you make yourself write two science limericks. Oh, you have two? Kind of. Okay. Energy freed that molecule from a polar to polar hydrogen bond. Now gas in the air, it flies here and there. It waits until the cold comes. When conditions ideal diagram it and people want to Instagram it, the molecules freeze to their tiny cloud seeds

and they fall on my windshield. God damn it That was great Doesn't make sense well it sounds like conditions ideal diagram it Doesn't mean anything sounds like a chemistry thing. Yeah, it sounds like a poem thing The secrets that poems are bullshit. Oh, the secrets. Sam, let out the secret. You can't tell people the secret. Sorry. You can't write poems now though with that secret. It's our intellectual property. So all poems are ours now.

We've trademarked the idea of poetry. Just bullshit poems. Okay. So you can't write bullshit poetry. That bullshit poems. Oh, okay. So you can't write bullshit poetry. That's just us. That's just us. That's good. Well, I'm into it. And our topic today is ice and snow.

And I assume other kinds of solid water. Wait, what other kinds of solid water are there? Besides ice and snow? Besides ice. They're like... Well, we said ice and snow. Snow is ice. Yeah.

So you can't, like, there's no reason to say and snow. But like, I guess it kind of feels like it's not ice because it's snow and like frost doesn't really feel like ice. You know, but it's all ice. It's all ice. And I think there's like 17 secret ones. Sherry knows about the secret. Yeah. Unless you're not a little secret. There's secret ices.

Are they only on on Mars and stuff? A lot of them we haven't found and they couldn't form on Earth. They are secret! We haven't even found them yet! They're different crystalline structures of ice. So different ways that the ice crystal can form and sometimes it's relying on different temperatures, different pressures. Some of those temperatures and pressures are hard to get to.

Yeah. And the molecular structures shift around. Some of them, I think, are glassier, so they have weird transitions or they behave strangely where they're a solid, but if you squish them a little bit too much, then they start getting all amorphous. I don't really know a lot about them because this gets to the really theoretical chemistry. Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty nerdy part of chemistry.

Like there's a lot of thought about ice crystals. Sure. So what is ice? Ice is, as Hank's poem said, water molecules that are in a solid form. What is ice? What is solid? So that's the thing. So a solid is when it doesn't fill the container that it's in. So it stays rigid. And this generally happens when the temperature is low enough that the molecules aren't moving so fast that the little forces that hold the molecules together aren't overcome by the motion of the energy of the heat of the molecules. That is the most abstract way I can explain FaZe

in the podcast. Okay. I think that's a good explanation. And water is weird because their liquid form, the liquid form of water molecules is denser than the solid form, which is why ice floats on liquid water. Which is very weird.

It's very weird. Never happens. Doesn't make any sense, but until you're like, oh yeah, weird hydrogen bonds. So it's sort of, when it freezes, it's forced to take a certain shape that is actually less dense than the fluid flowing phase. Does the O and the H2O make it float? No. No.

No, definitely not that. The O does feel like the floatiest letter though. It should be like the one making it float. It's shaped like a balloon. Yeah. Well, hydrogen is way lighter than oxygen. 16 times lighter than oxygen. What is?

Hydrogen. Oh, that's the other one in it. Yeah. Okay. Chemistry is the class that I flunked the most. Glad to explain as best we could. I hope that it was helpful. It was kind of. Thank you for teaching our children, Sam.

Also, thank you for being the purveyor of our truth or fail. So, truth or fail is the part of our podcast where one of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The other three panelists have to figure out which one is real, either by deduction or wild guess. And if they do, they get a Hank Buck. But if we're tricked, then Sam gets a Hank Buck. All right, Sam, tell us our things.

Japanese macaques, aka snow monkeys, are cute red-faced monkeys native to Japan. They live in super cold and snowy places for primates, and in fact, they live farther north and in colder temperatures than any other non-human primate. They are well known for the fact that a certain tribe of them likes to swim in hot springs and hot tubs and stuff, but they also do some other kind of human-like things. Okay.

Ahem. Oh, you're gonna give us three things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's all your facts are about, snowy macaques. Yeah, you know, it's snow-adjacent. Uh, number one, they season their food with herbs they scavenge in the woods.

Ooh. Number two, they keep pet deer and ride them around. That's amazing. They don't. Number three. Number three. There is no evidence that taking hot spring baths is helpful to them at all and may in fact be harmful.

Oh! Just like us! Just like a human. I try to make that one work okay. I know people who spend too much time in the bath. Like my son for example. 45 minutes this morning! And he still cried when he got out. That's a perfectly fine bath.

What else does he have to do? He's a kid. I can't leave him in there by himself. I got stuff to do. So number three, much like Hank's child, he spends too much time in the water. And it might be bad for him. If there were primates that rode deer, I would have seen a picture of that.

It would have been in like, at least half of the anime I've ever seen. That's true. Okay, that makes sense. Herbs and spices thing seems plausible, but also. If they're in the snow though. They're not all in the snow. They live everywhere in Japan.

Okay. It seems too plausible to me. I don't know, it's just like... Too plausible? Yeah. Yeah, it's like, it's typical. Maybe they pull a leaf from a tree and they stick it on. What do they eat?

Do they eat leaves? They eat plants, I think mostly is what it seemed like. Okay. So they season it with other herbs. Yeah, they herb their herbs sure They eat fruit a lot of apples and stuff. Oh, yeah I mean, I know that when they first found that like different groups of dolphins Like had similar recipes for how they like to eat food

They'd like like grab like several different things and then eat them all together because they liked it better together. Oh like grab like several different things and then eat them all together because they liked it better together. Oh. That was like a, like kind of a big news thing. Basically they were like doing cooking. Like there was a culinary tradition among dolphin pods. And that's very cool.

They were different between pods? Yeah, so they did it different in different groups. Regional dishes. Yeah. I like that. I like it. So like, I think it would be big science if they found that macaques

Seasoned. Were like kind of cooking. I'm sorry, I have to go with the other one. What do you mean? The bath? The hot spring bath. Yeah, yeah. Cause like if I'm a monkey,

I will definitely spend an unhealthy amount of time in a hot spring. Yeah. Like just no doubt in my mind, if I was a monkey that lived in the cold and there were hot springs around I would be in the hot spring to my detriment sure even as a human Well, there's also other ways that they might be harmful too because hot springs have all kinds of bacteria Inside and so I can imagine monkeys not knowing that and that's a drink the water hanging out. Yeah, they're just drinking the water. They'll get a little thirsty, drink the water.

Or they like dunk their food in the water. Maybe they want to heat it up, make some soup. Oh, they're cooking. They're cooking. It can sound like they're cooking. Little stew. Little fruit stew. Wouldn't it be great if we like came across that the first humans arrived and the macaques

had turned the whole hot spring into soup? Yeah. Just like a big beef stew. Yeah, just a giant like little deer stew. Because they also kill their little deer in addition to riding them. Oh, that would be cute. They ride them into the soup pot and they're like, here you go. They're just ladling.

Hello, humans! I'm a very small monkey, a very fuzzy pink face. Would you like some soup? Please don't kill us all like you definitely would. Yeah Yeah, I'm into the soup. It'd be monkey. No, no Why would you do that humans would humans would but I wouldn't I wouldn't like now knowing what I know But like if I was the first person to ever see them I'd be like this is dangerous. You guys know too much Yeah, I think also like yeah, I think they could dehydrate themselves No too much. Get in the soup. Get in the soup.

Yeah, I think also like, yeah, I think they could dehydrate themselves. I think they could, like heat can mess with your ability to procreate, like can mess with your like sperm count and stuff. So like maybe that too. Yeah. Okay. I'm in on hot springs. I'm sorry, Sam.

Ooh, this is why I lose. Why are you apologizing to me? Because I think we're right. You're gonna lose all your Hank bucks. No, this is why I lose the game every time, but I'm gonna go with the pet deer. No! Alright, good for the pet deer. Okay, I'll read the answers one more time. Number one, they season their food with herbs they scavenge.

This is snow monkeys I'm talking about. Number two, they keep pet deer and ride them around. Number three, there is no evidence that taking hot spring baths is helpful to them and may in fact be detrimental. And the right answer is they keep pet deer. No, I don't keep pet deer. They do. Oh my God.

Look it up. They ride them? Yeah, and they do something even worse to them that I'll tell you about. Oh, no. No. Can you talk about it on the podcast? Yeah.

Is it legal? They keep these herds of deer. No. Can you talk about it on the podcast? Yeah. Is it legal? They keep these herds of deer. They stand on their backs and pick fruit. The deer let them ride them around. They're not scared of them. They share their food with them. And also, they hump them.

For sexual gratification, male and females have been observed rubbing on their backs in a sexual manner. Oh my god! How? How did you not know this? I don't know. I'm ashamed. Yes. Like this seems like the top of the list

of things I would know. Not should, but would. But would, yeah. Like of all the random facts that I know about so many different animals, this would be one of them. Especially it's like a weird animal sex fact. Yeah, with the hump.

Right? Oh my god. They don't let other monkeys hump their own deer either. Wait, like they don't like want like they're monogamous? They have a bunch of- Or other species of monkeys. I think the monkeys that have the deer have a number of deer and they don't let other monkeys-

Like other groups of monkeys? They've been observed chasing monkeys, trying to hump their deer off. So they're like deer ranchers? Yeah, basically. I don't know if they eat, I don't think they eat them. I think they just ride around. Yeah, they don't eat them.

They don't put them in the soup. No, they do not put them in their stew. There's probably are different ones than the ones that live in the hot springs also. I'm not 100% clear on that. Yeah, I don't know. They're just the same species. In all these pictures, the deer's face is just like...

Meh. Yeah. So, I imagine this is what it's like for horses when a human climbed on one for the first time and they were just like, what is happening? These deer have a monkey climbing on top of them and they're like, excuse me? Yeah, they don't try to get them off, but the monkeys don't... I don't think they can control where the deer go or anything like that so the other two are based on real things, okay? I'm sorry that it's not that snow and ice related I just got really excited when I saw that they were riding the deer around. I can't believe Stefan got it

I can't believe I trusted you you were like I would have known about I was like yeah I would have known about it too. This should be in the anime. Yeah, there should be anime just about this So they season their food with herbs they scavenge no they season their food in the anime. Yeah. There should be anime just about this. So they season their food with herbs, they scavenge? No, they season their food in the ocean. Some of them have been observed throwing sweet potatoes into the ocean. To make it salty? They think to make it salty.

They're not 100% positive, but some will just brush it off and some will chuck it into the ocean and wait for it to come back. I think it's because. That can also be the. The ocean is their soup pot. Yeah, the ocean's a big old soup pot.

Yeah, and the evidence of it not being helpful to take a hot spring bath, they don't know for sure yet if it actually helps them keep warmer because there's maybe other complicating factors. Like being in a hot tub as a human doesn't necessarily help you not get hypothermia. But they studied the poop of a bunch of the macaques that live in hot springs,

and they found that the ones that spent the most time in the hot springs had the least amount of stress hormones in their poop. So they are probably less stressed out from being cold all the time. That's a lesson we all could learn. Yeah, they're really chill monkeys. Man, I want to be a chill monkey. Me too. I think everybody sees those monkeys and thinks that would be great

Yeah, just sit in a hot spring in a beautiful mountain all the time and then ride your deer around Eat some ocean soup Well, I'm rich now again That's pretty good I don't have anything You haven't had that oh, yeah, you have had the opportunity and you blew it. Yeah, I blew it, I was too confident. Speaking of being rich,

now it's time to hear a word from our sponsors. Oh, nice. Nice. Nice. ["Skyfall"] So here's where we're at halfway through the show. I got one Hank Buck from my poem. That's just a freebie that I got given. Sam, how many you got?

I got two points. Yeah, you do. One for, because Sari and I messed up. Stefan, how are you doing? I got one for being a genius. Sari, how about you? I have none, because I'm clearly not one. You guys are so smart, you are stupid.

It definitely happens. And now, it's time for the Fact Off, where two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact that they like the most. So, Sari and Stefan are gonna hit us with some science facts and we're gonna decide, Sam and I are gonna decide which science fact we like the most. All right, I'm very curious to hear what ice snow facts you got for us today. The person who is going to go first is the person who prefers the lowest room temperature. How do you like it, Sarah? What's your favorite temp?

I don't know. Right now my office is set to 64. That's very cold. Sounds like a dream. Ours is like 80. Well, how do you like it, Stephanie? 74. 74? That's really hot.

That's so hot. Oh my god. Oh my god. Stefan wears a coat all day every day. He likes to be toasty. Yeah, true. He likes to be toasty. I'm used to those California winters.

I'm used to Washington, just in general. 60s and cloudy. Yeah. Oh yeah, I love a crisp fall day. We had a lot of great crisp fall days last fall. It was a great fall in Missoula. Yeah, it was. I feel like the global warming thing might be real good for us. It's going to be great for a couple years.

It'll be really bad. All right, Sari, you got to tell us your fact. Uninterrupted time begins now. So during the middle of the Cold War in the 1960s, the United States military initiated a top secret program called Project Iceworm. They wanted to build thousands of miles of tunnels under the Northwest Greenland ice, and they wanted to put 600 nuclear missiles

that could be launched at the Soviet Union if nuclear war happened in those thousands of miles of tunnels. But the public facing cover story for this project was the military outpost called Camp Century, which they did run by the Greenland government. And they tested a bunch of experimental stuff there, like building trenches under the ice using new construction techniques or using a portable nuclear reactor for power.

And it was also a place for some really innovative science, because in the 1950s, geologists were just starting to hypothesize that we could study ice cores to understand the past climate. So between 1963 and 1966, the very first ice core sample that drilled all the way down to understand the past climate. So between 1963 and 1966, the very first ice core sample that drilled all the way down to bedrock was collected. It was 1,390 meters long and studied in Copenhagen. And it was the first real evidence

that analyzing chemical isotopes in ice cores could be used to reconstruct the changing climate from tens of thousands of years ago. Oh, huh. So something good came out of our idea that hey, let's turn the ice into giant, just a giant missile launcher. Yeah. Yep.

Let's turn the whole country into a giant missile launcher. And not tell them about it? And not tell them about it. Like that was, I don't know how this plan was supposed to go, but like 3,000, 2,500 miles of tunnels with 600 missiles in there. Don't know how they were gonna sneak those in. Oh, you know, in a boat? Yeah, I guess so.

It was all in a long time. You got a military base, Greenland isn't counting all the stuff that's coming into your military base. We're allies and we're just like, hey, don't check the ice. Why would you check the ice? There's nothing down here.

It's boring down here. But yeah, instead they sent like 200 scientist type people there to be like, can you be a military outpost? And do you want to do some science there? So did they put the missiles down there? No, when they did the ice core analysis, so it took them a really long time because these ice cores were huge,

they found that the glacier was shifting. I couldn't figure out why exactly, but probably just because they're trying to drill straight down. Yeah, glaciers shift. Yeah. Yeah. And they were shifting in a way that the base was probably going to collapse.

And so the geologists were like, we shouldn't be underground right now. Let's evacuate this and leave it. Yeah, I've also got a great plan. Let's not put a bunch of nuclear missiles inside of this shifting ice sheet Mm-hmm. It's still a problem though because they had a nuclear reactor to generate power And so they had waste that they just left down there. Oh, and so now there's new research

That's saying because we left a bunch of garbage underneath Greenland it's going to like the snow melt is going to happen and by 2090. It's gonna be like a toxic site Oh, cool great. Yeah of what we did in the past. Hey 2090's passed forever away. We're gonna have a lot bigger problems by then. Okay so serious fact is that, summarize for us. That the first big ice core samples were taken because of a weird strange military project in the Cold War. Can I ask one more question? Yeah. So were they digging and then they pulled out an ice core and they were like, huh, I know what we can do with this.

Or was there already an idea that they could do it and they just tried it while they were also digging these ice tunnels? In the 50s, they first had the idea, like what if we looked at the chemicals in ice to figure out how the climate changed? And I don't know when they figured out specifically to look at oxygen isotopes.

That was probably somewhere in that decade. But this was the first time that scientists were able to send a team to a place that was cold enough and where they could put a big drilling machine for long enough. And it was the first time they got this core was, yeah, like 5,000 feet long almost. So they went really, really deep and took it out. And so it was like the most comprehensive evidence that we had at that point to prove that this idea worked. So before this point,

everyone was like, Oh, could we look in ice maybe? Could we see things about the climate? But they pulled out this giant ice core and saw changes in oxygen levels throughout it and then mapped out what the climate would have looked like for the past, like for tens of thousands of years. We're like, this works. And now ice cores are used all across climate science. Thanks, Ice. All right, it's time for Stefan. Your uninterrupted time begins now. So in 400 B.C.E.

OK. In modern day Iran, Persian engineers had developed 60 foot tall mud brick domes that were connected to underground chambers that were five thousand cubic meters in size, which is a little bigger than like two Olympic sized swimming pools Mm-hmm and the base of the dome had walls that were two meters thick and the mortar was a nearly waterproof super insulating material that included ingredients such as egg whites and goat hair and this whole contraption involved aqueducts trenches and wind catchers and

Chilled treats came out of these buildings for the Royals chilled treats So basically these allowed them to store ice, even in the summer in the middle of the desert. Where did they get the ice? So sometimes they pulled the ice from nearby mountains in the winter and like brought it into these caverns, but they could actually form ice in these buildings. So they had a bunch of cooling mechanisms,

like the dome shape draws heat towards the top and there's vents up there. They even had like walls to like shade the thing so that it would be cooler. So the aqueducts would bring water in and then that would like sort of fill the trenches or like when ice in the building would melt that would also fill the trenches and that would freeze overnight because in the desert nights are actually pretty cold. And so it would freeze and they'd break the ice and then move it into like the storage chamber so so what kind of what kind of cool treats came out it's just like a Coca-Cola is it like a drink or do they make ice cream or what it's called there's like a traditional Arab treat I'm guessing it's a shaved ice so it was

basically just a thing for the rich people to get treats, to get cool treats. They did store food in there. Okay, that's good. Um, but it was also used to chill treats. For the rich people. I just like the idea of someone like, even back then, they could have been like, dude, why are you refrigerating your bread? You don't totally don't need to do that.

Your ketchup or your butter. Do you refrigerate ketchup? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a little bit. Your ketchup or your butter. Do you prefer to eat ketchup? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Why? Because I like it to be cold when I put my fries in it. Oh, I like it to be room temp.

There's so few things that I want to be room temperature. I feel like I want either hot or cold foods. But I also like food that's supposed to be hot, cold. Like pizza? Like pizza is like the quintessential example, but like for me, anything. Tacos, soup, like scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs?

No! What? So here's how I know, I'm going to spend a hank buck, you guys aren't going to appreciate this, but here's how I know that like different people are different. Because I will tell you a thing that I like and everybody, including everybody listening at home will be like, oh, I like it when I get a corndog and it's still cold in the middle. But it's hot on the outside. Oh, God. So you like salty, sweet, you like crunchy, chewy. Yes. And you like hot cold. It's like a hot fudge sundae, but a hot dog.

That sounds dangerous more than anything to me. Ah, it's fine. I put a lot of stuff in those hot dogs. So I hate that. So like, hey, we're all different people. And we have to, like I have to accept that like other people don't like that idea. But like doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. And I know there's nothing wrong with me.

All right. So I'm going to give my Hank Buck to, oh gosh, those are both very good. I'm going to go with Sari, because I feel like the long lasting science implications of this strange Greenland military experiment were extremely valuable. I'm going to go with Stefan,

because I like the human can-do attitude of the whole thing. Yeah, that's a pretty good human can-do attitude. It's like, yeah, the slaves are gonna build these really big high temples, just so that the rich people can have some hot shave ice. Somebody had to draw the schematics and stuff. I guess. It's not all, well, it's horrible.

I mean, it's amazing. Like, I don't know, how'd they figure out how to do that? It's amazing. Mostly it's that. I don't know if anybody figured out how to do anything. I was listening to something and they were talking about how highways and bridges and stuff were built before computers and it's like, no.

No, bad idea. I was looking at my shoes earlier and I was like, that looks like a lot of work. Yeah. But like somebody had to sculpt the bottom of them. Yeah, I was like, dude, like a lot of work. A huge amount of work went into this shoe. Even just fabric, right? Like everyone back in the day had to make leather.

You had to figure out how to do that or weaving. Or weaving, yeah, just like forever by hand. No looms even. And then when they had looms, that was also very hard. And you needed special people with small fingers, AKA children. Children, yeah, small boys. You small boys like let's change colors now okay i'm sure i won't get stuck in this giant machine it'll be fine all right

so it's time we gotta move on it's time for ask the science couch sam do you have ask the science couch question for us i do today's ask the science couch question for us? I do. Today's ask the science couch question comes from Jane Forbes. Jane asks, can you physically build structures out of ice, like buildings slash houses? Explain why it might not be possible. Oh, well you definitely can because that's what igloo is. Like an igloo, but can you make the ice palace

from that James Bond movie? Well there's ice hotels. There is an ice hotel too. That place is real, isn't it? Yeah. From the James Bond movie. Well, there's ice hotels. There is an ice hotel. That place is real, isn't it? Yeah. From the James Bond movie. I think that it's real. Yeah. I also know of people who've tried to build like boats out of ice slash wood slurry mixtures,

which turns out to be like a sort of a temporary thing. Piecrete. Piecrete. Oh yeah. That's what is like wood mixed with water frozen and it's stronger than just ice and like, but it has more like flex. So like it, you know, like ice, you hit it

and it just breaks, it doesn't bend at all. But this stuff has a little bit of flex before it breaks. It has lower thermal conductivity too, I think, right? Oh, that makes sense. That's why it doesn't melt as easily because it's not just a bunch of water molecules arranged. There's wood in there too, I think, right? That's why it doesn't melt as easily because it's not just a bunch of water molecules arranged. There's wood in there too, which can like be a heat sink maybe.

Insulator. Insulator. That's the word that I wanted. Yeah, that's basically what I wanted to talk about because pycrete is super weird. Oh, you want to talk about pycrete? I want to talk about pycrete because for some reason during war, we have weird ideas. Yeah. Yeah, it forces us to think like,

what can we do that the others won't do? Mm-hmm. Build a boat out of wooden dice! When is this? World War II. What? Very recently. Oh, I was thinking like Rome or something.

No. Um, Jeffrey Pike, I think he was British. Oh, is that why it's called Pike-reet? That's why it's called Pike-reet. Yeah. Ah. Yeah, English journalist, educationalist, and later an eventer. What the frick is an educationalist? I don't know.

That's not a thing. I think he was just a man who liked to think, and he was probably rich enough that he could just do that. Ah, so that's his job. Yeah. The dream. And so when they were out of steel, he was like, let's find a cheap substance to replace it. And he mixed water and sawdust at that point and let it freeze and made pycrete.

And then eventually the British military came up with a project Habakkuk, which is, I don't know if I'm saying it correctly, it's H-A-B-A-K-K-U-K, and wanted to create a whole aircraft carrier out of Pycrete and bring it into the water. Which is just amazing. They were like, if a whole spring's in it, we can just repair it by like, dumping more water on it and freezing it. It'll be fine. What keeps it cold? How would they freeze it? That was the problem. They never built it. Their plan was to make refrigeration units.

They were going to have basically just a bunch of air conditioners. I like the idea of bringing fans on board and just like, ah, keep it from melting. Did they build boats out of this? They think they built like a test version of a boat. Mythbusters has also built a boat, which I learned. And Mythbusters, they built it and I think they were able to boat around for a little bit, but then it sank eventually, because that's the problem, is keeping it cold.

So are people building ice buildings? Oh, you wanna know how big of a ice building a cube is? Before physics says no. I feel like pretty big, because I think ice is pretty structurally sound. Yeah. At least in the ice hotels.

And not super heavy. And not super heavy at all. I think stuff like stairs seem like it would be trickier unless you, everything would be very slippery. But there are ways to bind ice together. I don't know how sturdy it is. One article called it SNICE because it's snow ice. I think they just coat ice bricks in sort of like a snow slurry and then that sticks

them together because then when the less dense snow squishes the bricks together and you dump a little water on, then it just freezes into a bigger ice sheet. And so I assume that's structurally sturdy enough to create ice hotels or ice mazes or whatever novelty ice structure you wanna make. My biggest worry is floors and the reinforcements there. But that's why structural engineers exist and I'm not one of those. And I don't think about those problems. Well, also it doesn't just melt.

Like if it just gets hit by the sun, it could sublime. And then you've got like a giant. Oh yeah, it'll just always be going away a little bit. You don't want your building materials to vaporize generally. But that's probably another good thing gets hit by the sun, it could sublime, and then you've got like a giant. It'll just always be going away a little bit. You don't want your building materials to vaporize generally. But that's probably another good thing about, like, Pike Creek doesn't do that as much.

So wait, to summarize, can you physically build structures out of ice? Yes. Yes. Like buildings and houses? Yes. Why not? Explain why it might not be possible? There's no reason it's not possible. We could totally do that.

It'll just disappear into thin air eventually. It will eventually, yeah, it's not a long-term solution. There's gonna be a lot of upkeep on your home. Yes. Thanks, DraneForbes, for your question. And thank you, everybody, for sending in your questions. If you want to ask the Science Couch a question, you could tweet at us using the hashtag, Ask SciShow.

And you can also follow us on Twitter, at SciShow, where we will occasionally ask you for topic-specific questions for just this reason. But you can ask us any old question any old time too. Absolutely. So what do we got here at the end of SciShow Tangents? We got me with zero. We got Sari with zero. Oh no. We got Sam and Stefan tied at two. I made you tie me. I didn't mean to do that. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. First, you can do us a review wherever you listen.

That's super helpful and helps us know what you think about the show. Second, please tweet out your favorite moment from the episode so that we can be happy that you were happy about what we did. Thank you to at PSL Eyedrops and everybody else who tweeted us your questions. And finally, if you want to show your love for tangents and everybody else who tweeted us your questions. And finally, if you want to show your love for tangents, you could just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production between Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's produced by us and Caitlin Hofmeister. Our art and music are by Hiroka Matsushima and Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bonjorno. 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. [♪ Music Plays And Ends. But one more thing.

To survive icy ponds in winter when they can't get to the surface to breathe, some species of aquatic turtles hibernate by breathing through their butts. Do the turtles stick their butts above the surface then? No, they just lower their metabolisms really, really far down and they have a lot of vascularization through their cloacas. They have this whole chamber full of blood vessels. So they just-

They have a bany butt? Yeah. What do they suck in there? Water. They breathe the water? They breathe the water and then just like remove the oxygen from the water and then squeeze it back out.

They have butt gills? Yeah. Kinda. Kinda. Cool. It's called cloacal respiration, which is a great science. You should try it sometime. I don't have one of those.

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen as always, we're joined by Stefan Chin. Hello. What's your favorite, least favorite pizza topic? Least favorite? No, your favorite least favorite. It's the one that you love to hate the most.

That's right. Okay, so it's the one I love to hate, not the one that I least like. Yes. Anchovies I love to hate, but also olives. Oh, yeah. Aw. Olives are stupid little flavor packets of disgust. They have so much bad flavor.

Yeah. Steven, what's your tagline? Mired and tired. Sam Schultz is here too. Hello. How are, what's your tagline? Uh, mired and tired. Mmm. Sam Schultz is here too. Hello. How are you? I'm doing okay. What's your favorite fair food?

I like a chocolate chip cookie. Is that fair food? Oh, God. Deep fried? Like a chocolate chip cookie sandwich. Deep fried chocolate chip cookie, heck yes. I don't know, maybe I could try that. Yeah, I'm like, it sounds great.

Mm-hmm. What's your tagline? Uh, from ghosts and ghouls to logs of yuuls. Ooh. Oh, we've made the transition. Yeah, no more spooky music at the beginning. Thanksgiving can go right down the hole. Yeah, I don't care about that. Sari Riley is joining us too.

Yes. What's the best Pokemon? I like Arcanine. It's nice. It's like a fire dog. I would like to pet it. What's your tagline? Slip and slide in. And I'm Hank Green.

And my tagline is, incomparable shirt machine. And we are here on SciShow Tangents 2 every week, 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 from week to week. We do our best

to stay on topic, but if you go out on a tangent and we deem that tangent unworthy, like if it's about a lot of Twilight stuff, we will dock you a Hank buck. It's episode 52! We're a year old! Oh! That's how years work! Oh wow, we're a year old. Can you believe it? I can't believe it.

Okay. That means we have like 51 amazing episode of Sci show tangents. Why are we making any more? That's so much content. Well, we need to make at least one more Okay Alright. Well, let us know if you want us to keep making size show tangents at size show tangents on Twitter And now as always it's time to introduce the topic of the week with the science poem this week from Sari. It's really freaking cold, they said. My nose, my feet, my hands, my head. I yearn to be back in my bed, but instead they lit a fire in red. It's really freaking dark, he cries. I'm stumbling upstairs and squinting my eyes. This lack of candles will be my demise. He sighs, but the sun

begins to rise. We need a freaking boost, they thought, to move this hunk of metal a lot. But right now, air travel is awfully fraught. So then they gave combustion a shot. I'm really freaking tired, she wrote. My heart is sore, my days are rote. That fire inside us, that metaphorical moat, keeping us from burnout or giving off smoke, is doing its best to keep me afloat. Wow.

That was really good. That's exceptional. Well, our topic is fire. I think that this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. What is fire? Is it difficult? You're the chemist. I mean, so combustion and oxidation, but like the thing that is fire, the actual thing that you're looking at.

The flames? The flames. That's what I think of as fire. Because if it's just like a really hot coal and it's radiating a lot of infrared energy, that's not fire. Fire has to have the licking flames and the sparks going up and the smoke and all that. And that, like what the thing you're seeing is, at this point, we are not sure yet. You're talking about the flames? The flames.

Okay. We don't know what flames are. This is one thing that we know is a component of flames is the little pieces of soot that are hot. And then as they get higher, they cool off and then they just become smoke. And they like, so the glowing bit of the fire trails off. Yeah.

You need fuel, oxygen or some other oxidizing agent, and then like a source of heat or something usually to start the combustion reaction because we don't have spontaneous combustion. Usually, it can happen. People, there's this nice diagram on the internet that I'm sure if you Google it, it'll be like the fire tetrahedron.

And so it's like fuel, oxygen, heat, and the chain reaction is one of the thick facets of the tetrahedron. And if any one of those four things goes away, it will no longer be fire. So if you have no fuel, the fire burns out. If you have no heat, the fire won't start. If you have no oxygen, the oxidation process won't happen.

If the reaction just like runs out, if everything breaks down, then you don't have fire anymore. Right. So yeah, so that's why like fire extinguishers and things work. I don't know, anything for putting out fire, you're trying to remove one of those components, like remove the oxygen or separate it from the fuel or do whatever to put it out. And now that we're well and truly defined as far as we could possibly get, it's time for TREASURE FAIL! Where one of our panelists, this time it's me! I've prepared three science facts for everyone's education and enjoyment, but one of those

is real and the rest of them are lies, and you guys have to figure it out, and if you get it, then you get the Hank Buck, if you don't, then I do. So here are my three science facts. They're about a beetle, but a fire beetle. So when forests burn, usually all the animals run away from that, but there is a kind of beetle known as a fire chaser, also known as melanophylla beetles, and their larva feed on the wood of defenseless,

freshly burned trees. So to get their brood going, the wood of defenseless, freshly burned trees. So to get their brood going, the beetles actively seek out forest fires, mating nearby and laying their eggs in recently burned trees. The beetles are so keen to get to a fire that when a 750,000 barrel oil storage tank and Coalinga ignited in 1925, they showed up in huge numbers from 50 to 100 miles away, most likely using their infrared pit detecting organs. So they've got these like little infrared eyes under their arms that they can use to sniff out. But sometimes the Beatles' fire detecting skills are not so discerning. Which of

the following is a documented case of a melanophila swarm where the beetles were lead astray? Number one, in 1958, workers at the Miller Brewing Facility in Irwindale, California showed up to work one day to find the beetles gathered around their pipes, attracted to the heat radiating off of them. While the beetles were a nuisance and they didn't like it, it actually turned out that their presence alerted them to a dangerous overheating in their system, which ironically saved them from an actual fire. Number two, in the 1940s,

multiple football games at UC Berkeley attracted the attention of nearby Beatles who swarmed the stadium and began to bite fans. The Beatles were drawn by the smoky haze above the stadium, which was the product of approximately 20,000 cigarettes being consumed in the stadium. Or number three, in 1987, the Society of American Magicians held its annual convention in Las Vegas, as he will do, and there was a dedicated special demonstration of fire breathing where approximately a thousand performers

all lit up and breathed fire throughout the day, and the demonstration became decidedly less special when the fire chasers attacked. Oh my goodness. Well, right off the bat, I feel like maybe they wouldn't attack so the last two Maybe not They seem friendly yeah, but they're nice they they do bite them okay. You understand bugs. What do you think? Well, I do believe that a magicians conference would be in Las Vegas so that checks out But I don't know anything about beetles I bet there aren't even 1000 fire breathers I feel like yeah that seems it's a lot like Enough fire breathers to draw Beatles. Yeah seems sketchy 20,000 cigarettes what year was this it was it was in the 40s

checks out I Sort of think the beer one sounds the most plausible, which makes me think it's not true. The other ones would be like a really cool story that you'd want to make a torf out of. I don't buy the beer one just because I don't feel like anything would get that hot. Especially pipes maybe. But if it was like, if there was something wrong, that was like causing a fire hazard, and then the Beatles were like, hey, guys, you got a fire hazard over here.

Yeah. I'm going with the football game one. Oh, I'm a football game, right? OK, I also like the football game one. I'm going with it. OK. Oh, I'm going to go with magicians just because it sounds fun. Thank God, because it was the football game. Thank God because it was the football game

Yeah 20,000 second the thing that surprised me about this is that they have like it's really well Documented that they're good at detecting heat But this was just smoke. Yeah, so they're good at both not even the right kind of smoke. Yes Well, I mean, it's just burned They're giving the right kind of smoke. Yes, well, I mean, it's just burned leaves. That's gross. Yeah. So they go after smoke and they go after heat.

And their heat detecting abilities are off the charts. They're wild. When scientists first were like, okay, let's do the math and figure out how much heat they can detect, they were like, that's physically impossible. Like that their neurons would be able to fire at the level necessary for them

to actually receive a signal based on the amount of heat that they were detecting but it turned out that the background radiation plus the Actual signal was the only thing that would actually trigger the neuron if it was just the signal It wouldn't be enough to trigger the neuron but because there's like a regular background of infrared radiation It was triggering us. So that's really neat and weird That's sort of how I feel about dogs' noses.

Or just any animal that can smell really well. It's like, how can you detect that? That doesn't seem possible. Magic nose. Magic nose. Speaking of magic, I made that up. Um... Oh, dear. I really just like the idea of magician friends bonding together and getting attacked by beetles.

But they do attack and firefighters, so there was a Reddit thread where California firefighters talked about these beetles. They called them ninja beetles and they would sometimes grab them and then hold them up to their friend's arms so that they would bite them just to like play a little prank. And they suck apparently. They're really annoying and they hate them a lot. And then the other thing I totally made up too, and they have been found around tar pits

and cement kilns and even sugar syrup vats. So all those things have attracted these beetles. So there wasn't anything outlandish about it. Could have picked that one when there has been no yet known case of them alerting people to the possibility of a fire like problem, but I I predict it will happen sometime in the next 20 million years Cool. Anyway, it's time for us to take a break and then we'll be back with the fact off Hello everyone, welcome back. It's a tie ball game.

One to one to one to one. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So let's just keep it that way and end the episode. Bye everybody. Bye. No one move forward or backward. This one is seven minutes long Or we can get ready for the fact-off where two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to Blow our minds and we each have a Hank Buck to give to the fact that we like the most It's Sam versus Stefan and we're gonna decide who goes first with a trivia question.

At what temperature does paper burn in Celsius? Oh, balls. Oh, man. Okay, so. I... I... Ha ha ha ha ha! How do you decide who wins?

Is it just who closest? Who's closest? Okay. You go first or me go first? You go first. 270. 270? Oh, I was gonna say 270. Oh, really? No, I don't know. I have no idea. Okay, you go first or me go first you go first 270 270 No, I don't know I have no idea

312 233 so I guess Stefan goes first okay, so in Australia in 2018 a 60 year old man went in for emergency heart surgery And as they were cracking open his chest... He caught on fire! What? Hold your horses! So they noticed that his lung was kind of stuck to the sternum a little bit. He had COPD, which is lung disease, then part of that is that parts of his lung were overinflated. I guess that results in it sticking to the sternum somehow.

So they were being careful about this while they were like cracking him open, but they ended up puncturing the lung accidentally while getting to the heart. And on its own, this is not like the end of the world. They increase the amount of oxygen and anesthetic gases like going into his lungs to like sort of compensate. Love it. Good case study. I'm enjoying this.

And so in a lot of surgeries, they use what are called electro-caudery devices, and it uses a high-frequency electric current to generate heat. They use it for various things, like cutting tissues, stopping bleeding, all kinds of stuff. But, so, in this case, there was a spark, and it ignited, like, some of the dry material that was in the, like, open chest cavity, and, like, because of the extra oxygen,

like, a fire started in his open chest Which I shouldn't laugh but they Don't know how it ended they put it out immediately. They just poured a they just poured a bunch of water on Just baking soda, I don't know the extinguishing method, but they put it out turn off the Just baking soda. I don't know the extinguishing method, but they put it out... They'll just turn off the oxygen for a second. Well, buddy, you gotta breathe! Just like, boop, boop!

Ha ha ha! Take away the fuel. You've gotta disrupt the triangle. Yeah, you gotta disrupt the tetrahedron. The tetrahedron. It used to be a triangle, it looks like. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, the patient was fine in this case,

and they continued the surgery afterwards and finished that out. But there have been at least three cases of this specific kind of thing, where it's like a similar tool ignited some surgical material and the patient had lung disease and was getting extra oxygen. And so that's just kind of like nuts in general. But it turns out that surgical fire is kind of a thing

that happens more frequently than you might think. Oh, that's a great episode of SciShow Surgical Fire. I wanna start a new channel called Surgical Fire. Just, that's all we're talking about. Overall, it is very rare. A pre-2012 figure cites about 600 cases a year in the US. Okay. And that's out of like 40 million plus surgeries.

How the fuck are we having 40 million surgeries? There's only 300 million of us. Well I had 10 last year. You're getting the most of your health insurance. So that was pre 2012. But then in 2012 the healthcare facilities code adopted like new procedures and training protocols and stuff aimed at reducing that number. And so a more recent figure is that we're down to about 100 cases annually.

So it's been significantly reduced, but still, that's like a lot of cases. Not many people die from it, but some people are burned. And then you like finish up your open-heart surgery and they're like, you're like, so how'd it go, doc? And he's like, well, very rare thing called... Now, this is a technical term, surgical fire occurred. And so, no, let me explain exactly what that is. It's a fire in the surgery. You're lung caught on fire.

Cause there was dry stuff in it and too much oxygen. You wouldn't break it like that to a patient. No, not with your Muppet voice. Yelling at them. All right, Sam, you got a battle to fight here. That was pretty good. Oh, now you made me really nervous when you said that. Well, you're also in the lead,

so I'm not here to help you out. I don't care. So, a magnifying glass's ability to focus on direct light is well known to every boy or girl scout or scout, survivalist or bad little boy blasting ants with lasers. In fact, some of the earliest written evidence of magnifying glasses refers to their ability to generate heat instead of their magnification powers. Like Pliny the Elder had a lens he would carry around. Pliny? Pliny? Whatever.

He's dead. He had one he'd carry around. Pliny? Pliny? Whatever. He's dead. He had one he'd carry around. He cauterized wounds with it. Oh! Wait a second. Wow, yeah. It was surgical fires. Yeah.

Was he just looking for wounds? He's like, oh no, by the way, I've got money. He was an active folk. He was doing all kinds of things. People would be like, something's wrong with me. And then he'd have five different suggestions for you. Gotcha. Greek polymath Archimedes is even said to have made a weapon out of a giant magnifying glass

that he used to incinerate a fleet of Roman warships in 212 BC. But modern man has had trouble recreating that weapon. Yeah, because it's fake. At least they've had trouble recreating it on purpose. So 20 Finchurch Street in London is home to a big lumpy weird skyscraper known colloquially as the Walkie Talkie Building. I don't really know why. It's designed to look top heavy so all the exterior walls sort of bend out and balloon

so it's like big and lumpy on the top and skinny on the bottom. An unintended side effect to this weird design is that for two hours every day for about two to three weeks of the year, the sun shines directly on one of the concave sides. The wall is like mirror glass windows. So it focuses light onto the street below it. And on a particularly hot day in 2013, the beam reflected off the building was six times brighter than like the surrounding area, the regular sunlight. And a guy who had his bike parked there measured his bicycle seat,

and it had reached 224 degrees Fahrenheit. So almost hot enough to burn paper. A number of parked cars on the street also had the bodies melted and like the plastic inside of the cars melted, and they had to pay a bunch of people because of that. And store owners reported that their doormats would start smoldering sometimes if they left them out. So the beam is moving as the sun moves.

That's cool. Yeah, so the spot was kind of like a tourist destination that summer of 2013, and people would come and they would fry eggs and do all kinds of wacky stuff and take temperatures. But then within months of them figuring out how bad it was and paying a bunch of people because they melted their cars, they paid millions of pounds,

I don't know how much American money that is, to cover the windows with a non-reflective metal shade. And also this architect who designed this building had designed another building in Las Vegas that had the same exact problem, except this one would focus light into a pool deck and Some people said that it made their hair start smoking But to be fair to him he did seem like he would know he knew that that would happen

So he had designed ways to make it not happen, but they didn't build it into the building They learned after the fact yeah, he was was like, so I've built a giant death ray. Yeah. And you need to like, this is how I've designed, I'm aware that I built a death ray, but you have to do X and Y to fix it. And they were like, yeah, all we heard was death ray, money, money, money, money, no thanks. Can we still? No, it's all fixed now.

It's all like covered up and doesn't do it anymore. It doesn't do it anymore doesn't do it anymore It feels like it'd be a glorious. Just did it for that one summer in 2013. Yeah, Mr. Yeah, well, I'm glad so like I did I as you were saying this I was like there's no way they could have not known That this would be a thing. Yeah, like you you you don't you don't build a building like this and are like See what happens? Yeah, I read that they use the wrong kind of window because there's a cheaper window they use on purpose to lower costs, but yeah. All right, we have our facts.

One, we've got a 60 year old man who caught on fire during surgery with a surgical fire. And it turns out it's the thing that happens. People catch on fire during surgery and it's not good. Or we have a death laser building built in London by a man who also built a death laser building in Las Vegas. Where are we gonna do it on three? Are you ready, Sari? Yeah, this is so hard! Okay, we'll do it on three.

Three, two, one. Stefan! Oh, you bastards. Yeah. This actually had fire. If you had said the bike exploded some of the some of the small door mat smoldered I was just waiting for something in your story to be like the door mat was a fire mat Like the car I would suspect probably pretty quick. They were like we can't leave anything here that will actually catch They were like we can't leave anything here that will actually catch on fire. Yeah Yeah

And now it's time to ask the science couch We've got listener questions to ask to our couch of finally honed scientific minds. This one is from at Gabby lion How would fire spread in space in sci-fi movies? It looks as though explosions are the same as they are on earth But I've heard that flame itself would be spherical. So I would talk about explosions or fires, because those are two different things. We're talking about fires because the theme of the episode is fires.

Fire in space is a sphere for sure, because the reason that fire isn't a sphere on Earth is because heat, like hotter air moves upward, because hot air is less dense and the cold air is falling down around it. And that's a gravity thing. And in places where there is no Gravity then you don't have to do it

It's it there's no shape to fire another thing about fire in space is that it doesn't generate its own wind So on earth by with the convection of like throwing up the hot air The cold air has to come in to replace it because it it creates a low pressure area. And that wouldn't happen in space. Yeah, that's really interesting. Because that means that the fire would give it, like it would replenish itself less quickly. It would have less oxygen to fuel it. Yeah, oxygen is brought in in space by just diffusion,

which is really interesting, because it's still expanding, because hot air expands because the molecule yeah The molecules get farther apart. Mm-hmm but It's just like whatever Oxygen is around it like diffuses into this this fire orb. Mm-hmm heat also I don't know if diffusion is the right word, but is dissipating. I guess that, but that doesn't affect how the fire spreads.

No, I mean, the heat is moving and like, so like the energy, like the molecules are bumping into their molecules and that's increasing the energy of molecules farther and farther away. But that's not creating any sort of like, And I think that would be the, yeah, it wouldn't create a wind, but that would be the mechanism of the spread of the fire.

So when the fire, like, when the, like, hot molecules start to hit other things, that energy gets transferred and the fire still can spread. And fire is a huge problem in space, but not because, like, fire spreads any more effectively in space, just because there's nowhere to go. Like, there's no egress windows on the space station. Fire will spread more slowly in space just because there's nowhere to go. Like there's no egress windows on the space station. Fire will spread more slowly in space.

So there was a quote from some NASA scientist that said, if you ignite a piece of paper in microgravity, the fire will just creep along from one end to the other, which is what happens on earth, but like fairly quickly. But in space, it would just be like the slower reaction happening. Yeah, you need to blow on it. Yeah.

Maybe that'll just be it. You want to help it out, yeah. Which you don't in general. You want to help the fire out. I have more space fire facts. Yeah. This is the coolest thing that I've read today. NASA ran an experiment called the flame extinguishment experiment, or FLEX, to see what fire did in

microgravity and that's where the pictures of the dome fire and the sphere fire come from. The way that they do it, they have a special equipment rack in which they lit the fires. And they ignited a small drop of heptane or methanol as the fuel. And the most surprising thing that they found was the discovery of cool flames. Ooh, great. But when the droplets are still burning, so they're still like evaporating,

the fuel is being used up after you can't see the flame anymore. So it doesn't look like there's fire anymore. But you know that fire, like combustion is still happening. Now we're going full circle to the beginning. Is it fire if there are no flames? NASA says yes. Which is why I didn't want to jump in on that. Is it still burny and hurdy if you touch the... I think so. Ordinary fire, according to this NASA video, the temperature ranges from around

2,200 to 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit and like the main things being emitted from it are soot and carbon dioxide and water like we talked about but the cool flame and the heptane ball, it was around 400 to 1,000 Fahrenheit. And the main things being released were carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. Oh, weird. And there are cool flames that happen on Earth. So like we first discover them on Earth, but they flicker out almost immediately, or they're... Let me see. The discovery is attributed to... a dude called Sir Humphry Davy in 1812.

And so he found that he could generate flames that were so weak that they couldn't light anything. Hmm. And so then after that, people investigated cool flames, which are just barely, barely visible or invisible flame and much colder than a normal flame. And so before this discovery in space, people thought that cool flames almost always happened before igniting fires. But this is the first big instance where it's like, Oh, we can have cool flames almost always happened before igniting fires. But this is the first big instance where it's like,

oh, we can have cool flames after a bigger fire. Part of the process of like the last, the burning of the last fuel. Interesting. Yeah, so they're investigating why, because this was like this big mystery. The evaporation rates were basically the same to what was in a visible flame. I

think also when this happened, they were able to change some things about the pressure of the container it was in. And so after it became a cool flame, it reignited into a normal hot flame, which is concerning in space because they were worried that microgravity conditions might be conducive to re-ignition of fires that you think are out. And so that was basically like, yep, you should have that worry because this flame that you couldn't see anymore became a flame again. Ooh, secret flame.

Yeah, so yeah, combustion researchers, their minds were blown with these discoveries about space time. People who care about this were very excited. So yeah, combustion researchers, their minds were blown with these discoveries about space and time. People who care about this were very excited. Yeah, they were like, the fire is so weird. You know that thing that we study and we thought we knew? We don't. We don't, even more.

Thank God for space. Yeah. And they went and told their spouses and they were like, oh. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents. We will tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Thank you to Emily Janet Six and at Dana 101 and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode. Final scores. Everybody's tied at one except for Stefan with three. Cleaned up. Wow. We're with three. You're getting cleaned up. Wow. We're doing it.

We're doing it. Where am I now? There's a lot of clustering. Stefan at 66, Sari at 68, Sam at 69. So you're all very close to each other. I'm at 62. I'm fine. I have other things going for me.

Yeah, you have a child. You have a company you're on. We have finished our first season, I guess, our first year of SciShow Tangents. Stefan, it wasn't enough. You did not get yourself into second place, much less first. And so, Sari, I'm sorry, but we have a winner with one point ahead of you is Sam Schultz. Why do you say Sari, I'm sorry? Well, I would apologize to you if you were leaving.

Why can't you say, Sam, congratulations? Sam, congratulations! You are the winner of the first year of SciShow Tangents. Nobody ever even passed me. Yeah. Oh, right. Well, also, it's nice to have a winner, and we can all just celebrate Sam for a little while. Everyone tweet to Sam.

Say thank you, congratulations Sam. And then tweet to Sari and say I'm sorry. No, don't do that. Yeah, should they be called Sam Bucks now? Like is that your prize for the next year? Okay, they're Sam Bucks now. Now they're Sam Bucks. I think that's a really nice title.

That's a really great prize. Yeah, so like really fight for the buck title next year. Okay. Yeah. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. It also helps other people know that you like the show.

And we're going to be looking at iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And 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 Riley. I've been Stefan Schuh. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bonjorno. 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. In regions of the world where they don't want to use water flushing toilets for a variety of reasons, like if there's not municipal sewage systems or the infrastructure for that or remote rest areas or things like that. There are these things called incinerating toilets which are self-contained units of like a toilet where you put your poop in a bag. I do? And then it goes down onto maybe a little conveyor belt

or maybe just into a chamber. And there's a gas or electric or some sort of powered heating system that turns your poop into ash. And it's a way to reduce the volume of it because so much of poop is water. So that all evaporates off and sanitize it so you don't have like poop bacteria you just have like the small teaspoon tablespoon of ash.

Oh can you use it for something? No that's the one downside is that you can't use it for fertilizer or anything because you burn off all the nutrients too. What do they do with it? Just throw it away. Scatter to the wind. They take it to the beach and say, I remember him, he was a great poop.

I appreciated the work he did on this earth. And now he joins the... He will be part of the natural system once again. Here you go, fish. Here you go, fish. my poop ash. Ha ha ha. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. How's space?

Oh, you know, I haven't thought about space lately. I'm sure it's vast and empty and probably doing just fine. I don't think Sari cares about space, right? Well, I think Ceri cares about space. I'm pretty sure I've heard her say, I don't care about space. I probably have. Relative to other things,

like I am more excited about science on earth than science in space, like relatively speaking. So I don't pay attention, except for when space is doing something particularly exciting, like a Mars rover or something. Can I propose to you that if things are going bad on Earth, that's just sort of Earth, you know?

Like, it's messy here. But if things start going bad in space, it's all over. Like, if it's like, if you're like, what's the sun doing? Like the moment you're saying what's the sun doing, that's a bad day. That's kind of the end. If space begins to destabilize in any measurable way, like we're all about to evaporate.

That's the thing though about astronomers. And to be clear, I love astronomers, but whenever something weird happens in space, they're very vocal about it. Cause space is largely the same to me. Very, very the same. Very the same. And so when something weird happens, everyone's talking about it. So I'm sure that with my mild interest in space and my large, like what's the opposite of a fall? I follow astronomers talking about things.

So they will be yelling and I will be in the know if something happens in space without having to study it myself. And that feels like the perfect relationship to me. Isn't it just always like, here's another ball of gas that does this thing instead. Yeah, the thing, there is a kind of frustrating thing about astronomers

where they're like, we found a new type of star. And I'm like, that means nothing to me. More green by 2%. Yeah. And also we're joined by our resident every man, Sam Schultz. Sam, how is everything except science? Oh, it's not great. It's been better.

You guys gotta come help us. Okay, we'll get on it. I know we don't want you to, but you have to. Okay, that's a good point. That's very true. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. At the end of every episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. And now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this

week from me. These are rocks. My fingers hurt. I came here for some good soft dirt. No, clay is sticky. That won't work. I came here for some good soft dirt. Mud's too wet.

It's on my shirt. I came here for some good soft dirt. I's too wet. It's on my shirt. I came here for some good soft dirt. I need a pickaxe. This is chert. I came here for some good soft dirt. I wanna push my hands in it, squish and plant my plants in it, find happy, healthy ants in it,

and dirty up my pants in it. Black and loamy smells so sweet, so sweet like a well-cooked perfect beet. The thing we think of when we say earth, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt. I love that. That's like the new kids book of the year. All kids will be shouting dirt.

Make a mess in my pants with it? Is that what you said? No, dirty up my pants with it. That's pretty close to what I said. You know, it's like dirt. You dirty your pants with it. That's pretty close to what I said. You know, it's like dirt. You dirty your pants with it. I just love that I was like, oh, chert. What is chert? That's a rock.

It's a kind of rock. Pre-dirt. It's actually post-dirt. It's sedimentary. Excuse me. It could be dirt again, right? Eventually. Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right.

Cycles dirt. Yeah. Sari, legitimately, because I don't think I could answer this question. What the fuck is dirt? So to define dirt, I first need to define soil. Oh, no, they're not the same. They're similar, but from what I can tell, soil scientists prefer you call it soil

and then dirt is displaced soil. Oh, so soil is like, I'm here doing my soil thing and then you grab it and you put it in your hand and like, I'm dirt now. Yeah. Yep, exactly. Yeah, if you like, once you track soil into the house, that's like, oh man, that's dirt. But outside it's doing its soil thing.

So whenever there's like a bag of soil at the garden store, that's a lie. Yeah, that's dirt I think. Displaced. But what they have in common is that they are comprised of solids. So like a mixture of minerals and organic matter that's either in the middle of decomposing or decomposed into very small particles, liquids like water, but also other things and gases because there's also like little pockets in

the soil like of sometimes nitrate gas, but oxygen gas, other things that are in the atmosphere are also in the soil. And then also, like all the ecosystem that exists and there's like the soil ecosystem, which is, as Hank listed, ants and worms and microorganisms. Hank didn't list it, he only listed ants. He listed ants. I guess he listed ants. Yeah, it rhymed with pants. Okay, can a list be one?

No. Oh. Yeah, you can have a list of one. Sari, what is a list? Anyway, ants, fungi, plant, stuff, that's all in soil. And then as you start going down further, you're not in soil anymore. So like the top layer is mostly leaf litter and humus, not humus, but it's decomposed organic matter.

And then below that where you like germinate seeds is topsoil. So I would say those two layers of the sandwich still soil. And then below those are mostly like sand and silt. And it's like, starts getting rockier. And then the further down you go, the rockier it gets. And then you're out of soil territory completely. Dirt is complex is the main thing. Dirt is not just like, I'm just hanging out. And like you, dirt doesn't exist without life.

It is a byproduct of a living ecosystem. Yeah, and it's such a byproduct of a living ecosystem that it requires us humans or our domesticated animals to move it from outside to somewhere else for us to call it dirt. We have to get it under our fingernails and it's like, why are your fingernails so dirty? And no one has ever said, my fingernails are soily. I've soiled my fingernails. Yeah, I would say that. Soiled is weird because you do not need soil

to soil something. No, poop can do it. The job just fine. It's the main way that I hear about things being soiled. But there is poop in soil. And speaking of the two meanings of soil, they come from the same root, but they diverged around the 13th or 12th century, which I thought was interesting. So they both come from the root sed to sit or the Proto Indo-European sodio, which means sit. Oh, interesting.

Why is soil from sit? Cause you sit on the ground? I think it went to like a pigsty. So like soil is the defiled, like the poopy version. Came from like pigsty or tub, like to wallow. And then from there, it went to, to defile or to like splatter with mud or make dirty. And then as far as like soil, the, the earth material that you touch that's soft, it came from area or place or ground.

So like you can sit on the ground and it's like an area. And so I guess if you referred to soil as like a pigsty or soil as ground that you own or can like trot on, then those are the two. The two. That's, that's where it diverged. What about dirt? Oh, dirt, dirt. I don't know where dirt came from.

We just decided to start using it around 1300 to the 15th century. That's pretty late. So that's like 1400s. Yeah. So dirt came after soil. Okay. And it was after we were using the words earth and mud. Oh, yes.

I think. The thinking man word for dirt. And then we were like, dirt is anything gross. Like, poop was dirt. But now I think moving into modern times, dirt is more specifically synonymous with soil. And so now it is time to move on to the quiz portion of our show where we have more rhymes for our...

Is it rhyme time again? Well, it's a different kind of rhyme time. Oh, okay. We got two different versions of rhyme time. One where I just make you say words. And then one that's much more the wait, wait, don't tell me, hey, you have to come up with the last word of the rhyme. Yes, rhyme time has diverged, just like dirt and soil or whatever.

Evolution is taking place and now they are two completely different species. All right, it's rhyme time 2.0. Or is it called Guess That Rhyme? I don't know what it's called, so I will tell you a poem. It is four couplets, and you will have to tell me the last word of the poem, and it is what the poem is discussing. And now we will begin. The dirt and dry lands faces the constant threat that drought will leave it even more unwet, and over time with rain clouds inert, those dry lands may turn into desert. But lo, our hero enters on a quest, though we may know it as a pest. The mounds it builds keep moisture tight, for the savior of dry lands is the mighty...

Termite. Termite. That's correct. You probably don't want to find termites in your house or anywhere near your home because they will eat all of the wood that your house is made out of. But there are also termites that build their own mounds out of soil and saliva and dung.

And those mounds are remarkable structures on their own, but they also are a tremendous aid to the dry lands of Africa, South America, and Asia, where the mounds store nutrients and moisture and help water get into the soil. And scientists have found that drylands are better able to survive as drylands, meaning they don't turn into deserts with less rain when they have termite mounds. It's possible that other mound builders like ants and prairie dogs may also help their ecosystem in a similar way. Wow, but they don't really know how they're doing it?

Yeah, no, not really. Like the main thing is that they do. How exactly works? I don't know. Well, I didn't even try to guess. I was like, mole doesn't rhyme with any of those words. I was waiting for erosion and then I was like, oh no, pivot, pivot. All right, poem number two. Petrichor is the smell of dirt that's rained on, the product of bacteria living within our lawn. But though we know the source of the scent, we know less about the purpose for which it is meant.

But one recent result suggests a goal universal to attract animals that aid in bacterial dispersal, and so it's possible that this earthly petrichor is used to drive the spread of bacterial... Spore? Yeah! These are smart people ones. They are, yeah. This is ultimately, if you want to blame someone, this is all Deboki's doing. It's not me at all. I've been writing for Deboki for like two years now for Crash Course Organic Chemistry,

so we are on the same wavelength. I'm much more at Hank's speed. So you know Petrichor, it's that smell when there's lots of rain. And it's due to an organic compound called geosmin, which is made by microbes, particularly the bacteria streptomyces. And while some insects like fruit flies

are turned off by geosmin, potentially to avoid toxins, there are other animals that are drawn to it, like the springtail, which is an arthropod, but it is not an insect. And when studying the relationship between springtails and streptomyces, researchers found that the springtails were drawn to the smell of geosmin, possibly because it helped them find food. And in exchange, the streptomyces would use the springtails as a vehicle to attach their

spores to. Ah, pollinating. Yeah, streptomyces is like, hey, it's wet over here, there might be food. would use the springtails as a vehicle to attach their spores to. Oh, pollinating. Yeah, sheptonmises is like, hey, it's wet over here, there might be food. And the springtails are like, yes, excellent. And then the sheptonmises is like, ding, carrying my baby.

Yeah. Yeah. A little bus to school. Is that the thing that people like, that maybe people evolved to be able to smell it so good because it helps them find water back in? Yeah, yeah, I think we've talked about that on a previous episode,

that geosmin is weirdly one of the things we are best at smelling. In the whole world. Very pleasing scent. Yeah. All right, last poem. Come on back, Sam. To explore the boundaries of our next frontier,

we apply the lessons of our earthly sphere, like how microbes and fungi break down rock to release the nutrients for future plant stocks. But can they succeed in microgravity? Well, let's fly them up to see their activity. And so we've sent microbes into the void to see if they can mine very old- Asteroids?

No. That is correct. I'm sorry, I should have waited. It's okay. Yeah, it didn't seem like he was close. Oh, okay. Yeah, you're supposed to count, I think the rule officially of this game

is that Hank is supposed to count to three and we try to say it at the same time, but. Did you have it? No. Okay. Not at all. In the year 2020, the bio asteroid experiment was launched with SpaceX delivering bio reactors to the ISS that held pieces of a 4.5 billion year old chondrite asteroid.

Aboard the ISS, the asteroid pieces would be mixed with various combinations of the bacteria sphingingomonas desiccabilis and the fungus Penicillum simplicissimum, I think. These microbes have been tested on in other biomining experiments, and the goal of the experiment was to see whether they can help us extract material from asteroids in microgravity and maybe even break the rock down into soil. Shouldn't just start flinging bacteria out into the cosmos, should we? It definitely is the plot of bad science fiction stories.

Alright, well, Ceri Reilly has racked up some points, but who knows what will happen when we come back from our short break for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everyone. It's time for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought a science fact to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After you have presented your facts, I will judge them and award the Hank bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. A crater on Mars and the Dokuchev Award for Soil Science are both named for Vasily Dokuchev,

a Russian scientist credited with laying the groundwork for modern soil science. Among his contributions to the field is his system for describing the natural soil forming factors. How many factors are included in Dokuchev's factors for soil formation? So these are like the things that are necessary and a part of the formation of soil.

Sarah's counting on her fingers. She might have an idea. I'm just guessing. I mean, you're guessing with the counting though. So like, what is one of them? Poop. I love that. Soil comes from poop, yeah.

Imagine the conversation we just had and then just like think of how to categorize those. That's all I do is like I try to categorize. Okay, so like okay poop is different from organic matter decaying so that's two right there which is different from rocks breaking down. That's giving you these for free Sam. No, I'm already making my own list so I'm not even listening to your list. Okay. Well, so these factors, I'll give you hints here.

All of those are one of them. Oh, shit. So like your starting material is one of the factors. But then there are other things that are necessary for that starting material to become soil. I'm going to go first. Okay. I'm going to name all the ones I think it is. Water, wind, wildlife, the three W's of soil formation.

Okay. The history of the area, like what you just said, the starting point and the X factor. Five. Okay, Sam's going for five. I'll go with four. I also got water, wind, and then starting material, I guess. And then the Z factor for zappy sunlight or like whatever energy input into the system. Oh shit, I didn't think of that one.

Doesn't matter, Sam got it right. Exactly, correctly with five. They are the climate of the area, the relief, which means topography. So like the relief of the area, the organisms, so the life, the parent material, so whatever you started with that was there in the first place, and time.

None of you thought about time, but that is a very important factor. Time is the X factor. That's the X factor, time. Sarie, I'm gonna go first this time, I'm gonna be brave. Is that okay with you? Yeah, you've got the X factor, Sam. Time is on your side.

In 1797, a man named William Tuttle bought 300 acres of farmland in Southern Maine near Portland. This was 300 acres of good, honest dirt, and he turned that dirt into a thriving farm and ranch. So for the next few decades, William Tuttle and his family farmed the land, mainly growing potatoes, and they raised animals like sheep and cattle

that grazed on the land. But the Tuttle's were making a couple of classic farming errors, overgrazing and failure to rotate their crops. So when animals graze, they pull up plant roots, and plant roots help keep soil in place. As we just learned, if you don't have soil in place, it's just dirt.

So if you have too many animals grazing, they pull up the roots and the soil can wash away or blow away or just go away in general. And when crops are growing, they draw minerals from soil. So different crops need different minerals and deposit different minerals back into the dirt. And farmers have like very complicated systems of crop rotation, where they'll plant something in the dirt to put something back, and where they'll plant something in the dirt to put something back,

then they will put something else to grow something else. And if they don't rotate the crops, especially in the age before lots of chemical fertilizers and stuff like that, like William Tuttle is living in 1700s, then the soil will again blow away, wash away, whatever. So the Tuttles were doing both of these things. And one day they noticed something weird.

The soil was eroding, and in places where it was eroding, what was left behind was sand. And that's because the turtles had another problem besides overgrazing and mineral depleted soil. And that problem started tens of thousands of years ago when glaciers were slowly scraping across Maine, and they were so heavy that they're making huge divots all across like glaciers are want to do.

And when the glaciers cleared out, they left behind these huge holes and then sand, for some reason, tons and tons and tons of sand blew into and collected in Maine. So Southern Maine is like the most sandy part of Maine too. And there are sand deposits that get to be like 80 feet deep under the topsoil. Whoa. So back in the 1800s, not millions of years ago, the sandy patches under the soil at the Tuttle's farm started to widen but the Tuttle's kept trying to farm the land

until the sand claimed 40 acres and then they abandoned it in 1890, which was almost exactly 100 years after William Tuttle had first bought the land. So the farm sat abandoned for a long time, and dunes built up, and the buildings and farm equipment that they left behind sunk completely into the sand and just disappeared under the sand. And it kind of became like a local curiosity

until 1919, when it officially became a tourist trap, a guy named Henry Goldrup bought it for $300 and capitalizing on the fact that it was so sandy and that it was also usually 20 degrees hotter there than the actual temperature of whatever, whatever the actual temperature was, he named it the desert of Maine. And he bought like a live camel and he like

Got like all kinds of desert props and stuff So now a day is I suppose that camel is probably dead and there's just a fiberglass camel but you can still go there and take a tram tour of this ruined farm that is now a desert and visit like a museum and make sand art and camp and Still nothing really looks like it's growing there, except for these pine trees, which have figured out a way to grow by, I guess, finding a solid layer underneath all of that sand.

And they grow 50 feet trunks up through all the sand. And then just their little tippy tops are poking out the top of it. But they're really 50 feet tall and going in dirt under the sand. Oh, wow. That's cool. And that's the desert of Maine. You have to know that Maine is not a very deserty place for that to be impressive. But oh, yeah, Maine, this is like right on the right on the sea and everything. Yeah, it's a wet place, but there's just nothing in the not. There's just too much sand. There's nothing in the dirt. Yeah, it's still like, in the articles I was reading,

it takes pains to mention how wet it is in that particular area, and it can rain and rain all it wants to, but nothing's happening. I mean, that's gotta be so disappointing. Imagine being a farmer and being like, you know, I've got a farm. This is my farmland that I bought.

It's grown things just fine. And then you're like, oh, it's 80 feet of sand with like a one inch layer on top of it. There's plenty of other farming happening in the area. I think the turtles just did kind of a bad job of farming. Sari, what do you have for us? So as we've been talking about, dirt isn't just annoying dust,

it's microorganisms and insects and fungi and minerals and water and gases and plant roots. So that means there's a lot of variety of dirt, even just on Earth. And some of the most extreme dirt is the geothermal soil in Yellowstone National Park. Extreme dirt! Yeah. A little local science story. Where you do not want to be walking bare feet

or planting carrot seeds or dirtying your pants in it. Because temperature-wise, it gets up to 65 degrees Celsius or 149 degrees Fahrenheit, and mineral-wise there's a lot of silicon, and it's generally pretty basic in pH. That's more normal, but the temperature and the hot water and steam make it seem like a place where the soil ecosystem would be kind of barren because it's just too hot for anything to exist. Instead, though, it does what ecosystems do best and thrives thanks to symbiosis. So there's a species of panic grass called Dichanthellium lanugiosum. I did my best.

And it's named panic grass because it's in the panicum genus, coming from the Latin word panicum, meaning ear of millet, which is like a type of grain, not directly related to the Latin panicus, meaning terror, derived from the god pan and scary noises. So different panic, grain boring panic. And so this not terrified panic grass would normally have its roots shrivel at anything above 38 degrees Celsius or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But there's also a fungus called Curvularia protuberata, which tangles itself into plant roots and cell structures. And the fungus helps the plant absorb more nutrients and water, like extra roots, and the plant shares its food and resources with the fungus. And at first, scientists thought that was the end of the story. Together, this plant and fungus could live in harmony and survive hot temperatures and

drought and odd mineral combinations. But in 2007, they dug deeper and found out that there's actually a virus that infects the fungus that attaches to the plant. An RNA virus called curvularia thermal tolerance virus. And without the protein ending codes, the whole heat tolerant mutualism wouldn't happen and the plant and fungus would both shrivel. We don't know the exact mechanism.

When the fungus is infected, we think it could make compounds that help dissipate heat somehow or signal the plant to protect itself and therefore the fungus from stress. And that's cool on its own, like this three-way symbiosis, but it may also be important research as the climate warms because a fungus plus a virus conferring stress tolerance, and particularly

with higher temperatures, plants, may be important in future crop hybrids. So just in case we need a little doom and gloom on the end of that fact, cool that it exists but also may become agriculturally necessary. How does a three-way mutualism in an extreme soil evolve? I have no idea. That seems tricky. It just seems like a weird thing. Three crazy kids just made it work.

That's right. Just like us. Yeah. Which one are you two? I want to be the virus. That one's the little guy. I feel like Hank is the one? I wanna be the virus. That one's the little guy. I feel like Hank is the plant. I might be the plant.

Well, I don't know. It may be that you're the plant and I'm the fungus. Sarah's like stately and elegant and then you're just like, hey, I'm down here too. I'm a mushroom. I'm the panic grass. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense too. And now it is time for me to choose between Sam with his bad farming practices and odd geological events from ancient history, combining to create a desert in coastal Southern Maine, despite the fact that it is quite rainy and wet there, or Sari with a plant, a fungus, and a virus joining forces to be able to survive in the high temperature soil

of Yellowstone National Park. And it was a deep deficit to try and remove yourself from salmon. I think that you just didn't make it out. I'm going to put a toilet flushing sound in right now. It's me going down the crapper. It's time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for a couch of finely honed scientific minds.

It's from at shed Tyler and at Magnilla Quint Mel. Both ask, there's an expression, to rub or throw some dirt on it in reference to treating a small wound. Is that actually a practical method of wound dressing? First of all, I've never heard, rub some dirt on it. You haven't?

No. Oh, I've never heard it. I feel like it's like a, get hurt on the football field kind of thing. Yeah, I didn't play outside with enough people. No one would have yelled, rub some dirt in it to me. And forwardly say, smack it with a frog. You can treat wounds with frog skin. So that's probably better. Smack it with a frog. You can treat wounds with frog skin.

So that's true. That's better. Smack it with a frog. Don't actually, you don't know what's on that frog. No. Also probably don't rub some dirt in it. Now I know that people have used mud as a wound dressing, but I can't imagine that it's better

than anything that we currently have. We've said dirt has poop in it like 10 times in this up to this. Yeah, and one of the things you don't want in your body is poop, unless it's like where it's supposed to be. And even then you don't want it for very long. Yeah, you gotta get it out.

You evacuate that. It's true, it's true. I would like, once it's poop, I think let's get rid of it. On the offset, do not rub dirt in your wounds. Unsterilized soil can lead to infection, and even sterilized soil, if you killed all the stuff in it, why would you do that really? When there are better medical treatments out there.

Couldn't find anything as to where it comes from idiom-wise, but I assume that it's from using clay, which is not quite dirt. As a wound dressing, like Hink said. Clay differs from dirt because of, I think, the type of minerals that it includes. Besides, you can look at clay and be like, it's used for pottery, and it's stickier, and it's wet, and it's more solid. But chemically, that means that there's more silicon compounds, aluminum compounds, magnesium compounds, and water, but also there

could be potassium, sodium, and calcium. So a handful of different chemicals that basically make it like clumpier and like the moist clay that we're used to. And clay has been used as early as 5,000 years ago to heal wounds because you didn't really have much first aid technology, but like clay was something that was moldable, it was cool and could like stick onto a surface. And around 1600 BC, the Ebers Papyrus,

which is recognized as the world's oldest medical text, recommended using clay for ailments like tapeworm, hookworm, dysentery, diarrhea, wounds, and abscesses. And so I think for quite a while it was used as a topical treatment. I don't really know what you're supposed to do with diarrhea and clay. Plug up your butt. Yeah, I guess plug up your butt. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter

at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Charlately, or Char-latay-ly, I'm not sure, at Remarose and everybody else who tweeted us your question for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, here's a way you can do it. Go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron to get access to our newsletter and our bonus episodes we just recorded our bonus episode today for the for this month we talked about the future of science we got real yeah we did get real you know maybe we came out of it not feeling as better as we had anticipated.

Yeah, rough way to start your Tuesday morning. Sorry Sam. But I think it's all very, it was, yeah, it's all very important stuff and was a great chat to have with you guys. So thanks for having it with me and you can have that if you go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for the show, you can 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 Hofmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto, our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti, our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Menish, 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 lightened. But one more thing.

The Pink Fairy Armadillo is a cute pink little armadillo from Argentina whose shell is connected to its spinal column through a thin membrane and gets its pinkish hue from the blood vessels that are visible through the shell. connected to its spinal column through a thin membrane and gets its pinkish hue from the blood vessels that are visible through the shell. So since the shell is so thin, that means it's not really super strong armor and it probably isn't very helpful in terms of protection like maybe other armadillo shells are.

But it still does come in handy because they are a burrowing creature. And when the pink fairy armadillo burrows, it has a special butt plate that it uses to push back against the dirt that it has just dug up to compact the walls and build itself a little house with its butt. Wow.

I've never looked at a pink fairy armadillo's butt, but I am now and it's spectacular. It's big and flat for making a house. making a house. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science nod showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is our science expert, Ceri Riley. Hello.

And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. What's up? Everybody in the room knows that I got everyone together so that they could watch me write an email in a panic. Yeah. We get, it's like a private Hank's Channel live stream, productivity stream, except we've already done our work and we're just watching you do yours.

It was a little bit understood because the person I was emailing who desperately needed the email is Sam's partner, Rachel, who works at DFTBA. That's just the way you're justifying it to yourself though. That's yeah, because that way it was like at least one person aside from me is going to benefit from me sending this email. Though I'm sure as soon as this podcast ends, Rachel will be like, I cannot believe what Hank did to me today.

Yeah, probably. To create a bunch of extra work when I have been working so hard to not have extra work. Oh, it's my fault, but it's more past me's fault than current me's fault. Isn't it always though? Isn't it always? Yeah, I feel like past me is like the ultimate. He's got he's just like full of power moves. Yeah, where he's like, oh you didn't want to do that. Well, you have to because I didn't. Yeah. Where he's like, oh, you didn't want to do that? Well, you have to because I didn't. Past Me is also over ambitious, I think.

Thanks to Hylia Future Me. Future Me is just kind of regular, just kind of okay. But Past Me is like, oh, you got this. You can wake up early for the first time in your life and do all that homework. How was your past self, Sam? Awful. I have been trying to wake up early for like two years. How do you do it? Do you have any tips?

Oh me? I've got a, this will kill it. There's no way. If you do this one thing, you will absolutely wake up early every day. Oh no, I know what you're going to say. All you have to do is have a child. No. Yeah.

Shit. Okay. Yeah, no, it's the only thing that ever worked for me, but I get up every morning at seven o'clock and today I got up and my son was yelling help, which wasn't great. Help! Help! Help! And I ran into his room and I was like, it's kind of funny, but it's not. I was like, what's wrong? And he's like, my tummy hurts! And then he puked a bunch. Oh no. He needed actual help and it was very sad and he's like, my tummy hurts. And then he puked a punch. Oh no. He needed actual help. And it was very sad and he's been pathetic all day long. There it is.

That's the reason I didn't send the email until SciShow Tangents time. Cause I have a sick child. I'll blame him. All is forgiven. 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.

And I got some doozy's today. Our panelists are playing for Glory, but they're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week from Sam. Step right up and rest your peepers on a liquid that'll make you say jeepers. It may look plain and unassuming, but what if I told you it could get your plants a-bloomin'? And that's

not all. You ever had a thirst? I tell ya, friends, ain't that the worst. Your mouth's all dry, your spit is sticky, but this potion'll fix ya in a jiffy. It goes great in soups from chowder to bisque. You can drink it hot or have it brisk. Is that all it does? Why don't be a fool? Heck, you can use it to fill your pool. Too runny, you say? Well, here's a trick.

Put it somewhere cold, it gets hard as a brick. Or maybe gas is more your scene. Simply give it a boil and now you've got steam. Most amazing of all, and I'm not telling you, fibs, all living life needs this stuff to live. It's everywhere, from the sky to your cells, from the tip of your tongue to the bottom of wells. What's this miracle substance you all want to know?

The stuff that is made with two H and an O? Well pay attention and go with the flow. It's hydrating, condensating, precipitating, evaporating water." That one's going in the book. Oh my gosh. I like Carnival Barker Sam. Yeah. He's a real everyman kind of guy.

I can't talk loud enough to be a Carnival Barker, but I would love to be able to. Yeah. I need one of those megaphones, I guess. Uh-huh. Or just a filter. Tuna can do it. Okay, cool. Our word for the day, children, is water. Which is one of the very best liquids, also one of the only ones, if we're gonna look around

at standard temperature and pressure anyway. But maybe the best, I'm just gonna say it, it's the best liquid. Well, once you get past water, you're into like molten metals and stuff, right? Yeah, it's not very good. Like oil,'s the best liquid. Well, once you get past water, you're into like molten metals and stuff, right? That's not very good. Like oil, that's a liquid. Oil, alcohol, gasoline. There's not very many, but there are some.

But yeah, oils are great. Olive oil, great liquid. Not as good as water. Would give up olive oil before I gave up water. You'd have to, or you'd die. Sarri, what is water? I mean, Sam Spiel really covered it. He was the salesman for water.

Yeah. Well, the great thing about water is that it is clear what it is. There is a hard line there. That's why I love chemistry. Yeah. Water is the name for the liquid phase of H2O molecules. I think, like, technically, you can use it to apply to ice, which is solid water and steam, which is water vapor. So like water is a component of those names as well.

But usually if you say, give me some water, you don't want like a block of ice or you don't want some steam blasted in your face. You want the liquid stuff. Yeah, I guess you have found a fuzzy spot, which is that water technically can be any of those three phases, but usually when we say water, we are asking for the stuff that we can take

a bath in. Do those two things have a different chemical formula? No. They're all made of molecules of H2O. So one oxygen with two hydrogens sticking off of it. It's just how close those molecules are spaced together. Yeah, how they're interacting with each other. Yeah.

So like in a gas, they basically aren't, they don't have any bonds between them. In a solid, they have many very rigid bonds between them. And in a liquid, they have sort of like wibbly bonds between them. Okay. It's how close they're parting with each other, basically. Yeah, how many kisses they get. Molecules, all kisses. Yeah.

We can't say ice water, because that's a thing. That's water with ice in it. Water ice. That's what it's called. Water ice is just water molecules that never stop kissing. But they kiss in lots of different water molecules. They each kiss a bunch of each other. That's okay. At the same time, because they have more than one mouth.

Ew. That's less okay. They each have like three time, because they have more than one mouth. Ew. That's less okay. They each have like three mouths, so they can do some fun kissing. I think oxygen does have four bonding orbitals, but. Yeah, because it's the orbitals, it isn't just oxygen. Two orbitals and then the two hydrogens, yeah. So it's four, and two mouths are invisible.

Okay, well now it all makes sense to me. There's kind of an in-mouth and an out-mouth too. There's like, you can't have two of the same mouths kissing. And really the mouths are just kind of like the idea of a mouth distributed across the general region outside of the molecule. There's like a solid mouth. Yeah, it's also important to note that like any individual mouth exists in a probability field that could stretch as far as the entire universe, but it's just a very low probability once you get more than like a fraction of angstrom.

Okay. Doesn't that clear it up, Sam? Is quantum kisses stretched across all of reality? Yeah. That's not what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. So, Sarri, I imagine that the etymology of water goes back as long as human time. Yeah, it's water all the way down of as far as words go.

We've identified things as water or wet. And so I decided to bring some other words that are related to water that might be fun. Oh! Like whiskey, which is water of life from old Irish. Or vodka, which a lot of people know or have joked that in Russian vodka just means water, but it does mean little water. It's a diminutive of voda, which is water. Ah, okay. Vodka, my little water. Um, and then my surprising word, that's not alcohol related, is redundant, is related to water.

What? What? Which means, as opposed to like happening over and over again, like superfluous, so exceeding what is necessary, that meaning of redundant, comes from to overflow or pour over, which comes from undare and re, which is like again, so like a rise in waves again. And so it's just like, ah, the waves got too big again and they float over.

And that's like a very weird word to come from water. Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't hear it in there. No. God bless it. We need that wet stuff. And now that means that it's time for us to move on to the quiz portion of our show.

This week, we're gonna be playing To The Film. We need that wet stuff. And now that means that it's time for us to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're gonna be playing Truth or Fail. All right. So I have three facts for you. This is how truth or fail works, but only one of those facts is true. And this truth or fail is about water,

but a specific kind of water, because we were talking about water is H2O, but there's different kinds of H's. So I'm not talking about like vitamin water or alkali water or whatever special new health water there is. This is a water that is actually chemically different because instead of two hydrogens and one oxygen, it has two deuteriums and one oxygen. And deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. So chemically, it behaves very similar, just one proton and one electron, but deuterium also has a neutron, which a normal hydrogen doesn't have. So because of

that extra neutron, deuterium weighs roughly twice as much as normal hydrogen. So water made with deuterium is literally heavier, so it is called heavy water. Now, heavy water is useful in all kinds of physical applications, but biologically it's kind of dangerous. It acts a lot like water, so it is uptaken into our body just like water, but it's not exactly water, so it can just kind of mess with stuff. Which of these three ways can heavy water mess up a living organism? Are you ready? I think so. Fact number one. Heavy water makes you have to pee a lot.

Because deuterium forms stronger hydrogen bonds, your kidneys filter out more of it on every pass, so you need to drink more heavy water to stay hydrated. There's also some thought that having a literally heavier water in your bladder could make you feel like you have to pee more than you actually do. Makes sense. Or it might be fact number two. Bacteria grown in heavy water are able to survive just fine, but as all their normal hydrogen gets replaced with deuterium, something very strange happens. Their flagella stop working, which would be a death sentence, but then they begin to rotate

the other way, which has no effect on their survival. It's just really weird. Or fact number three could be the true fact. Scientists have given heavy water to a bunch of different organisms over the years, and one of the most consistent effects from hamsters to fruit flies to houseplants is that it slows their circadian cycle, lengthening their day. Heavy water appears to just slow all biochemical reactions, so the body's clock on heavy water just ticks a little more slowly. So, which is it? Is it fact number one, it makes you have to pee?

Fact number two, it makes bacteria's flagella go the opposite direction? Or fact number three, it makes your body clock tick more slowly. This is interesting. I've never thought about drinking. Like I've known about heavy water's existence, but I think this is how you can tell I'm like a science nerd and not a normal person. Cause I've never posed the question like,

oh, what if you just drink a bottle of heavy water? Yeah. There's some YouTube videos of people drinking heavy water, which is a bad idea. You can have a certain amount of it, but it does eventually have some clear negative consequences. Oh boy. Okay, have to pee, make the guy's propellers go backwards, or what was it, make your day shorter?

Make your day longer. Make your day longer. It makes your body think the day is longer than it actually is. That seems like something somebody would have tricked people into thinking was a health thing somehow. Right. Drink heavy water, you never have to sleep again. Productivity water. Also, you move.

Sarai, do you have any thoughts on this? Not really, because I don't know enough. So the circadian rhythm one feels truish because so much signaling, like chemical signaling is involved in circadian rhythm one feels true-ish because so much signaling, like chemical signaling, is involved in circadian rhythms and because water is basically, like its key role in your body is as a solvent. It like dissolves other things into it. It like lets your blood carry so many different things because your blood is watery and lets your things move around your cell because they're just like moving around in an aqueous

environment. And so it would make sense that the hormones that control your circadian rhythm would move differently if that solvent were different. And same goes for the flagella. I accept, I don't know how it would affect, like that feels like it would be very weird because it would affect motor control in some way. And I feel like as we, I can't think of a single thing that goes backwards in biology. Bacteria flagella are very weird. They spin. How does motor control work in something that teeny?

Wouldn't it just be like some kind of chemical exchanging in a... I mean, a bacteria flagella is basically a stick that sticks into a wheel and the wheel spins. Then the flagella spins around in the water, pushes you around. That seems quite plausible to me. The pee one feels like it wants us to choose it, so, which is making me very much not want to pick it. Why does he think that wants you to choose it?

Because it's heavy and it sits in your bladder heavier, it makes it to pee more. Yeah. That sounds too good to be true. It sounds also too obvious. It feels like a punch line. Like what happens if you drink puffy water? Oh, you pee more. And it's like, good job, five-year-old. You came up with a good joke.

Not that really, that good of a joke, but. I guess I'm gonna guess circadian rhythms, but not for any particular reason. It just feels more correct. I think I'm gonna go with the flagella one because it seems nice and clean. Nice and clean, just like how you feel after you drink a bunch of heavy water because it makes you pee so... No, actually.

That was gonna be so bad. Ha-ha-ha! I made that one up completely because it seemed like if there was heavier water in your bladder, you might have to pee more. So you were exactly right. Well done on your reasoning. So one of you is correct. And which one is it? It's Ceri.

Yes. That's so weird. Yeah, it is super weird. And it is it is a well understood effect that or is a well proven out effect. It's not super well understood. It just seems like all chemical processes happen more slowly because it isn't just the water. Like the water's deuterium gets incorporated into the rest of the chemistry of the organism.

So like that, those hydrogens start moving around and they end up inside of the, all of the different chemicals and those things just, it just goes slow. Everything gets gummed up and that seems to happen like universally in life. If you have deuterium, your body moves more slowly. This isn't the only problem. Like as the level of deuterium increases,

like you end up with all kinds of bad stuff. Basically your organs fail, but you're like at lower levels, this is one of the first effects and you can see it pretty clearly. And do people act like, do you actually move slower? I don't think that they have noticed that the movement of the organism is more slow, but like, maybe like it's, it's certainly possible that like muscles would fatigue more quickly as you're consuming something that does eventually

lead to organ failure. Sure. Seems like a thing that would happen. That makes sense. And then as far as the bacteria goes, I found something out that was fascinating, which is that like, unlike large organisms, bacteria can, you can stick them in 100% heavy water, and they'll just like work it out. They don't care. And like all of their hydrogens will eventually be replaced with deuteriums and they'll just be fine. What? Weird. Weird, huh, guys? Alright, we're headed into the break with Sari at one point and Sam with zero. After this, it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the Fact Off.

Our panelists have brought in science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them. And harshly, and award them Hank Bucks anyway I see fit. To decide who goes first, though, I have a trivia question. When tardigrades were first described by a German zoologist in 1773, he called them Kleiner Wasserbar, or in English, little water bear. And while they frequently live in water, different species of these little water bears have been

found in every type of habitat on Earth. How many different species of tardigrades have been described by science? Oh, this feels like a trick. Does it? One. Is there a one? Sam's gonna go with one. It's just the one guy.

I'm gonna go with 10. Well, Sari was always gonna win that one because she could have gone with two and still won. There are about 1300. Oh my gosh. Oh man, that's way more still one. There are about 1300. Oh my gosh. That's way more than one. And that means that Sarah gets to choose who goes first. So I will go first with my very sad guess of 10. So when humans have to put out a fire in many but not all situations, we generally put water

on it. It's what Pokemon teaches you. fire is weak to water, but the real life chemistry is pretty interesting too. To create a combustion reaction, fires need fuel, oxygen, and heat. So to stop this reaction, you need to deprive it of one or more of these things, and water is great at this. When you spray water on a fire, it cools down the system, the water droplets basically steal the heat and evaporate, lowering the temperature of the burning reaction, kind of like sweat evaporating off your skin. And water is pretty good at coating things. So it covers the fuel and prevents it from getting oxygen,

keeping the components apart so they can't react, kind of like throwing dirt on a fire to smother it. And water is nicer than dirt because it's easier to pump a liquid than to move around a solid like dirt. But with some virus, the problem is, water is only pretty good at coating things. That's because water molecules make really strong bonds with other water

molecules, so liquid water has a high surface tension. This is why it beads up into droplets, or water insects can skate on top of it. And so instead of spreading far and wide over the fuel to smother it, plain old water could still clump up into bigger droplets, especially on fuels that have a lot of air space in them like wood or hay or forest floor junk. So that's why firefighters may use what's called wet water instead of normal water. Wet water? Yeah. And wet water has chemicals mixed in called wetting agents, which interfere with the bonding

between the water molecules a bit and decrease the surface tension. water, has chemicals mixed in called wetting agents, which interfere with the bonding between the water molecules a bit and decrease the surface tension. This makes the water spread out more easily and seep in more deeply rather than forming big droplets. And a 2017 study found that some wet water formulas seeped into loose rotting wood up to 68 times faster than normal water. And it's not like we figured out the magical formula for the best or wettest water. So this is an active area of research

in putting out wildfires, figuring out how to get wet water that will put out fires on different kinds of vegetation the best. Wet water, Sam, you're up against wet water right now. This is great. Can I drink it? It sounds quenchy. It's delicious. It would quench your insides,

but my guess is the surfactants inside would be not good for your digestive system. Maybe give you a bit of diarrhea. Right, so these chemicals are probably not super different from just like soap. Yeah, I don't think so. I think they're fairly simple chemicals and like not a whole lot of them too.

It seems like the percentages that they put into water are it's like pretty diluted but it has a huge effect on how big the droplets are that form. Okay, well I won't be drinking it then. Yeah, you can look at wet water but don't drink wet water. So do you know like sort of some of the mechanism of how you prevent water from clumping to itself? So like surfactants in my sort of like vague chemistry understanding basically have sort of a polar end and a non-polar end and so like the polar end hangs out with the water

and then the other end is like, no you can't because I'm non-polar. So you don't, it doesn't allow the water to get to sort of like hang out with one end of the water. Sort to sort of like hang out with one end of the water. Sort of like gets in between. I think that is my understanding of how these wedding agents work as well. They like provide physical slash chemical barriers to prevent the water molecules

from getting close to each other and bonding so that they can't have that strong of an interaction. Yeah. There's less kissing. Yeah. They're like the chaperone at the water dance All right, Sam we got wet water, what do you got? All right All right

So submarines are renowned for their ability to be underwater and airplanes are of course the exact opposite of submarines Known for their ability to fly around in the air So with that in mind, let's say the airplane fell in love with the submarine and it wanted to stay in touch while one was in the air and the other was underwater. With our current technology, that love would be star-crossed big time because it's basically impossible to perform wireless

underwater to air communication. And underwater to land communication ain't that easy either if you're wireless. So a sub and a car would also be doomed. They would not be in love either. And that's because of the very different properties of air and water and the methods that we use to send info across those mediums. So radio waves don't make it very deep into water before fading away, I guess because water is so thick compared to air probably. And wireless

signals sent from underwater devices mostly just bounce off like the underside of the surface of the water and back down into the briny depths before they can escape. And obviously this is not ideal for things like military submarines that want to stay hidden because they have to come very close to the surface to talk to the above water world, but it can also be pretty annoying for researchers like you can transmit data acoustically from a research sub to a boat, but the boats got to be pretty close to the drone in order to receive the data and the rate of transfer isn't so hot. So that's bad. But also like if you have a drone

out in the ocean and you're in a building, you can't really talk to it or anything like that. So it just slows everything down. But a team at MIT is working on a way to finally bring plane and sub together. They created a system called Acoustic RF Communication, or TARF for short, that uses the air-water media mismatch to its advantage. So it all starts with what's pretty much is an underwater speaker attached to your drone or your submarine or your scuba diver or whatever

has the data collecting device. It translates the ones and zeros of data into pulses of sound and shoots those sounds toward the surface of the water. And when the pulse of sound hits the surface, it makes teeny tiny ripples that are just a few micrometers in height. So on the surface, you have a high frequency radar that's either attached to a plane or directed at the surface of the water from the land. And it can see these pulses and it's also sensitive enough to detect the minor differences in the height and angle made by different frequencies.

So like if this thing was shooting 100 hertz sounds for zeros and 200 hertz sounds for one, it can pick up like the couple micrometer difference between those two types of ripples and then translate that data back into ones and zeros. So it's just all happening right on the surface of the water. So right now this is mostly just useful in relatively calm waters with waves up to only 16 centimeters high.

So maybe not the best yet, but it's been tested in situations where there's like people swimming around in the way of it and like drones zipping around in the way of the pulses being shot out and it still worked fine. So it's semi-promising. So this technology could speed up the rate of data collection and underwater research, increase the range of underwater to above water communication, keep military submarines safe if you're into that kind of thing,

and it could help Love-Lorem planes and submarines finally connect with each other. both laugh So, I mean, I guess this is a really big problem, and it makes sense that people would be thinking hard about how to solve it. But that seems like a big ask. Yeah. Waves.

Like, there's gonna be, it's the ocean. Yeah, that's a problem. So I don't know what they're gonna do about that. Maybe make bigger ripples, I guess. But then maybe if your submarine's making big ripplesipples then the other army or whatever is gonna be like Hey, what the hell is that? I mean in general I think you just get quiet if the other army is the or Navy I guess in this situation So like sometimes you'll see submarines with live stream video, but I don't know how they do that

I definitely found a few instances of submarines live streaming, but not very many and I couldn't figure out how the heck they were doing it. Yeah, no, you're right There's that YouTube channel that's like all live stream. There must be a wire that just goes all the way to the surface Yes, that's like a science vessel. It's not like they're trying to hide right? So yeah, they can do stuff like that But I just didn't occur to me that you can just shoot wirelessly your data to the boat basically Yeah, it wouldn't have occurred to me that you can just shoot wirelessly your data to the boat basically. Yeah, it wouldn't have occurred to me either. Especially that barrier where like way that wireless communication works is that you're transmitting through a roughly homogenous medium and when that is like suddenly there's this barrier where it's just a complete difference

from one to the other. It's amazing that they could solve that problem at all. All right, so here's how I'm thinking about judging these. I've never said this out loud. Which one of these would I make a TikTok about? Oh my gosh, this is illegal. So I think that the one that I would be most likely to make into a TikTok is wet water. Because it's got fire,

which were a problem we're dealing with now. I get to say, did you know that water can be wetter than water and people be like, what the fuck? Is he, man, now, I get to say, did you know that water can be wetter than water? And people be like, what the fuck is he? Man, Hank, I guess I'll watch it. Hank's on his shit again. Hank's on his shit. Well, this is a fun new metric to think of my facts by,

just being a content machine for Hank Green Incorporated. I love it. Congratulations, Sari, on your win. And that means that it's time to ask the Science Couch where we've got some questions for our virtual couch I love it. Congratulations, Sari, on your win. And that means that it's time to ask the Science Couch, where we've got some questions for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. At CrystalR99 says,

why does water conduct electricity so well? Sari, I don't know if I'm gonna make a fool of myself out of myself right now, but does it? So pure water doesn't. Yeah, there's not a lot of, there's no ions, there's no shared electrons. The things that do a very good job of conducting electricity,

basically instead of having like electrons around the atoms, just sort of like share them in a soup, which is what metals do and that's why they're shiny and it's why they're good conductors of heat and electricity. But water, I don't see why it would conduct electricity well unless there's a bunch of ions in it. Yeah, so that's the tricky thing about this question. It's like, is it? Kind of. But like

we've been talking about water, like the water molecules, H2O are polar, so there's a positively charged end and a negatively charged end. But in liquid water form, those charges balance each other out, so they're basically neutral. And so that's in like distilled water or deionized water, which you can process in various ways, either condensing it from steam or pushing it through a semi-permeable membrane to remove all the impurities. This stuff takes a lot of effort to generate because water is such a good solvent. It's known as the universal solvent because it's so good at dissolving other things. So there's almost always stuff floating in water. If you run

it out of your bathtub or out of your sink or even out of your britter water filter, like there's stuff in there. Yeah, there's still gonna be stuff, ions in there, yeah. Enough to make it conduct electricity well. Yeah, well it wouldn't be like a good insulator. Like I wouldn't wanna be in it with a toaster, you know? Oh boy, yeah.

Yeah, that's why it's like, do not drop your hairdryer into the bathtub, for example, because that water is good enough at conducting because there's just so much other stuff in it, like the ions that we were talking about, minerals, just all kinds of stuff. Yeah, and let me go ahead and shout this out. Don't take a bath in deionized water and think,

I can put my hairdryer in it now, because Hank Green told me, no, there's still, your body will introduce ions, and even if it's perfectly deionized, I still don't trust it. It'll jump across the surface and get you. Electricity's dangerous. Electricity, very dangerous,

especially, like, I'm gonna be a little hand wavy around the electricity part, for reasons mentioned in past episodes, mostly that I'm not a physicist, but like any sort of moving of charged particles is what's creating the electric current. And so like ions moving in the water creates an electric current, or when lightning strikes a lake and there's electricity flowing, when there's charge flowing throughout it, then that's creating the electric current, which is very bad for your body

because so much of it is electrical, your muscles and your brain and like you depend on electric current and so many other living organisms do. Don't take a bath and drop a toaster and deionize water. Also take cover if you're in a lightning storm or whatever. So like all these asterisks, protect yourself. But depending on the amount of stuff in the water, it can actually be safer for you to be in like salty seawater than freshwater during a lightning storm, for example, because there are so many ions in the water and saltwater conducts electricity so well that the electric current sticks to the easiest path.

It is harder for it to go through the human body and so it'll go around you. But don't do it. That's the thing. It's like electricity will always go by the easiest path. And oftentimes human bodies are a fairly easy path for it to go through. But in a very ion rich solution, you might not be. That's interesting.

But in any case, don't be out on the water when it's lightning-ing. Immediately come in, even if it seems like it's far away. Public service announcement from the team at SciShow Tangents, mostly trying to not get sued. If you want to ask the Sci and Scout your question, you can announcement from the team at SciShow Tangents, mostly trying to not get sued. If you want to ask the Sci and Scout your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out the topics

for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Devon Parham, at Bike Commuter, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you liked this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes.

Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen, that's super helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show. And 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 Hofmeister and Sam Schultz,

who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia-Pieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki 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. [♪ Music playing. But one more thing. In the Mara River in East Africa, sometimes hundreds or thousands of fish die all at once.

And according to a 2018 research paper, these mass deaths are because of hippo poop. During the day, hippos hang out in rivers to stay cool and take care of all their waste dumping needs. This poop is an all-you-can-eat buffet for aerobic bacteria who use oxygen to help them digest. But when this oxygen-poor water flows downstream, like during heavy rains, it engulfs any fish and starves them of oxygen, so they can't breathe and die, basically drowning in poop water. Noooo.

There's no good ways to go, but... Yeah. Drowning of asphyxiation in poop water. Lowdown on my list. INTRO Hello and welcome to a normal and not spooky episode of SciShow Tangents. We're all a little sad when the Halloween season ends. It is 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. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz.

Hello, also. Sam, when does this episode of SciShow Tandems come out? November 2nd. So you cannot yet go to awesomesocks.club and sign up for a sock subscription that will eliminate the worry of needing to buy socks from your life while also donating all of the profits to charity instead of having your sock profit go to some stranger somewhere. You're so lucky that you're hearing about it now before it opens so that you can remember

that on November 5th you can go and sign up at awesomesocks.club. But we'll probably also talk about it next week. You can go to the ftba.com and find the new SciShow Tangent sticker though. Came out yesterday. Oh, all right. Well, I didn't even know. So many integrations. Get a sticker, put on your sock. Or you can get like 50 stickers and just cover your feet in them.

Make them into socks. They are socks now. Innovative. And shoes. If you get like 400, they're shoes now. I think you'd need way less than 400. I think you'd only need 100. Well, but look, Sam, I'm trying to upsell them. Oh, excuse me, I'm sorry. These stickers are flimsy. You gotta buy 400 to make them into shoes. That's right.

No, you can't tell people they're flimsy. They're high quality. They're high quality shoe stickers. What if you want to become a morph suit of Saisha Tangen stickers? How many do you need, Sam? A whole morph suit. 10,000. That sounds very sweaty. I know it sounds super comfortable, Hank, please. You'd be perfectly hairless after you were done as well.

I mean, all we need is one person to buy an entire morph suit of Seisho Tangent stickers. So basically we can spend a lot of money marketing to that one person, we just have to find them. is true our whale they are our whale the size show tangent sticker morph suit person So let us know if you are that human or cow Yeah, take like 200,000 to cover a cow 200,000 stickers now. We're wealthy now. We don't need anybody's money anymore We're quitting the business. We don't need to be There is a there is a need to be at the tangents anymore.

There is a space between SciShow Tangents being a good sustainable podcast and us making too much money and just being like, I don't care. I live in the Barbados. I don't care about science anymore. So buy just enough stickers, but not too many. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up ummies and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on a topic. Which is especially humorous after that intro. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play and at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner.

Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me. Our bodies sense so many things so that we can know what is up and down and nice and bad, and even fast and slow. We can smell the flowers, bitter and sour, and know when the cookie is sweet. But it's crucial to know when you're in the snow, where you can find some heat. And so evolution granted us this special superpower, so that we can know how good it feels to take a heated shower. But as for how it works, you'll have to ask again. And by again, I mean you'll have to ask

your time-traveling friend. Because we know molecularly how sight and smell and sound work, but as for heat and cold, we're still laying the groundwork. Our bodies contain mysteries, both elegant and not, and one of them is how we tell whether something's cold or hot. Our topic for the day is heat, and I went to the internet to be like, hey, how does thermoreception work? And the internet was like, ehh. Because all of science is like, ehh. It's wild. There's one thing that we know. There's like kinds of diseases where your cilia, like throughout your body, cilia are constructed poorly, which can

really negatively impact digestion and some other things, but it also decreases your sensitivity to heat. So people think that cilia must be involved somehow. What's cilia? They're like little like projections of cells that like are wiggly. Okay, okay, okay. They're often used by single celled organisms to like move around, but in your intestines, they're used to absorb nutrients, increase the surface area of the cell. Anyway, Sari, I know that this is not as easy as a question as it might sound like, but what is heat? Yeah, this is a tricky one.

So if you think about, temperature is like a physical quantity of something. So like you can, that expresses how hot or cold something is. So like an object can be hot, an object can be cold and it is a certain temperature and that's something you can measure. Heat, you don't say an object has seven heat. Heat is something, is a quantity of energy that is transferred to or from something else. So like heat can be transferred from lemonade to ice cubes in the lemonade.

Or heat can be transferred from... An oven to a turkey. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is heat the transfer itself? Or is heat the thing being transferred? It's the energy being transferred, I think. Okay.

Because you can describe that. The unit of heat is Joule. So you can say like- The singer from the 90s. She is hot, and so everyone was like, how many Joules do I have to look at at once? To boil a pot of water. To boil a pot of water, and then they were like, ah yes, that is one Joule.

Now Joule is the French guy. No, he's English, nevermind. Wow. James Prescott Joule is the French guy. No, he's English. Never mind. Wow. James Prescott Joule. His first two names sound less French. But yes, so the unit is named after him. And heat is mostly used when you're describing thermodynamic systems. So like, as things are getting hotter or getting colder, that's when like physicists and chemists

are interested in heat as a concept. And the history is very weird. I don't know if you know this, Hank, but we've been confused about heat, not only in the present day, but also in the past. And I love that the things that we made up to describe it. So one of the theories of heat was that there was a fire-like element called flostagon. Flogiston. Flogiston?

Oh, yeah, you're right. Flogiston. I'm glad you're here, so I didn't have egg on my face saying flostagon like a dummy. People were thinking that this element was in things that combusted or rusted or had fiery things related to it. And it was like held within the thing that could catch on fire and then was released when that fire happened. So it was like a hot element.

Makes sense. Yeah, seems reasonable to me. Yeah, so after to me. Yeah. So after Phlogiston, then they upgraded to the caloric theory, which thought that heat was a fluid called caloric that flows from hot to cold. So we were getting like the flow of things and how heat is transferred, but we couldn't figure out what it was. It was like a fluid, but also like a weightless gas that could seep in and out of pores and

could just go wherever it needed to be. But like that is how we conceptualize heat as like you have more of a thing than you are hot. And if you have less of a thing, then you not, like the fashion spreads, you know. But then we started learning more about thermodynamics and conceptualizing heat as a variable and in like kinetic terms of how molecules are moving. We had to have an understanding of molecules and atoms first, and then we could apply that concept to what we know about temperature and extrapolate from there.

I mean, it turns out to be a pretty confusing thing where it's like, okay, so it's an increased temperature is the molecules moving faster, which just doesn't seem right. It is such a clear sensation that I have physically when I touch something. But what's happening is like, my molecules are starting to move faster, and some system in my body is able to transmit that information Like take that knowledge of that information and transfer it to my brain as a sensation of heat and when my molecules slow down That is sensed as cold It just seems way too fundamental to be real. Mm-hmm

It's a lot to think about like when I taste something I'm tasting it, you know It's like the chicken molecules hit my tongue and then my brain is like chicken. But like, that's not what's happening with heat. It's like, it's not like chemical sensing. It's like feeling the molecules move around. Mm, I don't like it. Yeah, getting some of their wiggle into your body. Yeah, or they say they suck your wiggle out.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the two things that happen. Do they suck your wiggle out. Yeah. Yeah. This is this is the two things that happen. Do they suck your wiggle out? Okay Yeah, you stick your head in a refrigerator That's right you go outside in the winter in Montana my way to suck your wiggle out Give me back and then you and then you go get a hot cup of coffee and you put that wiggle back in Okay. Okay now I get it Sam's on board. Yeah, so replace caloric with wiggles and then you've got heat.

And all your stuff's just bumping around more. Now the word heat, it seems like we've probably been dealing with being warm for a while, so I'm going to go ahead and guess that that one's been with us since the Proto Indo-European route. Uh, yes, indeed. But there's actually two. I think everyone was confused about heat. So it seems like from my understanding, there's a Proto Indo-European root meaning to heat or warm,

like the verb, which is G-W-H-E-R. So that's the root for things like thermal or like brandy or a lot. I don't know. These letters change sounds a lot, I think. But there's a lot of things that derive from that route that mean like to heat or to be warm. But hot and heat, like with the huh sound, they came from the same source as Old English hat and heyda or something, meaning hot weather. So it's like the word for hot, we are not sure where it came from.

Okay. Because the caveman went, huh, and then from there, the rest was history. I think you've cracked it, Sam. And so it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing a game of This or That. Do you guys remember how This or That works? Uh-huh, it's either this one or that one. That's right. Yeah.

Is it hot or not? No, it is actually, it's hot or hotter is kind of the vibe of this one. So as Sarie just told us, heat and temperature are different things. Temperature is a measure of the energy of the molecules inside something. Heat is describing the flow of energy between things. Today we're going to play this or that heat edition. I'm going to present you with two things that have different temperatures, and it's up to you to figure out which one is hotter

than the other one. Oh, okay. It's pretty easy to figure out. So we have round number one, body temperature addition. Animal bodies, including our bodies, have different needs when it comes to regulating their body temperature. We might live in a hot environment or have a very active life or have feathers or fur that trap our body heat. And if our animal bodies exceed the temperature that we're like the animal sort of evolved to exist in, we can get really sick unless we find some ways to get rid of that heat. So which of the following is hotter, a flying pigeon or the hottest ever fever recorded and survived by a human? Whoa, gosh, I think animals are unreal hot and people can't. So I don't think it goes pigeon.

You think it's a hot pigeon? I think that's one hot pigeon. Oh my gosh. I was thinking the opposite. I just don't know how hot pigeons are. I've never touched one. So I'm going to say humans because I think we're hearty. And I know there was weird experiments with like intentionally causing fevers at some point. In 1980, a man named Willie Jones, he had a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's over 2000 wiggles after he was admitted to the hospital because of heatstroke. So he wasn't a fever from an illness, he was in a very hot place. So he had this heatstroke fever and he survived after being in the hospital for 24 days. And that is hotter than a flying pigeon, but not by as much as you might think. Scientists studying pigeon flight found that on a 34 mile per hour flight, which is very fast, pigeons exceeded an average body temperature of 111.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, that's hotter. That's up from its normal temperature of a hundred and seven point eight

So they're just burning that that glycogen is creating some heat which brings us to round number two So this is the geology round of this or that heat addition The earth is situated at a nice location in our solar system that makes life as we know it possible But life at the surface is much different from at the Earth's core. So which is hotter, lava as it erupts out of a volcano on the surface of Earth or the daytime surface temperature of Venus? No, no.

I don't have a concept for how hot either are, but I... I'm gonna guess Venus just because it's closer to the sun. The problem is, is I don't know enough about its atmosphere, like how much it is shielded from that solar radiation, but it seems hot and bad there. Yeah. It's really hot and bad there. I'm gonna say that.

I was leaning towards Venus too, cause like maybe its radiant temperature is more than the lava. Oh, it's radiant temperature. I don't know, it's something temperature, Hank. I don't know. It's something temperature Hank I don't know what any kind of temperatures are maybe it's atmospheric temperature Okay, so so you're going with Venus but you're going with Venus. Yeah So I'm gonna ask a follow-up question, which is what is Venus made out of rock?

Yeah rock is a good answer right and the rock on the surface of the Venus is solid. Is not lava. It is, yeah, it is solid. It's not melting. No. Hmm. This would have been good question to ask

before we gave our answers, Hank. You could have really helped out. Yeah. So Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, not just because it's closer to the sun, but also its dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. As we've heard, carbon dioxide good at trapping heat. So the surface of Venus reaches 880 degrees Fahrenheit, Mercury only 800 degrees Fahrenheit

during the day, and negative 290 at night. Meanwhile, the temperature of lava erupting out of the Hawaiian volcano Kilauea is around 2140 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the lava does cool down quickly after being exposed to air, going down by hundreds of degrees each second. So just at that moment when it hits there, it is very, very, very hot. We beefed it completely. Yeah, that was pretty embarrassing, but, you know. All right, let's see if you can make up for it with round three, which is we're zooming out

even further into the cosmic edition. Quasars are very bright objects in space. They're thought to be early stage galaxies and to be powered by supermassive black holes. And one of the first quasars to be discovered was 3C273, which was discovered by astronomer John Boston in the early 1960s. So which is hotter, the center of quasar 3C 273 or the hottest temperature ever made by

man? We can do some pretty fucked up stuff. So I imagine they would both be like some sort of like nuclear fission or fusion or something like that, right? Like hot elements doing something. That would be like the same as whatever's going on in whatever quasar. But more so perhaps. Or Hank will make fools of us again.

I'm gonna say human created is hotter. Yeah, I guess. So if it was human created, you could see the hot quasar and then be like, I can do one hotter and then make something slightly hotter. That's a very human thing to do. Yeah. I'm going to be made a fool of, but I'm going to guess the quasar because I don't understand space things. And I'm just like, oh, it's in space. It's hot. It's, it's extreme. All right. Well, here's a little story for you. In 2012, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron collided lead ions to create a quark-gluon

plasma — the mass of subatomic particles that might have existed before the Big Bang — which resulted in a temperature of around 9.9 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. Which is very hot. But it is not as hot as the core of a quasar. No! Yes it is! It's hotter! It's hotter. In 2016, scientists studying that quasar with a Russian satellite found that the core of the

quasar measured around 18 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, which is not just hotter than CERN, it's hotter than what theoretical predictions had said was possible for a quasar, which is about 179 billion degrees Fahrenheit. So very very different from that. That discrepancy points to mysteries in how quasars emit light and how the molecules inside of it are interacting that we have not yet solved. That's hot! Trillions of degrees! Yeah, my head can't even wrap around how hot it is. No. All right, well, congratulations to Sari for coming out with two points to Sam's none.

Next, we're gonna take a short break, and then it will be time for the fact-off. Hello and welcome back, everybody. It's time for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. Sam is currently two points behind, so he will have to have his fact be twice as good as Ceri's for a win to be in his future, which look buddy, it's possible. You could do it. And I judge these based on which one I want to turn into a TikTok. And then I turn it into a TikTok. Which do very well. So good job bringing me good science facts.

I think it makes people listen to our show too. I think it's made people sign up for the show. I love this. I'm glad that they're here for this mess of goofiness. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. Millions of people experience hot flashes, and contrary to what the name might suggest, the symptoms aren't just feeling hot. During a hot flash, many people's metabolic rate increases, with associated heart rate

increases by about 7 to 15 beats per minute. But that's not to say you don't also get hot. So based on readings from a finger monitor, what is the average body temperature increase during a hot flash? Well, it's not more than like 10 degrees. It can't be. Yeah, I mean that dude did die almost at 115. Well, it's not more than like 10 degrees. It can't be.

Yeah, I mean, that dude did die almost at 115. Like he did max out. So it's not going to take you above 115. I feel like you can also feel extremely hot and then take your temperature and be like, I am not, I am normal. So it's weird. Those moments where you're just like, I have my everything. And then you take your temperature. It's like 99.6 and you're just like, Oh, my everything. And then you take your temperature.

It's like 99.6 and you're like, I'm bad at it. I'm just a very whiny person. Yeah. My proteins. They're denaturing. I have such a good like I'm melting, but instead, like the Wicked Witch gets water poured on and she's like, My proteins! They're denaturing! I think that the answer to this question is.4.

That's a lot. I think the answer to this question is 3. That seems like a lot. The average finger temperature increased 2.7 degrees Celsius during a hot flash. Ceri's the winner! A zinga. All right, so Sari, that means you get to decide who goes first. And I'll go first. So like Hank was saying, mammals, like humans, expend quite a bit of energy to keep our bodies toasty warm. But other animals, like many reptiles, are ectothermic

and mostly rely on external factors for temperature control. And I have just kind of assumed that plants are also beholden to the whims of their environment. They can either just tolerate the cold or the heat or die off and regrow. And for the most part, this is true, but there are a handful of thermogenic plants, plants that can generate heat from within and raise their temperature far above the air that surrounds them. So for example, the skunk cabbage doesn't sound or look like much. It grows near the ground in wetlands across the North American continent and is kind of brownish, greenish, and stinky. I've seen some skunk cabbage in my time.

I haven't. I'm excited to see one now, though. I'm gonna go looking. Because in March, when the ground is often still frozen and covered in snow or ice, you might see a small melted spot surrounding one of these little guys. For about two weeks, a modified leaf pokes out of the ground, protecting a cluster of flower heads called the spadix. And even when air temperatures are below freezing, the spadix is around 15 to 35 degrees Celsius hotter than its surroundings. Almost like it's a tiny animal, the skunk cabbage generates this heat through cellular respiration, using up oxygen and sugars like starch in the process.

And cellular respiration, as anyone who's had to memorize it for a test knows, has a lot of different steps and proteins and genes involved. And for those nerds like me, it seems like thermogenic plants may use pathways that animals don't, but exact biochemical process is a botanical mystery. It likely involves classes of compounds

called alternative oxidases or plant uncoupling mitochondrial proteins or pumps, which is confusing because there are protein pumps too. But they don't use cytochrome C oxidase, which is that big one that you learn about at the end of the electron transport system in biochemistry. This is a little in the weeds, but I was like, that's very weird.

So I decided to include it in my fact. And biochemistry aside, it's strange that a plant would expend all this energy to bloom a little bit earlier instead of just waiting for the weather to change. So the other botanical mystery in play is why these hot plants exist. The main guess is that the warm, radiant heat helps circulate air around the flower head, like how hot and cold pockets of air in the atmosphere create wind, and this wafts stinky organic compounds through the air to attract pollinators.

Another guess is that what fly or beetle or spider wouldn't want to hunker down in a cozy stinky plant when it's cold outside. But besides the skunk cabbage, most thermogenic plants are in more tropical environments, so this might not be as likely. But either way, these weird warm plants exist, and now I want to touch one. Can I get enough together to warm me up? I'm just like wilderness survival time, and I've gotten out in a swamp in the cold. Can I just gather up a bunch of skunk cabbage and be like, warm my body?

My guess is no, because the heat would dissipate probably pretty quickly. They need to be rooted and metabolizing in order to produce that heat. But maybe if you like, if you planned ahead before you became a survivalist and like planted a grove of them, then you might have a little warm pocket. That's cool.

I had no idea about that. And there's lots of skunk cabbage in Montana. I've seen it around. I've never like approached any because it's swampy where they are. So I'm like, I'm gonna stay over here where my boots are not cabbage in Montana. I've seen it around. Um, I've never like approached any because it's swampy where they are. So I'm like, I'm going to stay over here where my boots are not covered in mud. But now I kind of want to go touch one. All right, Sam, what you got for me?

What do you think of when you think of ice? Do you think of cubes floating around in a refreshing summer beverage or maybe icicles hanging from a festively lit home on a cold Christmas morn? Above all, you think about ice, you think about cold. So what am I doing talking about ice in an episode about heat? Well, what if I told you that some ice could be quite hot indeed? Hot ice. So first of all, this fact off might be a bit of a team effort,

because it turns out that ice is weird as fuck, and I'll probably get something wrong. Second of all, ice becomes ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit when it's on Earth, right? So water becomes ice at 32 degrees. But as pressure increases, the freezing point of water changes. So under a little bit more pressure, the freezing point gets lower.

But once you start putting enough pressure on it, the freezing point increases. So on other planets with different conditions, you can get all types of wacky ice with all types of wacky freezing points. So one place in the universe with lots of water under super extreme pressure is the core of gas giants like Uranus and Neptune.

The water there could be under so much pressure in fact that scientists figure there must be some really weird hot ice down there. Ice that would, according to egghead math, have a solid lattice of oxygen atoms with hydrogen atoms sloshing around inside like a liquid. So they've called this hypothetical form of water super ionic ice and I suppose probably contented themselves to never seeing it because we do

not live in the core of Neptune. But in 2019, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, used six quote, giant lasers to create shock waves that compress liquid water to between one and four million times Earth's atmosphere and heated it to between three and five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. And the thing that they thought would happen, super ionic ice, happened. So super ionic ice formed for like literally a nanosecond and they took some X-ray measurements to prove it or something. That's what they do. And then another team in New York

did like the same thing at the same time and they both got the same results. So I guess that settles that. So they call the ice, ice 18 and it is thought in its natural environment that is probably black and four times heavier than our boring old earth ice. And since there are lots of big gassy

water-filled planets out there, it's also thought that it might even be one of the most common forms of water in the whole universe. Since on Earth it only exists for a nanosecond after being shot by six giant lasers, it's not really that useful to us for any practical reason. But knowing that it can exist, it gives us a better understanding of how planets work when they have watery cores. And it also seems to be super conductive. So it might help to explain some previously mysterious

magnetic fields that we've seen in the universe. And maybe there are aliens out there with 8,000 degree drinks that need to be cooled off. Sam, I gotta say, I don't care that much about how this helps us understand other planets. You just told me that there is black ice that is four times heavier than ice, but it's still water ice. It's got like a liquid soup of hydrogen inside of it and

is potentially superconducting. And that we made it on earth. And it's potentially the most common form of ice in the universe. I don't care about any practical use for this knowledge. I just care that that is a thing. What's this do for me? What's this do for me? What can I do with 8,000 degree ice? Yeah. That's fascinating.

Anyway, since that one shook me to my core, my core of Ice 18, I'm gonna call this one a tie. What? You can't just let me win. No, absolutely not. Ceri had two points coming into that. Does this mean you're going to make both of them into TikToks again? No, I think I'm going to make Sam's into a TikTok.

So then Sam wins. I think that's that's only fair. Yeah, but you won the other one. The points have to mean something, I guess. I humbly accept my basically defeat. It's now time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for our virtual couch of finally honed scientific minds. It's from at joshijostar who asks, why is my breath warm when I say ha, but it's cool when I say whew. It's a superpower that we all have, it's fun.

Uh-huh, I have a guess, as I usually do. When I go, ha, the air is coming out nice and slow and it's sort of in a nice big fat column of hot air. And when I go, I'm blowing, I'm blowing air and it's sucking a lot of air in from outside and move like it's creating this like vacuum basically it's being filled. But the reason it feels cool is because there's more molecules hitting your fingers where you're feeling it. And those are room temperature molecules, but you're getting hit by more molecules.

So there's more wiggles going into the air than staying in your fingers. That's pretty much it. Oh, wow. Science man Hank. All I have is a couple more fancy words to describe what you're saying. But yeah, it's basically, it's a matter of turbulent flow. So turbulence is something that exists not only in airplanes, but in any sort of fluid.

So like gas or a liquid that is flowing. And there is laminar flow, which is where the fluid moves in very smooth layers. And then there's turbulent flow, which is where it like swirls around. And that's like what's happening when you blow air out of your mouth. It's not moving perfectly. Like there's tons of different swirly bits of how your mouth is shaped and the air is being pushed out, but also just the air currents around in the room. And I don't want to just repeat what you said, but yeah, you're blowing out air

in a less directed way when you go, ha, uh, and it doesn't grab as much nearby air. And when you blow air in a more directed way, it like swoops up the room temperature air and feels cool, like a breeze. But if you like blow, if you go hoo, and you put your hand really close to your mouth, it still feels warm because it hasn't had time to like suck up that air. Or if you like blow through a tube, then it also doesn't have time or the space to get all turbulent with the other air to hit you. So it is in the way that any sort of temperature is kind of like an illusion of just there's more space, there's more molecules mixing up, which makes it feel different to you.

What a world. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter. It's at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Vanya Tweets, at T. at TR Anson, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can go to our Patreon at patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes, where we are even more goofy than we are here. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show.

And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. And buy stickers too. 10,000 minimum. 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 Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti, Emma Dowster, and Alex Billo. 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. [♪ INTRO & MUSIC PLAYING FADES out, then changes to a more dramatic theme song. But one more thing! F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f —heat has long been used as a tool to join things together, for example through welding. Specifically, butt welding is the term used to describe joining two pieces of metal by aligning their ends and then heating them up. But the heat can come in many different forms. Resistance butt welding passes a current through the metals, and the resulting resistance generates so much heat that it softens the metals to join them. There's also laser butt welding that indirectly heats ions by heating electrons with light. And there's ultrasonic butt welding that heats metals with high frequencies that make low amplitude vibrations. There's so many

ways to make a butt out of metal. Hmm, that's a stretch, huh? That ain't about butts. It's a bit... I mean, a little, but like, I did get to say ultrasonic butt welding. That's true. That seems like a butt fact to me. You can make it about your butt too. Ultrasonic butt welding sounds like a way to describe,

like when you sit on a plasticky chair and your butt really sticks to it, then it's like, oh, that's freaking ultrasonic butt what's going on down there. Especially when you have to stand back up. That's the ultrasonic part, because you can hear it.