SciShow Tangents - Electricity

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Danger! High voltage episode! This week, we're zapping your earholes with electrifying knowledge that's sure to illuminate you!Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Space tethers to generate electricity https://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.htmlhttps://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-75.htmlhttps://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3563?journalCode=jsrhttps://edisontechcenter.org/generators.htmlhttps://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3563?journalCode=jsrhttps://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://en.wikipedia.org/&httpsredir=1&article=2532&context=smallsatElectric fish with dramatic pausesttps://www.fishbase.se/summary/5208https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/electric-fish-pause/618993/https://www.pennlive.com/life/2021/05/new-research-shows-that-electric-fish-pause-before-sharing-something-meaningful.htmlhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/wuis-ef-051921.php[Ask the Science Couch]Static electricityhttps://www.utm.edu/staff/cerkal/electricity.htmhttps://www.livescience.com/51656-static-electricity.htmlhttps://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/hr/documents/public/hsu/information/electrical/staticelectricity.pdf[Butt One More Thing]Manure electricityhttps://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-sports-science-technology-business-3ad8a6b9b1cb4100a9db1b2e406ad14dhttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-equestrian-manure-energy/poo-power-horse-manure-from-world-cup-powers-helsinki-homes-idUSKBN1X70QX

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. I'm very much not an expert on this week's topic, so maybe you can change it to enthusiast this time. Are you even enthusiastic about this week's topic? No, I'm not. This topic has intimidated me all throughout all my school. Wow. We have a lot of the same feelings about science, you and I. It's oftentimes our unenthusiasms line up well. And we're also joined by our resident everyman, Sam Schultz.

Sam. Hi. You are more enthusiastic about this topic because you don't have to think about it. You just get to use it. Yeah. And it's everywhere. And I don't know how it works or where it comes from. It seems to just be around when I need

it, and that's great. Yeah, and I do. I desperately need it. I don't know how I would do anything. Everything I did today was influenced or mediated or made possible by this thing. Every week here on SciShow Tangents we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts.

Our panelists are playing for glory, but I will also be giving them Hank bucks as we play the episode. And then at the end, the one with the most Hank bucks will be crowned the winner. As always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, it's from Sam. I have to set this one up a little bit. My, for some reason, my Spotify has decided to play me randomly Allen Ginsberg poems all the time, and I cannot make it stop doing it. So I decided to embrace it and write a beat poem

for today's poem. It's a weird problem to have. It's a weird problem. I don't know why it's doing it to me. So imagine that you're in a smoky club. Okay. It's alive. It's alive. It's alive. Frankenstein

PhD gives his homemade man a jumpstart of sky science magic. The heart thuds. The brain begins to spark. I turn off my TV, brush my teeth at 30,000 beats per minute, close the light of my lamp, and then the same magic sparks a picture in my brain of mighty American

rivers bottled, denied, collected to run your suburban garbage disposal. Two double A's shoved in a Furby at a rude child's birthday party. Kame me unai. A lever thrown, a spotlight beaming down on a three-act play about the life of Nikola Tesla. When I was a boy, my hand grazed the bare wire of a broken bulb on a string of twinkle lights. Oh, Christmas tree. Oh, Christmas me. My muscles illuminated by mystery force. Tense like death?

Could be. I moved away. I looked in the empty socket at an invisible beast that desired to flow through my feet to sweet equilibrium. I got distracted looking at a picture of Allen Ginsberg, and I found this one, which I think either of you could play in a biopic. Wow, it is like a Hank and Sam. Like Sam and Hank had a little baby. Oh, no.

I'm saving this one. You can look out for that picture in the next newsletter if you want to see it with me and Hank had a baby. Exactly. Oh, no. the next newsletter if you want to see it with me and Hank had a baby exactly oh no oh man those nerd genes are strong half cool guy genes half nerd genes

okay Sari I'm sorry I have to ask you this question but it's part of the show what is electricity well I wish I could just leave it at Sam's poem because it was a little bit confusing, like electricity is to me. Yeah, no one knows. You can't make a poem about it.

Yeah. It's nothing. Well, it's nothing and everything. So scientifically, here's my best stab. Please do not come at me. It is a form of energy. Agreed. Good, good.

So a form of energy that results from charged particles, such as electrons or molecules or atoms in the form of ions that either exist statically, so a separation of charge, which leads to things like static electricity or lightning, or dynamically, which is like a current in a wire. It's like when electrons go someplace. Wait, do it as balls. Is it a bunch of balls that are waiting to go somewhere?

Is that what it is? So if you imagine a wire, this is the easiest to imagine balls. It's like a bunch of balls clinking into each other and then passing along. Yeah. And that is like an electric current. And so when you break a circuit, then the balls can't roll and push into each other anymore. And so you have no current. I feel like we had the word electricity before we knew what the heck it was.

I feel like we had the word electricity before we knew what the heck it was. And so it's basically like we've retroactively defined what it is. Yeah. And we first discovered what electricity is. So electricity, electric, comes from Latin electrum, which means amber and so we actually discovered electricity as static electricity because rubbing amber with like sheep's wool uh creates electrostatic phenomena so it like in the way that you can like electrostatically charge your hair and then a balloon will stick to it you can electrostatically charge a piece of amber and Because they didn't have balloons back then.

No. So all they did was have amber and sheep's wool. If they had had balloons, we wouldn't call it electricity. We'd call it like balloonicity. Yeah. Because they just called it like ambericity. Okay. Yeah, I also read that we knew about electric fish for way longer than we knew about electricity which i think is wild like ancient egyptians were grabbing electric fish

and getting zapped and being like whoa the hell was that that's not what i expected a fish to do at all the thing about it is like electricity from electric fish or from amber like attracting particles and this is where it gets like very wibbly in my mind, is specifically like movement of electrons. But when you talk about electricity within our body, it still is electricity because it's caused by the movement of charges, but it's caused by ions being pumped in and out. So the electrons are not hopping over the barriers to our cells.

Little channels are opening up and we're pumping in differently charged atoms. And that's what's creating the charge differential and sending the electrical signals down our neurons to power like our brain or our muscles or things like that. But it's still electricity? Or do we just call them both that? It's still electricity because it has to do with charge like charged particles and i think that's why the definition of electricity is so vague

because it it is like energy that is generated because of charged particles moving around no matter if they're like very tiny like electrons or slightly bigger like atoms still relatively tiny it's not very fair that it's all been set up like this very hard to visualize i think that's what i don't that's what i struggle with when it comes to electricity is a lot of biology which is what i'm fairly good at you can visualize just like on a smaller scale but then once you get into electricity you get into things that you can't quite visualize and metaphors don't quite work. Yeah.

The other problem is that like apparently electricity and magnetism are like the same thing. And I'm like, get on out of here. And there's like the right-handed rule. You like stick your thumb in a direction and you curl it around and that's where the magnetic field goes. Sam's just squeezing air over here. Yeah, right-hand rule. You have like your axes I forget one time I did an entire

physics test with my left hand because I write I hold a pencil with my right hand and I was like I'm stressed and so I did everything backwards and then I went to my TA being like I know where this mistake happened I'm a dummy

alright you guys that really cleared it up for me, by the way. Yeah. Thanks. All right, now that everybody really understands what electricity is with no problems or confusions at all, we're just through a couple of right-hand rules that Sam just said have no idea what the heck that means. We're going to go to our quiz round.

This one is called The Secret Ingredient. It's a new game. Oh, what the heck? In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered that you can induce an electric current in a wire by coiling it and then moving a magnet inside of that coil. And that Faraday disk has become the basis for many electromagnetic generators when coupled with things like turbines, and that can convert kinetic energy into electric energy, which we use to do all of the things that we do. But that is not the only way to generate electricity. Scientists and engineers have devised all sorts of ingenious methods to power our devices, though sometimes those ingenious methods rely on some ingredients that you might not expect.

So for today's game, I will be presenting you with a method that has been tried and tested for generating electricity, as well as three options for that secret ingredient. It is up to you to guess which is the correct secret ingredient. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. So semiconductors are useful because scientists have found different methods to manipulate their ability to conduct electricity, but not conduct it all the way. That's why they are semiconductors. One of the thinnest semiconductors is molybdenum disulfide, which is three atoms thick. So that's about as thin as you can get. Recently, scientists attached molybdenum disulfide to a flexible antenna to create a rectenna, a device that can convert alternating current electromagnetic waves into direct current electricity.

And this rectenna has the advantage of being cheap to make and bendy in its movement. But what was the source of the electromagnetic waves taken in by the antenna and converted to electricity? Is it A. Cos cosmic radiation hitting a satellite, B, commonly used Wi-Fi signals, or C, the inside of a microwave? What? I tried to think this through logically, and I truly, I can't do a process of elimination on any of these.

So the rectenna is hit by electromagnetic waves and turns those waves into electricity. What, just saying again for Sam, who looked very confused, what is the source of the radiation? Right. What was A again? Cosmic radiation. I'm going to guess that one

because you'd want something thin and bendy in space. Hell, I'm going to guess a microwave because that seems more useful to me than like, I don't know, controllable or something. Sure. Well, the good news is that you're both wrong. Oh, the answer is Wi-Fi. Oh, that's also controllable. So a bunch of these rectanas are things that we've been looking at to like there are like four waves that are around. If you can capture very small amounts of energy, maybe you can use it to do some like sensing of the environment or something. But traditional rectinists haven't been able to convert

at the frequencies that Wi-Fi signals use. And there are a lot of Wi-Fi signals around, so it might be useful to be able to do this. But the molybdenum disulfide material used for this device is flexible and fast at converting signals, making it capable of converting Wi-Fi into electricity. When the researchers tested the device with a typical Wi-Fi power, they were able to produce 40 microwatts of power, which is not very much, but it's enough to power a small silicon chip or an LED. Probably a pretty little LED.

Yeah. Just a little glowing one. Seems like maybe a little guy. Someday that could be useful, but it's very cool. I don't know what we're going to do with it, but maybe something. A flashlight for a bug. Well, that's prescient, Sam, because we're moving into biology, which is full of chemical reactions and molecules that can be used to generate electricity. And that has led to the construction of enzymatic biofuel cells, which use the transfer of electrons between enzymes that are linked to some construction of enzymatic biofuel cells, which use the transfer of electrons between

enzymes that are linked to some kind of substrate to generate electricity. In one such device, scientists used the enzymatic breakdown of a naturally occurring sugar called trehalose to generate power. But there was one key step that they needed to take in order to get the sugar and get their biofuel cell working. Was it, A, they implanted it into the head of a cockroach, B, they attached it to a bioreactor full of lab-grown meat, or C, they planted a lawn full of grass and biofuel cells. Don't mow it! Okay, so like the cells would be hooked up to the grass,

and while the grass was doing its thing it would be collecting some kind of residual it would be using the breakdown of the energy of the tree hose in order to create electricity this is a dang matrix right is this what they're doing to us in the matrix turning us into biofuel batteries yeah every human mind produces it's enough is it 2 d batteries is that what they say i don't remember i just remember thinking like that's like there are much better ways to create electricity robots yeah just wipe us out gosh what was the middle there was cockroaches grass and lab-grown meat bioreactor. These are all great.

Cockroach will run away from you, though. Biomeat, that seems like it'll be hard to maintain. But the grass, that seems like it's in the sweet spot. Doesn't run away. Takes care of itself. Yeah. That's the one I'm going to go with, grass. Sam's going with grass.

Okay. Even though it can run away, I'm going to go with, grass. Sam's going with grass. Okay. Even though it can run away, I'm going to go with cockroach because I think it has to be something, like meat is dead. I think it needs to be something living. Well, grass is living. It's true. So it could be, so either of you could be right, but it is in fact the head of a cockroach.

Yeah. Not the future I want to live in. Oh, sorry. They also did do it with a shiitake mushroom. Is that the future you want to live in? That's much nicer They also did do it with a shiitake mushroom. Is that a future you want to live in? That's much nicer, yeah. Oh, that'd be fun. Little mushroom friends powering our cities.

Exactly. So the hemolymph of a cockroach contains trehalose, the sugar underlying this reaction. They used a female cockroach because their abdomens are larger than males, and the procedure did not have any long-term effects on the cockroaches, so they turned out just fine. Both the cockroaches and the shiitake any long-term effects on the cockroaches so they turned out just fine both the cockroaches and the shiitake mushrooms were able to produce electricity

though it was a very small amount of electricity but good guess sam if a mushroom can do it grass can do it i was almost basically right that's right they didn't just didn't try grass that means sari has one point sam has. Can Sam make a comeback here with our final round of secret ingredient? Thermoelectric elements can turn waste heat into electric power with only a small temperature difference. And while thermoelectric devices often use bulk inorganic semiconductors, those can be expensive and also bad for the environment. Recently, scientists coated paper with a semiconducting material, turning it into one part of a thermoelectric device.

What was the other component? Was it a scratch-and-sniff sticker, a pencil, or a hole puncher? A hole puncher? I don't know how any of that would be useful. Sarah, you go first this time. They're all things that you can like interact with a thing with. So like scratch and sniff sticker, you can like scritch it. And then like that would presumably generate the energy. A pencil, you could like write with it or erase with it.

Sure. And then the hole puncher, you just like punch a chunk out of it. Obviously. Which is obviously, it's right there in the name. You punch a hole. My fundamental inability to understand how electricity works. I think it's not helpful in this round. But Hank did say thermoelectric.

So something that generates heat, which is all of these things like friction can generate heat. So this is the two elements that would be different temperatures and it would allow like if one side was a different temperature than the other side, then that would be different temperatures and it would allow like if one side was a different temperature than the other side then that would create an electrical gradient so it's not the application that's creating the electricity so different different sides are different heat i will go with scratch and sniff sticker then because you're scratching one side and that that'll be the hot side and also the stinky side and then there's

the cool side which is on the other okay but why i'll just go with hole puncher because there's a lot of stuff going on with the hole puncher i feel like there's so much going on with a whole punch so many moving pieces it's true but the answer was the pencil oh oh they needed apparently a side that had a bunch of graphite powder and clay. That turns out that graphite powder and clay mixed together, which is what a pencil lead is made out of, is both electrically conductive and stable. And also like really available. It's around.

So to create their thermoelectric devices, the scientists traced pencil on regular paper, and then they painted the semiconductor on top of that. They also created an improved thermoelectric pencil lead by mixing graphite with a semiconducting material called indium selenide, which increased the power output of the device that they created. What were they doing with it? I don't understand it at all. So they make one side hot and then it creates an electrical current between the two sides. And then what?

You can take that current out and turn it into a back massager. Probably not. Charge your phone. Probably a very, very small current that you would use to, again, power a very small chip or an LED. A flashlight for a bug. So bugs are squared away on flashlight technology. Yeah.

They're just like very increasingly fancy potato lights. Like, you know, those lemon connected to a light bulb. It's just like a very, very small one. Flashlight for bug.

Okay. All right, everybody. Well, Sari came out of that one point ahead. An unhonorable win. Which I guess is all that matters. And now it's time

to take a short break and then it will be time for the Fact Off. All right, everybody, it's time for the fact off. Sam and Sari have brought me science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award the Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. What year was the first U.S. patent for an electric vehicle with rechargeable batteries. Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb because I think I remember in my research for this episode,

and I know so little about electricity, that there were electric taxis like way before the modern electric vehicle revolution happened. So I'm going to say 1930s. 1930s. 1930s. Okay. In my research for this, in my even less understanding, I know that there were like electric cars that they were using at first to break like land speed records. And that was a long time ago.

It was like the 1900s. But the rechargeable part, I don't know when we came up with rechargeable batteries. But the rechargeable part, I don't know when we came up with rechargeable batteries. So I'm going to say the 1960s. Is a decade okay? Yeah, a decade is fine. The answer, truly remarkably, is 1890.

So Sari wins that one. Wow. But only, look, no one expected any of us to know anything about this topic coming in. We set standards correctly when we entered into the episode. But yeah, apparently electric cars were sort of the first idea before internal combustion even happened like this this seems like how we're going to do it but then found out gasoline is really good at storing energy and that created a long time of that being in charge and now maybe it's time to exit that era how did they recharge batteries back then do you know like did you know that rechargeable batteries have been around that long uh boy i did not i bet that they probably just like were like,

you're doing great. It's great to be on an episode where you two are as useless as I usually am. We should put a warning before this episode so no one actually gets

like wants to learn. All right, Sarah, that means that you get to decide who goes first. Oh, well, I'll go first and pull off the band-aid. So on a 15-day space shuttle mission that launched in February 1996,

the crew ran a weird experiment. They deployed a large spherical satellite that flung out behind the shuttle, connected by a conducting cable, which was a copper braid wrapped around a nylon string encased in Teflon, then Kevlar, and more nylon. This cable was called a tether, and it was 20 kilometers or around 12.5 miles long. So the satellite was flying, and the tether was unrolling mile after mile, when suddenly it snapped. Experiment over. And it took some further analysis to determine exactly why it snapped, but it wasn't from tension. It melted from super high electric current at 3,500 volts through tiny air bubble holes.

What? This is the part I don't really understand. So there's like holes in the material, and then the current was very high in a very small space, and so it turned into plasma and melted. So this was obviously a big sad day in space experiments. And the media viewed it as an expensive failure. But it's just one.

Yeah. I was two. Yeah. Well, as you may have heard, I was born in 1980. So I'm older than you. Uh-huh. Okay. Can't believe it.

Really? You remember something from the 90s? Well, I'm glad you remember it because it's just one of several experiments to try and generate electricity in space this way. And the whole idea of a space tether is to generate electricity like a dynamo where, and this is where my understanding gets wibbly, Dynamo, where, and this is where my understanding gets wibbly, there's one magnet rotating in another magnet's magnetic field, which then generates a current of electrons. So the rotating magnet is the little ball satellite, and the big magnetic field is the Earth, or like generated by the Earth. So the idea is to use the magnetic field of our planet to power things, whether it's like a space shuttle or a satellite in orbit. But there was too much power.

They were like, we did too good, or there was like some kind of flaw in the device that made the current run unevenly so that it ripped itself apart or melted itself. Yes, that is what happened. I think there was a materials engineering problem. So as the current was building higher and higher, and they were like, great, this is wonderful, then there's a material problem. So as the current was building higher and higher and they were like, great, this is wonderful. Then there's a material problem. And so it got too concentrated in one

part of the tether and then melted and then snapped off. That's wild. And as far as I can tell, this mission was a failure and there have been a variety of different failures that are like unspooling errors where tethers get stuck. It's just been bad conditions to deploy a tether. It seems like a very materials-heavy experiment to like fling something out on a really long rope. But there have been smaller successful implementations of this idea, like the small expendable deployer system, which was a 500-meter tether attached to a smaller satellite.

So some researchers are still exploring this with little guys like CubeSats, which are 10 centimeters cubed. And even though it sounds like kind of a wacky, ridiculous way to generate electricity and won't fulfill dreams of being a big solution to spacecraft propulsion or anything big like that, it works and could be good for something and that's the only conclusion i could draw i mean i i do love that it got it was just like wow it's working so well look at all the electricity and then just like the electricity just melts the thing does that mean it was working really really well it was working really well but

also it was not working well at all because it they had planned for it to not melt itself. And it did melt itself. So that is a failure state. You've got to harness the electricity better. So like it was working, but like the whole system had flaws in that. It's just like if your Christmas lights outside, I don't know, the cable melts and pops and breaks. Then it's like there's something wrong with the system, even though if the electricity flowed correctly, you would have nice, pretty lights.

Sam, what do you got? Whether you're an actor in an action movie about to deliver a killer one-liner, an inspirational speaker trying to motivate a room full of board office workers,

or a politician whipping a crowd of potential voters up, there's one trick you gotta know to keep people hanging on your every word. The dramatic pause. And it turns out some animals might know this trick too. So Brinomyrus brachyceistius, I'll just call him the fish from now on,

is a species of elephant fish that live in coastal basins in West Africa. They, like other elephant fish, have an electric organ that lets them discharge electric fields. So mostly it seems like elephant fish use this as like an extra sense for when they can't see, like if they're in muddy water. But this type of elephant fish use their electric discharges to communicate with each other. So each fish seems to have its own unique electrical signal, and they can only make that one single signal. So they have to increase or decrease the frequency that they're emitting this signal to get across different meanings, such as like mating calls or staking out territory or like warning other fish away, stuff like that.

So there are, of course, as there are for all things, scientists that study these pulses. scientists that study these pulses. And one of these scientists was looking at data from these fish conversations and noticed that the fish listening to another fish pulsing started to get sort of bored or distracted after extended bouts of pulsing. So in these conversations, the listening fish, while it's listening to the talking fish, will send back little acknowledgement pulses as it's listening. So it's like going, uh-huh, uh-huh, as you're listening to somebody talk.

But if the talking fish was just going on and on and talking for long, drawn-out bursts, the listening fish would start sending out its uh-huh signal less and less frequently. So the scientists also ran across what seemed like a way that the talking fish were regaining the listening fish's attention. The talking fish would pause its pulses for a second or two right before letting out the most frequent or information-rich bursts. So the listening fish would start paying attention again during this pause. And then after the pause was over and the fish was talking again,

it would shoot out the uh-huh bursts more frequently than it had been before. So what seems to be happening is that the receiving cells of the fish's brains are getting tired, like whatever receives those pulses, and the pauses give the fish a chance to rest their brain cells. So to test this out, the scientists put two of the fish in two different tanks that were connected by a wire that could transmit their pulses, but they could also mute the pulses when they wanted to, the scientists could. So when one fish started to like really blab and the other fish was kind of zoning out, they would mute the feed for a second and they would find that the other fish would like snap to and start paying attention and start replying to the fish that

was talking. And even though they're muting parts of conversations in these experiments, they've observed enough data of these pauses in the fish conversation. And then the listening fish paying attention again to think that the fish are pausing on purpose when they know that the next thing that they're about to say is important. Weird. And like when they're by themselves, they kind of babble to themselves or they just like talk stream of consciousness and they don't use any kind of pausing so that tells the scientists that the that seems to be like an adaptation purely developed to keep their audience like hanging on to what they're saying sam that's very weird i mean so

there's a lot of sort of anthropomorphizing going on there like obviously these little fish are not talking yes elephant fish though in one of the articles i read are apparently really really smart like way smarter than other kinds of fish or like comparatively pretty smart for a fish but like to your point there's a lot of anthropomorphizing going on the scientists that they're interviewing in one of the articles does say that these fish have a lot of attitude for a fish and that some of them have a fish and that some of them have like very different personalities some of them are like depressive some of them are like really aggressive and some of them are just like super mean so they got that sounds like someone

who spends a lot of time with fish it does sound like maybe he's looked at a lot of fish you start noticing personality differences between fish yeah i'm not saying it's not there but i am saying you're good at detecting it it's a learned skill um i love elephant fish now i don't know why i didn't know about them i need to know more about them well gosh you got you did make it hard for me a giant 12 milelong rope in space to generate electricity for a spacecraft getting so hot that it incinerates itself is very good. And a cute little fish, opinionated little fish, communicating in an effective way is having a dramatic pause,

allowing for it to recapture its audience's attention before conveying the most information-rich bits of knowledge. Also very cool. I think, oh, I hate it, but I think I'm going to have to give you guys equal points here. We've been talking a lot lately because we're equally as smart as each other. Yeah, but I got one right in the trivia round robin.

Okay, well. I tried really hard. That means that Sam is the loser for the episode. I don't know why I led with that. That means that Sari is the winner for the episode. And now it's time to ask the science couch. We've got one from Cyanochick who asks, We've got one from Cyanochick who asks, Why do I get shocked by static electricity way more often and stronger than anyone else I know?

Oh, wow. My suppositions are you either are just noticing it more than other people because you're inside of your own body, or two, you just are a shuffler. You've got to pick your feet up more. Does dryness of your skin have something to do with it too? Maybe, I don't know. That's possible.

I do know that like I never, I didn't even know what static electricity was in Florida. So like certainly the dryness of the air matters. Yeah, I think dryness of the air matters more than dryness of your skin. But unsure because as we know, I'm not an expert. but i can try my best

to explain static electricity a little bit better because the reasoning is basically what hank said those are my guesses also cyanochic uh you're either more sensitive to electric shock or you you shuffle or you're wearing clothes that are, that are quite static. Maybe it's a close thing. Static electricity happens when you rub two surfaces together or two objects together. So that could be like your clothes and your skin or your shoes and the floor and negative charge is transferred from one body to the second, like one object to the, to the other.

And that just depends on the composition of the object. Because of how chemicals work, some atoms, some molecules hold on to their electrons more tightly and some are more likely to receive them. And that is as deep as I'll go into that. But one ends up getting more negative charge and one ends up getting more positively charged. And so when you touch a conductive material, like a grounded piece of metal, then the charge, this built-up charge has somewhere to go. And there's a difference between your charge surface, whether it's like your body or your shirt,

and the ground, which is like the grounded piece of metal, not the physical ground. And that creates that spark that that shocks you that or makes the snapping noise and so you can like build up static electricity when you're shuffling your feet across carpet or like rubbing a balloon against your hair and it depends on the material that they're made out of so shoes that are pretty insulating can build up a lot of charge, and this is where I stop understanding molecular structure. But certain combinations, like pretty insulating shoes with older nylon carpets,

can end up with a lot of shock. Scooting around with your fabric, like your clothes, on certain kinds of chairs that are like nylon can create static electricity more regularly if the air is drier so less humidity then the air is less conductive and it's harder for charges to just dissipate so they're more likely to build up and cause more static shock so that's it you're either it's some combination of your lifestyle and or when the, like people have different pain tolerances.

If I get a tattoo, it'll be different than anyone else getting a tattoo. And that's like needle pricking. But in that same way, if, and do not touch an electric fence. But if you, I did at one point, cause I was curious. Apparently I thought that was the best way to satisfy my curiosity. But like it affected me much less than it affected my friend who also touched the fence and like was in more pain. Because I was like, that wasn't that bad. It was like a little static electricity.

And they were like, that hurt. It's like the TikTok challenge or what people are doing where they have like the electric cramp simulator. Yeah. Like period menstrual cramps. And they have different people wear it. And it's just like there are so many things both in life experience and like psychological experience because pain is like how your brain processes events that tell you how much pain you should be in and how you react to pain. And so if you've spent your whole life saying like, oh, this is nothing. Oh, I shouldn't respond to this. Then your pain tolerance goes up and it is wild.

And I think there should be more studies on it. But very interesting. That's also cool. Well, as expected, we didn't really have a great answer for you because this because we should really stick to biology. If you want to ask the science couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Simphing12, at FoxNarotoMax,

and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. First, you can be our patron of ours at patreon.com slash SciShowTangents. You can get access to things like our newsletter, where you can see me and Sam's love child, Alan Ginsberg, and also our bonus episodes of our special patron-only podcast, Q and Bidet.

Okay. It's becoming canon whether you like it or not, Sam. I'm forcing this on Sam. Sorry. I'm sorry, Sam. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. It'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 Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz who edits a lot of these episodes as well our social media organizer is Paola Garcia

Prieto. 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. But one more thing. For at least five years, the Helsinki International Horse Show has been fulfilling its electrical needs by turning to one of its most easy-to-find resources, the poop of their horses.

In 2019, they generated more than 150 megawatt hours by burning more than 100 tons of manure with forestry residue. So they had to mix some stuff in as well. This was enough electricity to power the event and feed back into the national grid. Wow. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. A poop-powered future. All you gotta have is, you need just a bunch of horses. Just a lot of horses, yeah. At every event. And then, because of the magic of electricity, you just burn it, and then you leave it next to some power lines, and then the electricity just happens.

Yeah. And then all the bugs have little flashlights. Uh-huh. And the future is saved. That's green energy for you. Thanks, Helsinki.