SciShow Tangents - Fear Month: Claustrophobia

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

SciShow Tangents' Month of Fear continues and… wait… do you feel it… the walls they’re... closing in around you! Crushing you!...were you scared? Well, if you were Hank you probably would have been because his fear is enclosed spaces! How is that related to science? Good question!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links: [Truth or Fail]Fire Extinguisherhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-04/tuot-ncf041819.phpWater-Filled Suithttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214552417301335Air Purifierhttps://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/space-station-mold-survives-200-times-radiation-dose-would-kill-human[Fact Off]Noc the beluga whalehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/story-one-whale-who-tried-bridge-linguistic-divide-between-animals-humans-180951437/?page=1http://cell.com/current-biology/supplemental/S0960-9822%2812%2901009-3https://www.public.navy.mil/navwar/NIWC-Pacific/technology/Pages/mammals.aspxNormal beluga: https://dosits.org/resources/resource-categories/feature-sounds/beluga/Noc sound: https://www.nature.com/news/the-whale-that-talked-1.11635Dark flieshttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/03/14/fifty-seven-years-of-darkness/#.XaY74udKgW_https://phys.org/news/2016-02-evolution-dark-fly.htmlhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160204111403.htm[Ask the Science Couch]Estimates of plant roomshttps://io9.gizmodo.com/how-many-plants-would-you-need-to-generate-oxygen-for-y-5955071http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-02/917906305.Bt.r.htmlhttps://everything2.com/title/How+much+plant+life+is+needed+to+keep+a+person+alive+in+a+sealed+room%253FPhotorespirationhttp://www.plantphysiol.org/content/155/1/56Biosphere 2http://biosphere2.org/visit/about-biosphere2/fast-factshttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/sunday-review/biosphere-2-climate-change.htmlhttps://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/68/9/722/5055575?searchresult=1[Butt One More Thing]Apollo 10 floating poophttps://www.vox.com/2015/5/26/8646675/apollo-10-turd-poophttps://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a410/AS10_CM.PDF

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chan. Oh, hi. Yeah, hi. How are you guys going? Stefan, what's your tagline? Can you zip me up? Sam Schultz is also here.

Hello. Sam, what's your tagline? I'm just bones. No, you're not. Yes, I am. You have all kinds of parts that aren't bones. Sari Riley is also here. Yeah, and I'm more than just bones.

Yeah. I don't like new energetic Seri. This is not energetic Seri. Does this seem like energetic Seri? Yes. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's a new energetic Seri because she's read all the comments about people who think she should be president of the United States. Have you seen it?

I have not seen it. Seri for president. What? Why? Because she's so great. Everybody is like, these three doofuses and Sari is basically a nice show of tangents. There was just a Reddit post about tangents and how great it is. What did they say about me?

But mostly about how great Sari is. A lot about how great Sari is. There was some discussion about breaking up the responsibilities of the science couch because it seems a little one-sided sometimes. Yeah, it's like the science cushion. What's your tagline? My tagline is the knife wife thing, and I'll leave it a mystery. Okay. Whoa. And I'm Hank

Green, and my tagline is was that ham okay? Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, and we're also playing for Hank bucks, which we award from week to week. I think I'm losing now. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by the previous conversations, we won't be great at that.

So if you go off on a tangent and everyone deems it unworthy, you'll lose a Hank Buck. So tangent with care. And for this, the scariest of months, we are doing something a little different. Each episode in October is covering a topic that is one of our panelists' greatest fears. So as always, we will introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem, This Week, from me. I pull my tie out from the drawer, tie it carefully two times more. They will see me on that floor, I'm going to Studio 54. They will see me on that floor, though they keep stopping

me at the door, no matter how much I beg, implore at the entrance of Studio 54. But I will no longer be ignored. I will win my little war, sliding through my little door, my secret door to Studio 54. The air pushes past. I smell Dior. I hear the bass of the encore. Squeezing tighter, tighter more, I am here in Studio 54. In full attire, I look down for the sparkling, twinkling decor. Through the slats, my vision pours into Studio 54. No one hears my screaming or the thumping music my throat sore. There is no door, there is no door packed in tighter than a humidor.

Never leaving, evermore, my tomb is Studio 54. Whoa. Studio 54 is like a disco. It was a disco. And a guy tried to break in through an air vent and he died in there. Oh my God. Oh. Studio 54 is like a disco. Was there? It was a disco. And a guy tried to break in through an air vent and he died in there. Oh, my God. Oh.

I didn't know that story. So I was very confused about why we were going to a nightclub. Yeah. So that's. That is terrifying. I read this story about a guy who jumped into the air vents at Studio 54. And then like several days later, somebody was like, it smells like a cat died in here. Oh, no.

It was a man, though. Yeah. Yeah, somebody was like, it smells like a cat died in here. Oh no, it was a man though. Yeah. Yeah, it was a... So ever since then, I've been really afraid of tight spaces. That's like particularly bad too, where it's like you think there's enough space for you to crawl into a thing

and then it gets tighter and tighter and then you can't like, you decide, oh, I may be in too far or like I need to move my arm this way and I can't do it. Did that happen to you at all? That scares me. In my mind. Okay.

I think about breaking into nightclubs all the time. Yeah. How are we going to get in here? I want to get into the club, but they won't let me in. He was in a full tuxedo. So he was just trying to sneak in to party. Yeah. Oh, no.

Yeah, because it was a in to party. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. Because it was like super exclusive club. Huh. I don't mind like being in a small space as long as there's a way out. But the idea of like being able to like not able to move forever is the thing that is the scariest for me. But this isn't really a science topic. It's very hard to look stuff up about. I guess small space is easy enough to define.

I define it as like I can't move. It's very hard to look stuff up about. I guess small space is easy enough to define. I define it as like I can't move. It's so small. I define it as the third row of an SUV. Because every time I have to sit back there. Yeah. Your knees are all up. Yeah. It's like this is the position I'm in forever.

I feel cozy there. Yeah. I'm tiny so I can fit anywhere. I always need to like itch or like move or like I just have the urge to like shift and I can't and I freak out. I do feel that way about airplanes, which I never used to feel like. Like maybe they did make everything small enough that now I'm just like my legs are up a little too far. My feet feel weird and I just want to like crawl out of my skin and beat everybody up on the plane or something. I don't know what you guys decided to do with this, but I'm excited to find out because it's certainly you could go any any old direction. Did you look up any science about this?

I looked up claustrophobia. I don't know. I feel like a lot of terms have been thrown around for this episode to like enclosed spaces versus small spaces versus other things. Yeah. Does everyone know what claustrophobia is? Does it do all the listeners know? Is that a common enough word? So it's just like a fear of being enclosed in a space. Yeah. And it's like linked with panic disorders and anxiety disorders where it's not always rational. It can sometimes be caused by trauma. So like if you were locked

in a confined space, then like that can psychologically affect you the rest of your life. There's also another word that I found called clithrophobia or clithrophobia. Couldn't find a pronunciation, only found the word. Clostrophobia is the fear of being in a confined space. Clithrophobia or clithrophobia is being trapped. So there's like a slight difference between those two things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The example here is being locked in a small space such as a closet, abandoned refrigerator, or the trunk of a car.

Abandoned refrigerator? That's a thing. Who abandons a refrigerator? It used to happen a lot more. Yeah, there was this thing where you like, there was no way to open a refrigerator from the inside. And they had to like change how refrigerators were made because like people died. Yeah, it's likeators were made because, like, people died.

Yeah, it's like something that pops up in old cartoons and stuff. Yeah, it was like a known problem that we have now completely forgotten about because now to open a refrigerator you basically need to blow on them. So I guess that means it's time for Truth or Fail. Where

Stefan has brought three science facts for our education and enjoyment, somehow tangentially related to small spaces. But only one of those facts is real. And we have to guess which is the real one. And if we do, we get a Hank Buck. If we don't, Stefan gets the Hank Buck. Stefan, what are your three weird space facts, but not outer space?

But they are outer space. Being a human in space, very risky. Which of these three things is a technology that is being developed to mitigate a risk that you might encounter on the ISS? Okay. Which is a very enclosed space. It is. You can't go outside. You'll die.

You'll die. Number one, water-filled suits that would protect astronauts while the inside of the space station is irradiated to curb the spread of mold. Number two, a fire extinguisher that sucks rather than blows in order to contain fires more quickly and safely in space. Or number three, a laser air purifier that could continuously purify the circulating air in the station without the need for replacement filters. So we've got one, a water-filled space suit so that they can irradiate the space station while you're in your water suit. Two, a fire extinguisher that sucks instead of blows,

which is also useful for when you lay a real big stinky fart. Or three, a laser air purifier that just like heat seeks on the impurities and zaps them. I do know that space stations are crazy moldy. They are bad mold. And like it's a problem. But is it a problem? It is a problem.

Why is it a problem? You can't like look at something and be like, wow, there's a mold all over the place. This isn't a problem. They release spores and then people sneeze and it's unhealthy for your lungs. I think it's probably that. And maybe it's also growing inside of stuff. Yeah, but Mira was really nasty, and they couldn't do anything about it,

and it was fine. So they threw it into the atmosphere. It threw itself into the atmosphere. I think that one is very plausible, but I think that seems like more trouble than it's worth. Yeah. Watersuits, like the idea of them, I can't wrap my brain around it.

Do you plug in somewhere and then fill up your spacesuit with water but not your head? But then what's your head doing when it's the radiation? Yeah, no, you got to get your head in there too. You got to breathe. Hold your breath. Oh, you got to breathe. And you're breathing out that you got to just a snorkel.

Like the opposite of being gagged where the only thing on the outside is your mouth. So like a straw. Yeah, so it's a giant latex suit with a mouth hole. And that's it. Fire extinguishers are very important on the International Space Station. If there is fire, everyone dies. It eats up all the oxygen and also fire. I think they are always looking at new ways to do fire extinguishers.

Can you suck up a fire? Can you suck up a fire? Sari Reilly. I was going to ask what's the difference between this fire extinguishers. Can you suck up a fire? Can you suck up a fire? Sari Reilly. I don't know. I was going to ask, what's the difference between this fire extinguisher and a vacuum?

Do they have vacuums to suck up dust? Yeah. Well, except probably it would need to go real fast. But I feel like that wouldn't help. Maybe it would if you got it really close to the...

Because I feel like mostly it would just like draw air toward where you would create the low pressure area and that would just feed the fire. It sounds like it's sucking the oxygen away. There's just more there.

A chamber or something that you put over it and then you suck the fire into a fireproof bag. I've never seen Ghostbusters but this is what I imagine the Ghostbusting machine is like. Never mind. They use lasers. You're thinking of Luigi's Mansion. Oh, I did watch that.

Yes. He uses a vacuum. So I guess what a laser air purifier would do is it would suck air through and then there'd be lasers in there and it would vaporize whatever things were. All the mold spores, presumably.

Do they have lasers? Can lasers... Yeah, lasers can do that. It didn't require a lot of energy. I can't believe the laser one. I refuse to believe that that's the one. Okay. I don't like the fire extinguisher one anymore either, though. I'll go with water suit.

I'm super excited about water suit. I like water suit. Do you want to be in a water suit? I kind of want to try being in a water suit. I would like it. It's like a water bed, but all around you. But a suit. So you just like flop around.

Yeah, I think it'd be an interesting sensation. Could you use like the Epsom salts that they have at the float tank places so you don't get dehydrated? Oh, I thought you meant to say just float. Float inside of my water suit. Yeah, that too. Make it neutral buoyancy. Yeah, you're already in space though. It's just like...

I forgot. That would not be important. I want to go with water suit. Oh, two water suits. Okay. We're going to get fleeced by Stefan. We are. I love Luigi's Mansion.

I'm going to go with the fire extinguisher just for fun. I just can't believe that Stefan, this is not an insult, I can't believe that anybody here would come up with this water suit idea. It's just too weird. So it was the fire extinguisher. Yes!

My boy Luigi never lets me down. Yes, as you were talking about, fire is super bad in a space station, and most of the space craft use CO2 extinguishers like we have on Earth, and those seem to be better for extinguishing

electrical fires, which are probably the most common source of a fire in space. So there's a couple issues with those, which is that you can't just dump a bunch of CO2 into that small of a space without putting oxygen masks on first. And so that leaves time for the fire to spread. And also, if you're blowing, that can spread the combustibles and things around.

So this team at Toyohashi University of Technology has developed the vacuum extinguish method. And it's basically a really thin nozzle that like uses a vacuum to vacuum up the combustibles in the flame into a vacuum chamber. And it doesn't spread anything around and you can use it right away because you don't have to put an oxygen mask on. As you were describing it, I was thinking a cool thing would be if you combine these two ideas and you had like an outer layer shooting co2 out and then an inner layer of sucking it all back in so that the it was like if you ended up sucking some like atmosphere toward the fire it would be sucking co2 toward the fire you're welcome nasa people have proposed water-filled suits as a way to protect astronauts from radiation on like longer trips or

if you're in space for long enough like you're gonna end up in a low shielded area at some point and so having a water-filled suit might do something but it seems like you might need too much water i don't know it's just pee what if you just had like a bag around you essentially and then you just eat into that oh all the time and never stopped forever that's it yeah what if you did that i just want a big bag around me that i pee into radiation only in space not in everyday life i don't want a hamster ball full of pee around me mold is definitely an ongoing problem on the iss and so a team exposed the two most common molds that are found on the iss to extreme amounts of radiation and found that they can survive oh great to 200 times the lethal dose for humans the laser purifier thing i just made up but i was

counting on the fact that no one here knew how air purifiers work it seems like air purifiers rely on negatively charged ions. They release them and then it attaches to the particles and then also that attaches to the filter medium. So yours is like that, but with lasers. But with lasers. So way cooler, guys. What I want is an air purifier that I can put my hand in

and not take my hand back out of. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it's time for the Fact Off. Welcome back! Hank Bucktotals, Sari has one, I have one for my poem. Stefan, because you fooled us with big weird water suits, has two.

And now it's time for the fact. How many do I have? Oh, you got zero. I skipped you. And now it's time for the fact. Two panelists have brought science facts. Present to the others. To blow our minds.

And we will award the Hank Buck to the fact that blew our mind the most. It's Sam versus Sari for some high-stakes science battles here tonight at the Coliseum. Hit me with your science facts. Who first? What's the topic?

Small spaces. Sure, of course. You're terrified of them, remember? The person who's going to go first today remember the person who's gonna go first today is the person who has the biggest bathroom the biggest bathroom my bathroom is tiny

my bathroom is also pretty small do you have a bathtub I do Sari's bathroom also has a slanted ceiling so like probably smaller

there's much less volume yeah if you stand up over the toilet without thinking then you hit your head. Yours is probably smaller. I have a lot of head space.

Yeah. I'm going to go by volume here, not square feet, and have Sarah go first. Okay. So in 1984, there were a group of Navy specialists living and working by San Diego Bay because of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, the NMMP, where the military kept marine mammals in captivity to train them to do underwater tasks. But in May, they started to hear some strange noises. One person would hear muted conversations that sounded like they were coming from adjacent piers as he was walking to the

parking lot. And another set of divers were making underwater repairs when one thought he heard his supervisor over the underwater wet phone give a command. So he swam up and asked, who told me to get out? And they solved the mystery when they realized the real culprit behind these voices was one male beluga named Nosy, who lived in one of the enclosures without very much company besides humans and a couple female belugas. And he sort of learned how to mimic human speech. And this is something that people had heard about with belugas, but this is the first instance where humans were able to do repeated observations and recordings of this. And this is a normal beluga. This is Nosy.

Nosy doesn't sound like a person. Nosy sounds like what people sound like when you're underwater. It's like vaguely like Charlie Brown parents. It's kind of mushy. But the rhythm of the sounds were close to the pattern of human speech. The frequency of the noises matched humans and you could hear were much lower than the usual

beluga noises. And it took him a lot of effort to do that because the way that belugas make noise is by inflating nasal sacs near their blowhole and forcing air through them. So they don't have vocal folds, I guess. So he over-inflated the nasal sacs, basically, to be like, I want to sound like human.

Lonely whale. I need friends. Yeah. Talk back to me. was just bored so we don't really know the why of the behavior because we know cetaceans like belugas and dolphins are really social and get really stressed out when they're in enclosed spaces this is my tie to the topic and wild belugas don't make this kind of human-like frequencies. So because Nosey was captive, they speculated that it was some sort of like a coping mechanism to captivity and mindless mimicry rather than I'm actually trying to communicate with the humans. But more like if I make these noises, I get attention.

That is my like social interaction now because I'm not in the open ocean and can't interact with a lot of other belugas. I feel like the way that a beluga would mimic human speech might tell us something about how beluga speech works. The way that they hear us and thus the way they try to parrot back to us indicates maybe that their system of communication isn't so granular as like parrots or songbirds or humans, but like contains information in sort of more bulk ways. Right. That is just all guessing. Okay. So, Sam, you got a fact for us?

In 1954, a biologist at Kyoto University put a bunch of fruit flies in containers, covered the containers with blackout cloth, and let them just do their fly thing, which is mostly eating food and having sex. Now, 64 years later and 1,400 generations of flies later, a genetic line of these original flies still exists, still in total darkness, and is still being studied at Keeler University. They're called dark flies. They're the dark flies? They're the dark flies. And they have a number. How many years? About 64. Jesus. Of flies who have, like, we've forced them to live in the dark flies. They're the dark flies. How many years? About 64.

Jesus. We've forced them to live in the dark for 64 years. Yeah, the papers I read said that that's the equivalent of 30,000 human years. That seems like a weird false equivalency of some sort. No, well, by generation. Sure. Number of birth cycles. Right.

They have some weird side effects from living in darkness for so long. Like the hairs on them are extra long which obviously people think they probably use to like feel their way around and feel each other.

I thought they might be cold. They could be cold. Or they didn't care what they looked like anymore so they just stopped training. They can't cut their hair. And they out-compete normal flies

when breeding in the dark and they think that that's because they have more pheromone sensors so that they can also find each other in the dark so then also on the topic of breeding dark flies lay more eggs than normal flies and researchers aren't really sure why but they've mapped a bunch of places in the dark fly dna that deviate from normal fly dna and they have narrowed it down to like 84 specific genes. I think it might be. And one of the likely ones is that there's a light receptor gene that a normal flies is just like donked up and it's not in dark flies anymore.

So they might just be healthier because they didn't need that light recepting gene. This line of flies may still exist, but the researcher who began the experiment, Dr. this line of flies may still exist but the researcher who began the experiment dr siuichi mori died in 2007 so he's a ghost now it's a halloween episode oh when they put them in light they revert to a to the regular fly day night cycle like of activity within three hours or something like that they They can still do it even after 30,000 years equivalent, but they're hairy.

Just a little bit more hairy. I don't think I have a good sense of evolutionary time in the same way I don't have a good sense of geologic time. And so to know that even after thousands of generations, they don't change very much because they're successful enough in their environment. They're still breeding. They don't change very much because they're successful enough in their environment. They're still breeding. They're still having babies.

So we have to pick between 1984 Navy Specialist in San Diego hearing a beluga going, or Sam's 64 years of dark flies. We're going to do it on three. Are you ready, Stephan? Yep. One, two, Stephan? Yep. One, two, three. Sam. Ooh.

And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we have some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds, or just mind. This question is from

Hammer Sasha. How big would an enclosed space full of plants need to be to produce enough oxygen for one human who is trapped inside with those plants i think i have the answer okay 680 what units plants as if it's like oak trees yes yeah so i've heard, I think there was a NASA study where they, it was studying air purification of like plants and they needed 680, I think in the size of a typical home was the result of that study. Oh, wow. That's a lot of plants. Like 680 houseplants? I don't know what plants they were using.

It could have been oak trees. Individual single celled microalgae. Has everybody here seen Pauly Shore's Biodome? And if not, because definitely if Sari hasn't, we're going to watch it at my house right now. Okay, we're back from watching Biodome. It's so good. It was amazing. Wasn't it great, guys?

It was very funny. Love that movie. When he went, uh, wheezing the juice. Was that that one? That's in C, though, man. That's the one I was thinking of, too. But anyway. Pauly Shore. Pauly Shore.

This is a weirdly specific question. Somebody has someone sealed up in a dome. Like, oh, no, I need to buy some plants. Do I need? Yeah. There was the Biosphere Experiment, Biosphere 2, the first one being this one that we're in right now. Oh, that's why it's called Biosphere 2? Yeah. Earth? I i had never heard of it before i think i was just on the cusp of i read

about it for like an hour i'm so excited about biosphere 2 it's so weird it is weird i'm very surprised you don't know about biosphere no they had their second trial from like i forget june to september 1994 so like right after i was born right and so i just never heard about it because i was a wee baby but so what's biosphere 2 uh it was it's a giant glass enclosure that was supposed to be like closed to the outside okay just like biodome and uh and they wanted all the plants inside to sort of like recycle all the nutrients and oxygen but it turned out that it didn't work because the foundation that they poured was made of concrete. And it kept on eating up oxygen and outgassing CO2, which is part of how concrete cures.

And everybody was like, we're dying in here and have to leave. What I read about it also said that the microbes in the soil respired more than expected because of the type of soil they chose or something like that they didn't account for that in their calculations however many they did right about the dome but it's so cool it is i don't know we learned so much stuff like it was a really worthwhile project and like i'm totally in favor of trying again with a bigger dome they had different biomes in it so they had like a rainforest biome and an ocean with a coral reef and wetlands there was a point in this afternoon where i sent this to my friend my nerd friends who's like i just learned about biosphere too if i was rich and bored i would just

like do a book about it instead of doing anything else with my life i just want to like go paid for it texas philanthropist ed bass who had inherited his family's oil fortune, but took on ecological causes. $200 million into the project. That seems like a deal for a biodome. I'm glad you think so. I think that's part of the controversy surrounding it, where they recruited people with scientific backgrounds to help design it, but it was not always linked with a university or linked with like a solid data collection programs. It felt from what my understanding, a little more haphazard of like, let's create this thing. Let's send people to

live inside and let's make all these qualitative observations about how it's going and like, oh, no, they're running out of oxygen. Let's it back in right as opposed to like controlled experiments doing multiple trials with multiple types of separate domes and then the way it ended was really like politically messy it's still out there somewhere i think it's in arizona you can go visit it's like an attraction i don't think it's an attraction but it's being maintained by the University of Arizona now, starting from 2011. I've got an idea for a reality show. Can I be on it if it's living in the biosphere? It's biosphere three.

How many plants do you need? One Gizmodo article said, in a 10 by 10 foot airlock, they didn't show their work, so I don't know, about 300 to 500 plants. I don't know how big these plants need to be. You couldn't fit that many plants. Yeah. And basically, it seems like there is a lot of subjectivity into this because you need to determine what type of plant it is, how much leaf surface area there is, how much does it photosynthesize versus respire. much does it photosynthesize versus respire? I don't know. There was some discussion around using C4 and CAM plants. So there are different types of plants and the way that they respire. Basically, like photosynthesis takes in carbon dioxide, spews out oxygen. Photorespiration

usually happens at night, and that's when it consumes oxygen to use up other things. And so there are some plants that have adaptations to make that photorespiration pathway use less oxygen, essentially. And those are like the C4 and CAM pathways. And I don't need to go into the molecular biology of it because it's really boring and Calvin Cycle-y. People who have looked into using plants to boost the oxygen levels of indoor spaces are like, well, you want to choose their plants carefully so that they're introducing as much oxygen as possible and taking out as much carbon dioxide as possible. Because when humans are in a space, we're generating a lot of carbon dioxide. They are bulking carbon inside of them. And so they are increasing a net amount of oxygen until they fall over and decompose.

And then you're back to net neutral. Yeah, and that's the other problem. How long are you staying in this room with just plants providing you oxygen? Because as soon as one dies, that throws off your calculations and throws off your system. Yeah, because then it's producing carbon dioxide. It's not just not consuming oxygen. It's off-gassing. Also looking into, like, space stuff and going to Mars and all of that for this episode

and hearing about Biosphere 2, it seems clearer and clearer to me that it is extremely hard to recreate the, like, systems. Yeah, Biosphere 1 is real good and we should do what we can to keep it stable. We're going to have to exit it in a politically messy way too though.

Yeah. Inevitably the exit will be politically messy. So there isn't really an answer to this question because I didn't feel like doing math. I hear that. But you should contact

so many botanists that I'm sure would be so excited to do this calculation and give you the species of plants. But it's not actually really that possible, right? I don't think. Not really. No, I mean, as Biosphere 2 indicated, though, I do want to go to Arizona to go to Biosphere 2 now that I know

that it's open to the public. We should record an episode from Biosphere 2. Or just all of our future episodes. Or start a new channel. Sci from Biosphere 2. Or just all of our future episodes or start a new channel. SciShow Biosphere 2. We're just going to move into Biosphere 2. I call it the fish room.

I want to be in the coral reef. I want to be in the one with Pauly Shore. Okay, we'll bring him too. But, uh, he says that, right? Yeah, that's correct. Good job. So, if you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, right? Yeah, that's correct. Good job. So,

if you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at KBeamSupreme, at PrincessLotus18, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Final Hank Buck scores for the episode. I continue my

losing streak tied with Sam at the bottom with one Sari and Stefan tied for the win with two wow things are turning around oh man not if you're me do you want to know Hank especially you the scores

no not really alright in last place can you guess who it is it's Hank 59 points in second in last place, can you guess who it is? It's Hank. 59 points. Oh, gosh. In second to last place, Stefan. 63 points. I'm doing it.

Whoa! I got a deficit to make up. Next up, Sari with 66 points. Finally me, 67 points. Still champion forever. I'm climbing up. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that.

You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and lets us know what you like about the show. Also, we look to iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes. So leave them there when you leave your reviews. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the show. I love that. And finally, if you

want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, tell people about us! If you want to read more about any of today's topics, check out SciShowTangents.org to find links to our sources. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly

and the Wicked 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 eerie editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sinister sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our

scary social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno, and we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-aco lantern to be lighted. But, one more thing. Apollo 10 was a test run for the 1969 moon landing.

And during that flight, a piece of poop was just mysteriously floating through the air. And there's very funny records of the astronauts on board talking about this turd. Hey, do you want to do a dramatic reenactment? Oh, we could, yeah. Okay. They saw the turd in the air, and then one person was like, I didn't do it.

It ain't one of mine. I don't think it's one of mine. Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away. Well, did they figure it out? No, no one admitted to it. There are only three people. It could be, so...

Man, I'm glad they all had really good, like, BMs. I feel like some of mine, if not, we need to get into a bag.