SciShow Tangents - Fear Month: Decomposition!

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

As the SciShow Tangents Month of Fear continues, your hosts get down into the wormy, slimy muck to discuss Ceri’s biggest fear: decomposition! Does that sound too generic to be truly terrifying? That’s what Sam thought too, and now he is also quite scared of decomposing! Boo!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 this these links:[Truth or Fail]Straw Urinals - https://www.unreservedmedia.com/paris-open-air-urinals/Peepee Day - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/6554958/Urinate-on-the-compost-heap-to-save-the-planet-says-the-National-Trust.htmlhttps://grist.org/living/ask-umbra-can-i-pee-in-my-compost-pile/Human Composting - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/washington-first-state-allow-burial-method-human-composting-180972020/[Fact Off]Ocean viruses - https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1602565.fullhttps://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/oc400/Arrigo2005.pdfBurying beetles - https://www.fws.gov/Midwest/endangered/insects/ambb/abb_fact.htmlhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/10/news-burying-beetle-nursery-bacteria-fungus-decomposition/[Ask the Science Couch]Food Safetyhttps://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/internet/main/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/safe-food-handling/food-safety-tips-for-college-students/ct_indexhttps://food.unl.edu/will-reheating-food-make-it-safe-if-you-forget-refrigerate-ithttps://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/food-technology/bacterial-food-poisoning/https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/what-you-need-know-about-foodborne-illnessesDecomposershttps://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/docs/tip-sheet-decomposer-id-cpts-id-f.pdfPizza (Quora answer)https://www.quora.com/Is-it-safe-to-eat-pizza-left-out-overnight[Butt One More Thing]A/V plughttp://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/deathly-doodle-leakagehttp://fluidpusher.blogspot.com/2009/10/questions-of-day-jenn-edition.html

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Lightly competitive. Only lightly, right? I'm going to win today. You're passionate. We're joined today by Stefan Chin, as always. Yeah.

And what's your tagline? Leftover bread. Sam Schultz is also here. Hi. Sam, what's your tagline? Incandescent label. Great. Good one.

Sari's here, too. Yep, I am. What's your tagline, Sari? Part cat, part bird, all muscle. And I'm Hank Green. I am going to be here at like 80% today and my tagline is robot spectacles. 80%

is pretty good. I've been here at less than 80%. Oh yeah, me too. Frequently. I'll try to be at 120%. Ready for it. It's a lofty goal, I feel like. It's very ambitious for me, especially. It's 120% of your usual. Yeah.

Every week here on Slash Your Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory. We're also playing for a Hank box, which are the way that we keep score. Why? Don't ask too many questions.

For this, the scariest month of all, October, we're having a great time doing something a little different. Each episode is featuring a topic that is one of our panelists' greatest fears. And Sari is going to introduce this one with a science poem. When creatures of flesh and bone drop dead, their organs red, their insides shred,

the cells they lice the bacteria feast the beast has ceased to breathe they scream wood bones sway to and crash and fall as fungi small both grow and sprawl they rot the insides more and more in every pore they spread their spore before we're dust we're goop and grime and i for one detest this slime but someday this body will give way and to my dismay i will decay oh that's a real poem 20 percent nice yeah i need that horn noise you always write real poems when it's your turn yeah none of us can do real poems except Hank sometimes. Yeah. Thanks. The topic of the day is decay, decomposition.

So, like, after a living thing has died, it's inevitable journey from organized to random again. Entropy. Entropy. And that involves a lot of goop and gross. Yeah. Little buggies crawling in places. Some buggies doing it. Yuck. The weird thing is that like decomposition can happen inorganically.

So you can decompose without life, but it happens much faster when there's like life helping it happen. There's like this sort of question what would happen if there was just a dead body in space. And even that would decay in a way. It would get sort of broken down by. Those solar rays. Solar rays. Meteors. Get a nice tan. Eventually, tiny meteors

will rip you up. It'll just be like Swiss cheese in space. This topic made me extremely uncomfortable as I was researching it. Are you also afraid of decomposition? I think I'm more afraid of dying. Thinking about dying. It's like this body

which has held itself together quite nicely for 40 years just uh not anymore yeah and i was looking up like mummies i thought mummies would be fun mummies are not fun why are you afraid of this i don't have like many big fears but it's something that always creeps me out which feels like the general sense of october like mowing the lawn or something and coming across a dead bird or a dead mouse my instinctual reaction is back away i'm scared i don't want to deal with it so whatever instinct is deep in my brain of like dead equals disease trotting is bad bacteria maggots whatever is dialed up to whatever it can be or like reading about things like maggot therapy grosses me out yeah so where i don't know

you have dead skin and it's easier to on a living person on a living person you have dead skin yeah it's easier instead of like cutting it out with a scalpel you like have sterilized maggots that just eat away at the flesh don't worry about it i hate it i hate it you can't it's been in the autoclave no there's no such thing as a sterilized and then i looked at pictures of them to prepare for this episode i don't know why i just wanted to be yeah disgusted going in here yeah Yeah, I definitely, I went intentionally in a direction that did not allow for me to see anything actually decomposing. I mean, it's like a very important part of biology. Yeah, it's sort of the last step in the energy chain, you know?

Making sure the nutrients that were absorbed into this one organism get recycled back into the environment. And pretty much nothing would live unless we had this recycling decomposers putting nitrogen back in the environment and carbon and oxygen. I don't know. A bunch of stuff. But they're still nasty. Good, but nasty.

It just reminds you that we're so far from equilibrium. Living things are just like all the good chemistry that keeps them together. As soon as that chemistry stops, it just falls apart. Yeah, like quite literally. Your cells start exploding

and then the bacteria produce so much gas and then your skin starts sloughing off and your eyes glaze over and it's like wah! Gross, gross, gross. And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists, it's Sam this week,

has brought three science facts for us to enjoy, but two of them are freaking lies. We have to pick the true one and we'll get a Hank Buck if we do. If not, Sam gets the buck.

Sam, what are your three facts? All right, so today I'm going to talk about the cute, kid-friendly version of decomposition. Composting. And in the U.S., Washington State is one of the most prolific and progressive composters

that there are with mandatory composting and curbside pickup and all that stuff to make it really easy. Mandatory composting? What happens if I don't put my banana peel out? Probably get fined. I don't know. You're from Washington. What happens? Do I go to jail? I never went to jail for not composting but composting was really normalized growing up because we had the garbage bin recycling bin and compost bin like in the back like yard waste compost i don't know and those were like our three things and we learned which to throw in

which one they drill it into you to be environmentally friendly and do that. If I'm about to puke in Washington, would I puke in the trash bin or the compost bin? What would you eat? Just a bunch of Snickers wrappers. Wrappers? No, you can't do that. All right. So which one of these is a real composting program practiced in the state of Washington? Number one, straw-filled urinals in parks where public urination is a problem.

The idea is that public piers would use them at least every now and then, and cities can use the urine-soaked grass for composting. Number two, so-called pee-pee days, where people are invited to urinate into or pour saved urine onto municipal compost heaps. Wait. Or number three. Keep going. Human body composting, where bodies are buried in containers with plant matter and allowed to break down naturally.

The compost is then given back to the family of the deceased. So our three facts are straw urinals in parks. Pee-pee days. Where people are invited to bring their pee pee out or human composting where you get buried in a box and they give the compost who's they?

the place where you put them in the box the people with the box the people with the box so it's like a company and the way that someone would cremate you but instead they make dirt

yeah and then I make carrots out of my grandma grandma, yeah I love that yeah? yeah, I do cremate you but instead they make dirt yeah and then i make carrots out of my grandma yeah i love that yeah yeah i do maybe this is very washington of me to love this idea that i could eat my grandma but like in a wholesome way yeah yeah not cannibalism yeah you could like literally have grandma's cake or something or grandma's pie because she would be in the pie come on oh be cool i'm breaking 120 yeah you really are you're tapping into something i'm not comfortable with

to to so i know that there have been weirdnesses with body disposal and that there are lots of regulations around it but i don't know if those are state based or federal so this doesn't help me figure the answer to this question out because i know that there are places where composting human bodies has been like people want to do it and they're like no you can't you have to fill them with a bunch of toxic stuff and bury them in a freaking like there's only one way you can do it it's the way that the funeral homes want you to do it because it costs a bunch of money but i feel like there's a lot of like quote-unquote green way body disposal methods that have come out in the recent years and i get here green coffin like coffins that are not designed to like protect your stupid mortal coil this is useless flesh sack that like i don't care if it's in a comfy cozy

box and gets preserved for an extra 20 years like it's still going to become worms it's not about you at that point i also don't care if anyone i love becomes worms in 20 or 40 or 60 years they are the same amount of time yeah i agree with that i'm willing to be liquefied liquefied i don't know to another level you can also become a diamond I think yeah maybe that one's better yeah just plant a tree on me I like Stefan

becoming a diamond I can see that you know yeah I prefer that to liquid Stefan if it was gonna be something I got to keep

if you got Stefan in a jar or Stefan in a diamond yeah I'd prefer Stefan in a diamond just some kind of Stefan that I could hold in my hand

without having to wash afterward. I think it would be funny, you know, like a pop bottle or something. Like a two liter? We could maybe have like a six pack of Stefan. Oh! And then every like 10 years you pop one open. No! Would you drink Stefan juice for a million dollars?

If it was safe, like the maggots, I've been through the autoclave. You're all in trouble. Sam, will you drink one Stefan? I will take the hit. I'll answer the question if you get a Hank bug deduction. I'll get a Hank because I do want to know if you will drink one Stefan. For a million dollars? Yeah, yeah. I'd do anything for a million dollars.

Me too. I'd drink myself. I would too. Yeah, same. So is Sarah now at negative one point i'm at zero because i had back down to zero wow it's a good poem sorry you had to waste it like that so the other two are peepee ones um sari resident compost expert is peepee good for compost i have no idea i apparently did not learn as much about composting as I thought I would. Probably there's bacteria in it, but I don't know.

There's not very much bacteria in urine. That's one of the things. Is that like, we used to think it was sterile, but it turns out it's a little bit not sterile. Is there ammonia in there too? Sure, there's lots of nitrogen.

Is it old pee on pee-pee day or is it like fresh pee? It's both. I doubt pee-pee day because who would want to carry jars of pee? Just's both. I doubt pee pee day because who would want to carry jars of pee? Just Washingtonians. Washington.

Everyone in Washington walks around with a mason jar. Just in case. Catheters. Oh, that's a great idea. You move to the state of Washington, you get your catheter. Well, the catheter goes into the mason jar. Right. It's like the mason jar is strapped to your ankle.

You just dribble into it all day so straw urinals in parks seems like super plausible to me because you basically you just want somewhere for people to pee and then you have enough straw you can compost it and it's better than just letting it soak into the ground. I'm going to go with straw urinals. I'm not going to let any of you guys steal it before I get to it. I'm going to go with the human body one. Human compost. Yeah, turn me into dirt.

I like pee-pee days. You like pee-pee days? Yeah. If it's pee-pee days, I will be over the moon for you. Bring out your pee. A couple months ago, it was announced that starting in May 2020 in Washington, it's totally legal to compost human beings. There's already a company that does it. But they're breaking the law?

They're breaking the law, I think. But everybody's like, ah, it's fine. The company is called Recompose. And they put you in a box with straw, bark, and alfalfa, and they turn you into soil, which you can then donate to be planted, to like plant in a public park bed or like a tree or something. Or they give it back to your family, and they can grow a grandma carrot. It was a little unclear to me

because it seemed like at first they wanted to treat it like human ashes, the same rules as human ashes. But I think this new legalization of it will make it so that it is just treated like compost instead of human ashes the same rules as human ashes but i think this new legalization of it will make it so that it is just treated like compost instead of human ashes so you couldn't be dumping it like in public legally i don't think i don't know how long it takes to turn it into compost but like i got a bunch of stuff in me that i wouldn't necessarily want inside of a carrot like i take medicine and i like yeah got mercury fill. Maybe it's case by case. Do they take all the teeth out?

Because you don't want to find a teeth in your grandma cake. I don't know. You're not like putting the compost directly into the cake. I don't know how it got inside the carrot. You grow some corn and then like One of the corn kernels on the cob

Is a tooth What if it was one corn but instead of kernels It was teeth I can't believe that's not a Halloween Decoration Is this a whole corn that's just teeth Oh good thanks Sari I'm so glad that everybody In the world is thinking about that now That's the worst thing I ever heard in my life

Peepy day is a day I made up. But in the UK, the National Trust, which is, I think, from what I can understand, the British version of the national park system, basically they protect

like heritage sites and stuff. There are some parks where employees are encouraged to pee into compost heaps instead of the toilet. And number three, public urinals in Europe are fairly

common and they've been around for a long time, but last year in Paris, there was a new breakthrough in public peeing technology because they put out urinals with straw in them and once they're all soaked with pee-pee, they take all the straw and they put them into composting. A breakthrough technology! Yeah, put some straw in there.

Next up, a short break. And then, it's time for the fact off. Welcome back, Hank Bucktotals. Sari, you're coming in with number one. You could have had two. I could have had two, but it was worth it. I got zero, Stefan's got zero, and Stam is in the lead. Now get ready for the fact-off.

Two of our panelists, me and Stefan, have brought science facts to blow the other's minds. And you, the other panelists, have to decide which fact you want to award your Hank Buck to. We're going to go in order of the person who most recently ate dead animal. For lunch, I had a beef bowl. A beef bowl. A homemade beef bowl. That sounds great. Well, I had

ham inside of a hot dog bun not 30 minutes ago. Alright, so I guess it's me. I feel like I've set myself up to be going first because I knew how recently I had eaten ham, which was very. So a thing that's rough when you're a virus

is that you sometimes infect a host and you take advantage of all of its cellular machinery and you produce so many copies of yourself and everything's going great, but then you accidentally kill the host and it dies and all of its cellular machinery doesn't work anymore and it's just like sad for that organism but also bad for the virus right so when a host of a virus

dies a few things can happen to the virus the thing is going to decompose but the virus also sometimes doesn't make it out okay now sometimes it's able to survive for some time on some bodily fluids or it might be able to infect something else, or thanks to a variety of factors like sunlight and temperature and radiation, the virus itself can decay. So, some scientists wanted to look at virus decay in different benthic deep-sea ecosystems. Because why not? So, benthic deep-sea ecosystems are, you get super deep in water but you're also with sediment so like you're and you're not like in the middle you're on the ocean floor uh and these areas can sustain a lot of prokaryotic life but prokaryotes get infected

by viruses a lot and when they die they get they like break open and they release the virus and according to the scientists estimates about 25 of the released viruses end up decomposing. And viruses are small and simple. So this might not sound like that big of a deal compared to dramatic, gross decomposition of a giant whale that sunk down there. But it turns out that viruses are having a huge impact on this ecosystem where nutrient availability is a very important thing. So the viruses are already sort of helping out by killing the prokaryotes and making their nutrients available, and that releases a bunch of debris for other new organisms to use. But because viruses are really simple, they're just nucleic acids wrapped up in this little protein thing, they get broken down really fast, and they are a great source of carbon, especially because they decay much faster compared to a lot of other

stuff that's sinking in the ocean. According to that paper, all that decomposition might amount, the virus decomposition, these tiny, tiny, tiny organisms might account for up to 50 megatons every year of nice, easily consumable carbon, which they believe is an important contributor to the cycling of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and deep sea prokaryotic metabolism and is thus very important to life overall. 50 megatons of virus decomposition. How much is 50 megatons? All I can say is that if my hand was covered in viruses, it would not be a measurable amount of weight. And a megaton is a lot. How many elephants?

So a megaton is a million tons. Okay. The average elephant weighs around seven tons. So how many elephants? How many elephants? Seven million elephants. About. That's a Seven million elephants, about. That's a lot of elephants.

Yeah. The ocean is just so full of stuff. Isn't the factoid, though, that, like, ants have the most biomass on the planet or something? No, the thing that has the most biomass on the planet is, like, ocean bacteria. Well, this is what it's sounding like. Even on the solid ground, bacteria have more biomass. There's just so much of them. They're just all up and down the ocean columns.

So like the surface of the planet is sort of like a film, whereas the oceans are like... Saturated. They're deep. There's all this space for stuff to be. Pelagibacter. What's that? Ocean bacteria. Pelagibacter is a specific species that is the most abundant species on the planet. Maybe not including viruses because they're not really alive.

Well, it's debatable. It is. I would, I'd go to the mat for viruses. People are always like, viruses aren't alive. And I'm like, well, I don't think they are. They're holding themselves together. They're doing the thing. You think a lot of things are alive.

I do. I also think that Google is alive. Do you think certain cars are alive? Yeah, I think probably maybe some cars have the sort of consciousness of a bacteria. The thing is, people are like, is it alive? And I'm like, well, if a fucking bacteria is alive, then a car is alive. It's making the same decisions. A car can't make another car, though. Is that an important part of it?

Not to me. That's an important part to a lot of biologists the thing about our definitions of life is that they're all designed not with a idea of what life is but with like this is what life looks like and so let's try to describe that but also not describe something that we all agree isn't alive and i don't think that that's how you should be defining things scientifically i think that you need a first principle for what living is. And to me, the first principle of what living is

is something that, like, wants something and moves toward it. What's the car want, though? A self-driving car wants to not hit other cars. I like that. We've signed off.

Okay, good. I got the purple couch on board with my fucked-up life theory. Stefan's turn. So, carrion beetles, those are a group of animals that I completely forgot existed because luckily I don't interact with dead things that often. Carrion beetles are a family of species and then there's a specific genus, Nicrophorus, that is burying beetles. What they do with carcasses is that they try to find a somewhat fresh one because they don't want to compete with maggots.

And then they dig a hole under it so that it sort of falls in and they can bury it. While they're doing that, apparently they take all the hair off and they are secreting a bunch of liquids with their mouth and anus that ends up covering the carcass. Is it the same secretions out of both ends? Unclear. Okay. Unclear. Yeah, it the same secretions out of both ends? Unclear. Okay. Unclear. Yeah, it's like twice as efficient with just two nozzles. I don't know.

I don't know how it works. After they finish this whole process, it's a pair of them that are doing this. There are only two? Oh, do they do it monogamously? Like they love each other very much and they secrete together? Once it's buried, I think males fight for the reproductive access there but in

any case once once they've narrowed it down to a single pair they climb inside and mate which sounds fun and not personally for the beetles and then they lay their eggs inside and when their larvae hatch they like the carcass provides food for them sure but like a carcass is decomposing which is not great for like things that are food like you lose nutritional value over time and also the microbes that are decomposing the carcass are also leaving behind toxic byproducts and things that can damage the larvae but researchers knew that corpses that these beetles interacted with did not decompose as rapidly as corpses that were just left out they were studying this one species microphorus vespelloides to see if they could

figure out like what what was going on there and so they were testing like the different micro microbial communities in the carcass and around on the outside of it and they found that this beetle is basically when it's like spewing up all these secretions it's replacing the decomposition microbes with its own like gut microbes and they are good at out competing those microbes they puke up the good bacteria into their little sex hole what animal is this this is it's, it's a beetle, a burying beetle. No, what animal are they in? Oh, like a mouse or something. So something fairly small?

Yeah, all the examples that I saw were in like a rat or a mouse, not, yeah, not like a cow. Another thing that happens though is when they cover the carcass is that there's a yeast in there that forms this film that like is a protective like casing sort of.

So it keeps those microbes from sort of coming back in and furthering the decomposition and the end these researchers also tried removing the yeast sack that was containing this carcass and found that the the larvae didn't survive as well and also didn't grow as big i'm looking at pictures this is very gross and weird yeah if i saw this on the ground, I would recoil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the dead mouse carcass with some larvae poking out. That's its sex hole.

Yeah, that's the sex hole. Now it all makes sense. They make a little mouse house for themselves. There's the babies inside the sex hole. Oh, I don't like that. That's a bad thing to see. But would you like to be born there? It seems better than a lot of bugs don't even have houses, so yes.

If I was a bug. Yeah, as long as I have a house, it doesn't matter if it's made from a decaying mouse. Because your parents painted it with their butts. Two beetles, four holes. One home. All right, those are very good facts. By which I mean, Steffens was better than mine. But I'll let you guys decide assign your Hank bucks

so I'll count down and then you say who you're assigning it to on three one two three Stefan

I love the sex hole Beatles yeah 50 megatons 50 megatons it's too big a number we can understand two Beatles

four holes one home those are all small 50 megatons. It's too big a number. We can understand two beetles. Four holes. One home. Those are all small. Those are all understandable numbers. I would like that on a shirt. Or a pillow. Embroidered pillow.

Embroidered pillow. Okay. So warm. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we have some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At peach underscore s 17 asks, how long does it really take for my pizza to go bad when I forget to put it in the fridge and leave it on the counter?

So, I can answer this not scientifically, but experientially. Just that it never goes bad. Yeah, it's fine. I've never had pizza i'd never i've never in my life thrown away pizza have you ever gotten sick from pizza no me neither not that i know of what is the oldest pizza you've eaten or like the grossest pizza uh probably

a week plus no whoa that's been left out or refrigerated refrigerated i would get food from around campus there's like free food mailing lists. And since everyone was on their email, they'd be like pizza. Or you just walk by a pizza box. And if it didn't look like people around, you take it. Like in the trash? Sometimes on the like on top of trash cans. I never rooted around inside, but it was like no one wants this pizza.

It's probably fine. Yeah, no, I've definitely had some pizza from the top of trash cans that i had no idea how old it was anyway apparently the government says uh we're all bad people i'm gonna die but first of all this is like sort of decomposition question but sort of not i don't know we're not worried about the breakdown of the pizza compounds and like pizza itself is not going to become toxic as it breaks down it's the things eating the pizza that we're worried about. Okay, okay. So it's like the mold or the bacteria growing on top.

So according to all the official school, government, etc. websites, you should not eat perishable food if it's been out of the refrigerator for more than two hours. What the hell? It seems like so small to me. I completely disagree. seems like so small to me. I completely disagree. The danger zone

is temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 4 and 60 degrees Celsius. That's every temperature. And that's when bacteria can multiply

the most. And so, they were basically like, if your pizza's been out for two hours, more than two hours, don't eat it. Man, I don't want to say

that this podcast, like, don't listen to what we say on this podcast. But, like, don't just throw away your food because it was out for two hours. Okay, so the other thing I found, I found a Quora answer. We'll mark the source as such in our show notes. That's the genius forum. Yeah, of course. No one's ever been wrong on Quora. There was a man on Quora.

Human male on Quora, says. Here, he has a credential, so I'll read his credential. Timothy Sly, foodborne diseases epidemiologist, Toronto. Oh, fuck yes. There you go. This guy seems legit. I trust Canadians. He says,

One week, one week. Pizza is not as hazardous as some would have us believe. Let's break it down. So the crust is a yeast-based bread. It doesn't stay warm and moist enough for us to worry too much. I have noticed that old pizza has very hard crust. The tomato sauce is too acidic for the growth of the type of bacteria that we're typically worried about. Cheese has a low pH from lactic fermentation and very low water activity. too acidic for the growth of the type of bacteria that we're typically worried about. Okay, cool.

Cheese has a low pH from lactic fermentation and very low water activity. This must be why I'm alive. Veggies are not able to grow like the types of Staphylococcus. None of the cold pizza I've ever eaten has had vegetables on it. And stuff like semi-dry pepperoni also has a low water activity. Yeah, you can leave that stuff out forever. So, it goes on. Yeah, it's a salted meat. Ham is apparently one of the most dangerous things you can have on pizza because it's moist meat.

That's great to know. But, bottom line, there's very little threat of a foodborne illness from unrefrigerated pizza left out overnight. This is specifically overnight. For seven or eight nights. That's what it says right after that. Pizza's non-perishable. I think that's what we're learning yeah yeah it's basically dry good shelf stable there's just like very low rates of foodborne illness because of pizza overnight and the u.s government is saying like in the worst case scenario do not eat your wet meat if it's been out for two hours yes and i think like college campuses are saying this too because they don't want to encourage their

students to eat wet meat don't leave your steak tartar out at room temperature yeah and and so like a big concern with these kinds of things because it is worth mentioning more actual science so staphylococcus aureus is one of the big ones, but then there's also E. coli and salmonella and things like that. A couple of these that start growing on food or multiplying on food produce heat-stable toxins, and that's what makes us sick. So even if we microwave the food afterward or heat it up afterward, the toxin is heat-stable. So that's why. The bacteria die, but the bad poop they made sticks around.

Yeah. And so that's why. Microwaving was fixing it. Me too. Well, ish. Yeah. But that's why food safety is so much about like cooking it to the correct temperature and then preserving it and refrigerating it to stop bacteria growth altogether.

Because if you let bacteria grow, then there's a chance that they're producing toxins that won't get destroyed by reheating. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents. That also makes us feel better. Where we will tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Isabella, Carl's3, at Anatomythical, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final Hank Buck scores. Sari, you've got one.

I've got negative one. Jeez, Hank, that's not helping you in the standings. Sam has two and Stefan has two. If you like the show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like like the show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show.

And we'll be looking to iTunes reviews for topic ideas for future episodes. Leave your topic ideas in your iTunes reviews, everybody. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, tell people about us. We also did an episode of SciShow Tangents crossed over with Dear Hank and John, my podcast giving advice with my brother, except my brother wasn't there, and instead, it was you guys. Thanks for doing that. Thank you.

If you want to read more about any of today's topics, we have our show notes at SciShowTangents.org with all of our sources and maybe a picture of a decaying mouse sex hole. Thank you for joining us. I have 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 organizeroki Chakravarti. Our sinister sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our scary social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon. And remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled,

but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. but one more thing because decomposition means a lot of fluids morticians have different ways of keeping corpses from leaking out of their wet holes, including the butt. And so they use things like diapers, cotton, or other absorbent things shoved up there, or what's known as an AV plug. Not audio-video, but anal-vaginal,

which is basically just a plastic stopper that they stick into bodies. Oh, morticians, God bless you.