SciShow Tangents - Fear Month: Failure with Caitlin Hofmeister!

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Here at Tangents, we don't mess around when it comes to Halloween. So each week in October, the topic will be one of our greatest fears! Hank was apparently too afraid to even be on this episode, so instead special guest Caitlin Hofmeister confronts her fear of failure as we tell her tales of science gone wrong! 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]Bubble Wraphttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/accidental-invention-bubble-wrap-180971325/Whoopee Cushionhttps://torontoist.com/2013/04/toronto-invents-the-whoopee-cushion/Vaselinehttps://www.dummies.com/education/history/american-history/the-history-of-an-incredibly-useful-u-s-product-vaseline/https://www.damninteresting.com/nugget/story-of-vaseline/[Fact Off]Mosquito self-limiting geneFour Pests campaignhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/bodyhorrors/2014/02/26/mao-four-pests-china-disease/#.XKzfDOtKhxwhttps://io9.gizmodo.com/china-s-worst-self-inflicted-environmental-disaster-th-5927112https://chineseposters.net/themes/four-pests.phphttp://www.zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htmhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/[Ask the Science Couch]Killifishhttps://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6317/1305https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/against-tide-fish-adapts-quickly-lethal-levels-pollution/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/science/atlantic-killifish-evolution-pollution.htmlRadiotrophic fungihttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-helps-fungi-grow/https://mbio.asm.org/content/7/6/e01483-16https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000457Birdshttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140424223057.htmhttps://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.12283https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/pdf/S0169-5347(16)00019-7.pdf[Butt One More Thing]Artificial poop pillshttps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/sham-poo-washes-out/493811/https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/214/2/173/2572105

Hello, and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Hank's not here. Ha ha ha. But guess who is? Stefan Chin. What's your tagline? I'm jumping right to it.

Jumping right to it. Oh, geez. Sour Patch Kids Ice Cream. And over on the science couch, we got Sari Riley. Hello. What's your tagline? One Big Noodle. And this week we have a very special guest in place of Hank, SciShow senior producer Caitlin Hoffmeister.

Hello. And lots of other things producer. Yeah. Producer at large. Yeah. But I am always here. You are always here just over there with less microphone. My ears feel very naked though when you started talking.

I was like, where are my headphones? Caitlin, what's your tagline? My tagline is tuna medicine. Every week on Tangents we get together and try to one. Oh God. Yourself. I'm me. And it's-up. Oh, God. Yourself. I'm me. And it's me, Sam Schultz.

All right. Every week on Tangents, we get together and try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank Bucks from week to week. They can still be Hank Bucks, even though Hank's not here. Sam Bucks? That's fine. That's fine. You can take over.

It's pre-established too much. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by previous conversations with this group, we will not be good at it. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your Hank books. So tangent with care. And for this, the scariest month of all,

we're doing something a little bit different. Each episode in October will cover a topic that is one of our panelists' greatest fears. So, to introduce that fear, we will have our traditional science poem by Stephen Chin. How can we fly? By flapping? That kind of makes sense. But I guess with tiny pecks like these, we won't find much success. Can we turn lead into gold? It seems like we're so close. But I guess distilled pee is no philosopher's stone.

Why am I sick? Easy. Check the balance of your humors. But I guess now we know about bacteria and tumors. Why do human embryos have little neck slits? Well, clearly those are gills. But I guess it turns out we aren't fish before becoming ourselves. Failure is inevitable when you're asking all these questions, and those failures can send you off in better directions. So failure is important. For a fail, I will cheer. For where we have failed, often knowledge is near. Wow.

It's not a Stefan poem if there's not one rhyme that makes me question all of reality. And that was gills and ourselves. Stefan poems make me feel like the anxiety of my own train of thought building up they're a roller coaster yeah oh yeah the theme this week is failure and it's not stephan's fear it's caitlin's it's my fear why did you pick it because you're just terrified of it all the time i'm terrified of it all the time like you were like what are you afraid of and i didn't even think sam i said it's failure that's a real fear because you know it's like deep in your gut if it just comes out yeah it's a motivating fear though like i think it is really good for science and i think it's good for creativity but i still fight it yeah i think

failure and especially like our kind of career has such a different we have such a different relationship with it than scientists do because when you're looking at like scientific failures it's usually like they just were wrong and then they figured out what they what was right so it's good in science totally well it is good in science a lot of people still cover it up because of the way that it's stigmatized in science. So that's like a whole thing that's going on now where people are trying to get other scientists to publish their failed experiments, too, so that people can learn from them. Because right now, mostly people just publish their successes. So we know what worked, but people are like retrying things that don't work because no one publishes like yeah things that

are bad i was reading something i don't know if you guys saw this when you were researching but there's a movement trying to get publications to agree to publish something at the start of the experiment i was gonna say too they it's the that you submit what you're gonna do yeah publish it regardless of what the outcome is and i can't there's some magazine that's doing it but i can't remember which one it is i can't remember either but i think that's a great idea do you think it's a great idea yeah i do skeptical look on your face i thought oh well literature reviews are already like a difficult thing like that as being a science student was really hard is like wading through papers and finding what matters and finding what doesn't. But I think it's a good idea overall.

I think the skeptical look on my face was just thinking about the ways that people like cheat their values to make their studies seem more significant in order to get published. The whole publishing of science industry is very fraught. And it'd be great if people could just like plug away at their research and collaborate a lot but there's a lot of like hiding what you know or needing to get funding specifically for what you know and like i don't know whoever publishes first gets the accolades instead of just like a collective advancing of our knowledge which is the scientific utopia not how anything

works yeah we all have to be nervous and paranoid about something. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, let's move on now to... Truth or Fail. Ha, ha, ha, ha. One of our panelists, it's me, has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of them is real.

The other three panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact. If they do, they get a Hank Buck. If they are tricked i get a hank book further increasing my lead over all of you failure is generally something people fear something to be avoided at all costs but in the world of science failure like i said earlier it was a great point on my part can frequently lead to new unexpected discoveries which of the following inventions was not the product of scientific

or technological failure? Number one, bubble wrap was originally pitched as a textured wallpaper to appeal to beatniks in the late 50s. The idea flopped, but the inventors devised some more useful applications of their sealed air technology. Number two, whoopee cushions were first conceived of in the late 1920s as an inflatable easily portable bicycle helmet unfortunately the inventors were never able to get the rubber helmets to be strong enough to survive an impact on the street they would break but the fart sound that they made when they were squeezed led to the development of a classic prank toy or number three vaseline was originally an unwanted byproduct of oil pumping that would gum up machines.

Workers in the oil fields figured out that it was great for protecting and healing burns, though, and they would smear it all over themselves. Someone saw them doing this and basically stole the idea and monetized it and made a bunch of money. Stealing from the worker man. Yeah. So, number one, bubble wrap was invented to make beatniks happy as wallpaper. Number two, whoopee cushions were an inflatable portable bike helmet. Or number three, Vaseline was an unwanted buildup. Which one of those is not really the origin story of that invention.

Can I ask what your definition of a beatnik is? I don't know. Beatniks were like people in the late 50s. They were kind of like a precursor to like hipsters and hippies and stuff they were the counterculture of that time and they would like listen to jack yeah definitely the white counterculture that were like stealing a lot from everybody else's counterculture they would sit in poetry bars yeah and listen to jack kerouac say stuff and snap and wear berets things like that

are they all the the people in cartoons that have like black glasses black berets and bongo drums or something Max Goof's girlfriend

friend in Goofy Movie Extremely Goofy Movie I think was a beatnik just to get on your level thank you yeah you have to explain it which cartoon character do I need to point out

definitely the bongo drum thing was a beatnik. That was where I came from. I would guess they were not homeowners. Maybe some of them were. But like lived in shitty apartments in New York, in Greenwich Village. And like would not buy wallpaper. I think they would maybe put up bubble wrap just to be weird.

I don't know. Or maybe to make it sound better for their poetry readings or something yeah like like insulation or something whoopee cushion bicycle helmet sounds too wild to me but maybe that means it's true just like a farting bicycle helmet only if you crash only if you crash and it doesn't work and this is like Yeah, you get a hurt head like a bruise on your face and it farts. And everybody laughs at you. Yeah.

There is an invention today that looks like a scarf and it like deflates like an airbag and comes over your head like a hood. I believe that people are thinking about that. I can't imagine a human has ever looked at a whoopee cushion and thought, this could protect me from a high speed impact.

They didn't know what they were yet. They just got invented. I guess if you think of them as airbags, what if you line your face with airbags and those airbags just happen to fart? Okay, you guys got a guess now? Okay, I'm going to go with whoopee cushion heads. That's not the origin story. Oh, no!

So two of them are real? Two of them are real. One of them is fake. Oh, my God. Okay, I've been thinking about this all wrong. Sorry. I was trying to make that very clear by saying this. You did.

I just forgot. Yeah, yeah. One of the origin stories is a lie. One of them is a lie. And two of them are true. Yeah. I think the Beatnik wallpaper is fake. Yeah, if there's only one of

these that's fake it's the wallpaper but i don't know the whoopee cushion still i'm gonna say whoopee cushion okay i'm in i'm gonna go in on whoopee cushion too okay so you're both saying that one's the whoopee cushion the fake yeah and caitlin's saying the bubble wrap the real fake one is whoopee cushions that is not the origin of whoopee cushions that's great Sam I was thinking exactly of the thing you were talking about that inflates over your head

when you get in a crash but whoopee cushions were invented to be whoopee cushions that's it they just were for fun so bubble wrap

was invented for beatniks to put on their walls yep so originally I hate that Alfred Fielding and Mark Chauvinist

invented it as a wallpaper using two pieces of shower curtain that they heat sealed together. But eventually they figured out that the heat sealing process they invented, because nobody wanted to buy their wallpaper, was more lucrative. So they started heat sealing everything they could think of, it seems like. And eventually IBM paid them to develop a packing material for one of their early computers. And that's how that took off. Their company was called the Sealed Air Company. Cool name. Vaseline was, air quotes,

discovered by Robert Augustus Chesaboro, who owned a failing kerosene business in Brooklyn. And he went to Pennsylvania to see what this oil boom was all about. And while he was there, he saw some dudes like take a big glob of stuff off of a machine that was seized up because it was globbed up and they were rubbing it on like a wound or something and they told him that it helped him heal faster and protected it so then he went home and he stole he like took some of the goo with him purified it and invented vaseline and became

like a billionaire or something how were whoopee cushions invented? So one thing I read said that some ancient Roman emperor invented whoopee cushions. But what he really invented, after I read more about it, was like this prank chair. And he would like deflate the chair while his friends were sitting on it. And then they would be on the floor

and everybody would laugh and laugh. So there were like some kind of air cushion based pranks going on. So in ancient Rome, they had those inflatable furniture from the 90s and you just like poke a hole in it. I mean, ancient Roman emperors were like pretty young, right? This one was the youngest one ever, who they were talking about. So I think probably people have been inflating things and making them make fart sounds since the beginning of time. I love that a whoopee cushion is not something that could be discovered.

It exists in its own way in every civilization. It's from prehistory. It's very important that all cultures discover a farting bag. And you know what? In Canada, it was invented in Canada, like the one that we know was made in Canada. It has been so long since I've seen anyone do the like armpit fart. I've never been able to do that. I also haven't been able to do it.

Can you do it? I don't know if I want to try. Try right now. Yes. We got a yes nod from Tuna. Got it. Okay. And now we're going to take a quick break.

And when we come back. The fact off. Fact off. Fact off. Thank you. All right. We are back. Sari, you have one point. Yay.

Caitlin, you have zero points. I'm so sorry. I'm points. I'm so sorry. I'm failing. I'm on topic. We're just really making you experience the fear. That's part of fear month. Everyone is going to have to confront their fear. You're failing your own episode about failure.

What you listeners don't know is that we're all in a dark room covered in creepy crawlies. We're in underground and we're in coffins. We all have our own coffin. That would sound so much own coffin that would sound so much better that would sound really nice I would never do a podcast

in those conditions well you wouldn't sound good then and we all would we told you it was a sound booth Stefan this is actually a coffin

in front of a funeral home we made Stefan dig his own sound booth alright oh boy I have one point and Stefan congratulations

you have two points. Thank you. Because Hank's not here. Hank's your bad luck charm, I think. Yeah. I almost think you should get a bonus point for your armpit. Hell, yeah. Let's give him a bonus point.

Hank's out of town. There are no rules. Now, everybody get ready for the fact. Two panelists bring science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their slash our minds. The presentees each have a hangbook to award to the fact they like the most. But if both the facts stink on ice, the presentees can choose not to award their hangbook and instead throw them into the witch's cauldron. This week is Sari versus Caitlin and we will decide who goes first based on who had the lowest GPA

in high school. I don't remember getting lower than an A in a class ever. So Sari probably was a four point and probably even higher than a four point

because weighted means that you would have a five point class. Yeah. We need some high schoolers to listen to the show and tell us if we're wrong. Write us in high schoolers.

I once got a C in chemistry and then I came back and got an A in high school. I once got a C in chemistry. And then I came back and got an A the next semester. So I have between like a 3.6 and a 4. I did not have a 4.0. That's still lower than Sarah though. So you go first. 3.6 is a very good GPA.

Don't consider yourself a failure. It's so liberating to get that first bad grade though. It was liberating to get that bad grade because it's like the class I tried the hardest in and liked the most. So I was like, oh, grades don't matter in the way that I thought, you know? Oh, that's interesting. That happened to me in college, like freshman year of college, because everything was so much harder than I expected it to be. And I was like, ah, I'm getting C's in physics and this advanced math class that I'm taking. And it doesn't really matter.

They also do at MIT. The first semester is pass no record. So your grades get erased because everyone was so stressed out heading into the school that they're like, OK, this doesn't affect your GPA at all. You either get a pass or the class disappears from your record for all eternity. But if you pass, it doesn't disappear from your record? And you can ask your advisor for your grade if you want to. So you don't even know how badly you failed if you fail? Yeah, you don't know how well you passed it if you passed

or how badly you failed it if you fail. Mostly I wanted to know my biology grade because that was what I was going to major in. So I was like, did I get an A in this class? What was it? Because it felt good. I did get an A in biology. I got a C in multivariable calculus and physics.

I got a D in German. It was a pity D. Caitlin's going first. It's the point of this. Since Hank's not here, I'm going to talk about him. Once in like 2012 or 2013, he wanted to do a SciShow episode on the deadliest animal ever. And was like really excited about it. And everybody was like getting excited.

And I was like, mosquito. And they were like, oh. And that was like the end of the conversation. Mosquitoes are like not cute. They're not fun to do episodes about. They are annoying and they spread like malaria and West Nile virus. And they're bad. And they look like bad guys and they are bad guys.

They feed bats, which is their one redeeming quality. So in like 2013, a group of geneticists wanted to reduce the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in Brazil. They're the type that carry Zika and dengue and they're often just called yellow fever mosquitoes because they carry yellow fever. When we think about like reducing bug population, we just think about killing bugs, but these are geneticists. And so they work in like generations over time. So their plan was to reduce the population over generations. And this company called Oxitec Limited is a British biotech company that genetically modifies insects to control their populations, sometimes called living insecticide. The idea was to transgenically modify male AE-Gepti mosquitoes so they had a dominant gene that would limit the development of the mosquito,

meaning at a certain point their cells just stop functioning normally. Do they just keel over or is it just they can't reproduce? They kind of like, I think they're like unattractive is like how it was described in a couple of things, but I think they just keel over or just can't reproduce or something there's something wrong with them it's like limiting they're eventually just die really young and so since this is a genetic trait it's a gene it gets passed down to offspring and then the offspring also have this self-limiting gene since it's a dominant gene and died young presumably before they've had a chance to mate lowering the

population of aedes aegypti overall so they took of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that were found in Mexico and Cuba, modified this gene so it would self-limit, quote-unquote self-limit, then released the males in Brazil to hopefully reduce the Zika-transmitting population. Oh no, I bet it didn't work. Yeah, so if you're following this logic, they're using reproduction to produce offspring that can't reproduce. That's a bad idea. It doesn't make any sense. The father mosquitoes could reproduce even though they had this gene.

And these scientists clearly never watched Jurassic Park. Life finds a way. So, obviously, 10 to 60% of the A.E. aegypti population in this trail are now hybrid mosquitoes with this dominant gene that's supposed to mean that they can't exist. These populations have rebounded to near pre-release levels now. The study I was reading was about this Brazilian population, but they've done it in other places too, I guess. And none of them seem to work. The genetically modified strain was from a population found in Mexico and Cuba and then bred with the Brazilian population. So they can survive in lots of places. So they're being described as a robust population

that might eventually replace the original insects. So super mosquitoes. Yeah. That like maybe aren't going to do any worse damage than the originals, but it failed. So they still have the gene. Yeah. But it doesn't seem to actually be doing anything probably it's doing a little bit and some of them probably aren't able to reproduce but enough of them are that it hasn't really affected like they're saying that both in the lab and in real life like it dips for a little bit by by 18 months it's like back up to normal levels so they're supposed to breed and have the sick babies. Right. And then they're supposed to just like go down in population and die.

But that's not really how populations work. So they would have had to keep introducing, I think, maybe males with this strain of self-limiting gene. The males with the gene were able to mate, but it was stopping their offspring from growing properly. Yeah. So it like is limiting enough so that they could survive but were hindered by it but if you like dump that gene into a baby they can't grow big and strong like that's the difference so they can't get to the mating

yeah they can't get their lives so the goal was just to like decrease population over one generation yeah or like you'd have to keep doing a bunch of genetic experiments keep mutating males and then releasing them in waves to be like okay mate and have babies that don't grow up so they just not do that it sounds like they didn't do it or didn't do it enough enough of them in the next generation could meet it sounds like the gene didn't work like they thought it would like even though they put in this self-limited gene to prevent offspring from developing some of them did anyway and so then it was like well why did we even mutate them in the first place because we didn't do a good job stopping their babies from developing right

great fact sari what's your great fact it also has to do a little bit with mosquitoes and also has to do with the question of what if we killed off a bunch of stuff as the communist party in china rose in 1949 one of the really big efforts was to fend off infectious disease and so there were things like massive vaccination campaigns more sanitation infrastructure and more public health personnel but as caitlin mentioned we hate mosquitoes and like we look at them and think that they cause disease. So there was also a public health campaign called the Four Pests Campaign where they wanted everyone to target vectors of disease, rodents for the plague, mosquitoes for malaria, flies because they were annoying and landed on poop, and Eurasian tree sparrows, which ate grain seeds that had a lot of labor to plant. So, like, it took a lot of steps to seed rice paddies.

And so they wanted to combat disease, which is public health related, but also starvation. And even as advised by some biologists, the sparrows were considered menaces to farming and this became kind of a national duty thing where everyone is encouraged to jump on board to like swat flies and kill mosquitoes and stab rats or whatever and like one quote says the chinese people took to the streets clanging their pots and pans or beating drums to terrorize the birds and prevent them from landing so like exhaust birds so they can't rest this is where it gets a little dicey because reporting from Western countries gets a little biased and I can't read Chinese. So I'm going to try to present this in an objective way. One article said that 1 billion sparrows, 1.5 billion rats, 100 million kilograms of flies and 11 million kilograms of mosquitoes were destroyed over the four pests

campaign. Because of that, many infectious diseases had their scope diminished. But what they failed to predict from killing all these things was the massive impacts on the ecosystem. In this case, the sparrows had the biggest impact because any benefit they got from killing them got counteracted because other pests like locusts started rising up and eating the grains. And the scientists and the government started to realize this was the case because they autopsied some sparrows and realized that there were more insects than grains in their stomach. And they were like, oh no, we're killing the wrong thing.

And then there was some messaging readjustment where they, I don't know, repainted the posters and were like, don't kill sparrows, kill bedbugs. Yeah, sparrows are our friends, bedbugs are the enemy. And there are other sociopolitical factors that contributed to this, but some experts think that the sparrow extermination contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, which happened from spring 1959 to spring 1961.

And it was like a very, very bad famine. Or at the very least, it was enough of a problem that they had to start importing sparrows from the then Soviet Union to like mitigate the ecological effects because they killed so many of them. And so this isn't to say China bad, to be totally clear, just because I have to say that explicitly. It's just to say birds good. Birds good. And this is one of many instances where like humans made decisions trying to make things better and then we failed very badly and made things worse. And there are lots

of good posters too, right? There is a good poster and we can link to it. But it's like everything, all the pests impaled on a sword. It's very dramatic. The power of graphic design.

So then at some point maybe there was a version of this poster where they had hastily painted over the bird. Yeah, painted over the bird and just like drawn another big bug.

This is tough. They're both mosquito facts. I'm gonna give it to Caitlin. I'm gonna give mine to Sari because I like that poster a lot. If you can find a good poster for your thing, then I'll give you the

points. No, I think they're trying to like not draw a lot of attention to it. Yeah, I don't really want people to know about that. They're genetically altering things and releasing them into the environment well now we have a very special ask the science couch this week to fit in with our theme of failure we're answering a question from an episode that we recorded but lost due to technical difficulties the topic of the episode that you'll never get to hear was environmental disasters but people still sent in questions and sari still researched them so stefan do you want to read the question sure at mizuki ayu asks have there been any observed adaptations in wildlife that suggests

they are becoming better equipped to survive our disasters kind of like the straw the bees that lived in straws you talked about a couple weeks ago. Yeah, straw bees. Diana Six is a tree biologist. She was on SciShow Talk Show a while back. And when you're a tree biologist, you also have to study the bugs that eat trees. And she talked about

how the white pine beetle is swooping in and killing all these trees. And that's horrible. And they usually die in the winter, but they're not because the climate is changing and winter's not as cold. But following up on her studies a few years later, she realized that the pine beetles are eating trees that are more adapted for cold and leaving trees that are more adapted for warmer weather that's just what she's like observing but like trees have defense mechanisms and they are not selfish you know they sacrifice if one tree is not going to make it another tree could use that energy because they're connected uh via like mycorrhizal fungi and stuff like that. So the theory is, I think it's very early,

the theory is that the trees are adapting and the beetles are part of that adaptation. And I think that is where the most observed adaptations have been is related to climate change. There are birds or rodents or other species that are changing when they breed and when babies are born to adapt to the climate and survive better as the the weather changes and like you don't want your babies to freeze and you don't want them to hatch too early or too late and have time to grow and

have like time them when there's food but i also brought examples of more extreme disasters, like more extreme failures, you might consider. Nice. So there are Superfund sites in the U.S. and like the Berkeley Pit in Butte. So Superfund sites are usually where toxic waste has been spilled or garbage has built up and converted into other chemicals. And it's become a dangerous enough site that the U.S. government has devoted money to cleaning it up and making it not toxic for people who live nearby. And some of these superfund sites are bodies of water

where people have dumped industrial waste, like heavy metals and hydrocarbons and other chemicals that are toxic to the life inside it. But an animal called a killifish, the Atlantic killifish, which is known for being a model organism for some things like development and toxicology and metabolism, are also really sturdy. And we found a mutation in certain populations of killifish living in Superfund sites called the HR mutation,

which is the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, which regulates the immune system. And what it seems like it does is it like switches off their immune system so that they can swim in toxic waters without getting hurt. And they can turn it back on? No, they just survive. They just don't have an immune system.

Basically. It sounds like what happens is they modify their immune system somehow so that it doesn't consider the toxins as toxic. And then they just like live their lives. They can't be entirely well. Yeah. They're probably not entirely well, but they survive instead of dying right away. Okay. What's a model organism?

So a model organism, lab rats are considered to be a model organism. They're things that we experiment in to test drugs in humans or test out what genes do. So usually they have like a similar gene profile to humans or they, if you break certain genes, they react in similar ways as if you broke those in humans. you break certain genes they react in similar ways as if you broke those in humans and so they're just like useful organisms that don't have the ethical implications of experimenting in monkeys or humans but it's just a little fish yeah because just a little fish they breed quickly yeah you can like get a bunch of them and try try things like you don't feel bad. Well, you do feel bad. I experimented with mice once and I felt so bad. But you don't feel as bad introducing toxins into their system and seeing which ones develop cancer or something like that. That's something you can do with a model organism, but not with like a human population necessarily.

So there's killifish in labs somewhere having experiments done to them? Yeah, lots of killifish in labs having experiments done. And also killifish living in extremely toxic water and just kind of chugging along and we're like, I guess they're surviving and have genetic mutations to do so. Yeah, but they probably are like, I don't feel so good. Yeah. If you want to ask the Science

Couch, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. And even if the episode gets deleted, we'll figure out a way to answer your question. Thank you to at Rage Against Twit, at Bree Beecher, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this last

episode. Final Hank Buck scores. Caitlin and Sam, me and you. One point! Last place. We don't have to fail alone. In second place, Sari with two points. And in very first place, Stephen Chin with a bonus point. Three points. And in very first place, Stefan Chin. With a bonus point.

Three points. Bonus point for farting armpit. We can never tell Hank that a fart got Stefan another point. Otherwise, he will be insufferable. He'll be coming in here with talents all the time. Well, he got an extra point when he brought his guitar in. That's true. It's a musical instrument point. Yeah, and I think that you wanted that extra point.

So you are just a sucker for talents, Caitlin. I am. Sari's going to come in here and fence us, and she'll get a point. Oh. And I think that you wanted that extra point. So you are just a sucker for talents, Caitlin. I am. Sarah's got to come in here and fence us and she'll get a point. Oh, yeah. I don't have any talent. So my talent is being good at this show. That's why you're the host. If you like the show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, leave a review wherever you listen. It's super helpful and it helps us know what you think about the show. And also, we are still looking at iTunes reviews for topic ideas. More of those are coming in the future

after Fear Month. Second, tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your support and love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Tell people about us. If you want to read more about any of the things any of us talked about, you can check out

SciShowTangents.org to find links to the topics, pictures of propaganda posters about killing animals, and all kinds of stuff like that. Thank you for joining us. I've been Sam Schultz. I've been Stephen Chin. I've been Caitlin Hoffmeister. And I've been Sari Riley. That was weird. It was all wrong.

SciShowTangents 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 me, 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 Tuna-Medesh, who is also recording this episode.

He's in the room with us right now. 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'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing. Some people have been trying to do fecal transplants by making capsules of microbes that simulate the composition of poop instead of actually collecting and freezing poop. And one of these, called SER-109, was designed with 50 species of microbes to treat recurring Clostridium difficile infections, which cause intestinal inflammation. C. diff is bad, bad, bad, bad. And in June 2015, the U.S. FDA considered it an

especially promising therapy. But in July 2016, it underwentS. FDA considered it an especially promising therapy. But in July 2016, it underwent a phase two drug trial and didn't do any better than placebo. So scientists think there's something about the whole community of poop microbes that make it special. And these fake poop pills were a failure. Even though it's the same exact thing? Basically the same thing, but not all the nuances of the species they just pick like the 50 most prominent that they think make up poop right but then scientists are like no every single like weird microbe in poop makes a difference probably that's beautiful that is really beautiful