SciShow Tangents - Feathers

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary and champion of Curse Boba, Sari Reilly. A lot more epithets. I didn't know I was champion. And also our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Someday I'll get another honorific.

Starting point is 00:00:34 What do I have to do? Become a wolf. Our resident everyman and wolfman. If only, Hank. Way to hit upon one of my greatest wishes and regrets of all time that I can't be your hair is looking sort of wolfman today yeah Rachel didn't cut my hair in a long time I'm going through it you know by going through by going through it do you mean slowly turning into a wolfman by going through the change as they called it in my family excuse me yeah you didn't get the

Starting point is 00:01:03 talk about the change Sam the last day of my life when i'm 100 years old i'll be like my transformation will be complete i'll be like finally yeah but it's it's a slow transformation but like it all it only appears all together when you finally are complete yeah the last day of my life when i'm 100 years old yeah much like a pokemon evolution like that's how it works. When I reach level 100 and I have high friendship and it's nighttime and I'm holding the right stone, then that's it.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Then you'll start glowing and your dream will come true. So when Pikachu's level 100, he's 100 years old. Is that what you're implying? There's a lot of old Pikachus out there. There's a lot of old guys out there. And then you'll be like a very old wolf man and you'll try to rip the throat from a rabbit and the rabbit will just be like i'm faster than you old man yeah what are you doing bud yeah giving me a little snowball right at your nose i need a carrot in front of you like hit me yeah uh so if you could be any cryptid genuinely i'd be a vampire i have no problem with being a vampire i could stay up all night

Starting point is 00:02:11 sleep all day would you just feed on rats like vampire listat and the sewers of paris there's so many deer around here it would be easy they just hang out in my yard i would just be like the twilight boys they ate deer right exactly yeah be up, bud? No nods in the room. No nods. I know more about Twilight than everyone in the room. This is me. I said exactly because I know precisely that you're correct. I watched the movie.

Starting point is 00:02:35 And I think I did read the first book, actually. My dad read the books before they were cool because he was like, hmm, I like vampires. He was really into vampire diaries and things like that and a local pacific northwest author i might as well support her and then he was like i don't think this is a good book but i'm gonna keep reading them to support a local author and then they got huge and he was like well maybe he told a friend who told who told two friends and they told two friends you know i brought them to my school because of that because like he bought a copy and i was like

Starting point is 00:03:09 this is fine and then i but i didn't i didn't participate in the fandom aspect of it like other people from my school took road trips to forks washington because it was it's like far ish but not too far strips yeah yeah totally oh man i've been alive a long time you guys i think if uh on this topic i think if i was a cryptid i'd be a stephanie meyer because it feels like it comes with a lot of money oh you want to be a rich cryptid you could be a leprechaun or something yeah yeah what kind of cryptids go goblins got their own special gold but i don't think you can spend it dragons have hordes but is a dragon a cryptid are these some of these aren't cryptids i feel i you know it's i think that we can be loose as we found here on such a tangents defining

Starting point is 00:03:50 things is very messy no one really knows it's just a guy that you see out of the corner of your eye that's encrypted you know okay i have a new conspiracy theory i have to tell you about real quick that apple has increased the how easy it is to trip Siri. Because that never used to happen to me. And now every time I say your name, it happens to me. It goes, hello, what do you need? Are you bringing that up because Siri is probably a cryptid? She is probably the closest to a real-world ghost or something. Yeah, Siri and Bored Apes.

Starting point is 00:04:19 Those are the two real-world ghosts that actually happened. Well, I don't want to be either of those. I want to be a swamp monster. A swamp. Not minding my own business in the water. Sometimes emerge. Just like Shrek. Just like this.

Starting point is 00:04:41 Get out of here. I'm podcasting. I want to be Stephanie Meyer. And I think that Sam wants to be. I'm just going to be a vampire. What a boring answer in retrospect. Every week here on SciShow Extensions, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts, while also trying to stay on topic.

Starting point is 00:04:57 Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of these two goons will be the winner. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Sari. Hope is the thing with feathers, poetically at least. But actually, these delicate fans are just weird growths of beast.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Beta keratins twisted and packed into interlocking barbs for fluffy warmth or a mighty flap or neon mating garb. The diversity of plumage outcompetes that of all birds. So thank you, evolution, for never not being absurd. The topic for the day is feathers, specifically feathers. Can I guess that this one has extremely easy to define? There is no there's no question about what a feather is i'm gonna i'm gonna defy sam's explanation guess and and say that actually

Starting point is 00:05:52 probably there's a place where it gets fuzzy i also thought it would be simple but feather scientists are sitting on the biggest like deep rabbit hole of what even is a feather there are so many different kinds of feathers they're super weird and when you start thinking about them too hard you get grossed out or at least this is my experience okay it is weird that they just sort of like get oozed out of the skin yeah like they they are skin growths and i guess everything like hair is technically a skin growth and scales are technically a skin growth um but they are according to some sources like one of the most complex skin structures like part of the

Starting point is 00:06:32 integumentary system so like the outer protection on on vertebrates they are one of the most complex structures your skin is that the integum integui into gary system yeah so like skin nails hooves scales okay but like feathers compared to something like skin which is very complex it has pores and whatnot or compared to something like scales which have kind of like a relatively uniform structure all around there are so many different types of feathers uh that can form if you picture a feather that comes to mind that is probably a wing or a tail feather like that smooth shaped they are specialized for flight either for like pushing air or for steering mid-flight and they have a clear central shaft and these sticky outy parts are called barbs or

Starting point is 00:07:27 barbules and they are aligned and usually intertwined but then you get into so many different types there are like these feathers called contour feathers that start getting a little fluffier that kind of give birds their shape their down feathers, which are the stuff beneath that, that help keep birds warm. But then you get into things like phylo plumes, which are short feathers with just like a couple barbs at the end. And they work like whiskers for birds. Like they are feathers that work like whiskers. Why not? There are bristles, which are just feathers without the side bits. Just a stick? Just a stick sticking out of the bird what is those it's a feather hair yeah halfway between feather but or there are feathers

Starting point is 00:08:13 that have all kinds of weird designs like tail feathers that are mostly stick but then at the end they have a weird fan or a swirl or a twirl these are all feathers there's no nobody saying that is and isn't a feather right yeah no one's saying that that isn't a feather but like you think about them as weird skin growths and how do they form like that where it gets weird biologically keratin wise and maybe this is me overthinking it now, is like trying to define what makes a feather from that. It's like, oh, it's a structure made of this protein and it looks weird, but it can look weird in a hundred different ways.

Starting point is 00:08:55 What is the protein it's made of? Keratin. So it's just like hair. It's just another keratinous structure. Yeah. And so at what point is it not a hair anymore is there like a biochemical difference or is it just because it looks a certain way because like famously birds do not have hair only mammals have hair and so but like why what's the what's the thing that

Starting point is 00:09:20 like do we just have does it turn out that we have feathers? Or did the human bird, like, last common ancestor, what did that thing have? Oh. Did it have hair or feathers? Did feathers turn into hair? Actually, I don't know. I think they were independent. I think they, because they are feather follicles and there are hair follicles, but I think those are convergent evolution. I think.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Uh-huh. but I think those are convergent evolution. I think, I think, I think there are slightly different forms of keratin in mammalian hair, horns, hooves compared to the keratins found in reptiles, birds, claws, scales, beaks, shells,

Starting point is 00:10:00 feathers. But then it gets still fuzzy a little bit of what these growths are it seems like what what was before feathers and scale and hairs with scales scales were first and then and then like that that was the biochemical ancestor anyway of both feathers and hairs and some birds feathers look kind of like hair if you look up a kiwi yeah it's shaggy little guy little baby chick that looks like it just has hair all over it a little fuzzy fella oh man you guys i did not realize how distantly birds and people are related like a worm or something yeah like we're like it's basically we're as the same

Starting point is 00:10:41 distance from alligators and how distant is is that, though? Is that like talking worm territory? No, I mean, it had a spine. It had a vertebra. It was bone territory. Yeah, okay. Bone territory. Actually, now that I hear all this, I feel like, hey, feathers are a pretty specific thing. I agree.

Starting point is 00:11:02 Sarah's trying to convince us not, but trying to inject some drama. Yeah, maybe that's it. I'm bringing myself to this definition. You're always trying to start shit, Sari. So this word I bet is old as heck because people have been using these things for a long time. Yeah. And I couldn't find anything really interesting about it because we just pointed it out because birds have been around and we were like, well, that's a feather. So it comes from the old English word feather uh which is of germanic origin from

Starting point is 00:11:31 the german fetter oh and then somewhere in between that i cannot find the linguistic link but the like the root is from latin um penna which. And then it's also the root word that led to pen because a quill pen. Because they were the same thing for a long time. Yep. You had it on birds and then you plucked it out and then you wrote a little poem. You wrote a little song for your neighbor. Nobody writes songs for their neighbors anymore. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:00 Back in the day, people were writing odes. People were writing epic poems. You just show up at your neighbor's house and you just hand them and it's like, somebody once told me the world is going to end. Okay, now it's going to be time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing a game called Torf. It's truth or fail. In 1996, paleontologists discovered dinosaur fossils with some surprising

Starting point is 00:12:27 things on them. They were feathers. And since that discovery, paleontologists have continued finding more examples of feathery dinosaurs. Most of them seem to belong to meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods. And the more examples we find, the more questions scientists have about how and why feathers evolved in dinosaurs. So today, our Truth or Fail is all about dinosaur feathers. I will present you three tales, but only one of them is true. It's up to you to figure out which is the true story. Are you ready? Yes.

Starting point is 00:12:54 Yes. Story number one. When scientists peered into a sample of amber from Spain, they found a bunch of downy dinosaur feathers packed together densely. The dinosaur that gave rise to the feathers is unknown. But what was more interesting to scientists was what they found buried inside. Larval molts belonging to an ancestor of modern-day feather and skin-eating beetles called dermestids. Hmm. Or it might be story number two.

Starting point is 00:13:22 Feathers may have evolved since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but that does not mean that we can't use them to evolve our modern day technologies like badminton shuttlecocks. A badminton company has developed a new shuttlecock whose nylon feathers are inspired by the short feathery fibers found on Dylong paradoxus, a predator related to T-Rex, with the promise that these feathers will make a more aerodynamic birdie. Or maybe it's fact number three. After paleontologists identified dinosaur fossils with feathers similar to modern aquatic birds, scientists wanted to see how their feathers might have evolved and led to the modern-day aquatic bird feather. So they constructed robot ducks decorated with synthetic feathers inspired by the fossilized feathers and found that these feathers were not as efficient at releasing water compared to duck feathers. So either it's story number one, dinosaurs may have had to contend

Starting point is 00:14:16 with feather-eating beetles, story number two, badminton company created a dinosaur birdie, or story number three, scientists built a robo duck with dinosaur feathers. When researching feathers, all you find is scientists thought this about dinosaur feathers, scientists, scientists thought that about dinosaur feathers. So I saw a version of all of these stories. I didn't read any of them,

Starting point is 00:14:39 so I have no idea, but I know that, that they all are something. I don't think the shuttlecock one could be right because why would you pick something old from before feathers were any good to be aerodynamic? That's my only thought. Who's to say that just because it's old

Starting point is 00:14:53 doesn't mean it's good? Some of the best things in life are old. Like kisses. I'm a zoomer. So, you know, I don't like old people. I always see when I look at your literal gray hairs. I had gray hairs when I was 14. So when I was a Zoomer, I did have gray hairs.

Starting point is 00:15:11 Okay. That's not how generations work. But yeah, I hear you. Yeah, we just become each generation, right? To be fair, every old person, I'm pretty sure, will be a boomer for the rest of history. Yeah, that'll be interesting to see if they just start calling people boomers after the boomers are gone. Age into boomer. That is a permanent age of humanity now. As soon as you start griping about not singing your neighbor's songs, you boomer immediately.

Starting point is 00:15:40 Uh-oh. That's it. Nobody writes me poems anymore. Yeah. uh oh nobody writes me poems anymore yeah they don't make shuttlecocks like they used to back in the dino day I also I'm skeptical about that because I do I know

Starting point is 00:15:56 that they make them with feathers and it's something to do with you only want feathers from one wing so they spiral good or something like that this is an extrapolation of just the fact that shuttlecocks exist perhaps and are made of feathers yes the other two though i know they're always finding everything in am everything's in amber yeah because it's a good preservation method something died something dropped a feather and bugs love hanging

Starting point is 00:16:22 out on trees so they're always getting trapped in there the problem is is i have very bad paleontology knowledge so i don't like the spain part is throwing me because i feel like a lot of these amber specimens are usually like east asia but dinosaurs are all over the continents and the continents have rearranged so you know i think i saw a version of the robot duck thing that was not this story, but something about ducks doing something else. So I don't think it's that one.

Starting point is 00:16:50 I do think it's maybe the Amber one because that just seems right to me. That one also rings the most true to me. I'm not going to metagame. I'm too tired to metagame. I think it's the Amber one too. I'm going to go with my instinct. Two Amber votes. Yes, two Amber 1-2. I'm going to go with my instinct. Two Amber votes?

Starting point is 00:17:06 Yes. Two Amber, two Furious. Yes. Amber. I'm walking in for Amber. All right. Dylong Paradoxus is a small relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex, reaching two meters long.

Starting point is 00:17:17 And some fossils show that the dinosaur is likely covered in a fluffy layer of protofeathers, but no one's ever tried to make badminton birdies with them. Okay, phew. Additionally, scientists in South Korea recently built a robotic dinosaur to test out a theory about how their feathers may have been used to flush out prey.

Starting point is 00:17:33 So that's cool, but nobody ever built a robo duck with dinosaur feathers. It's true. They're besteds. Also called skin beetles, were found in fossilized amber along with some dinosaur fluff. You guys are both correct.

Starting point is 00:17:48 Hooray. Do you like the part where I made you think over and over again that you fainted? Yeah, that was a fun way to present it. Yeah. A lot of twists and turns. Apparently, we can't conclude much about whether or not the mystery dinosaur the feathers came from would have had beetles as a pest. the feathers came from would have had beetles as a pest. According to the scientists involved in the study, the larvae weren't feeding on the living feathers and didn't have the structures and modern dermestids that they use to irritate the skins of their hosts. So they think the beetles

Starting point is 00:18:15 probably were not causing the dinosaurs much harm. Sounds lovely. That's nice. Birds do look really creepy if they have like some sort of feather parasite and lose a patch of it. They need their feathers for sure. They need their feathers to be cute, to be wholesome. And then as soon as those are gone, it's like, oh, I see how you are an avian dinosaur. Humans are really the only animal that looks good naked. Well, that's good.

Starting point is 00:18:49 That's a nice, safe statement to make, yeah? I think that's true. I think you're right. Yeah, like you see a hairless cat, you're like, nope. Hairless bears, very bad. Yeah, really scary. Really scary.

Starting point is 00:19:01 So bad. That's true. I don't know. What other naked animals we got out there? I mean, really, hairless cats are the closest to being acceptable, and they're pretty far from acceptable. Pretty far away. So I think you're right. Naked mole rats, not good.

Starting point is 00:19:16 A sheep shaved looks good. A shaved sheep? A completely hairless sheep, I think, would maybe just look kind of normal, I guess. Yeah, naked mole rats don't have any hair and they look very bad. Hippos, whales. Whales. Pretty good. Whales look great naked.

Starting point is 00:19:33 And dolphins. Whales are dolphins. Dolphins are whales. Well, okay. Not to me. Not to me. Somebody asked me recently, they were like, what's the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise? And I looked it up and I was like, absolutely nothing.

Starting point is 00:19:46 Like, there are two different things. We call some things dolphins and some things porpoises, but taxonomically no sense to the what we call what. So I think we should just call all of them whales. And that's where I'm sticking to it. I don't want to say cetacean.

Starting point is 00:20:02 People are going to think I'm terrible. I agree with you. I think you're right. But you got to have at least another adjective. You got to have big whale, fun whale. Happy whale, mean whale. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, then within that, you say blue whale.

Starting point is 00:20:15 Blue whale and dolphin. But when you say both, you are saying whale. Dolphin is whale from now on. Got it. This is science law but if you want to if you're talking about dolphin then you say what you say i think happy fun whale was was my dolphin a fun whale look at that naked fun whale yeah look at that naked fun whale it sure does look good pretty good over there man it looks like he could have a good time, if you know what I mean. A hairy dolphin would be really disturbing, too.

Starting point is 00:20:46 Hairy dolphin! Hairy dolphin! I think all the animals around us have the appropriate amount of covering when they are healthy. Yeah. It all worked out somehow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somehow. I like the idea, except for naked mole rats.

Starting point is 00:21:02 They really, that did not. That's the wrong call. I love the idea that like dolphins would like swim and like they like a super sleek hair to sort of like flowing behind them. But then when they dry off on land after a little bit, it's just like a big fro. Yeah. I like that too. It's like super fluffy curly hairs.

Starting point is 00:21:20 Yeah. Next, we're going to take a short break. Then it'll be time for the fact. All right. Welcome back, everybody. Now get ready for the fact art. Our panelists have all brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and I will award them Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And I could do that just out of malice. We don't even have to be playing a game. You could just call us one day and say, you get 100 Hank Bucks. Sarah, you lose 100 Hank bucks.

Starting point is 00:22:06 I'm a cruel master, but I'm in charge, so whatever I say goes. Anyway, you want to do some trivia question to decide who goes first? I guess. You're making the rules now. That's too bad. Sam and I are monkeys dancing.

Starting point is 00:22:20 I don't have it open right now. Trivia question, you guys, to decide who goes first. Outcast famously commanded us all to shake it like a Polaroid picture. But maybe he should have told us to shake it like a peacock trying to attract a peahen. In 2016, scientists published the results of a study on how peacocks rattle their train, that's what it says, to convey their interest and merits to a potential mate. I don't know if that's the actual word for a peacock's tail feathers. I feel like maybe it is.

Starting point is 00:22:54 But the question is, how many times per second does the peacock shake their tail feathers? I was so distracted by the fact that you said Outcast was a singular person that I didn't even hear the question. So I'll say, i'll say 14 outcast is a bunch of people outcast is a big boy and andre 3000 oh wow andre 3000 specifically saying that song that you were referring to i'm i'm learning every day wow okay i was just distracted, but by a completely different part of the sentence, which is that

Starting point is 00:23:28 it's peacocks and peahens, which makes sense for the genders of the birds. Yeah. Female peacock is a peahen. Baby peacocks are called pee-bee-bees. Wow. Sciences and nature are both amazing so i think well yeah and pvps cannot shake their tail feathers because they are not sexually mature uh and so they do not have their beautiful tail feathers

Starting point is 00:23:57 i think it's gonna be like i think it's fast i think it's like 40 40 shakes per second baby peacocks are actually there is a name they're called p chicks oh yours is better it makes more sense yeah but pbb is better petition for pbb pbb we had 14 and 46 is that what we had yeah oh gosh this is close actually sam you are closer it's 26 so not not far off either of you that's much more than i would have guessed that's a lot of shaky shaky that is not how fast i go when outcast sings for what unit of time are we talking for a second oh see i missed that part that's really fast yeah no i shake my polaroid picture far slower than a peacock. I could probably do it like four times a second. I don't know. Yeah, maybe.

Starting point is 00:24:48 No, I think like maybe one. That seems really generous. Like a little more than one. It's impossible to count one second and also shake your butt at the same time. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, yeah. I can't. No, it's not.

Starting point is 00:24:59 Aren't you focused on the butt shake? You can only count the shakes. Yeah. Neither of you are trying to shake your butt right now. I'm currently shaking my butt entirely. I just have a very still upper body. You have good movement isolation. That's what I always say about you, Sam.

Starting point is 00:25:16 Yeah. So this all, we got to move on. Sam goes first. Okay. Humans love eating chicken. They love it so much that in 2020 73 billion chickens were slaughtered for me worldwide compared to 332 million cattle which is bonkers right chickens are much smaller well yeah that's my next point hank a chicken is one one hundredth the meat of one cow but i do

Starting point is 00:25:40 think that the math still works out to that. People are wild about chicken meat, right? That's still like whatever 332 million times 100 is still less than 73 billion. Yeah. Yep. So, OK, but when you slaughter and prepare chickens to be eaten, you are left with a bunch of, you guessed it, feathers. 10% of a chicken's weight is its feathers. So that's a lot of feathers per chicken and you can't turn feathers into leather even though they rhyme like you could with slaughtered cattle a lot of these feathers they just end up getting thrown away or even worse incinerated and as feathers break down or burn they release sulfur dioxide which can cause stuff like acid rain and among other bad

Starting point is 00:26:24 things so chicken feathers are sort of a big, bad problem that you don't really think about all that often. That's right. Science, however, is on the case. And one of their proposed solutions, what if we just ate feathers? I don't like this solution. Chicken feathers, like fingernails and hair, like you mentioned, are pretty much made entirely of the protein keratin and proteins can be good food if you can digest them and digesting but however digesting keratin is pretty hard i'm just picturing like me with just like white feathers and also like hank saying who wants to eat feathers but scientists don't let things like that stop them, do they?

Starting point is 00:27:05 That's right. In 2017, a team of researchers from Lund University in Sweden published a paper identifying a strain of bacteria that is able to break the keratin in chicken feathers down into amino acids, which can then be eaten and digested by animals. These bacteria were isolated by one of the researchers on his parents' chicken farm. And I couldn't find more info about that. Wow. So he found the bacteria, like, eating feathers on the feather farm. Did he find, like, a melty feather and go, like, something's going on here? Anyway, this particular process, I think, breaks the feathers down into just, like, mush.

Starting point is 00:27:37 And then that mush gets added into animal feed. You feed it back to the chickens. Probably. Unfortunately, yeah. But there are other people out there that are messing around with similar processes. And in 2020, an art student worked with scientists using something very akin to this process that instead turned the feathers into something with a more meat-like color and texture. Did you say an art student?

Starting point is 00:28:00 Uh-huh. Okay. I think he was getting a lot of help from scientists but it wasn't our student this feather meat was then made into a series this is where the art student part comes in into a series of fine dining type dishes as sort of a proof of concept of what we could be doing with our food waste this feather meat mimics real meat in many ways well not real meat just meat but this feather meat mimics meat in many ways but is reported to be entirely devoid of flavor, which is cool and also unnerving.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Yeah, that sounds right. I guess it makes sense for liquefied fingernails wouldn't taste like chicken. As a small aside, there are other less immediately viscerally unpleasant things that people are figuring out to do with chicken feathers, like repurposing the keratin into semi-permeable membranes that can be used in stuff like batteries, which you don't eat, except for the one batteries that I talked about that you do eat. Yeah. Also, that I did use to put them in my mouth because they were in the freezer,

Starting point is 00:28:59 and I liked them being cold in my mouth. The batteries? Batteries were in the freezer? Yeah, we got the batteries in the freezer because it was supposed to keep them alive longer. Is that true? Well, my facts are over. So anyway, here's my finale. All of this research could also set us up for a future where we collect all of our hair and fingernail clippings,

Starting point is 00:29:18 pour some microbes on them, and then it's dinner time, baby. Sam, that's such a good fact. I hate it so much.'t it the pictures there's pictures and they're really gross so bad just looks like mushy looking chicken feathers oh my god like the future where you know you just like put a couple of tablespoons of feather dust into your curry because you need the protein yeah i'm not looking forward to mush and the you would definitely feed it back to the birds but like is that weird i don't know i like i could i'd eat my hair if i could it's i feel

Starting point is 00:29:53 like it's better than feeding them chicken meat that's a weird thing to say hank but i totally agree with you i would also eat my own hair like i would eat human hair i'm just saying i need human hair way before i need eat human meat. Totally. I don't think. Yes. I think if somebody presented me something that tasted perfectly fine or like nothing and said, I made that out of liquefied human hair, I guess I don't know what my reaction would be as I say it out loud. Now that I've gotten this far down the sentence, I'm not comfortable exactly finishing it. I think if it tasted like a chicken nugget, even if it was made from human hair.

Starting point is 00:30:24 Yeah. I'd be like, oh, I'm going to eat this now. It tastes like a chicken nugget and I like chicken nuggets. This is my whole attitude towards fake meats also. If it tastes as good as a chicken nugget I'm eating, I don't care what it's made of. I mean, and I've been guaranteed that it's not going to hurt me. I mean, and I've been and I've been guaranteed that it's not going to hurt me. Yeah, that's not true. That it is digestible and will not injure me. Yeah. I, Sam, that's nuts. How how recently did they do this to feathers?

Starting point is 00:31:13 2020 is when the art student did his thing. And I think 2017 was when the first paper came out. And those researchers now, they like have a company that makes microbes that break down all kinds of stuff, including feathers, kind of on a large scale level. You know, I want to sign up. I want to eat the feather mush. We can get some. You said that they were like in Europe somewhere? Yeah, Sweden. All right, I'm going. Sweden sounds great.

Starting point is 00:31:26 I mean, they can mail you some, I bet. Yeah, I want to go Sweden. Okay. All right, Sari, you have quite a hill to climb here. I am really astounded by this feather protein mush. It's an uphill losing battle, but I'll do my best. The Namaqua sandgrouse is a very cute little bird that lives in the dry desert on the ground and flies in a fast and direct manner singly or in groups which feels a little like bullying to me honestly dumpy is not a descriptor of science stuff

Starting point is 00:32:14 um they do kind of look like pigeons but with pointy tails the looks can be deceiving because adult male sand grouse have a very special adaptation hiding underneath that dumpiness. They can soak up water using their tummy feathers and fly it back to their babies to drink. The first formal paper describing how these feathers worked was published in July 1967 by Tom Cade and Gordon McLean, estimating that male sand grouse could soak up around 25 milliliters of water, which is around 15% of their body weight. And even with evaporation, they estimated that the sand grouse could still deliver a good amount of that, like 10 to 18 milliliters to their nests around 10 to 30 kilometers away. So flying quite a distance in the dry desert, still have water.

Starting point is 00:33:01 And in April, 2023, Lorna Gibson and and yachen muller uh did a more detailed analysis on the structure of these feathers using modern microscopy tools to see what was going on basically what they found was that these belly feathers have two separate parts there's like an outer part with straight barbs those like the feather offshoots from the central shaft and then the inner part closest to their flesh has a tight coiled structure so when they get wet the tightly coiled part unwinds becomes uh like straighter flat featherier and provides a lot of surface area for water molecules to grab onto and kind of like form this, I don't know, in the way that water bunches up through capillary action and surface tension, like form this lump of water. And each feather basically

Starting point is 00:33:51 becomes a separate tube sponge structure holding onto water on their bellies. And it's like not a coincidence. These males go into the water and they shimmy around for like five minutes and soak up water. And it's specifically the males and they shimmy around for like five minutes and soak up water. And it's specifically the males because they looked at the tummy feather region in females as well. And it's smaller and the feathers aren't structured to hold as much based on the same absorption tests of just like putting water on the feathers, which is weird on its own. And then they mentioned at the very end of the paper, because I think modern papers are like, what's the point of this? I think they wanted to look into it because

Starting point is 00:34:27 it was really weird but it may also help us design some like water soaking or capturing technologies inspired by by these tummies it's like a camelback but it's a bird belly yeah we can create a competing company to camelback who needs camelback waterfowl? Bird front. It's called bird front. It's called bird front. And you can have each both on at the same time, and then you'll be real hydrated. If I had one of these birds and I squeezed it, the water come out. You'd have a little drink, I think. Neither of these papers did say how the chicks suck the water water out of their tummies i assume that they just

Starting point is 00:35:06 kind of just get in there yeah exactly like that but yeah i imagine that you'd be able to scoosh it out you you too as a human it wouldn't be very much water uh it's a lot of water for a baby bird but 10 milliliters of water is not very much. I do like the idea of just being in the desert and just like no water at all. And I find a bird and I'm just like licking a bird. Who's the survivalist guy? Bear Grylls. Bear Grylls. He's always out there licking birds.

Starting point is 00:35:38 Yeah. Yep, slurping down a bird. So I have to choose between chicken feathers being a source of pollution but maybe they're a source of nutrition or uh sari and the male sand grouse belly feathers soak it up water like a sponge to feed that little cute little that's really cute it's more cute it's pretty cute but it's not as fascinating it's not as fascinating as a bowl full of feather gruel. I think I'm on a hot streak. I think I'm winning this season.

Starting point is 00:36:11 Sam, you are trouncing me this season. Honestly, sometimes I feel bad about it. Wow. Sam's figured out the calculus. The magic formula, yeah. Maybe it's just that Sarah has too many epaulets. What's it called? Yeah, I've got too many epaulets.

Starting point is 00:36:30 They're all over me. They're hiding my eyes. They're hiding my ears. Weighing down my brain. Epithets. Is that right? Yeah, and then I'm a fraud. I worked so hard to get them and then gave up completely. Sam's bringing his A-game this season.

Starting point is 00:36:43 That's right. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask a listener question to our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. Sky on Discord asks, do feathers grow entirely within the skin and then come out as a whole, or do they get extruded

Starting point is 00:36:57 like hairs? And when you put it that way, it kind of gross, doesn't it? I think they get extruded like hairs. I guess they come out all twisted up and then they go poof. Yeah. Yeah? Is that the question? That is it. And that's the answer. But they come out like one bit at a time.

Starting point is 00:37:13 Yeah. They do get extruded. And so like a hair, the tip is the oldest part and the base is the newest part. But unlike a hair, there's more stuff going on the outermost layer of a developing feather that is being extruded from a feather follicle is a sheath that disintegrates later to let the feathers pop out and then the middle layer within that sheath is all the keratin filaments. So the stuff that will form the central bit called the rachis and then the barbs. They're all made of the same material, just compacted in different ways where like the barbules are the most feathery and the barbs are less. And then the rachis is like the toughest little bit and then

Starting point is 00:38:06 within that is the pulp which is like yucky to think about that there's pulp inside feather but it's got to be there because it's got to grow um which is like fiber blasts and blood vessels and all the stuff providing yeah and it goes all the way up the stick it goes all the way up the stick yep it's in there the whole time? It's in there during development. And then as the sheath, the feather sheath disintegrates and then the feather fans outward to let the barbules and the barbs fan out, then also the pulp gets disintegrated. And will slough away to allow the central vein of the feather to open up. Which also makes sense because you need them to be light so that you can fly and whatnot.

Starting point is 00:38:48 But it is very weird to think about. And you can kind of see it. So there are two types of, I guess it's a spectrum. But there are two main categories of birds, of all organisms when they're babies. There are atritial organisms. babies there are attritional organisms and there are precocial organisms and attritional organisms are ones that are like helpless when they pop out of their egg or the womb or whatever babies human babies are attritional any sort of like naked baby bird parrots pelicans things like that they're just like fleshy they're pink they can't do a damn thing

Starting point is 00:39:26 they can't protect themselves they can't walk around or feed themselves or fly or whatnot those are often really interesting to look at because you see these like feather spikes come out but then the precocial birds and and the chicks those are the ones that tend to grow feathers within the egg still and so they do all this like weird growth and, those are the ones that tend to grow feathers within the egg still. And so they do all this like weird growth. And those are like chickens where they come out already pre fuzzy and are more able to like walk around and eat. And they're not fully fledged. They're not like full giant feathers. I think there's one group of birds that I don't have the name of right now that does come out like almost fully adult from the egg.

Starting point is 00:40:08 It's like super precocial. I was picturing like a little hawk hatching out of an egg and just going. It is a weird, it's like a ground bird. I think it's kind of like a turkey and it buries its eggs in mounds of dirt. And then they just like emerge from the dirt mound. Like little adult men. I know this is weird, but the turkey gives birth to men.

Starting point is 00:40:37 Human men. Little ones, but still. Little human men. They're called megapode birds, I think. Megapode. Oh, yeah. And they put it on top of the rotting compost to keep it warm. Wow.

Starting point is 00:40:51 That's smart. Too smart. That's how you make a human man. You take some rotting compost, a little sand insulation. Put some baseballs in there and a man pops out. Baseballs are just man eggs. Don't tell Ken Griffey Jr. Alright, that

Starting point is 00:41:14 makes sense. Thank you, Stary. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter and on threads at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week, or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at Bucky's Revenge on YouTube, at JCB on Twitter,

Starting point is 00:41:30 and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents, become a patron, get access to our Discord and our CONUS episodes, and our commentaries of movies. Shout out to patron Les Aker for their support.

Starting point is 00:41:47 Second, you can use the review wherever you listen. That's helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Kempert.

Starting point is 00:42:04 Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Tupac Echarm-Rabardi. Our sound design is by Joseph Poonamedish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:42:21 And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. What? One more thing. One of the most dramatic ways that birds lose feathers is through a fright molt when they're stressed, like when they're almost eaten. And to understand a little bit more about fright molts, in a 2006 study, researchers measured the force needed to remove feathers from around 70 bird species, specifically from the breast, the back, and the rump. They found that on average, the butt feathers were pulled or fell out most easily, especially in solitary prey species that are known to have a, quote, high frequency of fear screams, according to around 15 years of audio data anyway. So if you see a bird flying around without a tail, it might look pretty silly.

Starting point is 00:43:25 But also that poor little guy's probably been through some recent horrors. My butt. My butt fell off. My butt fell off. And it's not the scientists, though they did also do that.

SciShow Tangents - Feathers

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