SciShow Tangents - Frogs

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

What’s a frog? Well, it’s not quite a fish, and it’s not quite a lizard, but put them together and you have a stout, slimy little pal that everyone can agree on! Especially Ceri! Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links! [Truth or Fail]GlueImage of crucifix frog: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holy_Cross_Frog.jpghttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05473-zhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6492-frog-glue-repairs-damaged-cartilage/SandImage of tadpoles: https://www.thehindu.com/migration_catalog/article14128847.ece/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1200/31th-frog2.jpghttp://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160330-these-newly-discovered-frogs-have-really-weird-tadpoleshttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151781SuctionImage of paradox frog tadpole: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NHM_London_Paradoxical_frog_(Pseudis_paradoxa)_model.jpghttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31509/what-big-baby-life-and-times-paradox-froghttps://www.mtpr.org/post/field-notes-tale-montanas-strangest-frog[Fact Off]Foam-nest frogshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D8b4e9nGwEhttps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2009.0934Frog cell robotshttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200113175653.htmhttps://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853Video: https://movie-usa.glencoesoftware.com/video/10.1073/pnas.1910837117/video-1[Ask the Science Couch]Sticky frog tongueshttps://theconversation.com/the-frog-tongue-is-a-high-speed-adhesive-72064https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2016.0764https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/watch-frog-s-tongue-ultrasoft-shock-absorber[Butt One More Thing]Frog skin buttock grafthttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2355278/?page=1

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stephan Chen. Stephan, what was your first email address? I don't want to say. It's my current email address. Oh. But my first instant messenger, my AIM name, was Joseph2G,

because a girl that I liked called me Joseph. You were like, all right, I'm Joseph now. It happened. Everybody, Melinda says, I'm Joseph, I'm Joseph. What's your tagline? It's a gosh darn lovely day. Aw, Sam Schultz is here as well. What's your tagline, Sam?

Spider anxiety. Sari Riley has joined us today. How many Earths would it fit inside of the sun oh okay i'm gonna guess and then you laugh if i'm way off 350 oh that's kind of that seems low yeah yeah you weigh off i don't know how big things are yeah it's it's over a million oh i feel like once things get a certain amount of big, I am not good at understanding how big they are relative to each other.

I know that's like a human problem, but me especially, even with like crowds above 50 people, like, I don't know, that could be 100 or 300. What's your tagline, Sari? Egg apocalypse. And I'm Hank Green,

and my popsicle is Taco Burp. Every week here at SciShow Tangents, we get together to 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 sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we're not always going to be good at that, so if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy,

we'll force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care! Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sam. This poem was already read by me in the unreleased pilot episode. So this is kind of a behind the scene peek for everybody and not due to my complete mess of a life. My dad always says when he was a kid, there were frogs all over. You'd hear them all night sitting by the stream doing whatever frogs do. In the time I've been around, I've seen a couple frogs swimming somewhere maybe. I don't really remember. I think I probably know where

they all went, but I won't go into it here. I know some other frogs like kermit or the budweiser frogs and they are good frogs but there used to be more the end it's a very different vibe from our current tangents poems very yeah that was the very first tangents poem ever written yeah oh really yeah they're a little happier now usually yeah that was just kind of like a collection of thoughts that you think at 2 a.m about frogs so the topic today is frogs sari what's a frog we actually my favorite part of the podcast is when i get to say that sari what's wind sari what's the sky and i'm just like i'm gonna sit back and get learned on So we actually have a definition for frogs, which are exciting. They're amphibians in the order Anura.

So there's a whole order of them in the class amphibia. And basically they are very diverse, but they're pretty stout, tailless amphibians. And they're widely distributed across the planet from the tropics to sub-arctic regions. And toads are frogs. So toads are the family Bufonidae or Bufonidae, which is a subcategory of the order Inura. All toads are frogs, not all frogs are toads. I am a little surprised that you included the word stout in your official definition of a frog, because to me, stout is a completely subjective thing. But then I look at a frog and I'm like, compared to other reptiles, which are very long, they're kind of stout.

Yeah, they're not very long. They're not very tall. So the only adjective to describe them is stout. Stout. Yeah, OK. Are you looking up the definition of stout? Yeah, I just I've never quite locked on to what stout. Yeah, okay. Are you looking up the definition of stout? Yeah, I just, I've never quite locked on to what stout means. It means whatever, like a little teapot is.

Yeah, teapot. Winnie the Pooh is stout in my brain. Winnie the Pooh is definitely stout, yeah. Sari, do you know the etymology of frog, which is a great word? It is a great word, and it's even better because it's mysterious. Like, I can't find a good etymology for frog. The Proto-Indo-European root is pru, P-R-E-U, to hop. And then it just jumps to frog, or Old Norse frosker, or Old English frogga. And so at some point, we switched from jump to frog.

And who knows? A linguist somewhere, maybe. But then like Rana is the Latin word for it, which is sort of like croaking. And then Bufo is toad from Latin. But like, I don't know. They're all it's like from hopping or slimy or I don't have an answer. What else are you going to call them though, really? They are frogs.

Yeah. So it's basically like calling something like jumper, which that's what I'd call it if I didn't know what it was called. Well, thank you, Sari Riley and Dictionary Corner. Now it is time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists, and it's Sari, has brought three science facts

for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The rest of us have to figure out which is the true one, either by deduction or a wild guess. And if you get it right, you get a sandbuck. If not, then Sari gets the sandbuck. And remember, you can play at home at twitter.com slash scishowtangents. So, Sari, what are your three facts? So part of what's so weird and incredible about many frog species is the drastic change from a baby tadpole to an adult frog, which is sort of like what we were talking about with tails. So which of these weird tadpoles is real?

Oh, weird tadpoles. I didn't know there were many kinds of tadpoles. There are. You're going to learn about them. So number one, after hatching, the tadpole of the species Notaden benetti poops out a sticky super glue-like substance in a lump. Small phytoplankton or algae or things like that get stuck to that glue poop. And then the tadpole can just slurp it up to get food plus their nutrients back. And then they poop again and the cycle repeats so they can cautiously venture out for food, but always have a safety lump of glue poop stored up. Number two, the tadpole of the species Microlaxis hairyi are really muscular and flat. They have stiff ribs on their tummy and bulbous eyes covered in a layer of skin. So they sort of look like tiny

buff eels instead of your typical tadpole. And that's because they don't swim around in water. They live in wet sand and need to be strong enough to burrow through the particles without getting hurt. Ooh. What? Weird. Okay, good.

Or number three, the tadpole of the species Ascophis montanus is sort of like a mini Hulk vampire. After they hatch, they have leech-like mouths and suction onto the nearest living thing, like a fish in many cases. They feed like a parasite, and they grow about two to four times larger than the adult frogs of that species,

some even approaching a foot long. So these are really big babies, and when they metamorphose, they get smaller instead of bigger. Oh, God. What? Oh, jeez. How big are they?

Two to four times larger than the adult frog some even approaching a foot long i hate that but like the adult frogs are like two to three inches and then bigger than that so it can vary from like four inches but some of them have been found to be very big beefy tadpoles okay so we've got a tadpole that poops out sticky super glue to catch food, a tadpole that looks like a buff eel and swims around in the sand instead of looking like a tadpole. So it looks like a buff eel. I want to Google it, but I can't

because that would break the game. Or third, a tadpole that's like a mini Hulk vampire. These all got to be true. That all seems perfectly possible to me, that there would be any of those things. I love secreting glues, but I know a number of organisms secrete glue, and so that's drawing me away from it.

I just think you wouldn't secrete it out your butt. You accidentally super glue your butt shut. That's a good point. And that, that does go poorly. That happens to baby chickens. It's called poopy butt. No,

I don't know what it's called, but it is a real thing where they like the pasty butt. Maybe they have to like clean their little butt so that they can poop. I think you'd be immune to your own glue maybe though or is that not how glue works i mean i think it could certainly be how glue works evolution has all kinds of tricks up its sleeve okay but then you have to eat your own butt to eat the food is that works yeah yeah well animals don't mind eating their own butts, though. Okay. And that's their primary slash only way of eating? Yeah, for the first few bit of life when they're just newly hatched. So we got buff eels in the sand as well.

Yeah. This one freaks me out because you said they had ribs, and that's making me think about how bones work in a tadpole. Do tadpoles have bones? Of course they do. Are they just born like a skull and they grow more bones? Do they not even have a skull? What's their deal? I think they have

basic bone structure. I know frogs have bones. Right. Yeah. My guess is that tadpoles just have fewer? Yeah. I mean, they're vertebrates, so they gotta have a spine, and then probably they gotta have something for their muscles to connect to. Yeah. So ribs don't seem out

of the question but also i've never heard of a tadpole that doesn't live in water well it could be like wet sand it's got to be wet sand and then we've got the the vampire tadpole and my only problem with this is that like wouldn't somebody have told me if there was a vampire tadpole i feel like that would have come up are Are there other things that get bigger before they become an adult? Oh, yeah. Bugs do this all the time where their larvae are bigger than the eventual bug.

What the hell? I'm trying to find anything that will help me determine which of these is fake, and I have no idea. Yeah, they're all very good. They all seem completely both plausible and also absolutely bizarre. I'm sure that every single frog, every frog,

go pick a frog. And this is what I did for my fact off fact. You pick a frog. There's something weird about that frog. Something really weird about it. All right, everybody,

the moment has arrived. Go to twitter.com slash scishowtangents to vote. And now we will vote. The butt glue seems so boring by comparison to the other two. So I think, well, I think I'm going to,

I'm going to go with that one. The butt glue one. I'm going to go with the buff eel. Well, I'll go, I don't know. I'm going to go with the buff eel too. I don't really have a reason. Well, at least you're going to make me feel less lonely in our loss. S sari is it the buff eel

it is the buff eel it's the buff eel yeah i can't believe you both got it right i was really proud of my lies they were both great and you also like had great back at like good information about them so they are all based off of real things but to start with the real one the buff eel tadpole they just exist uh which is very cool so they are indian dancing frogs so like india the country and they were named for the fact that they stick out their legs really long to do mating dances, which is very fun and cute. And so they're like, they're dancing frogs. So even though we discovered those frogs 125 years ago, as of 2016, I think, or 2014, no

scientist had ever seen their tadpoles. And their tadpoles were the last to be discovered out of all known i think species of frogs and toads out there were they just looking in the wrong place yeah they were looking in the water yeah it's the only family out of the 54 frog and toad families that they hadn't seen tadpoles because they were always looking in the water and then eventually one group of scientists in 2014 to 2016 ish like started digging in the sand because they were like, I don't know, we've looked everywhere else.

And then they found a bunch of little wormy things that looked like tadpoles that like wriggled away from them and buried deeper into the sediment. And so they were like, ah, it's the tadpoles. And so these are called ossorial tadpoles because they live underground instead of in water and it is wet sand

and they do still breathe through their skin as far as I know but they just like eat the sand so their intestines were full of sand and their outside is covered with a thick layer of skin so their eyeballs don't get scratched up by sand and they just live their tadpole lives as though sand were water. What do you mean they eat the sand?

What are they eating? Like there mean they eat the sand what are they eating like there's food in the sand yeah there's probably like little crumbs of stuff in the sand little tiny chunks of algae um and they're getting nutrients from it but yeah their entire digestive tracts were full of sand i i love that there was a long period of time and this would have been a good fact too where you're just like there's a there's a frog that we don't know where it comes from it's just like mystery frog is there a vampire tadpole that is like a mixture of two there is not a vampire tadpole there is a tadpole it's like the rocky mountain tailed frog and their tadpoles have leech-like mouths and they stick onto the bottom of rocks and in rushing streams and just stay there to be safe and so when a researcher picked them up they were like ah leeched onto

my hand is this really a tadpole um but that's just their adaptation to surviving in more fast paced waters they latch onto surfaces and then there are paradox frogs, which do exist. They are frogs where the tadpole is way bigger than the frog. But the eggs are normal sized, so that's fine for the mother frogs. They don't have to lay like humungo eggs to get the giant baby. They just have to look at their ugly babies. Yeah. Well, they leave them behind and the babies forage themselves. That's good.

There is no super glue poop, but there is a frog called the crucifix frog and it's really cute. It's really lumpy. It's like my favorite kind of frog appearance where they look kind of like a rock and look kind of sad and grumpy. It has evolved a sticky goo secretion from glands on its skin and back.

They use it to attract insects to their skin, and then they just, like, shed their entire skin and eat it. So, very similar to this. Holy shit! Yeah. And they also use the glue to attach to

their partner during mating, so, like, nothing slips and slides where it shouldn't. I love it it eat my own skin all right next we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off welcome back everybody sandbuck totals it's a tie game everybody's got one that means that stefan and i have the chance to run off with it here because it's time for the fact off we have each brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. Sari and Sam each have a Sam book to award to the fact that you like the most and to decide who's going to go first. We have a trivia question. Who's going to ask it to us? Oh, I will. The average golden dart frog carries about one milligram of poison in its skin glands,

which is enough to kill how many mice? A hundred mice. A hundred mice, okay. Hank, how many mice? 500 mice! Whoa. Wow, you guys are not prepared for this. It is 10,000 mice. What?

Holy crap! Or 10 to 20 humans, or two African bull elephants. What the hell? Oh, my God. That is a toxic boy. It seems like a little bit overkill i suppose how do i get like just like by what eating it or injecting it i imagine just looking at it it's a tropical frog it's touching it to your mucus membrane so like getting it inside you somehow when i was in costa

rica uh doing some volunteer work i convinced one of the guides to let me touch a poison dart frog. My teacher was not into it. The guide, very much so. And he was like, you can touch it, but once your hand starts feeling super tingly, you've got to wash your hands and don't touch your eyeballs or tongue or anything in between. Otherwise, you'll probably get poisoned. I loved it. I was in high school and it was one of the most exciting experiences of my whole life.

I've suddenly started to feel bad that I employ Sari Reilly, keeping her from her dream of being a frog scientist full-time. I feel like we've discovered something. You're a big fan of frogs. Yeah. I didn't know it.

It's awaking something inside me. Did your hand feel really weird? Yeah, it did. It started feeling like it was falling asleep a little bit, like that kind of tingling. All right. Well, I guess I'll go first then. I want to tell you guys about this frog. It's called the Tungara frog. And different animals build all kinds of nests, and they're good for protecting their young animals. And you might turn to a hardy material like sticks or leaves, something that'll last a while and protect your young. Tungara frogs build nests not out of either of those things. They are found throughout Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

And you might see their nests lining the edges of ponds or puddles or just bits of standing water. And so to make the nest, that I have not described to you yet, the female tigra frog will release her eggs along with a special fluid cocktail of protein and carbohydrates. fluid cocktail of protein and carbohydrates. The male frog will then whip that fluid into a foamy lather by stirring his legs around while also adding his sperm into the mix. And that spermy foam will keep the eggs hydrated and protect them from microbes

and other potential environmental concerns. And if conditions are good, they will emerge from that foam three days later. But scientists have observed the foam nests lasting for 10 days. So if you can imagine like getting a cappuccino that the foam stays for 10 days, that's the situation we're looking at here. And this is actually pretty weird chemically. So scientists are very curious about it. There are ways to make foam that lasts this long, but the detergent molecules that we would do that

would be small enough that they would get through the eggs or the sperm and damage the inside of them, which is the exact opposite of what you want this foam nest to do. So because they can't use that, like what we would do, and we don't know any other way to do it, we had to study this

and found that this all sort of hinges on one very unique protein inside of this protein-carbohydrate mixture. So they studied all the components of the foam. It was mostly made up of six proteins that serve various antimicrobial and anti-insect defense purposes, which is pretty amazing. So six different proteins that do that, but one called RSN2 that provided that detergenty surfactant property to make the foam, but was too

large to enter into and disrupt the membranes of the sperm and the eggs. So it might even actually also bind to those other proteins and carbohydrates to stabilize the bubbles and sort of like present out the antimicrobial anti-insect parts. And then that just makes like a nice, beautiful micro-bless sperm foam for the frog's eggs to live inside of when the

babies hatch do they eat the foam is it like nutritional also or is it just like they leave it behind i think they just leave it behind i did not see any reference to them eating the foam though that would be great because if the first your first act as an organism is just to eat the leavings of your parents' coitus. Oh, boy. Oh, I hate it when you say that. I really ruined tuna on that one. He's getting ready to not work here anymore. Are they going to make shampoo out of this frog foam? Is

there something we can do with it? Yeah, there is. There weren't any published papers, but there's been a little bit of research on whether it would be a good like delivery mechanism for antimicrobial stuff. So to either use their antimicrobial things or to use ours, but sort of like use this weird surfactant protein to bind antimicrobial molecules to it so that you can like rub it on a wound. Also, the way that the males whip the foam up with their legs is pretty worth watching.

So we'll put it up on SciShowTandits.org. They really whip it up. All right, Stefan, what do you got? When you build robots, you're usually using synthetic materials. And so like if you make a bunch of nanobots and for some purpose to put them in the environment or in your body,

because they're not super biocompatible, you can end up with side effects in the environment or side effects in your body. So this team took frog stem cells and built little bio robots out of them that are designed to perform different tasks. Like they could collect microplastics or other toxic substances,

or you could use them in the body to clear plaque out of your arteries. And since they're just made out of cells, they're super biocompatible. And so they designed these robots using an evolutionary algorithm. So they like tell the algorithm we're using pluripotent stem cells and cardiac stem cells. What you got? And these are cells from the African clawed frog. And then they program it with different desired behaviors. So I think all of them can locomote in some way. Some of them are oriented more towards object manipulation and some are

oriented more towards object transportation. And so they got a bunch of these designs and took the most promising ones and then built them out of actual frog stem cells. And so to do that, they perform little microsurgery on the frog embryos to separate the cells out. And then in the video, it looks like they let the cells coalesce into like a sphere naturally. And then they perform surgery on the sphere to like sculpt it into the shape that the algorithm spit out. And then they layer in these cardiac cells in specific places, also according to the designs that are generated by the AI. And so then they have these little biobots,

and there's no nervous system or brain or anything like that, but the combination of the physical shape and the properties of the cells that they use cause these behaviors that they're looking for to just spontaneously emerge. How big is this thing pretty small they're they're not that many cells um but it's enough to like like one of them looks like kind of like a human tooth with four little legs okay there's a version that's like a tooth with only two legs oh man there's some that look like Rubik's cubes, but if you poke out all the middle squares, so it has like holes and the center is hollowed out.

And then all the like cardiac cells just naturally start contracting. And they said that they didn't select for this, but that they just sort of naturally like work together. And so it acts like a little muscle and like flexes the legs in just the right way to like get it to move it's very weird and if you cut them they self-heal and maintain the shape of the design and then there's sort of a built-in like lifespan timer because they

eventually like they don't eat so whatever like embryonic energy reserves they have is like whatever they have and then once that runs out, they just die. And then they're just a bunch of cells that get reabsorbed or whatever into whatever, like, I guess if they were in your body. And so they imagine that you could use these to like trap microplastics or clean up other environmental pollutants, or you could have them transport medicine through the body to specific places or clear out plaque in the arteries, like I mentioned earlier. And they describe them as bespoke living

systems, which I thought was kind of fun. I like when, so they've got like the sort of three-dimensional designed version that you can sort of see like, here's what we were doing. And then they've got the actual cell or the actual, not cell, but I don't know what to call this thing. They call them biobots, but it's like, because it's not an organism. It's not alive. Yeah. So there's little biobots.

When they're zoomed up in close on them, they do not look good. They look upsetting to me. Why were frogs stem cells specifically good for this? Could it be any stem cell or i don't know if why frogs specifically but it it might just be that they know like they had a good enough idea of the properties of these frog stem cells that they could simulate it well and so that the simulated designs they could be confident that it would translate to the real world.

But I'm not actually sure. That's pretty cool, man. That's pretty cool. I don't know if it's a frog, but it's pretty cool. It's parts of a frog. That's not a frog. But is it stout? Would you call these little things?

Yeah, those are definitely stout. Definitely. All right, so it's time to vote. Would you vote for the Tungara frog that creates a durable foam nest for their eggs or a team of researchers that made little bio-robots from frog embryo stem cells that could be used to clean up the environment

or in medicine? I don't know. I don't, this will be really hard. Yeah, I agree with you. Three, two, one. Stefan. Fuck me. Whoa.

It blew my mind. It, like, made my stomach actually queasy. Yeah. It's too freaky. It's like this is the first step to Frankenstein's monsters, like fully reanimated cells that have no nervous system. They're just blobbing around, responding to stimuli. All right.

That means it's time to ask the science couch. So we've got a listener question for our couch, digital virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at KRSKJ1018. What makes the tongue of a frog sticky? And I'm going to go ahead and say the answer to this question

is proteins. Yeah. That's kind of a cop-out. That's what makes everything everything for the most part in animals. But yeah, that's literally that's as specific as I can get. So it's a two-fold

combination frogs are wild i love frogs um we gotta welcome to a new podcast i show frogs this is our frog cast hello i'm your host frog tongues weird two things about them one they're really soft and squishy they're like um the scientists created a machine to basically poke the frog tongue tissue and poke other tissues as well. And they found that frog tongues are about 10 times softer than human tongues and are also about as soft as human brains. So they're very, very squishy. Oh, wow. That's pretty soft. And that means when it hits an insect, the tongue deforms.

So a lot of contact is made with the insect body because it's so soft. And then the second part of magic frog tongues is their saliva. And that's where proteins particularly come in. It is a two-phase viscoelastic fluid. It changes its thickness depending on the speed at which something is pulled and at the speed at which it's moving and so when it hits an insect the saliva is liquidy and seeps into cracks and then when it pulls really fast uh the force on it makes the saliva really really sticky and then it gets into the frog's mouth. And then without the extra movement,

then the saliva becomes less sticky again so that the frog can blink and squeeze the insect down its throat. That's genius. I never thought about how it can actually swallow the stuff. Yeah. If it's got to be really sticky, it's hard to get it off your tongue.

Yeah. Unless you're just eating your own skin. Yeah. It's a separate mechanism. Yeah. So it're just eating your own skin. Yeah. It's a separate mechanism. Yeah, so it starts out thin and liquidy, and then as soon as it attaches on the insect and during that big yank, then it becomes really thick and gloopy,

and then it becomes thin and liquidy again. So does that mean it's non-Newtonian? I think so. Yeah. If it changes properties based on other properties. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Thank you to at Void6425, at Jameson D. Moore, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Sam Buck, final scores! Sari and Hank and Sam all combined. If we were all working together, we would have tied with Stefan, who has three points to our one. Thank you.

Which means that Stefan is now in the lead. Chinbucks, let's go. And I'm still, oh God, I'm not just behind. I'm dragging so far back there that it really does seem insurmountable at this point. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen.

Very helpful. Let's just know what you like about the show. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. And if you want to listen to SciShow Tangents ad-free, you can do that on Luminary. Thank you for joining us.

I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Shin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of

this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. In 1916, H.W.M. Kendall, who was a british army doctor stationed in india wrote in the british medical journal that thanks to an abundant supply of frogs ulcers and time he had learned to use frog skin grafts to treat not only ulcers but also several battle related wounds so he would cut the skin off the inner thigh of a frog and leave the frog alive, apparently, and then put it on the ulcer, which I guess ulcer was kind of like trench foot is what he was talking about, it seemed like,

because people had it on their legs. And this included one attempt at using frog skin to graft a bomb wound on a soldier's left buttock. But Kendall noted, dressing on the buttock were difficult to keep in place and the graft was unsuccessful. So you could have frog skin, but you can't have a frog butt skin. Maybe if you were really still, you could have a frog butt.

Yeah, I feel like we've got better elastics nowadays. We could keep that frog butt graft. Yeah.