SciShow Tangents - Fuel

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Cars need it, trains need it, and guess what? People need it, too! Can you deduce the answer to my devious riddle? That's right, it's fuel! Fill up your tank, cause we're going on a trip to learn all about the things that keep other things going, from coal to tuna sandwiches and everything in between!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley, Tom Mosner, Daisy Whitfield, and Allison Owen for helping to make the show possible!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: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]New York Times rocket fuel correctionhttps://www.nasa.gov/feature/95-years-ago-goddard-s-first-liquid-fueled-rockethttps://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/news/150th-anniversary-1851-2001-the-facts-that-got-away.html[Fact Off]Nuclear carshttps://www.greencarreports.com/news/1066000_txchnologist-thorium-lasers-thoroughly-plausible-for-nuclear-carshttps://www.thedrive.com/news/41103/heres-why-the-nuclear-powered-1958-ford-nucleon-never-entered-productionhttps://www.autoweek.com/news/a1988761/are-laser-powered-cars-our-future/Fuel cell breathalyzers https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-batteries-store-an/https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/fuel-cellshttps://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-history/breathalyzer-there-was-drunkometerhttps://blog.history.in.gov/tag/breathalyzer/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/breathalyzers-of-the-future-today/277249/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5857179/[Ask the Science Couch]Chlorophyll in photovoltaic cells/solar powerhttps://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_record_Report.cfm?Lab=NCER&dirEntryId=187266http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/chlorophyll/chlorophyll_h.htmhttps://opentextbc.ca/biology/chapter/5-2-the-light-dependent-reactions-of-photosynthesis/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01673-whttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/plants-versus-photovoltaics-at-capturing-sunlight/https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/762519[Butt One More Thing]Human waste converted into biomethane fuelhttps://www.npr.org/2016/01/01/461692939/from-poop-to-power-colorado-explores-new-sources-of-renewable-energyhttps://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/fart-powered-vw-beetle-tested-in-uk/ 

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 science expert expert Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. When was the last time that you touched a coin? I picked a penny up off the floor the other day that my cat was playing with. Yeah, it wasn't so much because you wanted a penny as you wanted that noise to stop happening, huh? Yeah, and I wanted her to not be the richest cat in the world anymore. I wanted her to not be the richest cat in the world anymore. You had to put her in her place. Yeah.

I was probably a street coin for me, even in these times. Interesting. You still pick up street coins? I still, there's something innate within me where I see a street coin and I'm like, I need that. So you're picking up a street coin more often than you are being handed a coin by a person who is giving you change. Yes, definitely. I haven't gotten change in maybe more than a year, probably. Like forever. I also very rarely touch coins these days, but I've been touching a lot of this coin, which I will show you the people who are recording with me.

And also anyone who's watching on video, which is now an option at youtube.com slash SciShow Tangents. But this is the Crash Course coin, which is available now. Crash Course is a thing that, you know, I think that we all have worked on a little bit at least. Certainly Sari and I have a lot. You have.

I'm sure you have. You designed the organic chemistry set. I'm sure you've done some Crash Course thing. Oh, shit. You designed the organic chemistry set. I worked on that series. That was my life for so long crash course is a thing that that helps a lot of people and the goal of crash course is to make the

best content possible at the lowest price possible when i say the lowest price possible i don't mean the lowest price we can get away with charging i mean the lowest price possible which is zero dollars i guess less than that would be paying you to watch it, which we do not do. Maybe someday. Somebody should. But we do make it available for free for everyone because we think that it is a very useful tool to help students and teachers just learn stuff that is hard to learn. And we, I think, do a really good job of that, but it's hard to make work financially. And so every year we do this thing where we sell Crash Course Coins and you can get them at youtube.com slash Crash Course Coin. There are two of them. There's the 2000 Learner Coin, which allows you to help us reach 2000 learners. That's $100. And there's the 10,000

Learner Coin that allows us to reach 10,000 learners. That's $500. And it's stamped with a unique number. you get a little signed thank you card from me and john and a little box we send to you um and we make 500 of them last year we sold out of all 500 and this is how we make crash course work so i'm deeply appreciative of everybody who has gotten or may get a crash course coin if you want to support crash course in that way we really appreciate it and you can go toourseCoin.com now if you want to do that. So thanks for listening to me talk about it. But I've been touching them a lot and they're beautiful. This year's

back is the art from the cave at Lesko. Which is some of the oldest cave art out there. And this is part of our story and we're part of their story. This is a thing I forget. That we are part of those people's story.

Talking about the cave people? Those people who created those things. Yeah. When Picasso saw it, apparently he said, we have invented nothing. I've heard that before too. It's just like,

everyone's still trying to draw a gazelle that good. Yeah. We haven't quite got back to where we were. Well, every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze,

and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory and also for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always,

we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem This Week from Sam. Okay, so this one's a little bit of a quiz or a call and response maybe if you will so it's participate we gotta participate otherwise you'll be embarrassed yes when the night is cold and you can't see good oh let me hit the thing a little harder so you can know what you're supposed to do i think i guessed it already. Yeah, I think I've got it too. Oh, well, shut up. Just start a fire with some good dry wood.

Oh, you guys are smart. When talking internal combustion, don't take no sass. What your car needs is good old gas. Gas. When it comes to grilling, you'll never cook in vain if you're feeding your fire with a tank of propane. to grilling you'll never cook in vain if you're feeding your fire with a tank of propane yeah if powering a city or state is your goal you might build a power plant and burn up some coal if you need nuclear power get this through your cranium you better get digging and find yourself some uranium when your body needs fuel you can satisfy that itch by chomping into a big turkey. Sandwich?

Oh, I was too eager. I didn't know turkey was going to be there. I went turkey so that you'd know that it was, you know, a sandwich. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't have it until turkey. So, the topic for the day is fuel. And I do love, I love human fuel. Human fuel is one of my very favorite things in the whole world.

It's so good. It's wonderful that we need it to survive. But also, I guess not. It's not really a coincidence. It's really good to do to get it into you. One of the best things. Sometimes cooking it really sucks. But sometimes that's bad, but sometimes to get it into you. It's one of the best things. Sometimes cooking it really sucks, but you know. Sometimes that's bad, but sometimes that's fun.

Yeah. Anyway, fuel, fuel. Sari, what is fuel? So fuel, as far as I can define, drawing these lines somewhere, is a material that can be broken up or react with other substances so that it releases some form of energy. So that's like solid fuels like wood or coal or food that you eat and then digest. Liquid fuels like petroleum or- Gatorade. Yeah, or Gatorade.

like petroleum or Gatorade. Yeah, or Gatorade. Gaseous fuels like natural gas, propane, the gas from the Cheez Whiz can that you're spraying in your mouth. I don't know if you actually turn that into energy. That's probably just a propellant, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't suck on the gas from the Cheez Whiz.

That's actually not allowed. Okay, do not take I was trying to think of a gas like a a gas I don't think that we get energy

from any gases unfortunately it'd be really cool to be able to eat some air the stuff you get from oxygen like oxygen

doesn't count oxygen is not a fuel it is necessary for the for the oxidation and combustion that turns the fuel into energy

okay but it doesn't it doesn't well i mean that's right interesting interesting actually because part of the energy is in the oxygen bonds because it is a kind of unstable molecule and it it is more stable once it's co2 and water than when it's oxygen. So kind of, I guess some of that energy gets... Now I'm very curious how much of our energy comes from oxygen. Oh, quite a bit, I think. Even in like generating fuels and fuel cells, which we'll talk about later. But that's like, oxygen is a really key part of that.

We're slappy chopping this guy all up. Nothing's nothing. We slapped you. I thought we had it. I thought it was easy. But now I'm like, oxygen is not a fuel. More isn't. Things that are not fuels, like a capacitor, something that stores electrical energy.

Holds energy. Yeah. A ball on a hill, which has potential energy. But it's not a fuel. It rolls down. But it's not a fuel. It's not a fuel. But it's not chemical.

It needs to be chemical? No, because nuclear energy is not technically chemical. And that's fuel. Sure. Because we've expanded it. I guess uranium is technically the fuel. Yes. I'd probably call it fuel pellets.

Yeah. I don't know. That's extending the idea of a fuel to an analogous thing. So an analogous thing. Yeah. I think that if I'm going to be pedantic, fuel pellets are not fuel in the same way an uphill ball is not fuel or like the water in a dam is not fuel. Well, I'm in trouble later then. Quick, Sam, research a new fact.

So, Sari, do you know where the word fuel comes from or got any etymologies for me i do i have a couple of them for you so it comes from the classical latin word focalia which means uh brushwood for fuel uh from the latin focalis which means pertaining to a hearth which comes from focus which means a hearth or a fireplace. And so focus before it meant a point of convergence or like the focal point of anything was a fireplace because it was the center of the home. So it's like, that's amazing. That's our focus over there. It's got that wood burning in it. That's so cool. That's interesting that we had a word for that before we had a word for the stuff we burned in it. and then we like took the word for the stuff we burned of like oh we i guess we need need something fuel fuels in for the fuel yeah can i ask one question yes sir you know gamer fuel is uh is the drink the

yeah the energy drink yeah is caffeine uh a fuel noine would not be a fuel. Okay. It doesn't actually provide you energy. It just increases the metabolism somehow. It's a stimulant? The word caffeine works to be very complicated. Yeah. It's a stimulant. So it affects your hormones as opposed to being converted into energy itself.

They got to change their name then. Well, I think they also put a bunch of sugar in, so they're probably good. Oh, okay. That is technically fuel. And that means that it's time to move on to the next portion of our show, the quiz portion of our show. We're going to be playing Fuel Truth or Fail. Humans have been using

fuel to power everything from our lights to our transportation for an awful long time, and our reliance on fuel has forced us into strange situations and adaptations. The following are three stories of our dependence on different types of fuel, but only one of them is true. Which one is it? Round number one. In the early 19th century, the price of candles suddenly dropped due to an exceptionally successful whale hunt. While the reason for the success was unknown at the time,

scientists reading logs from the whale hunts have since hypothesized that the whales were easy to isolate and kill due to a parasitic infection. Or it might be the second fact. In the early days of gas stations in the 20th century, consumers were concerned that the gasoline they were putting in their cars would be dirty or contaminated with other molecules. So local newspapers began to send a reporter out every morning to every gas station to do a write up on the quality of the gas of that day. Or it could be fact number three.

Recently, to cut down on fuel costs, ships have begun using a technology that creates millions of tiny bubbles for them to float on. This carpet made of bubbles cuts down on resistance between the body of the ship and the water around it so that the ship can move more efficiently overall. So, is it whale parasites driving down the cost of candles, newspapers including a daily gas report on the molecules in the gas, or ships blowing bubbles to be more fuel efficient gosh the ship blowing bubble is a good idea i don't know if it works but we got a patent on our hands i think but i think like maybe i feel like some animal does that and i've heard of it maybe the

bubble thing that's what i was thinking too i know we're not supposed to help each other but i'm pretty sure it's a snail let's be friends today okay let's try to tie okay you're going for a time yeah let's try to be equally witty and smart okay yeah okay yeah then i'm pretty sure the bubbles are a snail they like bubble up the way that bubbles keep their form is by excrete excreting a mucus and then they like create these little bubble rafts so they can float along the ocean. What if you're trying to trick me? I agreed. Oh wow.

Oh god. Here's a virtual handshake. They're shaking hands. We're in the video. This is why I did the bit. That was a weird thing because you both used the same hand so you'd just be sort of like holding your hand next to each other. Well, we can hold hands to seal the deal too.

That's a very tender way to do it. A newspaper gas report sounds just stupid enough to be something that would be like. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, I would love if I do not want to go into journalism. If journalism involved going to test the gas molecules and writing about it, I think I would do journalism. I would just show up to my local gas station and be like, hello, I'm here to check your molecules.

Squirt some gas in your mouth and squish it around. Like a little wine bottle. How did they do it? Do you just give it a sniff? You're like that smells right. I love that. The secret is it doesn't How do they do it? Do you just give it a sniff? You're like, that smells right. I love that. I think the secret is it doesn't matter how they do it because they can just say that it's, this looks great or this looks terrible. Maybe get a little money on the side, you know?

The whale parasites and candles, I don't know. I know whale oil was a big thing. And I know there was a time where whale oil like significantly disrupted the economy I think because we realized that we could get oil from whales instead of oil from other sources and like that's what made it easier uh so it was like a one-to-one replacement as opposed to replacing candles which is like a separate source of light and heat i guess this is dependent on somebody being really interested in why in candle prices a long time ago and being like ah mystery is afoot is that what it is like somebody looked into it way later and was like why are these

candles so cheap well i know i think that like um that shocks like that are pretty well documented in the time but then the idea is that scientists were able to go back and figure out what caused the shock. Sort of like the root, root cause of it. Which is a parasite as opposed to just whaling. Yeah, as opposed to just like a bumper crop of big marine mammals. You guys are trying to tie, so you don't actually have to think about this.

You have to guess the same thing, and the outcome will be the same whether you get it right or wrong. Yeah, that's no fun. actually have to think about this you have to guess the same thing and the outcome will be the same whether you get it right or wrong yeah so you have kind of ruined the fun by by your by your cooperative nature of gameplay i'm gonna guess the newspaper gas reports i was leaning towards that before our conversation so okay i'll go with that one too it didn't matter uh it was the thing you were both wrong anyway because it was the bubbles oh no some ships including cruise lines are sailing on bubble carpets and the technology is called air lubrication you're right about the snails that's a real thing you didn't make that up i was like what a tale you've woven for me yeah for one end for one end? So it reduces the friction between the ships and the ocean.

In one version of the lubrication setup, there's a blower that blows bubbles continuously at different points along the bottom of the ship's hull. While one company estimates that the air lubrication technology can reduce fuel consumption by 5% to 10%, there are some limitations. The ships have to be traveling relatively quickly, and it likely won't accomplish much in rough seas. So it's sort of more useful for faster-moving ships, which is maybe a smaller portion of the average number of ships out there. But yeah, there are real things here. Early gas pumps had a little cylinder where you could actually see the gas

that was getting pumped into your tank so you could look at it and be like that looks good by my expert eye i don't know why i know in this this uh the first fact about the whale parasites was loosely inspired by a flu pandemic in 1872 that infected horses and mules and this like, it feels quite reminiscent of the problems that we have these days because it was a horse and mule problem, but it became a coal problem

because the horses and mules were used to move around coal at coal mines. And with the lack of horses to move coal around, coal prices went up because of the flu pandemic. So there was like,

it sounds familiar, right? You get these disruptions that are sort of second order and third order effects that are like, oh, there was like some horses got sick and now people are cold. Wow. Which is a bummer. But no bumper crop

of, and also mostly I think whale oil is used as a liquid fuel and not as a solid one. Necessary, I was saying. No whale candles. So we're moving into the break with a 0-0 tie as they wanted. We'll be back in a second. I regret it now. Welcome back, everybody.

It's time to get ready for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after everyone has presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. The first liquid-fueled rocket was successfully launched on March 16, 1926, by the physicist Robert H. Goddard. Goddard's first launch only went 41 feet into the air, but he believed that rockets like that rocket might one day travel to outer space. However, there were plenty of skeptics, including the New York Times editorial board. In 1920, the newspaper published an anonymous op-ed titled A Severe Strain on Credulity, which argued that a rocket cannot travel in the vacuum of space because there isn't air to push against.

Of course, even the New York Times makes mistakes, and they did eventually publish a correction. How many years did it take for them to make that correction? Space stuff was like the 1960s. Yeah, there was a lot of space stuff going on in the 1960s. I feel like that was it. I'm going to say 40, 42. Sam, what do you got?

What do you think? 1951. So you're going to make me do math now. 1929. So that's 22. 22 years. All right. Sari is the winner.

And indeed, the correction was published on July 17th, 1969, which you may recognize as the day after the Apollo 11 launch. Yeah, they really ate it. Yeah, that was not, by the way, the first time space happened. Space rockets did a number of things before then. But I think somebody sort of pointed it out to them and were like, hey, it's a pretty big deal going on right now. You wrote this in the 20s and you might want to say sorry. To quote the original editorial, that Professor Goddard with his quote chair in Clark College and the countenancing of

the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction and of the need to have something better than a vacuum with which to react. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. Boy, I'm glad that this person was anonymous because otherwise they would have had to deal with that forever. What a deal. Yeah, the problem is people still would write. I could see that

being written nowadays, not anonymously. They just got away with it back in the day. From the correction, it says, further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established

that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. Did they not mention the Apollo 11 launch at all? No, they did. Okay. Well, that means that Sari gets to decide who goes first. Did they not mention the Apollo 11 launch at all? No, they did. Okay. Yeah. Well, that means that Saria gets to decide who goes first.

Oh, Sam, you can go first. Oh, okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Of all the things in the universe that use fuel, cars is one of them. And they use a lot of it. In 2020, in America alone, cars used about 123 billion gallons of gas. And this gas, well, it's not so good for planet Earth.

Gases like carbon dioxide are expelled in car exhausts that make their way to the atmosphere, causing all sorts of climate changing issues. You all know this. Of course, there are cars that exist today that don't use gasoline as fuel, but use electricity instead. However, that electricity has to come from somewhere and more often than not it's coming from power plants that also expel greenhouse gases you simply can't win but back in the late 50s when uh plastic was allowing for unprecedented convenience in people's day-to-day lives and everyone was expecting jet packs and hover cars any minute automobile engineers were playing around with using a new fuel source in cars, one that's clean, long-lasting, dependable, and could allow for thousands of miles of travel on a single tank.

And that fuel source was a nuclear reactor. I mean, it's a fun idea. It's a fun, I don't know that I want every single American to have some uranium, but it's a fun idea. Well, we might not have to have uranium. I'll get to that in the end. By 1958, nuclear energy, which had, as many things do, started out as a terrible weapon, had been harnessed for power generation all over the world, powering cities and even some vehicles like nuclear submarines. And it was going pretty well.

and it was going pretty well. So the next logical step was putting one in every car in America, or at least that's what some scientists at Ford thought when they mocked up the nuclear powered Ford Nucleon in 1958. This concept car, which basically looks like a sporty version of the Homer from the episode of The Simpsons where Homer designs a car called the Homer,

was only ever made in non-functioning model form, but would have featured a replaceable uranium powered nuclear reactor that would get you about 5,000 miles before it needed to be swapped out. That's pretty good. Not as far as I kind of expected it to, honestly. Well, you know what? I'll tell you a little bit more about that later also.

And it had another advantage that they maybe weren't thinking about too much at the time. I'm not really sure. But sounds pretty good to us these days, since nuclear energy is basically like a steam engine uh except with a big chunk of eternally hot rock making the steam spin the turbine turbines or whatever uh it didn't make the same carbon dioxide heavy exhaust that your standard gas guzzling car does wait so this was a steam powered car yeah so they okay i would have assumed that it would be electric, but that's wild. Well, there was like a steam thing in there that was spinning a turbine to make electricity.

Oh, to make electricity. Which was. So it didn't actually, like the steam didn't like connect to the wheels. But that was the problem with the car because the steam nature of the nuclear power was also the thing that made the nucleon impossible, basically. Because in a regular car you turn gas into an explosion of mechanical energy yeah there's a problem here and then the nucleon you turn the thermal energy into mechanical energy into electricity and the equipment to do

that made the car really heavy with a huge area taken up by the engine like 60 or 70 of the car is just like a huge engine and the car was even huger because the reactor would always be making heat i think so it was covered in exhaust vents that would just spit out really hot air all the time even when you were driving it i hate this more and more all the time and none of that is to mention all of the extremely heavy shielding required to protect everyone in the vicinity from deadly radiation. Yeah. And I'm sure that these things would never get in car accidents. What would happen if they did? Just like.

Well, the shielding may be compromised, which I don't love. They wouldn't explode though, right? I don't think so. I think that the way that it sounds like this works, it isn't a meltdownable thing. So a real working version of the Ford Nucleon never saw the light of day, but science is always marching on and there are apparently several companies working on nuclear cars these days and some 60 odd years of research and development has changed a lot and these days nuclear cars in development are powered by thorium which is an element with a more controllable

reaction than uranium and they shoot it the thorium with a laser and that makes the thorium make heat and a pressurized steam chamber that spins a turbine and all of this happens in a 500 pound engine which is about the same as an engine in like a gas powered car and it's been speculated that eight grams of thorium could power your car for 300 000 miles so that's what i'm talking about yeah it's like a nuclear powered aircraft carrier like 20 years between refuelings and i'm like that's what i want yeah i don't not want anything to be involved if i'm going to be using a thorium powered laser activated nuclear reactor in my car i don't ever want to have to go to the gas station like i'm done it's it's the life of the car thank

you my kids will be driving this car. No problem. Yeah. I want a laser car. I want a Nucleon. It looks great. Maybe we could have laser planes. Thorium planes, you know? Yeah, that makes sense to me. Then a trained professional has to operate them.

Exactly. It's not like some stranger is just buying one of these at a used car lot. Yeah, and putting offensive bumper stickers on the back of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't like it if there was a really scary bumper stickers on the back of it. I wouldn't like it if there was a really scary bumper sticker on the back of a nuclear-powered car. I'd be like, I don't think I want to live in this country anymore. But, you know, airlines are

very regulated already, and no one's ever stolen an airplane, right? Ever. Alright, Sari, I feel good about Sam's fact. Okay. But what do you have? So it's fairly easy to confuse fuel cells with batteries because their basic structures are similar, or at least it was for me. There's two electrodes called an anode and a cathode separated by an electrolyte that allows ions to move.

And the main difference... Are you ready? Yeah, it's just pure gator. Your car is very thirsty. Please, top her off. And the main difference, in my understanding, is that batteries have all their chemical reactions contained inside them, whether you can rearrange ions to recharge the batteries or not.

But on the other hand, fuel cells need a constant stream of fuel to the anode and oxygen to the cathode for the chemical reactions to happen and the electrical current to be generated. And the most common fuel you hear about with fuel cells is hydrogen gas, but there's a lot of exploratory research these days to investigate fuel cells that run on different substances like glucose or lignin or other weird innovations. But I'm not here to talk about those as cool and weird as they are. Instead, I want to present a fuel cell hiding right under our noses in breathalyzers. Oh,

that makes sense. Yeah. Isn't it weird? I'm glad you don't know about this already. Cause I didn't. And I was going to feel like I had egg on my face. If you did, if everyone was like,

well, I mean, you have a little bit of egg on your face because I was a lignin chemist in college. And so anything to do with lignin, I'm like, you win. face because I was a lignin chemist in college. And so anything to do with lignin, I'm like, you win! No one ever talks about lignin. Damn.

Okay, well, let me just... Keep that in mind for the future. You re-alert this article again. Because it's kind of invasive to sample some blood to calculate blood alcohol content, breath analyzer technologies have been around since at least the early 1900s. As you know, the alcohol we drink is just ethanol, and chemists know how ethanol reacts in predictable ways. So an early breath analyzer was developed in the 1930s by a biochemist named Rola N. Harder, and he called it the drunkometer. Wait, was his name Rola Harder? Hardger? Yeah, Rola Harder would have been great. It's just like, yes, that is a man who parties right there.

And so it worked by, you blew into a balloon, and then the balloon was hooked up to a machine, and then the machine pushed the air through and reacted the ethanol in someone's breath with a potassium permanganate solution, and the gas turned more and more purple with more and more ethanol. So you just looked at how purple it was,

and I'm like, eh, they're kind of drunk. That's a fine drunkometer, but that's not nearly as cool as what's coming next. Yeah. The next big advancement was in the 1950s by Robert Frank Borkenstein. Great name also. Also a 30-year-old.

Everybody left, hey, Bobby Borkenstein. Bobby, Bobby, Bork, Bork, Bork, Bork. And so Bobby Bork took advantage of the fact that ethanol is a perfectly good fuel that can be used by a fuel cell to generate electricity, which is how the first breathalyzer worked. So you blew into the device, and if there was enough ethanol in your breath, then it would chemically react with the anode, power the fuel cell, and generate an electric current. power the fuel cell and generate an electric current. And more ethanol means a stronger current because there's more fuel in the cell, which then can be mathematically translated

to an estimate of your blood alcohol content. Whoa, what the hell? Yeah, and so you can still get fuel cell breathalyzers that work like this. A lot of the ones that are like casually on the market for people are fuel cell breathalyzers. Although there are also much fancier ones uh devices that use spectroscopy to more precisely analyze the molecules in your

mouth and there are so many other better ways to generate electricity with your body like pedaling on a bike or eating food and just letting your body do its thing but i guess drinking alcohol and breathing it in a mini fuel cell is one of them which is so weird that is very that's i mean ethanol is a fuel you put it into a fuel cell you generate electricity with your drunkenness is it enough to like shock me this is what i want to know i don't think it's enough to power the device if you do it regularly enough oh yeah it charges itself yeah it charges itself i think i think if like if you blew into a thing and it had a little electrode at the end of it then go and electrocute people i bet it would be milliamps small yeah maybe you can maybe make their tongue feel a little. So if you blew into one end and then someone else.

It's like a nine volt battery. Yeah, a nine volt battery, like a little sour on the other end of it. So I think that Sari convinced you to go in on a Thai salmon. It's come to bite you in the butt because Sari has taken away the episode. Though I loved yours as well. I think your decision is flawed, but that's okay.

I don't want to argue. Yeah, no, this is totally understandable about having a group of people who are working together is that you're not always going to agree but as long as you understand the reasoning behind the decision we can move forward it's gonna take some time it's time to move on to uh the next segment ask the science couch where we've got some listener questions for our finally honed couch of scientific minds what sort of research james from discord asks has been done on chlorophyll-based solar power that what a great question uh so i guess

the idea being chlorophyll turns uh turns sunlight into fuel lignin uh and other and cellulose and stuff the face you made when you said lignin. Any chance to mention lignin? And that is electrons moving around. Like there's a lot of how that happens. So why not? It would be nice to do with plants because they're made out of carbon dioxide

rather than out of a bunch of heavy metals and silicon and stuff that's what i know sarah what do you know i'm just gonna take what you said basically and string it into the narrative order that i pre-crafted for the episode but try not to repeat as much uh so solar cells the way that they work is by capturing sunlight to generate electricity. And so in a photo photovoltaic cell, like Hank was mentioning, it's usually a semiconductor like silicon, which just the sun, the sunlight hits it. And then electrons get excited or get popped out in some way. and then those electrons become electricity. Vaguely similar with chlorophyll. Electron gets excited, it absorbs sunlight, electrons get excited and then get moved around in photo systems one and two within a plant.

And so that's the piece that we would replace. It's like, okay, instead of a semiconductor, what happens if we put in chlorophyll? And even though it sounds good on face value, the problem with it is the limitations of chlorophyll. Like it did not evolve to capture the most energy possible. Chlorophyll only absorbs light within the visible spectrum, whereas like semiconductors can absorb light more broadly. There's still flaws in semiconductors. So like silicon, for example, absorbs most in like the infrared red part of the spectrum and less at higher levels.

And like some energy gets wasted as heat gets converted to heat instead of electricity. But chlorophyll is like a very specialized molecule, a very specialized set of molecules that can only absorb certain kinds of electricity. But chlorophyll is like a very specialized molecule or very specialized set of molecules that can only absorb certain kinds of light. And it's not as efficient as a solar cell, like an artificial solar cell that we've created because plants, they absorb a ton of energy, but then dump it out a lot to avoid like toxic chemical reactions. So they are intentionally inefficient so that the plants can survive and don't get like overwhelmed with molecules or chemical processes. Yeah.

Mostly free radicals from the oxygen. Electrons jumping around and doing stuff to their DNA and stuff. Yeah. So they want to avoid mutations. And so they don't want to absorb too much energy. Whereas the goal with a solar panel is to absorb as much energy as possible so that has made plants evolutionarily a little bit inefficient but i think in all this a lot of the discussion is like well what if we change chlorophyll? What if we like put in a different swap out atoms in chlorophyll so that it can absorb a spectrum more broadly? And also, what if we figure out how to modify like the photo systems themselves, like other things that the chlorophyll interacts with?

But that would just take a lot more work. And we are maybe starting to head down that path but also i don't know chlorophyll is good at making food and silicon's good at making solar panels so maybe the path of least resistance is continuing that but also maybe we get better at making food this way and like we have instead of making electricity you just make sugar with it and then you do things to make sugar that would be a big level up for humanity maybe you answered this but could we just get like real mad sciencey and make like the perfect sun absorbing plant so we would have to modify the chlorophyll molecules themselves. The leaves would be black, which is interesting. Once you get past the,

okay, I'm going to modify chlorophyll as a pigment, there are so many interfacing systems that you'd have to also modify to make the plant grow into what you want it to grow and make sure you don't break all that in the way that we don't know how to change someone's eye color.

Like we're not at Gattaca yet for human DNA. Yeah, but we couldn't just start now and be like, I'm going to take this plant and put it next to this plant and they'll make a slightly better one. And then we'll just like in a few hundred years, we'll have like the perfect one. Well, you're not. So if you're trying to make electricity, plants don't really make electricity in the way that we can that we could capture it. So what you'd need is you need to engineer it to not just have like awesome black leaves that capture all the energy, but also wires to move it. OK.

Yeah. So that would be tricky, but not I mean, not impossible. But not, I mean, not impossible. Like science fiction world, like 400, 500 years from now, I could totally see growing a plant that has that like you plug, you could like plug in. Put your phone, put your phone around it. Just plug your phone right into it. Bacteria do make like electrical filaments, which is very, very weird. There are some bacteria that just like make these. Conducting filaments?

Yeah. Yeah. Just make them all around. So like maybe combining a plant and a bacteria, then it just grows some wires instead of roots. And then you just. There's no reason you can't grow a wire. Like it is a it is a feasible thing to do with carbon chemistry. Robot plants.

I'm sure nothing bad would ever happen because we would all be fine. Yeah. I'm sure that there wouldn't be some fungus that would eat all of the power-generating plants on Earth and end it all for everyone. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon

and ask us on Discord. Thank you to TotallyNotACris on Discord, at MooneyRiot, 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 very easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents and become a patron, where you can get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. And as I say frequently, we can't do this without our patrons. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. It also has helped us, by the way,

create our video episodes, which are on YouTube and are a joy, and you get to see some of the things we're talking about. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That 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 Riley. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes, along with Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Emma Douster. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And of course, 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 burn. But one more thing humans have been burning dried animal dung as fuel for thousands of years but nowadays reusing our very own butt excretions is more common than you might think don't say that is that what that is yeah okay millions of gallons of human waste around the world gets fed to anaerobic bacteria who help process it into a mixture of gases called biomethane aka renewable natural gas and biomethane can be used for things like heating generating electricity or fueling vehicles from fleets of dump trucks to modified volkswagen beetles which are cheekily called dung beetles did you pick dump trucks because of dump all because of dumps also yeah i was like trying to spice up this fact as much as possible because

it's kind of generic you know but i want to say some funny words trucks yeah