SciShow Tangents - Graveyard Smash - It was a Dark and Stormy Month

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Ceri and Sam headed on down to the cemetery to dig Hank up for one more bone-chilling edition of It Was a Dark and Stormy Month! We hope you enjoy and have a happy and safe Halloween!Head to https://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!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Eclectic Bunny and Garth Riley 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]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969716324202?via%3Dihubhttps://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lam.12345https://www.epa.gov/so2-pollution/sulfur-dioxide-basics[Fact Off]Spaceship debris graveyardhttps://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-happens-to-rocket-boosters-after-launchhttps://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/in-russias-space-graveyard-locals-scavenge-fallen-spacecraft-for-profit#.w0egudhkhbwhttps://www.nature.com/articles/433095a.pdf?origin=ppubhttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19127713Oleic acid as a death cuehttps://web.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/previous/Gordon1983Dependence.pdfhttps://www.pnas.org/content/106/20/8251https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/04/01/102601823/hey-im-dead-the-story-of-the-very-lively-anthttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-24054-2https://www.ijbs.com/v09p0313.htmhttp://www.researchtrends.net/tia/article_pdf.asp?in=0&vn=9&tid=20&aid=5289[Ask the Science Couch]Eco-friendly burial options https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/is-cremation-environmentally-friendly-heres-the-sciencehttps://www.cremationassociation.org/page/alkalinehydrolysishttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4895712/New-type-cremation-DISSOLVES-bodies-LIQUID.htmlhttps://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12421https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWo2-LHwGMM[Butt One More Thing]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30111659/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17091303/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the frightly competitive science knowledge scream case i'm your ghost hank gang green green and joining me this week as always is mad scientist scary riley uh pumpkins i forgot to think of something our resident every ghoul sam skulls uh hello guys i'm curious what your Halloween decoration situation is because I'm feeling really below average. Oh. And I need help. This is a Sam question entirely. All I have, my grandparents sent me a card that was doubled as a Halloween decoration.

It was like a circle haunted house with little bats suspended beneath it. And so we hung that on our door. But we live in a locked building and are definitely not going to get trick-or-treaters. So that's it. Yeah. As a, as a homeowner,

this is my second Halloween. And so we've been really like leaning into it. We have a projector with like bats against our wall. We have lights strung up. We have like bones in the yard. When I was a kid or in like a teen, I wanted to have like a spooky, really actually spooky house and scare people who are walking up to it. It's way easier to just have a cute, nice house with fun lights everywhere.

Yeah. But Missoula also doesn't have like a really prolific trick or treating scene, except in like the- It really doesn't. There's like two neighborhoods that are rich. I don't know if this is like if this is like a relic of when it used to be colder because now

it's not even that cold that's true kids don't need to wear coats over their costumes anymore it's almost like something's making the planet warmer

is what it feels like but yeah we really I can expect like three trick-or-treaters a year yeah that's about which kind of bums me out

it's a waste I look when I see people walk by my house, I look out the window, and when they don't look at my decorations, I'm just like, what's wrong with you? At least look over here. I need you to enjoy this.

I didn't do this for my own enjoyment. I can't even see it. I did it for you. I'm inside the house. I can't even see it. Yeah, there is something very sad and not exciting about buying a bunch of candy for trick-or-treaters other than being left with a big bowl of it. Yeah, there is something very sad and not exciting about buying a bunch of candy for trick-or-treaters other than being

left with a big bowl of it. Like, yes, you get to eat it, but it's sad because you didn't get to see the children's joy in giving them the good candy. You can eat candy whenever you want to now. Yeah, you're an adult. I can just go and buy candy, but for them, it's special and I wanted to be the cool adult

with the fun house and the big candy bars big candy bars can't but they don't don't care they don't come no one cares they're too busy playing fortnight they're trick-or-treating in fortnight by trick-or-treating i mean shooting each other this doesn't doesn't sound like the kind of constructive pro-social activity i expect children to be engaged with. Yeah, I want it like the good old days where kids alone, wandering the streets, knocking on strangers' houses, yelling at me

to throw them candy. Alright, well, thank you, Sam. Every week here on Tangents we get together to try to unnerve, disgust, and horrify each other with science facts, all while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Gory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the

episode, one of them will be crowned the winner, and the other one will die. And for this most horrible, awful, bone-chilling month, we'll be focused on some traditionally eerie topics, but also each week, we're going to collaborate on an exquisite corpse science poem.

So an exquisite corpse poem is a collaborative poem where participants take turns writing the next word of a poem without being able to see the words that everyone else has written. So we're going to introduce this week's terror with our exquisite corpse science poem. Eek! Forlorn skeletons lay prone in the ground, buried ritually. Ashen vessels lie in a memory-haunted mausoleum. Egads! Our gruesome fates. The crematorium?

To rot eternally? Or to sleep in soiled tombs or exhumed remains displayed? Zounds! The worn mortician embalms his subject peacefully. Abyssal gloom awaits this mournful cadaver. Yikes! In lonely crypts decaying mournfully

ah fuck i used mournfully twice well the mummified departed fester in their silence we didn't get any better at exquisite corpse poems no i feel like we need to have like a meeting where we like talk for an hour about how to do a good exquisite corpse poem. The topic for this week is Graveyard Smash.

Sari, what is a Graveyard Smash? Yeah, Sari, what is it? Is it like a party in a graveyard? Is that like the context that's used in the

Monster Mash? That's what I've always assumed. Yeah, the Monster Mash is a Graveyard Smash for instance. Have you ever heard the song The Monster Mash? Is the dance I've always assumed. Yeah, the Monster Mash is a Graveyard Smash, for instance. Have you ever heard the song The Monster Mash? Is the dance

the Graveyard Smash? No, no. The Monster Mash is the dance. This is a common misconception with the song Monster Mash. Everybody's like, oh, it's a song about a song you can't,

but you'll never hear the song Monster Mash. The Monster Mash is a dance, obviously. The monster gets up and starts doing the Monster Mash. And then when you,

once you're doing the monster mash, then it's a graveyard smash. Then it's a graveyard smash. Is it a graveyard smash because it's a big hit amongst the graveyard population? And the world, yeah. Last year's Halloween episode was called Monster Mash. You remember this?

So this year it's Graveyard Smash. Sari, so I feel like we are tenuously with our fingernails gripping onto the idea of what a Graveyard Smash is. Are we going to get any closer? Well, so in the email that Sam sent me, this is the real key. It said things to do with graveyards or burial or embalming related science or how animals, including humans, deal with their dead. So that was what Sam was thinking, and that's the vein that my fact is in.

So basically, ignore the smash. The smash is a silent smash. And just say the episode's theme is graveyard. It's just the smash is the interestingness. It's graveyard smash. Yes, it's the festive part. It's a little sparkle just the smash is the interestingness it's graveyard smash yes yeah it's a little sparkle on the top of the graveyard it's the jazz hands of the episode well so what did you did you look up anything about graveyard i looked up the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery because i was curious i'd love to know that so it comes down to where they are um

so in european countries which is where like our english language words come from generally uh the process of burial was very much a church thing and so a graveyard was part of the church yard where the graves went and so the church was like ah this is where the dead bodies go this is the graveyard and then when burying bodies became a more broad thing where you didn't have to like tether the dead bodies to a church land in some way yeah then those became cemeteries. So a cemetery is just for dead people. Yeah. No church attached. Yeah.

I need to know if you looked up the word graveyard, though, or cemetery or anything. What, the etymology of graveyard? It's a yard where there are graves, dude. What about cemetery? What about that one, though? That comes from like sleeping place or dormitory or put to sleep. Like those kind of origins. Dormitory means a sleeping place.

Dorm. I get it. Oh, yeah. I never put that together either. All right. Well, I feel we have over explained what a graveyard smash is. So it means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show, where I'm going to present you a graveyard smash. If you are in Egypt and you travel 20 miles south of Cairo,

you will end up at the Saqqara Necropolis, a burial complex that archaeologists have been studying to learn more about burial practices from around 600 BCE, which is considered the late period of ancient Egypt. The following are three stories of what those people have learned in studying the Saqqara necropolis, but only one of the facts is true. Which of these stories is the true fact? Fact number one, archaeologists discovered a nearly 20-foot-long manuscript describing a lecture on embalming held at the complex that was so popular it attracted an international audience that included students all the way from Greece.

Or it could be fact number two. The archaeologists discovered that wealthier patrons were able to purchase burials that would place their coffins at lower depths, keeping them closer to the underworld. Or it could be fact number three. Archaeologists discovered the buried remains of funeral gardens, where among shrubs and small trees, there were also a series of miniature pyramids that acted as grave markers for the dead buried underneath.

Little dead time garden. So is it, fact number one, they discovered a manuscript for a lecture that brought students all the way from Greece. Fact number two, wealthier patrons could be buried closer to the underworld, meaning deeper into the ground. Or fact number three,

creepy death gardens. This is an ancient Egyptian thing, correct? Yes, late ancient Egypt. I don't know that. I guess they believed that the underworld was under them. I'm pretty sure that they believed that there was an underworld and that it was physically underground. I think as far as I know and as far as we know, I think they're not around for us to ask. Yeah. I don't know why. Maybe this is just me. I read a lot of books about mummies as a kid

and my school library had a lot of books about mummies. I don't remember anything related to death being a factor in your funeral rites in any way as in ancient Egypt.

At least according to your elementary school science books. Yes. According to my elementary school science books. It was a lot more about the rituals in getting you to that place and then what was surrounding you when you were there. Right. But not like a physical, like, oh, dig this hole deeper. Otherwise, dad's not going to find his way to the top.

Yeah. I love the upsell idea. It's like, do you want three feet? Four feet? We can go all the way to 10 feet. Oh, I'll tell you who got ten feet was Joe Johnson. Do you love your dad ten feet?

Yeah, you know Joe Johnson's kids loved him ten feet. Yeah, that one just rings untrue to me also. My source also just being like the amazing cross-sections book of like the great pyramids or whatever from my grade school. Oh, I love those. The one about international students, like how'd they get the word out about that?

They got horses. People are going around. I guess so. But ride your horse all the way to Greece and be like, I heard about this great lecture. No way. Boring. I could see that. Humans love to point out where they think each other are wrong and like either go to observe it like for entertainment

or to like steal the idea and do better so i can absolutely see some greece no shame to greek folks but like going and being like oh is this cooler than the way we bury our dead or is this worse and we can feel morally superior now okay and then the last one about a little garden. It sounds nice. It sounds very clean. Like you just have a little. Yeah. Plant some plants near you.

I feel like they wouldn't be allowed to use mini pyramids. Like the Pharaoh would be like, uh-uh-uh. Those are for me. I think despite all my shade, I'm going to go with the lecture one. I think I'm going to go with that. Oh, wow. All right. But I like the idea of an underground garden, so I will go with that.

All right. Because I want it to be true. Well, I have good news for you both, which is that you're tied at zero. Oh, no. No! I hate that. Ritual of being buried deeper seems so crass and commercial. Well, that's what they seem

to have discovered. So, you can tell the difference between a rich person or a more rich person and a less rich person in these necropolis because there's like a bunch of differences. There's like nicer coffins. You got a gold or silver face mask over your face or like no mask at all.

Your organs can be stored in nicer jars. So you have like a clay jar for your organs or an alabaster jar for your organs. And the people who had like the nicer stuff tended to be like if you had a nicer jar and you had a nicer face mask, those people tended to be deeper in the ground as well. Now, I don't know if I threw you for a loop to be closer to the underworld. That's like a thought, but I don't know to what extent that's definitely a thing. As for the people visiting from a long way away, there was discovered a 20-foot long manuscript that contained medical information on embalming, but it was not related to a lecture and there were not students from Greece visiting.

And as for the funeral gardens, funeral gardens are a thing, but not the way that I described them in that guess. They don't build little pyramids with tiny people. Yeah, they use mice, actually. They enslave the mice to do it. I see. People are weird about being dead, huh? People are so weird about being dead. And I get it.

It's a lot to be like, ah, you get to exist, but not for long. Just wait. You're going to stop existing. When? We're not going to tell you. It's a lot. That's a lot of pressure, man. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it will be time for the Fact Off.

Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back, everybody. It is zero to zero, and it's time for the fact-off, where I'm going to be presented with two science facts from each of our panelists, and then I'm going to pick which one I like the best, but in order to decide who goes first, we've got a trivia question for you. Many cities burn fossil fuels and produce lots of sulfur dioxide. Then, bacteria that grow on gravestones can convert that sulfur dioxide into sulfuric acid, which softens the limestone gravestones

by turning them into gypsum. Studies in Massachusetts have found that these sulfur-converting microorganisms are enriched on the more polluted urban gravestones compared to less urban gravestones, but further research found that a canopy of trees can help reduce acid deposition and gravestone decay. What percent less decay was found on gravestones under a canopy of trees compared to an open sky graveyard?

Get out there, Sari. Start doing some measurements. In Massachusetts? Yeah, I'll go out. Uh-huh. So I'm going to say a canopy of trees can help. It's a percent less decay. 25% less decay. That sounds totally reasonable. This feels like one where we'll answer and then we'll go, whoa, that's so much more than I thought. So I'm going to say 60%.

Sam, you are the winner. 50% less gravestone decay under a tree canopy. Congratulations. Do you want to go first? Do you want Sarah to go first? Oh, jeepers. I think maybe I'll try to go first. We'll see how that suits me. All right.

So when rockets carrying spacecraft, satellites, all that kind of stuff launch, they're attached to a giant booster engine that helps the craft escape Earth's gravity. But that booster does not make it to space with the spacecraft. Generally, maybe there's newer ones that do. I don't really know. I don't think so. So where does the big booster go? It's really, really big, and it seems bad to have it just fall somewhere.

Well, if the rocket is launched from Kennedy Space Center, for example, in Florida, the huge booster falls safely in the Atlantic Ocean, away from people, animals, buildings, trees, any smooshable things. It probably does smoosh some fish. Maybe. There's probably some fish have gotten smooshed over the course of this whole process. Yeah. What else are you going to do about smooshed fish? But when rockets are launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian space center in Kazakhstan.

So this space center was built in 1955 and was the site of lots of really important moments in space history, like Sputnik launching, which was the first satellite. Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, launched from there. And things still launch from there to this day, including the occasional NASA spacecraft, a rocket booster falls, it falls onto land between 50 and 600 miles away into a remote mountainous region called Altai. So the region is basically a spaceship debris graveyard, and guess what? You can get smashed there. So residents, there are people who live

there. Not a ton, but there are people who live in this region. So residents are given a 24-hour notice to get out of the area where the debris falls. I couldn't find any examples of people being killed by falling rocket boosters. I imagine it's probably happened. But the debris does land on towns and a booster that was still filled with fuel even, like a launch went wrong and a fuel-filled one landed and exploded. And it broke windows in a 60 mile radius uh but there's also more subtle and sadder side effects to these rocket launches so the boosters that fall

in the area tend to still have about 10 percent of their rocket fuel in them which uh like over the past 50 years has been leaching into the ground and ends up in the food that people grow in the water that they drink. So doctors in the area say that residents often suffer from headaches, high blood pressure, anemia, sore throat, and various skin diseases. And a study in the early 2000s found that children who live in this strip of land where the debris falls are twice as likely to need medical attention as children who don't live in a place where rocket stuff is falling on them all the time. need medical attention as children who don't live in a place where rocket stuff's falling on them all the time. And residents have even sued the Russian government for things like a guy's field of horses died

and he thinks it was because they were poisoned by the rocket fuel and destroyed property. But as far as I know, there's only been one instance where compensation was paid out in the last 50 years. So they kind of are just like, eh, whatever. So the people who live in the region also strip rocket remains for valuable metals, but that doesn't really seem worth it compared to living in a place

where you have to leave a rocket right before your head. The government's required to give you 24 hours notice so that you can leave your home. But are they required to give you a new home if it gets hit by a giant rocket booster? I don't think so. I'm not really sure, but I don't think so.

It doesn't seem like it. And sometimes it's our rocket booster that falls on them. So that ain't good. Yeah, we should stop doing that. Yeah. That doesn't seem great. And the thing is, there's so much ocean for rocket boosters to fall into. Yeah.

Russia's got lots of coast. They could have done that, but they didn't. And they're not planning on changing this up anytime soon? I don't think so. I think it's been more and more common for people to sue them and for people to complain about it and for articles to be written about it. But I think for most of the 50 years that it's been going on, or more than 50 years it's been going on. They've been, or more than 50 years it's been

going on. They've been not really too concerned about it. All right, Sari, what do you have for us? So when we humans are trying to deduce whether another animal is living or dead, we tend to use a lot of visual cues like, is it moving? Are there any obvious signs of injury? Or if you're getting more medical, there are things like feeling for a pulse or checking pupil responses to light. But insects don't rely on their eyes in the same way. If an ant sees another curled up ant with its feet up in the air and not moving, it won't necessarily register that. Like, oh man, Brianna's dead over there. Instead, insects largely rely on sensing chemicals to communicate. And a big category of compounds that mean death to them are fatty acids, especially oleic acid, which builds up while the bodies decompose.

In some species, like American cockroaches or solitary bees, oleic acid means go away, possibly warning them that they might die if they come close, like if the insect died of disease or a predator or like a human squishing them, something that could spread or repeat. But in others, particularly social species like some ants, honeybees, and termites, oleic acid has been shown to cause what's known as necrophoric behavior, which is a fancy way of saying tidying up dead bodies. A lot of the papers use the word undertaking to describe this, which I thought was kind of fun and appropriate. So there are many, many research studies about social insect death, and I'm going to make some generalizations based on patterns that scientists have found. That being said, in termites, they often straight up eat their dead kin to recycle nutrients,

or else they bury the corpses with dirt or other stuff. And in honeybees, they often carry the dead bodies of larvae or adults right outside the hive and just dump them to keep them away from everyone else. And this behavior is stronger if they're more hygienic, as researchers say, as a species or a colony. And ants are a little more complicated or at the very least have been tested in more situations. Part of their response to oleic acid is based on their behavior. So if they're already in the middle of chores around the nest and sense oleic acid, they're like, uh-oh, someone's dead,

and then look around for the corpse and do their undertaking. But if a lot of workers are out foraging, then anything oleic acid-y gets treated more like food instead, I think. So it's like, ah, dead thing. We're like foraging for dead things. Dead thing. Love that. That's food. Dead thing is food.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in many cases, the ant undertaking involves picking up the dead body and plopping it into a graveyard slash trash pile called a midden somewhere in or around the nest. And this is where one ant researcher's experiments got kind of hilarious in a dark way. The biologist E.O. Wilson, who is still alive, by the way, was testing a lot of different chemicals to see what they meant to ants and found that oleic acid caused this necrophoric behavior. So one day, he took a drop of oleic acid and put it on a living ant. And in response, another worker smelled that it was dead, even though it was still squirming around, and picked it up and threw it in the graveyard.

And even though this poor ant would struggle and try to clean itself and run back to the central parts of the nest to get back to work, someone else would always grab it and throw it back in the graveyard. It's like an ant nightmare. I'm not dead yet yeah so so the yeah i'm not dead yet basically it was stuck wearing a very convincing costume of a dead ant and couldn't take it off uh for a couple hours oh but after after that it's self grooming did work and it was less stinky and the other ants stopped thinking it was dead but it just goes to show how powerful chemical signals are can't you see me

it's like sorry we're ants that's not we're just doing chemo taxes here so i have been recently deciding on which of these facts to award the points to buy how good of a tiktok I think that these facts would make. I'm going to have to get this across in a minute. And it's good pictures are a plus. I got to say the Baikonur Cosmodrome Rocket Graveyard would have some pretty good pictures. But I think that there's probably some pretty good dead ant pictures that I could also use. The EO Wilson is a plus that he's involved. I like the story.

I like the tension of the ant. I like the ant tension better. The frustration of being carried over and over again into a graveyard and then just walking off and being like, I'm not dead and then getting put right back on. That sounds like what we're all dealing with. Sari, I'm going to award you. And since it was a tie in the beginning,

to be the winner of this episode of SciShow Tangents. I hate you. Thank you. You hate me? I've won Halloween, Sam. No. Well, congratulations, Sari. You did the monster facts.

Anyway, it's time to ask the science couch where we got some listener questions for our couch of finally owned scientific minds, our virtual couch. This question was from three different people, from Guy and Luck, from Sarah Heidman, and from Mama Sarah One. So two different Sarahs. What is the greenest burial method and also the riliest and the schultzest burial method? For a long time, I wanted to be turned into ashes that that could then be scattered around uh but at this point i'm starting to get behind the idea of having a grave marker and i don't and i think it's just it's pure ego it's like i feel like if somebody like look maybe somebody will care about me after i'm dead and they'll want to go to stand in a place

we're gonna put you in a glass coffin like linen puts you in the great hall. I don't like that, but I would like a, I would, if possible, like a little garden with some pyramids. Okay. Okay.

I'll get the mice right on and start training them now. I feel, I feel like there are now some things where you can like hire someone you to like in some places, hire someone to bury you naturally in a forest which does seem like the thing to do sari do you have any idea what the most environmentally friendly burial method might be i think it's it's basically what you were talking about the less you do to a human body we're all full of good nutrients and there's

already decomposers out there so if you can just like facilitate that process happening and use as little energy as you can in that process. So that's where modern burial methods get a little tricky because if like so much effort goes into keeping the body from decomposing so that everyone can get like one last look at the dead person so embalming chemicals prevent like formaldehyde prevent decay and they like prevent decay even as you're in the ground um and can be carcinogenic and other like toxic to other living things or these fancy caskets are made of materials that don't decay or put in like concrete things so the ground doesn't sink down. And all of those things limit the speed of decay and also like increase how much junk just gets like left in the environment. It does seem very strange to build a concrete bunker under the ground to put a dead person in into does stretch my disbelief that that is something that we do inside of like a velvet lined casket that costs like a couple thousand

dollars and yeah and so that's like a way that a lot of people have done it so uh certain religions practice natural burials i think particularly judaism and uh mus Muslim folks tend to have like very simple burial methods. So it's just like a biodegradable shroud or a wicker casket and you put them in the ground pretty quickly. And so just like the more people that are comfortable with natural burials, the more eco-friendly. And then one thing that gets painted as eco-friendly is the idea of like scattering ashes and cremation. I think there's something inherently like we think bodies are gross. Right, so get rid of that.

Yeah, we've got to incinerate it. But yeah, so I guess it's hard to compare factors like what is the environmental impact of a giant concrete box versus a very hot fire. So it's a fire that's around 800 degrees Celsius or 1472 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's got to be like natural gas, right? Yeah, natural gas. And you burn everything in the body.

So like anything plastic or anything metal that's part of it like the goal is to reduce it all to ash so they're often like mercury teeth fillings like that mercury then gets released into the atmosphere as well which is something to consider yeah don't do that um but there is an alternative to that that is greener it still uses energy because there's still heat involved and chemicals involved but it's called alkaline hydrolysis or water cremation. That water cremation is a very lovely term for what this is. It's cool. So you take the body and you put it in a tub and a solution of like 90% plus water and 5% sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide aka

lye which is just like a very basic substance and it just dissolves you dissolves you right up into goo yeah just liquid goo and it leaves behind anything that wasn't flesh so like there are these bleached bone fragments that can then be pulverized and like given to the family as though they were ashes but also it leaves like teeth with mercury inside of them that don't get burned up or pacemakers and so people are recycling like the electronics from it and like uh you can like reuse those devices in in like a safe way then the the goop water that contains all your dissolved up body is just basic organic chemicals at that point because it's just all broken down. So it gets treated

to change the pH a little bit. Yeah, because it's got super high pH. So you have to, you don't want to dump that, you know, because if it can dissolve a human body, you don't want to touch it is one of the things i've learned but also i guess asterisk it can dissolve a human body but they also heat it up right pretty hot they heat it up around 150 degrees celsius or 302 degrees fahrenheit so like much less hot than uh cream fire cremation and they agitate it and stuff so i think it would take you a while if you just like dunked your hand in to dissolve and they like really accelerate it in a lot of different ways by putting energy into the system i've gotten sodium hydroxide on my hand before i know what i know

what it's like yeah burny and bad yeah it hurts it's a it's a burn but yeah and so that's like uh that water doesn't go straight into the atmosphere but it's like it can be treated in wastewater plants because it's like way cleaner than poop. So water cremation, that is a way. But you're saying that a lot of people have already figured this out and just burying a body is probably pretty good. Mm-hmm. All right. That might be what I go for. Sarah, what do you want to have happen to you?

I feel like probably either one of those things whatever is least expensive water cremation sounds a little cool though because then they can make like a rock out of my powdered bone or something put it in their yard that's pretty cool you don't get like a like a cup that's like here's the remains pour pour him out wherever wherever he wants to be his favorite place all of my relatives must drink a small part of it take one shot

of my liquid body no that's way too much Sam how would you like to die I think not how would I like to die oh sorry how would you like to be buried? I think I'd like to be thrown in a field so animals could eat me or something. Is that possible?

I don't know. Or like one of those body farms where they stab you or whatever. And then they're like, this is what it looks like when someone's stabbed. I don't know. Yeah, and then six months later. Yeah, that makes me want to take back mine, which is I want to get stuck in a glacier so that I can be found in 10,000 years. That's a really fun one.

Like this guy's wild. It seems like from what we can tell of our reconstruction of his neural anatomy, he was an early 21st century video blogger. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. That's at SciShowTangents.

Thanks to at DreamsCanLive, at that Mark Meyer, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can go to Patreon.com slash SciShowTangents, which is a place where you can become a patron. That means you're going to give us a little bit of money, and you're going to get access to exclusive content, to great stuff like our patron-only podcasts of Poopy Peepypedia and Q and Bidet. And we're doing like a spooky pee episode this month, is what Sam told me.

Yes, I got a hot tip also, that there will be a new Tangents sticker on DFTBA.com, the SciShow store, on November 1st. So look out for that, too. Look out for that as well. Also, if you want to help us out, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. I love reading them, and there's so many good reviews, and it 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 Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz,

who edits a lot of these episodes along with the horrible Hiroko Matsushima. Our scary social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti, Emma Douster, and Alex Billow. Our sound design is by Joseph Mouhamedesh, and we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon.

Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But, But one more thing. Decomposing bodies provide tons of nutrients to the ground around them. This can be great for plants that soak up the extra resources to increase their growth. But that's not the only way that dead bodies help plants out. Death also attracts scavengers. So when researchers from the University of Southeastern Norway studied the area surrounding

reindeer carcasses, they found a clustering of bird and fox poop with viable crowberry seeds in it. So it turns out that plants take advantage of scavengers' attraction to dead bodies to be closer to those sweet post-mortem nutrients. Wow. So there's a bunch of like crowberry bushes growing right now that used to be dead reindeer. Mm-hmm. They call it something fun. A corpse island or something like that.

A corpse island. That's a corpse garden, please. Corpse. If it's not called a corpse garden, then it should be called a corpse garden. Because I'm loving that. And also, I can't wait for all of the metal bands. Yeah. Hank, you should start a metal band.

I probably write a pretty good metal song, but it feels kind of contrary to my brand at this point. That's true. Is there a thing called goof metal? Because I think I could do goof metal. Here's my new goof metal band, Corpse Island. Oh, goof metal. I thought you said goose metal. I thought you said goose metal too.

I was like, what does that have to do? Chugga-chugga-honk, chugga-chugga-honk, chugga-chugga-honk. I was like, that would be on brand for you for sure.