SciShow Tangents - Hearts

Episode Date: February 11, 2020

This Valentine’s Day, what could be better than cuddling up with someone special and listening to the Tangents Crew talk about various medical procedures in gory detail! Pucker up! They say the fastest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but I think if you ask a doctor they would probably say that’s wrong! But what do I know?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]Dr. Clarence Walton Lillehei and Heart Surgeryhttps://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002950.htmhttps://www.healthline.com/health/open-heart-surgery#when-it's-neededhttp://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/why/human-health/history-of-the-heart-lung-machine/https://www.texasheart.org/heart-health/heart-information-center/frequently-asked-patient-questions/how-is-the-heart-stopped-during-open-heart-surgery/https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circ.102.suppl_4.IV-87Cold Operating Roomhttps://www.jtcvs.org/article/S0022-5223(11)00421-1/pdfhttps://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/0003-4975(89)90151-3/pdfPatient-Donor Pumphttps://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(09)01080-7/pdfhttps://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.CIR.100.13.1364https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circ.102.suppl_4.IV-87https://www.jtcvs.org/article/S0022-5223(04)00093-5/pdfhttps://books.google.com/books?id=M5sbCxd5cioC[Fact Off]Chopin’s hearthttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/chopin-heart-tuberculosis.htmlhttps://apnews.com/bc0f09217f564329ae6fa2aefa6349a6/chopins-heart-exhumed-secret-relichttps://www.livescience.com/60953-chopin-pickled-heart-reveals-cause-of-death.htmlhttps://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(17)31025-2/abstracthttps://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(17)31278-0/abstractHeart catheterization https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/0003-4975(90)90272-8/pdfhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/clc.4960150715https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1956/forssmann/facts/https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cardiac-catheterization/about/pac-20384695[Ask the Science Couch]Non-human hearts (octopuses, earthworms, etc.)https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/why-does-an-octopus-have-more-than-one-heart/https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~rlenet/Earthworms.htmlhttps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)60870-7/fulltextHumans multiple heartshttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20131122-can-humans-have-two-heartshttps://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/circulatory/two-lungs-one-heart1.htm[Butt One More Thing]Poo-phoriahttps://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/02/18/poo-phoria-passing-a-stool_n_4808627.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3778072

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. Hi. What's your tagline? Gimme the fizzy. Sam Schultz is also here. Hello.

What's your tagline? Sweet little grandpa. Sari Riley's here as well. And what's your tagline? Unicorn piss. Oh, shit. That's the best. That's a direction.

I was looking in my brain. That's the way to do it. All you people coming in prepared. Viol's the way to do it all you people coming in prepared violates the sanctity of the tradition of the panic and then say something

my tagline is the sanctity of the tradition yeah but one time your tagline was like yellow pants or something yeah and then the next time

I was like I gotta prepare green pants every week on Sashio 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, by which I mean not really. But if you go on a tangent and the rest of the team deems it unworthy, we can dock you a sandbox. So tangent with care. Now, always we introduce this week's science topic with the traditional science poem this week from Stefan. Step into this atrium of inquiry and science. Ooh, I like it so far.

And let's take a look at one of the organs that's inside us. It's wondrous and constant, this four-valve appliance on which we've got quite a dire reliance. Oh, good. Our steady hearts carry on keeping up the pace, delivering oxygen and removing metabolic waste. A regular hum of ba-dum-ba-dum, pushing blood through the veins. A hearty thanks goes out to this pump

for maintaining such consistent flow rates. But the heart's where you feel the burden when love goes down the drain. And it also sometimes gets to hurting when you eat too many spicy chicken wings. But if you decide you want to run, it also picks up its speed because it knows that I've got a ton of hungry cells to feed. That's right. Thanks, heart.

You just rhymed drain with wangs. Hell yeah. Well, that's how I say it in my everyday life. Yeah, you do. I need some chicken wangs. You say that all the time. Yeah. So it is Valentine's week here in the world, in America. I don't know how widely Valentine's Day is celebrated, but we wanted to do a Valentine's Day-ish thing.

So we're doing hearts, but not like the metaphorical kind the physical ones and what is what is a heart sari it's like part of your circulatory system it is made of cardiac muscle which is different than the skeletal muscle on your on your bones and different things it has four chambers like stefan's poem not always well we've got more human hearts. Mammals, many birds. Yeah. Reptiles, you start getting into three. Other organisms, you get like five squeezy bits that you call a heart. Yeah, and sometimes you get more than one heart in an organism. Octopi have three. What about animals that have that hemolymph stuff?

Yeah, sometimes animals move their blood around with hearts, and sometimes they move their blood around around other ways where they just contract their body tissues to shove blood around. But that like a heart is a sort of a centralized system for moving like oxygen containing fluid through a body. Or to get that fluid to be oxygenated. Yeah. Yes. That is an important part. Yes. Because your heart like system like pumps it from your

body into your heart to your lungs back into the heart back out into your body this feels like one of the only episodes where we've like been able to definitively say yeah this is what this thing it's hard to argue about what it is yeah i'm sure that there is somewhere in the animal kingdom some animals that have like weird, not quite heart tissue stuff. That's like worms and stuff. We'll talk about them later. But they have like heart-ish tissue that squeezes and that helps move blood around. And so some people call them hearts and some people are like, meh.

Why not distribute the heart and just have all of my arteries and veins do like. That's what our intestines do. Yeah, the way my intestines do it. Some peristalsis. There, that's the word intestines yeah the way my intestines do some peristalsis that's the word i was looking for wow i think it's because the heart is so energetically taxing so our cardiac muscle cells contain way more mitochondria than the rest of our muscle cells because like our heart never stops we can contract our muscles but we can like relax the rest of them but if your heart stopped contracting you would die and that's like what happens during cardiac arrest or, well, that's like rhythm getting messed up. But the energy it takes to have our inhumans four-chambered heart

that can contract so regularly is a lot. So we have mitochondria generating a lot of ATP. And if all of our blood vessels were aligned with that we would probably need to eat so much and probably also sleep a lot to recover from that and i love both of those things you got the etymology of the heart i did look at that it all sounds like from words that look and sound sort of like heart but it has relatives beginning with card and cord from greek and latin and french so that's where like cardiac comes from but also other words like accord and discord and record those come from relationships between people so like accord is harmony between people and so it's like an agreement of the heart.

That's lovely. Never touch your heart to another person's heart, though. Will they, like, shock each other? No, it's just gross. You gotta open your whole ribcage. It's hard. Which brings me to my... We've got a panelist. It's me, who's prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment.

But only one of those facts is real. And the other panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact. If you do, you get a Sambuc. And if you don't, then I get your Sambuc. And I would like to tell y'all about open heart surgery. So this started being done a while ago and really sort of gained prominence and was done frequently starting in the 50s. So here's the thing. Open heart surgery, just for clarity, is not when the heart is open. It's when the chest is open. So it is open heart surgery. You're usually doing

heart surgery on the heart or the circulatory system when you're doing this. But there's a problem, which is that you don't want to do a surgery on a thing that's moving around. So you stop the heart during open heart surgery, but you don't want to stop a heart because then people die. So the patient's heart has to be stopped, but then you have a machine called a heart-lung machine that takes over the job of circulating and oxygenating the blood. One of the pioneers of open heart surgery was Dr. Clarence Walton Lillehay, who performed his first open heart surgery in the 1950s. And while techniques since then have come a long way, thankfully, it made the process safer, Dr. Lillehay took advantage of what was available at the time to make his life-saving surgery possible, including one of the following strange but true approaches. one of the following strange but true approaches. Fact number one, Dr. Lillehei enlisted the help of a local ice cream parlor studying their soda fountain because he wanted to understand how it moved liquids around

and combined it with the carbon dioxide gas, adapting that soda machine into a machine that would transport and oxygenate the patient's blood during the surgery. Number two, Dr. Lillehei would cool down the operating room to a frigid temperature before beginning surgery. So, the patient would lay in the room as their body temperature decreased, allowing for them to have more time to do the surgery before the brain damage would occur. And then we would come in and all the nurses and doctors would be dressed warmly to do the surgery. Or, fact number three, Dr. Lillehei recruited a person to serve as the human heart-lung machine, connecting the patient to the donor through a pump so that the patient's blood flow

would be routed from their body into the donors where it was oxygenated by their lungs and their heart and then pumped back into the person who was having the surgery done on them that is the one that i hope is the one so we've, he was inspired to create a heart-lung machine by an ice cream parlor soda fountain, or fact number two, he cooled down the temperature to keep the patient hypothermic so that they wouldn't go brain dead as quickly, or number three, he used a person instead of a heart-lung machine to be a living blood oxygenator. Can you explain, number two, to me why that helps? So when your body slows down, like your metabolism slows, and your body doesn't use the oxygen

up as fast, so the existing oxygen in the tissues would last longer, allowing them to do like 15 minutes of surgery instead of five minutes of surgery okay okay so they still have to work really fast okay and we do that now sort of with some things yeah slowing yeah i feel like you've talked about it yeah previous brain related something it's like in like trauma like hardcore trauma yeah situations right when you have to they need more time yeah a lot of stuff to fix the people and things are broken enough that you can't just stick them on a machine okay so that sounds plausible i really wanted to be hooking up to a different animal though

i just imagine though like that's a person when i was running through it in my mind I was like you could do like a cow whatever they got so much blood it would have to go into their arteries and veins so the blood would mix yeah well that could be good get some cow blood in there that never goes wrong

don't put cow blood inside of you I'm not a doctor but I know that that's bad well it'll happen. It's probably okay. That one where you hook somebody up to you sounds very familiar to me. But I feel like it's from like a Star Trek or something. Yes, Mad Max.

Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. But I feel like if you were hooked up to someone, like if you were the human blood machine person, you would have to like breathe a lot more, right? And your part would be pumping harder. Oh, yeah. Seems like you've got more distance to go. There's got to be some hazard pay maybe. I don't know. Siri, what seems the most plausible? Yeah, you're being really quiet.

I don't know. I'm only trying to wrap my head around these because I'm getting too in my head about them. Like this sounds plausible, but this part sounds fake. And that's how I lose truth or fail every single time. You really should get this one right, I feel like. I feel like I should, but that is the pressure that I feel every episode. The cold one makes sense to me for the reason Stefan described,

but that also feels like it makes a good lie. I'd be worried about open heart surgery being cold. Yeah. Like maybe the imaging tissue. You freeze a burn in your dang heart. Oh, and like the surgeon. Like when I'm trying to play games and my apartment is cold, ooh, like you lose finger dexterity.

You're right. Like, oh. You're right. It's bad. I also think that the human sounds really cool. I feel like it wouldn't be additional strain beyond like exercise. And there are probably family members that would be like, oh, yeah, I would give my blood. I would stand in the surgery room.

Is that too complicated a thing for them to have done back then? Probably not, I guess. I don't know. Almost on the moon. That's true. We were a decade off from the moon or two or whatever. I don't know. I feel like people did blood transfusions just like person to person

instead of like blood bags. So they would be like, here's my blood. That is now used for trauma medicine, but used to be like the standard for that kind of treatment. The soda one, it sounds so dumb. It doesn't even sound like you have to like go ask somebody who owned an ice cream parlor. You just read about it in a book. Be like, oh,

he's a doctor. Two tests do know how it would work, right? No, that one sounds like something that would happen in the 50s. When they didn't have the internet? Like, doctors are not engineers. And so like you'd have an engineer who designs a soda machine and then the doctor's like how does this work maybe I can do something with tubes to let me work on the heart I don't know I believe it even less specifically the dissolving like how do you get carbon dioxide into soda versus how to get oxygen

and I don't know where they would get if they had just like vials of oxygen. Probably. I know nothing. The history is like squished into one plane. Everything happened at the same time. Everything that happened before I was born is the same. So yeah, I don't know. I'm going to make you guys guess.

I'm not going first. You go first. I'm going to choose the human heart. Human pump man. Human pump man human pump man i'm gonna choose ah freak the human heart man human pump man oh no i'm gonna choose i don't like it but the cold one i guess i don't want to give hank three points sarah you convinced them the right answer you did it and then you didn't get it. Oh, no.

Well, not only did Sarah, you got it, like, it was almost always a family member. Yeah. Oh. And, like, you had the whole, and it was like exercise. It was like a little bit of extra work. You're so smart. Yeah, you had everything right. I just didn't want the risk.

I overthought it, like I always do. like i always do i thought my effects were so good this time i mean i was all on board with the soda fact i thought that sounded super right it fell apart under scrutiny i feel like so he did he did help create the bubble oxygenator which went on to replace the human body pump but it was not inspired by our soda fountain number two thing they did used to before dr lilla hay they would sunk like sink the patient into a horse feeding trough full of ice before doing open heart surgery so that is pretty real but they didn't probably for practicality reasons and maybe they didn't want to get their hands cold and like be bad surgeons they didn't probably, for practicality reasons, and maybe they didn't want to get their hands cold and be bad surgeons. They didn't cool down the whole room.

And then, yeah. So, the real person, it was called cross-circulation. And he did over 45 heart surgeries on children using that system. And the donor was typically the parent. Little body. No problem. It'd be easy to support a child. Yeah, no worries.

They have very little blood. So the blood was routed from the patient's heart through a single pump to the donor's femoral artery and then fed back into the patient with the same pump. And that is similar to how a fetus is kept alive inside of a pregnant

person. Now, part of the reason this works is because you don't need to have like a hundred percent blood flow. So during the the procedure it was about one-third the normal rate of blood flowing through them and 62 of the people who came in for this surgery were discharged from the hospital which means that a lot of people did not live through it but they were people with very serious conditions that he was operating on and 49% of those people were alive 30 years later which is extremely impressive considering the severity the conditions he was working on but they moved away from it because of safety and ethics concerns

for the donor because it did turn out to be fairly dangerous and one of the donors had some kind of an embolism so like an air embolism that led to a stroke and I think survived but was disabled because of it. That had developed because of the process? Because of the donation process that they were using. So they invented the bubble oxygenator so that they could oxygenate blood without a pair of human lungs.

I think we use those in fish tanks too. Yeah, it's actually very similar next up we're going to take a short break then it's time for the fact off so Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals. Sari has none. I'm tied with Sam with one, and Stefan's got two. Now get ready for the fact-off.

Two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a Sam Buck to award the fact that they liked the most. To decide who's going to go first, we've got a trivia question. The blue whale has the slowest heart rate of any mammal. The fastest heart rate in the animal kingdom goes to the blue-throated hummingbird. What mammal has the fastest heart rate of any mammal, just slightly slower than the hummingbird? One, the mole rat mole rat two the hedgehog three the shrew or four the jerboa sam you go first what's a jerboa it's the mammal with the

fastest heart rate in fact is it you're going with jerboa sure okay he's going with jerboa what do you think sari a shrew maybe yeah I would have said shrew. The answer is a shrew. Hey! Go, Sari. Nice. There is an object that was put in a glass jar filled with maybe cognac or some brownish alcohol. It was not a jerboa. It was smuggled from Paris, France to Warsaw, Poland in 1849

and has pretty much remained sealed in a pillar in a crypt at the Holy Cross Church until close to midnight on April 14, 2014, when 13 people, including an archbishop, a culture minister, and just two scientists, were allowed to look at it, taking over a thousand pictures and adding wax to the jar's seal to keep it tight. That object is Chopin's heart. What? to keep it tight. That object is Chopin's heart.

What? Because on his deathbed, he apparently wanted his heart to be buried in Poland, even though his body was in France because, I don't know,

symbolism. He wanted his heart to be in his home country. And then it's very precious to them now because it's been protected this whole time. And even this inspection

was mostly kept secret with no released public photographs. And those two scientists getting to go were mostly because they were bugging, it seemed like, them to look at the heart because they wanted to answer a key question, which is what he died from. He was a sickly man throughout his life, but it's sort of a mystery what disease killed Chopin from things like cystic fibrosis or tuberculosis. And ultimately, it would be great to do a genetic test to figure out what happened to the tissue. But for now, this like couple hour glimpse at his heart in the dark of night in secret in a crypt is the

best we've got. The researchers say that the heart was massively enlarged and floppy. That's a quote. And had whitish. It covering around the heart tissue which they attributed to a condition called pericarditis which is inflammation that could have been the result of long-lasting tuberculosis so the two scientists that actually took pictures of it and wrote a research paper as of 2017 said mystery solved probably tuberculosis that's where i thought my fact would end but i was like double checking just to make sure there's a 2019 paper that says the things that the 2017 paper used to diagnose his death with tuberculosis need a closer examination so like histology some sort of tissue analysis, or even something non-invasive like a high magnification microscopy or a CT scan.

Or just like tipping the jar around to help tell whether the whitish deposits happened before or after the death. That doesn't seem allowed. Yeah, they're just trying to get in there. That's what it seems like to me. This person's like, I want to see the heart. I want to see Chopin's heart. And shake it around. Why don't these people see the freaking heart?

To Polish people, it is like a very important artifact because he was such a great artist. That's fine. They'll be careful. The Statue of Liberty is very important to America and we let people see it. Yeah, we hang it on their head. It's a little bit big though to like hide away. Or like drop on the floor.

Yeah, I guess so. Hard to break. I think they're worried that the alcohol inside will evaporate. That was my next question. I gotta drink it.

I just wanna get drunk on Chopin's heart alcohol. That would be extremely powerful. Oh my God. Excellent. Thank you. And it's Sam's turn? Yeah.

So, I have a fun story that turns into not a fun story very suddenly at the end. Cardiac catheterization. Is that how you say it? Catheterization. Yeah, good job. There we go. Is a procedure where a teeny catheter, a.k.a. a tube, is run through an artery or vein all the way to your heart. And there are lots of life-saving and preventative uses

for this procedure, including installing pacemakers. You can also perform angioplasties with it, and a variety of tests and measurements can be performed using a catheter. So basically, it's a vital part of heart medicine, but in order to convince the medical establishment that it was possible, its inventor had to go to extreme lengths.

So Werner Forsman was a 24 year old recently graduated doctor he was like less than a year out of medical school working at a hospital in eberswald germany in 1929 and he was inspired by a medical illustration of a horse having its veins catheterized and he wanted he tried to he started like scheming up ways that he could do that to people because he saw what it was helpful for on horses. Did they were using it actively on horses? They were doing stints and stuff on horses. They could blow balloons in there. So you'd think that if they were doing it on horses

that they would say, let's do it on people. But at the time, it was a commonly held belief that any tampering with the heart was basically insta-death for people. I guess they thought their hearts were more important than horses' hearts. I mean, I guess they are. It's probably stuff with like the soul

in human hearts. Maybe. What year was this? 1929. But that belief was something that had carried over from like the middle

of the 1800s. Somebody had written something like don't mess with this or you'll die. And then since then it seemed like everybody was not messing with the heart.

So pretty much there was like no progress made in heart research for a long time so he tried it out on some cadavers and it was working okay and when he was ready he asked his superiors if he could start doing it on patients and they said no so he conceived of a little plan he said no you're 24 yeah well then he did what a 24 year old would do he convinced the OR nurse with the keys to the medical equipment storage room that his idea was really good and that she should help him so she agreed to secretly help him in the middle of the night

and she offered herself as a test subject so he strapped her down he anesthetized her arm and made a cut then unbeknownst to her he sliced his own arm and started doing it on himself because he couldn't make himself do it on her, I think. Like, he didn't feel right about it.

So, she was strapped down and saw him doing it and she was, like, freaking out. And he was shoving the thing up his own vein. And he had cut a length that he thought was the length it would take to get to his heart. And when he got to just about that length, he unstrapped her from the table. And they went to the x-ray room together. And they stood in front of the fluoroscopeoscope which is like a live x-ray and she held a mirror up to it and he finished shoving it in all the way because it was only to his shoulder so he had to keep feeding it and he could feel it hit his heart and he said it made him feel like he had

the cough and while he was doing this one of his friends found out he was doing it and they ran in and they tried to pull it out of his arm. But then he, quote, overpowered that person. And he got it in one of the chambers and it worked. He didn't die instantly. So he told his bosses and he got in some hot water, but they let him start trying

it on patients. And eventually he went to a bigger hospital to continue his work, but he had been publishing papers that some people in the medical community didn't like, and he was kind of fired with that explanation. So then he floated around working at other hospitals until World War II when he joined the Nazi party. I was wondering when the bad twist was coming. And he got captured by the U.S. really early on, I think,

and held as a POW until got captured by the u.s really early on i think in hell as a pow until the end of the war but during his imprisonment a french and american doctor were using his research to like build upon and they started to come up with all kinds of ways to use this process he had made up and then when he when he got out of being a pow a few years later he won the nobel prize so i guess he never really got in that big of trouble for being a Nazi. So that's the end of my story. But he did it to himself. He strapped a lady down. He was 24

though. You're not making great choices. There's probably a lot of 24-year-olds who listen to this podcast and I just want to say, you're doing great. I hated being 24. That was a bad time for me. Like my mid-20s were very bad. So I'm sorry. 24 was maybe my worst year too. 24 was a bad time for me. Like my mid-20s were very bad. So I'm sorry.

24 was maybe my worst year too. 24 was last year. Oh no. How's it going? It was actually like pretty shitty. So 25 is better. Yeah, 24 year olds out there. Yeah, it gets better. From a ripe old age of 25.

So we've got Sari with Chopin's heart treated as a holy relic and inside of a pillar and it was floppy and massively enlarged or Sam with Dr. Werner Forsman who created catheterization he did it on himself first

and he also fought off a person who wanted to stop him and then he became a Nazi or maybe he was a Nazi the whole time he's probably a Nazi the whole time I him and then he became a nazi or maybe he was a nazi the whole time he's probably yeah yeah yeah i suspect then won the nobel prize yeah still a nazi though yeah all right you ready ready to vote stuff yes i'll count you down yeah three two one sary what on earth i know i was surprised i was pretty sure i do enjoy thinking about catheters. But yeah, the enlarged heart in a jar. His heart was already dead. Drink that heart juice, Sam.

Join us. I disagree with this. I'm going to start a poll. Yeah. I bet if you took the whole average of the world, you would have come out on top. But in this room. This is a classic case of like important medical discovery versus

weird old facts weird things and I have lost several fact-offs to weird old facts yeah Sarah's going weird

I mean yours is a weird old fact too he thought off a guy he tied a woman down to a table for some reason sliced her arm open and didn't use it I know

I told the story I know it already that's fine it's a conspiracy to make me be in last place for some reason sliced her arm open and didn't use it. I know. I told the story. I know it already. That's fine. It's a conspiracy to make me be in last place. It's the curse of the sandbuck. And now it's time to ask the science couch.

We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It comes from at Clubjaw. Squids, octopi, and worms can have multiple hearts. What advantage would we

as humans gain by having multiple hearts? Also, where would you want your second heart to be? In or outside your body? So it could be anywhere inside or outside my body. If I had a second heart, I would want it to be inside of cognac in a can inside a pillar in Poland.

I would want mine to be in like a fake android body somewhere that's pumping blood through it to keep it alive so that when my heart fails I will have a

replacement there waiting for me and they're just like ship Sari's second heart to her and then the android just

dies yeah what's going on there why does it need to be in an android why did you create a life

just to kill it? It's just like, okay, I missed out on the android. Human-shaped box. Right, okay. Human-shaped box. Why is it human-shaped? Yeah, it's creepy. Why don't you make it adorable baby seal-shaped just so it can be more freaked out about it?

Check this idea out. Yeah. I kind of want a little compartment maybe near the, you know, on my flank. Just a little compartment and I can open it up and like stick different organs in there. So if I need an extra kidney or if I'm like going out to the bar, I'm like double up the liver. Let's go. Or if I'm going to exercise, double hearts. Let's get it.

Yeah, I love that. It's like it's modular. You know that horses have a heart in every foot, kind of? What? Yeah. They have like a little cushion system that when they hit their foot on the ground, it pushes blood up their legs. So like when they run, they sort of like have assistance in pushing their blood around. There's an adaptation that appears to help them run longer.

I think that my feet actually sounds like the best one. Let's do it. Is there an adaptation that appears to help them run longer. I think that's the best idea. Let's do it. Is there an advantage to having multiple hearts? It doesn't seem like it. So it seems like any animal that has multiple hearts has it because their heart is not as powerful as ours. For example, octopuses

have three hearts. They have one central systemic heart that supplies blood to the body and then they have two branchial hearts that push the blood toward the gills. So they have like separate hearts for each part of the process

where it's like pulmonary heart. Yeah. Our four chambers handle like pumping out to the lungs and pumping to the body. Worms have

five aortic arches that squeeze blood into different vessels like either to the front body vessels or the back body vessels they just kind of like squeeze so it seems like like nature does do multiple hearts but human hearts have evolved intentionally and are pretty much going at the max capacity they can we're doing it good we're doing it good but we can't get much bigger no uh someone asked a physiologist this and so so I'm just going to steal his answer, where it's like adding a second heart probably wouldn't do much.

Sometimes heart transplants, you don't actually get the whole heart replaced. You get like a piggyback heart grafted on to help. So the donor heart does most of the beating while the original heart pumps less. There's two hearts in you. Yes. the beating while the original heart pumps less there's two hearts in you yes but if you just like had two hearts in you your body might get used to the second heart and then your muscles might get more blood and you might get stronger over time like it would just mean pumping blood more let's fill stephan up with hearts see what happens can't have enough and then there's like one sort

of experiment but i don't think scientists pursued it very long. But when we're embryos, our heart is actually two. It's called the primordia is what the heart is called at that stage. And then eventually fuses into like the four-chambered thing that is in our chests. There's probably certain circumstances in which humans could develop two hearts if like something goes awry during development. But there are probably other things going awry that would not lead to the most robust health as an adult so mostly like even though we have really good places to put our second hearts a second copy of our heart probably wouldn't do much but if we had like squeezy tubes like a worm or like a horse does in its feet that might help because

that just like helps squish blood where it needs to go a little bit faster and now stefan has a correction it was pointed out to me on twitter by at emily janet six that in our music episode i mentioned that or i said that 440 hertz is middle c but it is is not middle C. It is the A note that is above middle C. I really blew it. I was too excited to be on the science bench. I knew it was wrong, but I was too embarrassed for you to correct you. Yeah, all of us knew it. You were all laughing at me.

Just let him be wrong. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, follow us on Twitter at SciShowT Tangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at emmaferry11, at crystalr99, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Final scores!

Sari and Stefan are tied with two. Me and Sam came out with one. Which means that Sari and Stefan are tied for the lead overall. What the heck? Yeah. I came in three points under them

and Sam two points under me. Oh, wow. I could have been tied with you. Interesting. Interesting. 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. That lets us know what you like about the show. Also, you can put topic ideas in your iTunes reviews. We look for those there. Also, you can put topic ideas in your iTunes reviews.

We look for those there. 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.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stephen 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 also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph

Tunamedish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. 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. When you have a really big, satisfying poop, the stool could activate the vagus nerve which is involved in the

parasympathetic nervous system so it can cause your heart rate and therefore blood pressure to drop which leads to mild lightheadedness and good feels called poo-phoria by dr ednish chef in his book but if there's too much book what's your poo telling you listen to your poop i've heard of this book actually but he warns if there's too much lightheadedness, it could potentially lead to fainting while pooping, called defecation syncope. Poophoria, according to the internet, is also called a stool high.

Don't do drugs, kid. Just get poo high. Yeah, just not amuse-le, man.