SciShow Tangents - Monster Month: Living Dead

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Monster Month shambles on! This week: the living dead! We’re talking zombies, we’re talking Frankensteins, we’re talking skeletons. And by the end, things get downright poignant!Also in this episode, an all time Hank hot take about ghosts. I’d love to hash that one out more, so be sure to hit him up on Twitter so we can all figure out why he thinks ghosts are alive… 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]Brazilian Treehoppershttps://io9.gizmodo.com/the-brazilian-treehopper-may-be-the-strangest-creature-5975761https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/what-is-a-brazilian-treehopper/Cicada Wing Flickinghttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/uoc-iot022218.phpProtective Ant Fungushttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/ps-tzf050212.php[Fact Off]Neochromosomes (Frankenstein’s monster chromosomes) & cancerhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-11/giom-ssm110514.phphttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4905327/https://www.nature.com/articles/515314bhttps://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(14)00373-0https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14493https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383574218300322https://www.nature.com/articles/4401161Glass knifefish brain transplanthttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/njio-sb032420.phphttps://news.njit.edu/simulated-frankenfish-brain-swaps-reveal-senses-control-body-movement[Ask the Science Couch]Trying to reanimate animal corpseshttps://www.livescience.com/65542-zombies-real-resurrection-experiments.htmlhttps://io9.gizmodo.com/real-life-scientists-who-meddled-with-life-and-death-5949176https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15595271/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003497500010912Animal brainshttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0006899374904788https://science.sciencemag.org/content/168/3929/375 [Butt One More Thing] Dead butt syndromehttps://www.healthline.com/health/dead-butt-syndrome

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly horrifying knowledge screamcase starring some of the ghoulish geniuses that bring the YouTube series SciShow to life. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chen, also known as the Horror of Party Beach. Stefan, what's your favorite kind of candy? Oh, Skittles, probably. What? Oh my gosh. I can't believe that that's a thing that anyone thinks.

What? They make your snot so thick. It's great. I thought that was definitely going to be a bad thing about them, but no. Or like watermelon, those sour watermelon wedges. Now we're talking. You guys like the pure sugar candies, huh? Yeah, I don't want anything getting in the way.

You want to eat candy that's going to ruin your whole next day. All right, Stefan, what's your tagline? Garbanzo wheels. Oh, that's not going to work out well next day. All right, Stefan, what's your tagline? Garbanzo wheels. Oh, that's not going to work out well. Maybe though, who knows? We are also joined as always by Sam Schultz, AKA the head that wouldn't die. If I was going to have a head,

I'd probably want one that stayed alive as long as possible, I guess. Yeah. What's your tagline? It's monster surfing time. And we are also joined by Sari Riley, AKA the Adam Age vampire. Sari, what's your tagline it's monster surfing time and we are also joined by Sari Riley aka the Adam age vampire Sari what's your

tagline a wee little snail and I'm Hank Green and my favorite candy is orange slices wait like real orange slices or those candy type no the candy orange slices with a

crusty sugar on them yeah those are great and my tagline is All's Hell in Fire and Dancing. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to freak out and frighten and terrify each other

with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we aren't always great at that. So if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy,

we will force you to go up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care. And for this most horrifying month of all, we're doing things a little differently. Each week in October, we will be talking about science related to,

inspired by, or just sort of vaguely reminiscent of classic horror monsters. And now, as always, we will summon this week's monster with the traditional science incantation this week from me. Once upon an evening, Smokey, while I ate an artichokey, I googled odd facts with which I hoped to increase my score. While I googled changing phrasing, suddenly, a fact amazing, a fact so damn amazing I was bound once more to score. While I googled changing phrasing, suddenly, a fact, amazing, a fact so damn amazing, I was bound once more to score. This is great, I shouted. They will pick this one for sure,

and my score will then be more. Ah, distinctly, I remember, the fact was a contender, the greatest fact I'd ever found in all of Tangents lore. Eagerly, I wished to tell them these facts. I would expel them from my mouth and to their ears, these facts they would adore. I would yell and shout and share them, and these facts they would adore. And then we would call them Hankbucks once more. But then a scraping, scraping, and a mouth lolling, gaping,

it wrenched into my office, left the hinges hanging from the door. It shocked the fact out from my head. Only fear was left instead. It then destroyed my computer and left it in pieces on the floor. The fact too good, it was destroyed by this zombie on the floor. I would remember it nevermore. Oh my God, That was super meta. So yes, the topic for the day is the living dead.

Sari, what are the living dead? Well, I think also called undead. When something is dead, it is no longer living. But then the living dead is when you loop-de-loop that back around again and take a corpse and make it living again. Well, I'll just go ahead and say this. I think that if something is moving around, that it's alive. Oh. So there's no such thing as the living dead.

There's just the living. Well, I think it's more about its, like, past status. Like, I've graduated from college. This skeleton was once dead. Now it is living again. Right, okay. Something like that. And also graduated from college, this skeleton was once dead, now it is living again. Something like that. And also graduated from college with you. Yeah, and is also my best friend. It feels like there's

also, like, the past past status, because, like, if you animate a puppet that was never alive, it's not the living dead, it's just an animated puppet. That's true. It had to be alive, then it died, and then somehow, in some form,

it's back. Terrific point. But if a zombie is alive, then Chucky is alive. Well, Chucky's a human soul trapped in a doll's body, so that's a little bit more complicated. Are ghosts undead? I think they're still dead. I think ghosts are alive. I'm just gonna say it? I think they're still dead. I think ghosts are alive.

I'm just going to say it. I think they're alive and I think they can vote. Yeah, I think they should be allowed to vote. I think the living have to be fully in this dimension. And I imagine ghosts as peeking through some other dimension. This is an important conversation. Yeah, they're alive in that other dimension. That doesn't mean that they're not alive.

I also don't really want ghosts to vote because there's a lot of old people. Oh, that's true. Really bad. Very wise. May not line up with our current values. Maybe they bring otherworldly wisdom back with them from the other side. Nah, seems unlikely. I think they would just be like kind of racist and mean.

But you at home should vote. And if you want to check if you're registered, go to vote.org. And if you want to see how to vote in your state, go to How to Vote in Every State, the YouTube channel,

where there's a less than three minute long guide that teaches you all about how to get your sample ballot, how to check if you're registered, where your polling place is going to be, and when you can vote and how you can vote early, whether absentee or at a polling location.

How to Vote in Every State on YouTube. Check it out. You could have at least said it in a spooky voice. The deadline for registration has already passed in some states. So go now! Thank you. Did you look up anything about the etymology of the living dead

or the history of them or anything? I looked up undead and dead and those were pretty boring because those are another thing where it's like we had to have a name for a thing for death. And so I think that word came pretty early on and sounded

fairly like dead. But zombie is kind of cool because it is a word of West African origin. And it was when slaves were brought over to Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean during the 18th and early 19th centuries. They brought their religious beliefs and practices with them. And so that is how zombie was learned by the English language. Do we know where that word comes from? It was originally the name of a snake god, possibly. And then got attributed to meeting of reanimated corpse

in voodoo or adjacent religions. I didn't look in further than that because it's probably much more complicated, but it seems like it had a similar meaning when it was integrated into English for the first time of like living dead. And that means it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared

three spooky science facts with which to torment us, but only one of them is real. The other three panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact. If we do, we get a sandbuck. If not, then Stefan gets the sandbuck. Stefan, what are your three undead facts? You've all probably heard about that fungus that can infect certain kinds of ants and turn them into zombie ants and their bodies get eaten away and eventually

they end up clamping down on part of a leaf and they just hang out there and their bodies waste away but the fungus grows little spores out of its head and spreads its spores onto the ground, I assume. But this is actually a whole group of fungi that do this.

Each fungus has one species that it infects. So here are three facts that are related to zombie-making fungi. Number one, carpenter ants infected with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis usually end up dead on a leaf with a stalk of fungal spores sticking out from the tops of their heads. And the Brazilian treehopper, who's a sapsucker and thus also tends to be hanging out on leaves, has evolved a structure on its head that closely resembles the fungal stalks protruding from the infected ants. Scientists at first thought they were trying to deter predators by looking like an infected ant, but it turned out that they are actually used for sexual selection, and the resemblance to the fungalospores is a bit of a coincidence.

But they did observe treehoppers attempting to mate with dead ants who had apparently impressive headstocks. Oh boy. So number two, male cicadas infected with Massospora cicadina will begin acting like female cicadas, doing a characteristic wing flicking behavior to try to attract other males. And then those other uninfected males who are wooed by this flicking will come over to see what's going on and they'll end up getting infected by the fungus. But all of these infected cicadas will go on to try to mate with females as well, which further spreads the infection. Or number three, some ant colonies that are susceptible

to these fungi cultivate their own parasitic fungus that fights back against the zombie fungus. Through the ant's grooming behaviors, the hyperparasitic defense fungus is spread throughout the colony, causing many of the ants to be protected from getting infected. They have a good guy fungus. So our three facts are Brazilian treehoppers will sometimes try to mate with infected ants because the fungal spores protruding from their heads look like treehopper headstocks. Two, infected male cicadas will flick their wings like females that attracts other males that come to them thinking they are females.

They also get infected and then they go and infect females too. Or number three, some ant colonies cultivate a fungus and spread it around to protect the colony from a different mind controlling fungus. Oh boy, those all seem totally completely likely. I really like the one where the male cicadas are like forced by the fungus to act like female cicadas to infect more male cicadas. Does that mean it's harder to find a female

cicada to infect or why? I don't understand why they're doing that, I guess. They both are initially infected in the early stages, but part of what helps spread it around faster is that the male cicadas are acting like females. So they're just encouraging more fraternization.

Okay, that makes sense. Does the fungus do something bad to them or is the fungus just like to hang out in cicadas and that's that? Oh, all of these funguses, I think all of them do some pretty nasty shit. Starts with a wing flick and then your entire insides are eaten out. Is it just

me or, like, I feel like I first heard about this, like, zombie ant fungus, like, four years ago. And now there's, like, a fungus for every insect that, like, turns them into a zombie and then grows out of their head. Did we not know about this? And then suddenly we did, or like, was it just the

scientists were like, oh yeah, that's a thing, but it's not that interesting. Is it? It does appear that most of what we've learned has happened in the last decade. I don't know if it was completely unknown before that, or if we just like didn't study it until about a decade ago. Right. Maybe the fungus can read the internet and they're like, oh, that's a good idea. And then they all just start. I'll try that out.

We should stop giving them such good ideas because the last thing I want to do is climb to the top of a tree and have a fungus grow out of my head. I mean, I know that some ant colonies cultivate fungus. The leaf cutter ants do that. They feed their fungus the leaves and then they eat the fungus. So maybe it's not that one.

I think I'm going to go with number one just because I like the style of that story. It sounds funny. You just like it when animals get tricked into humping stuff. No. Not dead stuff. No. That is part of the story. I represent that. I like animals with funny

things on their heads. I'm going to go with the cicadas just because. I think I'm going to go with cicadas too. It's the right one, isn't it? I don't know. We're about to find out. But you can vote at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents which one you think is the true fact.

And that will give us way more than just three data points on how well Stefan did the fooling. Stefan, which is the true fact? It is the cicadas. So apparently not very well. When they all emerge, only about 5% of them or less than 5% of them are infected. So it'll spread.

But like part of what it's doing is having these males act like females to try to increase the amount of canoodling that's happening and help it spread faster. But over time, with all of these, I think it kind of eats away most of the body parts of the animal. But in this case, the cicadas' abdomens fill with the powdery fungal spores until it bursts open or falls off. And then that takes the genitals with it, I guess. But despite this, the cicadas are apparently fine. They just like they act pretty normally. They're just flying around doing cicada shit.

But that like lets them spread these fungal spores all over the place. And they keep trying to mate with other other females. So why are their genitals fall off? Well, it's just why is a really maybe more involved question than i can answer but my assumption is that the genitals are part of the abdomen and so it just like falls off or explodes they lose their genitals so it's kind of like those are two very different things. Oh, no. I hope nothing makes my abdomen fall off or explode ever. Or explode, yeah.

Those sound equally bad to me. I'm so happy to be my species. Yeah, and a bug. Poor bugs. So the ant colony thing, there is what they call a hyperparasitic fungus that some of these ant colonies have that attacks the mind controlling fungus and prevents it from being able to spread the spores. As far as I know, they do not cultivate it. And I don't know anything about

the grooming behaviors. Like I think ants do have some grooming behaviors, but I don't know if that contributes to anything here. But the other thing is that this protective fungus doesn't actually protect the infected ants. It only protects the colony. The ants that are infected will still die. This fungus will make them march to a particular place

and all the ants who are infected march to the same place. You get this pile of dead ants that are infected. If they are also infected with the good fungus, then 94% of the bad fungal spores are not able to spread themselves. So it neuters the bad fungus in some way. Why did you think about Brazilian tree hoppers mating with infected ants? Yeah.

Why did you think that brain come from? That one came to me while I was in the bathroom. Okay. It was like, it was a shower thoughts. And I was like, yeah, that's a good one. That's a good lie. You just thought of that. Okay.

So you should definitely Google these Brazilian treehoppers. They're little, I don't think they're beetles, but they're little treehoppers. And they look like they have four oh my god hairy balls on their head basically it's like very weird oh no i really hate them a lot that's that sounds like you're being you know glib but no no four four to five hairy balls yeah they don't think that they're for sexual selection because the females also have them. They think that maybe the hairs are like sensory. And so maybe there's some like tactile feedback that they're getting.

But it's probably not bad to mimic the infected ants because predators probably aren't going to go after them. So I think that's maybe the leading hypothesis there, but they don't know. It's really troubling. It's a challenging, it's a challenging bug. Well, next up, we're going to crawl into our coffins for a short nap, then it'll be time for the fact off. Creak! Opening the coffin door. We're back, everybody. Same book totals.

Sari with one, Stefan with one, Sam with none, and I am in the lead with two. Brutal. But I can't get any more points. And now it's time for Sam and Sari to compete in the Fact Off. They have each brought science facts to present to us in an attempt to scare off our pants.

The presenters each have a sandbuck to award the fact that they like the most. And to decide who goes first, here is our trivia question. Because of a copyright mistake, the 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain and has numerous unofficial remakes and spinoffs. How many official films are in the original Night of the Living Dead series? That's a fraught question.

I don't know. Okay. Sarah, you go first. I was going to complain about the question because I have no clue and you watch movies. Okay. Sarah, you go first. I was going to complain about the question because, like, I have no clue, and you watch movies. Sam's like, oh, well, my educated guess is going to be potentially wrong, and I'm going to feel bad about it. So you should just take whatever Sam says and add or subtract one. That is what I'm waiting for.

I'm waiting for Sam to give the first answer. Okay, okay, okay, okay, wait. So there's five movies that comprise the storyline of Night of the Living Dead. Those five movies have been remade various times. Oh, no. I'm going to go with five. I'm going to go with four. Oh, God.

Okay. The answer is six. What are they? Do you know? No one besides you cares. Okay. I think I want Sari to go first. To lean into my molecular biology background,

when we're talking about death on a cellular level, what happens to DNA is really important. Sometimes too much DNA damage leads the body to say abort and the cells rot away. Or sometimes cell death happens intentionally and there are enzymes that chop up chromosomes into bite-sized pieces or organelles like lysosomes, which are kind of like the garbage disposal in a sink, but with stuff in a cell. You shove it in there and then it gets chopped up. But the point of this is that DNA getting chopped up usually means death. But bodies work in very, very weird ways, and sometimes

cells totally defy these patterns. For example, there's a mutational process called chromothripsis, chromo referring to chromosome and thripsis referring to shattering into pieces, which sounds bad or maybe even impossible because of all this stuff with cell death. But especially in the past decade or so, scientists have observed these chromothripsis events corresponding with cancer cells. So instead of gradual DNA mutations, there is one explosive event of a chromosome basically bursting into smaller bits and it gets restitched together like a Frankenstein's monster with some deleted pieces, extra amplification of other pieces, and the order all mixed up. So it like generically looks like a chromosome, but all the contents are mushy and bad. And genes that spur cancer development called oncogenes proliferate somehow. Scientists

aren't really sure how all these mechanisms work. And sometimes they even incorporate DNA bits from other chromosomes to form a stabilized structure called a neochromosome, which sounds cool, to form a stabilized structure called a neochromosome, which sounds cool, but really it's just like if a chromosome is a normal living body, the neochromosome is Frankenstein's monster with all these bits and pieces hacked together that maybe shouldn't function, but it is, and it's in cancer cells. And it's not a one-in-a-million thing. Neochromosomes have been found in around 3% of all cancers, but especially certain subtypes like liposarcomas in fatty tissues and some brain and blood cancers. So understanding

how these Frankenstein monsters form will be key to adding more treatments to our cancer fighting toolkit. So this is a thing that happens, it causes cancer, where a chromosome explodes and recreates itself in a bad way. Yes. I refuse to accept. Is it ever a good thing? I don't think so. I think it's a process that has only been discovered as a way to create a cancer-causing chromosome arrangement. And it's like an alternate hypothesis to the idea that all these mutations are really gradual.

Now they're finding that there are these neochromosomes that by mathematical models and tests had to have, or like most likely formed by shattering and then recombining. Do we know what to do about it? No, we don't. I think it's just like, well, it's in 3% of cancer. So that's like a relatively small subset. It's non-negligible, but it would, I guess, be a preventative measure if we try to control this explosion somehow, because like by the time the cancerous cells are proliferating, the abnormal chromosome is already assembled. And so I think it's more of

just an understanding of how these things came to be. Sam, what's your fact? Hey, I also have a story about our good friend Frankenstein. Okay. In many depictions of Frankenstein making his monster, one of the most prominent aspects is the doctor procuring and placing a brain in his new monster's body. Usually it seems like this procedure doesn't go so good because it sort of seems like the brain and body don't work together and all Frankenstein can kind of do, sorry, Frankenstein's monster can kind of do is like lurch around and scream about how horrible his new hellish existence is.

But if we could perform a brain transplant in the real world, would things go any better? So earlier this year, a team put a bunch of glass knifefish through a series of tests and took roughly 40,000 measurements regarding movement and behavior per fish. So glass knifefish, they live in streams and rivers, and they're always reacting to changes in currents to keep themselves hidden in roots mostly is like they just try to be always hidden in roots so they're not getting eaten. So the researchers were tracking how their fish subjects reacted to a tank that had different currents in it and a little like shelter that would move around the tank. So then they would

zip around to hide in it. So they noticed that they were all zipping around different ways or like bigger ones were doing one thing, smaller ones were doing another thing. They took all this data and they made a computer model that had all of their fish subjects modeled in computer form with their different body sizes, swimming styles, and their little fishy personalities all put in this computer model. So after they had all their fish modeled up in the computer, they started switching their brains around Frankenstein style to see what would happen. What they found was that in the model, not for real, because we can't, I don't think we can switch anything's brain, can we? No. So what they found was that placing a brain in a different body had pretty much no effect on the swimming abilities or behavior of the fish as long as they were receiving sensory feedback from their virtual surroundings.

feedback from their virtual surroundings. So if there was a button clicked on that was like, this tank has changing currents, or if they could have a visual of where the moving shelter was, it seemed like their virtual brains could pretty much fill in the gaps of their brand new body to like instantly start moving around like they used to. They weren't any more clumsy or anything like that. And on the other hand, if the brain wasn't provided a lot of sensory feedback, then the brain wasn't able to get its bearings and it never really started to swim normally like it did before so researchers concluded that instead of the brain being quote precisely tuned to mechanics of the body's muscle and skeleton that the brain is more flexible than that and it's using like a constantly fluctuating

set of sensory inputs to guide your body more effectively. So I guess in my opinion, it seems like if you put your brain in a Frankenstein body, you'd maybe be totally fine. But people aren't fish. And this was a simulation. So who knows? But people aren't fish and neither are these. Yeah, that's true.

But they also said that it could point the way towards a future in robotics where we're just developing like a robot brain that has senses, basically. And you could plop it into a body and it would teach itself how to use its body instead of having to program it to like to walk or whatever. You can just plop it in and it would teach itself how to do it eventually. I definitely think that if you put me in a body of like a seven foot tall or five foot tall person that i would not move around well well that was what that was part of the reason they wanted to do this was because one of the researchers was just musing about why like tall and short people can do things like similarly well right or like they have the same like reflexes and stuff why the human brain

is so like elastic enough to to work in all these different kinds of situations. Okay, let's decide who is going to get the points here. We have either Sari. Sometimes chromosomes can shatter and then reassemble in weird ways that create undead neochromosomes that often can cause cancers. Or Sam. Scientists used a computer program to put a fish's brain into a different fish's body and learned that as long as they're getting stimuli, the brains basically adapt to the vessel that they are in. So Frankenstein's totally possible. Just put my brain inside of some young body.

Wow. That doesn't, whose back doesn't hurt. Three, two, one. Sam. Sari. Yes. I can't not get points or I'll be in last place.

I don't want to be in last place. And now it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our crypt of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at AddyGilio11. Sorry if that's supposed to be pronounced a particular way. How close have humans come to a Frankenstein's monster situation?

There's a couple of ways to think about this. The first is like we have created cells and then put other DNA, even DNA that we have created, into a cell. And then it's like this is a cell that has like entirely synthetic genome we've also done some really terrible unethical things with dogs yep yeah there are dogs and then they're also just like a variety of of animals including human corpses that a physicist was experimenting with did we ever reanimate any of them his name name was Giovanni Aladini in the 1800s, and he just shot a bunch of electricity into them. And so it made muscles spasm, and he was like,

they're alive, and people were like, eh. But he was like, they're alive! And it was just highly unethical and very weird. I feel like cloned animals are vaguely maybe. Yeah, you can be like, can you make my dog again? very weird. Okay. I feel like cloned animals are vaguely maybe. Yeah. You can be like, can you make my dog again? Yeah.

That's definitely not it, but it's on the path. It takes up the same cognitive space in some ways. Frankenstein wasn't trying to make like a monster. He was trying to make a dude. So if he could have cloned,

he would have. We did a head transplant with a monkey once, but they were, they was alive. Both of the monkeys were alive did that work sam it did uh for a period of time and it's very upsetting okay sort of along that same line and sam's fact there was that study in april 2019 on pig brains that like blew up

across the internet right yeah i should did a video about it and that felt Frankenstein-y to me. So this is where they slaughtered. And I think, I don't know if these pigs were going to be slaughtered. I don't know like how they ethically arranged this, but they had 32 pig brains four hours after they were slaughtered and they created a system called BrainX in a specially designed chamber. You don't want to design a system called Brain X. I don't.

Yeah. To like pump blood and nutrients and other things in. But they were very careful as far as like questions of consciousness went because they pumped in chemicals to prevent the neurons from firing, which is like the opposite of what Frankenstein would have done. What were they trying to do? They wanted to see if like the cellular functions would maintain without the like electrical activity that would indicate consciousness. So like some metabolic functions returned, the cells started consuming sugar and making carbon dioxide, and some immune responses in the brain started happening and like some neurons still fired because that added chemical didn't suppress it completely but it

prevented like a global kind of brain activity that would show up on an EEG and register as like a working brain and I think they did this study mostly to like study organ transplants and like how to keep organs functional over a period of time, even after death, or if you can revive organs from death. And we've done that with like cat brains and rhesus monkey brains to like cut off blood flow. So that would get them to a point of death and then restore blood flow and be like, okay, after an hour of no blood flow their brain is now functioning again what's the like ultimate goal here like well the ultimate goal i think honestly as is usually in these cases is to make it so that i do not die i do not want to die and i I would like to, if I die, come back from that. I think it also

has to do with like doctors resuscitating. So there's a lot of like medical codes. I'm not a doctor. None of us are doctors. So I don't want to like overstate this, but about when to resuscitate someone before a point of being declared dead. And so this could change that point a little bit of when to continue giving care, like medical care versus when to stop that. There are decisions that need to be made with that. And so having more medical definitions of when death is and what parts of the body stop, I think are useful in making educated choices. It seems like it's sort of dictated by our technology as well which is i guess scarier now because we are can get closer and closer to that line whereas like if you died in 1700 like

this is pretty clear distinction there like you know i don't think they knew cpr they didn't have like defibrillators you were just like done whereas here there's like that line is pushed a lot further and you have i don't know we have the technology to bring people back further from from from certain states yeah like you get to die more than once kind of situation which i guess is good if we can if we can keep people alive but it's's just, it's kind of weird. So really we defined living dead way to 17th century with like, you must die, be buried,

then crawl out with dirt all over you. Really, you can be resuscitated and the living dead walk among us. There are, there are probably

some undead people listening to this podcast right now. We're glad you're here. We're so glad you're here. If you want to ask your question to the science crypt, follow us at SciShowTangents on Twitter, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Thank you to at FutureNovas, at 42Griffey, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode. Final Sandbuck scores. Sam and Stefan are tied with one. Sari and Hank are tied for the lead with two. And that means that I am just two points behind Sam. I have a chance of not coming in last, but we are both very behind Sari and Stefan,

who are tied for the lead. It's a close race. 71 points each. Wow, you guys. Jeez. I'm glad that I'm not in the lead there, because that would make me nervous. It's stressful. 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 helps us know what you like about the show and maybe makes an algorithm happy. Second, tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroka Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing. When are you alive, but also maybe a little bit dead inside? Well, maybe when you're dealing with dead butt syndrome. It has another name, gluteus medius tendinopathy or gluteal amnesia, which is what happens when you've been sitting for so long that your butt gets numb

or starts to like sing out with nerve pain. Either my butt is always numb or my butt never gets numb. I don't really know. It never feels any different. Well, then you don't have dead butt syndrome. Okay, good. It's just sort of like your tongue. You ignore it after a little while. It's like, don't have dead butt syndrome. Okay, good. It's just sort of like your tongue. You ignore it

after a little while. It's like, ah, just a butt. Yeah, it's like all the parts of my body. I don't notice them until they give me a hard time. Just go surf TikTok for a while while you're on the toilet.