SciShow Tangents - Paper

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. What's the coolest thing you've ever ridden? Oh, Toyota Corolla.

Starting point is 00:00:38 I don't know. Nothing. Have any of us, have any of us ever been on a motorcycle? Oh, actually I used to own a motorcycle. Really? Why did you say Toyota Corolla? I forgot. Motorcycle, I would put in quotes. It was a Honda 90. I don't know if you're familiar with what those are. They're almost like a little toy motorcycle, like a hobby motorcycle. Oh, it's awesome. It was cool as hell. It's very cool. It looks like a bike, like an electric bike, kind of, but a little bit chunkier.

Starting point is 00:01:07 It was old, though. They're very old and it just didn't work super great. So I gave it up. But I drove that to college for a couple for like a couple months. And then, God, you have blown Sari and I out of the water. Mine might be one of those like lime scooters. I'm sure you've been on a jet ski before, right? I have been on a jet ski.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Thank you for salvaging my credibility. That was my second answer. Well, I haven't been on a motorcycle or a jet ski or a snowmobile. Probably like a roller coaster is the coolest thing that I've ever been on. Yeah, that's a cool thing to ride. Like the Mount Everest one at Disney World.

Starting point is 00:01:42 You ride it. You ride it. I said, what's the coolest thing you've ever ridden? I feel like steering it is an important aspect. No, you ride a roller coaster. Okay, then like a bumper car. It's called a ride. I'm steering a bumper car.

Starting point is 00:01:54 We would go to this little bumper car place near Cannon Beach, Oregon, and my grandpa would bumper cars with me and my sister. That's fun. And that was great. You've never even been on a motorcycle for one second? No. I haven't either. My mom got in a motorcycle her brothers run a motorcycle shop and she got in a pretty big accident her whole knee scraped up so i think she was like let's not have my children in the

Starting point is 00:02:17 kind of way that it's still scraped up and yeah it's like very she would she would always be like this is my motorcycle scar from Malaysia. Wow. So your mom is way cooler than you. Oh, yeah, definitely. She knows like five languages and has ridden motorcycles and, yeah, extremely cool person. It's a fairly universal experience for my slash your generation that our parents are way cooler than us. Yeah, my dad was driving a truck when he was like 10. Yeah, my dad was a commercial fisherman in Alaska, and he has like rocks inside of his knee.

Starting point is 00:02:51 Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory and also for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, it's from me. Are you ready?

Starting point is 00:03:13 I wrote it four weeks ago. The long-promised paper poem. It better be good. It's not. Soft and crinkly, very thin. Fold it into a shape you can put things in. Get it real wet. What? Fold it into a shape you can put things in.

Starting point is 00:03:31 I mean, yeah. Get it real wet so it's nice and pulpy. Put locks together. It gets real bulky. Write down your thoughts in short little jots or make little dots in the shape of knots. Made out of lignin and cellulose. Trying to eat it is really paper so brown or paper so white paper so dull or paper so bright paper in the day or paper at night paper on which we all can write people that threw at the end there i liked it i kind of got sucked in i think i think it held up all the way through thank you i feel like you know that a poem is gonna be bad when it starts out and you're just describing the thing, like literally describing it. One thing I know about paper, very thin.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Yeah. Sari, what is paper? Well, it's very thin and it's kind of crinkly. I mean, now that I've said that, there is some like thick paper. There's thick paper that you can't easily crumple. There's paper that you can't easily write on. You gotta have special inks or materials. People make like couches out of paper.

Starting point is 00:04:31 Is there a thickness of paper at which it just becomes a plank of wood? I don't think so because paper is processed wood. So paper is material that's produced by a combination of mechanically and chemically processing plant matter. So wood or grasses or fabrics like cotton that are derived from plants, you process it and then you get a bunch of the cellulose fibers, you extract them, that's the pulp uh there's often usually lignin in there as well but in modern paper we remove it because that's what makes

Starting point is 00:05:10 paper yellow as it ages and like get kind of crinkly and degrade um then you like mush the pulp flat and you dry it out and then you cut it into your pieces and that's paper it's pretty amazing like when i picture what like the byproduct of of what you the process you just described i'm not picturing something super smooth and silky like apparently it is like a piece of printer paper yeah that doesn't seem like something that happened by chopping up tree into little bits and yet and. And yet, I think a lot of modern paper, like the printer paper that you're imagining, has had a lot of other processing and additives.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Like it isn't just cellulose. There's bleaching materials in it to make it whiter, a whiter white for your black ink on it. I think there are also sometimes some mineral additives like chalk or other things to make it smoother smoother probably chuck some microplastics in there yeah i think a lot of like any any waterproof paper has microplastics in it like if it's i thought i was i thought i was making it up oh no i think there are plastics in some papers uh great that are i'm i'm not shocked now shocked now that we've tested it.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Can we just make it out of polyester? Why not? But there are some papers that I feel like the more traditional paper, like washi paper or rice paper, that's where you can start seeing more of the fibers. Or if you make your own paper. I don't know. I feel like that's a big thing.

Starting point is 00:06:42 I did it in kindergarten as like a learning opportunity moment where we mushed up construction paper and then packed it together and then made new construction paper that was all brown. Because we all did too many colors. And sucked also. Yeah. Like it fell apart. Look, we made worse paper. We took this perfectly good paper from the recycling bin. We ruined some paper and made bad paper.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Yeah, we did that with like jeans, which was cool. We like turned some pants into some paper. Yes. Which is good for like post-apocalypse situations. I suppose. When you got a lot of like old jeans you don't want anymore. When you find a jeans warehouse. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:22 And you need to write letters or something. Yeah. jeans warehouse yeah you need to write some letters or something yeah yeah for that apocalypse where it's much more important to write letters than have jeans we've got too many pants and not enough

Starting point is 00:07:34 communication all right I am about to ask you a question that I had never thought of until just now and it has become

Starting point is 00:07:44 extraordinarily obvious to me where the word paper comes from. Obvious. Why? Because I assume we didn't get papyrus from paper. We got paper from papyrus. Yeah, we had papyrus and then was like, this is a plant. And then we made a product from that plant. Papyrus was the name of the plant.

Starting point is 00:08:06 But if you're being semantic, papyrus isn't technically how we would define paper modernly because it's just like the way that it's made is overlapping reeds. Like you don't make them into a pulp. You just kind of get the reeds really thin sliced and then overlap them, kind of like you're weaving and then smush them together. And then you've got your paper. So in the way that parchment is animal skin or vellum is animal skin from the olden days, that's not technically paper because it's not wood pulp. Papyrus isn't wood pulp, but we took the word for paper from it anyway.

Starting point is 00:08:39 Well, isn't that the way? Be like, hey, I'll take that. You can't have it. I'll take it. And then I made it to my thing. And it's not your thing, though. It's better. Yeah. Well, in fairness, it is better.

Starting point is 00:08:54 I'd prefer a nice sheet of printer paper to some papyrus. Printer papyrus. I mean, everybody's looking for something a little hip. And I think that if, like, printer papyrus? Yes. Some people listen to vinyl records, think that if like printer papyrus yes some people listen to vinyl records and some people have you have to have a really beefy printer though yeah that sucker's jamming up for sure every time all right i feel like i know what paper is and that means that it's time to move on to the quiz

Starting point is 00:09:21 portion of our show this week we're going to be playing Paper Truth or Fail. Most of us use paper as a thing on which to write or print, but scientists and engineers have devised many ways to make and use paper over the years. The following are three stories of incredible paper technologies, but only one of them is a true story. The rest are lies. Which one is the true one?

Starting point is 00:09:49 To enable other scientists to read the sequence of short pieces of DNA, scientists crafted a paper strip labeled with fluorescent dyes that reacted with nucleic acids. When the strip is dipped into a solution containing the DNA in question, it produces a color readout corresponding to the sequence. It could be that. or it could be, while secret messages can be sent with invisible ink, one engineer wanted to see if they could make a paper that is the secret message. To do this, they drew lines onto a paper

Starting point is 00:10:16 using an ink containing materials that reacts with infrared light. The paper then looks like it's filled with scribbles, but under the light, materials inside of those lines contract and cause the paper around them to self-fold into a message. Or it could be this fact. To create a material that could potentially be used as a powerful band-aid, researchers fabricated a paper using organ tissue. They used pig organs, stripping them of their cells and grinding the protein mesh that remained into a powder

Starting point is 00:10:49 that they then mixed with other chemicals to create a thin sheet that is able to support the growth of human stem cells. So is it the genetic paper for your genetics paper, a secret paper into your secret paper, or a tissue paper made out of paper tissue. Those are good descriptions. I do not understand the first one, I don't think. So it's a piece of paper and it's got special stuff inside of it that binds to nucleic acids

Starting point is 00:11:19 and reacts with them. And as the solution is drawn up the paper by capillary action, it binds. And then according to some thing to do with the DNA, it then is able to show you the pattern that a specific sequence of DNA would make on the paper. Smart guy stuff. That feels like it would be rude if that existed because i did so much dna sequencing in my undergrad just the old-fashioned way this is the thing this is the thing like that's how every like it's been 20 years and and now people are like oh you had to pipette by hand well of course

Starting point is 00:12:00 they still have to pipeette by hand. Yeah. You don't, you let the robot pipette for you? There is a, there are robot pipettes though. There's a pipette and robot by now. Yeah, absolutely. Just like. Meep, meep, meep, meep, meep. I've seen them. No more scientists, only pipette and robots, right?

Starting point is 00:12:18 That seems like as much as I know about scientists, it seems like mostly what they're doing is pipetting. Is that true? That is, yeah. There is a lot of it. You complain about pipetting. I've they're doing is pipetting. Is that true? That is, yeah. It was a lot of work. You complain about pipetting. I've heard Siri complain about pipetting. I've heard Deboki complain about pipetting. It's a big part of the job. I mean, I've even pipetted and it sucked ass.

Starting point is 00:12:36 Number two, I think is something else that has been turned into this fact. I feel like I've heard something like this, a self-foldinging paper but i don't think it was used for secret messages it was used for something else that i feel like is the most likely one for me just because so much gets invested into secrets i feel like ever secret paper codings secret messages look at that paper and be like there's something weird about this paper and i'm a spy so i will get to the bottom of it you don't want the spy, so I will get to the bottom of it. You don't want the spy to think I will get to the bottom of this. You want them to think,

Starting point is 00:13:08 oh, what a normal looking piece of paper. I don't have time for paper. I'm a spy. Yeah. I think it's number three, based on absolutely nothing, I think. Number three- Tissue paper made out of paper tissue?

Starting point is 00:13:19 Yes. Number three sounds nice and useful somehow down the line. It doesn't feel like there's enough structure. I've heard of people stripping up cells, but I feel like as soon as you grind them up, then it becomes less biologically useful. So I'm going to go with the secret paper. Well, Sari, there is self-folding paper inspired by plants, and it really does rely on water-based solution created by a team of scientists from Japan.

Starting point is 00:13:45 It was inspired by the movement of plants as controlled by the absorption and release of water within cellulose. And they used an inkjet printer to print using cartridges full of the inks and different concentration of solutes. It was a real thing. You can read about it by googling self-folding paper structures right out of the printer. You'll find the advancedsciencenews.com article. But indeed, there was not a thing where you can do this fancy stuff.

Starting point is 00:14:14 Trying to tell you, sir. Okay, okay. I thought you were trying to trick me. No, I'm not smart enough to remember that I should try to trick you. And of course, that first one is mostly just based on how existing techniques work to use electrophoresis and gel materials uh you can't do you can't do it with paper unfortunately yet maybe someday to make the lives of all those students easier and that means sam is correct and it all started out with a mistake a materials engineer at northwestern university was working on making an ink out of ovaries that could be used in a 3D printer.

Starting point is 00:14:48 Why? It's a bunch of words I really just said. When he accidentally spilled some of that ink, but when he went to clean up the mess, he found that the ink had dried into a sheet. What? This ovary paper. What a series of events this fellow experienced yeah so he and a team of other scientists at northwestern decided to see if they could create paper out of other organs testing out their method uh with material taken from cow and pig organs these included uh material

Starting point is 00:15:17 from the ovaries uterus heart liver and muscle and for those different parts the scientists had to first wash them with a detergent that stripped away the cells. So Sarah, you are right. This isn't the cells. It leaves behind the scaffold of proteins and carbohydrates, which they then ground up into the powder, mixed it with a solvent, and then left it out to dry into a thin, flat, flexible sheet. It's like vellum, but of the future. From there, they did some sensible experiments like showing that the paper could support stem cell growth and that they could grow hormone-producing ovary tissue on their paper. They also, oh no, it says from their paper.

Starting point is 00:15:56 They also demonstrated that they could make a paper crane out of their tissue paper, which is silly and a little gross, but also demonstrates the flexibility of the material, which could make it useful in surgical contexts. So Sam came out of that with the point. Sari got nothing. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it's time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Now it's time for the fact off.

Starting point is 00:16:40 Our panelists have all brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge whichever one I think is going to make the best TikTok and award it Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. When you are buying groceries, you might be familiar with the question paper or plastic. But the first mass-produced paper bags were flat and shaped like an envelope, which limited both the amount of space they had to hold stuff and their durability compared to the flat bottom upright bags that we have at the store today.

Starting point is 00:17:11 At first, these flat bottom bags could only be made by hand, so they were expensive to make, until an inventor named Margaret E. Knight created a machine that could fold and glue them, making the mass production of these bags possible. In what year was she awarded the patent for her machine? So her name's Marguerite Knight, and she got a patent, which I feel like narrows it down to some certain time frame. Yeah. But I'm going to say 1922.

Starting point is 00:17:43 All right, 1922. I feel like earlier than... Grocery stores feel like an old thing. I think grocery stores are kind of a new thing. I think grocery stores of some kinds have always existed. Yeah, you'd go to the grocery stores. We understand it.

Starting point is 00:17:56 Paper or plastic. Still, you don't have to have a grocery store to have a paper bag. I think they put everything in a crate for you up to a certain point. Just a bunch of human nailed wood. I'm going to say 1760. That can't possibly be right.

Starting point is 00:18:18 Well, I thought Sari was going to have a lock on this. But you went way early. I don't know when things are existing it's 1871 uh so sam congratulations you weren't named margaret e knight in 1760 okay okay i think i went a little early people were named margaret the knight in 1770. in 1760. Margaret E. Knight would have to be like Manfred E. Knight, secretly patenting

Starting point is 00:18:50 under a male name, probably in 1760. Okay. Here's some names from the 1700s. Betty, Bridget, Caroline, Catherine. See? Okay, okay. These are normal names. Harriet, Francis.

Starting point is 00:19:08 Betty in the 1700s? Apparently. Of course, the most common boy name during colonial times was John, closely followed by the other very classic boy names such as William and Henry. All three. Got all three of your names in the first sentence of 1700s names. I like the fact that Sam thinks that there were knights

Starting point is 00:19:30 in 1760. There's still knights. It's a really good joke, so I didn't want to be mean about it. There were probably a couple left. There was definitely

Starting point is 00:19:42 like colonial nostalgic people who did renfares and like oh sir knight how's it going europe still existed in the 1700s europe still exists now and there's knights paul mccartney's a knight you know that's true paul mccartney is a knight there are still knights okay sam wins and also Sam wins. Who do you want to go first? I'm scared of this one. I want to go first because I

Starting point is 00:20:11 don't know how this is going to go. Okay. In the 1850s, America had newspaper fever. And in the 1850s, and this I did not know, we were using linen fibers usually from old rags to make paper, not wood pulp like newsprint is made of today. And we needed a lot of rags to make the millions of newspapers being printed every year.

Starting point is 00:20:32 Something like 405 million pounds or 183 million kilograms of rags every year. And we are importing rags from all over the place. But as other countries started printing more and more as well, there aren't that, you know, there's so many only so many dirty rags to go around. So we had a rag shortage. I like. So, like, all newspaper is is like the existence of newspaper is is built upon just a tremendous surplus of rags. Yes. Yeah. There were way too many rags i don't know what we were doing with them but there were lots yeah and and so we were like i guess we should

Starting point is 00:21:13 just create journalism we need to create journalism and then the and then we that journalism got so popular that the rags were like we're all done done with it. Now we have a rag shortage. We thought we'd have rags forever, but look at us now. So anyway, we're out of rags, so radical solutions had to be explored so we could have newspapers. Meanwhile, in like 2050 BCE, the Egyptian people were engaging

Starting point is 00:21:37 in the practice of mummification. That's not how meanwhile works. A type of ceremonial burial that involves embalming the body and wrapping it up in linens. You know what mummies are. And while it might seem to the modern day person that mummification was reserved for pharaohs and people of high rank, I think pretty much everybody got mummified back then. It was just what you did when you died.

Starting point is 00:21:59 I'm a little worried about where this is going. And after being mummified, often you were buried in what was basically a graveyard with lots of other mummies. Now, back to the 1850s, another fever that was sweeping not just America, but the world was mummy fever. People in Europe had been obsessed with mummies for a pretty long time at this point, stealing them from Egypt and destroying them to make medicine, to make paint. And basically as like sideshow acts, they would just take mummies apart and be like, well, look at this for like the previous 200 years before this. So there were European people crawling all over Egypt, digging up mummies for all kinds of reasons. And one of these people was Dr. Isaiah Deck. Deck, an Englishman, was an explorer by trade. And I think what explorer means basically is that he just would go around the world looking for stuff to steal and ways to make money.

Starting point is 00:22:47 And wouldn't you know it, the London Times put out a 1,000 pound prize to anyone who could find a new source of paper. So according to my very unscientific calculations, I think that was about $35,000. And, you know, that's a lot of money. So off Dr. Deck went in search of paper. He went to Jamaica where he was simultaneously looking for copper mines to exploit. And he thought about plantains and native grasses, but he couldn't make that work. Then he just happened to be on a trip with his dad in Egypt looking for Cleopatra's lost emerald mines. Real explorer thing to do.

Starting point is 00:23:22 It's a different era. Yeah. That's just what people did on vacation back then yeah they didn't have it's just like I got a lot of irons

Starting point is 00:23:29 in the fire you know trying to solve this paper problem trying to exploit copper in Jamaica there's a lost emerald mine I'm pretty sure

Starting point is 00:23:38 I think that this guy's got I'm pretty sure he's got a good line on the holy grail I'm gonna head for that real Indiana Jones vibe here while he and his dad were in Egypt he realized that there were just tons of mummies everywhere they were digging up big holes filled with mummies and they were all wrapped in linen

Starting point is 00:23:53 linen that had been treated with preserving chemicals even mummies thought dr deck was paper so he wrote a scientific paper called on a supply of paper Paper Material from the Mummy Pits of Egypt. And when she estimated that if we took the wrapping of all the mummies in Egypt, we'd have enough linen to supply America with paper for 14 years. That's not true. That's gotta be wrong.

Starting point is 00:24:17 Yeah, I think since then, people have looked at it and been like, no, that couldn't possibly be right. I was like, that was only for 14 years. And we were just like, it's worth it for our newspapers. Look, from what I can tell, this mummy pit goes all the way down. Yeah. Like so far, we haven't hit the bottom.

Starting point is 00:24:32 I'm guessing center of the earth. Like I might as well just keep stealing. Like there must be more things that I haven't found. Yeah, this mummy pit. It's unlimited. I'm just going to take it all and the more will appear because I'm a great treasure hunter what I know about stealing from other countries is that the exploitation goes

Starting point is 00:24:50 on forever and that you never run out of the resource absolutely not so he wrote this paper but there is scarce evidence that anyone actually ever made paper from mummy wrappings there's evidence that big bales of mummy wrappings were imported to America all the time there's correspondence from paper manufacturers asking very serious questions

Starting point is 00:25:08 about if it's possible to make paper out of mummies. And as of 2010, there have been two broadsides discovered that describe a paper manufacturer in Connecticut that made 14,000 pounds of mummy paper every day, according to them, at least. But apparently there's been no tests conceived of that would positively identify paper as mummy paper and not just linen paper. And some of the tests that could help us narrow it down, like carbon dating, are destructive enough that and wouldn't narrow down the information enough that anyone has thought it was worthwhile to do it. So it's still a mystery.

Starting point is 00:25:45 So it seems like maybe people made a lot of mummy paper. According to them, anyway. According to them, they're making lots of mummy paper. Fortunately, simultaneous to all this, the process for making wood pulp-based newsprint was being perfected, and by the end of the 1850s, newspapers were printed on that instead of mummies. But I'm actually not sure if anybody ever got that 35 000 yeah i mean it feels like it must have been the the wood people i guess they

Starting point is 00:26:11 were like hey we did it and they're like no you don't need it you're you're fine your solution's too boring yeah these people were trying i wanted to come i wanted it to come out of big pits of dead people. The reality that this was all rag based really does like change how I'm trying to imagine the importance of rags. We were thinking about rag binding. Now I just have rags sitting all over the place. Yeah, nothing to do with them. I just feel like this guy was a tremendous bullshit artist well he might have also just been really dumb too you know probably a little bit of both maybe could have figured out a better solution maybe would have looked at that those tree people

Starting point is 00:26:57 that's the thing he he looked at trees and was like nah that can't be paper i couldn't possibly i can't take these banana husks that look papery already and turn it into paper i need a rag i think outside of the box man yeah i mean his mindset unfortunately i just gotta be like i gotta just like slice this tree really thin yeah that's gotta be it that's just hanging out in jamaica trying to slice a tree really thin. Yeah. That's gotta be it. That's just hanging out in Jamaica, trying to slice a tree as thin as he possibly could. Never worked out for him though. Yeah. And his dad,

Starting point is 00:27:30 then his dad swooped in and said, Hey, you got emerald mines to look for. Stop slicing those trees. Let's go. All right, Sari, what are you,

Starting point is 00:27:37 what do you have for me? Something much less weird. But is it more of a thing that actually happened? Yeah. Is it more science related related it is more science related less uh grand movie plot uh so like we've talked about modern paper is dried plant mush and the orderliness of cellulose molecules is important for the structure and function of living plant cells but when we make paper that doesn't matter so much. What we're really going for is enough molecules squished together

Starting point is 00:28:09 that the paper is thick and sturdy enough. So some cellulose fibers end up being amorphous or disordered, and some are crystalline or ordered. And paper is fairly easy to recycle because you just have to strip away anything that you don't want, like ink or glue, mush it back up again, strain out the not sturdy enough cellulose molecules, and then make more paper out of what's left. As we reuse and reuse paper, we get more of that not very sturdy paper sludge, which can be dealt with in a number of ways, like burning or composting, because nature handles cellulose really well.

Starting point is 00:28:39 But another strategy is to make cellulose nanocrystals, or CNCs. I won't get into the weeds of the material science here, but basically you can take waste newspaper or paper sludge or bulk plant material like banana husks, extract the cellulose and use a technique called acid hydrolysis to create this crystalline material with some very cool properties. From what I can tell, a lot of people are currently exploring what cellulose nanocrystals can do. There are lots of papers from the last decade or so. One option is adding it back into paper making processes or even concrete to increase strength. They're just like these really stable crystal structures. Other scientists have tried assembling CNCs into thin cellulose films, which are a biodegradable alternative to plastics like polyethylene films. And those are cool and

Starting point is 00:29:31 all for environmental reasons. But for the glamorous folks among us, a study published in November 2021 in Nature Materials showed how a team used cncs to make really beautiful rainbowy glitter uh this glitter gets its pizzazz thanks to structural color rather than pigment so it's the way visible light refracts inside the cellulose nanocrystals similar to how butterfly wings or peacock feathers get their iridescence as opposed to uh like paint and it's sparkly. It's colorful. It's edible and wearable and biodegradable and not made of microplastics like a lot of current glitter. I mean, like all of current glitter. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:12 Like what else do you make it out of? Mica, you can like squish up rock, get the mineral. Yeah. Fish scales too, I bet. Yeah. Anything's shiny that you find, you can just mush it smaller and then that's glitter. But a lot of plastic. So if we can push to recycle more paper and plant scraps then maybe we don't just make

Starting point is 00:30:31 more paper we might be headed into a bright cellulose filled future of arts and crafts see this is good because one my brain is like no you can't make glitter out of paper it makes sense but you know crystals two people are worried about microplastics three people like glitter yeah you got biodegradable glitter you can sprinkle it it'll still get everywhere but then eventually a bacteria will just eat it away it'll be gone well if i had said mine in the 1850s, you would have said this is good because people love money. People like a newspaper. And I have no problem with grave robbing. Well, here's the situation.

Starting point is 00:31:17 I think that both of those facts are about equally good. But Sam already had a point coming into it. So the winner of our episode. Sorry, Sari, is Sam. Congratulations, Sam. I've been real smart lately. You are handily winning this season. Don't worry.

Starting point is 00:31:40 You got a lot of chance to come back, Sari. It's seven to five. I think I lost by like 20 episodes last year. Yeah. It's okay okay we're neck and neck yeah all right that means it's time to ask the science couch where we've got some listener questions for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds this one is from at belinda messi who asks what gives fresh paper and fresh books that nice nice smelling smell. You know, I don't know. I know that there's like a thing that happens to paper after it's like been around for a while where it degrades into

Starting point is 00:32:13 vanillin, which smells like vanilla because it's the thing that gives vanilla a lot of its vanilla smell. But I think that that mostly happens when it's a little old, not when it's brand new. So I don't know what like VOCs would come off of paper that would be actually smellable because the cellulose is probably too big to smell. I would guess it's the bleaching stuff because bleach smells kind of nice, don't you think? I think it does. So do you know, Sari? I got nothing. Yeah. So I also found a lot about old books

Starting point is 00:32:48 and you're right vanillin benzaldehyde is another big one that's the almondy smelling one um and fur for all i think that's how you say it which is almond like uh so yeah a lot of a lot of people talk about old book spell because those are what the paper compounds like the cellulose and lignin break down into. For new books, it's what Sam said basically of like everything that we put into the paper or books, new books, that could be kind of stinky. So papers, inks, bleaching agents, adhesives. Inks, totally. Yeah. I totally feel like when I crack open a new book, there's like an ink smell.

Starting point is 00:33:29 And I tried to find some of it. There isn't a lot of modern printing press literature out there as far as I could find. But a lot of bookbinding adhesives used nowadays are ethylene copolymers, like vinyl acetate ethylene or ethylene vinyl acetate. Right, so just some normal solvent smells. Yeah, normal solvent smells, but, you know, could be good. Hydrogen peroxide is like a common bleaching agent. So that's like medicinal. What was interesting is that paper mills have a very bad rap for smelling very stinky. Yeah. For just because it's like industrial and sulfurous and a lot of sulfurous chemicals or reduced sulfur chemicals that smell like rotten eggs or whatnot get released into the air.

Starting point is 00:34:24 From what I can tell, the good paper smell is probably the printing process. And I only say this anecdotally because we used to have a laser jet printer. Like, that's what I printed all my high school essays on, was, like, this big laser jet printer. And printers like that can be like the combination of heat. So then they're heating up toner and like to melt the plastic. They could give like a light heat up the wood a little bit. So it's like a light burnt smell, but also it heats up air molecules.

Starting point is 00:35:00 And like you can smell ozone, which is kind of like a little bit smoky sweet like the the smell of thunderstorm you know sari's being a real champion given this whole spiel while sam and i smell every yeah listening and thinking about yeah yeah me too but like we're just smelling books i love it this is great uh yeah or or printers any sort of printer where you're putting ink on there's usually some heat so like it could be just heat burning up dust a little bit or it could be like any sort of so if you like camp fiery smells or like burning things then so i've gone through and i've smelled a sort of like selection of books that i have like this is the book i got most recently i think i got it in the mail from my publisher and it has very little smell it is like

Starting point is 00:35:52 hard to detect there's a smell there but it's kind of hard to detect and then i like the the oldest book i smelled i think had the the strongest and smell. The older books smelled better. And the newer books smelled less but also worse. Comic books smell different than non-comics. That's what I was saying. Comic books, more ink. Let me get a...

Starting point is 00:36:18 Yeah. Very inky. So that one's pretty old. It does have that vanilla smell. And it smells like a little bit like the bookstore in general, which would be like, I don't know, furniture. We're really going

Starting point is 00:36:34 after it, you guys. I have a lot of books down here to smell. I'm going to be at it all day. Well, the world will never know. Yeah, whatever Sari said is the right answer. If you want to ask the Science Scouts your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents,

Starting point is 00:36:51 where we tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to everybody who does that. We've got a lot of followers now. Or you can join the Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at Jill Friedenberg, at Mystical Elvin, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. First, you can go to

Starting point is 00:37:10 patreon.com slash scishowtangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful, and it helps us know what you think 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.

Starting point is 00:37:29 I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes, along with Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Trappervardi and Emma Douster. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Bettish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green.

Starting point is 00:37:50 And we couldn't make any of this, of course, 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 humans have been wiping their butts with paper products for centuries but the

Starting point is 00:38:22 first commercial toilet paper is credited to an American inventor named Joseph C. Gaiety in 1857. It was made from a banana plant fiber, again, bananas, they're back, called manila hemp, and it was infused with aloe gel. That sounds awfully nice. Also, it had his name watermarked into every sheet. That's nice. He had to market the heck out of it to get people to give him money instead of wiping their butts with free catalogs. So I present to you a quote from a flyer titled, The Greatest Necessity of the Age, Gaiety's Medicated Paper for the Water Closet. And here it is. Quote,

Starting point is 00:39:03 Printed paper, everybody knows, is rank poison to tender portions of the body. And here it is. to lay in a plentiful crop of piles or aggravating them if they exist by applying that ink to the tenderest part of their body corporate. If we accept the eye. So the question was asked at Gaiety headquarters, what is the tenderest part of the body? And they were like, I think it's my butthole. And somebody was like, no. Your eye. Eye. It's the eye. It's the body. And they were like, I think it's my butthole. And somebody was like, no. Your eye.

Starting point is 00:39:46 It's the eye. It's the eye. They're like, okay, fine. How much cheaper in every respect is it to use paper made of the purest material

Starting point is 00:39:57 and medicated with the greatest care? How much, I agree, cheaper in every respect except for dollars. Except for dollars. You save a lot of money in butthole respect, except for dollars. Except for dollars. You save a lot of money in butthole maintenance, though, Hank.

Starting point is 00:40:08 That's right. The thrifty man spends twice on his butthole. But that's like... That's a true gaiety of our age, Sam.

SciShow Tangents - Paper

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