SciShow Tangents - Plastic

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

Plastic: space age wonder material or planet-destroying scourge? The real answer may lie... somewhere in the middle (but leaning more towards scourge). Plus, learn exactly how many LEGO minifigures yo...u can eat before you die! Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!  If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Milkhttps://blogs.getty.edu/iris/galalith-alchemy-in-the-age-of-plastic/https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/casein/3007625.articlehttps://www.ganoksin.com/article/galalith-jewelry-milk-stone/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-home-milk-plastic/Bloodhttps://books.google.com/books?id=3uoiAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA9https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/rjrtags/ill65.htmlhttps://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=beadshttps://materialdistrict.com/material/blood-plastic/https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=beadspictures: https://www.hippohardware.com/blogs/news/at-deaths-door-a-history-of-hemaciteVenomhttp://www.t3db.ca/toxins/T3D2544[Fact Off]Bees and plastichttps://www.sciencealert.com/wild-bees-have-been-found-building-nests-entirely-out-of-plastic-for-the-first-timehttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13592-019-00635-6https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/pp-bsw030117.phphttps://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1890/ES13-00308.1Celluloid billiard balls http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/05/13/the_death_of_billiards_and_the_rise_of_plastic_on_99_invisible_with_roman.htmlhttps://www.liveabout.com/what-pool-balls-are-made-of-368742https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/once-upon-time-exploding-billiard-balls-were-everyday-thing-180962751/http://mentalfloss.com/article/64247/first-plastic-billiard-balls-routinely-exploded[Ask the Science Couch]Corn plastichttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/environmental-impact-of-corn-based-plastics/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/corn-plastic-to-the-rescue-126404720/https://mcgillcompost.com/blog/recycling-number-7-pla-plastics[Butt One More Thing]Cigarette buttshttps://www.sciencealert.com/this-company-recycles-cigarette-butts-and-turns-them-into-plastic

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Stefan. Hello. Welcome. How are you doing, bud? I'm all right. What's your tagline?
Starting point is 00:00:31 Ooh, I'm real busy like a bee. Buzz, buzz. I don't know. That's great. I loved it. Why is it so menacing? Sam Schultz is also here. G'day, mate.
Starting point is 00:00:44 Oh, good one What's your favorite marsupial? There's only like four of them That's not There's so many marsupials There's all the mammals Kangaroo Smaller kangaroo
Starting point is 00:00:55 Kind of bigger kangaroo Koala And then a bunch of wallabies That all kind of look the same Do you know the possum is a marsupial? Yeah What's the one we got? That one's maybe my favorite.
Starting point is 00:01:06 I like that one. I like them. They're cute. I think they're cute. I like that they're cute and then really scary both in one package. Yeah, they have terrible
Starting point is 00:01:12 insides of their mouths. Yeah. What's your tagline? Roast beefy weefy. Whoa. I don't like it at all. Sari Riley is also here. I am.
Starting point is 00:01:21 How are you doing? Okay. I'm wearing a vacation shirt today. You do. It does look like it's time for vacation. Yeah. What's your tagline, Sari? Buckle up, kids. Ooh. It's time to go. Buzz, buzz. And I'm Hank Green, and my tagline
Starting point is 00:01:38 is 100 purse alligator. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with the facts about science. We're playing for glory, and we're also keeping score and awarding Hank Bucks from week to week. So,
Starting point is 00:01:53 we do what we can to stay on topic, but the podcast is called Tangents, and if your tangent is deemed unworthy, we'll force you to give up one of your Hank Bucks. And as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem. This week, it's from me. Long organic polymers of high molecular weight, massive chains of atoms, twisty, curved, or straight, sometimes created from fossil fuels, sometimes from agriculture. It's a useful and convenient part of our disposable culture.
Starting point is 00:02:20 We use it every day. Of course, as Barbie said said life in plastic is fantastic as long as we're not dead that's the wow yeah life is life and plastic is fantastic as long as we're not dead i added that oh okay yeah because you know plastics do have their downsides and i don't want them to i don't know i feel like we worry a lot about plastics it's like the ocean's clogged with plastic i'm like oh it's there but small yeah it's a big ocean there are bad areas so it's fine but there's not like a texas sized island of plastic which is the impression i get sometimes i thought there was i thought there was no no well then what what are we worried about i mean there is the great pacific garbage path what's that it's microplastics mostly yeah you can't like yeah that's a sized area where there's
Starting point is 00:03:12 a slightly higher concentration of microplastic in the water yeah or you know like it's it's it's you know how much higher than you would like right but you can't like walk on it oh i thought it was just a like rubber duckies and all kinds of stuff just floating out there. Well that's the other thing is that like the plastic in the ocean
Starting point is 00:03:31 is mostly fishing nets. And that's also the most concerning piece of plastic because like it's designed to catch fish. To catch fish in it. But we do have too much plastic.
Starting point is 00:03:39 It does last forever and we should stop drinking out of disposable containers. I agree with. Yeah. It seems like people are so close to not
Starting point is 00:03:44 doing that anymore, and that's kind of relapsed to me at least. Which direction were we going where we stopped drinking soda? It seems like people were thinking more about, like, don't use plastic water bottles. Right. But now it, like... It's right out.
Starting point is 00:03:56 Yeah. Nobody cares anymore. Except Sarah with her analogy. What's plastic, Sarah? You did a pretty good job defining it in the poem because it is an organic compound that's often a long polymer chain. Okay, we gotta
Starting point is 00:04:09 unpack some things here. What's an organic compound? So, yeah, so it's a carbon-containing compound and they can be synthetic or semi-synthetic, so they can be made from just man-made materials like chemicals, or they can be made from structural compounds that
Starting point is 00:04:26 we find in nature and that we react with one another, like cellulose. Is there any purely natural plastic, like rubber from rubber trees? This is where the definition gets a little fuzzy for me because I'm not a material scientist. It seems like rubber is not plastic because plastic's main property is plasticity, so that it deforms irreversibly. But plastic's main property is plasticity, so that it deforms irreversibly. But rubber's main property is elasticity, which means it deforms and then snaps back into its original shape. And so rubbers can be mixed with plastics to form different compounds, but they are two ends of a material science.
Starting point is 00:05:02 And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for us, but only one of those facts is true and the rest of us have to guess or know which one is the real fact. And if we get it right, we get the Hank Buck.
Starting point is 00:05:18 And if not, Sari gets the Hank Buck. Sari, it's time for you to try and fool us. Okay. Semi-synthetic plastics have been around for a while, like how celluloid film can be traced back to the sugar polymer cellulose from plants.
Starting point is 00:05:29 If you can get a substance to polymerize through chemical reactions and have plasticity, you've basically made a plastic. So I guess I am contradicting myself already. Okay. So which of these proteins was historically used to make a plastic? Number one, casein from milk to try and make erasable whiteboards instead of black chalkboards. Okay, gross.
Starting point is 00:05:50 Two, hemoglobin from animal blood to make jewelry beads that oxidize to be a deep red hue over time. Ooh. Fake. Or three, convulsin from snake venom to make exceptionally strong but expensive plastics used in handguns for decoration and functionality.
Starting point is 00:06:08 Whoa. Convulxin? Yeah. Ooh. Convulxin. With an X. C-O-N-V-U-L-X-I-N. Ooh.
Starting point is 00:06:17 That's a terrible one. Sounds like something in snake venom. Definitely in snake venom. Don't put that inside of you. Venomy. I've heard of that protein in milk. Yeah, that's definitely a milk protein. Milk is white. Milk is white. White boards are also white.
Starting point is 00:06:30 Which makes me think it's a lie. That's misleading. The connections, that seems like one of those things where you're just trying to play on my biases, my psychological biases. I guess I'm not sure if the trick is what it was made into or if it exists. Okay.
Starting point is 00:06:49 Hemoglobin turned it, like, it's just a very complicated protein, hemoglobin. It seems like it would be a difficult thing to polymerize is my main concern with that one. Is it easier to polymerize simple things? Well, most polymers are really simple. Huh. Well, does hemoglobin have, is that the part that has the iron? Yeah. So hemoglobin is a complex of different proteins, like four different proteins around the sort of iron-containing part of it.
Starting point is 00:07:10 Okay. See, again there, that seems like a lie. Because then it's like, okay, the hemoglobin's got the iron, and then you make a bead in it, oxidizes like iron does. Wink, wink. It's trying to trick me. Yeah, I mean, making snake venom into guns also feels that feels just weird so it must be true it feels kind of like the same kind of lie where it's like it's white and it's a whiteboard
Starting point is 00:07:32 it's a snake and it's a gun it's gonna kill you and it's still gonna kill you okay okay see and it's And it's blood, and it's blood-like object, a bead. I'm leaning toward Kacen making whiteboards. Me too. I think that one, because I know Kacen is like a thing that they tried to make into stuff. I'm going to go with the snake venom one. He's going with snake venom. I'm going to go with my own gut.
Starting point is 00:07:59 I'm not going to listen to these boneheads over here. Even though Samson knew the answer. Okay. I'm sorry, Stefan. Sam didn't know the answer. And the snake venom one is just the one that I completely made up
Starting point is 00:08:12 because I thought it'd be cool. Guns and snakes. Guns and snakes. If you can put venom into anything, what would rich people buy? A fancy gun. Yeah. So wait,
Starting point is 00:08:24 did they try to make blood into stuff, into products, like plastic products? So yeah, there was a thing called hemocyte in 1885, which was apparently animal blood, which they didn't have a use for, mixed with sawdust. And then this article in whatever old newspaper I found was not very specific. It said some chemicals. Ah, sure. And they mushed it together and really squeezed it to make it compact. And they would make like doorknobs out of it. They would make roller skating wheels out of it.
Starting point is 00:08:55 Whoa. Blood knobs. What's this stuff called? Hemicite. H-E-M-A-C-I-T-E. It was like a tough material. I don't think it would be considered a plastic necessarily. Right.
Starting point is 00:09:04 Depending on what. No, I don't think so. I don't think it had. It was a a tough material. I don't think it would be considered a plastic necessarily, depending on what. No, I don't think so. I don't think it was a polymer or anything. It was just like very squished together wood with blood as a binder. In 2018, apparently, someone took 100% cow's blood and also put it under a lot of pressure and dried it out and made it into some sort of compound. So like people have turned blood into solid objects before. Nice. Can I do that?
Starting point is 00:09:27 Can like Catherine and I make blood gems and wear them on each other's fingers? Literal blood diamonds, yes. But milk plastic's totally a thing, which is very weird to me. Still don't believe it. Yeah, it's weird to polymerize a protein, man. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:44 It was first created in around 1897 and patented in 1899 when a German material scientist or printing press owner, something like that. It was developed as an alternative to blackboards. So they were like, what can we do to make a whiteboard, basically. But it didn't end up being good for whiteboards, but it was fairly easy to make as far as synthetic plastics go at the time. It was easy to color whatever you wanted. And so it became a staple in like jewelry and other like it was basically anything you could think of for a cheap plastic at the time. Okay. People used it as that. And it became popular when Coco Chanel, I think, used what is called Galilith or case in plastic.
Starting point is 00:10:31 That's the name of it in an ad, like in a clothing ad. And people were like, oh, milk plastic is fashionable. Okay, sure. Next up, we're going to take a short break. And then it's time for the Fact Off. Hello and welcome back. Hank Buck totals for the episode thus far. Sarah, you have one. Sam, you have one. Sam, you have one.
Starting point is 00:11:06 Stefan, you have zero. And I have two because I did a poem. This is my comeback time. Well, I guess sure. Yeah, it's your comeback because it's time for the fact off in which two of our panelists, this week's Stefan and Sam, are going to present me and Sarah science facts in an attempt to blow
Starting point is 00:11:21 our minds. And our minds are sturdy, so you have to work hard. We each have a Hank Buck to award the fact that we like the most, but if we hate them both, we can throw them away and burn them in the fire. And to decide who goes first, we're going to go by which one of you has the most credit cards on you right now.
Starting point is 00:11:38 Ooh, on us right now? I don't carry all of mine with me. I have a debit card. Does that count? It's just loose in your pocket. That's why. I like to live dangerously. How many you got?
Starting point is 00:11:52 Three. Three. Is one of them a debit card? It's five, including debit cards. Wow. You've got five on you? I have two debit cards, and I have an Amazon card, and a Target card, and a Costco card. Oh, I see.
Starting point is 00:12:04 You're loaded down with plastic. I got it. So give me your facts. Let's do it. So I think we've talked about before on the show, the different ways that bees are affected by the presence of humans, like what's called any collapse disorder, that kind of thing. But some species of bees, which I didn't know for a long time, are solitary.
Starting point is 00:12:22 So they don't have hives or make a bunch of honey and honeycomb and all that. In those species, each individual female bee has to construct its own nest. And it seems like a lot of the time they like to find like little long, narrow, like tube holes to do that in. And so some of these species are also leaf cutter bees that have really strong like mandibles that let them cut little sections of leaves out. And then they bring those back to their tube and like line the walls and make a little nest. And so in the last 10 years, what we've been seeing is that various leaf cutter bees are incorporating pieces of plastic into the nest construction. So instead of cutting out little bits of leaf, they'll cut out a bit of like a plastic bag or something like that.
Starting point is 00:13:03 So it's still like soft and thin pliable plastic. but then they incorporate that into the lining for their nest cells there was a 2019 report that was the first time that they'd seen the entire nest constructed out of plastic they were even stealing little bits of polyurethane based sealants off of buildings to like glue the leaves together between windows from like material to like sealant like everything that they were using was plastic based and they don't really know if it's good or bad yet but it could be a sign that like they're just really adaptable and like are grabbing whatever's there right and they can make it work um but it could mean that like the plants that they normally use for that sort of thing are not around as much.
Starting point is 00:13:47 They did say that it didn't seem like the best building material because they found only three cells total in this one nest. And one had a dead larva in it. And one seemed to have worked fine. And then the other one wasn't finished. So not the best track record there. Also a pretty small sample. Right. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:04 But in other papers, they had noted that like they'd seen bees nesting in straws. And that protected them from parasites because they can't penetrate the straw. But then they also lose most of the larvae to mold because it also can't get rid of moisture. So kind of good and bad. So I should not build a bee nest out of boba tea straws. Because that's what I was, I had that thought. You know, in a pinch, they might be able, I don't know. I'm not going to speak for the bees.
Starting point is 00:14:34 I'm not a representative of the bees. Who speaks for the bees? The alliance of bees. But yeah, so that's the fact is that they had a 100% plastic bee nest. Wow. they found. Do you think the bees like the plastic? Like there's some bees who think that the plastic is the best? They think that might be one of the possibilities too
Starting point is 00:14:52 is that there's some reason that they haven't figured out yet that the bees actually prefer using the plastic. They're like, this is great. It's super, like it's not rotting. It's like impenetrable. I can do a better seal with this stuff than I can with leaves. Keep those parasites out. They also mentioned that they've seen
Starting point is 00:15:10 birds lining their nests with cigarette butts because it keeps parasites out. But it probably isn't great for the eggs and stuff in there. So yeah, I don't know. If they like it or not. I don't speak for the bees.
Starting point is 00:15:25 We covered this already. Stefan, I need you to go interview the bees. Go find them. Speak for the bees. What? Knock on the bee tubes. I am the Stefan. I speak for the bees.
Starting point is 00:15:34 Hello, my name is Stefan. May I interest you in... In a boba tea straw? Yeah. God, I want a boba tea. Sam, what's your fact all right so in america in the 1860s billiards was a big honking deal billiards but like pool in general i think any form of pool uh so there were thousands of pool halls across the country but america's foremost billiard ball manufacturer
Starting point is 00:16:00 phelan and colander had a big problem billiard balls were made out of ivory and the tables and other accessories that were made for billiard balls took into account like how ivory moved how it bounced, how heavy it was but ivory was incredibly expensive and they were running out of people who were rich enough to be able to afford a set of billiard balls
Starting point is 00:16:20 they needed to come up with a cheaper solution fast so they offered $10,000 in cash or $200,000 in today money to anybody who could come up with an alternative to ivory to use for these balls. So John Wesley Hyatt, who was a photo printer from Albany and his brother Isaiah, heard about this competition and it just so happened that John had fairly recently acquired a patent from a British inventor named Alexander Parks for a waterproofing agent that was made when Parks realized that when a certain kind of developing agent dried, like a hard left behind thing. He had a lot of this stuff sitting around to dry. So they started messing around with it and figured out how to harden it and shape it.
Starting point is 00:17:02 And they made their own ivory free pool balls, and they dubbed the thing that they were made out of, celluloid. Their new balls had a few problems that prevented them from actually winning the contest, though. Mainly it was that they were kind of just really shitty. They were not like ivory. Yeah. They didn't bounce right, they didn't feel right,
Starting point is 00:17:20 nobody who played pool liked them, and the company would not give them the prize money for it. But they still set up a pool supply company and they sold even worse versions of the balls that were just plaster that had a thin layer of the stuff on it so they're like you don't like our balls fine we'll show you bad balls but it seems like a lot of people out west bought them but the lack of quality of the balls seems like a small issue compared with another problem which is that celluloid is super flammable so hot balls yeah when the balls would hit together too hard they would make a little explosion or like catch on fire um that is a problem yeah not a huge explosion but like loud enough that they were getting letters from people out west oh yeah who
Starting point is 00:18:00 own bars who said that when this would happen the people in the bars would all draw their guns. So it wasn't great. Eventually, they pivoted celluloid into faux ivory products in general, like combs and buttons for clothes. But they also had the same problem where if you were in the sun too long and they got too hot or something like that, they would burst into flames. And it killed a few people. What?
Starting point is 00:18:24 And then eventually eventually of course they started using celluloid for movie film reels and that would also catch on fire and kill everybody in the theater okay occasionally that would happen too but it was like good enough yeah so at the end of the day it was good enough that it was the first commercially successful form of plastic and it also probably kick-started people trying to find forms of plastic that did not explode. And they killed everybody. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:51 The Celluloid Brothers, were they commercially successful? I believe so. When we started using celluloid film, they made money off of that? I think celluloid film came after them. Okay. Because I couldn't find anything that linked their company to making that. Sure. But I think celluloid film came after them because I couldn't find anything that linked their company to making that.
Starting point is 00:19:05 Sure. But I think celluloid fashion products were pretty successful and they were making that. So like the combs and stuff that like, and you have like a thing
Starting point is 00:19:12 on your head, a barrette that just like you go outside for too long and your head catches on fire. Yeah. And that this is a, this is a bad thing and did they feel bad?
Starting point is 00:19:21 It doesn't seem like anybody really felt bad about it. Human life. Yeah. It was the 1800s. Yeah, and I think that their pool supply company was successful, even though they were making bad balls. Yeah, well, I mean, if you're making bad balls for way cheaper, and the people out west, they don't know. They've never used an ivory ball.
Starting point is 00:19:37 Yeah. It's all brand new. Yeah. And they're like, and it's great, because sometimes they go, pow, pow, pow. It's fun. Right? Fun. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:43 And then it bounces different when there's an explosion. Which is, you know, that's an introduction of a new element of play. So, like, if you really want the ball to move fast, you've got to hit it extra hard and then there's an explosion. That's pool two. You've got to add some more features to pool two. So, we've got solitary bees constructing their nests entirely of plastic sometimes. But also more than sometimes partially out of plastic. And we've got Sam with explody billiard balls from the 1860s that were so bad no one would use them except that then they went on to be a commercially successful product that occasionally killed people.
Starting point is 00:20:26 successful product that occasionally killed people yeah um i'm gonna give my point my pink buck to stefan because i didn't know about bees and plastics and even though we're slowly destroying the earth i like to think that there are some species out there that could maybe adapt and so maybe they like won't die of mold at some point and they'll just be very dry bees. I'm going to give mine to Sam because I love weird science history and all of the stupid little directions we went on the way to getting to where we are now. Even if it did make your head catch on fire. Yeah. Now it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a question to be read to us by Sam for our couch of finely honed scientific minds.
Starting point is 00:21:10 At SPath73 asks, what exactly is corn plastic? I don't think that corn plastic is any one thing. So once you've got organic compounds, you can polymerize them in various ways. But I think that there's more than one way to turn corn into, like molecules from corn into a polymer. And sometimes you do that with the intent for it to be something that's easily, like people are like, oh, that must be easier to compost. But like not if you don't have that as a goal.
Starting point is 00:21:40 So it sort of like depends on what you end up doing with it. Is this a thing that like, because we talked about cellulose too and like is it a thing about like a property of sugars that because they're that sugars are made up of these like chains of yeah things that that makes it easier to make into a plastic which is a chain of it has the carbon there it's like it has a bunch of organic compounds a cellulose is a polymer it's a polymer of sugar but like it has a bunch of organic compounds. A cellulose is a polymer. It's a polymer of sugar. But like I think a lot of what happens is you break that down and you create great ethanol or something like that. And that's sort of your feedstock for going into the biochemical process. My other guess is that because cellulose is like a structural polymer
Starting point is 00:22:19 of glucose in the way that like glycogen is less structural it just exists as a storage unit but like cellulose is like gives plant structure so then it itself is a sturdier compound and then can add functional groups onto it or break it down or reassemble it and it'll make something sturdy like plastic whereas like if you took glycogen from our bodies it would be floppy and a mess oh glycogen is trash yes it's good at one thing it's a hot take glycogen is fine it's very good at the one thing it does which is to store energy for quick availability in our bodies but yeah cellulose is very sturdy very good at being sturdy and then if you could if you know how to do organic chemistry you can do organic chemistry to it i'm not sure how corn plastic actually happens if you you are using the
Starting point is 00:23:08 sugar from the corn or if you're using the cellulose from the corn it might probably both so the reading that i've done corn is usually used to make one type of plastic called polylactic acid which is made from fermented plant starch okay starch is another sugar polymer there's cellulose and starch and those are the two like plant sugar polymers but you have to ferment it first so yeah so starch is the other one cellulose is one of the structural plant sugar compound starch is the other um and like the fermentation is probably just like the chemical reactions that you need to turn it into the plastic i don't have specifics about that process. I don't know if it's proprietary or if I'm just like not a chemist.
Starting point is 00:23:49 So I didn't dig into the research about that. And you can also make it from other plants besides corn. You find starchy compounds. You can turn it into polylactic acid through this process. And benefits of corn plastic that are like proponents of corn plastic say that it's carbon neutral because it's coming from plants that absorb carbon from the environment and then we're turning it back into plastic that goes gets reintroduced into the environment again so it's like the whole process cycle as a whole rather than just like generating
Starting point is 00:24:22 trash we're taking corn which would have been trash at some point or like poop yeah and we're turning into plastic that we then throw away or in an ideal world compost to recycle it back and is this stuff this polylactic acid is it compostable it is compostable but what is interesting is that it's only compostable in specific conditions, like under specific conditions. What a Scientific American article looked into, like they talked to people who actually do this kind of composting work. Polylactic acid will decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a controlled composting environment in fewer than 90 days. But what that means is they need to have microbes digesting it, not just worms, not just like a backyard composting thing. It has to reach 140 degrees for 10 consecutive days. of the writing time of this article that can compost things in this very specific industrial
Starting point is 00:25:25 way to handle food processing waste or compostable waste in this way. And you can't just like compost. You can't just put them in your backyard. Yeah. And like that is also a choice that you have to make, right? So like people have these corn cut plastics, but if they're thrown into landfills, there's no evidence that they'll degrade any faster than any other type of plastic so this has to be a very intentional change in the way that people use these single-use plastic objects and so if you throw polylactic acid cup into a landfill it's like just throwing any other plastic cup in the landfill yeah and there's no benefit from corn plastic in that way what i will also say apparently, so you can make a bunch of different plastics from corn, but now we, like, the thing corn plastic is polylactic acid.
Starting point is 00:26:12 It's sort of like we've decided that that's what we're going to call polylactic acid is corn plastic. But it is not the only plastic you can make from corn, which is interesting. How many plastics can you make from corn? Well, you can make polyethylene from corn. So just normal polyethylene, but it's like from a different feedstock. And then you can make like, and I think that's true of various like existing plastics. I guess that makes sense. Like if you break down corn enough, then you can get monomer. Exactly. You can then polymerize into something. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, follow us on Twitter at SciShow
Starting point is 00:26:43 Tangents, where we'll tweet out upcoming topics for our future episodes every week. Thank you to at Bridget McGann, at Cacodemonia, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Final, everybody laughing at Cacodemonia here in the studio. It could be Keiko. It's Poop Demon. Let's be honest with ourselves. Final scores.
Starting point is 00:27:00 Sari, one. Sam, two. Stefan, one. Hank, two. Yay. Yay. I co-win. High five with our feet. Sari 1 Sam 2 Stefan 1 Hank 2 Yay I co-win High five with our feet If you like this show
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Starting point is 00:28:03 And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But, one more thing. In 2018, a group of Australian scientists had six adults swallow the head of a Lego minifigure in order to figure out how long it would take for it to travel through their bodies. So first they established the participants' standard poop characteristics and habits before eating the Lego heads and formulated what they called the stool hardness and transit or shat score then they took another shat score after it was in their bodies and traveling through their digestive
Starting point is 00:28:51 systems and then they measured the amount of time the lego had spent in their subject systems with the found and retrieved time or the fart they found no meaningful changes in the SHAT score before and after the eating of the head and determined an average fart score of 1.71 days and they concluded that basically you can eat Lego heads all day long and not suffer any negative repercussions from it I feel like my fart score would be
Starting point is 00:29:18 lower than that you probably would have been filtered out of the participants I'm an outlier yeah

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