SciShow Tangents - Pregnancy

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

Pregnancy is, biologically speaking, extremely weird! A pregnant animal’s body goes through so many hormonal and physical changes to make sure a zygote has everything it needs to grow. This week, we’re talking about a few of those things, like why pregnant people get nauseated and other animals might not. So is pseudopregnancy a real thing, or are pandas just tricking zookeepers to get extra treats? Why is there a patent for a birthing machine that looks like a horrible carnival ride? And what the heck is a stone baby?Want to know more about our topics? Check out these links:[Truth or Fail]https://patents.google.com/patent/US3216423A/enhttps://dublin.sciencegallery.com/failbetter/apparatusfacilitatingbirthchildcentrifugalforce/[Fact Off]Panda pseudopregnancy:Lithopedion:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979976/https://alumni.amc.edu/pages/archives/archives---the-stone-babyhttps://utmb.influuent.utsystem.edu/en/publications/lithopedion-stone-babyhttps://www.health.harvard.edu/womens-health/calcium-beyond-the-boneshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4750627/[Ask the Science Couch]Morning sickness:http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2000/05/morning-sickness-protects-mothers-and-their-unbornhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676933/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2664252?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentshttps://www.pregnancysicknesssupport.org.uk/resources/literature-review/symptoms-of-nvp-in-animals/https://www.livescience.com/32301-do-pregnant-animals-get-morning-sickness.html[Butt One More Thing]Meconium:http://science.sciencemag.org/content/112/2901/150.longhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18281199

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 joining me, as always, are Stefan Jin. Hi. Hi. What's your tagline, Stefan? There's an alien inside me. Ooh.

Is it abs? No. I took those abs out years ago. You just don't have abs in general? Got them removed. Who needs them? Joining us also is Sam Schultz. Hello.

Hi. What's the weirdest thing you did this week? We blended some cabbage up at work. That was weird. That was weird. It smelled funny. It looked beautiful, though. Yeah, it was beautiful, but that funny smell.

That was probably the weirdest thing I've done so far. Yeah, I also. That is the weirdest thing I've also done this week. Yeah. What is your tagline? Eight pack of paper towels. Sari Riley is also here. Hi, Sari. Hello. What have you been writing about?

Oh, I've been working on AI, which I think I can talk about now. Because we're doing a crash course on AI and I'm learning all about computers. Are you excited or terrified? Both. Yeah. I never realized how much AI was in the world. Like I kind of in the back of my

mind did. But now everything is controlled by it in some way. Or there are so many systems that humans interact with that are also weighed in on by algorithms beyond social media. So understanding them will hopefully be help in some way. Probably a positive for our world, but maybe like a negative for the individual. Yeah. What's your tagline? An eight pack of eggs.

Oh. Eight pack of eggs? That sounds so wrong. Strange amount of eggs. I hate it. Who sells that? That's bad. And I'm Hank Green.

My tagline is, ew, bad eggs. Every week here on Tangents, we try to one-up and amaze and delight each other with science facts. We're doing it for the joy of it. We're doing it for glory.

And we're also keeping score to see who will be the winner of this week's episode. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but it is called SciShow Tangents. We will probably not be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, you will have to give up one of your Hank Pucks. Tangent with care. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem. Will you pee on these seeds of barley and wheat? Will you pee in this sink where I have placed a key? Will you pee where I can see and combine it with wine to react with the proteins? Okay, let's put your pee inside of this bunny.

Then we just have to check the size of its ovary. There have been throughout history many ways to determine whether there might be a baby inside Squirmin'. And since then we've done... And since then we've done a fair bit of science learning, but strangely we still often rely on people's urine. Yeah, of course we do. That poem was unhinged.

Something distinctly disturbing about it. It went through so many different phases, I think. Right, yeah. Lots of different rhyme schemes. Yeah, it felt as if the rhyme schemes were meant to keep us uncomfortable. Exactly. Is that your goal, Stefan? Of course.

Yeah. Very intentional. Well done. Just like the suspense of a pregnancy test. We had no idea where it was going. Yeah. What rhyme will come next? Very uncomfortable.

All right. So the topic today is not pregnancy tests, but pregnancy generally. Also, I think that you referenced pregnancy in your tagline. Yes. There's an alien inside me. Oh, yeah. Okay. We'll get into that later, maybe. But first, Sarah's going to tell us what pregnancy is. Pregnancy was actually kind of hard to find a definition for, for some reason. Pregnancy is usually used to refer to mammals, and it's the part of reproduction after implantation through the whole gestation period.

So like after the egg has been fertilized with the sperm, it implants into the uterus and then grows and that's pregnancy. But people say that non-mammalian animals get pregnant too because there are snakes that give birth to live young. There are sharks that give birth to live young and they also have placentas. I didn't know. To help feed them. Yeah, if they're viviparous, which is a great word, meaning live young bearing, as opposed to oviparous, which is eggs. Viviparous.

Would you say that those are pregnant? I don't know. Yeah, there's a living animal inside of it. They're definitely pregnant. And like male, everybody says male seahorses are pregnant. That's true. Because do they get the eggs implanted into them by the female? I think so. And then they hatch inside of him

and then he squirts them out. What about those toads, Suriname toads that get the babies implanted in their skin? Not in their stomach. Skin pregnant is also pregnant. I'm saying it. I'm here today,

chief science decider of Earth. Skin pregnancy is real. All right. So, we've got our topic defined. Do we have it defined? Yeah. I mean,

I am the chief science decider of Earth, so we've got there and so it is thus time for in which one of our panelists and it is me has prepared three science facts for the education and enjoyment of the rest of you but only one of those facts is real the rest of you have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact and if you do you get a hank book if you're tricked, then the presenter gets the Hank Buck. I am here for you with some pregnancy facts.

This is actually not quite pregnancy. I have prepared for you three different ideas that are in the U.S. Patents Database for how to help a person get a baby out of them because that process is hard. I love this. Help a person get a baby out of them because that process is hard. I love this. Yeah.

I didn't know that there were these things. One is real? One is real. None of them have ever been used. So it is important to know that none of them have ever been used because you will think to yourself, there is no way that any of these have ever been used. Patent number one. An inclined bed on a hinge that hinges up and down on one side where the head goes. And it is connected to a pole.

And that pole spins the bed around up to eight Gs, which would result in the baby being pulled from the body. And the baby would then land in a net that had been slung between the parents' legs. Oh, okay. Patent number two. So this idea that is patented would be having a person give birth by bouncing up and down. This is a never-used contraption

that would allow a person to basically be raised repeatedly up 20 feet and then dropped on a kind of bungee cord to put pressure on the baby. Or, number three, in the 1960s, physician John Burdick, after attempting to remove a stripped screw from a door hinge, realized that the process worked better if he used a tool to vibrate the hinge. Thus, he developed the never-used Burdick vibrating birthing bed, which would jiggle people as they gave birth, theoretically

loosening the child inside them. That sounds okay to me. Give me a jiggle, Dr. John. They all sound like really sketchy theme park rides. Like, come on in, have a baby. I feel like the bungee cord one would just take too much vertical room. I mean, I feel like so does the centrifuge one. But okay.

Yeah, no, I agree. That was easy. To be clear, none of these were ever implemented. I want it to be the centripetal birth machine. If you've got any questions about the centripetal birth machine, I can attempt to answer them. Who's catching the baby? Right. Just a circle of doctors.

You ready? Who's going to get it? No, it's just the bun? Just a circle of doctors ready. Who's gonna get it? No, it's just the bungee cord catches the baby. No. That seems so... That doesn't seem right. No, that's real bad. Definitely not the thing that happens. What about the bouncing up and down? Is that also a net beneath the person

that catches the baby? Yeah, same situation. Also seems bad. There's too much force. Like, babies are too fragile. They put a lot of force on babies. The forceps, that's a lot of force on the head and the neck.

Vacuum sucking. 8G is a lot. Fighter pilots pass out, I think. What's up, Sam? I'm just thinking going back up on the bungee cord. The up went slower and then they dropped and then slowly up and then dropped. The up seems like it would be more useful than the down.

Well, it's the catching at the bottom that creates the G-sense. Okay, okay. So, like, there's that moment of weightlessness, which is just very relaxing, I assume. Yeah. And then the moment when the person gets caught, and then the baby gets pushed down. Tower of Terror. I assume. Yeah. And then the moment when the person gets caught and then the baby gets pushed down. Tower of Terror. The vibrating one sounds,

I can't believe I'm soon to say the sentence. It sounds like the most uncomfortable one. Really? Yeah. Oh, I completely disagree. Being spun around at 8 G's

while giving birth sounds less comfortable. It sounds horrible. Being dropped from 20 feet sounds less, I don't know. I would lay on a vibrating bed right now. I do think that all of these ideas sound like ideas dudes had.

Yeah, I'm already scared enough of pregnancy. I'm glad none of these are used. I want to go with the shaking one. I think that one is too boring to be real. The spinning around one, I just don't think it's realistic enough. I'm just counting the bungee cord one. I think that one's not realistic enough. Too dangerous?

It just seems like a lot of extra stuff. The vertical part of it is what bothers me for some reason. Yeah, it's just like you need a tall room. This is not how tall buildings are. Who has a 20-foot room in a hospital? Old-timey medicine was weird. I could see someone be like, this is an outdoor contraption, so you're just going to give birth in the lot next to

the doctor's office. People can come watch. Yeah, there wasn't even a doctor's office. It was just like... Yeah, it was a barber shop still. The town birthing bungee. Come see it. Yeah. It's also a good just spectator sport.

People come by. They're like, hey, did you hear? You bring kids by. That's their sex ed. Yeah. This is how it works. This is how babies happen. This is why you shouldn't have sex.

We'll put you in the birth and drop. I'm going with the stupid shaking bed. I know I'm wrong. I was going for the stupid shaking bed. Sam's got stupid shaking bed. I'll do the wrong. I was going for the stupid shaking bed. Sam's got stupid shaking bed. I'll do the bungee. We got bungee? Oh, okay.

I'll do the centrifuge just to divide them up. Yeah. All right. I'm just going to open the patent up here and read you the title of this patent. You were smiling too big for it to be the shaking bed. I know it. Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child

by centrifugal force. Holy shit. There's the patent diagram. This is from 1963. You can see the net there between that person's legs. It's strapped on two times just for

safety because they don't want the net to slip off. Absolutely not. And then there's your tilty bed. And then it swings up as the centrifuge starts going. So it goes flat. Who invented this? Was he even a doctor? Boy, I don't know.

George. Well, George and Charlotte, actually. Oh, no. George's wife assisted him in the creation of this thing, which one assumes is a joke, but it is an actual patent. They applied in 1963. It was granted in 1965. Patent number 3,216,423. It was the space age, baby.

It does not appear that this person is a doctor. I wonder if they tried that at home. Like, she was giving birth, and giving birth and he held onto her arms and started spinning. Is this working, honey? Is this better? Is this helping? Is it better? I found an even better photograph here of

it that apparently someone Not photograph. They didn't build it, right? Sorry, no. Not photograph. Illustration. Imagining George and his wife building this death trap of a perving machine in their basement oh boy one assumes that the woman is unconscious for this process right that didn't occur to me like that must be but it seems like her head's in the center of the circle so like her head her head is very close to the center of experiencing a ton of yeah

forces but then like all of her blood's being pulled down to her feet still. But she's unconscious. And also it's all about getting the baby out. Yeah. Not about whether she survives this process. Were the other two even remotely real? No. I made them up completely.

Both of those were totally made up. The Blonskys never themselves had children. The idea was conceived during a trip to the Bronx Zoo. They noticed an elephant that was slowly spinning in place, and the zookeeper wrongly told them that elephants do that while they are giving birth. Oh, man.

That's awesome. Oh, no! Oh, this invention inspired an opera called The Blonsky Device that premiered in 2013. Well, thanks everybody for this fun time. I'm glad I found out about the Blonsky's Bizarre Device. We're going to head to the fact-off soon, but now, a word from our sponsors. Welcome back, everybody.

Here's where we're at. Re the Hank Buck totals. Sarah, you have one for guessing the correct device. Nice. I have two. Sam has zero and Stefan has one. I have two. Woo-woo-woo! Sam has zero, and Stefan has one.

Now Sam and Sari have a chance to get some bucks and catch up with me in our next segment, The Fact Off. Two panelists have brought in facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow our minds, and Stefan and I will decide which fact we want to award our Hank Buck to. Who goes first? That is the person who most recently touched a baby. Oh. I touched one

on Tuesday. Last Tuesday. Last Tuesday? Not today. Okay. I don't know when I've touched a baby. Have you ever?

I don't know. Probably not. You've never touched a baby? No. I don't know many babies. So I guess that means Sam's going to go first. Breeding pandas in captivity is super hard. Female pandas only ovulate once a year, and they have like three days to be impregnated.

So basically— Be better at being alive, pandas. Well, I'm going to get into that a little bit. Okay. So basically there has to be a male like right next to them or like a team ready to artificially inseminate them and that doesn't always work. And if there's a male around, it's not a sure thing because some pandas just don't seem to know how to have sex. So when Yuan Yuan, the panda, was successfully impregnated in 2015, the Taipei Zoo took it really seriously. Like all the other pandas that were pregnant before her, they moved her into her own room where it was climate controlled

and they gave her buns and candy and and like bamboo just really good bamboo and snickers well she was like squirting like in the picture she was squirting honey in her mouth that sounds awesome i think it's what she what it was it was some kind of honey like substance yeah but then a few months later despite showing various hormonal and physical signs the staff of the zoo figured out that she was not pregnant at all and that she was living it up in this climate control room for no reason she's faking it so newspapers all over the world published articles that said things like sneaky zoo panda fakes pregnancy to get more treats and panda accused of faking pregnancy to get better food and those are really interesting headlines and click-baiting,

but they're not even remotely true. Oh, okay. So Panda researchers for a long time have known about something called pseudo-pregnancy in pandas. A panda's hormones change, their uterus thickens, and they get really picky about what they eat. And they show all the normal signs of pregnancy that other mammals would show, but they aren't pregnant.

People aren't really sure why this happens, but the current best theory is that they only have a baby every like three years and they only have one baby at a time. So they're like wired to know that they're not very good at it. So they're also wired to make sure that when they get pregnant, they like keep the baby. Right. So they do all this stuff just when they think that they're pregnant. They got a hair trigger. Yeah. So to the outward observer who's not an expert in pandas, it would seem like they just are like making themselves seem pregnant.

And it's a really well-known thing, like I said. And the articles that I talked about all had that information in them, but it was always at the very bottom. Well, here's the situation. We're writing headlines, Sam. Yeah. We'll get the whole article. It would be like the whole article where it was like this panda's really sneaky it did this crazy thing

and then the last paragraph would be like panda researchers actually say that it's pseudo pregnancy and that this happens to pandas all the time and that they're not

tricking anybody and pandas aren't smart enough to trick anybody so that's my thing pseudo pregnancy pseudo pregnancy pandas are dumb yeah

they're trying their best why are they why do they not know how to have sex? Sam, I don't know why. We're doing our best to keep pandas around, but they are not helping. They're not helpful at all. So that's like they experience the hormonal changes and everything in their body. It's not that they're just behaving differently.

No, they sampled her poop and it had pregnancy hormones in it. She was not eating everything that she normally would eat. She was like very specifically eating certain things and they were taking samples and stuff and could tell that there was physical changes to it yeah she was feeling it's probably the morning sickness well i don't know we're gonna get into that later too yeah oh oh all right so we've got this fake pregnant this this pregnancy faker wasn't a pregnancy faker. Yeah. But they still tried to inseminate her, right?

We've been using a lot of language that's like her body is deciding to do it, but there's probably a chemical signal involved. Oh, yeah. I think probably the process of knowing she was inseminated in some way was what did it. I don't think they consciously make the decision to do it. I think we all understand that, but the way we've been talking about it was not clear to viewers. The panda doesn't decide

to do it. The knowing that we're talking about is chemical signals happening and things like a domino effect based on sperm in their body rather than thinking really hard. Just hoping and praying.

Yeah. All right. Sherry, what do you got for us? So in humans, most of the time, the embryo implants inside the uterus. But there are some cases when it can implant somewhere outside the uterus, like in a fallopian tube or in the vaginal canal. And that's called an ectopic pregnancy. And they're usually really risky situations.

And a lot of times the embryo dies. And in even rarer cases, an embryo can start developing somewhere in the abdomen, where it's definitely not supposed to be. Like outside of the uterus, outside of the entire reproductive tract. Yes. Boo. Don't know how it gets there. Probably some weird tear we don't see inside our bodies.

In the good days. Yeah. If it's allowed to grow for a couple months, it can become too large to get broken down and reabsorbed by the body. Because usually if you have foreign tissue, your immune system kicks in, breaks it down. And in these cases, there have been less than 300 across medical literature this chunk of dead embryo tissue looks like damage to our immune systems and instead of getting broken down it gets covered in a tough

mineralized layer of calcium man and becomes what is called a stone baby or a lithopedian. A lithopedian? Yeah, lith is stone. Stone. Pedian. From baby. Yeah, like stone baby in Greek. And so oftentimes they don't cause medical problems, and so they can go undetected for a really, really long time

until people come in complaining about pain or needing an x-ray for another reason and doctors notice a weird lump and then extract this thing that looks like a rock in the shape of a small human. Wow. I'm looking at pictures of them. It just looks like a rock until they cut it open and then it's like, oh, baby. I don't know where in the pregnancy it stops and I think it probably varies. And so all the pictures out there are probably the more developed ones. How often does this happen? Very rarely. So you said there are 300 cases.

Is that of the stone babies or is it? Yeah. So then more frequently the embryos are implanting outside of the uterus, but they get reabsorbed. Is that common? No. Americanfamilyphysician.org says that ectopic pregnancy occurs at a rate of 19.7 cases per 1,000 pregnancies in North America. But that's like. That's like in general. But yeah, that's like fallopian tube.

Yeah. Like abdomen is way more rare than that. Yes. And then calcifying is even more rare than that. So it's an extremely, extremely rare phenomenon. There are other times when calcium can get deposited into injuries. It's not an uncommon bodily process. It's not like the rarest thing to happen.

So like kidney stones happen because of a buildup of calcium. Breast tissue, if there's damage, like the fat gets replaced by calcified bunches at some points or around arteries. There's calcium in your blood vessels, and there are some cases where it can build up and form calcified formations. And all of these things are like pathology. They're not like things your body is doing that is what it's supposed to be doing. Yeah. It's the complexity of your body interacting with itself in an unintended way, and then you end up with these rocks inside you.

Sort of like a pearl. Yeah. They call them man pearls. Oh, okay. Kidney stones. Have you ever never seen a necklace of kidney stones? No. Yeah, that's because we definitely don't do that.

I'm going to Etsy right now. It's like a protective mechanism too. That way it doesn't become a site for bacterial infection. Yeah. In the case of the stone baby, this is what the immune system is supposed to do. It's like, this is foreign. We can't get rid of it. So we're just going to seal it off and make it a rock. And it'll just be a rock inside of you, which is kind of amazing that we have a process for that. It would be interesting to see what gets calcified inside you if you leave other weird objects inside you. Alright. We're doing an experiment.

Easy to test. Put some objects in me. We'll each have a different object. All of us have to get the same like four objects in us so that we can test to see how it goes. For science. We'll report back. Can I get like a cool object

though? Like a shark's tooth? Yeah, we need different materials too. So like dentine. Yeah. Can I get like a cool object though? Like a shark's tooth? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, we need different materials too. So like dentine. Yeah. A plastic thing maybe. Sure. Can of tuna. I was hoping for something a little smaller like can of tuna.

Something that would be smaller. Where are we going to fit it in around our organs? Do they make sample cans? Oh, high quality tangents, everybody. There's definitely kidney stone jewelry. I'm looking at it right now. Oh, really? There's none on Etsy.

No, there's none on Etsy. They must not sell human waste products or something. There must be a rule. Okay, we've got to move on. We've got to move on. There's not enough time for this. We have, we gotta move on. We gotta move on. There's not enough time for this. We have to vote

and move on to Ask the Science Couch. I've actually heard of both of these things. So, I was not mind-blown. I knew that there was like fake panda

pregnancy and the panda was like, I'm getting honey and Snickers bars. I did not know that that was made up by clickbait headline writers.

So, that's good. That's way cooler. You didn't know part of mine. I'm QuickPay headline writers. So that's good. That's way cooler, though. You didn't know part of mine. I'm going to give mine to Sari. Oh, my God. I had heard of the stone babies, and I didn't know about the fake pregnancy. So you're going to give it to Sari. So I'm going to give it to Sam.

Thank you. All right. Now it's time for Ask the Science Couch. Stephan, hit us with that question. AtPolly Zendy asks, are there any other species that experience morning sickness during pregnancy, and what causes it? As far as we can tell, no other animals do.

What? Which is wild. I tried my best to research it, and I couldn't find any primary sources. So if you have papers, send them this way. In all the literature, it's called nausea and vomiting of pregnancy or NVP. It affects 70 to 80 percent of all pregnant people. 20 to 30 percent are just lucky.

Yeah. Like as far as we can tell, there is one review by Pregnancy Sickness Support, which is an organization in the UK that reviewed different studies in like captive rhesus macaques in captive chimpanzees they asked experts and People have said we have not seen vomiting and apes or monkeys or any signs of nausea That's even remotely comparable to jump around in the trees and stuff Is it because we are capable of responding to like our emotions are we have the luxury of being able to be physiological? There are hypotheses so what we have the luxury of being able to? It's definitely physiological. There are hypotheses. So what we have seen in non-human animals like macaques and dogs and cats, also these are quoted from experts, I have not read the papers, are that they experience food aversion. So at certain stages in their pregnancy, they avoid certain types of food.

And that could be an evolutionary response to protect the baby from potential toxins, especially if you're sharing nutrients. Apparently pandas do this too. Yeah. One of the main hypotheses in humans is that morning sickness is a way to protect our embryo because our diets are so, so varied. Vomiting protects against toxins from microorganisms and other chemicals that could affect fetal development, especially because morning sickness peaks a lot in the first trimester, which is when, according to this, the cells of the embryo are starting to differentiate and form organs. So like really critical parts of early embryo development.

We eat so much varied food that there could be natural chemicals in those because everything is chemicals that of the pregnancy, which is a very important thing for a human being. You shouldn't eat right now. Just stop taking in anything. And it does make sense because not only one person in one place is going to eat a lot of different things, but humans are all over the place. We have such a varied diet. And, yeah, there's a lot of, like, you know, when you eat like ground up grain, like who knows what's also in that grain. It's not just like beautiful carbohydrates.

There's a bunch of other stuff in there. Does morning sickness last throughout the day or is it just a morning thing? In my experience, having had friends go through this, it is not always isolated to the morning. Yeah. Morning sickness is not a really good name for it, which is why the scientists call it nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, because it can happen at any point during the day. There are a couple other hypotheses for why it exists. Hormones is like one general thing,

because I don't know, that seems to make sense in how we study human bodies like something weird is happening during pregnancy i don't know what's happening hormones right chimpanzees also have lots of hormones this time they're not puking but hormones but hormones we got different ones or different levels of them yeah some people have hypothesized it's parent offspring genetic conflict so the fact that i don't know you are like your tagline stuff and you are growing a foreign body inside you that has a different genetic makeup and a blood type that's not compatible with you and the placental cells i think are chimeric so they're part like parental part child which is a weird biological thing that's happening and so as a part of that your body is

reacting negatively to the fact that you're growing an alien but also a thing that happens to chimpanzees yeah yeah but shrug um or the social hypothesis is that it's communicating to nearby right people that you're pregnant and need help, basically. I like that. I like that one. Please take care of me. When you're like a Neolithic person and you're like your 16-year-old daughter starts puking and you're just like, I am going to check this out. Yeah. I'm going, I am worried now. Do you have the flu or do you have the baby?

Either way, lie down. I'll take care of you. Yeah. It's just, it's's a signal there should be some other early pregnancy signal that's just like you just grow like a green patch on your forehead that'd be great uh so we didn't have to have pregnancy tests fascinating didn't know how many places we could go from just that one question if you want to ask that was my favorite viewer question ever that's very good like that if you want to ask the Science Couch, you can tweet your

question to us using the hashtag AskSciShow. Thank you to Emma Price and C.L. Polley and everybody else who tweeted us your questions. And now it is time for the final Hank Buck scores. Stefan, you lose with one. Sam, you lose with one. Sari and I tie

with two. Yay. Science Couch. Cool. Science couch. Cool. One day. One day. One day. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that.

First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. Second, tweet us your favorite moment from this episode.

And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us for this podcast. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Stephen Ching. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's produced by all of us and Caitlin Hoffmeister. Our art is by Hiroko Matsushima. And our sound design is by Joseph Tuna Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this stuff without our patrons on Patreon.

Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lit. But one more thing. So the very first ever baby poop is like a blackish green sticky mass that apparently doesn't stink like normal poop called meconium. And it's just a bunch of junk that builds up from being in a uterus like dead cells, amniotic fluid, intestinal secretions, and bile. Ooh, yay. Your very first poop, everyone.