SciShow Tangents - Quiet

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Do you hear what I hear? Probably not, because in this episode, we're bringing things down several notches to learn about quiet. Does it have a scientific definition? Is it all just relative? Should crickets have podcasts? Join us as we (ok, maybe not so) quietly contemplate quiet.SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Truth or Fail]Larval reef fish bury their heads in the sand to reduce noiseQuieter Bison bulls get more matesDolphins quiet their clicks to ambush each other [Trivia Question]Loudness of lead singer in Billboard Hot 100 from 1946-2020https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jel/article/3/4/043201/2885300/Lead-vocal-level-in-recordings-of-popular-musichttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/986837[Fact Off]Water-based sound suppression systems for rocket launcheshttps://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/142/4_Supplement/2489/603382/Sixty-years-of-launch-vehicle-acousticshttps://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC15/demos/demo10.htmlhttps://www.nasa.gov/news-release/space-launch-systems-sound-suppression-system-final-test-at-kennedy/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022460X23003528Small tree crickets use leaves to amplify their chirps[Ask the Science Couch]Quietest period in history of the Earth (of all time & anthropocene)https://www.curtin.edu.au/news/media-release/earths-mid-life-crisis-new-research-backs-lull-geologic-record/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-017-0051-yhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1342937X13000506?via%3Dihubhttps://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/23/1005574/lockdown-was-the-longest-period-of-quiet-in-human-history/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd2438[Butt One More Thing]Unplanned 9/11 study shows whale poop stress levels associated with ship noise https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/unplanned-911-analysis-links-noise-whale-stress/2012/02/14/gIQAmQnlPR_story.htmlhttps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2011.2429

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 and Forbes 30 under 30 education luminary, Sari Riley! Ta-da! I've graced you with my presence. How long are you going to be under 30 for? For the next, until May, next May. But I'll be an education luminary forever. That's right. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi. I don't have any laurels to speak of, do I?

Hey, I also was never a 30. Now, if I put me in a list now, they'd put me in a 50 under 50. Possibly a 45 under 45. You can do any number under number, I think. Yeah. You can just make it up. You just have to found a magazine and then you can do whatever you want. That's right.

We're going to start the SciShow Tangents 100 under 100. And if you're 101, you can do whatever you want that's right we're gonna start the size show tangents 100 under 100 and if you're 101 you can suck it that's just too bad this isn't a joke you actually are in the 30 and the forbes 30 under 30 we were just looking at it and i would also like everyone to know that when you become a 30 under 30 luminary they they make an NFT and they give it to whoever pays the most. You don't get it. That's not yours. You don't get it. It's not for you. You don't really get anything. You get the article posted publicly and then you get a look at it along with everyone else who gets to look at it. You didn't even know much before anybody else that you were on the list, right?

I did not. Did you just find out the day everybody at the same time i found out because someone in the sideshow tangents discord said holy shit sari you won and then i texted sam and then i texted sylvia uh so sam you were first. Wow. I also did get a text. I'm sure I wasn't third though. I was thinking of buying your NFT, Sari, but then it turned out that I had to own crypto. I can only hope your NFT goes to a good home though.

I hope somebody out there who listens buys it. Yeah. If you can get it for double digits, then that's worth it for the bit and let us know if it's more than that please don't i don't know 99 we can get it for 99 that's too much i think that's maybe it's gotta be like five dollars yeah i think single less than a sandwich yeah don't bid against each other the first person who bids i don't know how it works but do not drive this price up we were getting a taste of this action on the other hand so then maybe yeah but we don't care that's forbes's money i

i want to know if a single person will have their nfts sold this year i also want to have been in the room where they were like we can't do the nft thing again last year no one bought any of them and they were like it's harder actually to not do it it says there's no one bought any of them. And they were like, it's harder actually to not do it. It says there's no offers on any of them, which makes, I'm just so like, I don't even know if they're actually for sale. They might just exist, but I don't know. They must be for sale. Well, it's only been one day, Sam. You can't count out that Forbes has an entirely new revolutionary business model on their hands, potentially.

Yeah, I'll let you know if I get any secret Forbes emails that say push the NFT nft really you gotta you gotta tweet about you gotta post about it we're going out of business my boss is so mad we spent all this time and money investing into nfts and now we really gotta do it do a solid for us and i'll say thank you. That's not the kind of attitude that got me here in the first place. Make me a deal. Give me a cut. All right. Well, congratulations,

Sari. I hope that your newfound luminariosity is bringing us lots of attention to size your tangents, the best podcast in the world. Yeah. I hope, I hope it brings a lot of attention to Tangents too because I love making this thing with you all.

Yeah. And I do think it's the best podcast and it brings me a lot of joy and maybe brings a lot of other people a lot of joy. Just don't forget where you came from. Oh, I won't. Every week here on 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 for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of those two will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem, This Week from Sarah. How does one speak of the absence of noise? from Sarah. How does one speak of the absence of noise for the stillness and calmness that balanced poise does rupture with the slightest vibration from vocal fold. This poetic narration may be soft and restful to match your mood, but it is not nothing. And in fact, a prelude to three rowdy voices filling your ear or your house or your car or your biosphere.

Proudy voices filling your ear or your house or your car or your biosphere. Noises abound from the wind to your breath. Our bodies do gurgle and off gas in death. So loudness is relative, but quiet is rare. Those in-between moments. That's the good stuff right there. The topic for the day is quiet, which, of course, we cannot even try to define it's just less noise that's it there's no scientific definition it's less noise an absence of noise or certainly not an absence because there can never be an absence right oh yeah well well there can be i'm sure that they're

like in the vacuum of space it feels like that would be pretty but like but is is it quiet if there's no noise or is quiet a quality of noise oh well if you were floating in space you would say it's quiet so i feel like it's very extends all the way to no noise it's like a a spectrum a part of the the auditory spectrum where you're like yeah it is very relative though because you know let's do a spectrum, a part of the auditory spectrum where you're like. Yeah. It is very relative, though, because, you know. Let's do a test. You two are going to raise your hand when you think I've gotten quiet.

Should I not look at Sam? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Close your eyes. I'm covering the computer. I'll cover you up, too. Oh, okay. Everybody do it. And then two and a little later, we'll put in a ding noise when Sam raises his hands

and a dong noise when Sari raises. Okay. Okay. Ah. Ding. Dong. Dong. Dong.

You guys have had your hands raised for so long. I was like, come on, Sam, put it up. Great. Yeah, that seemed about right to me. You raised your hands at quite similar times. Sari raised a little after Sam. I regretted my hand raise when I did it, so. I thought that I was going to be able to be way quieter than I was able to be.

Turns out my voice isn't like 100% right now. And I just like lost the ability to make noise at all. I mean, you're a loud guy kind of, I think. It's turned out that way, yeah. Unfortunately. And I'm a bit of a quiet guy. And I think Sari's right in right in the middle am i in the middle that's why we work so well yeah sam like maybe says more but he says it quieter this is the first time i've been called not quiet in my entire life so i'm very happy this wow thrilled a really revision to my self-image it's not my first time yeah all right well now we know what quiet is

it's right when like right between when sari and sam raised their hands oh that's gonna be the average quiet scientists have at it we've we've determined it sari do we know where the word quiet comes from because it's adorable it's been that way its whole time. This is one of the ones where I think we nailed it. So it comes from the classical Latin quietus, which is a state of... Oh, wow. That really is the same. Yeah.

That sounds like you made it up. And from French. I don't know how you'd say it in French, but it's like quiet with an E on the end. Actually, every letter is silent

in that word. Oh, yes. Very that word but it means a state of rest or asleep or inactive so like tranquil kind of right version yeah you'll say like quiet your quiet yourself quiet quiet little town and then i don't know when it became probably just morphed around for multiple uses from that sense of rest or inactivity to noise specifically. I love that word. I haven't thought about how lovely a word quiet is before. It makes me want to be quieter. I do hate it when people say that I'm quiet. It makes me actually viscerally angry when someone's like, speak up. I'm like,

I'm going to bury you. So now that we know all about quiet, as much as we're going to learn, it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. Today, we're going to be playing a little game of truth or fail. Nature can be pretty noisy, but there are also plenty of quiet moments out there as well. So today we're going to do a Truth or Fail that's all about mammals, animals, and their relationship with quiet.

I'll be telling you three stories of silence, but only one of them is true. And it's not just mammals. Can I tell you, I saw a TikTok the other day. And in this TikTok, one man asked another man, what animal are you least afraid of? And the other guy goes, fish. And the other guy, the first guy says, no, I said animal.

And he says, fish. Oh, no. And then he says, no, an animal animal. And look, I get what he means. He's got an idea. Yeah. I think the crazier thing is saying fish, which is one, 50% of vertebrates, and two, a group that includes the great white shark. Yeah, there's some really scary looking fish, even if they're not actively scary.

The great white shark is the scariest animal. You are in its element. You're stuck there. You can move not very well. You have to splash the whole time you're doing it. And it's made of teeth. In this hypothetical question, he said, which animal are you least scared of? Did not say where.

If I had to fight a great white shark in my living room, I'd still be scared because it's sharp teeth and it's large. It could be thrashing a bit, but you could just walk out of the room yeah and wait yeah close the door yeah but like this is a good point i am not very afraid of fish because i am on land if i woke up with like a fish laying on me like like any like a little guppy or something i would be like so like a cat maybe i'm least afraid of i don't know like what's the thing you could touch and not be like weirded out by? I don't know. This is an interesting question. I should have saved it for another episode.

Yeah. We don't have time right now. We do have to do the truth or fail now. Okay. Next time we're going to talk about what this least scary animal is. I'll think about it. I'll think about it. Story number one, though.

Coral reefs are very loud. They're filled with the sounds of shrimp and fish and countless other creatures. But even for residents of coral reefs, that noise can become a little much. Scientists found that at the loudest times of day, larval reef fish will bury themselves in pockets of sediment where the sound was at least three times quieter. And this quieter environment seems to be essential for the development of the fish. They gotta do their homework. But that one might be a lie. It could be this one. American bison usually produce a loud bellow at a low frequency, and bulls will actually bellow get more mates and produce more offspring compared to their louder counterparts, potentially because it allows them to get mates and copulate without other bulls finding them and challenging them to a fight. Or it could be story number three. Dolphins use echolocation to hunt in the oceans, producing clicks that reflect off of surfaces and allow them to understand their surroundings better.

But sometimes a dolphin just wants to ambush another dolphin. And scientists have found that they will occasionally perform quiet micro clicks, whose amplitude is lower frequency compared to the normal clicks. And these micro clicks have only been observed in moments leading up to a dolphin challenging another member of their group. So scientists think that these micro clicks are difficult for nearby dolphins to detect and allow them to ambush each other. So it could be larval reef fish burying their head in the sand to get some peace and quiet,

or story number two, quieter bison bulls getting more mates, or story number three, dolphins quiet their cliques to ambush each other. Do dolphins always need to echolocate, is what I'm wondering. Because maybe if they're somewhere, they could just see each other normal and they wouldn't even need to do that. But I actually never really thought about how they see otherwise. But I imagine they can see. They can see. But they can only see so far underwater, and maybe you want to get your ambush speed going.

You still got to echolocate a little bit. That seems like a dirty trick too. It wouldn't count if you beat your rival by ambushing him first. I don't know. I don't know. That doesn't seem like the dolphins I know. You don't know what I know about dolphins. Okay. Maybe.

The dirty trick. They'll do any trick. When we write our animal sex book, there's going to be a chapter about dolphins and it's not going to be pretty. So they would definitely ambush each other. But yeah, I agree. Once you get close enough to sneak up, would you click at all? I even bother clicking. Sam, do you have bison knowledge from being...

From butte? Do you have like extra bison as part of your elementary school education? My grade school mascot was the bison. So I should have a lot of knowledge. What did it sound like? It sounded like nothing. It sounded like a flag going on our flag. Okay.

What about when that flag wanted to get a mate? This is going to sound stupid. I never heard one make a single peep in my life and i've been in yellowstone and stuff yeah they aren't moving or anything like that and i can't think of like there's elk calls which are very distinctive there's not a bison call i can think of that people that that i've ever heard or or i know of so i don't know i think they're all quiet i think they're all whispering they're all low-key you know elk certainly do have their whole own way of like you'll be out sometimes you'd be like who's being murdered right now yeah like no that's just a horny elk why are there dinosaurs now

the stupidest noise you're gonna call one too, Hank. It's gonna bust your wall. Be careful. That was the best call I've ever heard in my life. So, by process of elimination, I think I know the one I'm gonna pick. You think it's this little fish? It's just like, I just want... If I was a fish, I think I'd do that. Why not?

Yeah, that fish is scared of all the other fish because they should be. Yeah, all fish should be scared of each other. It's horrible down there. I'm going to guess the bison. I feel like it's like an infrasound thing. It's like below the range that we can hear, but they can hear it pretty loud is my guess. Oh, I didn't think of the infrasound.

Okay. But I could be totally wrong because I have no idea. Because what was your mascot of your grade school? My grade school was a bald eagle. Oh, me too you know a classic american uh-huh elementary school and then my high school middle school high school was phoenix which is very cool wow so that hasn't helped me with literally anything in my life uh so and you're going with the fish, Sam? I'm going with the fish. Well, scientists at one point monitored 325 wild bison in Nebraska during their

rutting period, tracking which bulls competed with each other and how frequently they found mates to reproduce with. And they also measured how loud their bellows were. And they had expected that louder bellows would correspond to bigger, stronger bulls who would immediately be more successful when it came to producing more offspring. But they actually found the opposite. The quieter bulls were more successful. And when they returned in the spring to track the births of calves and get DNA samples from them, they found that the bulls who had the lowest number of copulations and offspring were at least 50%

louder compared to the most successful bulls this also uh tracks with my own experience of humans the loud guys uh at the club do not tend to be yes the guys getting in the bar fight then you're just like because this i'm so smooth i, hey, you want to get out of here? It works every time. Yeah, that's my quiet voice, Sam. Like I've ever talked to a stranger in a bar in my entire life. Never, never have I. Hey, you want to get out of here? Sam, do not.

I cannot picture you. I just meant I'm going to the bathroom. Goodbye. Goodbye. I just meant I'm going to the bathroom. Goodbye. As for the fish, sound and quiet are very important to directing animals in the ocean toward their appropriate homes. Scientists tested this out by setting up two sound systems underwater, one with reef noise and one that was silent. And then they watched to see what animals were drawn to which sound systems.

to see what animals were drawn to which sound systems, and they found that animals that tended to be found in reefs, like larval reef fish, were drawn to the reef noise, while animals that were found in open water, including many crustaceans, tended to be drawn to the silent sound system. So they are out there listening. As for the dolphins, no.

But bats, so hoary bats, will use quiet microcalls or even not use echolocation at all during mating season. Similar to the bison story, scientists think that this might be a way to keep competing bats from tracking each other during mating season. It might also explain why so many bats end up getting killed by wind turbines, even when those wind turbines are using acoustic monitoring to track bat populations, as this might mean people are undercounting bats in the area. So there's actually lots of bats because they're being so quiet and also they're not echolocating, which means they might not notice the wind turbines. So yeah, you were kind of right, Sam,

that because dolphins, they don't need to use echolocation all the time, but bats do. That adds up. Okay. Yeah. Poor guys. Alright, now we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for but bats do. That adds up. Okay. Poor guys. Alright, now we're going to take a short break, and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. now get ready for the fact our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind and after they have presented their facts i will judge them and award hank

bucks any way i see fit to decide who goes first though i have a trivia question scientists at the university of oldenburg in in Germany wanted to look at how music production has changed over the years, so they analyzed 300 songs from 1946 to 2020 to see how different the soundtracks are mixed. They picked the top four songs from the Billboard Hot 100 chart for each year and then calculated a value called the LAR, which describes how loud the lead singer is compared to their accompaniment. While the LAR started out at five decibels in 1946, it went down over time,

meaning the lead singers are now quieter than they used to be relative to their background music. What was the LAR value in 1975? It's a number less than five. Was it called the Billboard Hot 100 in 1946? I can't imagine it. It's Hot number less than five. Was it called the Billboard Hot 100 in 1946?

I can't imagine it was. It's the Hot 100, guys. But maybe. I don't know. They were pretty hip back then. Yeah. Three? Is my guess.

I have no basis. I will say people are quieter now. Does that just mean everybody's so gentle i don't know uh 3.5 in the meantime i looked it up and it was called the billboard neato 100 back in the back is that true with the the billboard swell 100 okay you're having a bit of fun. Billboard Radical 100. Billboard Tubular 100 is good. I like that. That is nice, yeah. The answer was one decibel.

So Sari is closer. The LAR hit one decibel in 1975. Has mostly stayed constant since then. Is it because of like sound mixing? Yeah, yeah. So like they were able to basically mix uh to have the vocal still come through while having music be as loud as possible i think is a big part of it and we kind of reached the limit of the possibilities there here are the lars for genres in decreasing order

uh so the the loudest lead singer relative to background to quietest can you guess which genre would be on top of the loudest lead singer rock yeah no because it's the music is loud and rock it's country yeah i don't know a damn thing i should let sam guess instead the lowest is actually metal music because the music is so dang loud yeah that makes a lot of sense it's actually the lead singer is quieter than the background vocals in metal music. It's an LAR of negative three. So take that, neato 1940s. But that does still mean that Sari gets to go first. So rocket launches are really, really loud.

To try and put them into perspective numerically, the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions was measured to be over 200 decibels, while a jet plane taking off or a loud concert is like 120 decibels, and anything over 80-ish is considered dangerous when it comes to hearing loss. I didn't fully dig into the math behind decibels as a unit,

but I tried to. Broadly speaking, they're a ratio that conveys the power and amplitude of a unit, but I tried to. Broadly speaking, they're a ratio that conveys the power and amplitude of sound waves, and they're exponential. So every increase of 10 decibels is equal to a 10 times in the sound pressure level. So that difference between 120 and 200 is like multiple times over. And from what I understand, the sound from rocket launches largely comes from all the exhaust being shoved outward at a really high velocity, which is what propels the rocket upward and into space. And that makes shockwaves.

And vibrations make sound, and sound propagates through vibrations, so it's all intertwined. And powerful vibrations can cause intense damage, as we know from earthquakes and whatnot. intense damage, as we know from earthquakes and whatnot. So besides being dangerous for any human ears nearby, all these powerful sound waves from rockets can cause damage to the launch pad, to the rocket engines themselves, to the payload, and any nearby structures that you generally want intact because they're important for the launch, and also super expensive because everything in rocketry in space is very expensive. So basically, since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 by the Soviet Union, there's been research into the acoustics of rocket launches and specifically how to create sound suppression

systems to absorb or deflect all this energy, basically making rocket launches much quieter and therefore safer. One threshold I read about was trying to get it down from that 200-ish mark to around 145 decibels, which is basically loud jet plane level. And one of the main sound suppression systems used on launch pads, including the space launch system for the upcoming Artemis missions to the moon, is a whole bunch of water, which I'm not like a space guy, so I didn't realize this. And as of a october 2019 press release their current space launch system uses 450 000 gallons of water in less than a minute like shoots it all onto the platform which is slightly less than one olympic size swimming pool worth of water so not that much it's just it's

just it's just one olympic size swimming pool Just one giant pool. For a whole rocket launch. That does seem like way, way less than I would have expected. That's a big rocket. Yeah. Big rocket, lots of water, very fast water. And the way it works physically is as the super loud rocket sound waves, the super powerful sound waves, all that energy propagates through the water and encounters the rushing bubbles of air through it. and encounters the rushing bubbles of air through it, there is a lot of reflection and absorption and scattering physics that goes on to dissipate that energy as other forms like heat and really dampens that sound noise.

And those white clouds that come up around the rocket are actually a bunch of steam from this process of dissipating. It's like the heat from the engines, but then also from the dissipating sound energy, which is like energy is not created or destroyed. So of course it has to go somewhere, but it goes to vaporizing the water. And there are other explored ways of suppressing sound

that channel and redirect the exhaust, like these fire channels. And maybe this is a known thing, but it was not known to me. And so I was excited to talk about it, that we use a bunch of water to make rockets quiet it's just like very wild like this is the best thing that we've come up with we don't use sound foam we don't use anything else it just throw in a bunch of water it does the well yeah it's like sound foam that like moves around and goes but then it like

dissipates and disappears which is amazing um but it isn't like it's not just the like it's very loud and that's bad for people and animals ears uh it just it tears things apart and the the spacex heavy launch i don't know if you remember this like through chunks of concrete you know like forever and into the ocean and all over the place and they don't use this sound suppression because it's expensive and it instead they the idea i guess is to just rebuild the launch pad every time but yeah it's super cool and the the i mean it's also the added benefit of the giant steam cloud is very cool it looks great. How do they get water to come out that fast? I think they're big pumps. I think they're

on the platform and sticking out from the ground rather than the water being suspended above. But yeah, I think that's where a lot of the engineering comes from is just how do we pump it so fast so it's bubbly, it's frothy, and the rocket launches within such a short span of time

that you need as much sound absorption, pressure absorption. Right. As possible. Could they build it like on the ocean or something? Would that work? I don't know. Or really close at least. That's an interesting thought, Sam.

Yeah. Or in it. Just build it in the ocean. It's like, sorry, sharks. Watch out. Here we go. Get out of in the ocean. It's like, sorry sharks, watch out. Here we go. Get out of here guys. No shark zone. Then you wouldn't have to pump it at all

if you just put the rocket on top of the ocean. Exactly. If you found a way to put the rocket right on top of the ocean and then just go. NASA, I await the phone call. Yeah. Alright, water deluge. Water deluge for rocket launches to make it quiet.

Sam, what do you got? All right. So crickets might be a weird choice for an episode about quiet because bugs are usually pretty quiet. So just by chirping, crickets have got to be like in the top five loudest of all bugs. But loud and quiet is, as we've mentioned've mentioned relative and today i'd like to talk about the plight of quiet crickets so quick cricket chirping might be the universal indicator of a quiet peaceful evening but to a cricket that is probably the horniest sound on earth fraught with sexual tension because male crickets chirp to attract mates and generally speaking

the bigger the cricket the louder the chirp the easier it is to attract a mate. So it stands to reason that the smaller a cricket is, the quieter it is, and the more it is drowned out by the big, loud, chad crickets. And this tiny quietness is actually made worse by a phenomenon called acoustic short-circuiting. I bet Tuna knows what this is exactly. short-circuiting i bet tuna knows what this is exactly but to my understanding it is when sound waves coming out of something making noise in this case the cricket meet opposing sound waves on their way out and are canceled so uh sort of like a process that makes sound producing things less efficient and crickets have it extra bad because their two wings seem to cancel out a lot of each other's sound when their sound waves crash into each other in the middle there.

And I'm not sure why, but for some reason, this is worse the smaller a cricket is. And it has something to do with the sound wave of the call that they are making. So as you might conclude, a tiny, quiet cricket is doomed to a lonely, reproduction-less life. And maybe for lots of species of cricket, this is true, but one species of tree cricket found in India has found a way to circumvent both its small quietness and the effects of acoustic short-circuiting with one simple trick that big crickets hate.

About 5% of male tree crickets, on average the smallest males, chew a hole in the middle of a leaf, cram their little bodies into the hole, and then they start chirping. And now sound is very confusing, but I think what the crickets are doing here is almost but not exactly the same thing that a stereo speaker does. So the leaf is like the flexible diaphragm of a speaker, and the cricket is like the thing in the middle that makes the sound. speaker and the cricket is like the thing in the middle that makes the sound and the leaf's extra surface amplifies the chirp out through the edges of the leaf far away from the opposing sound waves of the other wing cutting down on short circuiting ultimately doubling or even tripling the volume of these otherwise quiet crickets so that's pretty cool and it seems like a clear-cut example of

animal tool use but that distinction is a little bit more complicated than animals use a thing to do something there's more science to it than that i guess so current research into these crickets is based around determining if they display flexibility or preferences and selecting which leaves to use and when and it seems like they do so so far tests have showed that crickets are able to pick between several leaves choosing usually for the largest leaf. And they're real good at finding the center of leaves. They usually do it like in one shot.

They can figure it out. And they seem to know when it's simply like not even worth trying to make a leaf speaker because all the leaves suck too bad. So I guess the moral of the story is, even when you're so tiny and quiet, you can get your hands on an amplifier and talk into it until everybody thinks you're cool and they love you. Making crickets the podcaster of the bug world.

Now that cricket is definitely under 30 years old and it's definitely a media luminary. He can't get his NFT either. He doesn't have a computer. Oh, gosh. I might set up a Coinbase for crickets 30 under 30 NFTs. Just pick 30 crickets that you can find in the world, and those are the ones that make the list. These are the best ones. I found them.

There's lots of good crickets facts. I think that the animal that has the largest testicle-to-body size ratio is a cricket. Wow. That's amazing. That's just a piece of information that's in my head. I didn't even know that bugs had testicles exactly, I guess. Never thought about it. They've got to make sperm somehow. That's true. And the National Geographic article about it says, Cricket has the world's biggest testicles, but puny output.

So, what's it doing with them? Cricket has the world's biggest testicles, but puny output. So take that. What's it doing with them? Make that an NFT and smoke it. So what do I have to choose from? Two facts. I've got water-based sound suppression systems for rocket launchers and crickets being the podcasters of the bug world. Sari came into it with the lead, but I think that Sam pulled it out. Wow.

I did already know about the sound suppression water, but I don't know. Podcasting crickets. I have to have some kind of reward in this life, don't I? Hasn't Sari gotten enough? Also, Sari's had enough today. Gotten enough good news. Yeah.

Sam, congratulations. Thank you. Your crickets are very cool. And you're not under 30, so you weren't even applicable. Yeah. Sam, congratulations. Thank you. Your crickets are very cool. And you're not under 30, so you weren't even applicable. Oh, I know. That doesn't make it feel any better at all. So now it's time to ask the

Science Couch where we've got a listener question for our Couch of Finally Honed Scientific Minds. AtKF10147 on YouTube asks, what was the quietest period in the history of Earth? That's a great question. Snowball? No.

Probably there'd be lots of wind. I don't know. Sari, what's the quietest time? I can't. I'm broken. I can't come up with anything. I know. Geology is weird. So this is the definition of quiet that i guess we didn't really talk about where in astronomy um like a

quiet part of a solar cycle is when there's like less sun spots or less activity um or like it physically that's not what i mean but okay that's not what i want either if that's what you answer i'm gonna be so mad physics it's no fluctuations of magnetism i think this lines up though i think i think this is sound wise in as much as i can estimate it so i think that the earth like the all the all the seismic activity that's going on under the earth's surface like the geologic activity of the volcanism everything like that is loud on a seismic level it's rumbly it's grumbly when the earth formed 4.6 billion years ago lots of collisions happened so after the first life but before multicellular life um there's the paleoproterozoic era um which started around 2.5 billion years ago and ended around

a billion years later it was when like the first glaciation events were happening in the in the earth's history and it is also when the first supercontinent which was called columbia or nuna was was in the process of being formed. But before that super continent formed around 2.45 billion years ago, towards the beginning of the Paleoproterozoic, there was a time when the Earth took a nap, geologically speaking, which is very weird and interesting. And as far as I can tell, because I'm not a geologist, they collected a bunch of rock samples. And there's very little preserved record from that period of time, which they are, I think, translates to. We just don't have data about this 250 million years stretch.

And there's a gap in the geologic record, which means that there was a gap in the number of volcanoes erupting during this time and the amount of material that was like becoming sedimentary rock and a lull in tectonic plate movement um and it was a as like a dormant period where earth's geology just calmed down for a bit. Like tectonic plates weren't moving as much. There wasn't a lot of volcanic activity. And then all that energy, according to these geologists that know more than me, kind of like built up in some way. was a shift from ancient style, is what they called it, plate tectonics, to modern style plate tectonics,

which I think is what led to, instead of disparate continents, the first hemispheric supercontinent. So whatever happened during that time, geologically speaking, there was a shift in the way that the continental crest started moving around and i think it's a controversial i think some some scientists some geoscientists are like well

we just don't have evidence from that period while others are like this lack of evidence from the period means that there was no activity during this time and so i would say this is like what came up when i was looking for quiet. The quiet time. This was the quiet time. Geologically time. And probably quiet because there wasn't a lot of life around. Like if you've got single cellular organisms and the earth is kind of calm.

And then hollering or anything like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Don't make any noise. You're not making mountains. You're not like, I don't know. Yeah. There's not as many volcanoes maybe.

Not as many earthquakes maybe not as many earthquakes earthquakes seem pretty loud to me and then if we want to fast forward to the anthropocene um the quietest time on recorded record was during the pandemic which is wild so we and i think it's because we have all these seismometers now. So there was a 76 author paper published in July 2020. And these seismometers that we have around the world, they collected data from 268 monitoring stations, as well as personal seismographs. So like citizen scientists who contribute their data as well, like to this paper.

And the seismic noise typically comes from like ocean or like ocean swell, etc. Atmospheric pressure, earthquakes, things like that. But humans are a pretty big source because, I don't know, we're driving cars, we're walking around, we're commuting, we're running our appliances. I don't know. There's airplanes, there's're walking around. We're commuting. We're running our appliances. I don't know. There's airplanes. There's trains. We're hustling and bustling. We're doing things. We're bellowing at each other to try and find a mate.

And when the lockdowns happened, the silence began in late January in China, and by mid-March, it spanned the world. I remember. As we all all remember but the seismic noise was reduced up to 50 percent um which is the this is the longest anthropogenic seismic noise reduction in in like the records that we have so far, just because there was such a unified effort to not do things that scientists were able to use this data.

And I think are still probably analyzing it to try and tell what is human generated versus what is like small seismic activity that's happening because of the earth. Because normally, I don't know, you can't tell if it's a bus driving by versus a very tiny earthquake. But with all the people staying inside, not doing anything, we could use these advanced instruments that we have now to read the earth and understand what the baseline levels are and what signals you're looking for, which is kind of cool. Another accidental experiment.

Weird. I don't want to do it again. It was not, I didn't like the quiet. Let's rumble our way forward. Yeah, but the whales and the dolphins, they really liked it. That's, so I don't know. Nature is healing. Maybe this will tend to be said about that.

Because there was dolphins all over the place, you know? They were swimming around New York City and stuff. Remember that? I saw it on a blog. Yeah. We can be a little quieter for those guys, I think. Yeah, let's do our best. If you want to ask the Science Catch your questions,

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for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert.

Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bazaio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakrabartman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bazaio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakrabarty. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green.

And we could not 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. In September of 2001, two researchers were gathering data from endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy near the eastern coast of Canada. One was measuring acoustic recordings to study social behaviors, and the other was collecting fecal samples to study things like reproductive and stress hormones. Of course, something else happened in September of 2001, the tragic events of 9-11, which led to a sharp decrease in shipping traffic along the entire North Atlantic coastline. And years later, these researchers realized they had a really unique opportunity to combine their data sets.

In February of 2012, they published a study on how underwater noise from large ships affects the stress levels of whales. from large ships affects the stress levels of whales. Compared to the two days before 9-11, there was a six decibel decrease in underwater noise in the two days following, and the post-9-11 whale poop had decreased levels of fecal stress hormones as well. So that is all to say, when the ocean is quieter, right whales are less stressed,

at least according to their poop. It says poor guys are down there, and it's so loud for them. It is. They just need to stick their heads under the sand. We came up with a solution for them and we say hey, we know you got things to do, but how about you just

take a little break. Take a little nap. I'll give you a little kiss on the cheek while you're down there. I'll tuck you in. You think anybody's ever kissed a whale on the cheek? Must have, right? Yes. Oh, yeah. I think I've seen it happen at SeaWorld as a child.

Give him a smooch. You're doing a good job. You're doing a good job.