SciShow Tangents - Rainy Day Compilation
Episode Date: June 10, 2025Grab a hot beverage, cuddle up with something soft, lean plaintively against a chilly window, and let the tremulous tones of Tangents lull you to the relaxation that only a cozy rainy day indoors can ...bring.Episodes in this compilation:S1 E29 - Sleep, original airdate: May 28, 2019S2 E28 - Games, original airdate: May 19, 2020S3 E3 - Weather, original airdate: January 26, 2021S4 E6 - Soft Things, original airdate: April 12, 2022S4 E15 - Books, original airdate: June 28, 2022Sources for each episode can be found in the descriptions of the original episodes on your preferred podcasting platform.SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X
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[♪THEME MUSIC PLAYING》
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 Chin.
Hello.
Are you still looking at metal bands on your computer there?
No, I'm done. I closed all the tabs.
Thanks. I appreciate your input though. I needed some expertise.
Stefan knows a lot about metal bands.
I know a lot about metal bands.
Of metal band names.
(*laughter*)
Stefan, what's your tagline? Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss a few shirts. This is one of them. How many shirts do you have? Like five.
You have five shirts?
How many shirts do you have?
Oh, I'd say maybe 20 or 30.
Okay.
What's your tag on?
Fatality.
Sari Reilly is also here.
Hello.
Good green sweater.
Thank you. Yeah, this is also in the realm of-
How many green sweaters do you have?
I actually have two green sweaters. Oh, okay. Yeah, because're both comfy. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a blanket on my body to the same one
No, I have like a bigger one and a slightly smaller one. What's your tagline?
I'm not gonna give you another chance. That's the one we're sticking with.
Cause I'm in charge and I'm Hank Green
and my tagline today is,
Bougainvillea!
Ooh, what is that?
That was very metal.
That was pretty metal.
It's a flower.
Oh.
Well, it sounded very metal.
None of you know what a bougainvillea is?
No, it sounded vaguely.
I'm the only person in the room that knows about bougainvillea.
Anyway, every week here on SciShow Tangents,
we all get together to try to one-up an amaze
and to delight each other with science facts.
We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks.
We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging from our previous conversations,
we won't be great at that.
So, if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one
of your Hank bucks.
Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science polo.
This week from me! bed and I get real mad when I'm awakened instead.
Do do do do do do. But I think it's kind of weird actually that I spent so much time asleep a whole unconscious life inside
my head oh no no no I'm a sleepy man oh sleepy man I'm purging toxins from my
brain sleepy man if I don't do it I will go insane
and I think it's kind of weird actually
yeah I think it's kind of weird actually
Yes, it's pretty freaking weird actually. Oh yeah.
At first I was like, you're just filling up all this time with music so you don't have to have as many lines.
But then it picked up.
No, my thought was no one's ever going gonna be able to do a poem that good.
It's like a two Hank Buck kind of poem. I'm gonna bring my boombox.
Okay, I'm in. So the topic for the day is sleep.
That was so good.
Oh, thanks.
So sleep, Sarri, what is it? What is it? Just what is it?
It's very hard to define. Even sleep scientists have a lot of trouble defining it. I found
four bullet points on a medical Harvard website that says,
sleep is a period of reduced activity.
Sleep is associated with a typical posture, such as lying down with eyes closed in humans.
Sleep results in a decreased responsiveness to external stimuli, but there's still brain
activity.
And sleep is a state that is relatively easy to reverse, which distinguishes it from hibernation or coma
or things like that.
Other than that, what is sleep?
These are the characteristics of it.
But as far as like what's actually happening in your brain,
we're not including that in the definition.
Yeah, because we have no idea.
I found a very good quote from a sleep scientist,
William Dement, who co-discovered REM sleep
and had spent more than 50,
he spent his whole life studying sleep.
He said, as far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep
that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.
So.
So am I purging toxins from my brain?
Maybe, yeah.
Maybe, yeah, maybe, yeah.
Don't look at me.
I don't know.
Yeah, maybe purging toxins, maybe consolidating memory,
maybe, I don't know, all kinds of things.
Like giving your brain a time to reset in some way
because it's not inactive.
And during certain kinds, I think REM sleep,
it's like even more active than you're awake in some cases.
Oh yeah.
And now it's time for
Jesus Fail.
One of our panelists has prepared three science facts
for our education and enjoyment, but
only one of those facts is real.
The rest of us have to guess or determine through the fact that we already know things,
which is the true fact.
If we do, we get a Hank Buck.
If we get tricked, then the presenter gets the Hank Buck.
And this week, it's Sam.
All right.
Let me sleep on it.
It's a common idiom, basically meaning that you'll think about something overnight and
have an answer the next day.
But could sleep actually help you solve problems?
Science says maybe.
A 2018 study from Cardiff University proposes a theory that non-REM and REM sleep might work together to reorganize your thoughts and memories and allow you to wake up with a new perspective on things. Non-RM sleep, they say, strengthens memories and extracts patterns from context.
And RM sleep creates new,
seemingly random connections in your brain,
and that these two things together
might be the thing that makes you wake up
and be like, I got it,
because you're just thinking about stuff in a new way.
But this research might be new,
but many scientific breakthroughs have been attributed
to particularly revelatory dreams.
So which one of these was allegedly discovered in a dream?
Good. I'm glad that that first thing wasn't a fact, because I was like,
that seems very true.
Yeah, it's true. Also too long.
So number one, Dmitry Mandalayev saw the periodic table
assemble itself before his very eyes in a dream.
He then woke up and wrote it down and found it to be pretty much basically correct. Number two, Thomas Edison had a dream where he was fishing in a stream with a bamboo
pole and then woke up and decided to try bamboo as the filament for his new light bulb, which
ended up being able to burn long enough to make his light bulb commercially sustainable.
Or number three, Dr. James Watson had a dream where he was pulled in half by two horses and then woke up and had the idea for the double helix in his head.
BOTH LAUGH
I feel like I'd have heard that. He talks so much.
BOTH LAUGH
Was bamboo the filament?
I think that there may have been a time when bamboo was the filament before tungsten.
Yeah.
It was the early filament.
And it's in a vacuum, so it doesn't burn.
It just like blows.
Oh.
And so, I could see me not knowing about any of these.
I could see, but like I feel like I'd know about the James Watson thing.
But here I am getting myself in trouble.
But I feel like Thomas Edison would totally tell that story.
Just because like that's what he does tell stories. So we've got Dmitri Mendeleev
dreaming of the periodic table
We've got Thomas Edison bamboo filaments after a fishing dream and we've got number three
Dr. James Watson getting torn in half by horses in an unpleasant dream, but realizing I am DNA
in an unpleasant dream, but realizing, I am DNA or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, to me the connection there is very strange.
Which makes me think it's true.
Because maybe the other ones are too neat.
Too neatly connected.
Well, yeah, Mendeleev's is just like, I thought of it.
But that makes me think that might be the real one.
I don't know, that one seems the most plausible,
but it also seems like the easiest one
that Sam would make up is like,
of course, blocks coming together as a periodic table.
Right.
Seems rude somehow.
Oh, I wasn't trying to dunk on you.
Yes, wouldn't be the first of you dunked on somebody today.
I know, I'm just snarky for some reason.
So the thing about that one is that like,
Mendeleev knew a lot about chemical elements, and he was thinking about like periodicity and was like,
like that could be something that would actually happen in a sleeping brain, like...
Oh!
When you wake up and you're like,
I don't even want to pee first, I gotta write this down.
Alright, Picked.
Stephen Pick.
I'm gonna go with the double helix DNA dream.
Oh, I'm gonna go with Mendeleev.
I'm gonna go with Mendeleev.
Okay, the correct answer is Mendeleev.
Yay!
So he was already studying this stuff like all the time.
And he was writing a textbook
and thinking about it extra hard, I guess.
And then he went to bed and he said
he saw the whole thing just come together.
And it was just the first draft. There was things wrong with it otherwise.
But like, as far as it went, he said that his first draft basically came out of his head to the paper, basically.
Yeah. Perfect.
And there were a lot of like, things we didn't know.
Like he didn't, like he wasn't able to put the whole table together
because there were elements we hadn't discovered.
Right. But he knew that those elements, some of them at least would have existed.
Yeah, that's the coolest thing about the table.
He's like, there's something missing here.
Go find it.
Okay, so, but also I have a confession to make that
I realized as I was reading them,
Stefan gets a point too.
Because my question turned out to be not correct
to what all the choices were.
So he actually did,
James Watson did discover
the double helix in a dream.
I miswrote the question.
He discovered it in a dream,
but it was a dream about walking up a staircase
with another staircase intertwining it.
Also a lot of people don't-
That's black hole bullshit so hard on that James Watson.
Also a lot of people don't believe that.
That is horse shit.
That is textbook James Watson horse shit.
Yeah.
And Thomas Edison.
So you get a point too.
I'm sorry.
I was mistaken.
So then Thomas Edison didn't have a dream, but he actually just went fishing with the
bamboo pole and was like, ah, I'll use this.
That's amazing.
In real life and space.
I would have been very surprised because that's the kind of lie that like,
if I came up with that and I was like,
I'm creating this lie, the horse got split in half
and he came up with DNA.
That's like, no, no one's gonna believe that.
It's a dream, right?
So if that had been a lie, you would have like out thought me
and I would have been sad about my own existence.
But one more thing I thought was cool
that somebody said that they thought about a dream.
I don't really believe any of these that much, but Albert Einstein said that he thought of
relativity because he had a dream where he was watching cows jump over a fence and a
farmer was on the other side.
And after the cows jumped over the fence, he went to talk to the farmer and the farm.
And he said, all the cows jumped over the fence at the same time.
And the farmer said, ah, I saw all the cows jumped over the fence at the same time. And the farmer said,
ah, I saw all the cows jump over the fence one by one.
And then he woke up and he had relativity in his brain.
Also sounds fake though.
I mean, he was inspired by it.
I could see that.
I get like, you know, you're playing around with ideas
and you're like, oh, what if?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm not like, I'm much more sympathetic
to believing Einstein's bullshit than their sponsors.
Next up, the fact off, but first a word from our sponsor. ["The Last Supper"]
Welcome back! The Hank Book Totals are...
Sam, you have nothing because you gave away one of your points.
That's fine.
You also gave me an extra one along with Sari.
I feel like you're just spreading the love around.
It's lonely at the top. I need somebody to catch up to me.
Stefan, you got one point. Sari, you got one point. Sarah, you got one point.
I'm at three.
Oh, God. That's a lot.
Yeah.
Well, you gave me two.
It was a good poem.
I defend that choice, even though it sets me farther behind.
I guess I do too.
The biggest problem is that I'm never not bringing the guitar to a Science Couch poem ever again.
Now, get ready for the fact-off.
Two of our panelists bring science facts
to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds.
We, each, me and Sam, have a Hank Buck to award
the fact that we like the most.
And we're gonna choose who goes first
by the person who dreamed most recently,
by which I mean the person who woke up last.
Ooh.
Oh, I set my alarm for 6.50, because I had to wake up and start editing the script. Oh, I set my alarm for 650
because I had to wake up and start editing the script.
I got up at 826.
Nice.
All right, so, so Stefan dreamed most recently and we'll go first.
Still tired though.
So you've got a little part in your brain called the basal ganglia.
Of course I do.
We assume. Yes, Yeah, we assume.
Yes, no, of course.
But that's associated with a variety of things like controlling voluntary movements and selecting
an action out of multiple possible actions to take.
But damage to both sides of the basal ganglia can cause a thing called auto activation deficit,
which is like intense apathy and an absence
of self initiated behavior. So like you don't have thoughts yourself. But if, if I like
asked you a question or asked you to like go do something, like you're perfectly functional
and able to do that, they described it as like total mental blank. No thoughts except
when an external stimulus or interrogator
provokes.
Oh, that sounds very bad.
Yeah, it does not sound pleasant.
And it mostly just happens when there's like brain damage in some way, like lack of oxygen
or blood flow or from surgery causing damage to that area.
But so the people who have this are sort of failing to be able to trigger thoughts and
actions when it's internally motivated and because
Everything that's happening during sleep is internal these researchers wanted to see if people with that syndrome still experience
dreams
So they had 13 patients who have the syndrome and 13 who didn't and they observed them over a couple nights to see
What was going on? So they monitored them over a couple nights to see what was
going on. So they monitored them over two nights, like videotaping, EEG. They like put
belts around them to measure their like breathing, nasal pressure, had microphones, like all
kinds of stuff. And then on the second night, they woke them up during non-RAM sleep and
during RAM sleep. And then like, I think they also had them keep like a dream journal outside
of those two nights to like get sort of a baseline or something.
But so it turned out that 12 out of the 13 people without the condition
had mental activity when they were awakened from REM sleep,
but only four out of the 13 did, who have the brain damage.
So some of them still had dreams,
but the ones who did, they were shorter and less bizarre.
dreams, but the ones who did, they were shorter and less bizarre.
They had like a team of people like independently, blindly, like assessing the dream journals.
The bizarreness.
Yeah, the bizarreness of the dreams.
And that there's not like as much emotional or like narrative content to it.
This result seems to support, I guess there's like multiple ideas, as we've
talked about, like we have, but we know very little about sleep and dreams and things like that.
Um, and brains.
There's a couple ideas about how dreams form or like where they start.
It was described as sort of bottom up or top down.
Um, and so like when we're imagining things when we're awake,
that's top down where you have like thoughts
that are in your higher level thinking areas
and then those stimulate feelings in the more primitive or brain stem-y regions. I say primitive with
quotes. And that sort of goes with how Freud would view dreams, like sort of revealing
your higher thoughts or your subconscious thoughts in the dream. But these results would
suggest that it's more bottom up.
That like there are areas in the brain stem that are initiating REM sleep,
and those may also be creating these like sensory perceptions.
And then your higher level brain is sort of interpreting that and creating narratives around it.
So even with this brain damage, they can still have dreams, but because they don't have the higher level
or access to the higher level thinking,
they can't have like the full dreaming experience, I guess.
That's fascinating to use, you know, using damage that has already happened to patients
to be like, well, we can discover a little bit about this tremendous mystery.
Yeah, because like a lot of the ways that we understand how things work in our body
is by looking at what happens when they break.
And so with the brain, it's very difficult to do that
because everything is so vital,
but when it's something small like this,
how does one small change in biology affect
how you process whole things and dream and...
Total mental blank.
Yeah.
But cool that we get an insight into some of how dreaming is working, because like that's
exactly when we say like, it's a mystery, but like, knowing some level of like, where,
like how we are doing this interpretation and that we are being sort of fed signals
to create a narrative around.
I feel like that's only in the last like 30 years that we've kind of gotten our head around that. And now it seems pretty understood that this is what dreams are made of.
Jared Sarkissian Some people...
Jared Sarkissian Oh, God.
Jared Sarkissian That some people think that there's no
reason that we dream, that it's just like biochemical side effect of like what happens
in our brains when we're sleeping. And that, I hate. I hate that thought. That seems completely possible.
It seems possible.
That's how everything else in your body works.
I don't like it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I feel okay about that with food,
where it's just like, this is a biochemical side effect
of needing to be alive.
Like, I have to take energy into me,
and like having a dream is just a biological side effect
of like, the things that my brain is doing to do its work.
When it's a process that's happening in the seat of consciousness,
it feels like it should at least be influenced by that.
Yeah, get used to it, buddy.
And like, oh no.
All right, Sari, you dreamed recently.
Recently.
So long ago.
Okay, so narcolepsy is a really unique and intense sleep disorder.
If you haven't heard of it before, the main symptoms are too much sleepiness and something
called cataplexy, which is like muscle weakness, like it's triggered when you experience intense excitement
or other strong emotions like fear or laughter
or anything that's intense.
And so narcolepsy was first described in medical literature
in Germany and France around the 1870s and 1880s,
but the definition was really hand wavy and incomplete.
As far as I can tell,
part of the problem was not having
like a group of people to study,
it was just like, there's this person who falls asleep.
What do we do with that?
And there wasn't a good enough understanding of the nervous system and daytime sleepiness
and stuff, so it wasn't pinpointed to a particular phenomenon.
And the research was sort of frozen for a century until the 1970s when Dr. William DeMent and Dr. Christian Guillemineau were studying
sleep and specifically narcolepsy at Stanford. And they started working with an animal model
to do this. And when I think of animal models, like my brain jumps to mice or rats or killifish
or maybe like monkeys if you're trying to approach something human. But the key to understanding
narcolepsy is having an animal that demonstrates clear emotions
because those are what trigger cataplexy.
What animal demonstrates emotions?
Do you wanna guess?
Dolphins?
No. Dogs.
Yeah.
Ah.
So that's how the Stanford canine narcolepsy colony was born.
Oh no.
And so.
Oh no.
The Stanford sleepy dog.
Yeah, the sleepy dogs.
So basically Dement was going around
and like trying to find people with narcolepsy
and someone, as far as I can tell the story was like
someone said that their poodle had narcolepsy.
Hey, I got a sleepy dog.
Yeah, I got a sleepy dog.
Mom, look at this sleepy dog.
And then.
I clap my hands on its face and it falls over.
Or like when they get excited, like it's time to for food and they get really excited
and they start wagging their tails and then just...
They get excited all the time.
I know, it's so sad.
And so like that happened and then soon after they found some dobermans that were narcoleptic
and when they bred these Dobermans together,
I don't think it was Doberman plus Poodle,
but they noticed that narcolepsy was hereditary.
It was autosomal recessive, so both parents had to be narcoleptic
for the puppies to be narcoleptic.
But from breeding them from around 1976 to 1995,
nearly 500 narcoleptic dogs that were mostly Dobermans
were raised to study narcolepsy.
And it's just like very cool that they had all these dogs to do this with. And to give sort of
a highlight reel, this is when Dr. Emmanuel Mingno came into the picture and through lots of studies
on these dogs, the team found the key hormone involved in narcolepsy called orexin or hypocretin,
plus genes in dogs and then genes in humans that
are linked to the disorder. At this point, we've learned even more like how narcolepsy is probably
an autoimmune disorder in humans. So there's a region of the brain that produces compounds
like orexin and your body's attacking that region of the brain. So you're not producing enough to be
able to stay wakeful enough. So like all very complicated,
all very interesting. But to return to the dogs, it's a happy story, which I also really liked,
which you don't always hear in animal testing. These researchers like loved the dogs and they
took really good care of them and they were just like observing them, but they all had names. They
were all treated really well. And after the experiments, they were all pretty much adopted, as far as I can tell. And Dr. Minow is still involved in narcolepsy research and treatment
today with a narcoleptic chihuahua named Watson by his side. And he has all these really nice quotes
about like learning from having adopted several narcoleptic dogs, but over the course of his
research, how to empathize better with patients,
because he can see how his dog gets really excited to play,
or really excited to have food,
and then all of a sudden has a cataplexy episode.
And it interrupts their life,
and so it's given him a lot of insight into how to help patients,
especially kids with narcolepsy,
who just don't know how to handle it.
When you're seeing the kid, you can be like, look, I know what you're going through.
My Chihuahua's got narcolepsy.
That's it.
I stand by my guess.
I think dolphins have emotions.
It's obvious.
They're always smiling.
It's the thing about dolphins. They're always smiling. They always smile. That's the thing about dolphins.
Yeah, they're always happy.
Yes, Always Happy Dolphins.
It's a band.
Always Happy Dolphins?
I love them, yeah.
No, I hate you guys.
If you just said, like, Always Dolphins,
that would sound more like a band name for some reason.
Yeah, Always Dolphins.
It's like Imagine Dragons. Yeah, that's reason. Right, yeah, Always Dolphins. It's like Imagine Dragons.
Yeah, that's our Imagine Dragons cover band, Always Dolphins.
Always Dolphins.
I don't know any Imagine Dragons songs.
I mean, I know one.
That's an Imagine Dragons song.
I must just not know that it's Imagine Dragons.
Because before music starts, it doesn't say,
we're Imagine Dragons.
But it should!
I mean, a lot of hip... At the end it does.
Hip-hop often, they do that.
Jason Derulo, he puts it in all of his songs.
Jason Derulo.
Yeah, I love that.
Anyway, that's not going in the...
Oh, shoot, it's not going in the episode.
Okay.
Yeah, because that's a Jason Derulo tanger, Sam.
Okay, I accept my fate.
So, we have Stefan with auto activation deficit sufferers being used to understand dreams better.
And from Sari, narcolepsy research being done with sleepy dogs at Stanford.
Oh, gosh.
Happy sleepy dog story.
Happy sleepy dogs, yeah.
You had to find a happy animal.
I don't know. I'm going with Stefan.
I think I might too.
Whoa!
He said, in the seat of consciousness.
That's what I'm saying.
I think that's it.
Yes.
Yes.
The iron throne of consciousness.
I'm gonna say that every time.
Yeah.
I mean, you can think about dogs
where dogs sit in your consciousness and in your heart.
Terry, it's too late.
I already got it.
I know.
And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch.
We had so many this week.
People are very curious about Sleep, where we ask listener questions to our couch of
finely honed scientific minds.
This week's gonna be read by Stefan.
At L. Hodenfield and at CinnamonPizza8 ask, are there genetic factors that cause people
to sleep better than others?
Are there genetic factors that cause people to want cinnamon pizza right now?
Yeah, I think that would be good.
Yeah, it's whatever makes you want sugar.
Because I have that one.
I don't know about cinnamon pizza.
It would be the crust, maybe.
It would be cinnamon.
Yeah.
Okay. Recently on the SciShow YouTube channel, we talked about night owls versus morning larks.
Chrono types.
Morning people and chronotypes and like how that affects.
And that's like a genetic thing that affects when you like to sleep.
But because society is set up for morning people more so than for night owls.
Night owls tend to have worse sleep.
So I guess that's kind of a genetic thing that leads to that,
but it's also societal.
I also think there's also like insomnia probably also,
like I would not be surprised if insomnia had genetic factors,
but I don't know that for sure, but I'm saying 90%, I bet.
I'd go, I'd do a double down on that.
Can I bet some?
Can you bet some on us?
The science catch is now gambling.
It's hard to look up specific genetic mutations
that cause these things, because like we mentioned,
maybe in the definition section,
that like there's so many things that influence sleep.
So regarding like chronotypes and things like that,
there are things, there's advanced sleep phase syndrome,
which are morning larks, I guess,
people who go to bed very early and then wake up early.
And then there's delayed sleep phase syndrome,
which is late bedtime, late wake time.
So do you, some people don't have one or the other though.
Right.
Yeah.
Most people are in the middle of the walker.
Most people are in the middle, but then they're skewed to either side.
Um, and I think with the DSPS, so the late, the late night owls, there's a
mutation in a gene called cry one, which yeah, that's how I feel maybe sometimes.
in a gene called Cryone, which, yeah,
that's how I feel maybe sometimes.
Um, and it encodes a protein that is involved
in circadian rhythm proteins like CLOCK,
which is a very good name.
Good and important name.
Is there a name of a protein?
CLOCK, yeah.
Or is it a gene?
Uh, it's all caps. Is that a gene?
Probably a protein.
I just Googled CLOCK, which is not helpful. Okay.
What does clock do?
I think it just is part of like the circadian pacemaker type stuff.
So like your cells have internal clocks and things that are keeping time.
And so it is involved in regulating that.
There's a clock inside of you, many of them.
Yeah, so cry one normally suppresses circadian rhythm stuff.
And so the mutation causes it to suppress clock
and other related proteins even more,
which means that that led to later bedtime.
So probably like you're more shifted from
like matching your bodily cycle to the sun
and like a more average daytime cycle
and you're pushed later.
So what I found was interesting is
there are studies about naturally short sleepers
that has to do with orexin,
which is the hormone I mentioned earlier
that has to do as involved in narcolepsy, but like orexin, which is the hormone I mentioned earlier that has to do, is involved in narcolepsy.
But like orexin is linked to wakefulness.
So it's something that your body produces
to help you stay awake.
Can I take a pill of it?
What I've read about narcolepsy is that
we don't have a chemical or a prescription
that someone can take to help with narcolepsy.
So we haven't found a way to bottle up orexin
in a way that your body can biologically process
or in a meaningful amount.
So no, but there is a gene called DEC2.
So DEC2 is a repressor for orexin expression normally.
So like it helps you fall asleep.
And so when it's broken, it results in increased expression
and so you're awake more.
And so people who sleep like four hours a night
and are wake up perfectly fine,
a lot of them have been found
with this particular gene mutation that has made it,
like their bodies are just naturally more wakeful
and they feel rested after that period of time,
which is also part of the mystery of sleep,
because they can sleep for fewer hours.
If someone can do it, why can't everyone do it?
Yeah.
Seems like this would confer an advantage.
Mm-hmm.
And they do not eventually have, necessarily,
like, drawbacks from not sleeping.
No.
Okay.
So, like, there's an interview with one person.
Yeah, who just like, I wake up at 4 a.m.
and I go for, I like, use that time to read or go for a run.
And then I like love to start my day before everyone else.
And they're completely rested.
That'd be great.
Nice.
Yeah.
If you wanna ask the Science Couch your questions,
you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents,
where we will tweet about topics
for upcoming episodes every week.
Thank you to at Katie Dozen FTBA,
at Color Me Trash 2ba, at color me trash too,
and at bloody lemonade,
and everybody else who tweeted us your questions.
We got like 124. Thank you.
Yes, it was great.
Final Hank Buck scores. Sarah you have one,
Sam you have a negative one.
Stephen came back with three,
tying me up for the lead.
I'm on top of the world.
If you like this show and you want to help us out,
that's really easy to do.
You can leave us a review wherever you listen.
That helps us know what you like about the show
and other people get to see that too.
Second, you can tweet about your favorite moment
from this episode.
And finally, if you want to show your love for Tangents,
just tell people about us.
Thank you for joining us.
I have been Hank Green.
I have been Sari Reilly.
I have been Stefan Schinn.
And I've been Sam Schultz.
SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios.
It's created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz and Caitlin Hofmeister.
Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish.
Our social media organizer is Victoria Bon giorno 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 lighted.
But one more thing.
There's a condition called sleeping butt syndrome or dormant butt syndrome that is usually caused by
sitting too much, sleeping curled up like a baby
or exercising wrong.
It's where your butt muscles are too weak
so your other muscles overexert.
Oh, I definitely don't have that.
Strong butt Stefan.
I just think my butt muscles are so strong that they just squeeze all the veins and then
there's no circulation and it falls asleep.
Wow, your butt muscles are squeezing their food out.
Interesting.
Maybe your whole body is just controlled by your butt.
It's like forcing your other muscles to do stuff.
Like the opposite of that.
That's what I call a basal ganglia.
Butt brain.
Yeah, you're a butt brain.
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 Jinnn!
Hey there.
Uh, what's your tag on?
2d6 plus 4.
That's a pretty powerful hit.
Sam Schultz is also here with us. Hello Sam
What's your tagline half man half pop tart? Oh, well, that's what happens
I've been eating a lot of them
I walked by the pop tarts in the grocery store just a couple days ago and I I looked at them
Solidly for a long time they looked back but I I blinked them away
I hadn't even thought about them in like 20 years. Yeah.
But all of a sudden.
I think about Pop Darts all the time.
Sari Riley is also here with us.
Sari, what's your tagline?
That's a good rock.
And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is Mystery Scent.
Every week here on Size Your Tangents we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight
each other with science facts.
We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week.
We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by previous conversations, we
won't be great at that.
So if the rest of the team deems the tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one
of your sandbox.
So tangent with care.
And now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this
week from me, everyone!
Wait for it!
What's on my floor?
What's on my floor?
Oh, Hank has taken out a guitar.
Somebody once told me the world was gonna roll me.
I'm round in being carefully aimed. I've been pumped up with some air and some people really
care when I go in the goal during the game.
Well, they keep coming and they don't stop coming.
Everywhere I go, there's more guys running.
Always on the move, never get any rest.
I'm starting to think that they might be obsessed.
Oh, just once I'd like to sit around maybe find a nice hill to roll
down but the whistle blew so now I'm back and suddenly I'm being attacked oh
hey now I'm the game ball and I never get bored oh hey now Hall of Fame ball
and I see now I've scored and someday I'll develop a hole
But until then I'll go for the goal
Wow
Beautiful that was really good. It also made it sound like you don't know the names of any specific sports
Yeah, I was picturing a soccer ball, but this wasn't a great way to fit that into the meter
of the song.
I'd say two points are in order for that one.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, ooh, ooh, that's why I need it so bad.
I worked hard on it.
I just can't get the All-Star out of my brain.
You and Smash Mouth both worked really hard on that.
Yeah, that's true.
You can't discount their contribution to this.
So the topic for the day is not balls, unfortunately.
Maybe that's coming up in the future, but it is games.
So, Sari, what's a game?
I looked around for this a lot,
and it seems like there are lots of different definitions for game.
But what they all had in common like there are lots of different definitions for game.
But what they all had in common was they're a form of play, especially when they're competitive
or structured in some way, and usually for entertainment or fun or sometimes education.
So it's not work and it's not art. And then in between that is game.
There are only three things!
Yeah.
The three genders, work, art, or game.
Is sport a kind of game?
I think so.
I would consider a sport a type of play.
All sports are games, but not all games are sports.
Yeah.
But there's like within sports and a lot of different kinds of gambling,
there are professionals who are working by playing the game too.
Yeah, explain that.
Yeah, now they're working. And they're also like sometimes the way they move their bodies
is a kind of art. It's that place where it all intersects in the middle.
But yeah, we're not going to get to the bottom of what a game is, I think.
There are plenty of people who are studying play and games to various degrees,
whether it's like how to write a video game script or how to design board games
or like how do children play?
And those are all like different fields of neuroscience and sociology and psychology
and different things.
So it's broad.
Did you discover the etymology of the word game?
Yeah, I did. So it is from the Proto-Germanic ga,
which is G-A, which is just a collective prefix,
so it means like a collective, plus man, which is person,
so ga-man, basically, which is people together.
So games are inherently a social thing.
They didn't have solitaire in old English, apparently.
Which are also coincidentally the same roots as gambling.
So gamble and game come from the same sort of place
in linguistic history.
And so then it went from being people together
to being like amusement or pleasure or joy related.
And now it is time for
CHILDREN FAKE
One of our panelists, it's Sam, has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment,
but only one of those facts is real. The rest of us have to figure it out either by deduction or
wild guess, which is the true fact. If we do, we get a sam buck. If we're tricked, then Sam gets
the sam buck. Sam, do, we get a Sand Buck. If we're tricked, then Sam gets the Sand Buck.
Sam, what are your three facts?
Association football, AKA soccer,
is the most popular sport in the world.
Even Americans who are notorious soccer haters
are starting to admit that maybe it is not so like,
dumb, I guess they like it now.
Soccer's pretty cool.
And all that popularity means there's a lot of science
and innovation happening around soccer,
some of it more useful than others.
Here are some weird soccer science inventions,
but only one of them is real.
Number one.
One of the most soccer-y parts of soccer
is the rowdy fans in the stadium.
Crowds can be whipped up by defeat or victory
and can get dangerous really fast,
and noise levels in arenas are often high enough
to damage hearing. So researchers are developing a sort of noise canceling sound system to be installed
in arenas that analyzes crowd noise with machine learning. And when the crowd starts to get
too loud or angry, the sound system would play a counter sound that would have the goal
of deadening the sound and hopefully calming everyone down.
Oh, so not only is it there to protect their ears, but it's also there to protect them
from each other.
Uh-huh, from getting too mad about sports.
Number two, soccer played by humans?
That's very boring.
So, a group of roboticists from around the world got together to start Robocup, a soccer
tournament featuring leagues of robots of all shapes and sizes and even hypothetical
simulated ones, with the goal of creating
a flawless team of super soccer robots that can defeat a professional soccer team in regulation
play.
Number three, soccer rules can get really confusing even for professional soccer players,
and no rule is more vexing than the dreaded off-sides rule, which I read and still don't
really know what it is, but I think it says that a player can't be any closer
to a goal than the ball or the closest opposing player.
And it's really easy to screw up and be in the wrong place
and get the other team a free kick.
So work is being done to develop sporty sunglasses
that calculate where offside is in real time
and display a line that you can't cross
on a hood inside the sunglasses.
And that's for the soccer player?
And that's for a soccer player.
Oh my God.
Okay.
So our three facts are a noise canceling arena system
so that the crowd doesn't get too loud or too riled up.
Two, Robo Cup, a soccer tournament
featuring leagues of robots
and even hypothetical simulated ones
to create a flawless soccer team able to defeat a professional soccer team in regulation play.
Or a pair of glasses that give you a heads up display that shows you where off sides is at any given moment in time.
So you'd have to wear sunglasses while you're playing soccer.
Or like goggles of some sort, yeah.
I feel like at that point, you're cheating.
I mean, it's just helping you not break the rules.
Well, but in football, like, well, American football, excuse me.
When you're watching on TV, you have all these overlays now
where you can see the line of scrimmage and all that.
But if the players could see that, I feel like that would be...
I mean, I guess everyone can see it, but...
I don't know, then you're gonna not get as many offside penalties,
and that's no fun.
It's more exciting with the penalties.
Do you watch soccer, Stefan?
No.
Okay. So you don't know if it's more...
I actually don't know.
...exciting with the penalties.
It does, to me, feel like something that you give to the referees, not the players, though.
Like, they're the cops of sports who stand on the sidelines and are like, you've gone
over the line, and they don't have those yellow lines.
They just have human eyes, but giving them lines seems helpful.
That was my first thought, too, is that it'd be useful for refs before players, because
like players aren't going to want to wear something on their face.
But nobody's saying that this is a thing that they're going to use.
They're saying it's a thing that someone is trying to develop.
Yeah, a bunch of dorks in some lab somewhere.
For their rec soccer leagues so they can become the best and win their little trophy.
So Robocup, I guess the near-term goal is to have two teams of robots playing against each other and the long-term goal is for them to defeat
The the soccer players because it feels we're a long way away from being able to defeat a soccer player
I've seen soccer players. I've seen those those latest Boston Dynamics robots videos where they'd like parkour and stuff
I would not fight that in soccer
No, I would definitely not fight it like I wouldn't want to hand to hand it
Swords, right
It's a lot of punching it's a lot of punching. I mean I could see
Robots playing against each other. I could not see them playing against people. I don't care how fancy your Boston Dynamics is
I could see that as a great way to incentivize robotics teams to develop better, more maneuverable
robots or whatever, is to compete in this RoboCup league.
Yeah, and if you have something like BattleBots with robots destroying each other, you can
have a ball bot that kicks a ball around. That seems achievable to me, knowing very
little about robotics.
And then finally we have our noise canceling sound system,
which if this is like technically possible,
there's gotta be somebody working on it.
It may be that it's like just not a thing that's possible,
but if it's possible, I feel like, yes,
somebody's gotta be thinking about this.
Like I know that it's of course possible
inside of headphones.
But that's like one person with one set of headphones, which is very different from,
like, giant 60,000 person stadiums.
I don't know a lot about, like, stadium or, like, concert audio.
The acoustics seem complicated to me.
It seems much more complicated than doing headphones to me.
Regardless, I'm going for that one.
Oh. Oh.
Oh.
It does feel like something a lot of people could use.
My dad is a big football fan, which you wouldn't expect,
coming from my family, but they love the sports.
And he brings earplugs to every football game
to put them in his ears like he's going to a loud concert
so that he can yell as loud as he wants
and also protect his hearing.
So I'm sure there are plenty of also hearing conscious people
who would like a sound dampening system.
But I'm going for robo soccer because I would like to see the robots.
Oh, boy. I mean, there's got to be robots playing each other in soccer.
There's not like that's a thing.
That's definitely I'm sticking with my answer, but that's got to be.
So since Hank is locked in, I'm just gonna say that I really don't think that
the noise-cancelling stadium is a thing.
Because you can't control... Like with the headphones,
you know how far it is to the ear, so you can control the phase.
Because that's what it is. You need exactly out of phase audio to cancel it out,
and you can control that. But in a stadium, you can't control the phase to everyone's ears.
They're all in different places.
But wouldn't you know where they all were to a certain degree?
Maybe. Maybe Hank knows something.
My thinking is that you have like a distributed system of many speakers.
So it's not like one noise canceling for the whole stadium.
It's like every little area gets It's its own. Okay. Well
The second Robo cup, okay, so you're ready for the right answer the right answer is Robo cup
Oh, my nose cancelling idea is pretty good
Except that except that Stefan's a freaking audio engineer
Better he can help me he can help you know how impossible it is.
Which is what he...
That's what every inventor hears before they invent, you know,
the automobile or whatever. It's impossible.
Okay, so the RoboCup, I'll start with that one.
It's real, like I said. It started in 1997.
And 2019 was the 23rd RoboCup.
What? Oh, wow.
1997? What the hell?
Yeah.
It started with a goal very similar to Deep Blue, which defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997
as well, except at soccer.
It wants to defeat humanity at soccer.
And it started out with just a simulated league, but it's grown out tons of leagues and subleagues
like the Humanoid League, which has kid, teen, and adult-sized sub leagues. And the Simulation League now has 2D leagues and 3D leagues.
And then it has all kinds of non-humanoid-sized categories
for more BattleBot-type soccer-playing robots.
And the stated goal of beating a World Cup team by the middle of the century
is secondary, like Stefan said, to having fun and to being like a good challenge for roboticists.
They do want to, by the middle of the century, make a team that can beat humanity.
There's one league called the like standard league where it's everybody gets the same robot body,
but they all have their own programming for it.
Right.
And they all go against each other. And they look like little babies playing soccer.
They do. And they just fall over all the time?
I'm watching them, it's really good.
They are not close to being able to defeat a human, I will say, from watching this.
They're not particularly good at soccer, but they're as good as like a toddler that knows the rules of soccer.
Which is pretty good for being only from 1997 until now.
Sam, I'm just gonna be watching robots play soccer.
Oh, that one fell down again!
This is like my entire rest of my night.
The crowd noise thing is fake,
but crowd noise in arenas of sports of all types is a huge problem.
Sports crowds tend to be about 90 decibels,
and hearing damage starts at 85 decibels.
But vuvuzelas, vuvuzelas?
Yeah.
Which are pretty much banned all over the place now,
but they were huge in the early 2010s.
They can be 127 decibels, which is mostly why they were banned
because they were just shredding people's hearing.
The best I could find in terms of actual ideas
for sound mitigation was just earplugs like Sari's dad does.
So he's ahead of the curb.
It's a low tech solution, I'd say.
Yeah.
Not nearly as high-tech as this terrifying spider robot
that I'm watching play soccer right now.
I gotta stop watching robots play soccer,
but we'll link to some good soccer robot videos
on SciShowTangents.org.
I'll track down as many as I can find.
Because it's great.
And then researchers are using machine learning on crowds
at some sporting events, I guess,
to figure out what makes people most excited.
So they can stop that from happening so that it's really boring and quiet.
There's a thought that they could anticipate where fights are going to break out with it,
but that was very early from what I could find.
And then the HUD glasses are not a thing for soccer as far as I know, but there's HUDs
being integrated into lots of like swimming goggles
and goggles that people who ride bikes wear,
so they can see like elevation, temperature, and vital signs,
and how fast they're going.
And now there are football helmets, like prototype football helmets,
that can display plays, and they can respond to like verbal commands,
so they can hear the person shouting the play and then show it on the HUD of your football helmet. But those are just used in like experimental practice scenarios
right now. Probably because they break into a million pieces if you hit them is my guess.
And also they have cameras in them so that you can like pull up their view to show to
like people at home I think is the idea.
I want to be inside of a quarterback's actual head.
The thing is, though, I feel like I've heard like streams of like football players
helmets while they're on the field, and it's not that exciting because they're just like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Next up, we're gonna take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact-off.
Welcome back everybody, Sandbuck Totals. Everybody would be tied with one, but I got an extra point for doing a parody version of Smash Mouth's All-Star, so I'm in the lead with two.
Now get ready for the fact-off.
Two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow
our minds.
We each have a Sam Buck to award the fact we like the most, but if we hate both of them,
we can just throw our fact away.
And we're going to decide who goes first with this trivia question.
Since we are recording this episode on Hank's birthday, happy birthday Hank.
So in celebration of birthday's and Hank's love of Tetris, when is the developer of Tetris,
Alexi Pajitnov's birthday?
September 30th, 1946.
Alright.
46.
I don't know, it just came out, Stefan.
The spirit of Alexi moved me.
I feel like, I don't know when Tetris was developed.
Maybe like late 80s, early 90s or something.
And it feels like something an early 30s person would develop.
So maybe May 5th, 1959.
Oh.
Wow.
So the answer is April 16th, 1955.
Ooh, that's pretty close.
Okay, well, I'd like Sari to go first.
Okay.
So, play in animals is kind of a biological mystery.
It seems like it's something that should be straightforward.
Like they play fight or chase a ball or goofy and we love them.
And that those all have purposes.
So play fighting might train them to defend themselves
or being goofy with us could increase their social behavior or decrease aggression,
but not all behaviors fit neatly into a box of a theory
for play and for games.
And so we don't really have anything really conclusive
besides it's fun and maybe lowers stress
or improves coordination,
but researchers are particularly interested
in studying play because it's tricky
and interesting to understand.
And one group of scientists at the Humboldt University of Berlin gave it a go in 2019
by teaching rats how to play hide and seek.
They didn't want to use carefully regulated classical conditioning methods like food rewards
or like negative electric shocks.
So they met the rats on sort of their own level.
They knew that rats would play with each other. So this
researcher, Annika Reinhold, started getting them used to her by petting and tickling them,
which I learned that rats giggle when they're tickled at really high frequencies that we
can't hear, but they love it. They love to be tickled.
Can they hear each other giggling?
I think so.
Oh, good.
After some training, all six rats learned how to seek.
So their starting enclosure was closed and then it would open up remotely and there would
be a human hidden in the room.
Then they would scurry around and like vocalize and check past hiding spots and like seek
out the human and then get really excited when they found them, executing what are known as joy jumps or Freudian sprung.
Oh my goodness.
So they were having a lot of fun.
And five out of six of them also learned to hide if their starting box was open
and the human was nowhere to be found.
So they would like sneak around, pick a hiding spot, stay still and silently wait
to be found. And sometimes when the human found them,
they would like run away before getting their tickle reward
and hide again because they were having so much fun.
And they were just like, I wanna keep playing.
And so then they would hide again.
BOTH LAUGH
So it was really, really interesting.
One, because Hide and Seek seems like a sort of more
complicated game than play fighting
because there are separate roles,
there are more rules involved,
but humans were still able to train them.
And they noticed that when rats are conditioned with food,
they're usually silent and can tirelessly perform
hundreds and hundreds of trials.
But these rodents were really eager to play
and really tired when the block of games were over.
So they were like giving their all to this task
and then being tired after.
Wow.
So it's like really heartening to see how happy these rats were, but also like sad to
see how other trial rats are not necessarily living their best lives.
There's a lot of competition to get into the giggle fight rat study.
At work today, I got tickled.
I've got to play hide and seek.
What did you do? Well, the bottom of my cage is electrocuted.
Mostly I just found this really endearing and play is cute and good.
And we don't know exactly what its evolutionary purpose is, but we know that it's really important.
Do rats have games when they're not in captivity? Do they know?
Yeah, I think they're pretty playful. A lot of mammals are really playful and demonstrate a lot of play behaviors.
So rats, I think, do a lot of this.
They like tussle and hide and pounce on each other.
So sort of similar to things that you'd see a cat or a dog or other pets do.
You said some of the rats are also seeking,
but do they seek other rats and then tickle them?
Or are they, like, seeking the humans?
It's a human-rat game.
So, the rat is either the seeker or the hider,
and then a human is the other person.
That is a good question, if rats can tickle each other.
Do we know the answer to that?
Probably. I don't know.
I hope so.
I feel like the way we measured their high-pitched tickly giggles,
it's because humans were tickling them.
But I imagine that they giggled because they tickled each other at some point and they
were like, hee hee hee.
They giggled before the first human-induced giggle.
One has to assume.
Yeah, okay.
All right, Stefan, what do you got?
So one of the very important skills in life is empathy.
So just understanding and experiencing the emotions of other people.
A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was wondering if they could use games to help
teach people empathy.
And so they developed this game called Crystals of Kador that was designed to teach empathy
to middle schoolers specifically.
They had 150 kids in the study, 75 played this game, and 75 played a control game.
The sort of premise of the game is that you're, I think you're a robot and you've crash landed
on this alien planet and you don't speak the same language as these aliens. And so you have to build
emotional rapport with them in order to like gather the parts of your spaceship and then
presumably like put it back together and get get back home or whatever.
It just so happens, luckily enough, these aliens have extremely human and expressive
faces.
And so all the key mechanics of the game are about identifying what emotion they're feeling
and how intensely they're feeling it.
They had the kids play the game for about an hour a day for two weeks. And in fMRI scans after those two weeks, I think all of the kids who
had played the game showed improved neural connectivity in the brain regions associated
with empathy and perspective taking. But some of the kids also had more connectivity in emotional
regulation brain regions. Those kids improved their scores on empathic accuracy tests.
And so they had taken those tests before and then after playing the game, they did better.
So kind of showing that like the game worked for them, but it doesn't necessarily work
for everyone.
But the idea behind this and like why they're targeting middle schoolers specifically is
like, you know, it's a time of life when your brain's still developing,
you're learning these social skills,
and it could be really helpful for children who are on the autism spectrum
or just generally have trouble with empathy and social skills.
But the idea is to show that it can be impactful
and then maybe inspire the game industry
to include more empathy-based things
in games.
Because that was the thing that I was thinking about while reading this is like, there's
no game that I have played that uses empathy as a mechanic.
It's like, can you click on this thing faster than the other person clicked on this thing?
Or in RPGs, you're like, I'm gonna use my charisma skill to get a good deal
on these vascular toenails.
But you just roll a die.
Stefan, you've played Rust, right?
Uh-huh.
That caused a big ruckus
because its character generator is automatic.
And so you can't choose the race or gender of your character.
And you're locked into it for the whole game.
And game scholars and sociologists were interested in that
because it's like, some people pick an avatar that resembles them,
and some people pick an avatar, like,
men will pick a sexy woman or something
because that's what they want to look at while they're playing a game.
But this took all control out of the player's hands
and forced you to be a person and hopefully, in some way, teach you empathy
or just see how it plays out in this survivalist game.
People were really mad about it too, I remember.
Yeah, I think so. People were very pissed.
They couldn't change their character.
No empathy was developed.
Yeah.
LAUGHING
So we've got, in 2019, neuroscientists teaching rats how to play hide and seek by rewarding them only with tickles.
Or we've got Stefan with a game developed for middle schoolers where you have to understand the facial expressions of aliens to develop empathy.
Sam, are you ready to vote with me?
Yeah, I am.
Three, two, one, Steph.
Mix it on up again.
I like Steph, I like this useful tool.
It seems like a game I'd like to play.
Also, I'm worried about my own child.
Also, his entire generation,
and I want them to be able to understand people
in the world.
I think, are you saying you wouldn't want to play hide and seek with a mouse?
Because I sure would. Or a rat.
Oh, yeah. No, I want to giggle the heck out of some rats.
And I want some kind of headphones that let me hear them giggle.
I don't know why that hasn't been developed yet,
but I think that our sort of species-level appreciation for rats
would go way up if that was possible.
Oh yeah.
I picked Ceres because it delighted me so thoroughly.
It was really delightful.
Your reasons were extremely compelling once I heard them and...
And uh...
Probably Stefan's is more important for the world.
Now it's time to ask the science couch.
We've got some listener questions for our couch in quotation quotation marks of finally honed scientific minds.
This is from atSciencesAndArt.
Why do we get so riled up about games?
This is like a psychologically complicated question.
And I tried to do reading and I recruited Deboki
to try to do reading and the answer is maybe just dopamine.
Because of course, anything-
As with so many things. It is the answer to everything, 42 and dopamine.
Our brains apparently have a tough time separating games from reality,
and that's partially because of game design.
Like, it wants you to become invested in winning or losing,
but also just we feel very big.
And so chemically in your brain, when you lose money in a board game,
dopamine neurons will start firing.
And when you win, you get the release
of those same hormones that bring you joy
and pleasure and feeling good.
So like we were saying in the definition phase,
game playing is like learning different sets of rules
and learning behaviors and accomplishing those behaviors
and learning from the consequences of your actions.
And those are all important parts of development in other regions of your life.
So like you learn from the consequences of your actions in real life.
If you touch a hot burner and you burn your hand and you learn from the consequences of your actions in soccer.
If you kick the ball, not to a player, but like far off field.
I assume that that's a bad thing.
That's like my most general bad thing I can think of with soccer.
And those drive the same general learning behavior.
Like, oh, that thing is bad, I should not do it again.
And dopamine is a key hormone involved in those kind of reinforcement learning pathways.
From like a fan's perspective, what are they getting so worked up about when they're watching
a game though?
That's the identity part?
Yeah, I feel like that is the identity part as part of a fan.
This I did less research into, so I'm pulling from very old knowledge.
But when you become a fan of something, you forge community around it in the same way
that you see in like internet fandoms, for example.
And so when good or bad things happen to the object of your fanishness, then you like have
emotional responses to that.
You have this parasocial relationship with that person or that team, which is just like
a fancy psychological way to say that you feel like you know them really, really well
because they've shared parts of their lives with you,
but they don't know anything about you.
And so you feel like you like know your football player's
stats, you know who's been traded onto the team,
you know how to cheer for them.
And that way their performance really affects you emotionally
even though like what you do doesn't affect them at all.
Well, if you want to ask your science couch question, follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents,
where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week.
Thank you to at PKLakeMama, at LittleGreyFish, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this episode.
Final Sam Buck scores.
Everybody's got two points except Sam, who's got one.
If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that.
You can leave us a review wherever you listen.
It's super helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show.
Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode and you can tag us, please,
and let us know.
And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about
us.
Thank you for joining us.
I have been Hank Green.
I've been Sari Reilly.
I've been Stefan Chin.
And I've been Sam Schultz.
SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios.
It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with
Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trakovarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish.
And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon.
Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.
[♪ INTRO & MUSIC PLAYING FADES out.] But one more thing.
In 2013, an engineer at the video game company Valve was playing around with creating two
different kinds of controllers.
One like a retainer that you stick in your mouth and use your tongue to manipulate and
click and one that you stick under your butt and lean or twirl to move around or pan the
camera or things like that.
Sometimes you just need two extra buttons.
One for each cheek. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents.
It's the lately competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the
YouTube series SciShow happen.
Or just some regular folk who are friends with each other.
This week, as always, as sometimes,
I am joined by Sam Schultz.
Hello.
What's the most satisfying size of battery?
Oh, you know what?
I can't stand triple A batteries.
I hate those.
Anything bigger than a triple A
and actually watch batteries too.
I like them all except a AAA.
That's such a bad size for some reason.
It's weird, I think about that all the time.
Finally found something that you're actually
passionate about with my question.
I figure if I get weirder and weirder,
I will locate more things that Sam cares a lot about.
Have you licked a D battery?
That's why that one's my favorite.
The nine volts, not the D battery.
Nine volt, yeah, you're right, the square ones.
I want to really bad, but I'm scared.
Oh, it's just like, no.
I've done it.
My guitar uses them, and so like during shows,
you have to make sure the battery is charged
and you can tell by looking at it.
Is that why you guys are so smart?
Cause we charge our brains with batteries.
We're battery lickers over here.
What's your tagline?
Exploring the idea of podcasting from bed.
I do sometimes podcast from bed for my podcast I have with my wife.
And it is not unpleasant, I will say that.
Sari Riley is also my other co-host for the day.
Hello, Sari Riley is also my other co-host for the day. Hello, Sari.
Hello.
Do you have any idea why there is a large taxidermied squirrel in the parking lot of
our office building?
I have not been to our office building in months.
How large?
I would say that if it were a live squirrel, it would weigh four times more than a fox squirrel.
And it's mounted to a piece of driftwood.
Could be a trap.
It's probably like a giant ruse set out
to catch you specifically.
One of the scientists we invited for an interview
like left out a squirrel as a social psychology experiment.
How long will it take for these nerds
to bring in a taxidermied squirrel into their office?
Yeah, it's a Trojan squirrel.
Yeah.
What's your tagline?
Conspiracy of snakes.
And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is,
printers be damned!
Take off the hat!
Every week here on Tangents, we are trying to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts.
And we're also trying to stay on topic,
but we're not going to, even though we're trying. We're also going to play for glory, but we're not going to, even though we're trying.
We're also going to play for glory, but we are also awarding chin coins from week to week,
because we need to keep track of who is winning and who is not,
so that we can feel bad or good about ourselves.
Just as last week, we're bringing in the new season by trying out some new games.
So each week in January, one of us is bringing a new game for the show.
If we like it enough, we might put it into our regular rotation. And I can't wait to
see what Ceri's mystery game is. But first, we're going to introduce this week's topic
with the traditional science poem, this week from Ceri.
I'm gonna say shanties are in right now.
Oh boy.
There once was a forest of old birch trees, struck by lightning for all to see.
The rain welled up, the leaves swirled round, oh blow my bully boys blow.
Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region.
One day when the thunder is done, we'll take our leave and go.
She had not been two weeks since spring went down on her, the clouds did bring the hail
and ice and wind did sting her face with all that snow.
Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region.
One day when the blizzard is done we'll take our leave and go.
And then the summer days get hotter, the sun beats down and we're chugging water.
Turn up the fan, I'm glad we bought her before the sky did glow.
Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region.
One day when the heat is done, we'll take our leave and go.
Thank you.
Holy crap!
You need more than one point.
We have established that parody songs get more than one point.
Oh, we also established that poems
don't get points anymore.
Yeah.
Oh, poems don't, oh fuck.
I went all out for just to scare myself.
You know, you gotta feel alive during a pandemic sometimes.
Yeah.
I hope by the time this episode comes out,
sea shanties are still a thing.
But I also hope by the time this episode has been out for four years, that sea shanties are still a thing. But I also hope by the time this episode has been out for four years,
that sea shanties are still a big part of popular culture,
because it is the main thing that I have
have like just had so much joy brought into my life by.
So thank you for doing a sea shanty cover.
And the topic for our day is not just weather men, but also just the weather
in general. So, Sie, what is weather?
Well, weather is all kinds of events that happen in the Earth's atmosphere,
usually in the troposphere, which is the part of the Earth's atmosphere
that is closest to the surface and under the most air pressure,
just from other atmospheres squishing down on it,
being pulled down because of gravity.
And it can be temperature and wind and humidity and storms and all that stuff.
If you point outside and they're like, look at that!
That's the weather.
How does wind work?
That's air pressure.
You can think of high pressure as when molecules are crammed close together, so like a crowded
room.
And you can think of low pressure as when things are more far apart.
So like everyone has an, is an arm's distance, is six feet away from everyone else, hypothetically.
And naturally to balance out, to reach an equilibrium, things move from high pressure
zones to low pressure zones.
So they move from the more crowded areas
to less crowded areas.
And so air moves from high pressure zones
to low pressure zones, and that movement of air is wind.
Do you know where the word weather came from?
I do.
It comes from Carl Weathers.
He invented it.
Wasn't around until like the 70s.
I don't know who Carl Weathers is.
Who is he?
He's an actor.
He is in Predator.
He's the strong guy who's not Arnold Schwarzenegger
when they do the cool arm wrestling thing.
The meme.
Yeah, the meme. He's the other guy in the meme.
He's the other meme.
Arm. Okay.
It could have been him if he's a time traveler.
The root word is we or weh.
I don't know how to say it, but it's spelled W-E,
which means to blow.
It's thematic with the shanty.
And then that changed into Proto Indo-European wedro.
And then it got passed around Europe as like wetter or wetter or wetter to
mean like a storm or wind, but then weather in general.
I couldn't find like when we started to differentiate or I couldn't find
any separate words for good weather and like storm or bad weather.
But in ancient Greece, at least they used weather to describe
like inclement storms and bad things happening.
But sunny weather, like calm weather was a different word.
And then at some point,
we mushed them all together.
Or like, you didn't need that word.
It's just like, that's normal.
It just is outside.
All right, Sari, well, it is also now,
you're gonna continue, it's gonna be all you.
This is the Sari episode of Danjins,
because now it's time for you to share with us
your mystery game.
Okay, I just have written in all caps,
hello, this is Brainstorm.
So that's the name of my game, is Brainstorm.
Here's how it works.
I will give a prompt and the number of answers I have on my list.
And you'll have one minute as a team to guess them with no penalties for wrong answers.
You both get points equal to the number of correct answers you guessed.
And I get points equal to the number of correct answers you guessed, and I get points equal to the number
of unguessed correct answers.
So for example, a prompt might be,
Kool-Aid was invented in 1927
when a man named Edward Perkins figured out
how to make a powdered juice concentrate
as an alternative to the liquid concentrates
available at the time.
The question is, what were the six original flavors
of Kool-Aid?
You have a minute to guess, and if you guessed after that minute,
grape and cherry, you would both get two points,
and I would get four points for the remaining four flavors.
But if you guessed grape, cherry, orange, root beer,
lemon lime and raspberry, you both would get six points,
and I am doing not so great with zero points.
I would not.
I've gotten root beer?
Root beer Kool-Aid?
That's an advanced flavor.
Apparently they had it figured out
right there at the beginning.
Yeah, how have we moved backward?
So substantially from root beer Kool-Aid.
What I want is some very flat root beer.
Question number one.
We learn basic types of precipitation in school,
like snow, rain, or hail.
But sometimes animals can get sucked up into the sky
by extreme weather phenomena like tornadoes and water spouts,
which are just tornadoes over water,
and then fall back out, like it's literally raining cats and dogs.
What are three kinds of animals that have been well documented
to fall out of the sky, kind of like precipitation. Ready, set, go.
Fish?
Yes.
Obviously.
Frogs?
Yes, also frogs.
Shoot, what's the last one?
I don't know.
What other kind of…
No wrong answer penalties, so you can just keep going.
Lizards?
Nope. Uh, birds Lizards. Nope.
Birds?
No.
Okay. Jellyfish.
No.
Rabbits.
No, but good thought.
Mice.
No, also good thought.
Rats?
No.
Is it a rodent?
No.
Is it a mammal?
No.
Oh, well, why'd you say good thought?
Just like you were getting smaller.
Lizards feel like you were getting, like, slowly getting bigger and then chickens.
There's all sides of lizards.
I don't think anybody said chickens.
Is the answer chickens?
Oh, stop.
The last answer, or the final one, was worms.
Oh.
Earthworms.
Oh, okay. When did worms fall out of the sky?
It's happened a couple times.
It's happened in the United States a few times.
A big one was 2015 in Norway, where a scientist found thousands of earthworms on the surface
of the snow, and they thought that the worms were dead.
But when he put them in his hand, he found that they were alive.
And so he assumed that they got sucked up out of mud somewhere and then just dumped
on the snowy earth.
Did I make up that there was once a shower of raw meat?
There was a shower of raw meat somewhere, I think somewhere in the United States.
It was called the Kentucky Meat Shower, everyone.
Some small chunks of red meat landed near Rankin in Bath County, Kentucky.
And we're not sure how it happened,
but the most popular theory is the vulture theory.
A group of vultures regurgitated their meals.
So that's not weather related.
Yeah, that's vomit out of the sky.
Anyone could do that.
No weather involved.
Because you got fish and frogs, you get two points each.
And because you missed worms of the three answers, I get one point.
Okay. I like this game.
Question number two.
It's really important to monitor weather before flying a plane.
So in the U.S., there are these things operated by the Federal Aviation Administration
called AWOS, or AWOS maybe, units, which stands for Automated Weather Observing Systems.
The latest and greatest specs I could find are for AWOS 4, which measures both general
atmospheric things and specific dangers that plane pilots might want to know about because
they could delay takeoff or require some maintenance on the plane.
So what are eight distinct types of things that automated weather-observing systems measure?
Ready? Go.
Temperature.
Yes.
Wind speed?
Yes.
Humidity.
No.
Wind direction. Does that count as a different one?
I lumped that with wind speed in gusts and direction.
Oh, please.
Uh...
Precipitation?
Yes. Yeah, precipitation type and amount I lumped into one.
Okay. There's like a billion more.
What does the sky do? It, um...
Think about planes. What do they need to know?
Okay, I'm thinking about them.
It's not helping me at all.
Height of something. Hank, you go.
Height of a fog? Yeah, visibility, a of something. Hank, you go. Height of a fog?
Yeah, visibility or cloud height.
Visibility, uh-huh.
Good job. Four more.
Okay, time.
Something that's turbulence related. Oh, shit.
Oh, time. Were birds, was birds one of them?
Birds is not one of them.
Oh, that would've been good.
Good guess. So the remaining ones were barometric pressure.
Oh, duh!
Lightning or like extreme storms,
which is separate from precipitation.
Ice or freezing rain and runway surface conditions,
which surprised me.
Right, cause it could be clear now,
but it could still be wet.
I wouldn't have got that last one.
Pressure, I feel like a total jackass for not getting it. That's like what weather is, is my understanding at this point.
Yeah, we just talked about it.
Still just barely winning.
You got four, and then there are four that you didn't get.
So we both got four, or we all got four points that round.
Question number three.
Weather modification has had its ups and downs in history,
but one thing that countries have consistently tried is cloud seeding.
Water vapor naturally condenses on dust particles or tiny bacteria,
collectively called condensation nuclei, to form clouds.
So cloud seeding involves spreading condensation nuclei, like silver iodide or even dry ice, to make clouds,
usually for two purposes. One is to fight off drought or one is to use up the water vapor so
there's clear weather in days ahead.
Some countries have experimented once or twice in particularly
dire weather situations or have patchwork regional organizations.
But I've narrowed down a list of 10 countries that have had well-established
cloud seeding programs for years or even decades.
What are those 10 countries?
Ready?
Go.
Russia.
Yes.
China.
Yes.
The United States of America.
Yes.
We do?
Oh.
England gets lots of rain, so not them.
South Africa.
No.
Hmm.
Canada? Yes. Canada?
Yes, Canada.
Argentina?
Not Argentina.
The United Kingdom. I'm going to try it.
They get a lot of rain Hank, come on.
Well, but maybe they want to clear it up.
There was another reason.
The United Arab Emirates?
Yeah! Good job Sam!
Oh nice! Yeah, I. Oh, nice. Yeah.
I guess that makes sense.
Saudi Arabia.
No.
Do we have more?
If there's more?
You have more.
You have one.
Yeah.
Five more.
Oh my God.
Five more.
Time's up.
Sorry.
Ooh, you gotta say countries.
Sam couldn't think of a country.
I couldn't think of a country.
It's true.
Ones that you missed are India,
which has been a clots in programs since the 1950s.
And it's some of the like the longest
and biggest programs in Southeast Asia.
You missed Israel.
I don't know, they're on Israel four,
randomized seeding experiments.
So it's definitely been going for quite a bit,
at least since 1975.
Yeah, at least four experiments since, for decades.
You missed Thailand, which I thought was interesting.
It was a project initiated in November, 1955
called the Thailand Royal Rainmaking Project.
And they have a department of Royal Rainmaking
and Agricultural Aviation.
Cool.
And then Bulgaria, they have a hail suppression agency that protects regions of
farmland from hail crops. And you missed Australia.
Oh, does it work?
So scientists are mixed on it, but it works enough and consistently enough that a lot
of people are researching it and looking into it. China was interesting because they used
it before the Beijing Olympics to make sure it was clear
on the first day of them.
So that worked because there wasn't rain
in their giant stadium.
But I think the biggest problems that people
are wondering about are making it work consistently
or in a meaningful way, because you can make it rain
by spraying condensation nuclei into the sky,
but at what pollution cost? Or does it have enough water to like significantly change
farmland or crops or anything? Like does it really increase the water that much? And effects
on other countries too. So if you like create clouds and then those clouds fly over to a
different country and then mess up their weather system.
What do you do about that?
So you got five and then you missed five.
So we all got five points.
If we just named the biggest countries by land area, we would have gotten seven.
Yeah, but I couldn't remember what they were.
I said all the countries I knew, OK?
Same those three countries.
Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it'll be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody.
Here are our scores.
We got me and Sam tied with 11, because that's how that game worked, and Sari with 10.
But you should honestly have 12 after that parody song.
Not too bad.
You don't.
And now it's time for the fact-offs.
Sam and I have both brought science facts to present to Sari an attempt to blow her
mind.
And Sari has points that she can award to the fact that she likes the most, and it will
decide the winner of the episode, I can tell by where we're at right now.
But to decide who goes first, Sari has a trivia question for us to answer.
Grapple is sometimes called soft hail or snow pellets, but it isn't really hail and it isn't
really snow.
It's supercooled water droplets that freeze onto snowflakes to form tiny balls of rime
ice.
So, how cold can these supercooled water droplets be before they freeze?
I will say negative 10 degrees Celsius.
Oh, I'll say lower than that.
I'll say negative 15 degrees Celsius. Oh, I'll say lower than that. I'll say negative 15 degrees Celsius.
The answer is a negative 48.3 degrees Celsius.
Whoa!
Why doesn't that water freeze like at a normal freezing temperature?
It's so clean.
There's no nucleation site.
So if you've got extra, extra clean air and just water floating around,
then it can get very cold until a snowflake shows up
and there's a nucleation site.
So then it gloms on and freezes.
In the same way where you can put in a water bottle
into the freezer and it can become super cooled
without being ice.
I guess I'll go first.
So in 2021, we have all kinds of computer models
and electronic instruments to tell us many days in advance
when bad weather is coming.
And this lets people like board up windows or build sandbag embankments and take lots
of other precautions to minimize the loss of life and property damage that a big storm
can cause.
But in England in the year 1850, they were mostly still relying on a combination of folk
knowledge and telegraphs from places that were currently experiencing storms.
So this meant that storms could pretty much come out of nowhere.
And if you were in one of the coastal towns that was supposed to send the telegraph,
if you were in a storm, you were already in a storm.
So there wasn't really that much you could do about it.
And England was also losing ships at sea to storms
because there wasn't really any way to communicate what the weather was like on the ocean.
So this combination of problems set the stage
for the invention of weather forecasting.
And a footnote in that process is Dr. George Merriweather
and a bunch of leeches.
While doctors at the time didn't necessarily believe
in balancing humors, they still practiced bloodletting.
And it was like a treatment for basically any disease
you could think of at the time, I think.
And they loved to use leeches to do bloodletting
So they had big jars of leeches sitting around doctor's offices basically
so dr
Merriweather spent a lot of time with leeches and noticed that his leeches got all worked up when bad weather was on its way and they
Would like ride around and climb up the sides of the jars and just like flip out
And from a modern lens people think that possibly what was happening was that leeches can sense drops in pressure from a coming storm, which means
that rain is coming and that they can travel farther than they could
otherwise in their search for blood. But inspired by this observation and a poem
by Edward Jenner, who is a scientist whose work also helped popularize the
smallpox vaccine, the poem was about how animals react to coming rain storms
because like animal instinct was also a big new discovery
that they were trying to figure out.
The poem featured the line,
the leech disturbed is newly risen
quite to the summit of his prison.
I don't really know what that means,
but to Dr. Merriweather,
it meant that he should spend several months
putting together an idea for a new type
of weather prediction device that used leeches.
I also think there were lots of types of barometers that existed at this point that also detected
atmospheric pressure.
So he was sort of reinventing the wheel, but with leeches.
I don't think he knew that though.
He didn't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, he came up with 12 corked glass jars replaced in a big circle at the base
of this contraption,
and some water and a leech were placed in each one.
He wrote that he used glass jars to prevent the affliction of solitary confinement in
the leeches, aka so they wouldn't be lonely, so they could see each other and be like,
hey, leech.
So each jar had a string through the cork and into the bottle, and the other end of
the string was tied to a bell hammer positioned by a big bell that was in the middle of the jars like on a big pedestal and he called his invention the Tempest
prognosticator. So the idea was that when the weather got bad the leeches would start to freak
out and climb up the walls of the bottle to go blood hunting I guess and they would move the
string and ring the bell so the more ringing was, the worse the weather was coming was his idea.
So he did a bunch of these tests through the 1850s and he had maybe some possibly successful
results. He would send predictions out to different like scientific organizations around
the country. And at least one of them wrote him back a letter that said that he had successfully
predicted a storm by up to 12 hours, but I don't know how many letters he sent out. So
he maybe just got lucky.
It's false positive.
Yeah.
So he thought his invention could save lives and he wrote letters to the
government asking them to adopt the prognosticator as the official storm
detecting device of the Navy.
Uh, and he made a really ornate version of it and showed it off at the great
exhibition in 1851, uh, hoping to sell them to rich people.
But as far as anybody knows, nobody ever bought a single one,
probably because you had to change the water
and feed the leeches and also they were full of leeches.
And he didn't get a government contract either.
The Navy tested, they think the Navy tested
the prognosticator, but they ended up going
with the Stormglass, which was a device championed
by Admiral Robert Fitzroy.
And the Stormglass basically was just a bottle
of mineral water and it definitely didn't work.
So they might've been better off going with the leeches
that maybe worked a little bit.
I love the idea of any science that at its core
isn't actually a science, it's just a clever animal.
Yeah.
So you just like build this beautiful device
around like 12 leeches or whatever.
Yeah, gross little worms.
And the only thing that's happening is a leech is moving.
You're harnessing the raw power of animal instinct.
That's what he thought you were doing.
Exactly. It's like the Flintstones.
In the Flintstones, that's what everything was.
It's like the remote control for your television was just a bird,
flew and turned the TV on.
But it's also kind of like if the Flintstones lived in a world where there were already
TV remote controls and then they built the remote control that the bird flew out of and
they didn't know that they were doing the same thing.
And he did really make a beautiful thing.
We'll put a picture of it in the show notes.
You can just type in Tempest Prognosticator on Google also because like nobody's ever
named anything else that since then.
I also while I was looking this up saw a bunch of pictures of leeches and I was like,
you know, they're kind of like a leech can be a little bit beautiful like snake skin patterns
and like lots of contrast and then it's like off that freaking head.
Pretty bad.
Alright, you guys want to hear my fact?
Yeah.
Yeah. It is in a similar vein, because the way that we determine what the weather is,
is really important to us.
And it has evolved a lot over the years
since the Tempest Prognosticator.
And it has been kind of surprisingly messed up by COVID,
and maybe not in the way that you would expect.
One of the things that was important to do, and that has continued to happen over the
last too long now since March, is that planes are not flying as much anymore, and that has
messed up weather forecasts, which is a wild thing to me that I never would have expected. And it turns out that every commercial aircraft
since like the 1970s is part of a like worldwide network
of weather data collection called
the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay Report.
All of these aircrafts constantly collect data.
So with 3,500 aircrafts flown by more than 40 airlines globally,
they take temperature and wind measurements
every few seconds during takeoff and landing
and every few minutes while the plane is at cruising altitude.
And so something like 680,000 observations
are sent into this every day if there isn't a pandemic.
But starting in February,
the number of flights dropped 50 to 75%
depending on the month.
And that in turn led to a lot fewer of these Amdhar reports.
So a scientist named Jing Chen
at Lancaster Environmental Center in the UK
decided to see how this reduction in data
affected meteorological forecasts from March until May.
And he found that in general,
weather forecasts have worsened more
in the Northern hemisphere,
which is where you usually get more aircraft data
than in non-COVID times,
because that's where most of the land is
and also most of the rich people.
In particular, accuracy of surface temperature forecasts
was off by as much as two degrees Celsius
in Greenland and Siberia,
because those are locations that are more remote
and they don't have as many
conventional meteorological stations.
So airplanes are like the majority of the data they get
or a lot of the data they get.
Other places with a lot of air travel
like North America and Southeast China and Australia,
so places where there were lots of planes,
a density of planes, they also experienced worse forecasts.
But one area that didn't do that badly was Western Europe,
which just has a really extensive network of meteorological stations on the ground
that were able to provide the data to compensate for the loss of this Amdhar network
that provides just a tremendous amount of data that we kind of just stopped getting for a while.
Yeah, I never thought about the fact that planes could have useful instruments on them
besides, like, carrying people.
But it makes sense.
Well, if you're gonna use all this fuel
to get people from place to place,
you might as well get as much utility out of that as possible.
Yeah, and this goes back a long, long way.
This first happened like when pilots first started happening, basically.
So the Weather Bureau would pay pilots in 1919,
they started doing this,
to fly with little things called aerometeor graphs,
that would be attached to the plane's wings.
And you'd get a 10% bonus for every thousand feet
you flew over 13,000 feet.
Oh, do they still get bonuses
or is it just something they do with it?
I don't think so, yeah, no.
But I love the idea that you just get paid to fly
because the weather people are like, holy crap,
we can find out what the weather's like up there.
It's amazing.
So Sarah, you've either got Sam's fact
that Dr. George Merriweather,
I can't believe his name was Merriweather,
invented the Tempest Prognosticator
to try and forecast storms using leeches
or my fact that COVID is affecting weather forecasting
because less commercial planes are flying
and we're not getting all of that good Amdhar data.
It's harder and I have to do it by myself.
Uh, I'm gonna give Sam three points and Hank two points
because I didn't know about either of these things before.
And even though Amdhar is gonna change
how I view plane travel,
I love the leeches and I would love to like find an old leech machine
and restore it and just have it as like, this is my leech machine.
And now it's time for Ask the Side Couch, where we've got some listener
questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds.
This is from at gingersnap273.
Is acid rain a real thing I should actually be concerned about?
Uh, yeah, but less so, right?
And it's bad for buildings and not necessarily as bad for people, right?
Is that the thing?
Well, it's bad for people and that it's bad for forests.
But like, you don't have to be worried about it.
You don't have to be worried about like getting your face
melted off by a rain.
Yeah, so there's different amounts of acidity.
It's all based on the pH scale,
which you've probably heard about
if you've ever taken a chemistry class,
which I'm sure people who have listened to SciShow Tandems
have or are going to at some point in their life
because they're a bunch of nerds.
But lower numbers on the pH scale are more acidic
and higher numbers are more basic.
So seven is neutral, pure water.
All rain is slightly acidic because there's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that
dissolves in the water to make carbonic acid, sort of like how our blood is slightly acidic.
Rain is usually around a pH of about 5.6 And acid rain is more acidic than that. It's a pH of about four instead
of 5.6. And based on the way the pH scale works, that's like a 10 times difference.
It's a logarithmic related scale. And it's caused naturally by things like volcanoes
erupting or decay of vegetation, but also things that we do as humans, like power plants that release
gases or cars that release emissions, particularly gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides
lower the pH of rain.
It can neutralize materials that can be washed away by acid rain, so that's why certain stones,
the acid will react with the minerals
and neutralize, but then wear away at the building material.
Four is, like, less acidic than orange juice.
Yeah.
Okay, orange juice won't melt you.
Yeah, you could put orange juice on your face,
but you wouldn't want to put it in your eyes.
It wouldn't hurt them, but it might hurt, you know?
But it is enough to harm things like insects or fish whose skin is less protective against water.
Mm-hmm.
When I was a kid, acid rain was like the scariest thing. Like in the 90s,
you'd hear about it all the time. So what happened to it? Did we just get like,
that's going to happen, we can't do anything about it?
No. We created really pretty tight regulations
on the emission of sulfur dioxide from coal plants,
which is the primary place
that sulfur dioxide was coming from.
So we created a cap and trade scheme where it was like,
you basically can only release a certain amount.
And if you release more than that,
you have to buy it from a different power plant
that has figured out how to filter out
or scrub out the sulfur dioxide.
And that was extremely effective in lowering sulfur dioxide, which actually did a really
good job of decreasing the amount of acid rate in America.
Wow. A policy was happened.
Yeah, it worked.
Cool.
Yeah. Regulations.
Turns out we can combat climate change and like the effects we're having if we enact
policy.
If we try hard.
Yeah, and it was expensive for the coal plants
and they didn't wanna do it.
And then they did it and we're okay.
That and the hole in the ozone layer.
We also fixed that.
I mean, we didn't fix it, but it's better.
If you wanna ask the science couch your question,
you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents,
where we tweet out our topics
for upcoming episodes every week.
Thank you to at neonmolly at Spaceikes, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions
for this episode. Final scores!
Sari with 10, Hank with 13, and Sam with 14.
Which means, Sam, you get another chin coin.
Oh, I already had one?
I think so, yeah. So you got two, and I've got one, and Sari's got none.
Oh no.
If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that.
You can leave us a review wherever you listen, that's helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show.
You can also tweet us people you might think would be good guests for SciShow Tangents,
because we're thinking about having more guests in the future.
Or you can tweet out your favorite woman from the episode.
Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can 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 Katelyn Hofmeister and Sam Schultz,
who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer
is Paola Garcia Prieto, our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti, our sound design is
by Joseph Tuna-Medish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.
But one more thing. Trees have to be pretty strong to contend with extreme weather, since they can't really like escape or hide from it because they're stuck outside in the ground.
One of the things that can impact their resilience is butt rot, a disease caused by fungi that
eat away at the butt of the tree, which is where the trunk gets a little bit thicker at the bottom
and intersects with the ground, which apparently is like
the like secret weak spot of trees.
From the outside, the trees don't show any sign of butt rot,
but they rot away on the inside, making them weaker and prone
to topple over in bad weather.
And everybody knows that the tree's butt is on the inside.
Every science is worth a salt. If ever we do a conference again and we if if if we do like a signing line or something I want that to be the secret
code that people will be like where's the tree's butt? On the inside! We need a
super fan chant of some sort. Yeah
Hello and welcome to SciShow tangents. It's the Lately Competitive Science Knowledge Showcase.
I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is science expert, Ceri Reilly.
Hello.
And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz.
Hello.
I'm going to ask you your worst food opinions.
Oh, god.
So for example, I will go first.
I kind of like it when the inside of my corn dog
is still a little cold.
That is horrid.
That's a bad one.
Okay, I get the mood we're setting now.
I love, my favorite french fries
are like the kind of soft and wiggly ones,
not the crispy ones.
Oh, you like them when they're basically just potato,
that it's cooked, it's wet cooked potato.
Not wet, it's slimy, oily.
Yeah, slimy cooked potatoes, I love them.
I can't get enough of them and I steal them
from Sylvia's fry containers whenever she gets one.
Whenever the palest of the pale ones.
Uh-huh. The palest, just like hot and soggy.
And it's great because Sylvia doesn't want them because they're awful.
I mean, I can't... I'm sure I have a bunch that I'm not thinking of.
I still drink a lot of Red Bull. Is that bad? I think Red Bull's delicious.
You like the taste of Red Bull. I love Red Bull. Oh, that's bad, Sam. I love the blueberry Red Bull. I love the pink of Red Bull. Is that bad? I think Red Bull's delicious. You like the taste of Red Bull.
I love Red Bull.
Oh, that's a bad Sam.
I love the blueberry Red Bull.
I love the pink Red Bulls.
What? I didn't even know there were different,
I didn't even know there were colors.
That's news to me.
I had a Monster Energy once and it tasted very bad
and it made me on drugs.
What do you mean? Like you went loco?
Yeah, yeah.
It just was a lot of
Like mood altering chemicals to consume which I guess is how I feel about like a cup and a half of coffee as well
Yeah, I don't drink caffeine
Regularly, but in in high school when I went to a PACS like went the video game convention
They were giving out cans of NOS. I had to look it up energy. Yeah
And my friends were like, oh, we should all get them.
And I was like, okay, I guess.
And I felt wild out of my mind, like running around the convention floor, spinning wheels,
winning prizes.
It was a lot.
I like any drink that you open as if it is an industrial lubricant.
It doesn't need that lid.
No one's coming up.
No one's saving their nos for a later out drink.
I don't think so.
But if I asked Rachel, would she?
She'd be the best person to ask.
We like the opposite foods.
I love spicy foods.
I love tangy foods.
I don't like tangy foods.
I like stinky foods.
I'm also kind of a little nasty man and I eat a lot of nasty stuff.
But it doesn't occur to me that it's nasty until someone's like...
Like footy cheese? Stinky food?
Yeah, I love a big stinky cheese. I like lots of garlic. You know, all the stinkiest foods.
I love a big garlic stink myself, you guys. I don't think that's a hard opinion to defend at all. No.
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 and failing. Our panelists
are playing for glory and also for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at
the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce
this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sam.
Eagles are fierce, ostriches big and buffy, but baby birds, they're soft and fluffy.
Lions are lethal and tigers are toughy, but little kittens, they're soft and fluffy.
Oh wow, this is already a children's book.
Cows are clumsy and bulls can play roughy, but little baby calves. They're soft and fluffy
Sheeps are creepy and goats are gruffy, but little lambs. They're soft and fluffy
How many things can say I'm gonna rhyme with fluffy humans can be rude cruel or huffy, but little babies
They're soft and fluffy
They're soft and fluffy. Oh, really?
Science can come off as sort of old and stuffy, but soft. Soft things, things about softness.
They are synonymous. They can go hand in hand in a way.
I think so. I think to be fluffy, you have to have hairs, unlike a baby person.
Everything that's fluffy is soft though, right?
Everything that's fluffy is soft. It's eye show tangents. Clouds, are they soft?
They look soft, but they're just wet.
But they're fluffy.
Yeah, they are fluffy.
Clouds are one of the quintessentially fluffy things,
but if you touched one,
you would not be like that was soft.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Yeah, thanks for saving us, Sari.
From the potential future of being wrong about something,
which never happens.
We haven't done it yet.
No.
So.
Sari, do you, can you tell us what soft is?
Well, science is really good at defining what hard is.
Different hardnesses.
Different hardnesses.
So there are a lot of different scales for hardness.
There are like scales, yeah, right.
There's the Mohs hardness scale,
which is minerals and like scratching minerals.
So chalk is low on the hardness scale and something like diamond is really high on the
hardness scale.
There's the Brunel scale, which is indentation of materials.
So like a pillow that you can poke into would be very low on the Brunel scale and like a
hard rubber that you
can't really tap into like poke is pretty high. Rockwell hardness is like
metal and knives so do they bend when you try and slice into something or do
they stay stiff and strong? Nowhere in any of these definitions is soft.
You said Brunel scale had the pillows in it.
Well, I made up the pillow part.
It's just through the penetration of an indenter, which sounded less fun than squishing a pillow.
But you're getting to the point that the conclusion that I've drawn for our podcast is that soft
is the opposite of hard.
And so it's whatever's low
on all these scales. Anything that's squishy, anything that bends, anything that flakes
off is kind of, is soft.
Is softness just the absence of hardness?
It's not the absence of hardness. That's nothing.
It's the opposite. The opposite of hardness.
Okay. Okay. The less hardness there is, the more softness there is.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Okay.
So to jump ahead a little bit linguistically, we use soft and hard as a pair of opposites
in a lot of different cases.
So there's all this tension between hard sciences like engineering and biology and soft sciences
like psychology or sociology, they're perceived
to be trickier and more data-driven or perceived to be more qualitative and fluffier.
And then there's hard and soft water and like hard water has mineral content in it, whether
soft water doesn't.
There's hard and soft drinks.
So hard has alcohol in it.
And soft drinks are just like a soda with a lot of sugar.
I never thought of that before.
Yeah, hard and soft rock, which Sarah doesn't know about,
but that's also a thing.
That's where you have, I already talked about that.
That's chalk versus obviously.
I already talked about that. That's chalk versus...
Obviously.
So yeah, so we use hard and soft in these like opposite ways.
And as far as I can tell, it's just because we created them as opposite words.
So hard is strong or intense or confident and soft is gentle or calm or undisturbed or weak.
And we just kind of use them as opposites to each other.
Just by default.
Yeah.
I gotta say the word soft sounds like it's soft.
It's definitely, it's like soft.
I'm like, yes, I will buy that toilet paper.
Just say that word. Soft. You can say hard pretty soft too soft. Soft. I'm like, yes, I will buy that toilet paper. Just say that word.
Soft.
You can say hard pretty soft too though.
Hard.
Hard seems pretty hard.
I think that there are harder words than hard.
The hardest toilet paper.
Charmin, it's hard.
I don't think it works, Sam. I think that's a losing message.
I agree to disagree.
It's like wood for your butt.
Well, where does the word come from?
Yeah, is it just people were like soft? That sounds right.
Yeah, it comes-
Is this a caveman word?
Caveman word.
I don't think it's caveman, full caveman. It's from Middle Dutch, so European-ish, from the root S-O-M, som, meaning fitting or agreeable.
It's nice.
Yeah, so it's like gentle.
It feels like it was from a root word that was applied to a lot of different things,
not just material things.
And then we started layering on more meanings of like,
okay, like in general, a scenery can be soft,
it's fitting or agreeable or like a mood can be soft.
And then we're like, well, that pillow is kind of soft
or that sound is kind of soft.
You put your head on it and say, that's nice.
Yeah.
And then later on, after we started calling squishy things
soft or fluffy things soft, then we started
using it as an insult and we're like, you're soft.
You're softy.
And that means it's time to move on to today's quiz portion of the show.
This week we're going to be playing Soft Things This or That.
So as we were just discussing, there are plenty of soft things, and we need to know how soft and hard things are.
And so there are different scales, as Ceri was discussing, for detecting the hardness of things,
and to see which thing is harder than another thing. There are several different scales used
for measuring hardness. And I'm going to present you with two things and the hardness scale being used
to test their hardness. And you're going to tell me which of these things is harder.
So to measure the hardness of minerals, the 19th century German geologist Friedrich Mohs
invented a scale based on a mineral's relative resistance to scratching by a set of 10 reference
minerals ranging from talc at
the softest end to diamond at the hardest end. So based on the Mohs scale
of hardness, which of the following is softer? A steel file or the mineral topaz?
I think you could do some real damage to a topaz with a steel file. That is
basically what you're what you're trying to figure out.
I definitely can guarantee that I am softer than both.
I think it's a trick question.
I think it's the steel file.
I don't know why that would be a trick.
I feel like, yes, I think it's a steel file.
It's a double trick question.
It's a double.
Yeah.
And I think it's the Topaz is softer.
The answer is the steel file is softer than the Topaz. I'm going to level with you. I don't know the topaz is softer. The answer is the steel file is softer than the topaz
I'm gonna level with you. I don't know what topaz is so it's a rock. Well, I knew that cool rocks
It's like a yellowy orange one
Mo's hardness scale ranges from 1 to 10 with 1 being the softest and 10 being the hardest a steel file is quite hard
With a 6.5 on the Mo's scale
But it is soft compared to topaz,
one of Mohs reference minerals that measures in at an 8.
Diamond is 10.
While Mohs codified this method into a scale, the method itself had been around since at
least 300 BCE when it was mentioned in a treatise called On Stones written by the Greek philosopher
Theophrastus.
Sounds like a page turner. in a treatise called On Stones, written by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus.
Sounds like a page turner.
Another method of measuring hardness
is a quantity called indentation hardness,
which measures how much a material resists changing
when it is compressed.
The basic idea is to apply a force to a material
and measure the depth of the indent that forms.
And while engineers in the 20th century created several different indentation hardness scales
to measure the hardness of metals, the shore hardness scale is different in that it measures
the hardness of stretchier materials like rubber.
So according to the shore hardness scale, which of the following is softer, a gel insole
or a gummy bear?
I think if you filled your shoes with gummy bears, you'd be in for a more uncomfortable
time than with the gel insoles.
I mean, I think the first step might be nice, but I think after half a day, you'd be in
a lot of sticky situations.
I think the gel insoles are softer.
Here's the thing. Both of you have chewed on gummy berries.
Neither of you have chewed on gel insoles.
So there's no... You can't know this for sure.
I know you pretty well.
You just told me all your worst food takes.
That's true.
The secret one, the one I'm most ashamed of, is that gel insoles are my favorite snack.
Yeah, Rachel actually texted me and she was like, Sam's grossest thing?
The insoles.
Most indefensible.
I'm going to guess gummy bears.
A good gummy bear, not stale.
If they were testing stale gummy bears, it's the other way around.
I'm assuming not stale.
Fresh, freshy gummy bear.
Fresh off the presses.
Right out of the newspaper machine.
That's going to be another win for Sari
because the answer is the gummy bear.
There are actually three different shore hardness scales
which exist for different types of materials.
Shore 00 is resolved for very soft, flexible materials.
Shore A is for flexible rubber materials
and Shore D is for hard or semi-rigid plastic.
Both gel insoles and gummy
bears are on the Shore 0.0 scale, with a gel insole measuring at about 30 Shore 0.0 and gummy bears
at around 10. Okay, that was close. Marshmallows are also around 10, and some items on the Shore
A scale. Mouse pad at 30, pencil eraser at 50, and the short D, a textbook cover, 40, and bone at 90.
Oh wow.
I don't know why the bone cracks me up so much.
The rest are objects.
It's like, okay, I'm tapping around my desk,
my marshmallow, my textbook, my bone.
Then it got dark.
Yeah.
All right, round number three. Sam, it's officially impossible to come back, but try anyway.
Solid materials are not the only things that can have hardness measurement,
because water can also become hard when larger amounts of minerals like calcium and magnesium get dissolved in it.
So water hardness is classified based on the milligrams of calcium carbonate per liter of water.
So using this measure, which city has the softer water?
Tampa, Florida or Cambridge, Massachusetts.
So which city has less calcium carbonate?
I think that the water is softer in Florida
because it's a hard life up here in Massachusetts. So our water must be hard too.
Yeah, everything's there, just decrepit and falling to pieces.
Because it's all a thousand years old.
And it's more carcinocarbonate or whatever is harder.
Yes, more calcium carbonate.
So I think it's harder in Florida because there's, because of coral for some reason.
Because all the pipes are made out of coral.
Yeah, so it's softer up Massachusetts way.
Well, the answer is that Cambridge, Massachusetts has this softer water.
The drinking water in Tampa comes primarily from the Hillsboro
River and the hardness fluctuates between 140 and 300 milligrams per liter. For comparison,
hard water begins at 120 milligrams per liter, so that's pretty high. Meanwhile, Cambridge
has hardness of about 50 to 70 milligrams per liter. Florida's hard water comes from
the fact that the state has a lot of limestone, which dissolves into the water with rainfall.
And we looked it up, and limestone can sometimes be from coral deposits.
Is it in this case?
I don't know.
So we're not going to give him a bonus point or anything, but good job, Sam.
But it wasn't so off base, huh?
Yeah, that's good.
I used the scientific method.
That's not what that is.
Oh, okay.
All right, Sam's got one point, Sarah's got two.
Next up, we're headed into a short break.
Then the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. INTRO
Welcome back, everybody! It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science
facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts,
I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And inside who goes first?
A trivia question! When you think of a ball of wool yarn,
you might imagine someone knitting a soft, cozy sweater.
But soft things like wool
can also make other things very strong.
Take, for instance,
the baseballs used in Major League Baseball.
Inside these baseballs is a core made of cork and rubber
wrapped up tightly in yarn that strengthens the baseball
against the impact of a batter hitting it very, very hard.
How many yards of yarn are there in the center of a Major League Baseball baseball?
I didn't know there was any of this in a baseball. I've never thought about it.
Sam is counting.
As if I'm rapping the baseball in my head.
I feel like it would take a lot of raps to get a single yard, but...
I'm going to guess 10 yards.
I'm gonna guess 20 yards.
I don't know.
You should have guessed 369 yards.
Holy shit.
That's so many.
I knew it would take a lot to make a yard.
So that means Sam wins, though.
Should he have?
How are baseballs not the size of like basketballs with that much yarn?
You know, it's not super thick yarn.
I think.
Have you ever taken a baseball apart?
No.
Yeah, it's real stringy in there.
Stringy in there.
I think I'll go first.
Before we went to the moon, all we could do was speculate about what the moon was made
out of.
Sure, it looked like a big old solid rock, but there were plenty of observations that indicated that the moon was covered in a layer of fluffy dust.
And not just a thin layer, there was a definite fear that the area chosen for the Apollo landing was actually dust deep enough that it would swallow the crew whole upon touchdown.
That would have been a really bad outcome.
I'm like, what's that?
How do we know?
How do you know?
Why didn't they shoot like another thing up there first?
They did. They did do that.
And they still were kind of like, I don't know.
Yeah, well, they didn't land in the exact same place.
Oh, that makes sense.
So luckily that turned out to not be the case.
Turned out, in fact, that the moon was covered with just enough dust
to allow for some extremely photogenic astronaut footprints,
but not enough to swallow anyone. But if we all lived on Saturn instead of Earth and our
brave boys were flying to Methone, one of Saturn's 82 moons, things could have turned
out a lot different. So Methone, named after the beautiful daughter of a giant from Greek
mythology, was discovered in 2004 by the Cassini probe. Hmm, cool moon, the people at NASA must have thought
at the time because the picture of the moon,
it was like one pixel in the first image of it.
So that's all they could think until 2012
when things got a little weirder.
So Cassini did another flyby much closer
and took a hell of a picture of methone.
And it looked- I like it, I see it.
It looked really weird.
Much like its beautiful namesake,
the five kilometer wide Methone was flawless
in a very non-moon-like way.
For one thing, its surface appeared to be totally smooth,
unlike the crater scarred surface
of many other moons out there.
And for another, it was shaped like a damn old egg.
Just in time for Easter.
I think this episode's coming out on Easter. Have a Easter,
everyone.
Enjoy all your damn old eggs.
Egg moon, egg moon.
Saloons are usually hard, usually rocky, usually covered in craters from the endless pummeling
by hurdling debris. And surely methone was also being pummeled, but somehow it was able
to heal itself?
And the current best guess as to how that happens could also explain the egg shape and
stir up some old NASA engineers' worst fears.
Methane is likely a big ball of space-borne fluffy ice and dust.
So the egg shape comes from the soft material being pulled towards Saturn, and the smoothness
is hypothesized to be due to the dust and ice flowing around.
So the idea is that Saturn's radiation belt
might charge the fluffy particles
and that makes them like flow and it makes them mobile
and able to flow into impact craters when they happen.
So it seals them right up.
It might take millions of years to seal them right up,
but it seals them right up.
Right.
With the new Cassini images,
the researchers could also calculate
how dense methone had
to be to be able to be stretched into an egg shape, but still hold together enough and
not be ripped apart by Saturn.
And it reported that the moon is probably less dense than water.
So the next time you think, wow, those old NASA guys didn't know anything, sinking into
the dust of the moon, ha ha ha, what a stupid thing to think.
Remember fluffy methone and be thankful that you are not on a lunar lander headed there right now.
Wow. To be entirely engulfed in dusty ice.
Yeah.
Just be like, well, um.
We didn't hear back from them, so.
I guess we'll take back off. Nope.
I imagine it would be like those foam pits at gymnasiums where you just sink.
It's kids' version of quicksand where no matter how much you struggle, you just fall deeper
and deeper.
But their parents aren't there to pull them out.
It's like a moon cloud.
There's also potentially, it's the source of the Methone Ring arc.
Yeah, I saw that too, but I couldn't figure out how to work it in.
But Saturn's like stealing bits of it.
And there's a ring of Saturn that follows Methone's orbit
that they think came from Methone.
It's just a bunch of little fluff pieces from Methone.
My goodness.
But Saturn, just stop it.
Stop being so cool.
Sari, what do you got for us?
You might have a favorite sweater or blanket
because they just feel so soft and good.
Yeah.
And maybe it's made from something synthetic,
like fleece, which is polyester, or wool, which is keratin,
like our hair.
But in the early 1900s, when fluffy sheep's wool
was in short supply, scientists came up with an
extremely creative alternative.
Fabric made from cow milk.
Milk shirts, milk sweaters, milk pants.
They were all the freaking rage.
Oh my God, they made milk thread.
They made milk thread.
And the whole reason this is possible is because of the proteins in cow's milk, especially
the casein.
So casein might sound familiar because it's extracted from milk as a protein supplement
along with the whey protein or because it's the main component of cheese.
And to make cheese, you mix rennet with milk to convert the lactose sugars into lactic
acid, which then curdles the milk proteins to make
them solid clumps, and then you do cheese processing stuff to separate curds from whey
and whatnot.
And if you want to make milk fiber, you mix milk with acid, and this time you don't have
to worry about it being edible.
So the casein protein curdles, and instead of doing anything with cheesecloth to make
gooey cheesy lumps, it gets forced through tubes so that it becomes really thin fibers that can be spun.
So I'm not saying milk fiber is cheese, but it's definitely cheese's cousin.
And when you take that milk fiber and dry it out and fluff it up, it looks like a soft
fluffy wool and can be spun the same way.
You can mix it with synthetic fibers or other natural ones and turn it into a soft, smooth, flexible, cooling fabric.
And in the 1930s, Italian chemists
were producing milk fabrics under the Lanotol brand
and basically repurposing wasted or undrunk cow milk
to make something useful.
And in the 1950s in the US, milk fabrics
were made and advertised under the name Aralac.
But the clothes that we are wearing right now are probably not milk clothes.
So obviously, there's a problem between then and now, and that is that it takes around
100 pounds of milk to produce three pounds of milk fiber.
So even though it feels eco-friendly, it is really resource intensive, which also means
it's really expensive compared to other synthetic fibers like nylon.
And even though milk fibers like lanitol had good qualities, like being soft and silky,
they weren't as durable as wool.
And most hilariously, apparently, when lanitol and arilac got wet, they smelled like spoiled
milk, which is a big fashion faux pas if I've ever heard of it.
Yeah, because shirts do have a way of getting wet.
Yeah.
Like things occur.
In the pit area.
Yeah, especially there where you extra don't want it to smell like spoiled milk.
You're already worried about being stinky and then you got a stinky shirt too.
So it's just squeezed through and it like just happens.
Like we don't have to do anything special to it, you just squeeze the cheese through
a little hole.
Like any fabric, there's a chemical processing to make sure the proteins polymerize in the
way that you want them to.
And nobody's doing this anymore.
So there are clothing companies right now that use them as like high fashion or supposedly
eco-friendly fabrics.
But they're also in other brands.
One article I read said Uniqlo,
which is like a pretty big brand uses them
in some of their like warming heat trapping clothing,
which is very wild.
So I don't know,
maybe we have a milk clothes revolution upon us.
I want milk Legos.
That's what I want.
There can be milk Legos, right?
Can they make milk Legos?
If you can make yarn out of it, you should be able to make like just a phone.
Yeah.
Stuffed animals.
Think of the hardest cheese you can and then imagine that being a Lego.
Is that sturdy enough for you?
I can think of some really hard cheese.
I'm imagining it now.
Oh, boy.
God, that's good. They're both very good. I'm imagining it now. Oh boy.
God, that's good.
They're both very good.
I, they both make great TikToks, stinky shirts, a cloud, like a moon that's a cloud.
It's got to go to Sari, but only because Sari won the first round.
I was genuinely not expecting that.
And now I'm hurt.
I thought this one was a lock for me.
Well, you should have done better in the first game, Sam.
One of us went to MIT.
One of us went to art school.
So I can tell you how hard a crayon is.
That's not how it works, Sam.
So now it's time to ask the Science C couch, where we ask some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds.
Connor on Discord asks,
Why do cats tend to be softer and fluffier than dogs?
I don't know, there are definitely dogs that have that big floof to them, and there are cats that don't have any hair.
I've met them.
Yeah, are they soft?
You know, they're soft like a person,
but not like a cat.
Skin.
Yeah, smooth anyway.
But that's kind of all I got,
but the way I got Pomeranian can be really fluffy too.
I guess I don't,
I can understand this question
because I do feel like I've never,
like when you pet a dog,
there's always a little coarseness there, I feel like.
And this is me speaking out of my ass, but I feel like every dog I've petted has been a little bit like...
There's a little bit of something there.
A little bit more grit to that dog.
Yeah, I feel like there's maybe like, it's just like a dog's like, I gotta be a dog sometimes.
And a cat's like, I never have to be a dog.
No. I gotta go run into some dirt and a cat is saying I have to sit.
I am going to be extremely quiet.
Yes.
Were we right?
Yeah.
So dogs and cats both have two types of fur,
at least two types of fur.
So there's the finer secondary hairs,
which are like the fluffy layer beneath it.
That's a lot of what traps warmth and whatnot.
And then there's the primary hairs,
which give them their color,
and they're generally bigger and thicker and coarser
and provide more protection for their top coat.
I think in general, those can vary a lot across
cat breeds, dog breeds.
So there are fluffy dogs and there are fluffy cats
and there are naked dogs and there are fluffy cats
and there are naked dogs and there are naked cats.
So given that that is basically the same
across both species,
the cleanliness of that fur is the big difference
where dogs don't groom themselves as aggressively
or as consistently like they do lick and bite.
Like there's a reason that you need to put a cone on them
when they get surgery because they will try
and lick at wounds.
But generally dog fur feels more rough and uneven
because you're feeling patches of dirt or dead fur
or just like grime stuck in their coat.
Once you start brushing and grooming them, then their coats
feel silkier and smoother, which is how those show dogs, like the dogs that have been bred
for-
Look so fluffy.
Extra fluffy. They take so much maintenance to be that fluffy. But the more interesting
part, I maybe should have led with it, but is cat grooming is also,
besides being very thorough, like cats just spend
a lot of time grooming themselves to detangle,
take out dirt, spread oils or spread saliva on their hairs,
which is what makes them so soft and fluffy.
Their tongues are uniquely adapted
to brush their hair super well.
They got little hair brushes in their mouths. Yeah, got little hair brushes in their mouths.
Yeah, they got hair brushes in their mouths.
And in a 2018 paper, they used a CT scan,
like a computed tomography scan to zoom into
and 3D print the tongue things.
And it's weird, because they, to me,
look like little claws.
They look like a little claw with a hollowed out inside.
Like Velcro-y or something?
Yeah, kind of velcro-y, where they have this channel running down the middle of them
so that the saliva can get distributed well, so it like wicks it down, kind of like a pen nib.
What the hell?
Like an ink pen nib.
And so that they can release the hair really easily because it doesn't get caught,
like a traditional
brush, a hairbrush or something, your hair wraps around the little sticks and gets caught.
But in cat hair, it like runs through the ridges on their tongue and then doesn't get
caught.
It just gets detangled.
Do they make brushes that are cat hair?
This is what I'm asking.
Can you just scale it up and I can use it.
So they made one for this paper.
They were like, there's a tongue inspired grooming brush,
the tiger brush, which is like 3D printed cat papilé.
I don't know if they've ever marketed it though.
They made it and they show it.
Is it made for cats or can I use it on my situation? they suggested using it for animals like vets as the first use but then because it's so easily cleaned
Then they were like this could be adapted for for humans, but I don't know I try it on their own heads
Oh, oh, I don't there's no no I don't I found one
It's called the the black Real Cat Tongue Textured Grooming Brush.
For man or beast?
For beast.
Well, I'll comb my hair with one if you buy it.
Mm-hmm.
Alright, done.
For the show.
Do you want gray or pink?
Pink is more tongue-like, so...
Pink is more tongue-like, it's true.
Alright, done.
Terrific. I can't wait. It's gonna hurt really bad is my guess.
If you wanna ask the science couch your questions,
you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents
where we'll tweet out topics
for upcoming episodes every week,
or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon
and ask us on Discord.
Thank you to at Kybernaka, at raccoon required
and everybody else who's asked us your question
for this episode.
Isn't that a good name?
I love that name. It's really good. If you like this show and you wanna help us out question for this episode. Isn't that a good name? I love that name.
It's really good.
If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's real easy to do that.
First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes and our Cars 2 commentary, where we really get to the bottom of how the inside of the cars and cars are definitely made of meat. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and helps us know what you like about the show.
And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us.
I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam
Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow, our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia Prieto,
our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Emma Dowsker, our sound designer is Joseph
Tuna-Medish, our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green, and we couldn't
make any of this 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!
A lot of male butterflies and moths are hiding something in their butts.
Two to four inflatable feathery tube-like appendages called cormata, or cormata, or
cormata, I'm not entirely sure.
It comes from the Greek korema, meaning broom, and like most of the weirdest and most horrifying
looking structures, they're for
sex but not for transferring sperm.
When male butterflies are trying to attract a mate, they inflate these fuzzy tubes with
blood or air and use them to spread stinky sexy pheromones around and when moths are
well fed, their cormata can grow bigger, core, cormata, I'm not sure,
can grow bigger than the length of their bodies
to show off their tremendous biological health.
You should look it up, they're horrifying.
Let me see one of these things.
Whoa!
Whoa!
Whoa!
Holy shit! Ew, oh, whoa, holy shit.
Ew, ew, ew.
Oh my God.
Is it those tentacles?
It's the tentacles.
Don't look at this anybody.
Never look at this.
Why have I never seen that before?
No, no, I don't know why I didn't learn about it until today.
They're nonsense.
They must've been filtered out via SafeSearch.
Like that's the only explanation why I didn't know anything about this.
I'm so excited about our new episode of SciShow,
the absolute worst thing about butterflies.
Oh.
I can't forgive you for showing me this. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents.
It's the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase.
I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly.
Hello.
Our resident everyman, Sam Schultz.
Hello.
And also, for some reason, Vanessa Zoltan.
To make Sam look smart about science.
That's the last nice thing I'm saying about you, Sam, though.
Why?
Because Hank sent me a text like 10 minutes ago
being like, being mean to Sam.
That's the whole thing.
This is what we, this is,
you're not really a member of the Tangents crew.
No, I did not.
Everybody loves Sam and Wim.
I follow orders.
Vanessa is the host of podcasts such as
Harry Potter and the Sacred Text and Hot and Bothered.
If you want to see some of Vanessa listen to some of Vanessa's
other
Projects all of you everyone. It's starting to be summertime. It's officially June. It's gonna be officially summer fairly soon
So I'm curious what all of our favorite things about summer are and I've got one that is I don't know if it's gonna be a weird
curve ball,
but my favorite thing about summer is big old thunderstorms,
even if they got hail. I love that too.
We only get like one good, like
thunderstorm every year, but it's so good when it happens.
So good. Yeah.
For me, it's the long days.
I love the longer the day, the happier I am.
I love being like, it, the happier I am.
I love being like, it's 901 and it's still light out.
It's just like, it's just the best thing in the world.
And then I get very anxious on like June 20th,
cause I'm like, this is it, this is the longest day.
And this is, I know it gets sad.
It lures you into a false sense of security too,
because during this time of the year,
the days are pretty much all the same length,
and they last, and you can't really tell the difference
from one day to another, and then all of a sudden,
like some moment in fall,
it's like every day is 80 minutes shorter.
Yeah.
Until the day itself is negative an hour.
Yeah.
Gosh, I almost want to steal your answer, Vanessa.
The long days are just-
It's a really good answer.
Yeah, in somebody's yard until like 11 and yeah.
It's terrific. Have a gin and tonic.
Okay, this is very, I haven't experienced this in a while,
but like the purity of a good sprinkler
or like a hose in the summer.
Yes.
When you need a child, this, it brings it all back.
The child running through the sprinkler is just like,
you just see their little face and you're like,
there's nothing better in the whole world.
That's like the peak joy, every, all of this like search
for happiness that we're all trying to do as adults.
That's it, is you're hot, you're a little sweaty,
and then you run through cold public water.
And that's it.
Cold water that was created by just many human hours
of work to come to our house clean and safe
so that we could put it under the trampoline
and jump on it.
Yeah.
You know, guys, I feel really good now.
Now I'm pumped, yeah,
now I'm stuck in my stupid basement for an hour though.
Yeah, I'm just inside getting sweaty.
Way too many clothes.
Every week here on Tangents,
we get together to one-up, amaze,
and delight each other with science facts
while trying to stay on topic and failing.
Our panelists, all three of you,
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 you will be crowned the winner. But first, as always, we're going to introduce
this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Vanessa. So this is called
a sometimes owed to books. Sometimes I only want to want to read you,
so you stay on the bookstore shelf. Sometimes I have you on a list called To Do, but Netflix
isn't going to watch itself. Sometimes I lie about reading you blow by blow when I'm really
just here for the chardonnay. Sometimes I watch your TV show,
but when people ask if I've read you, I say, yay.
Sometimes you disappoint us over time.
The fact of your permanence betrays you.
Sometimes you age with gorgeous fine lines.
Your genius, like magic ink, slowly shines through.
Sometimes you say more with what you omit,
make us wonder why it is this that we assume. Sometimes you delight us with your wit,
make us laugh in the cancer waiting room. Some of you are crap, some of you are great,
some of you are a waste of space. Depending on the book, I feel love or hate,
but you make the world a better place.
Books!
Wow.
Not sciency.
Hank wrote a poem about an eagle eating like a bird
or something once.
That's not science.
I did.
I forgot about that one.
We can do whatever we want to.
It's our podcast.
Yeah, it's our show.
And that was a beautiful poem.
It was.
It was very good.
The topic of the day is books.
And Vanessa, this is my favorite part of the podcast
where I ask Sari what a book is and she can't answer
because she's too much of a scientist.
Sari, what's a book?
I did look up, I was like, book science definition.
The internet did not help me with that. Shocked.
Yeah, unfortunately, the biologists and chemists haven't like, strictly defined book. But what I could find is we had written word in the form of scroll, which is one long paper, and then eventually we were like,
what if instead of one long paper, we have many small papers together? And then that became a
codex. And each sheet of paper in a codex, I learned, is called a leaf, and each side of a
leaf is a page. So even though we call them pages, they're a leaf.
We're leafing through.
Each side of a leaf is a page.
So the page isn't the, is the numbered thing.
So on one side is like 100, and the next one is the 101.
Both of those are pages,
but the physical thing I'm touching isn't.
When I wiggle it around, that's the leaf.
That's the leaf.
Yeah, and then at some point,
we just stopped calling them codices, maybe because it felt
snooty and we were like, it's a book instead.
Book.
That's where it gets kind of fuzzy.
It is.
It's too wizardy.
It's maybe not snooty, it's dorky, right?
Yeah, it's a little bit.
Consult the codex.
My codex shelf.
Yeah.
I love the idea that that's how etymology works.
Do you know what?
This word's kind of snobby. Let's retire it.
I mean, it kind of is. A lot of times people are like, we can't use that one.
That's got the wrong feel to it.
Bad mouth feel.
Codex and book both referred to or that came from root words that are related to trees or tree trunk.
So code, the word came from tree trunk and the word book came from beach, like a beach
tree.
And so like apparently linguists think there's some debate, there's always some debate with
words that both of these words came from the fact that early written language was sometimes
carved into barks, even though there were so many forms of writing. There was like vellum paper,
animal skin, papyrus, et cetera. Listen to the paper episode if you want to learn more.
But eventually the word for a specific type of tree or just tree in general was synonymous
with book because we were like, it's made of this thing.
And now it's just this thing because we have more use.
We want to talk about books more than we want to talk about beech trees.
So we're just going to steal that word and say, we're just going to call them books now.
The word code comes from the word for tree trunk.
Is that what you said?
Yeah, it does. Earlier caudex, C-A-U-D-E-X, from Latin, meaning literally tree trunk, but
means book.
All right. I feel like I am pretty solid on what a book is now. And that means that it's
time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, as is the case with our double, with our guest episodes,
it's a double quiz show with no fact off. So we are going to begin with our game number
one, which is going to be called Truth or Veil.
A new innovative game.
A new innovative game, Truth or Veil. So books are incredible portals. They transport us
into other worlds. But at the end of the day, they are also objects that exist in our world. And that means that
they sometimes appear in history for practical or even dramatic reasons that do not have
much to do with the text itself. The following are three tales of bookish influence beyond
the words on the page. But only one of these is going to be true. The others are going
to be lies.
Are you ready?
I feel the need to take notes, but I'm not going to.
Oh yeah, I always jot them down too.
I'll go over it.
I'll go over it, yeah.
I know.
I just rely on dumb luck the whole time.
There really isn't a way to do well.
That's why I win every time we play this game,
is because I'm taking notes.
Oh, okay. We'll see if that's true.
The true fact might be fact number one.
Early drafts of On the Origin of Species were used to board up cracks on the HMS Beagle.
So it took Charles Darwin some time before his expedition on the HMS Beagle to write
on the Origin of Species, but when conservators studied one of the cannons from his ship, they realized that some of the cracks in it had been filled with paper
from fragments that came from an early draft that he had thrown away while headed home.
Or it might be fact number two.
The early 1900s, a panic spread in the U.S. and the U.K. centered around libraries and
the possibility that books lent out by the libraries
might be contaminated with disease.
And so to test out whether this was the case,
one man fed monkeys some milk from pieces of paper
that came from books that had been borrowed
by people with diseases.
And then he found out that those monkeys didn't die
and he saved libraries, maybe.
Book milk?
Book milk?
Yeah, we gotta come back to this.
There's gonna be an extensive discussion on book milk.
Or it could be fact number three. In the 1960s, a chemist working at the company
Carter's Inc. developing pigments came upon an idea called highlighters.
But no one at the company was excited about his awesome idea until one of the executives
realized that his kids could use it for the
Bible they were studying in Sunday school.
And that saved highlighters!
Well, but maybe not.
It could be, again, fact number one, early drafts of On the Origin of Species used to
board up cracks in HMS Beagle canons, or it could be fact number two, the fear of library-driven
pandemic led one man to feed monkeys book-soaked milk, or fact number two, the fear of library driven pandemic led one man to feed monkeys
book soaked milk or fact number three, highlighters happened because an executive realized that they
could help his kids study the Bible. They also entirely plausible to me.
I call nonsense on the first option because he was working on multiple drafts while still on the boat.
He hadn't like written it yet.
I don't feel like you get rid of your field notes when you're still on the boat.
Right.
You know, you know how much Darwin hated himself, though.
He just hated.
He is just so sad.
And he's like, this no one will ever.
I can't I can't be perfect, so it must be burned.
No one will ever.
I can't I can't be perfect, so it must be burned.
I think even if he's sad, even in my fits of depression, I would not wad up my paper and then stick it in a cannon.
Yeah, I would toss it overboard.
If I'm sad, it's going as far away from me as possible. Similarly.
Also, they're his field notes, like, aren't they like the drawings of the things?
Maybe it's just the part where he was writing stuff down and he was like, I don't know.
Oh, no, I think Hank is trying to mess with us. I don't think it's going.
I'm definitely going to be wrong.
Yeah, I think similar to Darwin, like Ceri said, no matter how much I think everything
I've ever done is garbage. If somebody tried to like throw it away or make it wet and stick it on a cannon, also a cannon like a shooting cannon.
Yeah, yeah. That wouldn't do nothing.
They need to keep their cannons in good working order.
With water and paper. Uh huh. Sure.
Look cellulose is very strong.
Hank Lignan Green.
Yeah.
The second one.
Okay. Bulk milk. Is it like oat milk? Yeah. The second one.
OK, is it like oat milk? And it's not it's not monkey milk.
No, no, not monkey milk.
Is it like it's is it like oat milk?
Definite. It's cow milk with books in it.
Is that what you're saying?
So I think what happened is he is he put milk in a little cup of of book.
Like he poured the milk down a little book ramp
into a monkey like you're at a party.
Except it's instead of like a human body,
it's a book.
And instead of a book, it's milk.
The monkeys are taking a milk shot off of a book?
Instead of an ice chute.
Yes, an ice chute.
That's what I'm thinking of.
Yes, it's like an ice chute,
but it's a book and it's milk and it's a monkey.
I'm calling on sense on this too!
Because the way to test this would not be
we don't lick books.
That's not how a book would be contagious.
You are giving people of the past far too much credit.
You think people in the past licked books?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think that they made no sense.
Oh, you think that they ran bad experiments.
Yeah.
If you're-
I'm not dumb.
You're gonna get all the germs you're gonna get
from smelling the book that you would
from drinking milk off the book.
Right, right.
So if you're gonna get sick from looking at the book,
you're definitely gonna get sick from drinking milk off it.
I kinda want this one to be real
because I want you to tell us more about it.
It does feel like early COVID-19 pandemic
when we were wiping down groceries,
wiping down library books.
So, yeah.
My neighbors still do that.
We're just one step away.
I mean, I've got to be honest,
if you did this with Bailey's, I'd drink it.
At the next Tangen's Live show, we can do book shots.
This is going to be a Patreon perk,
is book infused Baileyused Baileys.
I see it now. It's going to be on a sock. I'll buy them. Jesus. It's going to be a soda syrup.
Okay, it is. I'm going for Bible highlighters. I know that Bibles, like, there's the red parts
that, like, mention Jesus, like, Christians
love highlighting the Bible.
Yeah.
Is that what the red parts are?
Yeah, that's what the red parts are.
It's His words, right?
Mm hmm.
That's where Jesus is talking.
And so, I'm going Bible Highlighters.
What if this is Vanessa bait, you know?
Yeah, no, I think it's, oh, oh, I'm falling for it. If this is Vanessa bait,, you know? Yeah, no, I think that's... Oh, I'm falling for it.
If this is Vanessa Bate, then good for you, Hank.
I think I have to go with the monkey drinking milk off the books.
My soul is just telling me that I got to go with that one.
Okay.
Alright, sorry.
Normally, I would do game strategy and just guess that...
I sincerely do not believe Darwin stuffed his thing into a cannon though.
So I think it has to be,
I'm gonna go with the highlighter as well.
All right.
Well, Sari and Vanessa,
Carter's Inc was one of the first companies
to sell highlighters,
but this story is actually inspired
by how Post-It notes came to be
because that was invented by a chemist at 3M
named Spencer Silver.
He'd developed a new adhesive that was easy to apply
and then reapply without leaving any residue behind.
He didn't really know what it would be good for
until his colleague Art Fry realized
that the adhesive would be really handy
for one of his own personal problems,
keeping track of the pages in his hymnal,
in his church choir, which he usually like use little,
just paper bookmarks, but they'd fall out
and then you lose them.
Yeah, that's not good.
And this would allow them to stick them in there, keep it there, and the bookmarks would
stay.
And that was one of the very first uses for Post-It notes.
And everybody was like, actually, these things are going to be great.
I lead you astray.
It's okay.
I usually lead myself astray, so it's nice to have a companion in this and be like, no,
I went with theologian Vanessa Zolton with this.
Yeah.
And Sam, taking place during the 19th century
and the beginning of the 20th century,
the great book scare was a panic that led people to think
that books could be contaminated with diseases
and that libraries in particular
would cause diseases to spread.
And that led to many, many experiments featuring animals,
including one from a scientist who claimed
that 40 guinea pigs had died from being inoculated
with book paper.
Inoculated?
Well, yeah.
What?
Who wouldn't?
They injected paper into the guinea pigs.
And they were like, oh no.
They didn't like it. And the monkey experiment was indeed a thing that was detailed by an editor of a journal called
Library. Oh
It is a real thing. They really put book milk into monkeys and the monkeys were fine. That's so goofy
Let them drink the book milk they inoc let them drink the book milk,
they inoculated them with the book milk.
No, no, no, no, they fed the book milk to them.
Yeah, they only inoculated the hamsters.
Excuse me, yeah.
I got too confused about how wild this recent was.
So the great book scare at Lead Library
is to develop a bunch of different methods
for disinfecting books like steam or formaldehyde,
or just straight up burning them, which definitely did disinfect them because of their problems.
Meanwhile, in 1907, the UK updated their Public Health Act of 1875, which had originally been
written to prevent people from lending bedding or other items exposed to diseases.
In this updated version, people who are suspected of having a disease
could be fined up to 40 shillings, it's about $200 today,
if they borrowed, lent, or returned library books.
Damn.
The panic eventually subsided,
especially when people realized that librarians weren't getting sick
at any higher rate than normal people.
Hmm.
Not that librarians aren't normal people.
But not, you kind of aren't.
So, but in a good way.
Yeah, can confirm being close proximity to many librarians, not normal people.
I love that at the end of the day, it was data science.
They were like, wait a minute, let's collect some data, not run an experiment, but look
at the librarians.
Let's look at the, let's just, and everybody's like, you know what, you're right.
Yeah.
I have seen that the librarians are fine.
Could have saved a lot of milk,
could have saved a lot of guinea pigs.
Could have saved, yeah.
But the monkeys were fine.
Yeah, the monkeys came out of the deal ahead.
They were like, thanks for the milk, bro.
See you later.
And that's how the monkeys learned Hamlet
and were able to write it on the typewriters,
is they probably drank Hamlet milk. They drank all the books. monkeys learned Hamlet and were able to write it on the typewriters because they probably drank Hamlet milk.
They drank all the books.
They drank Hamlet milk.
I think a new study strategy, everyone talks about textbook under your pillow,
osmosis learning. You got to drink milk off of the book.
Yeah, soak it in the milk and then the knowledge will soak through you.
Yeah, well, you just need a lot of milk for like your average chemistry textbook, but like I could drink a lot of milk
Thanks to all the cows out there the Darwin thing was a big fat lie
but it was inspired by the fact that
Conservators were studying the cannon from the wreckage of the Queen Anne's revenge a ship used by the pirate blackbeard
So that's a real person and a real name of a real ship. And it was a real
cannon. It sounds like a diarrhea disease. Sorry to take us there, but no one else. Okay,
it was just me. They were studying this cannon and they found that there were little bits
of paper in it, sealed up somehow. It'm not, it seems complicated how this canon worked.
But anyway, there's little bits of paper.
They spend a lot of time trying to figure out
what book these bits of paper might be from.
And after analyzing them for a long time
and trying to fit them together, they found out,
they figured out that it was from an 18th century book
called A Voyage to the South Sea Around the World,
written by Edward Cook. I love the idea that they had a book about just being out on the ocean on this on this
boat that's out on the ocean.
They really love it.
You know what I want to read more about is this awful life that I'm living right now.
But apparently they didn't like it enough to keep it all in one piece because it did
end up stuffed into a cannon.
Well, maybe they stole it from some snooty rich guy who decorated his cabin with nautical
things and then they stole it all.
Because pirates only got porno on their boats, I'm pretty sure.
Right?
Boy, one of the worst stories I know is about pirate porn.
OK.
What?
Are you going to tell us or is that all you're going to say?
Hank, is this one of your party stories?
You can decide whether or not to keep it in the podcast.
But because pirates were pretty heteronormative and also it was only dudes.
They would have a thing that would sort of be passed around
and it was like a device for just humping to get off.
And this is how many a pirate got chlamydia
and other sexually transmitted diseases
because they did not wash that thing often enough
Well, that's not one of the worst stories I've ever heard. No, yeah, I guess not. I mean if I'm a pirate
I just do it the normal way. Yeah, they got hooks for hands though Hank. It's too dangerous
Hahahaha
You think a lot of pirates have two hooks for him?
Every one of them just got hit with hooks.
And they're like, the only thing I can do is hook onto this massive flashlight and just
wail away at it.
I mean, have any of you watched Our Flag Means Death?
I haven't yet.
I'm very excited.
That's other solution. All pirates just have fluid sexuality, gay.
Like there are plenty of perfectly good people to smooch,
holes to do that in if you just look around you.
It wouldn't have necessarily solved the chlamydia problem.
No, unfortunately not.
I think it would have been more fun.
It's like a funner way to get chlamydia. It's like a funner way to get chlamydia.
It's a much more fun way to get chlamydia.
Yeah, that's true.
If you're gonna get it.
You get some emotional connection too.
Yeah.
It's a little support.
You might as well also get emotional chlamydia
if you're heartbroken.
Yeah.
You're heartbroken by a pirate.
Well, Sam's gonna cut all of that out.
I liked it.
I liked my joke about the hook hand. It was a good one.
It was very funny. All right, everybody, now we're going to take a short break, and then
I have another game for our panel. Welcome back, everybody!
It is now time for our second game of the episode.
This is called Secret Messages.
There are plenty of messages written in books.
That's one of the main things that they do.
But sometimes the most compelling thing about books are the things that you can't see. So today we're going to be playing a game
called Secret Message. I'm going to tell you a story of people diving deep into a book in ways
that do not involve actually reading the text. And then I'm going to give you two options for
the secrets they found as a result. And you have to guess which secret is the real secret,
and you'll get a point. So round number one is Galileo's Starry Messenger.
In 2005, a rare copy from the original printing of Galileo's Starry Messenger was found—it
was not called that, it's called something else in Latin, and I'm not going to try and
pronounce it—it was found by a New York City bookseller.
I'm sure that this person was extraordinarily excited.
It was particularly special because it had been signed by Galileo
himself and featured like actual watercolor art painted by people. And as historians studied
the signature and the artwork in the book, they realized that this book was hiding something
else. What did they realize? A, it might have been a personalized edition sent by Galileo to the astronomer Johannes Kepler,
or B, it might be that the edition was in fact a forgery.
So either it's extraordinarily even more valuable,
or it's a bonja BS.
I would have guessed that Galileo lived in 400 BC and Kepler lived in 1965.
I have no idea. We're thinking contemporaries. 400 BC and kept her alive in 1965.
I have no idea.
Were they contemporaries?
Pretty sure they were contemporaries.
Okay, great.
So what I know, Galileo was in a lot of trouble
a lot of the time and there was a trial.
I don't know if sending the book to someone
could implicate them.
I think it's that.
I think that it is a secret message to a friend book and he didn't want to get his friend in trouble
by being like, we're friends.
And so he sent this like beautiful hand painted edition
to his friend, but he didn't want to implicate his friend.
That's my theory.
I like that.
That's like a very deep story.
It's beautiful.
I made it up.
I like the very like the implications of the smuggling.
I want to read this implications of the smuggling.
I want to read this novel of the smuggler who carried this book from one astronomer
to another astronomer.
I'm going to guess the opposite way, I think.
Why?
Just to be contrarian, I think.
And like, what if it's a secret story on the other, like Galileo, his name was in the mud,
Kepler, who knew who that guy was? Stars?
Whatever. No one would, no self-respecting artist, even for a commission would be like,
I'll watercolor paint in your book. He'd be like, please, please add some art to my book.
And they'd say, no. No, you're in the dog house. The pope hates you.
Yeah. Right. I will absolutely not decorate these pieces of paper
and affiliate myself with you.
That's a really good point too.
Now I don't, I'm going to go, I want to go with Vanessa though.
I want to go with myself.
Thanks, Sam.
Well, guess what everybody points to Sam and Vanessa.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, take it back.
Sorry.
Oh.
No.
Everybody start over.
Ow.
Opposite of that.
You have to sit in that.
You have to give us points anyway. That was rude.
Points to Sari.
Sam, I led you astray with my story of nonsense.
Yeah, and I was so happy.
Yeah, I mean, I wish that that was the thing.
Maybe that's what got me confused.
So it was published in 1610. Galileo
included a bunch of observations he'd made through his telescope, including the fact that the
surface of the moon was mountainous and that Jupiter had its own satellites, its own moons.
And it was published, there were 550 copies printed and 150 copies remain today. So that's
pretty good, honestly, for 1610. Historians were super
excited when a bookseller thought that they had found another copy, even more so when
they saw that it was signed by Galileo and illustrated in watercolors and had been given
a stamp from the library of the Linkean Academy in Rome, maybe, I don't know how that's pronounced.
Then a few things caused this all to fall apart. First, there was an actual astronomy mistake made in the watercolors
with a lunar phase depicted not happening in time for the book to have been published,
so there was like something wrong with the astronomy where it couldn't have happened when
it was published, which is like, I don't know, maybe. And then there were some like inconsistencies
in the paper found with extra fluorescence, which is probably pretty good sign for people who understand these things.
But the big thing that was the linchpin, there was a little blotch that was in the book,
but it was only there because it was in another book accidentally.
So they accidentally copied a blotch that was a stain as if it were a part of the original
manuscript. So that was the thing that sort of sealed the deal.
Interesting.
Eventually it was revealed that the forgery had been created by Marino Massimo del Caro,
the former director of the Gioralmini Library in Naples, who was arrested for also stealing
and selling books from the library.
Oh, shoot.
What year? It was modern times.
So relatively recently, I think that he was the head of the library in 2011, 2012.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
Like really recently.
Yeah, he's like our age.
And the forgeries from around then too?
Yeah.
Got Galileo talking on a cell phone in some of those watercolors.
Yeah.
I accidentally like with a water bottle in the background.
Yeah.
He just spilled my Gatorade on one of the pages.
Oh shoot.
What confused everyone was that it was an iPhone 4
and they were like, no, that's old.
That doesn't seem old to me.
Those are around 400 BC or whenever Galileo was alive.
All right, what's going on with round number two? In 2016, researchers reported finding three rare
books in the library collection of the University of Southern Denmark dating back to the 16th and
17th centuries that covered various historical topics, but the researchers wanted to see if
there were any secrets buried in the text. So they studied the books with X-ray fluorescence, and they were surprised by what they found.
But what was it that surprised them so much?
Was it A, that the paper in the books was made from a tree that scientists thought had
gone extinct in the 1400s, or was it B, that the exterior of these books was covered in
poisonous arsenic. I mean, to not overthink this one, if they touched the arsenic, wouldn't that be bad
when you just notice like, oh, I touched this book, I got a rash.
Uh-oh.
Like, these are the rash books.
Well, honestly, I don't know what happens when you touch arsenic.
Do you get a rash?
Do you get the poops?
Like, sometimes you just get the poops anyway.
I guess sometimes you get the revenge of the Queen Anne
and it could be the Dwarf's neck or not.
You don't know.
I'll go with the tree one because that seems like
just the kind of thing a nerd would be into.
I'd be into that.
Like, oh, this paper?
This is from a tree that we didn't think existed
at this time. That's cool. Did they save a tree? Did they have special paper for hundreds of years?
Or did they just have a tree nearby where they were like, oh, I'm saving this tree.
It's cut down the last one.
They didn't have Wikipedia to see if it was a critically endangered tree or not.
They didn't have iNaturalist on their phone to look at the trees around them.
Yeah, so I think it's the tree paper one.
Maybe it's the arsenic one because there's some fun story of a booby-trapped book or
something.
I don't know.
I think it's arsenic in that it was some secret society and it was like if you knew, you would
know to wear gloves.
And if not, they could test.
Or for religious reasons to keep like kids out of something.
It was like the equivalent of like-
To just murder children.
Whatever.
It was like, that book is from the restricted section.
Exactly.
You deserve what you get.
Do not drink milk off of this book.
It's like parental controls of the 17th century.
Well, not for the reasons Vanessa said, but Vanessa and Sam are correct.
Is it real this time, Hank?
It's real this time.
So they're trying to do a bunch of analyses on these books and they turned to extra fluorescence
to get sort of under the paint that covered the top of the covers.
And in the process, they realized that the paint was made from arsenic,
which was used as a green pigment
to create art at the time,
which means they had some poisoned books on their hands.
They don't know exactly why the arsenic was used.
They think maybe to protect from insects,
but also maybe it was just like,
this is the paint that we have.
They have books, these books are now carefully stored
so people won't accidentally stumble onto poisonous books
and get themselves into trouble.
And I looked up the symptoms and indeed,
it is a gastrointestinal problem
that you have to worry about.
Oh, I just feel like my reasons were so wrong,
I shouldn't get the point.
Oh yeah, that's not how it works.
I know, but my reasons were so wrong.
I wouldn't get any points ever
if that was a stipulation of these games.
No one ever has good reasons in this show.
All right, our final round, round number three.
While we're busy looking for things hidden in past books, people are also creating books
that will have their own hidden messages for people both today and in the future to uncover.
For example, in 2015, scientists created a book whose pages are
embedded with copper nanoparticles.
What is the secret message in these pages? Is it A, that these pages can be used as a filter to kill
bacteria in drinking water, or B, that these pages are more resistant to light damage and will be harder to destroy over time?
pages are more resistant to light damage and will be harder to destroy over time.
Seems like too many steps to make a book and then make them a filter when you could just make a filter.
Does it have stuff printed on it?
I guess you didn't say, did you say?
Uh, it does have stuff printed on it, but like, I don't think that not, not for
like, they didn't like, they didn't like make the books to be books,
and then get them to be also help filtering water.
Because it could have just text on it that says,
run water through this page filter.
Yeah, it's a filter.
It's like an instructional manual.
Yeah, you can say whatever you want.
The first day of the rest of your life is today.
Drink safe.
Hang in there.
Pour water here.
If you lived here, you'd be home right now.
It's the Snapple cap of paper.
Well, she's not going with that one,
because that sounds fun.
Yeah, I kind of want to go with it too.
I mean, more resistant to light damage feels more logical.
Yeah.
But I feel like why not have a magazine page?
There's so many fun things that people put in magazines.
We got to get more fun.
Why not a water filter?
I'm like the light one is just so obvious that it's obviously a trap.
Sometimes the trap is the true one.
But no, go with your heart, Vanessa.
No, my heart is the light one.
Then you gotta go with it.
Okay, well, I'm going for it.
I'm going for it. It's the light one.
Well, Sam, what a disaster you have created for Vanessa.
Because it is indeed that it's just a little book of pages that you can tear out and put into a filter and make it so that it kills all the bacteria.
Now there are problems with this idea. One, it's not very good.
So carbon nanoparticles are taken up by bacteria, they kill bacteria.
But look, there are other things beside bacteria that might be a problem for water.
And so we have other filters that are much more effective than this thing that literally
does say, use this as a filter.
That's what it says on the pages of the book.
And they're also super thick, so you can't get that many in.
And you have to have a special device to sort of slide them into
so all the water goes through the paper.
If you have to have a device.
I know. I agree.
It's called a drinkable book, and it's from 2015.
And I think we have better, better systems now.
We continue to progress to the point where we no longer need
drinkable books and we no longer need to have monkeys
drink milk offable books. And we no longer need to have monkeys drink milk
off of books.
And instead we could just do vodka on ice luges.
So what does that mean for our final scores?
I'm checking right now.
It means that Sam has done the hard work of making it
so that Vanessa doesn't win and he does.
I made a big mistake,
cause if you had guessed with us, we would have all tied and that would
have been nice. Oh, that would have been beautiful.
You wouldn't have all done it. Oh, that's not true.
Sarah would have still lost. I would have won either way.
Never mind. Dirty comfort coming from you.
I don't feel bad anymore.
Sam, congratulations on your win this episode.
I know how much how that feels for you.
I know.
I know.
It's the saddest thing.
I know that's all you have left.
I was feeling pretty good about it.
No, you did great.
But now it's time to ask the scienceouch where we ask a listener question to our virtual
couch of finely honed scientific minds.
This is from James on Discord who asks, what were some ancient pest repellents for libraries?
I know old books had a real problem with bugs eating all of them.
Maybe apparently arsenic we've discovered.
But I think that there's been lots of terrible
Substances that have been used for pest control. I figured you probably use some naphthalene
Because we kept using that for a long time in the closet so that the moths wouldn't eat our sweaters. So probably similar
But you know, we got a lot of stuff that kills bugs. It also kills people
So yes, there are a lot of things that eat books over time, and I think still plague books,
as far as I can tell. Any sort of collection of books faces the uphill battle of protecting
this collection from pests. And these pests can range from rodents, big mice mice, rats to any number of small larvae or other insects. So there are things like
moths and cockroaches and silverfish and a lot of beetle larvae. And we've known about them for a
while. So Aristotle, that guy described what he said was, quote,
the smallest creature of all in books.
So he found-
The smallest one on Earth, like ever found?
Yeah, he was like, they can't get any smaller than that.
There's no guys in books.
I've never seen anything smaller,
which means there is nothing smaller.
That's Aristotelian logic.
Yeah.
Yep, over the course of time, as we started using agricultural methods to get rid of pests,
so learning about biological elements, ways to stop fungal diseases, ways to control weeds or
other pests, then we started applying some of these to book collections as well.
So the big one for rodents was cats.
That's where library cats came from.
It's like, you got a little mice eating our grain.
We've got, we've also got mice eating our books because it's made
basically from the same stuff, just kind of grain.
And so like the library of Alexandria, which had scrolls rather than codices,
but still library, had library cats.
And there's this documentation about how like the librarians
eventually built up this group of cats
that just hunted rats and they named them all.
And they had a little system going.
Got another novel right, right ready to happen. The story of the cats of Alexandria.
Yeah.
I needed to end before the fire. Definitely don't. I want to be, I want to feel good about these cats.
Yeah.
Or the cats caused the fire.
Yeah.
And the final shot.
Oh, you know they did.
Is the back of the cats caused the fire. Yeah. In the final shot. Oh, you know they did.
In the back of the cats watching it burn.
Some cats just like a candle.
Just push, push, push, plop.
Yeah.
Their insect advice also, which was on the bad end of the spectrum, it was things like
rub the books in certain months, like March, July, and September with pepper and cloth
and alum.
That sounds like advice given by a book.
I just want to get it rubbed.
Yeah and another recommendation was just to read the books.
That sounds like very librarian.
Also sounds like book advice too.
Or book advice like read me and then the insects won't come. Then, like Hank said, there were tons of chemicals
over time. Camphor, in quotes, poison paste. Don't know what that was, but it was definitely
bad for the librarians in addition to the books. And one that's not so bad, which is neem leaves. So neem trees and neem oil.
With the rise of indoor house plants being a fad,
neem oil has risen in, I don't know, popularity
as like an organic gardening chemical.
And that's all I got.
I stopped looking at the late 1800s, early 1900s,
because that didn't feel old enough.
That's a big problem, and we've been working on it.
And I don't know, like, I'm looking at my books
and I don't feel like a bug could take that on,
but look, they can do anything.
They got a lot of time, they got nothing else to do.
They got nothing but time.
Well, if you want to ask your question to the Science Cows,
you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents,
where we will tweet out topics
for upcoming episodes every week.
Thank you to at MayaBjard, at Nebbichueba and everybody else who tweeted us your questions
for this episode. Thank you, Vanessa, for joining us for this episode of SciShow Tangents. If we want
to find more of your insight and approachable humor, where shall we find you? I'm so bummed that my humor is approachable.
It's not what I've been going for at all.
She's edgy.
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry, for your very, very harsh edgy humor.
I'm so edgy.
We have three podcasts, The Real Question, where it's an advice show where we don't give
advice.
I know about those.
And then we have Hot and Bothered, where, no, but we don't even try to give advice.
We listen.
We listen.
We have Hot and Bothered where this season we're talking about pride and prejudice.
My whole shtick is we treat secular things as if they're sacred.
And then we have Harry Potter and the Sacred Text where we treat Harry Potter as a sacred
text while not liking or condoning much of anything
that JK Rowling says.
You ever do any hot and bothered about sexy pirates though?
We have an episode called, I think, Sexy Pirates.
Okay.
In season one.
Can't wait.
If you like this show and you wanna help us out,
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You can go on Patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents
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Oh, yeah.
Perfect.
I like that.
Thank you for joining us.
I've been Hank Green.
I've been Sari Reilly.
I've been Sam Schultz.
I've been Vanessa Zoltan.
SciShow Tangents is created by all of us
and produced by Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Seth Glicksman.
Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paola Garciurrieto.
Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Emma Dowsder.
Our sound design is by Joseph Tunametish.
Our executive producers are Caitlin Hofmeister and me, Hank Green.
And we couldn't make any of this, of course, without our patrons on Patreon.
Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing, librarians.
Keep an eye out for book-eating pests, like beetle larvae, by looking for evidence like
frass, which is basically insect poop that looks like piles of sand.
Besides being unsightly, the frass holds moisture, food particles, and chemical compounds that
attract even more adult insects who will eat, mate, and keep damaging the books.
You can easily vacuum up frass on the shelves, but a lot of poop dust can get inside the
partially eaten books.
So a librarian from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu wrote up a guide about
how they dealt with a huge beetle infestation, including thunking some more sturdy books
to knock out the frass and the, quote, effective and amusing solution of using personal massagers,
aka vibrators, along the spines of more fragile books to loosen up any stray
poo.
Now that is a romance novel.