SciShow Tangents - Salt

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Salt: a mineral so nice that much of early human civilization was based on its procurement! Now we put big chunks of it on tasty pretzels at the mall! Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we���ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links![Truth or Fail]Lake Peigneurhttps://www.damninteresting.com/lake-peigneur-the-swirling-vortex-of-doom/https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/sinkhole-swallowed-11-barges/Brinacleshttps://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/underwater-brinicles.htmSalt Hotelhttps://theculturetrip.com/south-america/bolivia/articles/welcome-to-the-hotel-thats-made-entirely-from-salt/[Fact Off]Coconut water IVhttp://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/14/12/5144https://podcasts.ufhealth.org/can-coconut-water-mimic-human-plasma/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735675700900627https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/08/15/139638930/saved-by-the-coconut-water-parsing-coconut-waters-medical-claimshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK154437/Salt flats for satellite calibrationhttps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Characterization-of-the-Salar-de-Uyuni-for-in-orbit-Lamparelli-Ponzoni/6b6a5037f838a2342d5681b642944fd68c775551https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/172/1/31/2081107https://www.nature.com/news/2007/071130/full/news.2007.315.html[Ask the Science Couch]Salt in a wound historyhttps://books.google.com/books?id=29gV_kCmZrIC&pg=PA141https://www.abc.net.au/life/will-sea-water-help-heal-open-sores/11279036http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abestwa8t.htmlSaline solutionhttps://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/31/597666140/why-did-sterile-salt-water-become-the-iv-fluid-of-choicehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4794509/Nociceptionhttps://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/m/s2/chapter06.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK32659/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2903433/[Butt One More Thing]Rectal salt glandshttps://www.jstor.org/stable/1541076?seq=1https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216465/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00364827.1963.10410275?journalCode=ssar20

Listener supported. WNYC Studios. 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 Chen. What's up? I don't know. I gotta be totally honest with you. I started off really strong there, but that's as much as I got. I started out at a 10 and I have nowhere else to go to. Stefan, what sport did you play in high school? Well, I played the

bench for a football team. Oh, yeah. Alright. Stefan, what's your tagline? Hop, hop, and away. I love it. Sam Schultz is also here as well. What's your favorite Cheech and Chong movie? I've never seen any of them, so I don't know.

I was just thinking about Chong last night. I don't know why. They both seem like pretty nice guys to me. What's your tagline? It's too nice outside to be podcasting. Sorry about that. We should all be doing it outside. Sari Riley, how are you doing?

I'm okay. Also wishing I was outside and not in a blanket fort full of bugs. I want outside bugs. Sarah, do you have a favorite pair of pants? Yes, I have these pair of black sweatpants that have, I don't know, elastic around the ankles and have really, really deep pockets. And they have a hole in the side or they're starting to get a hole in the side and I need to mend it because I can never let these big comfy sweatpants go. I think elastic around the ankles is the number one key thing for a good pair of sweatpants. I don't like a floppy bottom on my sweatpants go. I think elastic around the ankles is the number one key thing for a good pair of sweatpants. I don't like a floppy bottom on my sweatpants. Yeah. I want to like hike them up

because I need to do something with my feet. I don't know, like walk into the ocean. Sari, what's your tagline? Fortified. Nice. And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is Princess Leia's magical mystery mansion. Ooh. I'd go there. It sounds spooky to me. We could play board games or something. Oh, God, that'd be fun. With Princess Leia. Every week here on SciShow 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. Now we do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by previous conversations, we won't be great at that. So if the team deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care.

Now, as always, we introduced this week's topic with a traditional science poem. This week from Stefan. Combinations of things with pluses and minuses. Ionic assemblies for rinsing your sinuses. Used to make your food tasty or for food preservation. Used to energize some batteries and on the rims of tequila-based libations. Salt helps keep things right in my cells. Not enough sodium and they'll start to swell, but a dash of

strontium chloride will redden the flames. A pinch of sodium bisulfate is what this pool contains. They're in the soils of Mars, but Mark still grew a potato. And you can use salt to make homemade Play-Doh. Clearing icy roads and maybe raising my blood pressure, anions and cations do so many things once they're together. Oh, yes. Wow. That was really good.

That was a very Stefan Rhein scheme. I love it. You have no regard for syllables, and I love it. No, I don't follow those rules. So our topic for the day is salt, and you didn't just stick with table salt, which is what we generally call salt, but you were also talking about salts generally,

which are just ionic compounds, of which there are many, many, many, and some of them are, well, really just one of them is delicious. No, the lead one is super tasty. There's two that are delicious. Sweet but deadly. Yeah, but there are many, many salts.

Sari, I guess I should let you tell me what salt is. I mean, you already kind of told me what salt is. I kind of did it. I'm sorry. No, that's okay. You're a chemistry man, so you can do it. Sodium chloride is the one that we eat, so that's in table. Sodium chloride is the one that we eat. So that's in table salt.

It's also the one that we sprinkle on the roads. So it's rock salt as well. I think the most common one. So if you're like, I have salt, people are usually referring to sodium chloride. It's what's in the ocean and makes the ocean the most salty, even though there are other ionic compounds in the ocean. Salt is important for the human body, like Stefan mentioned. You need sodium ions for action potentials in nerve cells.

So they help with the electrical impulses that let you move or feel things or send signals to your brain. And they help with osmotic regulation, which is the swelling of cells. Stefan basically covered it too in his poem. So the basics of salts are ionic compounds are like ions are an atom, but they are charged. And an ionic compound is when two charged atoms, so these ions, have opposite charge and they stick together because of that. So they're basically in a normal molecule,

you're sharing electrons. In an ionic compound, it's just like these two atoms, and you shouldn't even call them atoms because if they are charged, they aren't anymore and they are ions. So these two ions have opposite charge and they stick together because of that. They aren't even sharing electrons. They're just sort of like stuck together. And that's why when you put them in solution, they often can dissolve really easily because the two ions actually dissociate and they're sort of floating around in there separately. And then when you evaporate the water away, they jam back up together again. But you can't like suddenly take all the sodiums out and just leave the chlorines behind because they are sort of dependent on each other for their

existence. You can do that, but it becomes a big problem. And just one little asterisk, ions can be polyatomic, so they can have more than one atom in them. So like a sulfate ion, for example. All right, it's time now for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists, it's Sam this week, has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but two of those facts are fake and only one of them is real.

We have to figure out which is the true fact, and if we do, we get a Sam Buck. If not, Sam gets the Sam Buck. Sam, what are your facts? All right, these are three accidents related to salt that highlight the folly of man's hubris. Great. Number one. An oil drilling operation in a lake in Louisiana Accidentally breached a salt mine beneath the lake Causing a massive whirlpool

That swallowed the drilling equipment Along with several boats Huge chunks of the shoreline And basically the entire lake Two A research boat studying a newly discovered species of starfish Living off the coast of Greenland Hit a patch of sea ice

Which released a bunch of super cooledcooled, super-salty brine water that was too cold to freeze, but froze all the water around it as it sank, eventually settling on and freezing most of the starfish colony they were studying to death. Or number three, inspired by the concept of ice hotels,

an entrepreneur in Bolivia built a hotel made of blocks of salt at Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. Unfortunately, climate change has increased rainfall in the region dramatically, and by the end of 2017, the hotel had almost melted down to its foundation. Whoa. Okay, we've got three facts here. One, an oil drilling operation in a lake in Louisiana accidentally breached an old salt mine beneath the lake, causing a massive whirlpool that swallowed the drilling equipment, along with several boats and a lot of the shoreline. Two, a research boat studying a new starfish hit a patch of...

Wait, what did it do? It hit a patch of sea ice, which shook out a bunch of briny water. Okay. That water was cold, but didn which shook out a bunch of briny water. Okay. That water was cold but didn't freeze because it was so briny and it sank and all the water around it froze and that killed all the starfish. Yeah. That's very good. Or number three, just like ice hotels, an entrepreneur in Bolivia built a salt hotel.

Unfortunately, it got rained on a bunch and it had almost melted down by 2017. Boy, all those seem really, really real to me. I feel like the Salt Hotel is a little bit too much hubris for me. Like, I don't know. Even like it rains everywhere, even in the desert. Not in a salt flat. Really? There's lots of like deserty salt flats.

Yeah. And ice hotels exist as well, and so I can totally see someone building a salt hotel with the idea in mind that they'd have to patch it up every once in a while, just not that they'd have it completely dissolved because it's raining too much instead of just once

in a blue moon. I know that this thing happens where the way that they get salt out of the ground sometimes, I find this fascinating, is instead of digging it out, they will pump hot water down into the salty area and it will dissolve the salt that's under underwater. And then they pump out the salty water

and then they evaporate it because it's like so super saline. And then, but what's left behind is this giant empty cavern. And I know that this happens in the southern u.s and i know that if you puncture that salty cavern like shit's going down literally and like i know that that's a thing i don't know if this specific thing is a thing uh and then we got this boat that killed all the starfish and i don't know if this is possible but like it seems so cool

that i want it to be not that i want the starfish to die because they are apparently newly discovered rare species of starfish but i want it to be real because that because it's so weird and also the hubris of man yeah i've definitely heard of brine pools before and i know that they are these super salty pools, essentially, at the bottom of the ocean, that if fish go into them, they experience toxic shock because it's so radically different. So they definitely can kill organisms, and especially if salty water just went on starfish, it's not like they can swim out of the way very quickly. All that to say it seems plausible. They all seem plausible. All right, I'm going to go for the starfish,

and I can't exactly explain why. It's real good. I want to learn more about it. That one smells the fishiest to me. Oh, wow. I'm going to go with the salt hotel. I guess I'll split it out because I truly have no idea I will go with the lake hole

okay lake hole you ready for the answer? Sam's got a guaranteed two points the right answer is the lake hole no! I knew it was a thing! it was a different lake hole I thought for sure a southern boy like you would have known about this

so in 1980 an oil rig was doing exploratory drilling in Lake Peigneur in Louisiana, and it accidentally pierced the underground crystal diamond salt mine with a 14-inch drill. So water started pouring into the hole and dissolving the interior of the salt mine, which some of it was held up by pillars of salt, basically, that they had just carved out to keep the thing supported. So the mine collapsed, and the hole got way bigger than 14 inches and a whirlpool formed at the surface of the lake that sucked in the entire drilling platform, 11 barges, a

tugboat and tons of dirt from the shore of the lake. And within like three hours, the whole lake had drained into the mine and then a 400 foot geyser shot out of the hole because of the compressed air. And then the hole caught on fire because there was a natural gas leak because there were natural gas lines under the lake too. Then the flow of a nearby canal reversed and water from the Gulf of Mexico

started filling the lake bed and it made a 150-foot waterfall. It was the tallest waterfall in Louisiana that's ever existed in recorded history. So then it went from an 11-foot deep freshwater lake to a 1,300-foot deep saltwater lake. And this whole thing, nobody died. It happened so slow that they evacuated everybody, but they just couldn't get all the boats out. So they had to get sucked in.

And the oil company paid the salt mine $45 million. I don't think they paid anybody else any other stuff. And that was that. Was the salt mine operating at that point? Yeah, yeah. Wow. That wasn't old. I think that was an abandoned part of the mine.

Like, that was an older part. But it was operational, yeah. A whole lake. And no starfish died. So, well, okay, that's not entirely true. I'm going to send you a video in a second. Starfish are dying out there. Just not both.

Constantly. Both are making it happen. Every day a starfish dies. So brinicles are underwater icicles that are formed by brine water leaking out from sea ice. It just kind of naturally comes out of the ice. So the water sinks and it freezes the less salty water around it and it forms a tube of ice that reaches from the sea ice down to the floor of the ocean.

It can't go too far and it can't be too choppy of water so they don't happen very often. But this video in particular shows it falling onto a colony of starfish and freezing them. It really does. It just was not happening. And they do not survive. So the brineacle is made of salt?

It's made of the super cold water falls down and freezes a tube of just the less salty ocean water around it. Ah, that's so cool. I'm sorry to all the starfish, but wow, that is awesome. I'm sure they don't always fall on starfish. And this video is ridiculously good. Yeah. That's a fantastic video.

We'll put it up at scishowtangents.org. And then the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the largest salt flat in the world. And it's home to, in fact, several salt hotels. But none of them have melted away due to rainfall. The first one was built in the exact middle of the salt flat and it had to be abandoned after 10 years because they didn't have a way to get all the poop away from the hotel. They forgot about that part.

So eventually there was 10 years worth of poop and they had to get out of there. Just dig a deeper hole. Fine. All right, Sam, congratulations. Sari, congratulations to you as well. to get out of there just dig a dig a deeper hole you're fine all right sam congratulations sari congratulations to you as well well next up we're going to take a short break and then the fact off Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals.

Stefan and Sari have one. Sam has two. And I'm coming in last with zero. Absolutely nothing so far. But we'll see if I can get, claw back some amount of credibility here in the fact off. Two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. You guys each have a sandbuck to award to the fact that you like the most. Or you could just throw it away because that's not very nice.

And to decide who goes first, I hear there is a trivia question. The open ocean has a salinity of 3.5% or 35 grams per liter of water. What is the salinity of the Dead Sea? Ooh. I will say 7.9%. I'm going to say 10.2%. Okay. The answer is 33.7%.

Whoa. It's very salty. Holy moly. Oh, I had no idea. That is 33.7. Whoa. It's very salty. Holy moly. Oh, I had no idea. That is salty. Don't put that in your mouth. So Sari wins. Oh, I guess I win.

Sari wins. What do you want to do with that information? You were slightly closer. I will go first. Okay. So coconut water is that clear liquid inside of coconuts that's getting boxed up for commercially using purposes now. And it seems like another health fad

because people are making all sorts of health claims about it. And it does have sugars and vitamins and ions like sodium and potassium in it, which make it almost like a sports drink. But supposedly during World War II, when medical supplies were scarce, both British and Japanese soldiers used coconut water for an emergency treatment as a saline substitute

that they would inject into their veins for rehydration. So like an IV drip, but of coconut water. And then just like hang a coconut from instead of a bag and have the water go straight into you. And there's one published study of one man who had it successfully used in an emergency on the Solomon Islands. And this is because when people get severely dehydrated or lose blood, doctors can use intravenous therapy to get fluid back in the body. It doesn't replace all the functions of plasma and the lost blood,

but just having hydration is really important. And so IV therapy- And keep all those blood vessels filled up with stuff. Yeah, filled up with stuff that's at a similar salinity to blood. So you still have the saltiness in there and you still have all the things in salts that help your cells function in addition to the fluid volume. And like we mentioned in the

definition section, our cells need ions like sodium for basic chemical functions like nerve firing. So in a pinch, these reports, mostly just anecdotal, say that coconut water can be used to replenish those compounds, rehydrate and survive. It's similar enough to blood that it won't cause a negative reaction. And scientists who reflect on this nowadays, mostly just in interviews, say this is probably pretty dangerous because coconut water doesn't have the right balance of chemicals, unlike carefully made saline solutions. It doesn't have enough sodium and has too much calcium and potassium, which could throw off our cellular systems. So it's definitely not a replacement for plasma or blood if better things are available, but it may do in a pinch if you're

in an emergency situation and need some IV drip. But there was a person recently who actually did this in the Solomon Islands, and why? I think it was someone who was on pretty normal medical treatment, like trying to be rehydrated, maybe had gone through some surgeries. But the hospital that they were at ran out of saline solution. And so the doctors were like, well, we've been treating this patient for a while, and we are waiting two days to get any saline solution delivered. What should we do? And then they were like, coconut. And so there's a picture of a coconut as an IV in this paper. All right. I guess that means that it's my turn, everybody. So if you wanted to figure out how high up in the air a satellite was, because that's really important sometimes. Like, for example, if you're trying to measure polar ice caps and how much they are shrinking or lowering,

you really want to know exactly how up your satellite is. And what if you wanted to do that, but you wanted to use salt to do it? Well, my friends, it's possible. So when you're trying to calibrate the height of your satellite, you want to shine basically a laser onto something shiny and flat uh so you know exactly what the level is and you know how shiny it is and usually we use the oceans for this because the oceans are fairly flat and they're fairly shiny and they're everywhere so that's nice the oceans do have that going for them. They're almost the majority of the planet. But two things.

One, the ocean actually isn't that flat. So one, there are waves. Sometimes there are big waves. Two, there are tides. We sort of know where the tides are, but we don't know exactly what they're going to be. And so, yeah, the sea level, which we think of as a constant thing, is not actually constant. It changes, and that's what tides are. In the 2000s, NASA wanted to find an alternative to calibrate the Ice Cloud and Land Evaluation Satellite, or ICESat,

which measures changes in ice sheet elevation in Antarctica and Greenland. And for this purpose, it's really important to have extremely accurate measurements. So they needed something very static that didn't have a lot of clouds above it. This is also a problem. You can usually find some ocean that doesn't have clouds, but someplace specific, you want to make sure there's not clouds. And also that's bright and shiny enough

to reflect the laser. And where was it? It's the Solar de Uyuni in Bolivia, everybody. It's back. It's back. They used the salt hotels. So many, many, many millennia ago, this area was covered by a lake called Lago Minchin.

Around 15,000 years ago, that lake started shrinking and the water evaporated, leaving behind thick crusts of halite or salt. It can get more than 10 meters thick, so that's why you can carve a hotel block out of it. The salt flat is not only super cool to look at, it also turns out it's great for calibrating

your satellites. And it's even more helpful because this salt flat is extremely flat. So the area gets rain between December and March, so this is a thing. It actually gets rained on. And when that water comes in and mixes with the salt and then evaporates away again,

the salty surface gets left behind a super physically homogenous structure. It's one of the flattest surfaces on Earth. Over an area of 9,000 square kilometers, there's less than one meter of elevation change. So using trucks equipped with GPS antennas, scientists were able to measure out the topography of the Salar de Uyuni,

make their calibrations about five times better than using the ocean as a calibration tool. Wow. It has to be able to see Bolivia. Yeah, it has to be able to fly over Bolivia sometimes. It's got to go over there every once in a while.

Be like, I'm going to head over to Bolivia, be right back. And then come back. No, I imagine the orbit is set up so that it hits that every once in a while. They should include that in the salt hotel marketing. Please don't lick the hotel. You might throw off the satellites. Yeah. Well, one of the problems that both the hotels and the entire area has is that the salt flat contains around

50 to 70 percent potentially of the world's entire supply of lithium uh lithium has become more important recently because of batteries and so everybody's got their eye on this salt because it could be super super useful uh and and the sort of electrification of the entire transportation infrastructure that may be coming in the next few decades. So you guys have to vote for either Sari with during World War II, people using coconut water from coconuts as a saline drip into their veins. But it's probably not as good as, you know, modern medicine. but it's probably not as good as modern medicine. Or you have mine where they are calibrating the altitude of a satellite using a really, really big flat white thing that is basically 9,000 square kilometers of salt.

I think I'm ready. All right. Three, two, one. Sari? Ah, I got a point. I just think Sari's fact, I got a point. I just think Sari's fact might save my life one day. Oh, that is an excellent point. I'm going to keep coconuts on hand now just in case.

What's going to save your life more? Add that to your survivalist bunker. This is my whole thing with survivalism. What's going to save your life more? The potential that someday you will be in need of rehydration where there are coconuts, or two, being able to maybe invest in a salt flat futures that's going to make you billions.

Billions! You can get as much human blood as you want with billions of dollars. That's true. All right, now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This one comes from at Maddie Habel. Where did the phrase salt in a wound come from, and why does salt make a wound hurt more?

Well, I imagine that the phrase salt in the wound came from the fact that it hurts more. salt in the wound came from the fact that it hurts more but why why that that that is an undeniable scientific fact i can confirm from having had salt in a wound yeah um but why does it make it hurt more i have a guess but sarah i would like you to confirm my guess my guess is that uh the salt in the wound actually destroys cells by sucking water out of them and breaking them. And that breaking of the cells is sensed by the nervous system, and the nervous system says, stop, I hate that, with pain. Did I get it right? That is a good guess and also part of my guess.

I couldn't find a scientist who was just like, this is why this happens. So I kind of cobbled together an answer. And that was one part of it that I was going to say where it was like, I imagine it's just going to bust open your cells because it messes up the concentration of salt in your body and your cells don't like it. And so then they explode. So yes, I think that's part of it. I think part of it has to do with concentrations being messed up or just like the salt physically rubbing into your cells and causing more abrasiveness in an already damaged area. They're kind of sharp. Yeah, they're pointy crystals. Yeah. I think another part of it has to do with your nociceptors,

which are the sensory receptors that are associated with pain. Those are the things that get activated if you touch something too hot or you pinch your skin. They can be activated through lots of different things like too high, too low temperatures, mechanical stimulation, but also chemical stimulation. So like an acid burn or something like that. And from what I can tell in literature, this is where my biochemistry knowledge is very rusty. It seems like nociceptors, so the nerve cells that sense these kind of extreme stimuli and signal to your brain so that your brain says can interpret that signal as pain and tell you to stop doing the thing, have chloride channels in them and have like sodium, potassium chloride channels. So not just sodium potassium channels in them. And so it's possible that because salt, table salt is sodium chloride, then the additional chloride is also activating them in some way or like changing the concentration in the way that these particular

receptors sense things. So basically what we're saying is that one of these ions, probably the chloride ion itself, is activating the pain receptor. So even if no damage is being done, pain is being felt. And maybe that's why it like that pain is so immediate the moment that salt hits the wound. Yes, that is a much better way to phrase what I was rambling about. It does seem to happen really immediately. Like, the moment the salt hits the wound, it's like zing!

It's like taste, almost. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It is almost like you're tasting the pain instead of, yeah. Did you guys know that the inside of a person's penis has taste buds in it? The inside of a person's penis? Yeah.

Why? The teepee? No. Yeah, yeah. I did actually know that. Taste buds? I had seen that. Does the rectum have taste buds as well?

Oh, I bet. No. Why? As far as we can tell, the only place outside of the mouth in the human body that has taste buds is the urethra of a person with a penis. But why? Weird. Do you really want to know why? Yeah.

I think you're already losing a point, so you might as well tell me. Oh, no! Just struggling to understand why you said that. Because we're talking about taste buds in your arm and being able to taste salt with pain. It's the opposite. It's that the inside of your penis can, it's not taste exactly, but it can sense the sugars

in semen and it senses that with pleasure. And so when you ejaculate, it's a signal of enjoyment. So basically the inside of your dick can taste your jizz, is what I'm saying. Your balls can't taste soy sauce. Is that? No, no.

This is a fact I learned from Christy Wilcox because she did a bunch of research on whether your balls can taste soy sauce. And they can't. But your dick can taste your jizz. Do I have negative one point, you guys? Yeah, I think you have negative one point. God dang it. Sari, do you know if there's any more depth to where this phrase came from? It's basically what you were saying in both positive and negative ways.

So saltwater was often used as an antiseptic in the mid-1800s. People sailing on ships were like, I guess if I rub salt in my wounds, then it'll be a little bit better than if I don't. Does that actually work? Because there's a lot of stuff in the ocean water, right? That's the problem, is there's a lot of stuff in the ocean water. So if you have feet wounds,

I don't know why feet in the ocean is my thing today, but don't go wading in the ocean. There are today. But don't go wading in the ocean. There are other ways. We have better medicine now to treat it. But to some degree, there was a plastic surgeon that found that fighter pilots that had burns on their body and fell into the ocean

healed better than ones that fell on land. So there's something to saline solutions helping with healing. Wow. If you want to ask the science couch, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents

where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at LittleGreyfish, at CurseDebeth, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode.

Sambuck final scores. Sari and Sam tie for the lead. I get nothing and Stefan gets one, which means that Sari and Sam tie for the lead. I get nothing and Stefan gets one, which means that Sari and Stefan are tied for the season lead. Sam is one point behind and I'm just dragging up the rear here. Only like a couple points behind Sam though.

Four points out of the lead. It's true. One good episode and you're all right. All right. We'll see if it happens. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super helpful and helps us know what you like about

the show. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. If you want to listen to SciShow Tangents ad-free, you can do that on Luminary. Thank you for joining us. I've 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 is also our editor. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our beautiful logo is by Hiroko Matsushima. 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. To survive in saltwater, some marine vertebrates have salt glands that let them excrete excess salts so that they can drink salty water without being more dehydrated. In some birds and reptiles, these glands are located around their eyes or nostrils, so it looks like they're snotting or crying goopy salt. But in sharks and rays and skates, the salt glands are in their rectum, so their salt goop comes out their butts. Can they taste it? I don't know. It's not the inside of a penis, so no.

That's beautiful.