SciShow Tangents - SciShow Tangents Classics - Cars

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

It’s too nice outside to make a podcast this week, so instead, we’ve got a classic episode for you! Learn basically everything you need to know about cars before you set out on your epic summer road trip. Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen

June is here, which means it's time for summer fun. Playing on the beach, grilling with your friends and loved ones, and of course, road trips. And what would a road trip be without a car? A walking trip. So this week, we're bringing you a classic episode of Tangents About Cars. What are they? Where do they come from? You're about to find out. And if you like hearing us talk about cars, you might consider joining our Patreon. Once we hit 500 subscribers, we're going to do a movie commentary for the film Cars 2, in which we will try to unravel the mysterious and disturbing biology of the cars world. And we're so close to hitting our goal.

So please go check out patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents while you enjoy this episode. Beep, beep. showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen this week. As always, I'm joined by Stefan Chin. Hello. What's the best, like, road surface? Probably pavement, but like well-maintained asphalt. What's your tagline? Hot sauce paradise. Oh, I don't know why that made me feel like I was going to take a bath in hot sauce, but I don't want to do that.

Sam Schultz is also here today. Hello. Sam, what was your first screen name? Oh, I've never had one I liked, so I don't even remember. What's your tagline? World-renowned inventor of the breakfast hot dog. I love the sound of that. Sari Riley is joining us as well today.

Hello. Do you have a favorite monkey? Oh, just like a gorilla because its scientific name is Gorilla Gorilla. And I gave a report on them in first grade

and I think it was the first ever school report that I practiced. What's your tagline, Sari? An asymmetrical shirt. Oh. And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is

glass half empire. Wow. What's the other half? It was almost something. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we try to one-up and amaze and delight each other with science facts.

We're playing for glory. We're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. And we do what we can to stay on topic, but we're not great at that. So if somebody goes off on a tangent and the rest of the team deems it unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your Sam bucks. So tangent with care. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic

with the traditional science poem this week from Sam. Ford, Focus, Honda Fit, the Stingray and the Corvette, Riviera and Camaro, Chevrolet, Bel Air, Expedition and Explorer, Pinto, it was quite a horror, Thunderbird, Firebird, the Edsel, Corsair.

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. El Camino pickup bed, putting gas that's got no lead. Take your Woody to the beach, make the rubber tires screech. Aero car with flight bestowed, amphicar aquatic mode. If the road is what you seek, for a steering wheel you reach. These are all types of cars.

Got combustion engines, people riding in them. These are all types of cars. There's also the Range Rover. Now my poem is over. Wow. Yes. Wow. What were you thinking? Well, I thought of the,

these are all types of cars in the shower. So I thought of the whole chorus while I was in the car, or in the shower. And then the rest I had to just make work because I couldn't think of anything else. Terry, what is a car? Well, that's a great question. I feel like, from my heart, a car is something that if I point and look at it, it has an engine, like a combustion engine.

Well, it doesn't have to be a combustion engine. Tesla makes cars. Okay. And then cars usually have four wheels i guess they can be electric or gas powered and can usually carry passengers or i don't know are operated by a driver sometimes whether that driver is a human or a computer sari where does the word car come from like in other places they call them auto. And I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. That comes from like automobile, which is like a mobile thing that moves by itself. But car

comes from the Proto-Indo-European cursos from the root word K-E-R-S or curs, which means to run. And then it seems like from there, it got adapted to any sort of moving thing. So it turned into a car for chariot or wagon. And then just like kept moving through the wheeled vehicles that humans developed.

Interesting. And now it is time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has brought three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real, and the other two are totally fake, and we have to figure out, either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. If we do, we get a sandbuck. If we're tricked, then Stefan will get the sandbuck, because Stefan has brought the facts today.

Stefan, what are your facts? Okay, this is about recycling tires. So we produce several hundred million waste tires in the US every year. And about 90% of them are actually recycled, which is very surprising. But burning them counts as recycling and we burn about half of them.

That's definitely not recycling. Are you talking about in an incinerator where they generate power? Yeah, yeah. They mulch them up. Still not recycling. Well, they're reused in a way that is not clean. They are used.

I can tell you that they are used. Well, by most articles' definitions, it's counted as recycling. But apparently also the tires that are just sitting around in landfills and stuff are there. There's a problem with like mosquitoes using them as like a breeding ground. So that's not good. So here are three things that are ways that we could potentially recycle some tires. But only one of them is true.

OK. Number one, we could use old tires to make new tires. I love the possibility that this one isn't true. This is like an impossibility. Okay, continue. It is possible already, but you can only use a small amount of recycled material in each new tire. And the new tires that are made this way are worse. They have worse

traction and they wear out much faster. But a team in Singapore recently made a breakthrough in processing old tires using a freeze drying process. And then the resulting recycled rubber was much higher quality, which opens the door for a more circular economy with tires. Number two, we could use old tires as a replacement for human tissues. So a Swedish team has developed a process to refine old tire material into a very soft elastic material that could be used as in its solid or liquid form to make medical devices or to even be injected into the body. As an example, reducing friction in joints where the cartilage has broken down. Whoa. Or number three, we could use them in batteries.

So by processing recovered carbon black from tires and bathing them in sulfuric acid, researchers were able to make anodes for lithium ion batteries that outperformed electrodes made from the typically used graphite. Well, very interesting. So fact number one, we've got Singapore scientists freeze-drying tires that allows them to more easily re-enter the tire-making, I don't know, supply chain, I guess. Number two, creating some kind of substance that you can use inside of human bodies to reduce friction in joints, maybe. Or three, you can process some recovered carbon black

from tires to make anodes for lithium-ion batteries that are better than the anodes that we currently use. Tell me more about injecting tires into my body. Well, they're no longer tires at that point. It's derived from... Okay, so they do something to the tires. Yeah, I mean, they're doing things to all... All of these are processed versions of tires.

Yeah. They're being very cagey. Do they, like, re-petroleumize them or something? Is that what tires are made out of? I don't know. You gotta turn them back into something slippery, though. The injection one is the one that I know the least about the process yeah and i guess

like just thinking about property wise not knowing enough chemistry or having stefan inform us of the chemistry it's like you take a rubber and then make it into probably smaller chain hydrocarbon and you do use organic chemicals as drug molecules or things like that. So like that basic, basic logic is conceivable. Like it doesn't set any red flags off. But also I just keep thinking of injecting tires into myself and becoming the Michelin man. Which is not this. Those are so much bigger. My joints could be tires. I can definitely see some kind of system for when you process a tire pre-recycling to make it better for recycling. I don't know what happens

to a tire in use or how tires are made and that requires certain kinds of chemicals and certain kinds of ways that like the existing tire rubber would be bad for, for some reason. But I can definitely, if you're trying to get like old tires back into new tires, it makes sense to me that you would need to do some chemistry to them before you did that.

What, is freeze drying just sucking all the water out of it? I think so. It is both sucking water out and making it cold. But I feel like there's not a lot of water in a tire. I think it's also like a vacuum thing. So freeze drying, I think it does that by sucking out all of the everything. And so so you you suck out, you get them in a vacuum, basically, like you both make them cold and put them in a vacuum at the same time.

So freeze drying, I don't think necessarily has to be about water. It could be about sucking out other volatiles. What was the last one? Carbon black and a battery. I'm not going to Google what carbon black is, but I know it's a thing. I know it exists. Yeah. It's like a black sooty looking stuff that's left over from partially combusting hydrocarbons.

Okay. Okay. So it's different than like activated charcoal or something like that. It's like a separate material, but still black and powdery. Yeah. I've heard that it has some kind of interesting nanoscale structure. You can get like buckyballs and nanotubes and stuff, carbon black, maybe. Maybe. Or like maybe you make those things from carbon black sometimes. I don't know.

I'm going to go with carbon black. I feel like carbon black is useful and maybe tires are a good way to get it. I don't know why that would be. That's how I feel. I'm also going to go with the last one. I don't know why it was like in listening to Stefan explain all of these. My brain was very skeptical for the first two. And then the third one was like, sure. I think I'm going to go for the first one, the freeze dried tires, just because like I know repurposed tires are bad, or at least I've heard that like truck drivers use them sometimes, I think. And they like fling tire chunks all over the place. That just seems like something

people will be trying to solve to me, too. I agree. If it is the middle one, I'm going to be incensed because there's no way that people are injecting lubricant into their joints. Okay. Oh, before Stefan tells us, go to twitter.com slash SciShowTangents and vote

for the one that you think is correct and play along with us. Because we have such a small sample size here in the SciShow Tangents virtual studio. So join us over there. Pause if you must. And then, Stefan, tell us the answer. So the true one is the batteries. Yay! No.

Phew. Yeah, I don't know if carbon black, if like the best way to get it is from tires but i think if i'm remembering correctly 70 of all carbon black is used in the production of tires isn't it what gives the tires their color this is the thing that i wanted to say but wanted to mislead hank and sam like tires would be naturally a different color, but then it helps darken them so they look cool. I think it, yeah, I think it does contribute to that.

Because they mentioned that it's used as a pigment in, like, some inks or plastics or things. And it's, like, a very black substance on its own. So that would make sense to me.

But this team has developed their proprietary, like, process using this sulfuric acid bath to pre-treat the rubber and then heating it up until it all breaks down. And then they use the recovered carbon black from that to make the anodes for lithium ion batteries specifically. And I guess for that kind of battery, those anodes are usually made from graphite, which is also a form of carbon. But the production of graphite is pretty dirty. And so this is a much cleaner way to do it. And you mentioned like the sort of nanostructures on the surface of carbon black, and that seems to be playing a part here too, where those unique structures make it perform better than graphite as an anode. I think it

has to do with the number, size, and distribution of the little nanopores on the surface. But it's, I don't know, it's all very complicated and I didn't understand it. But those structures combined with their proprietary pre-treatment process seem to improve its efficiency at conducting electricity. And so yeah, it ends up being a cheaper and cleaner and better anode for lithium batteries, which is, I think, the primary one that's used in electric cars. Yes. So are we injecting people with lubricants, Stefan? Okay, so this one has nothing to do with tires. But this Swedish team was trying to make a hard, bone-like synthetic substance.

And I think they started with the same foundation material as plexiglass, but after they did their special process to it, they ended up with a really soft, elastic, rubber-like material that they were very surprised by. No good for bones. Not good for bones, but because it's based on materials

that we know are safe in the body and they apparently can use it in solid or liquid form. They were saying the first use they were looking at was like to make catheter tubes. So like you can make medical devices out of it, but it can also be injected or inserted into the body and should be fairly non-toxic. And so they were looking at like using it in a viscous liquid form to like re-lubricate your joints after the cartilage has decayed. Or they said that you could also use it in plastic surgery in place of like Botox.

And so then the freeze-dried one is not about tire. Well, it is about tires, but it's using tires to make rubber aerogels. And so it's this team in Singapore, they filed a patent this year for like their novel technology for turning tires into rubber aerogel. And I didn't realize that aerogels,

I thought it was just like one material that's like really this really low density airy stuff. But apparently it could be a range of materials that are produced in a certain way so that you end up with, like you take this gel and you freeze dry it, which removes all the liquid, but it leaves the solid matrix that's in the gel. And so then you have like an aerogel, but you can have an aerogel made from a bunch of different things. And I guess they're the first ones to make this rubber aerogel.

And aerogels in general are kind of brittle, but this one, because it's rubbery, can sort of spring back into shape. And so they think it's much more durable than other versions of it. What's aerogel? So you have a gel. A gel is like solid particles mixed with liquid particles. And an aerogel is when those liquid particles are gas instead of being liquid. Is it squishy? It's not as squishy as you would think. Have you touched it? I thought it would be squishy.

I have touched aerogel. It's not like a dry cracker. You've touched it too? When was this? Sorry, touching this stuff. I've got so many things to be cranky about today. Have to define cars. I haven't touched aerogel and my friends have.

have to define cars. I haven't touched aerogel and my friends have. Well, I hope that you're not cranky about the break that we're about to take. This is my segue. Welcome back, everybody. welcome back everybody uh we are have a tie ball game right now everybody has one point cool which is pretty unusual but sari and i have a chance to take the lead because it's time for the fact off we've each brought in a science fact to present to the other in an attempt to blow their minds. And whichever fact blows the mind the most is going to be rewarded a sandbuck by the people we are presenting our facts to.

And who goes first is going to be decided with a trivia question. It will be read to us by Stefan. So the question is, horsepower is a unit of measure equal to the power needed to lift how many pounds one foot into the air in one second? Oh, rats.

Like one horse. How much does a horse weigh? I'm just gonna guess 50 pounds. Wait, what is the thing? One foot in the air? In one second. Oh, in one second? 200. Yeah, I felt like I was low.

Hank's only experienced weak horses. The answer is 550 pounds. Stronger than both of us. Yeah, very strong. Okay, I'll go first. So I've heard one thing that can feel really satisfied when you're driving a car is the vroom vroom

of an engine. You've driven a car before, right? Yeah, Stefan really likes the vroom vroom. an engine. You've driven a car before. Yeah. Stefan really likes the vroom vroom. I'm ambivalent to it. If it can get me from one place to another, I like it. So these particular vroom sound waves come from the combustion in engine cylinders and the way the engine is shaped and how engine cylinders fire and the airflow through the intake and exhaust systems and different combinations of those movement make different vrooms. And modern engines are built in ways

so that the natural engine sounds are quieter or relatively non-existent, like I mentioned with electric cars, but car companies are like, people really like the vroom. So in an apparently controversial move, certain automakers are using different means of sound enhancement to make cars

sound more car-like through amplification or even artificially. I'm not surprising Stefan with this. My mind was blown. I was like, people care about the broom enough to fake it? They do. So one, in Ford and maybe Porsches have a thing called a sound symposer, which is basically a tube that runs from the air intake, I think, or engine intake, one of those things, to behind the dashboard to pipe the good sound waves in. And there's an electronic flap that opens and closes to give you more vroom at appropriate times, like when you're speeding up and less vroom.

Wow. This isn't for the people around. It's just for you. Yeah, it's like personalized sound. So you can feel like you're going fast. Oh, wow. Number two, BMW has a system that plays a synthetic engine sound through the car's speakers, which is basically like a Vroom soundtrack combined with some amplification of the actual engine sound. So that's like half artificial, half real. And number three, Volkswagen has something called the SoundActor or SoundActuator,

which is a sort of buzzing hockey puck size speaker that adds noise to the part of the car between the engine and the cabin for the vroom sound. And it's completely from an audio file on the car's computer as far as I can tell, or it was for a while. And then I think now it might be a mix. And that's my fact.

It's just like, apparently people love the broom so much that their car companies are inventing many different ways to sneak it into. Right. And all of them are just for the person driving the car. All of the ones you talked about just now? Mm-hmm. So weird.

Look, driving a car is a five cents experience. So yeah, if you don't have the right sounds, it's just not the same. Well, I feel it. And I like the idea of having the sound piped in so that I, on the street, do not have to hear it just because you in the car wish to.

So if you want your car to be loud and you have to make it so loud that it feels loud in the car when the noise maker part of the car is pointing back away from you. Then you're going to have to make that way louder. So I want them to pipe it in so that you feel like your car is super loud. The second thing is it's interesting that they're trying to make this. You hear the natural sound rather than the Volkswagen angle of like we just pipe it in through the speakers because it has to be this like natural thing or else people will be like, this is fake.

Yes. But I like the fake angle because then theoretically I can hack my car and make it sound like a pigeon. Well, that's great, Sari. I'm really impressed because that's like, I feel like that's a fairly deep cut from the car world. Yes. For a non-car person to find.

That was my hope. I was like, I want some car people to listen to this episode and feel satisfied afterwards. So I hope I taught you something. I like it. I like that there were so many different ways to do it, too. Everybody's got a different idea. But it's not as good as this fact. So automatic transmissions are great, and I use one and have never not used one. They were invented in the early 20th century and worked

really well for several decades with less than 1 million failures every year. But around 1975, the number of failures in automatic transmissions shot up to around 8 million per year. But around 1975, the number of failures in automatic transmissions shot up to around 8 million per year. Why? Because of the Endangered Species Act and import bans. What? So it turns out we all know what the Endangered Species Act is. It was passed to protect animals that were on the verge of extinction, including the sperm whale. What the heck does this have to do with automatic transmissions? Well, sperm

whale oil was used as the oil in automatic transmissions to keep them running smoothly up until 1975. It's been used a lot, this substance, in cars and ships

and other industries because it's really good at not oxidizing and maintaining a steady viscosity over a wide range of temperatures. But there's no way

to get sperm whale oil except to kill sperm whales. And so when we decided to stop doing that so much and also to ban the import of sperm whale oil from non-particip and also to ban the import of sperm whale oil from non-participating countries to decrease the demand on their population.

There just wasn't a way to get the oil. So car companies had a really hard time replacing that oil. Their initial attempts would corrode the fittings that connected the transmission's cooling unit to the radiator, causing oil to get into the radiator and antifreeze to get into the transmission. And that was really bad. GM had an informal arrangement to pay back the work that people had to do to fix this issue, which was around $2,000 in today's dollars.

If you had a problem like this, GM would give you the money. But there was no formal recall. But eventually, chemistry has a way to solve problems. And in this case, instead of sperm whales, we found the jojoba plant and its oil is unestered just like sperm whale oil. And that makes it distinct from many vegetable oils and it gives it a longer shelf life. And jojoba seeds are about 50% oil. But because there were not a lot of jojoba plants in production at the time, they just used that as a model for creating synthetic oils that would do the same job as the sperm oil

or the jojoba oil. And that was what we ended up using in cars to fix that problem. All right, everybody, time to make your assignments of points. So will it be Sari's fact some car manufacturers artificially and controversially enhance engine sounds because people like the vroom, or my fact, when car manufacturers

were no longer able to use sperm whale oil in transmission, they developed new fluids based on jojoba oil? Three, two, one. Hank. Sari? Yes. Ah, dang it. I wanted both of those.

I wanted both of those. I got Stephen Kargai Chin. Yeah. I didn't know about the sperm whale thing, though. How could you not give the point to the sperm whale thing if you didn't know about it? Well, because he likes noise. I'm a vroom vroom man, so I'm more personally invested in Sari's fact. Also the sperm whale oil went vroom vroom.

It made the cars vroom more. I also drive a manual, yeah. Yeah. That explains it. I don't need sperm whale oil. Yeah, just pump in that vroom sound and you're good to go. Yeah. And now it's time to ask the science couch.

We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at creb shouting, who says, I've always wanted to know why we settled on wheels, not tracks like a tank or legs like those in robots

that can navigate rough terrain. And why four? I think I can like clearly say legs is a harder problem to solve. Legs is bad, yeah. But, Sari, do you have anything on why wheels are better than tracks? I think for similar but less obvious reason than legs are complicated and expensive and difficult to balance. But tracks versus wheels, physics wise, give you different advantages. And most of the reading that I did on this had to do with tanks or construction equipment

because you don't see like consumer vehicles rolling around on tracks. But it seems like tracks are, as the name would imply, really good for traction and rough terrain and distribute the pressure across the ground better. So if you think of like a snowboard versus an ice skate where the ice skate has a really thin blade and like puts pressure and melts the ice. But also if you're like walking in snow, it'll probably sink in. But a snowboard, it distributes the pressure. So you can sit on top of the snow, even though it's still holding your weight. Tracks on snow can distribute the weight of the vehicle more, whereas wheels are more likely to sink in because they have four points of pressure.

But on the other hand, wheels are easier to control and turn. So it makes your vehicle more spry. And it's just like lower cost, lightweight, all things that vehicle manufacturers probably looked at and were like, ah, yes, why would I equip every single car with slow, expensive tracks when I could just do tires, which are cheaper and easy to replace? If you inflate a tire, it becomes the size it should be.

And it's important to have inflated stuff when we're driving because inflated things don't tear up the road, which is something that we don't often think about. It's like the impact of the tire on the road matters. And it would be difficult to have an inflatable track, too, that would wrap around these interior wheels because I think if you drove a traction track like a tank has on roads, if we were all doing that, the roads would need to be replaced every few months. Well, maybe we just wouldn't need roads.

And you could just roll around. Yeah, where we're going, we don't need roads because they've all disintegrated because we drive tanks now. That feels like something that we're going to look back on this episode in 10 years and be like, ah, Hank was right. He was ahead of the curve on everybody driving tanks. Yeah, the next step isn't flying cars. It's tanks.

So everyone can still go wherever they want, but we just haven't figured out how to lift off. Well, if Elon Musk has his way, the next step isn't flying cars. It's burrowing cars well i'll just have big drill bits on the front of our cars we can go anywhere we want i love that and the instability it'll lend to every single thing on this planet yeah yeah it'd be great we'll just drive right through the sewer pipes the water pipes telecommunications whatever i didn't know that that is like sincerely worrying to me that he thinks it's a good idea. He doesn't want individual cars to drill.

Oh, he just wants the tunnel. Yeah, he wants lots of tunnels. But for clarity, Sari, it's still a terrible idea. Yeah. If you photoshopped a Tesla with a drill and sent it to me in like a press release-y type article, I would think it was real. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question,

you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics from upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Aaron Winnick at Mads2103 and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final Sandbox scores! Sari and I tied for the lead. Sam and Stefan coming in just one point behind us, which leads us to Stefan and Sari still being tied.

Yeah, I really could have influenced that game by giving my point to Hank, but... Yeah, you could have. And it's not like I'm going to do anything with it because I am a full 10 points behind you guys. 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 helps us know what you like about the show and is also possibly good for an algorithm.

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. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Jin. 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 edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. 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. So everybody likes heated seats, right? And they warm up your butt because it's a butt fact. But also if you're somebody with testicles, they might warm up those too. So some researchers were wondering about that because heated testicles can be a problem. So in 2008, a group of researchers published their results following a study of 30 men who were asked to sit for 90 minutes on either a heated or unheated car seat and then had their scrotal temperatures measured. So men who sat on unheated seats averaged a scrotal temperature of 36.7 degrees Celsius. And those on heated seats had a scrotal temperature of 37.3 degrees Celsius. And those on heated seats had a scrotal temperature

of 37.3 degrees Celsius. So based on the results, the researchers suggested that hot car seats could impact semen quality, though they did not investigate further within this experiment. So I guess this doesn't just apply

to heated seats, but also like a real hot leather seat that you sit on. Well, scrotums are the most weird part of the body they sure are yeah