SciShow Tangents - Soft Things

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

Spring is a soft and fluffy time of year, what with all the baby chicks and bunnies bopping around, so we here at Tangents are seizing the opportunity to talk about the softest, cutest, most huggable science there is!Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner 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: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]MLB baseball yarn yardagehttps://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-woolhttps://bleacherreport.com/articles/1676509-the-evolution-of-the-baseball-from-the-dead-ball-era-through-todayhttps://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1958/04/09/83408264.html?pageNumber=43[Fact Off]Saturn moon Methone and fluffy icehttps://gizmodo.com/the-weird-ways-nasa-thought-moon-dust-might-kill-apollo-1836459545https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/overview/?page=0&per_page=40&order=name+asc&search=&placeholder=Enter+moon+name&condition_1=38%3Aparent_id&condition_2=moon%3Abody_type%3Ailikehttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23560-astrophile-saturns-egg-moon-methone-is-made-of-fluff/Milk fiber (made from casein)Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyLnKz7uNMQhttps://ecoworldonline.com/what-is-milk-fiber-yarn/http://article.sapub.org/10.5923.j.ajee.20190902.02.htmlhttps://www.milkgenomics.org/?splash=back-to-the-future-milk-fibers-in-the-21st-centuryhttps://www.ijcmas.com/abstractview.php?ID=7406&vol=7-4-2018&SNo=140https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lanital-milk-dress-qmilch[Ask the Science Couch]Cat fur vs dog furhttps://cdn.citl.illinois.edu/courses/ANSC207/week2/hair_coat/web_data/slides_and_notes.htmhttps://animaldiversity.org/collections/mammal_anatomy/hair/https://www.uakron.edu/im/news/how-biomechanics-research-led-to-a-hairbrush-inspired-by-a-cat-tonguehttps://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1809544115https://texaswolfdogproject.org/resources/phenotyping/what-is-phenotyping/coat-and-color[Butt One More Thing]Moth coremata butt feathershttps://www.wired.com/2013/12/this-is-not-a-penis/https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/beneficial/leps/bella_moth.htmPicture: https://www.mothidentification.com/creatonotos-gangis.htm

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 always, is sari reilly hello and our resident everyman sam schultz hello i'm gonna 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 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 you like them when they like them when they're basically just just potato yeah

that isn't that it's cooked it's It's wet cooked potato. Not wet. No. 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.

Uh-huh. The palest, just like hot. 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 is 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 Red Bulls. What? I didn't even know there were different. I didn't even know there were colors. Yeah. That's news to me. I had a 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.

Yeah. 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 pax like went to video game convention they were giving out cans of nos i had to look it up energy drink uh and i 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 no one's saving their nose for later. 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. Like I love spicy foods. I love tangy foods. I like stinky foods. I'm just 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 is like. Like footy cheese yeah stinky

food 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 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 is Sam going to rhyme with fluffy?

Humans can be rude, cruel, or huffy, but little babies, they're soft and fluffy. Oh, really? Science can come off as sort of old and stuffy, but SciShow Tangents, we're soft and fluffy. Hey! We are very soft. We're at least soft. I don't know how fluffy we are. The topic for the day is unfortunately not fluffy, but it is soft.

Soft things, things about softness. They are synonymous. They can go hand in hand in a way. I don't think so. I think to be fluffy, you have to have hairs, unlike a baby person. Everything that's fluffy is soft, though, right? Right? Everything that's fluffy is soft.

It's eye show tangents. Clouds. 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. Yeah. From the potential future of being wrong about something, which never happens. We haven't done it yet. No. Sari, 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.

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 and i said brunel the brunel scale had the pillows in it well i made up the pillow part it's like it's just uh the penetration of 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 is low on all these scales. Anything that's squishy, anything that bends, anything that flakes off is kind of 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? Yeah. Okay. So to jump ahead a little bit linguisticallyistically we use soft and hard as a pair of opposites in a lot of different cases so like 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, where there's 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 sara 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 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 got to say the word soft sounds like it's soft. Yes. It's definitely, it's like 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 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 a caveman word uh caveman word it's caveman full caveman it's from middle dutch so european ish from the root 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 uh there are different scales, as Sari 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 Mose 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 Mose 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 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 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 the 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 what topaz is. It's a rock. Well, I knew that. It's a cool rock.

It's like a yellowy orange one. Moe'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 Moe's scale. But it is soft compared to Topaz, one of Moe's reference minerals, that measures in at an 8. Oh. Diamond is 10. While Mo's 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. Oh, sounds like a page turner, doesn't it? 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 yeah you'd be in some sticky situations i think the gel insoles are softer here's the thing both of you have chewed on gummy bears neither you neither of you have chewed on gummy bears. 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 shamed 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 guess gummy bears a good gummy bear not stale if they were testing stale gummy bears it's the other way

i'm assuming not stale fresh freshy gummy bear fresh off the presses right out of the newspaper machine that's gonna 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 00 scale with a gel insole measuring at about 30, Shore 00, 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 Shore D, a textbook cover, 40, and bone at 90. Oh, wow. I don't know why 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. Okay. 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 just decrepit and falling to pieces. Because it's all a thousand years old. And it's more calcium carbonate or whatever is harder.

Yes, more calcium carbonate. So I think it's harder in Florida 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 Hillsborough 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 I 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. 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. I'm wrapping the baseball in my head. I feel like it would take a lot of wraps to get a single yard.

I'm going to guess 10 yards. I'm going to guess 20 yards. I don't know. You should have guessed 369 yards. What? 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. 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 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 like how do we know how do you know why didn't they shoot like another thing up there first and they did they did do that yeah and they still were kind of like, I don't know. Yeah, well they didn't land in the exact same place. 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. 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 is coming out on Easter. Have Easter everybody. Enjoy all your damn old eggs. Egg moon, egg moon. So moons are usually hard usually rocky usually covered in craters from the endless pummeling by hurtling 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.

Methone 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, 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 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. Yeah. 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. So Saturn's stealing bits of it, and there's a ring of Saturn that follows Methone's orbit that they think came from Methone. It's a 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 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 shirts they were 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 Lanitol brand and basically repurposing wasted or undrunk cow milk to make something useful. And in the 1950s in the U.S., 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 3 pounds of milk fiber. 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 yeah because because shirts do have a way of getting wet yeah like things the 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 you to 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 could be milk legos right couldn't they make milk legos if you can make yarn out of it you should be able to make like just a phone yeah just 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. 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 couch where we ask some listener

questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds con 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,

that's kind of all I got. Cause there's, but the way I got Pomeranian can be really fluffy too. I guess I don't, I can understand this question. Cause I do feel like I've never, like when you pet a dog, there's a little,

there's always a little coarseness there. I feel like I'm, and this is me speaking out of my ass, but I feel like every dog I've had, it has been a little bit like, there's a little bit of something, a little bit more grit to that dog. Yeah. I feel like there's maybe like, there's just like a dog's like, I has been a little bit like. There's a little bit of something. A little bit more grit to that dog. Yeah.

I feel like there's maybe like this, 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 and take a nap. I'm 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 chops 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 naked cats. So given that that is basically the same across both species, the cleanliness of that fur is the big difference 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 looks so fluffy extra fluffy they take so much maintenance to be that fluffy but the more interesting part i should 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 hairbrushes 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 Valkyrie or something? Yeah, kind of Valkyrie, 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, 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 just 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 papillae i don't know if they've ever marketed it though i they made it is it made for cats or can i use it on my uh 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 they try it on their own heads though oh i

don't i don't know i don't i found one it's called the the black hole real cat tongue textured grooming brush for man or beast for beast well i'll comb my hair with one if you buy it. All right, done. For the show. Do you want gray or pink? Pink is more tongue-like, so. Pink is more tongue-like, it's true. All right, done. Terrific.

I can't wait. It's going to hurt really bad is my guess. If you want to ask the Science Council your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at Kybernaka, at RaccoonRequired, 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 want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents 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 Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Emma Dowster. Our sound design is by 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 which or cormata or core i'm not entirely sure it comes from the greek corema 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 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!

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'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 until today they're oh nonsense they must have been filtered out via safe search 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. I can't forgive you for showing me this.