SciShow Tangents - Sticky Things

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Sticky seems easy, right? You step on gum, it sticks to your shoe, You put glue on paper, it sticks to other paper. It just works! But it turns out stickiness is one of those sneaky, impossible-to-explain science things that involves physics and atoms and stuff!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: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Exploding ant butts with toxic goohttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1A_nAQosWmC5o_jepXNJ0oc3RacjLK5qe1groWg34bL4/edit?usp=sharinghttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/animals-ants-borneo-exploding-defense?loggedin=truehttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/science/exploding-ants.htmlhttps://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=22661Sticky rice mortarhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ar9001944https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11431-008-0317-0https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2010/may/revealing-the-ancient-chinese-secret-of-sticky-rice-mortar.htmlhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/amylopectin[Ask the Science Couch]Frog tongueshttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/01/special-spit-is-the-secret-of-uniquely-sticky-frog-tongues-study-revealshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5332565/Picture of finger: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5332565/figure/RSIF20160764F1/[Butt One More Thing]Sucker-bum squidhttps://australian.museum/blog-archive/science/sucker-bum-squid-and-other-intriguing-molluscs

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and I'm joined this week, as always, by science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. Ready to be an expert about science. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. I have a question for the two of you. If you had a country, what would be on the $1 coin? Because there's not going to be a $1 bill that's a ridiculous idea, and there will be no pennies because we're all not monsters. But what's going to be be a $1 bill that's a ridiculous idea and there will be no pennies because we're all not monsters. But what's going to be on your $1 coin?

I think I would go very simple. I don't want to memorialize anyone or anything. My problem with coins is when they look too similar. I just want all of my coins to have a different color and maybe different shape i like yeah that's great the one dollar coin will just be a circle it'll get the standard shape because that feels like a very practical thing but then like half a dollar you'll get a square or something like that square and that way you'll be able to like look at a pile in your hand and be like oh i can count more easily what I have.

Yeah, it's good. I don't know if it would work. I don't know if it would work easily in the coin machines. But hey, this is ending. We're not doing that anymore. We're moving beyond. I'm just going to touch it with my cell phone or better yet, the microchip that's implanted in my pinky finger and then get my gumball that way when I'm five years old because that's when you get your microchip. What do you think, Sam? What's on your microchip? I mean, your coin. For me, the answer is simple. My beautiful wife.

Oh, wow. Now I'm going to look bad for not seeing my partner. So Rachel's on one side of the coin and then the other side it's uh the big number one to tell you how many how many dollars it's big number one yeah I like that every week here on tangents we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic our panelists are playing for glory and they're also playing for hank bucks which I'll be awarding as we play and at the end of every 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 schultz now what

the heck this isn't right for though i'm pulling with all my might and to the ground i seem to be sinking and this whole situation has got me thinking about just how I got into this mess of black sticky goo. And here's my best guess. A long time ago, some creatures all died and rotted away and left this smelly slime. Then it came up through the ground it bled and pulled up here to kill my ass dead. It's a marvel of nature. It's pretty darn neat. If only I weren't sinking down to my teats.

But oh well, I guess. It's no good complaining. I keep sinking faster the more that I'm straining. Maybe I'll rot and become one with the tar, and someone will sink into me. But for now, au revoir. Okay, nice. Our topic for the day is sticky things and sam went for a tar pit which is a very sticky

thing and also does kill things by being sticky well used to i guess maybe not anymore i don't know i bet i bet a bird will fly in there every once in a while yeah they're dummies and sticky sticky is an interesting thing people often ask me about sticky when they're asking me science questions they're like how does a bug stick to the ceiling which is a very different thing from actual stickiness and they ask about how like how how how glue works etc so it's not all the same thing like the stickiness of us of slime is not the stickiness of a bug's foot is not tape stickiness it does work differently and some andiness of a bug's foot. It's not tape stickiness. It does work differently. And sometimes like a bug isn't actually sticky.

It's just like hooked on. Okay. It's like holding on with its little fingers, basically. But is that stickiness? Like what is stickiness? It's like it won't let go of a thing. So I guess it's kind of stickiness. Anyway, that's not my job.

Sari, what is sticky? Well, you just set up how hard my job is because I was going to preface it with, I don't know. Like, there are so many stickies. What type of sticky are you talking about? In the bubble that I'm drawing, I also left out hooky things. Like, I am not considering Velcro as sticky. So, any bugs or objects that work like Velcro with, like, hooks and loops or hooks and, like, crevices, not sticky. But sticky is broken into two chemical words um adhesion and cohesion so adhesion is the binding force between two

different materials so like uh tape and the wrapping paper that you're wrapping a present with. But cohesion is the binding force between two similar materials. So like one glue molecule and its neighboring glue molecule. So I adhere to a cat because I would like to pet the cat, but the cat doesn't really care. Whereas I cohere to my wife because we would both like a hug. Oh, is that right? It sounds nice. I hope it's right.

I don't see why not. As a science expert, I say that's okay. There are a lot of people who study stickiness and it's a lot of like very smart physicists. So I apologize to them in advance because I'm not a very smart physicist. I'm like an average biologist. So I guess like the best way to explain something sticky is something like tape because that's, I think, what most people, if you thought of something sticky, it would be like glue or tape. And the way that that works is the glue molecules on the tape are held together by cohesion. So like the sticky side has some sort of like glue or adhesive material and cohesion is holding those molecules together. So they're all like bunched

up. And then when you squish tape onto a surface, the molecules spread out and get into all the little cracks and crevices of that surface. Like you don't often see them with your eyes. And this is why it's hard to tape something to like a very, very smooth surface because even our glass windows often have little pores in them. And so like the adhesive gluey stuff seeps into those and then adheres to it. And so there are adhesive forces between like the glass molecules or the paper molecules and the glue. So that when you try and peel it off, it's harder to, because there's like that stick. That's my best, that was my best explanation of sticky, but then there's different

like electrostatic stickiness, which is like electric forces holding things together. Gecko's feets work really... Gecko's little feets. Gecko feet work really in a different way. I think they involve some sort of electrostatic attraction, but also, like, maybe some mechanical adhesion or Vanderwall's forces, which are, like, interatomic forces holding things together. So, I don't know. There's a lot of sticky.

There's a lot of sticky. The wild thing is, like, if you're coming at this like i have a question about science you can ask a question it's like that's very simple and easy no problems and like but like which ones turn out to be complicated are like make no sense at all. It's like sound, not that complicated. Pretty simple, all mechanical, really easy to solve with pretty simple math. Light, no idea. Sorry, can't help with colors.

Colors are nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. At least light seems like it should be complicated because it's from space. So that's understandable. But like color doesn't seem like it should be complicated because it's from space. So that's understandable. But color doesn't seem like it should be complicated. I feel like an F sharp and red should be analogous. Okay, that makes sense. But it's a completely different situation.

There's still, I mean, weirdly enough, there's still wavelengths and stuff involved. But why is one thing red? It's all inside of the atoms. So then you're saying if someone says, why is sticky? Then there is no way to explain to them why is sticky. Yeah, why is sticky is complicated, especially because there's not one sticky. And also, like, is everything a little sticky? Kind of.

Yeah, yeah. We live in a sticky world. Is the Earth sticky because is is the earth sticky because gravity is holding us there that's a force holding us I don't like that

I don't want to I don't want to live on a sticky planet that's a weird stick it's kind of sticky though it's kind of we're not floating off of it

the weird thing is that it keeps being sticky even if I'm not touching it I like jump up and it's like I still stick welcome to space time. Enjoy your stay forever. Anyway, thank you for helping. Do you know where the word sticky

comes from? Oh, this is like medium interesting to me. Less so. But usually when I say something are uninteresting, then one of you asks a question that makes it interesting. That's a lot of pressure. So sticky as meaning like adhesive or to stick to something else came about in around 1727. I don't know where the text was. I tried

to find it, but 1700s. And that came from the verb stick which means to pierce or to remain embedded or to be fastened so like in the way that you could stick someone with like a spear you could also that became like you can stick a piece of paper to a wall and those like share the same verb yeah and then stickers whole separate thing we're like in the like the 1580s uh so like before sticky was a word what sticker was one who sticks so if you were like the man with the spear who like poked people then you'd be a sticker but

then sticker as in the adhesive thing that you can stick on walls is from as early as 1871, but probably not until like the early 1900s when someone named R. Stanton Avery patented the world's first self-adhesive die-cut labeling machine. self-adhesive die-cut labeling machine, which are like, instead of having to paste a label before putting it on something, it just came with like the peel-off backing that you can then stick to something. So sticker, as we know it, very recent word. But before it was a fun thing for children, it was a murder man.

Anyway, it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, I've got a game called This or That for you. And it's about sticky food. Because different kinds of foods are sticky. And it's important to understand the stickiness of food for the consumer. Some people like your food to be more or less sticky. Also for the processing of the food.

So for today's game of This or That, I'll be presenting you with a scientific method used to determine the stickiness of foods, followed by two foods that have been tested using that method. And you have to guess which of the two foods is stickier. Oh, okay. Our first way that we determine whether or not things are sticky is scientific-ish, but it is just people. There's a bunch of sort of like descriptive ways of measuring stickiness. In 2003, a study of

cheeses was published that explored the various properties of cheeses. It was a very long article, but one of the properties was stickiness. They also turned to a panel of 15 people who had been trained for about 10 hours on different techniques to evaluate cheeses. Then those people were given 1.27 centimeter blocks of cheese, and they were told to score them on various properties, including

stickiness, which was called chew-down adhesiveness, which describes, quote, the degree to which the chewed mass sticks to mouth surfaces. Okay. This sounds fun. There's two cheeses here.

There's mozzarella or Monterey Jack. They've both been aged for 38 days, which has the higher chew-down adhesiveness, according to this panel of 15 well-trained, though briefly trained, analysisers. This feels like a trick question because mozzarella is the stickiest of the cheeses. I'm trying to imagine eating both of them,

like biting into both of them, and which gets stuck in my mouth more. Like, of course, mozzarella is on pizza, but like if you just bite into like a mozzarella ball, that's not that sticky. That's a great point. What the heck is Monterey Jack like? It's like a sandwich cheese, I think.

I think you can be like, I want to slice a Monterey Jack on my sandwich. It's got a little more tooth to it, I imagine. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little more toothsome, a word that I learned from Top Chef. All right, I'm going to make you guys guess. Stop talking. Three, two, one. Monterey Jack.

You are both correct. It is Monterey Jack. I thought both correct. It is Monterey Jack. I thought we might get you with that because mozzarella is stretchy and that seems like a stickiness thing, but it's a separate thing from stickiness. Okay. So just because something can stretch doesn't mean that it's sticky. So yeah, Monterey Jack was a seven on the scale. It was a one to 15 scale. One was Parmesan.

Munster is a seven. Munster is a 7. Feta is a 12. And then processed cheese got a full 14. So Jack, Monterey Jack was a 7, and mozzarella was a 5 on that scale. That reflects my life experience. That reflects my life experience. This seems correct. Cheese scientists have it right.

Next, we have the texturometer, which is not what it's called. It is called the TAXT2, and it's been called the texturometer or the tachmeter. It's a device that uses a probe to touch. These people also make a bunch of different things that, like, squish stuff and, like, see how flexy it is. It's great. It's just a thing that feels analytically um it basically just pokes stuff for a living and that the texturometer basically just puts like a little probe into the thing and then pulls it out and measures how much it it gets pulled back as it's

taking the thing out of the out of the thing. And it was originally used for dough stickiness. And when the two scientists in 95, they published Development of an Objective Method for Dough Stickiness. And since then, it seems like these devices that are used in food labs have done very well. So congratulations to those people who figured this out. But which is stickier? We've got dough, and I'm sorry I did not have a bunch of,

I wish I could have found a broader category of objects for this, but no. Dough or dough that has been prepared with microbial transglutaminase, an enzyme that helps to cross-link gluten. What kind of question is that? The regular or or cross-linked gluten dough three two one the normal though you are both correct the dough that was prepared with the microbial transglutamase was less sticky possibly because the matrix like held in the water better and those so there was less water around to make the dough sticky. You want a dough to be not sticky but stretchy, I imagine, right? I think you want it to be less sticky, yeah.

I'm imagining when I'm making dough, I don't want it to be sticking to me. I want it to be stretchy. I've been sourdough bread baking like everyone else on the planet. But it starts out stickier the like, the less you need it. And then as you need it, it gets into, like, a clump. And that's because your mechanical action of it is shifting the molecules around and, like, forming more gluten. Right. And so you, like, gluten cloak your bread, like, this one step where you, like, pull up the sides around it.

And, like, it gets less and less sticky the more you need it because you're forming the gluten strands. Well, Sari knew that one hands down. You would have bet $10,000 on that. Yeah, probably. Well, I don't have $10,000. If I could bet into like a sink, like I'll bet $10,000 and then just win it,

then hell yeah. You were ready to gamble on that, you would have gone on margin all right our our last method for measuring stickiness is about powders because even powders can be sticky and that's important because they can stick to each other they can also stick to packaging so one way to measure this stickiness is called the sticky point temperature and that's the temperature at which powders begin to cake together. And that sticky point temperature is measured by sealing a powder in a tube with a device that has blades that stir the powder up,

and then the tube is immersed in a water bath, and then the temperature is slowly raised until the blades suddenly need more force to stir, which is because the powder has started caking. There's some scientists out there doing some wacky shit, huh? Right? Well, this is all very important. It's wild to think this is all the stuff that is necessary to get us

our powdered cheese stuffs. You know, you gotta get that Cheeto dust to the Cheeto factory somehow. So, which is stickier? Instant coffee powder or tomato soup powder? Three, two, one, answer.

Coffee. Tomato soup. The answer is instant coffee powder. Sticky point temperature goes up with increasing molecular weight, and tomato soup powder has a higher molecular weight than instant coffee powder, making it less sticky. So that means Sam Schultz got three points and Sari got two. Congratulations, Sam, going into the fact off with a lead for once. Next up, we're

going to take a short break and then it will be time for the fact off. Sorry, was I a little rough on you? A little rough on you there? Dig in there. Welcome back, everybody. Again, Sam is in the lead, one point ahead of Sari, and it's time for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they've presented the facts, I will judge and award them Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Modern beekeepers owe much to Ukrainian beekeeper Petro Prokopovich for his invention of the movable

frame hive, which allows beekeepers to extract excess honey from the hive. But honeybees aren't just famous for their sticky honey. They are also known for sticking by their queen. And Petro studied this bee swarm behavior and used his knowledge to become the first person to ever model a bee beard by placing the queen on his chin and allowing her hive to swarm on his face what a fun man thank you very much ukrainian beekeeper what decade did this uh first bee beard occur in i have no clue when were people having fun with bees this seems could be like a medieval thing almost to me or yeah you have no other games to play so you have have bees. I mean, I guess the Ukraine had to exist. Oh, that's true.

I don't know what that was, though. I'm going to go with 1880. Okay, I'm going to go with 19... Sam is the winner! Sam is the winner! It was 1830, the first bee beard, which is significantly before I would have assumed. So, Sam, you get to decide who presents first in our fact off. I'm just going to go first.

Do it. In the rainforest canopies of Borneo, you'll find ants of all shapes and sizes. One of these is the weaver ant, which build themselves nests of leaves with sticky silk. But weaver ants aren't the sticky ants that I want to talk about today, and instead I would like to talk about a species of ant that weaver ants love to bully, eat, kill in various different ways. Colobopsis explodens are tiny, unassuming ants that have little, little, tiny, almost invisible mandibles that you can't even really see that make them not very good at fighting. Weaver ants are big and they have huge chompers.

So they just kind of like walk around picking on sea explodens and they battle them and eat them and steal their territory. territory. But while C. explodens might have teeny tiny chompers that you can't see, they do have unusually large mandibular glands, which are sort of like salivary glands of insects. And in ants, the fluids that the mandibular glands make are very specialized. Like some of them make alarm pheromones or some make toxins to make a painful bite. And C. explodens makes a sticky, yellow, toxic goo, but they are not using their mandibles to inject this goo like other ants do. So C. explodens' mandibular gland is so big that it runs through their entire body, including into their big old ant butt, known as their gaster. So when these ants, like home, is being attacked,

either by weaver ants or by any other kind of like unfriendly bug. A team of these sea explodons will latch on to the enemy bugs, clench their butts so hard that they, as you may have guessed from the name, explode. And they coat the enemy with sticky mandibular gland secretions like this yellow goo. When they explode, how do they feel? Well, they feel dead. Okay. Just making sure.

Okay, continue. They explode their asses and die. So the bad bug is immobilized by the goo, and I think more sea explodons will then come and probably tear it limb from limb, or if they don't do that, the animal coated with the goo will die later, most likely, since the goo is a chemical irritant. But to humans, the goo is harmless and it apparently smells like curry.

So there's like a dozen other types of exploding ants in the Colobopsis family that have been studied a little bit and science has known about them since 1916. But for whatever reason, people didn't really like study them in a ton of detail until recently it seems like and c. explodens which was officially named in 2018 was the first new species found since 1935 but people were really excited about it because these ants like to explode not like to tend to explode way more way more frequently than other exploding ants do. Like I think a lot of exploding ants use it as like the last line of defense, but C-explodents just kind of like explode whenever.

And if exploding butts weren't weird enough, there's a whole other hyper-specialized type of C-explodents ant. So the exploding guys are called minor workers, but there's also major workers and major workers have huge heads that are pretty much shaped like corks. And when a sea explodent's nest is attacked, the minor workers latch on to things and explode. But the major workers go to the entrances of the nests and they plug the holes up with their giant heads. That's very cool and i mean we all understand that like these colonial insects aren't really individuals they are out to protect genetic information in a very different way than we do

but the results of that keep being weirder the more I hear about colonial insects and like it's just it's making it work we're making like life makes life work and sometimes it makes it work by blowing your butt up like when is the first time I guess you get like better and better at like being nearly exploded

you gotta have like an evolutionary direction for that to go and until you're so good at it you can do it yourself. All right, Sari. You've got a pretty big deficit to overcome here. I'll try and convince you with my passion for this food. I love food. Yes.

Love food. Especially sticky rice, a.k.a. glutinous rice. It's delicious. I ate it a lot growing up because it's commonly used in east and south asian cultures so my mom made really good sticky rice but it's also at like dim sum in various forms and mochi in japan which is becoming more popular in the u.s i don't know i'm trying to name like foods that a lot of people have eaten and it's called glutinous not because it contains gluten but because it's glue like or sticky sticky when cooked. And this is because the sugars

in sticky rice are almost entirely amylopectin instead of amylose. So amylopectin is a highly branched molecule that is in starch, which contributes to its physical stickiness. And also the chemical structure makes it a little bit insoluble in water. And it's naturally in lots of waxy plant starches that are used as thickeners. But I'm not just talking about sticky rice as a delicious concept. It was also used in China around 500 CE as an innovative building material. What? Specifically, builders took an inorganic compound called calcium hydroxide, heated it up, and exposed it to water to make slaked lime. That was pretty standard. called calcium hydroxide, heated it up, and exposed it to water to make slaked lime. That

was pretty standard and one of several ways to prep lime mortar, which is a paste used to bind bricks or stones and seal the gaps between them. But at some point, someone was like, hey, let's mix in some sticky rice soup and see if it makes our mortar better. And thanks to amylopectin and the microstructures it formed with the calcium hydroxide, it had more strength and water resistance than the lime mortar. The sticky rice mortar was used in tombs, pagodas, and walls, including the Great Wall of China. And the proof is in the buildings because some of these structures, like the Great Wall of China, are still standing today. And material scientists are even considering using sticky rice mortar as a restoration tool because it's better than standard lime mortar for repairs, according to at least one set of experiments. Wow.

So it's not something they use anymore? No, I think like modern building materials are better. Like we have other mixtures of mortars and a better understanding of chemistry. But back in the day, were like well we know lime mortar is a thing and then some people were like let's add sticky rice well rice is sticky better try that my my true hope for all uh like building materials is that there's something that we can find that's better than what we're using now because what we're using now is both very good and also very impactful on the environment and if we could do that with rice instead that would be dope yeah and we can eat them that would be another good goal for a building

so sari are you saying i can eat the great wall is that no i think it's still mostly taste brick like the bricks are not made of it you can maybe lick the like the little cracks between the bricks and maybe taste and stick your eyes i don't know thank you for the advice don't tell the officials that stop you yeah i'm going to the great wall everybody all tangents listeners they go to the great wall and they're and then they the police are like what are you doing and they said Sari Reilly said I could lick the cracks. Yeah. So I have to choose a winner.

Should it be sticky rice used as a mortar in all kinds of building materials, including in the Great Wall of China or should it be that there is a kind of ant who can explode its own ass and coat its enemies with sticky goo?'m sorry sari but

sam came out in the lead on both of the games today yeah and it's emerging victorious i needed this which means it's time to ask the science couch where we've got a listener question for our virtual couch of finally honed scientific minds it's from at pax Zinka, I think. How does a frog's tongue work? Do you know this? I don't. Sam, do you know this? No. I don't know.

You know what I mean. I don't know. Why would I know this? Is it, Sari, are they sticky? They are sticky. Okay. In multiple ways, in fact. I've linked the paper in the show notes.

And I recommend, these scientists were great at writing. I love them. Like, for example, one of the lines from it is, touching the frog tongue with a finger, as shown in figure 1D, indicates that the tongue is quite sticky, similar to marshmallow or chewing gum. So descriptive. This is all I wanted to know about frogs' tongues. Thank you, scientists, for doing this.

And so it's sticky for two different reasons. One, frog tongues, apparently, are one of the softest biological materials known. They're about 10 times softer than a human tongue. And they're just like these pillowy structures. So they can bounce back and forth. They can work like a bungee cord. That's why they like fling out. And they can also deform around their prey.

So like they're so soft that kind of like when you smoosh your head into like a really soft pillow, their tongue smooshes around the bug and like envelops it in flesh. So bugs are experiencing the soft, almost the softest thing they possibly could right before their death. It probably feels kind of hard

in the way that when you like hit someone with a pillow in a pillow fight, it hits at a very high velocity. But for a moment, they might be really comfy in between the pain. And then secondly, the saliva,

which is also quite thick and it changes its viscosity. So it's considered a non-Newtonian fluid, which we defined in one of our bonus episodes kind of haphazardly. And I'm going to define it haphazardly now, which is just basically a fluid that doesn't behave according to like regular physical laws. When it hits the prey, the saliva flows. It's like really flowy and seeps into the crevices of the prey. But then as its tongue pulls back, then the mucus molecules in the saliva solidify basically and make it really easy for the frog to pull it back. So there's a lot of grip when its tongue is retracting. And then it flows again when the frog swallows.

So there are moments where it is acting like a liquid, and there are moments when it is like really, really grippy. Wow. That's what you want. If you're a frog tongue, how do I touch a frog tongue? I'm curious now. I want to touch this very soft thing. Got to go back to college, I guess.

Learn about frogs more. Be a frog scientist. Get a job at a frog lab. That seems to be the only way. Yeah. If you want to ask the science cows your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Thank you to at Jeffffro.vt at holy and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, there's several ways you can do that. You can become a patron at patreon.com slash scishowtangents. You can get access to things like our newsletters and our bonus

episodes where we go deeper on a bunch of questions and take questions from patrons. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That 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 Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Pygmy squids live in seagrass where they use an adhesive patch on the back of their body to stick themselves to seagrass blades. This feature has led some scientists to call them the sucker bum squid. Cool. It's too bad we didn't

get to evolve suckers. What I want is to be able to like hold my, just like stick my coffee to my arm and not have to eat, like so I can free up my hands to do something else. That's actually very, that sounds very dangerous. Not the best application. I'm definitely gonna spill that on me.

Yeah.