SciShow Tangents - Summer Road Trip Compilation

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Summer is just around the corner, with all its golden-hued evenings, icy-cold treats, groovy music, and winding roads laden with promises of adventure. If you're heading out on an epic summer road trip, bring this Tangents compilation along for the ride and squeeze in some learning between roadside attractions and snack stops! Episodes in this compilation: S1 E14 - The Sun, original airdate: February 12, 2019 S2 E7 - Radio, original airdate: December 24, 2019 S2 E40 - Cars, original airdate: September 8, 2020 S3 E36 - Heat, original airdate: November 2, 2021 S4 E14 - Beaches, original airdate: June 14, 2022 Sources for each episode can be found in the descriptions of the original episodes on your preferred podcasting platform. And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials: Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social @rhinoceri on Instagram Sam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social @im_sam_schultz on Instagram Hank: @hankgreen on X

INTRO Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, we've got another special guest! Producer of SciShow, head of all of production and stuff, Cailon Hoffmeister. How you doing? Good, hi! How are you?

Good, I'm great. What's your tagline? Cucumber melon. Mm, we've also got as usual, Sam Schultz chewing on some nuts it looks like. Well, passing that residue. Sam, what's your tagline? Thinking about Garfield.

Mm. Always. And we've also got Sari Riley here, general science communicator, writer person. How are you doing, Sari? I'm okay, tired. We're all very tired. This has been a long day for everybody in the office.

Everybody's trying to get ready for all of the content that we have to produce. And Sari, you got a tag on for me? Fruit nuggets. Is it deep fried? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. It could be good, it could be bad. I imagine it's like the little things on a raspberry.

Each one is a little fruit in them. Oh, that sounds nice. It's whatever you want it to be. I like that. And I'm Hank Green. And my tagline today is personal pan person. They're all food. Why? They're always all food. I don't know. It's what's on our minds, I guess.

It's almost dinner time. So, if you want to know what's going on, this is SciShow Tangents. And every week, four friends get together. Five, really, because we have a producer in the room silently staring at us. Hi, Tuna. Good wave. We get together, we try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with facts about the world and how we found out those facts about the world. And we're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks.

So we do everything we can to stay on topic, but the podcast is called SciShow Tangents, so it is possible that we will not be great at that. So you can go on a tangent, but if the rest of the crew deems that that tangent was unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your Hank bucks. So tangent with care, everyone. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari Reilly. Twinkle twinkle little star, actually average is kind of what you are.

And when you're refracted by the atmosphere, it's pretty, but not always sparkly, I fear. Our gassy glowing sphere of light helping helping some birds steer mid-flight, damaging ourselves with UVB, or making us sneeze photically. But thanks, I guess, that should be said, because without you, son, we'd be dead. Oh, man. You know what I hate is when people up the game.

We need to do more bad science poems. I thought this was a bad science poem. I wrote it so a bad science poem. You wrote it so quickly with rhymezone.com, not fun. Yeah, I'm sure you found a photically on rhymezone.com. I thought I made it up, but Merriam-Webster says it's a real word. Yeah, the problem is, you know, too much science and you're a writer. So you bring way too much to the table.

I don't know how you got on this podcast. You hired me. So you definitely, 100% get a Hank Buck for that science poem. So we're talking about the sun. Yeah, so the sun is the topic today. Sari, define the sun for us. Well, it's a star. Its gravity affects all the planets and space debris in our solar system.

We're specifically talking about the sun, meaning the debris in our solar system. We're specifically talking about the sun, meaning the star in our solar system. Capital S sun. Capital S sun. People like to call other stars suns, but we're wrong. Wait, are they not? I think they are. I think.

Okay, they are suns. Are there other solar systems? They're not the sun. Or are they star systems? We call them. Because our sun is soul, right? Yes. But it is also the sun, capital S, the? Because our sun is Sol, right? Yeah. But it is also the sun, capital S, the sun is our sun.

Yes. Other suns have other names. Yes. I think they're more often referred to as star systems. So disclaimer, astronomy is not my background. Everything that I know is. But it's like if there's a guy named Guy. He is a guy, but he's named Guy.

The son is a son named Son, right? Yes, sure. Yeah, but Sam is a guy, but if I go to Sam's house, I'm not going to Guy's house. Right, but if he was named Guy, you would be going to Guy's house and a Guy's house. That's what's up with the son. It is a son named Son.

As a Guy? I can't, it hurts. I call it guy. But like that's just me and I don't like to admit that to anyone. But for the rest of this podcast, we're gonna be calling it guy. Just in case.

Our buddy guy. Our buddy sky guy. Sky guy. He's a yellow dwarf star. Oh, dwarf. Yeah. It's quite big to me. It's quite big, but actually pretty average in the scale of different kinds of stars. What does that mean? What does a dwarf part, does that refer to the size of it?

Yeah, it refers to the luminosity of it. It's weird. I had no idea how nomenclature works in astronomy, but it's technically a GV star So G is a spectral classification and that's how hot it is So because it has a surface temperature around 6,000 Kelvin that puts it in the G category of stars and then the V is Luminosity and that's Roman numerals from I on the way up. And that is like how bright it is. And so like I is a super giant stars, and then it becomes II, and II is bright giants,

III is an ordinary giant, IV is a subgiant, and then V is a ordinary main sequence star or like dwarf stars fall in that category. Which is really weird. So they're only giants and dwarfs or are they dwarfs? Sounds like. Yeah. It's either. You're a binary, you're a giant or a dwarf.

In stars, yeah. I feel like we have adequately defined our topic for the week. The Sun is a guy named Guy and we are now, it's time to go on to Truth or Fail. Truth or Fail is a portion of our podcast where one of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and our enjoyment, but only one of them is real. The other panelists have to figure out which one is real, either by deduction or wild guess. And if we get the true fact, we get a Hank Buck. If we are tricked, then Sam, our Truth or fail presenter today, gets the Hank Buck.

Sam, are you ready for some sun facts? I don't know how it's gonna go. This was hard. I thought this was really hard. In my research of the sun, I was like, we know too much about the sun. Yeah, it's boring. Old guy. Recently, there's been a lot of talk about scientists proposing we dim the Sun. Which is just kind of a clickbaity way it seems like to say,

shield the Earth from the full effect of the Sun. Not like shoot a laser into it and make it dimmer or something like that. Just go there with a backhoe and like take some mass out. Yeah. The Sun does not need all of this hydrogen. It's too darn big and hot. Well, so there have been lots of fairly prominent proposals on how to dim the sun. So which ones of these aren't real and which ones is real? Okay, so wait.

There's only one real one. Only one is real, okay. Batteries of rail guns continuously shooting explosive payloads full of sun deflecting smog into the atmosphere. A fleet of autonomous boats sailing theing smog into the atmosphere, a fleet of autonomous boats sailing the ocean shooting mist into the atmosphere, or man-made volcanoes spewing sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Boy. Say the rail guns again. Batteries of rail guns continuously shooting explosive payloads full of sun

deflecting smog into the atmosphere. So do you know what a rail gun is? Some kind of magnetic force propulsion gun. Yeah. I know, I play a lot of video games. Vulcan Raven uses a rail gun in Metal Gear Solid, so I know what that is. Is he like a portable handheld one? He's very large. He's a big man.

So yeah, it's basically an electromagnetic cannon. Yeah. It's like accelerates a lump of metal to a very high speed. I'm not entirely sure how like it would shoot smog up. But like if you got something going fast enough, it's gonna like incinerate, basically. So like the compression wave ahead of it is going to get so hot that the slug just might burn all the way up. Yeah. So that could be a thing where... Could be.

What is mist was the second one with boats? Yeah. A fleet of autonomous boats sailing the ocean shooting mist into the atmosphere. That seems like it would disperse to me. It also seems like it would be it would make the problem worse. Like water vapor is a greenhouse gas. We shouldn't put more of that in the atmosphere. But maybe, I did hear once that the planes, those clouds you see that planes make, which I can't remember the name of.

Contrails. Contrails. Thank you. You know, that are full of mind controlling chemicals and stuff. Yeah. That like those actually significantly decrease the temperatures of places where there are lots of them. So there's certain times of the year

when they're much more common, when it gets colder specifically, and there are certain places where they're much more common because they're just like on air routes and that they are actually a significant enough blocker of solar radiation that it might actually decrease temperatures in some places.

But that's not creating new water vapor in the atmosphere. That's just turning the water vapor into little droplets or little ice crystals. Right. The boats is? No, with the airplanes. With the airplanes. But with a boat, that would seem like making new water vapor, which seems counterproductive probably.

But I have heard something about autonomous boats. Which that just sounds not fun. I know the ship tracks are a thing. So in the same way that planes release contrails, ships create clouds behind them called ship tracks and they crisscross the seas. And so I don't know if that is what this is referring to or if it's an entirely separate like sprain mist in the air.

It could be. I think maybe what I, this might've been in a science fiction book, but something about autonomous boats pumping water vapor out in particular areas because they were trying to like restart the jet stream or something. Maybe. I don't remember. I read a lot of science fiction books in my life. But I feel like we should answer the question. It's either-

Do you want to hear the last one again? Yeah. Volcanoes? Oh yeah. What would sulfuric acid do? Sulfuric acid is definitely good for lowering the temperature of one again? Yeah. Volcanoes? What would sulfuric acid do? Oh yeah, we have to... Sulfuric acid is definitely good for lowering the temperature of the earth. Sulfur compounds have previously lowered the temperature of the earth.

This is a thing that we know from the geological record and from volcanoes, that when there's, you know, sulfur gets in the atmosphere, it creates compounds that reflect solar radiation back. And that has been the cause of like famines and stuff. But since we know it works and since also like, you know, well, the earth spews sulfur in the atmosphere sometimes and like, so will we, we'll just do the same thing. I don't know what a manmade volcano is though.

You said a manvade volcano? It's just an oil derrick. Yeah, so they're just gonna dig a hole until they hit the mantle yeah and then they'll come out. It's like the big things at the beginning of a Blade Runner you know? The big pyramids with the flames shooting out the top. Okay. I mean I like that one but I don't think we're planning on building man-made volcanoes but I don't know do you mean like a thing that is like a man-made volcano? And spews out a similar amount of sulfur compounds?

Yeah, I guess that's what I was imagining, but that you would maybe decorate it like your middle school project. Or build it so it's super good at shooting out sulfuric acid, you know? I feel like, this is the trap again, I feel like if man-made volcanoes were a headline, I would have seen it I would have known about it. I don't know. I've been like what the fuck are we doing as humans? Yeah, don't do that. Yeah When we're already afraid of them erupting so where would you even put one? I don't know. I'm gonna put them in good places where there aren't people. Yeah Middle of the ocean. It's fine. Yeah. Okay, so we've got rail guns

Yeah. Middle of the ocean. It's fun. Fine. Yeah. Okay, so we've got rail guns, shooting smog, autonomous boats shooting mist, volcanoes shooting out sulfuric acid. I'm gonna go with volcanoes. Oh no. Okay, I'm gonna go with rail guns. Okay. No. Okay, well, I'm just, I'm gonna go with boats then. We're just gonna spread it out. Yeah, because I can't decide, so that's how I'm doing it.

Katelyn gets a Hank book. Oh no! What? What happened to my fists? So they're called Albedo. Is that what it is? Albedo. Albedo yachts.

Okay. And this is a proposed fleet of ships that would drift around the world under their own power with huge wind powered rotors pushing columns of saltwater spray up into the air. Cause saltwater makes denser, wider clouds that would reflect more sun. And it's called marine cloud whitening is the process. Oh wow.

So that's one of the ideas that they have. But if we ever stopped doing it, everything would go back to normal within two weeks. So we'd have to keep the boats in good order forever. But so they're worried that as boats get cleaner, they make less of the clouds that Sari was talking about. So they're worried that that is such a major way to reflect light back, that they need to replace it with something.

And that's one of the ideas that they have, is to replace it with that. So I accidentally wrote one that was real as I was researching it. Originally, they were rail guns that shot, well, the rail gun part I learned later, but they were gonna shoot, I wrote that they shoot satellites into the air

with mirrors on them that could fly around and reflect the sun wherever they needed to. Then I read about this other proposal where they would shoot trillions of AI-controlled satellites into the air, but they wouldn't have mirrors, they would have lenses on them, and they would make a big lens in space

that would diffuse the sun before it got to us. Like a big Fresno lens. Nice. I love it. But they would have to shoot 20 million into space every five minutes for 10 years, which is why. Every five minutes for 10 years. Well, I don't know, maybe you can get more than 20 million at a time. Well each gun would shoot one million and they'd need 20 guns.

With a rail gun. Yeah, so that's why they need the rail guns. Because you can't do that, well you could send up just like a big payload and a falcon or something. Maybe, I don't know. They wanted to use the rail guns really bad. They're like, we got these 20 rail guns. We might as well use them. So they would form a long cylindrical cloud, the diameter of the earth and 10 times longer

and diffuse 10% of the sunlight before it got to us. I mean, that might be good because you could like focus where the light was going. So if there was like a big hurricane, you could be like, stop pointing the light at the hurricane spot. Whoa, that sounds very dangerous and cool. It sounds awesome.

It sounds very Star Trek The Next Generation. It sounds like we could really mess up bad. And the man-made volcano thing kind of ties in with the plane thing that you were talking about. There's another idea to retrofit commercial airliners with sulfuric acid tanks. So they would shoot sulfuric acid out behind them as they went and make denser clouds. Yeah. But then I read if geoengineering were halted all at once there would be a rapid temperature and

precipitation increase at five to ten times the rate from gradual global warming. Why would that be? So if we started geoengineering and then stopped it. I don't know man. Okay. I saw this in a couple articles Well, it sounds like whoever did that study you need to read this the paper man. Oh, okay Sounds like why would that be? It doesn't seem like that would make it like Stopping it would make it suddenly happen faster to me But well, it's like when you use affrin, the nasal spray, and like, you're like, my nose is running

and then you use affrin, and then like, it's great for like two hours and then your nose runs even more. It's like that. Oh, okay. That's what the paper said, now that you mention that. It's like affrin for the earth. Yeah, so I got two books.

I got zilch books. I have one from the poem. I have one from the autonomous boat. Now let's go get some real bucks. Welcome back! Hank Bucktotals, Ceri has one, I have zero, Sam has two, Caitlin has one, and now it is time for the Facts Off, where two of our panelists have brought science facts to present to the other panelists in an attempt to blow their minds. The people receiving the facts each have a Hankbuck to award to the fact they like the

most. If they hate the facts, they can throw those Hankbucks in the trash. And I and Caitlin are gonna present our science facts. And we're gonna do that by the person who most recently got a sunburn. Oh, that is probably me because I always get sunburns. I haven't had a sunburn in like three years because I am extremely careful. I'm pretty careful, but I think I got a sunburn probably in like May or June. Once you have a baby, you go like very careful about putting all of their sunscreen on and

then you're like, well, we're here, we're doing it. Might as well get myself too. If he needs it so bad. Yeah. All right, Caitlin, what's your fact? Okay. During the Vietnam War, the US Navy developed and planted destructor mines off the coast of North Vietnam. And several of the bombs were a type

of magnetic influence sea mines that would be triggered when they detected changes in the magnetic field. So they're invented by the British just when they detected a change in the magnetic field above them. But by the 70s, they would go off when they felt an increase and then a decrease. Okay.

So it was like when ships would go over them. So they didn't just wait for an increase, they needed both the increase and the decrease. Yeah, and so on August 4th, 1972, a US aircraft was flying near the naval minefield off of Han La, Vietnam. And over the course of about 30 seconds, they observed 20 to 25 unplanned

explosions of these mines. And they saw 25 to 30 mud spots of possible earlier explosions. But they think what caused these explosions is those mines going off because of a solar storm that happened on August 4th, 1972. And it included an X-class solar flare, which is the biggest solar flare. And this one, it actually, there was like in the 1800s, there was a huge solar storm that it's everybody kind of measures against to talk about, but this one wasn't as big as that, but the X class solar flare made it to earth in 14.6 hours, which usually like that's four to six times faster than it would

usually take like solar wind ticket to earth. So super fast. So they think that this solar storm was just, it wasn't that powerful, but it was just really fast. Cause some of the solar flares kind of cleared space for this one to be really fast. So they changed the magnetic field over those mines really rapidly. And so they thought it was a boat. They thought, quote unquote, thought it was a boat and then they all exploded and the code name for deploying the mines was called Operation pocket money, so I think you should give me your Hank All right, so that is amazing so my fact is also about a solar flare So solar flare is part of the reason they change like if they induce a magnetic field

They induce a current because like it's coming to the earth and the earth is spinning. So the objects on the earth, whereas the charged particles aren't spinning, they're coming straight toward us and the magnetic fields aren't spinning. So we spin in the magnetic field of this solar like corona mass ejection or whatever. And that induces an electric current, which would probably be the thing that that mind is sensing, like looking to sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Great job.

We should make all minds have some kind of way that we can do like a mass. Blow them all up. Blow them all up. Yeah, seems like a good idea. Seems like a good idea. Maybe we should just let Guy do it. Yeah.

Yeah. It does sound like you're saying God. So Sky Guy. Sky Guy. Sky Guy. So like every, solar and also solar flares happen in like, like very, as far as we can tell, very regular cycles.

And so there's just like a period of like, if the mine has been on the earth for, through a solar flare cycle, it's exploded. It's a little bit scared away. Yeah. Is this the first time we've created mine? Like these mines were specifically created to track ships and changing magnetic fields? No, they existed in like World War I and World War II, but this is the first time they went

off. They had detonators, they had like self-destruct things that would happen after a certain amount of time, but this happened like 30 days before their self-destruct activation was supposed to happen. So at least it could be, this was declassified information. So there could be things that inadvertently exploded because of the sun. Cool. So by fact, in 2012, what may have been the largest ever, well, it probably was the largest ever coronal mass ejection happened.

So the sun spat out this coronal mass ejection that was so hot and spicy that it very nearly was a global catastrophe for the earth. So solar flares, they're a thing. And it's like, I'm not going to explain how magnetic fields in the sun work because I don't know. But when they, when all the magnetic fields bubble up in the right way, the sun will just burp out like literal billions of tons of high energy plasma traveling at roughly 1% the speed of light. And these charged particles will then slam into our

magnetosphere. They dent it, they distort it, and then they interact with our electronics. And scientists think that if this particular 2012 burp had hit us—and it just happened to not, that the solar flare was facing the opposite direction from us—it would have likely knocked out our communication satellites, possibly made it so that there would be areas of the Earth where power was not restored for months or even years. It was a global disaster that we missed because of pure luck. So it was better odds than a coin flip that it would miss us, but more like a one in four

chance that we would have been hit by that flare. But it came out of the side of the sun facing away from us, so instead of a global catastrophe, in 2012, scientists talked about it and no one else noticed. Will we know if this is going to happen to us? Yeah, but with like, not a lot of notice. Okay, and nothing really can do about it. There is nothing you can really do about it. Okay. So here's the thing, there maybe are things you can do about it,

but we have not put any of them into place. Okay. So we would need a system for like literally disconnecting power supplies. So like taking transformers offline, and there's really nothing we can do to protect the communication satellites. But the biggest concern is that like if every transformer in America blows up simultaneously, it replacing that and fixing them, because it's like, you can't really fix them. It's like all of the copper wires in them just-

They're either broken or they're not broken. Yeah. So you'd need to replace them all and that would be a long, long time. And events like this is that like, it matters which side of the earth is facing the sun when they happen. So it's like, it's not global.

It's whichever part of the, so it could just like hit the Pacific Ocean and it wouldn't be as big of a deal. It would still affect a lot of people, obviously. Hawaii would be in bad shape, particularly, and also probably coasts of both of the sides of the ocean. But like, if it hit like smack on, you know, Beijing, that would be much, much worse.

I guess this is like a magnetosphere question, but how, like, would you see effects of electronics across the globe or is it so, so targeted that it's only like within a certain radius of where the solar flare? It, yeah, so it depends on a lot of qualities of the mass ejection. So you have the speed at which the particles are traveling,

you have the sort of like wavefront, how thick the wavefront is. So it can be like a sustained, like being hit constantly. And so the earth could like spin and have it basically cover the whole planet. But that's usually a lower intensity event when the wavefront is more spread out. What I didn't realize is I was sort of imagined

that when these happened, it was like a laser beam. And so like, and it could happen at any angle. So the sun's shooting them up into the, into the up, down, up and down and side, and they're just like very focused, but they're actually come out more like a big, like a big ripple in a pond. And by the time they hit Earth's orbit,

like when it's on the surface of the sun, it's fairly narrow, but it ripples out. And by the time it hits Earth's orbit, it covers roughly a quarter of like the orbit of the Earth in the sort of like animation that because it was 2012, NASA was actually able to really study this particular ejection. And you know, you can sort of see

how it travels through the solar system. You can check out some video of it. It's very cool. And they also happen on the solar system plane. So they can't shoot up. Why? Yeah. Just because that's how the sun is built.

Like, yeah, cause it, because that's the way it spins. So like for whatever reason, that's how the magnetic lines line up. Guy better not burp anytime soon. Yeah, stop drinking Coca-Cola, Sky Guy. Well, I'm going to give mine to Caitlin. Cause it was real good. It was really good. Cola, Sky Guy. Well, I'm gonna give mine to Caitlin. That was real good. But we almost died. Well, I know if we had all died, I would have given it to you.

And then we'd put nobody hurt about it. I'm also gonna give mine to Caitlin. It was a good fact, a real good fact. I was a scientist in 2012, so I knew about yours beforehand. Can I ask a really important question? Yeah, it's gonna cost you a hang-puck. I don't care. We watched an episode of The Twilight Zone where the Earth's getting closer to the sun all the time, and they said, now there's no night.

Would you ever be close enough to the sun ever that there would never be a night? No, there's night on Mercury. That's what I thought. Now there's no night. The sun now surrounds us. Yes, there would never be any night if we were inside the sun. It'd be very bright all the time. There was no more night.

The writers didn't really think about this line very much. Powerful line. It was a good one. Everybody died in the end. Alright, now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This question is going to be read by Caitlin. All right.

River at Shattered Time Maloe asks, does the sun have an atmosphere? Sun does have an atmosphere. I mean, what's an atmosphere, Sari? I looked this up because I didn't know. The best definition I can find, it's like all the gases surrounding the Earth or another planet. So like you have the surface and then the gases surrounding it.

The tricky part about the sun, it's all gaseous. Yeah, it's not a planet either. It's not a planet, yeah. So I don't know if atmosphere is specific to planets. I don't think it is. I think the sun has an atmosphere. Like the corona is charged gases stuck to the sun by gravity.

There's more than that. Than the corona. Than the corona that is considered part of the sun's atmosphere. Which is interesting, I didn't know anything about this. So if it's considered part of the sun's atmosphere, then the atmosphere does scientifically definitely have an atmosphere?

I think so, yeah. NASA seems to say yes. So there's a point on the sun, it's called the photosphere of the sun is the point at which we can't see any deeper into the core. So there's like a layer of the sun where it gets, I don't know, the article that I was reading described it as like walking into a thick fog and there's a point in that fog where you can't see any deeper, like your visual information disappears. That is where the photosphere starts

and that's where we consider the sun's- Surface? Surface to be, yeah. Oh, cool. For lack of a better way of defining it because there's not like a hard rocky line where we can say this is one substance gases. I hadn't really ever thought about that

because oftentimes I see pictures of the sun and it looks like there's a straight line where the sun starts. But obviously that's just because it's very big. It's very big, but that's where you can start seeing it. The beginning of the atmosphere, that's where sunspots form is the photosphere. When it gets colder, then those are like become dark spots that we can observe. So next is the chromosphere. It's relatively thin and you can sort of see the reddish glow during a total solar eclipse.

That's from the chromosphere. It's where temperature starts heating up again. So it's really hot in the center of the sun, then it cools down to a point and then it starts heating up again. So the chromosphere is like the transition where it starts getting hotter again. And then after that is the corona, which is what you were talking about where it's like very gaseous in a total solar eclipse. You can see it like all the wispy stuff.

That's where solar flares happen. That's where ions and charged particles get flung out as solar wind. It's the least dense part and it's also extremely, extremely hot. And we have no idea why besides magnetism. Yeah. Yeah, sure. You know, energy being pumped around by a very big beautiful sky guy. So thanks everybody. If you want to ask the Science Couch you can tweet your question using the hashtag ask SciShow. Thanks to Ash Bunny and SK Bergoff and everybody else who tweeted us your questions.

And now we have our final scores. Ceri, you have one Hank buck. Sam, you have one Hank buck. Hank, you never got anything. And Kaelin, our special guest, comes out with three! If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen, like Theresa McD and MECD did. It's super helpful and it helps us know what you think about the show.

Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. We love it when people do that. And finally, if you want to show your love for Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz.

And I've been Katelyn Hofmeister. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC. It's produced by all of us, and by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our art is by Hiroko Matsushima, and our sound design is by Tuna over there as well. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bon giorno, and we couldn't make any of this stuff without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. There's a French writer named Georges Bataille who published a short

text called The Solar Anus in 1931. It's not really safe for work because it's just like astronomy and earth science mashed up with sex, but it's apparently a big old parody of philosophy like Cartesianism and art like Surrealism at the time. What? I mean do it I read it all today How was it? It was, it's short

Uh huh It's like bad erotic literature Is it like slash fake about Sky Guy? Yeah kinda Oh boy Yeah INTRO MUSIC Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's a lightly competitive knowledge showcase, starring some of the geniuses that made the

YouTube series SciShow happen. I'm joined as always by Stefan Chen. Hello. What's your tagline? Mr. Three Forks. And Sam is here. Hey. How many tines do you think a fork should have?

I think it should be four. I think officially, legally, it's four. The fork review board says four. It's right there in the name. What's your tagline? Advanced Darkness. Sari Riley's joining me here on the Science Couch. How's your cookie? I'm like staring at it. It's gonna be a little bit more stale after an hour and a half of podcasting, but it was a really good cookie.

Were you just gonna keep eating it while we podcasted if I didn't say anything? I think if you had given me like a five second warning, I would have shoved it all in my mouth. No, no, no. I'm really good at speed eating. That's what I used to do in high school all the time. Like competitive speed eating?

No, I went to Costco and got a hot dog and shoved it in my gob really quickly. All the way to Costco? Yeah, cause we were close. I went to high school in Kirkland, Washington, home of Costco. Yeah, the home land. Her high school was a Costco.

Yeah. So she went to high school. Within Costco, and so the food court was our cafeteria. And I'm Hank Green, and my tag on is 12 Penny Showdown. There's not even a name for 12 pennies. Plus a dozen pennies. It's a dime and a tip. Oh yeah, 20% on my dime order. That's two cents.

Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-of-a-maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory and we're also keeping score and awarding Sam Bucks from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we're not great at that. So if you go on a tangent and the rest of us deem it unworthy, you will have to give up one of your Sam Bucks. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem this week from Sam. This is KSCI SciShow Radio and tonight I'm doing something that's quite a delight. I'm answering all the questions that you have about science and nature and that's done in a lab. I will use my extraordinary knowledge to help you all out because I went to college.

Caller 1, you are on the air. Hello there, my question is really quite pressing. Can you explain RNA's role in the process of gene expression? The answer is obvious and requires no explanation. You're wasting the time of both me and the nation. Hang up on this guy. Next caller. Hi, I'm a long time fan, first time caller.

Please explain thermodynamics if it isn't a bother. The thing that you're asking, a baby would know. I'm sorry to say this, but you're banned from the show. Line four. Yeah, I have a question about gravity waves. Do we know from LIGO detectors if they're... Let me stop you right there. I'm sorry to tell you, we're all out of time and this week's show is through.

And dear listeners, I leave you with this suggestion. Please next time think of some harder questions. This is Smart Man Sam on KSEI signing off. So this was a science radio show skit. Were you a science radio show host and people calling with questions and then you belittled them? Yeah, they're too easy.

They're too easy. And you did that because our topic of the day is radio. Yeah, and radio is too hard to figure out what it is. Didn't want to do a poem about radio, so just did a poem about a radio host. We were getting towards the end and I was like, when is this going to be about radio? And then I was like, wait a second, we're on a radio show. This is great. I didn't even know participation was a thing we could do with our pelvis.

Oh no, Sam's always thinking outside of boxes. The question is, do we give him an extra half a point for that? No. A half a point, I do not want to keep your head up. No. I would give Sam a whole point for this, as the first person to just-

Yeah, introduce a new format. Like, so an extra whole point? An extra whole point. Whoa! In the way, bringing a guitar brings you an extra whole point, he printed out four pieces of paper. That's like, four times. True, he highlighted our lines.

Yeah, it has to be a unanimous decision though. What's your vote, Hank? I think I want to give Sam the extra point. Alright. I'll be peer pressured into it. I'm not in striking distance of any of you. I don't think so. That's probably okay.

Well, it's early in the season. Who knows what could happen. So, radio waves are a kind of electromagnetic radiation, and we have figured out how to make them contain information. Yes. That was rhymed. Yeah. OK, so visible light had a range of wavelengths,

and radio has longer wavelengths than that. OK, so it's just more electromagnetic radiation, and we have figured out how to harness it and shoot these waves. They are of the same stuff. That's probably not right to call it stuff, but they are of a different wavelength. And using science, they can contain information

inside of those waves and pass them along. And we've been able to do that for a long time since I got Marconi. Before that. Since before Marconi, he just tried to take credit for it. Marconi. Does it pass through us or do we block it? It passes through you.

One thing that you want out of radiation actually is for it to pass through you. If you stop it, that tends to be a bad thing because that's energizing you and then you're being microwaved. Is it bad that we stop light do we stop we stop light we stop light right on the surface though doesn't get very Yeah, we Like sunlight and that's why you get sunburned because then your body's like what strong light and weak light Yeah, I go for weak light that's why I don't go outside

We've been talking about artificially generated radio waves, but they can also just be generated by energy being released in the universe. And so when you hear about radio waves detected from space, those are used as measurements because other stars and objects in space are generating radio waves as they move around and collide and do Space things! But they do there's no music not that we know of but who knows there could be aliens broadcasting There are definitely aliens broadcasting. A whole bunch of new music for you to not know anything about Now it is time for

One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but most of those facts are fake. Two of them. One of them, though, is real. And we have to figure out which one is the true fact. And if we get duped, Stefan will get our Sand Buck. If we get it right, we get it. Stefan, hit me with your facts.

So which of these three things is a real cutting edge way to play music involving radio waves? Oh. Number one, by implanting a radio antenna into a saguaro cactus with a transducer that turns the cactus into a Bluetooth speaker. Laughter Number two, by engineering the genes of E. coli bacteria to act like the components of a circuit and using them to receive and decode radio waves.

Ooh. Or by using an infrared frequency comb and lasers like the components of a circuit and using them to receive and decode radio waves, or by using an infrared frequency comb in lasers to transmit and receive a song wirelessly in radio waves. Laser radio? Yes. Okay, so we've got number one, a Bluetooth speaker cactus. Number two, bacteria communicating through radio waves. Number three, a frequency comb laser radio.

What's a frequency comb, Stefan? So the easier way, I think, to visualize this is like, in sound, there's something called comb filtering. And so if you play a sound against itself, but the copy is slightly delayed, then the frequencies interact in a way where you get amplifications and cuts in a pattern that makes the frequency spectrum look like a comb. So it has a bunch of spikes that are evenly spaced.

And so that's happening, but in this case with light. Is this how you feel all the time when I explain things? A little bit. Oh, my gosh. It's like I was picturing like a physical comb. Oh, I can brush my hair and listen to music. Wow. Just hold it against your head. And the Beebees are staying alive. So the cactus is the one that I understand the most because it seems very simple.

Cactus equals speaker. I feel like it's a lie because it's too simple. Yeah. The second one, are they using the E. coli as a something? The E. coli receives and decodes the waves, but they're not like producing sound. Okay. Decoding it into what? Into like a digital signal,

which then goes into the speaker. Oh my goodness. That sounds impossible. I don't know, he seemed like he knew a lot about frequency combs. Yeah, but that's just something that he already knew about. And then he lied about something else involved in it. The laser thing.

I don't know how you have a radio laser. Can you store information in light that isn't just the stuff that's bouncing into your eyeballs? Yeah, I think yes, you can store information in light. Okay. You can transmit data in a laser. Yeah, that makes sense. That is possible. Okay.

Is that what a CD player does? No. Oh, damn. They have a laser to read it. I thought I understood something. That makes that as possible. Okay, so the CD player does no. Oh damn Something Well, they don't exist anymore. So I don't need to know that I'm gonna just go with them The the the equal I because it sounds really neat. I'm gonna go with that big bassy cactus Seems possible I guess split the difference. I'm gonna go with the comb that is not a comb physically. It is the comb Normally lasers are emitting a single frequency of light

They have these laser combs that cause the lasers to emit multiple Frequencies of light that are at these regular intervals along the frequency spectrum. And they realized that within the laser cavity, which is where there's like a bunch of mirrors reflecting the beams back and forth, those different frequencies of light were interacting in such a way that the electrons in that cavity were emitting microwaves at frequencies within the communication spectrum. By controlling the laser combs, they can control the radio waves that are coming out and then so they can just transmit Songs and they were also able to go in reverse having the the device pick up wireless Signals and then that affected the frequency combs and they could read that and so they could go both ways

Transmitting the music sort of the dream of the future with this is finding a way to apply that to terahertz wireless communication. Right now, we're, like, our cell phones and everything is using gigahertz wireless, but there's a band of frequencies in the terahertz range where we don't have the technology to, like, practically generate that for communications use. And no one's really close to doing that, making that viable yet. And now making the phone better? It will allow faster speeds. Okay.

So the cactus thing is from the Saguaro National Park in like 2008, 2009, there was a rash of like cactus theft. Yeah. And it's apparently not illegal to buy and sell Saguaro cactuses, but it is illegal to steal them from a national park. Yeah. So in the national park, they started implanting RFID chips into the cactuses, which you would think would allow them to track them down, but you actually can't track them down

because you have to be within a foot of the chip to actually detect it. Because they, yeah, these aren't like battery power things. They like have to receive a signal to radio back to you. So it's to scan a saguaro and you get it to see if it's an illegal saguaro? Yeah, well, they're counting on people being like, oh, they're putting chips in the cactuses, so I'm not gonna steal it.

I'm not gonna actually check. I like that. But I guess they were... That's my type of enforcement. They were sweeping the nurseries. Right. And RFID is a radio thing. Yeah. Which is why I found that.

I watched a review on YouTube of a device. It's like a little Bluetooth box and it has a thing that you stick on anything, and then it vibrates that object and turns it into a speaker. So I was like, what? Just do it with a cactus, I guess. That's a great idea. And so then the bacterial thing, this is the one I super do not understand how this works. I read the article several times, and there's too many words in there that I don't understand. But this team has been working in the space of like synthetic

biology for a long time. They have several papers that sort of build on each other. And it is through like genetic engineering of the genes to create like components in the genes that act like switches and logic gates. And so they can connect them together to execute, like, what they call genetic programs. The example from their 2011 paper is that they synchronized thousands of E. coli into what they are calling biopixels, and so they will fluoresce in sync in response to, like, chemicals that are present. So you can detect, like, arsenic or whatever.

You have an arsenic detector that gives you E. coli if you're not careful. Yeah, you gotta be careful. Cool. Next, it's time for a short break and then for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals. Sarri's got one. I've got nothing. Sam's got two for his good poem. I shouldn't have given you the extra points. That was your fault, Stefan. Stefan's also got two, so you guys are tied. But only because of the grace of Stefan's appreciation for your creativity.

My creativity. I did it for myself. Well. Do we really do anything for ourselves, I guess, in this society? Yeah, no. Everything is built on everything else. I stole every one of these words from other people. From Homer. Homer, the first worder. Yeah.

Before he made all the words. And now it's time for the fact-off, where two panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a sandbox to award the fact that they like the most. So get ready, it's me versus Ceri, and we're gonna decide who goes first with this trivia question.

The United States National Radio Quiet Zone is a large land area that was designated by the FCC in 1958, originally to protect radio telescopes. The area of the Quiet Zone covers parts of three states. Name one of the states. Colorado. West Virginia. Colorado! What? What's wrong with Colorado? It's not where it is.

It's West Virginia, right? I just figured it would be someplace where there's nobody. That makes more sense, doesn't it? Yeah. Instead of there being a place where there's a lot of people, like West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland. Wow, yeah, lots of people. That's the three states it covers. I'll go first to get it over with.

Oh, no. That is so over-radio. My confidence in science and my own scientific ability is low. There are lots of different kinds of wartime technology, but we usually focus on weapons or other big machines to cart people around. But radio, which falls under the umbrella of electronic warfare, has been used in plenty of wars too. And so specifically, I'd like to talk about a physicist who helped the UK out during World

War II using what's known as scientific intelligence, basically like an arms race of radio technologies. His name was Reginald Victor Jones, or R.B. Jones, and he wrote a whole book about this called Most Secret War because it basically became his job to figure out what the German Air Force was doing with radio, especially related to navigation, from literal scraps of information from decrypted messages or downed bomber planes. And it was called the Battle of the Beams, just like a very catchy name. And so I have a highlight reel of three of the things that he did. The first being on June 5th, 1940, a message was intercepted with the word Nicobine, meaning crooked leg and a set of compass bearings. And Nicobine was discovered to be the nickname given to the bent transmitting antenna.

And planes had a radio navigation system, the German bomber planes, that involved an antenna that switched between two radio beam transmissions from two locations. One was dashes, like Morse code dashes, one was dots, and the beams were adjusted to intersect over the target for bombing. So the planes would fly over and listen to like just dots until they heard dots and dashes interspersed. And they were like, oh, X marks the spot, got a bomb. Whoa.

Wow. Oh, that seems terribly fraught with definitely accidentally killing people. These signals were codenamed headaches. So R.V. Jones and his buddies developed transmitters that they called aspirins by using machines from hospitals that used electromagnetic currents to produce heat and cauterize wounds.

And they just like pointed them up at the sky and tossed out radio noise or produced false dot and dash signals. Highlight reel number two. This is the same guy. Same guy, yeah. X-beams were another German technology that they tried where the bomber pilots intercepted checkpoint beams as they got closer to their target.

So like at 30 kilometers out, they got a radio signal that was just like, or whatever. And then 15 kilometers out, they got another signal and then they set a timer in their plane so that like after X amount of minutes was up and they would arrive at their spot and then bomb. And so then they modified the jammers to be another cutesy name, bromides, to throw off the accuracy of those. But still, same hospital machines, just like, -"Oh, you're the best." -"We're shooting cauterizers at this guy."

It's like when I bake muffins and I'm like, 15 minutes from now, they'll be ready. Yeah, except... It's never right! LAUGHS Yeah, except it has to... It's whether you murder accurately or not. Oh, war is bad.

War is bad. Yeah, this is very scary. In July 1943, this is the third highlight, Allied bomber planes flew into German airspace under this dude's advice and dropped 92 million strips of shredded tin foil Which is not very environmentally friendly, but it messed with the radar operators and so their screens were just like we're swarmed Because all the tinfoil is reflecting their signals back So his whole strategy was like fight war with tricks. Did he have a cute name for that one?

strategy was like, fight war with tricks. Did he have a cute name for that one? Operation ibuprofen? Confetti. No. No fun name that I could find. Operation Tinsel. I don't know. We could come up with one. Yeah. Tinsel is dead. He won't hear it. It's true. I feel like shouldn't you just be like, bomb this thing. Look down through the hole in the ground.

You're so far up. I thought they were just using maps. There's like maps with like grids on them. and you have like a ruler, and you're like, I gotta go there. Yeah, god, GPS makes this all much easier. And the whole time you're in your plane, it's like, boop, boop, boop, it's probably terrifying. Yeah, and then you get that dot dash signal and you're like, okay, well, I guess. It's my job to push this button, so I will push this button.

Oh, well, good thanks to that person for, you know, saving lives with hospital equipment, which was meant to save lives, but in a different way. That sounds like the equipment that was responsible for all those surgical fires, though. All back. You guys want to know about my fact? I guess so, but... Yeah, I know, that was pretty good. So there was a young boy, his name was Owen Garriott, and his dad was really into radios

and stuff. And so his dad talked him about Morse code and got him a radio. And by the time he was 15 years old, he had an amateur radio operator license. So ham radio, like these amateur radio subs are like things that people use even now and you can sort of like have your radio and talk to people. It's like Omegle.

Do you guys remember Omegle? No. What's that? It's a internet application that you can just turn on and it'll match you with a random stranger. It's like chat roulette. Oh, creepy. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a very good way to see a penis. Okay.

But this is like with people in there, I can just turn this switch and like this radio will connect me to people and we can talk. So he was super into that. And then in 1983, that kid went to space because he was an astronaut by that point and he did a 10 day flight. And he wasn't a kid anymore.

He was no longer a kid. Okay. He was an adult man at that point. And he brought a handheld amateur radio transceiver with him and he operated the first amateur radio station in space using a call sign, W5LFL. And he turned it on and his first contact was with some guy in Montana. And he was just like, hello.

And the guy in Montana was like, what's up? And he was like, I'm in space. And the guy in Montana was like, that doesn't seem right. And he was like, no, I'm serious, I'm an astronaut. You can look it up, W5LFL, and they talked for a while, and then he talked to a bunch of different people while he was up there. And that project actually lives on. There is a project called the amateur radio on the International Space Station project and

When you wake up from a your space nap if you don't have anything to do you can go over to the thing and just like Turn it on and see if you can talk to anybody So they do it specifically and intentionally with school groups But they also will do it just to strangers. Bill MacArthur is an astronaut who was on the ISS, and he made it a point to talk to one person from each of the 50 states while in space. If he did that while also making 1,800 different contacts

in more than 90 countries and every continent, including Antarctica. So you gotta just turn it on and hope that you're getting somebody from a state that you don't have? You can do it intentionally. So if like one, if you're flying over that part of the world, you're gonna be able to connect.

And you can also, you know, sort of know when your partner is gonna be available and like both be there at the same time to talk. But you can also just like have it on and wait for somebody to talk. How long can you stay connected to one? Not long, when you're in the space station, not long because it moves pretty fast.

Seconds or minutes, do you know? Minutes. Okay, okay, okay. Like prank calling people from space. Yeah, I mean, how do you, I could just have an amateur radio and be like, I'm in space, there'd be no way to tell, right? Yeah. People would know your voice. You're hankering from SciShow.

I'm a nerd. No one's going to let you in space. That's a great story and it's beautiful. Thanks. Maybe someday we can podcast from space. No. Oh, OK. That's very dangerous.

Why? Not us, but somebody. I could be up there and I could talk down to you guys. Oh, that's fine. I'll just go by myself. Just you guys are chicken to go to space. It doesn't sound fun. To go to space?

No. Nah. It's weird to feel that way, but I'm gonna kind of feel that way. Yeah. I don't really like to have fun. It sounds expensive too. It's like a tattoo.

It's like paying a lot of money for just being uncomfortable. Oh, I'd be a fully trained. I like tattoos, so. Strong disagree on that one. Oh, I'd be a fully trained. I like tattoos, so strong disagree on that one. No, I'd be a fully trained astronaut. Right. So I wouldn't have to pay any money. They'd be paying me, baby. That seems especially unlikely for everyone in this room.

To be paid astronauts. Maybe I'm the only one who has the knowledge needed to fix something. Yeah, they're looking for radio skit scriptwriters. Yeah. All right, you guys want to do it on three? needed. Yeah, they were looking for they're looking for radio skits scriptwriters. All right, you guys want to do it on three? One, two, three. Hank? Oh, okay. Are we on Tide now? Is that gonna bring? Nope. No. Cause I only have one point. Everybody else is Tide though. Such a nice story. I think we're both good. Yeah. Yeah. Hank's was more wholesome. One was about war. Yeah, you had to think about war and people dying with mine. I just kept trying to bring it up.

So people died, huh, Sari? Lots of people were dying in your story, huh? Mine's cute, though. It's about a boy. A little space boy. And then he just wants to talk to Montanans. Oh, that's probably what really got me. I should have just ended it at Montana.

That's it. End of the story. We've got Sam. I mean, the Montreal... Oh, yeah, yeah. The Montreal. I should have just ended it at Montana. That's it. End of the story. Yeah. We've got Sam. And also, this astronaut says he loves Anaheim California. Yeah, he loves it there. That's where he was born and raised.

And now it's time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. We're terrified. This question is from Patty Shag, who asks, what is digital radio or HD radio, and how does it actually relate to standard radio, like what was coming out of our car stereos 10 years ago? You know, you guys don't even know what standard radio is. I'm ready. I'm ready for a general explanation.

It'll be unsatisfying, but you'll know more than when I started. Generally, how radios work is an electric signal can be an input to the antenna, which radiates electromagnetic energy and that's transmission or like the receiver antenna can pick up electromagnetic energy and convert that into an electric signal and that's reception and radio waves had different frequencies and by tuning a radio receiver to a specific frequency you can pick up a specific signal. And so AM and FM radio have different bands of frequencies that they operate in. I am not tuned to radio, so I have to explain this for myself.

Yeah. Now, this is part of the problem is that Ceri's never used a radio. Yeah. I also have never used a radio to listen to music, so. That's quite possibly be true. My mom played it in the car when she dropped me off at school during a brief period. I listened to it when I rode the school bus. The thing that we have said on this podcast, but anyone who hasn't listened, Sari, when

driving, just is in silence. Oh yeah. It's nice. It's not nice. No, that's horrible. You can be with your thoughts. When you're doing mundane things like that is when the real demons come out. I like that Sari is comfortable with her own thoughts

and we should all aspire to that greatness. I guess. No way, the shower, the car, you always have to have something going on or else you're gonna have to grapple with some stuff. Yeah, that's how. Do you wanna grapple with some stuff? You gotta grapple.

I grapple a lot of times. Otherwise, you're just hanging out in space. Hell yeah. I'm turning all my house plants into speakers as soon as I get home. AM is amplitude modulation, so if you imagine a wave, it's like how far up or down it goes. And FM is frequency modulation, so if you imagine a wave,

and you imagine like a point in space, it's like how many waves, full waves, pass that fixed point over time. So like if they're moving left to right, like how many are passing it? That's what radio sounds like. Is this radio? Yeah, that's what radio sounds like. And then I found a really good Reddit explain

like I'm five post about the difference between AM and FM and why AM is worse quality than FM. Yes. Is this a known thing? Yes. AM is like talk radio, really fuzzy, very hard to understand. So this person said to imagine instead of radio, light, because they're both electromagnetic energy. And with an AM light bulb, the signal would be varied by adjusting the brightness. And with the FM, the light would be changing in color

to produce the signal. And so if you're trying to see the signal through like a forest or something, it'd be easier to tell a difference in color than a difference in brightness. And that's why FM signal stays stronger than AM. Neat. Okay. I was like, wow, this person.

I love it. Thank you very much. Yes. What about HD and digital radio? Okay, yes. That is old radio. I've set the groundwork. Okay. So now, US radio broadcasters use both analog and digital signals,

but a digital radio receiver can receive both. So like analog and digital. HD radio does not stand for high definition or hybrid digital. It is a proprietary method of digital radio that is standard in the US, declared by the FCC and owned by a company. I forget, yeah. I biquity.

Can you just pan our groans to either side? Yeah, both stereo groan. Stereo groan. Of course it's a proprietary format owned by some company. Not all countries have HD radio. So like if you wanna talk about this kind of radio, use digital, because that's the umbrella term. HD radio is like, I found the trademark page

to explain what it is and what it isn't. Is it higher quality, or is it just a different system? Yes, it is higher quality sound, or it's supposed to have higher quality sound and more stations. I don't have any firsthand experience with this. Do XM rad Is that different? That's different. That's different. That's satellite.

Then maybe I don't know what we're even talking about. It is a different way for the information to be transmitted over radio waves. Is this something that some cars have? Yes. If you have a newer car, you can receive digital radio and you'll know when you get out of range of it, if it's regular old analog radio, it'll get like, and you can still kind of hear it. And if it's digital, it starts to have like digital artifacts where it goes like, and it sounds like a Skype call gone wrong.

Huh, unfamiliar with this. So radio frequencies, like AM and FM analog, have a limit on how much information they can hold. So there's a limit to sound quality. But in digital radio, the signal is digitized. So to the ones and zeros and compressed on a computer. So instead of like just transmitting the waves, it's transmitting digits.

And so then- It's being decoded by my radio. Yeah, that's being decoded by your digital radio. And not only can you transmit sound, but you can also transmit information. So things like with digital radios, the song title and artists can pop up on screen Because that information can be stored with the song and you don't have just like a radio man saying and now we're playing radio

I'm like trying to think of one song. That was what the pause is. And now we're playing. No, they said afterward, right? That was just Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen. And now... Another song that I totally know the title of. Another one from Carly, lover.

Welcome to Carly Jepsen Power Hour. Etc. No, that's absolutely... Carly Lover. Welcome to Carly Jetson Power Hour. Etc. Yeah, no, that's absolutely, they definitely, every time a song ends, they're always like, that was this song. Yeah, and then during the song, sometimes they go, we're listening too. Everybody, just so you know the name of this one. Everybody, that was our girl Carly with Call Me Maybe.

You're good at that. See, I don't know if this is like a real radio voice or if you're faking it. No, I'm sorry. Okay, I think I trust you, yeah. Do all radio announcers sound like the Kool-Aid Man, yes? No? Yeah.

The end, I tried my best. Well, if you wanna ask your question to the Science Couch, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out upcoming topics for episodes. Thank you to at Kujmas at SarahPreston92 and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final Sam Buck scores! It's a three-way tie, starring everyone but me!

It's a Christmas miracle, because I think today is Christmas Eve. Is it? I think so. Why didn't we do a Christmas episode? I didn't think people would really be listening on Christmas Eve because they're with their families. You think so? I mean, people do all kinds of stuff.

I love to listen to podcasts on Christmas. In our SciShow analytics, we, like, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas do really well. I think people are avoiding their families. Oh, well, maybe we'll make this an extra long one or something since already is very long, right? Since it's our Christmas Eve episode. What's what do you what's what your favorite cookie? Christmas cookie favorite Christmas cookie. I pretty much only have room in my heart for chocolate chip cookies Well, what is a Christmas cookie if your mom makes them it's a gingerbread. Is that not a Christmas cookie at all! Well, what is a Christmas cookie? If your mom makes them, it's a Christmas cookie.

Gingerbread? Is that the only Christmas cookie? It is a Christmas cookie, but it's also good. Of course, snickerdoodles. And there's also the ones that are like white chocolate with like melted with a bunch of crushed candy canes in them. It's not really a cookie. What about the ones that are the circle of sugar cookie with the kiss in the middle? Is that a Christmas cookie? Thumbpring cookies? Yeah. Is that what they're called? Is that a Christmas cookie? Thumbprint cookies? Yeah. Is that what they're called? Is that a Christmas cookie?

No, no. Maybe? It has a kiss in the middle. Yeah, I remember buying them. You probably put your thumb in the middle and then you put a kiss in the middle. I can eat those in one bite. That's right.

Congratulations. Yeah, that's it. I wanna know more about how fast Sari can eat. How fast can you eat a hot dog? The fastest I've ever eaten a hot dog is, so I was moving from Indiana to Washington state. My dad and my grandpa were in the car. He gave me a foot long hot dog from a gas station.

And then as he walked around the other side of the car and got in, I had already finished it. Wow. Wow, Ceri's a professional. She's Shaggy from Scooby Doo. It's been amazing to watch Sarah not eat this cookie for the entire episode. I loved you so badly.

And you could eat it so fast too. It's been sitting there, just, the icing is so bright. This is probably the slowest you've ever eaten a cookie. Yeah. Hank, I have a Christmas present for you. Oh no. It's a Hank book, we're all tied. No.

How about that? Holiday season, we're all tied. Yeah, okay, I like that. What did I do to deserve this? You... I just think you should have one. Okay, does everybody agree? Are we actually gonna do this?

Can I eat my cookie? If I can eat my cookie, you can have a book. Yes, sir, you can eat your cookie. You can eat your cookie. Heck, yes. Everything's going wild cookie. You can eat your cookie. Heck, yes. Everything's going wild now. It's all breaking down.

SciShow Tangent's end is just like, there's no structure anymore. Well, if you like this show and you want to help us out, well, Sari eats a cookie. Gotta give it some crunch. It's really, it's not really a crunchy cookie. No, it's a soft cookie, but I don't want to eat it in front of the microphone for people who don't like food noises. Yeah, no, don't make too many food noises. First, you can leave us a review. That's very helpful and also lets us know what you like about the show. You can also leave ideas for upcoming topics in iTunes reviews, because we look there for those.

Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just... Tell people about us! I waited for my second bite. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan J.

And I've been Sam Schultz. The SciShow Tanchin's is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Kailin Hofmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bonjorno. 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. Two radio astronomers were using a big antenna in 1964 and 1965 to receive signals from the Milky Way when they kept hearing a steady hiss. They chalked it up to a lot of things like pigeon poop from a nest inside the antenna. But after the poop was cleaned up and other signals were ruled out,

they were still hearing that hiss, which was actually evidence of cosmic microwave background radiation that fills the universe because of the Big Bang. And they discovered it then? Yeah. Whoa, and they thought it was pigeon poop. They thought it was poop.

They thought it was poop. But it was the Big Bang. Mm-hmm. The odds only happened one time. Yeah, what a thrill it was pigeon poop. They thought it was poop. They thought it was poop. But it was the Big Bang. The odds only happened one time. Yeah. What a thrill it would have been. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chin.

Hello. What's the best, like, road surface? Probably pavement, but like well-maintained asphalt. What's your tagline? Hot sauce paradise. I don't know why that made me feel like I was gonna take a bath in hot sauce, but I don't wanna 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.

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.

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 whore,bird firebird the edsel corsair do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do El Camino pickup bed pudding gas has got no lead take your woody to the beach make the rubber tires screech arrow car with flight bestowed and for car 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, what were you thinking? 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 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. Sarai, 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 KERS, 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 car for chariot or wagon, and then just like kept moving through the wheel vehicles that humans developed. Interesting. And now it is time for TRIGGER FAKE. 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 get a Sand Buck, if we're tricked, then Stefan will get the Sand Buck 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. And you're talking about like in an incinerator where they generate power? Yeah, yeah, they like 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, there's a problem with mosquitoes using them as 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. Okay. Number one, we could use old tires to make new tires. So I love the possibility that this one isn't true. It's just 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. Yeah, very interesting. So, fact number one, we've got a Singapore scientists freeze drying tires to 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 and 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... So they do something to the tires. Yeah, I mean, they're doing things to all... all of these are processed versions of tires. 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, 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 that basic, basic logic is conceivable. It doesn't set any red flags off.

But also, I just keep thinking of injecting tires into myself and becoming the Michelin man. Who's 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 in certain kinds of ways that 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 like it does that by sucking out all of the everything. And so you suck out, you like get them in a vacuum basically

and 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 gonna 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 leftover from partially combusting hydrocarbons. 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 bucky balls 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, because, like, truck drivers use them sometimes, I think, and they, like, fling tire chunks all over the place. So that just seems like... It seems like something people will be trying to solve to me, too. I agree. If it is the middle one, I'm gonna 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 SciShow Tangents 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. 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.

Tires would be naturally a different color, but then it helps darken them so they look cool. 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. So, 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 like 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 that's a very like, 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 pretreatment process seemed 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, like, bone-like synthetic substance. And I think they started with the same foundation material as plexiglass. But after they did their, like, 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. 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 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 that 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? You're touching this now. I've got so many things to be cranky about today. I 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. We 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 gonna be rewarded a Sand Buck by the people we are presenting our facts to. And the who goes first is gonna 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 just kind of guessed 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.

Hanks 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. Uh-huh.

You've driven a car before, right? 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 movements make different vrooms.

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. Uh-huh. Not surprising, Stefan, with this. My mind was blown. I was like, people care about the vroom 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. Yeah. 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 Soundaktor or Sound Actuator, 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 broom 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. Wow. 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 and all of them are just for the person driving the car. All of the ones you talked about just now. 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 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 like the noisemaker part of the car

is pointing back away from you, then you're gonna 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. 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 it. 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. 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-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 like 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 an ester 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 a serious 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 and 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 Stefan Cargai chin. Yeah. I didn't know about the sperm whale thing though. That's How could you not give the point for the sperm whale thing if you didn't know about it? Well cuz I like noise. I'm a vroom vroom man So I'm I'm more personally invested in Ceres fact also the sperm whale oil went vroom vroom

I made the cars vroom more. I also drive a manual. Yeah, yeah That explains them. Yeah, 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 crebshouting, 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 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 like 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 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, The manufacturers probably looked at them 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 like wrap around these interior wheels. Because I think if you drove, you know, a traction track like a tank has on roads, if we were all doing that, the roads wouldn't need to be replaced every few months. Well, maybe we just wouldn't need roads.

And you could just roll around. Wherever. 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 gonna look back on this episode in ten 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.

Yeah. So everyone can still go wherever they want, but we just haven't figured out how to lift off. Yeah. Well, if Elon Musk has this 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, but 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 a press release 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 at 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 gonna do anything with it, because I am a full 10 points behind you guys. If you like this show and you wanna 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 Jim. 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 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. ["The Fire Embrace Me"] But one more thing. So everybody likes heated seats, right? And they warm up your butt, cause 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. So based on these 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. INTRO Hello and welcome to a normal and not spooky episode of SciShow Tangents. We're all a little sad when the Halloween season

ends. It is the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello, also. Sam, when does this episode of SciShow Tangents come out? November 2nd. So you cannot yet go to awesomesocks.club

and sign up for a sock subscription that will eliminate the worry of needing to buy socks from your life while also donating all of the profits to charity instead of having your sock profit go to some stranger somewhere. You're so lucky that you're hearing about it now before it opens so that you can remember that on November 5th, you can go and sign up at awesome socks dot club, but we'll probably also talk about it next week

You can go to the FTBA.com and find the new SciShow tangent sticker though came out yesterday. Oh All right. Well, I didn't even know so many integrations Get a sticker put on your sock or you can get like 50 stickers and just cover your feet in them make them into Socks oh they are socks now in and shoes if you get like 400 their shoes I think you'd need way less than 400. I think you'd only need 100 well, but look Sam. I'm trying to upsell them Oh, excuse me. I'm sorry these stickers are flimsy. You gotta buy 400 to make them into shoes. That's right No, they can't tell people they're flimsy. They're high quality.

They're high quality shoe stickers. What if you want to become a morph suit of Saisha Tangen stickers? How many do you need Sam? A whole morph suit. 10,000. That sounds very sweaty. I know it sounds super comfortable, Hank.

Please. You'd be perfectly hairless after you were done as well. I mean, all we need is one person to buy an entire morph suit of size show tangent stickers. Yeah. So basically we can spend a lot of money marketing to that one person. We just have to find them. That is true. Our whale. They are our whale, the size show tangent sticker morph suit person. So let us know if you are that human or cow. Yeah. Take like 200,000 to

cover a cow. $200,000 stickers. Now we're wealthy. Now we don't need anybody's money anymore. We're quitting the business. We don't need to be in the tangents anymore. There is a space between SciShow Tangents being a good sustainable podcast and us making too much money and just being like, I don't care. I live in the Barbados. I don't care about science anymore. Yeah, so buy just enough stickers but not too many. Every week here on Tangents we get together to try to one-up ummies and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on a topic, which is especially humorous after that intro. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play, and at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned

the winner. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me. Our bodies sense so many things so that we can know what is up and down and nice and bad and even fast and slow. We can smell the flowers, bitter and sour, and know when the cookie is sweet. But it's crucial to know when you're in the snow, where you can find some heat. And so evolution granted us this special superpower, so that we can know how good it feels to take a heated shower. But as for how it works, you'll have to ask again. And by again, I mean you'll have to ask your time-traveling friend. Because we know molecularly how sight

and smell and sound work. But as for heat and cold, we're still laying the groundwork. Our bodies contain mysteries, both elegant and not, and one of them is how we tell whether something's cold or hot. Our topic for the day is heat, and I went to the internet to be like, hey, how does thermoreception work? And the internet was like, e eh, because all of science is like, eh, it's wild. There's one thing that we know, there's like kinds of diseases where your cilia, like throughout your body, cilia are constructed poorly, which can really negatively impact

digestion and some other things, but it also decreases your sensitivity to heat. So people think that cilia must be involved somehow. What's cilia? They're like little projections of cells that are wiggly. Oh, okay, okay, okay. They're often used by single-celled organisms to move around, but in your intestines,

they're used to absorb nutrients, increase the surface area of the cell. Anyway, Sari, I know that this is not as easy as a question as it might sound like, but what is heat? Yeah, this is a tricky one. So if you think about temperature is like a physical quantity of something. So like you can, that expresses how hot or cold something is.

So like an object can be hot, an object can be cold, and it is a certain temperature. And that's something you can measure. Heat, you don't say an object has seven heat. Heat is something, is a quantity of energy that is transferred to or from something else. So like heat can be transferred from lemonade to ice cubes in the lemonade. Or heat can be transferred from... An oven to a turkey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is heat the transfer itself? the lemonade or he can be transferred from an oven to a turkey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Is heat the transfer itself or is heat the thing being transferred? It's the energy being transferred, I think. OK, because you can describe that. The unit of heat is joule. So you can say from the 90s, she is hot. And so everyone was like, how many jouules do I have to look at at once? To boil a pot of water. To boil a pot of water.

And then they were like, ah yes, that is one Jule. Now Jule is the French guy. No he's English, never mind. Wow. James Prescott Jule. His first two names sound less French. But yeah, so the unit is named after him. And heat is mostly used when you're describing thermodynamic systems. So like, as things are getting hotter or getting colder, that's when

like physicists and chemists are interested in heat as a concept. And the history is very weird. I don't know if you know this, Hank, but we've been confused about heat, not only in the present day, but also in the past. And I love that the things that we made up to describe it. So one of the theories of heat was that there was a fire like element called Flostagon. Flogiston. Flogiston? Oh yeah, you're right.

Flogiston. I'm glad you're here. So I didn't have egg on my face saying flostagon like a dummy. But they, like people were thinking that this, this like element was in things that combusted or rusted or had fiery things related to it. And it was like held within the thing that could catch on fire and then was released when that fire happened. So it was like, like a hot element. Makes sense.

Yeah. Seems reasonable to me. Yeah. So after Flogistan, then they upgraded to the caloric theory, which thought that heat was a fluid called caloric that flows from hot to cold. So we were getting like the flow of things and how heat is transferred, but we couldn't figure out what it was. It was like a fluid, but also like a weightless gas that could seep in and out of pores and could just go wherever it needed to be.

But like that is how we conceptualize heat as like, you have more of a thing than you are hot. And if you have less of a thing, then you're not like the fashion spreads, you know? But then we started learning more about thermodynamics and conceptualizing heat as a variable. And in like kinetic terms of how molecules are moving, we had to have an understanding of molecules and atoms first and then we could apply that concept to what

we know about temperature and extrapolate from there. I mean it turns out to be a pretty confusing thing where it's like okay so it's an increased temperature is the molecules moving faster, which just doesn't seem right. It is such a clear sensation that I have physically when I touch something. But what's happening is like my molecules are starting to move faster and some system in my body is able to transmit that information, like take the knowledge of that information and transfer it to my brain as a sensation of heat. And when my molecules slow down, that is sensed as cold. It just seems way too fundamental to be real.

It's a lot to think about. Like when I taste something, I'm tasting it. You know, it's like the chicken molecules hit my tongue and then my brain is like chicken. But like that's not what's happening with heat. It's like it is not like chemical sensing. It's like feeling the molecules move around. I don't like it. Yeah. getting some of their wiggle into your body.

Yeah, or they say they suck your wiggle out. Yeah. Yeah. This is the two things that happen. Do they suck your wiggle out? Okay. Yeah, you stick your head in a refrigerator, it sucks your wiggle right out of you. That's right. You go outside in the winter in Montana,

that's going to suck your wiggle out. Give me back my wiggle. And then you go get a hot cup of coffee and you put that wiggle back in. OK, OK. Now I get it. Sam's on board. Yeah. So replace caloric with wiggles and then you've got heat. And all your stuff's just bumping around more. Now, the word heat, it seems like we've probably been dealing with

being warm for a while, so I'm going to go ahead and guess that that one's been with us since the Proto-Indo-European root. Yes, indeed. But there's actually two. I think everyone was confused about heat. So it seems like, from my understanding, there's a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to heat or warm, like the verb, which is G-W-H-E-R. Okay. And so that's the root for things like thermal or like brandy or a lot, I don't know. These letters change sounds a lot, I think. But there's a lot of things that derive from that root that mean, like, to heat or to be warm. But hot and heat, like with the h sound,

they came from the same source as Old English hat and hata or something, meaning hot weather. So it's like the word for hot, we are not sure where it came from. Okay. Cause the caveman went, huh? And then from there, the rest was history. I think you've cracked it, Sam. And so it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we'll be going to be playing a game of This or That. Do you guys remember how This or That works? Uh-huh. It's either this one or that one. That's right. Yeah. Is it hot or not? No, it is actually, it's hot or hotter is kind of the vibe of this one. So, as Sarie just told us,

heat and temperature are different things. Temperature is a measure of the energy of the molecules inside something. Heat is describing the flow of energy between things. Today we're going to play this or that heat addition. I'm going to present you with two things that have different temperatures, and it's up to you to figure out which one is hotter than the other one. Oh, okay. It's pretty easy to figure out. So we have round number one, body temperature addition. Animal bodies, including our bodies, have different needs when it comes to regulating their body temperature.

We might live in a hot environment or have a very active life or have feathers or fur that trap our body heat. And if our animal bodies exceed the temperature that the animal sort of evolved to exist in, we can get really sick unless we find some ways to get rid of that heat. So which of the following is hotter,

a flying pigeon or the hottest ever fever recorded and survived by a human? Whoa, gosh, I think animals are unreal hot and people can't. So I don't think it goes pigeon. You think it's a hot pigeon? I think that's one hot pigeon. Oh my gosh, I was thinking the opposite. I just don't know how hot pigeons are.

I've never touched one. Uh, so I'm going to say humans because I think we're, we're hearty and I know there was weird experiments with like intentionally causing fevers at some point. In 1980, a man named Willie Jones, he had a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That's over 2000 wiggles after he was admitted to the hospital because of heatstroke. So he wasn't a fever from an illness.

He was in a very hot place. So he had this heatstroke fever and he survived after being in the hospital for 24 days. And that is hotter than a flying pigeon, but not by as much as you might think. Scientists studying pigeon flight found that on a 34-mile-per-hour flight — which is very fast — pigeons exceeded an average body temperature of 111.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That's up from its normal temperature of 107.8. So they're just burning that glycogen. It's creating some heat.

Which brings us to round number two. So this is the geology round of this or that heat addition. The Earth is situated at a nice location in our solar system that makes life as we know it possible. But life at the surface is much different from at the Earth's core. So which is hotter? Lava as it erupts out of a volcano on the surface of Earth or the daytime surface temperature of Venus? Oh no. Damn.

I don't have a concept for how hot either are, but I... I'm gonna guess Venus just because it's closer to the sun. The problem is, is I don't know enough about its atmosphere, like how much it is shielded from that solar radiation, but it seems hot and bad there. Yeah. It's only hot and bad there. I'm gonna say that. I was leaning towards Venus too, because maybe its radiant temperature is more than the lava.

Oh, it's radiant temperature. I don't know. It's something temperature, Hank. I don't know what any kind of temperatures are. Maybe it's atmospheric temperature or whatever. Okay. So you're going with Venus, both of you going with Venus? Yeah.

So I'm gonna ask a follow-up question, which is, what is Venus made out of? Rock? Yeah, rock is a good answer. And the rock on the surface of the Venus... Is solid. It is, yeah, it is solid. It's not melting. This would have been a good question to ask before we gave our answers, Hank.

You couldn't really help out. So Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, not just because it's closer to the sun, but also its dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. As we've heard, carbon dioxide, good at trapping heat. So the surface of Venus reaches 880 degrees Fahrenheit, Mercury only 800 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and negative 290 at night. Meanwhile, the temperature of lava erupting out of the Hawaiian volcano Kilauea is around 2140 degrees Fahrenheit. Now the lava does cool down quickly after being exposed to air, going down by hundreds of degrees each second. So just at that moment when it hits there,

it is very, very, very hot. We beefed it completely. Yeah, that was pretty embarrassing, but you know. All right, let's see if you can make up for it with round three, which is we're zooming out even further into the cosmic edition. Quasars are very bright objects in space. They're thought to be early stage galaxies and to be powered by supermassive black holes.

And one of the first quasars to be discovered was 3C273, which was discovered by astronomer John Boston in the early 1960s. So which is hotter, the center of quasar 3C273 or the hottest temperature ever made by man? or the hottest temperature ever made by man. Hmm. We can do some pretty fucked up stuff, so... I imagine they would both be like some sort of like nuclear fission or fusion or something like that, right? Like hot elements doing something. That would be like the same as whatever's going on in whatever quasar.

But more so perhaps. Or Hank will make fools of us again. I'm gonna say human created is hotter. Yeah, I guess so if it was human created, you could see the hot quasar and then be like, I can do one hotter and then make something slightly hotter. That's a very human thing to do. I'm gonna be made a fool of, but I'm gonna guess the quasar, because I don't understand space things, and I'm just like, oh, it's in space, it's hot, it's extreme.

All right, well here's a little story for you. In 2012, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron collided lead ions to create a quark-gluon plasma, the mass of subatomic particles that might have existed before the Big Bang, which resulted in a temperature of around 9.9 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, which is very hot, but it is not as hot as the core of a quasar. No! Yes it is! It's hotter, it's hotter! In 2016, scientists studying that quasar with a Russian satellite found that the core of the quasasar measured around 18 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. Which is not just hotter than CERN, it's hotter than what theoretical predictions had said was possible for a Quasar,

which is about 179 billion degrees Fahrenheit. So very, very different from that. That discrepancy points to mysteries in how Quasars emit light and how the molecules inside of it are interacting that we have not yet solved. That's hot! Trillions of degrees? My head can't even wrap around how hot it is. No. Alright, well, congratulations to Sari for coming out with two points to Sam's none. Next we're going to take a short break and then it will be time for the fact-off. INTRO

Hello and welcome back, everybody. It's time for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks anyway I see fit. Sam is currently two points behind, so he will have to have his fact be twice as good as Ceri's for a win to be in his future, which, look, buddy, it's possible. You can do it. And I judge these based on which one I want to turn into a TikTok. And then I turn it into a TikTok,

which do very well. So good job bringing me good science facts. I think it makes people listen to our show too. I think it's made people sign up for the show, which I'm glad that they're here for this mess of goofiness. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. Millions of people experience hot flashes, and contrary to what the name might suggest, the symptoms aren't just feeling hot. During a hot flash, many people's metabolic rate increases, with associated heart rate increases by about 7 to 15 beats per minute.

But that's not to say you don't also get hot. So based on readings from a finger monitor, what is the average body temperature increase during a hot flash? Well, it's not more than like 10 degrees. It can't be that otherwise you'd have a whole fever. Yeah, I mean that dude did die almost at 115. Like he did max out.

So it's not gonna take you above 115. I feel like you can also feel extremely hot and then take your temperature and be like I am NOT I am normal So it's weird those moments where you're just like, ah my everything and then you take your temperature It's like 99.6 and you're like, I'm bad. I'm just a very whiny person Yeah, my proteins I'm just a very whiny person. Yeah. My proteins. They're denaturing.

I have such a good like, I'm melting, but instead, like the Wicked Witch gets water poured on and she's like, my proteins! They're denaturing! I think that the answer to this question is point four. That's so low. I think the answer to this question is three. That seems like a lot. The average finger temperature increased 2.7 degrees Celsius during a hot flash. Sari's the winner.

A zinga. All right. So Sari, that means you can get to decide who goes first. And I'll go first. So like Hank was saying, mammals, like humans, expend quite a bit of energy to keep our bodies toasty warm. But other animals, like many reptiles, are ectothermic and mostly rely on external factors for temperature control. And I have just kind of assumed that plants are also beholden to the whims of their environment. They can either just tolerate

the cold or the heat or die off and regrow. And for the most part, this is true, but there are a handful of thermogenic plants, plants that can generate heat from within and raise their temperature far above the air that surrounds them. So for example, the skunk cabbage doesn't sound or look like much. It grows near the ground in wetlands across the North American continent and is kind of brownish, greenish, and stinky. I've seen some skunk cabbage in my time. I haven't.

I'm excited to see one now, though. I'm going to go looking. Because in March, when the ground is often still frozen and covered in snow or ice, you might see a small melted spot surrounding one of these little guys. For about two weeks, a modified leaf pokes out of the ground, protecting a cluster of flower heads called the spadix. And even when air temperatures are below freezing, the spadix is around 15 to 35 degrees Celsius hotter than its surroundings.

Almost like it's a tiny animal, the skunk cabbage generates this heat through cellular respiration, using up oxygen and sugars like starch in the process. And cellular respiration, as anyone who's had to memorize it for a test knows, has a lot of different steps and proteins and genes involved. And for those nerds like me, it seems like thermogenic plants may use pathways that animals don't, but exact biochemical process is a botanical mystery. It likely involves classes of compounds called alternative oxidases or plant uncoupling mitochondrial proteins or pumps, which is confusing because they're protein pumps too.

But they don't use cytochrome C oxidase, which is that big one that you learn about at the end of the electron transport system in biochemistry. This is a little in the weeds, but I was like, that's very weird. So I decided to include it in biochemistry. This is a little in the weeds, but I was like, that's very weird. So I decided to include it in my fact. And biochemistry aside, it's strange that a plant would expend all this energy to bloom a little bit earlier instead of just waiting for the weather to change. So the other botanical mystery in play is why these hot plants exist. The main guess is that the warm, radiant heat helps circulate air around the flower head,

like how hot and cold pockets of air in the atmosphere create wind, and this wafts stinky organic compounds through the air to attract pollinators. Another guess is that what fly or beetle or spider wouldn't want to hunker down in a cozy stinky plant when it's cold outside. But besides the skunk cabbage, most thermogenic plants are in more tropical environments, so this might not be as likely. But either way, these weird warm plants exist, and now I want to touch one. Can I get enough together to warm me up? I'm just like wilderness survival time, and I've

gotten out in a swamp in the cold. Can I just like gather up a bunch of skunk cabbage and be like, warm my body? My guess is no, because the heat would dissipate probably pretty quickly. Like they need to be rooted and metabolizing in order to produce that heat. But maybe if you like, if you planned ahead before you became a survivalist and like planted a grove of them, then you might have a little warm pocket. That's cool. I had no idea about that.

And there's lots of skunk cabbage in Montana. I've seen it around. I've never like approached any because it's swampy where they are. So I'm like, I'm gonna stay over here where my boots are not covered in mud. But now I kind of want to go touch one. All right, Sam, what do you got for me?

What do you think of when you think of ice? Do you think of cubes floating around in a refreshing summer beverage or maybe icicles hanging from a festively lit home on a cold Christmas morn? Above all you think about ice you think about cold So what am I doing talking about ice in an episode about heat? Well, what if I told you that some ice could be quite hot indeed Well, what if I told you that some ice could be quite hot indeed? How first of all this fact off might be a bit of a team effort because it turns out that ice is Weird as fuck and I'll probably get something wrong Second of all ice becomes ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit when it's on earth, right?

So water becomes ice at 32 degrees, but as pressure increases the freezing point of water changes So under a little bit more pressure, the freezing point gets lower. But once you start putting enough pressure on it, the freezing point increases. So on other planets with different conditions, you can get all types of wacky ice with all types of wacky freezing points. So one place in the universe with lots of water under super extreme pressure is the core of gas giants like Uranus and Neptune. The water there could be under so much pressure in fact that scientists figure there must be some really weird hot ice down there.

Ice that would, according to egghead math, have a solid lattice of oxygen atoms with hydrogen atoms sloshing around inside like a liquid. So they've called this hypothetical form of water super ionic ice and I suppose probably contented themselves to never seeing it because we do not live in the core of Neptune. But in 2019, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, used six quote, giant lasers to create shock waves that compress liquid water to between one and four million times Earth's atmosphere,

and heated it to between three and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And the thing that they thought would happen, super ionic ice, happened. So super ionic ice formed for like literally a nanosecond, and they took some X-ray measurements to prove it or something. That's what they do. And then another team in New York

did like the same thing at the same time, and they both got the same results. So I guess that settles that. So they call the ice ice 18 and it is thought in its natural environment that is probably black and four times heavier than our boring old Earth ice. And since there are lots of big gassy water-filled planets out there,

it's also thought that it might even be one of the most common forms of water in the whole universe. Since on Earth, it only exists for a nanosecond after being shot by six giant lasers, it's not really that useful to us for any practical reason. But knowing that it can exist, it gives us a better understanding of how planets work when they have watery cores, and it also seems to be super conductive, so it might help to explain some previously mysterious magnetic fields that we've seen in the universe. And maybe there are aliens out there with 8,000 degree drinks that need to be cooled off

So I gotta say I don't care that much about how this helps us understand other planets You just told me that there is black ice that is four times heavier than ice But it's still water ice. It's got a like a liquid soup of hydrogen inside of it and is potentially superconducting Yeah, and that we made it on earth Yeah, and it's potentially the most common form of ice in the universe I don't care about any any practical use for this knowledge. Well, I just care that that is a thing What's this do for me? What can I do with? 8,000 degree ice yeah, that's fascinating anyway that since that one shook me to my core, my core of Ice 18, I'm going to call this one a tie.

What? You can't just let me win. No, absolutely not. Sari had two points coming into that. Does this mean you're going to make both of them into TikToks again? No, I think I'm going to make Sam's into a TikTok. So then Sam wins. I think that's only fair. Yeah, but you won the other one. The points have to mean something, I guess.

I humbly accept my basically defeat. It's now time to ask the Science Couch, where we've got a listener question for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at joshijostar, who asks, Why is my breath warm when I say ha but it's cool when I say It's a superpower that we all have it's fun Uh-huh. I have a guess as I usually do when I go ha The air is coming out nice and slow and it's sort of in a nice big fat column of hot air and when I go

and it's sort of in a nice big fat column of hot air. And when I go, I'm blowing air, and it's sucking a lot of air in from outside and move, like it's creating this like vacuum basically, it's being filled. But the reason it feels cool is because there's more molecules hitting your fingers where you're feeling it. And those are room temperature molecules, but you're getting hit by more molecules.

So there's more wiggles going into the air than staying in your fingers. That's pretty much it. Oh, I know. A science man hang. Oh, I know. A science man hang. All I have is a couple more fancy words to describe what you're saying,

but yeah, it's basically, it's a matter of turbulent flow. So turbulence is something that exists not only in airplanes, but in any sort of fluid. So like is something that exists not only in airplanes but in any sort of fluid. So like gas or a liquid that is flowing. And there is laminar flow, which is where the fluid moves in very smooth layers.

And then there's turbulent flow, which is where it like swirls around. And that's like what's happening when you blow air out of your mouth, it's not moving perfectly. Like there's tons of different swirly bits of how your mouth is shaped and the air is being pushed out but also just the air currents around in the room.

And I don't wanna just repeat what you said, but yeah, you're blowing out air in a less directed way when you go ha and it doesn't grab as much nearby air. And when you blow air in a less directed way when you go, ha. Uh, and it doesn't grab as much nearby air. And when you blow air in a more directed way, it like swoops up the room temperature air and feels cool like a breeze. But if you like blow, if you go hoo, and you put your hand really close to your mouth,

it still feels warm because it hasn't had time to like suck up that air. Or if you like blow through a tube, uh, then it also doesn't have time or the space to get all turbulent with the other air to hit you. So it is in the way that any sort of temperature is kind of like an illusion of just there's more space, there's more molecules mixing up, which makes it feel different to you. What a world.

If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter. It's at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Vanya Tweets, at T.R. Anson, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can go to our Patreon at patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes where we are even more goofy than we are here. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen.

That's helpful and it 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. And buy stickers, too. Ten thousand minimum. 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 along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti, Emma Dowster, and Alex Billo. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. INTRO But one more thing!

—— Heat has long been used as a tool to join things together, for example, through welding. Specifically, butt welding is the term used to describe joining two pieces of metal by aligning their ends and then heating them up. But the heat can come in many different forms. Resistance butt welding passes a current through the metals, and the resulting resistance generates so much heat that it softens the metals to join them. There's also laser butt welding that indirectly heats ions by heating electrons with light. And there's ultrasonic butt welding that heats metals with high frequencies

that make low amplitude vibrations. There's so many ways to make a butt out of metal. Hmm, that's a stretch, huh? That ain't about butts. It's a bit, I mean, a little, but like, I did get to say ultrasonic butt welding. That's true. That seems like a butt fact to me. You can make it about your butt too. Ultrasonic butt welding sounds like a way to describe,

like when you sit on a plasticky chair and your butt really sticks to it, then it's like, oh, that's freaking ultrasonic butt welding going on down there. Especially when you have to stand back up. That's the ultrasonic part, because you can hear it. Hahaha. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green and joining me this week as always is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello.

And also our resident every man, Sam Schultz. Hello. As you may have noticed or known or heard, SciShow Tangents is now a YouTube channel with YouTube videos. Yeah. And in those YouTube videos, I can see that I keep my notes slightly to the left of where my camera is. So I just spend the entire episode like this.

Yeah. That's how you've always looked to us. So I'm used to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't care about you. It's all about the people, Sam.

People are gonna just have to deal with it, sorry. Yeah, and nobody knows, but hiding behind the graphics is Tuna. He's here too. And we can see him, but they can't. Yeah, he's just a... So he can do whatever. He can have his duck doing stuff,

he can just walk away, which is what he just did. He's standing there, head up to the side. It's great. You guys will never know what a great time we're having. All the goofy things, all the goofy lovely things Tuna is up to. So right now in my life, I'm currently suffering from a debilitating case of dealing with copyright, which is not a normal thing, I feel like, for most people, but we're all, to some extent, YouTubers, so we know the life.

Look, I had to pay $150 for a video for SciShow, and I said, look, I do the scripts for free. You could pay $150 for this video of a scientist inflating a moth. What? Why? Is that the butt thing? Yeah. You take the butt thing? Yeah. You take the butt thing. Yeah, yeah.

So, so a while back, like a, you know, six weeks ago on Tangents, we talked about Koromata, which are the inflatable butt tentacles that some moths have. The worst butt on planet Earth. Yeah, terrible butt situation. And I wrote, I wrote a SciShow about it. And then everybody was like, we can't find any footage of this and I was like, well, usually you pay for the script and in this case you don't so you can afford to pay Juken Media $150 for a clip of a person inflating a moth butt.

They got their hands on it, huh? Juken got it. And in the video, there's a party blower noise that happens when the coramana come out. That's so disrespectful. And in the video, there's a party blower noise that happens when the tauramata come out. And I had to put in the script, take out the party blower noise. I don't know what you're talking about. That is completely natural, Hank. That's the noise that it makes? Yeah, of course.

Anytime something unfurls in nature, it's a party blower noise. And all the nature documentaries edit it out because they're like, that would be too startling. This is too silly. Yeah, we're trying to make something relaxing right now. This isn't a party. Yeah. Nature isn't fun.

Nature isn't fun, it's relaxing. It's soothing. Speaking of relaxing and soothing, this is a science podcast. And every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic and also failing. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, I will crown one of them the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's

topic with the traditional science poem, this week from Sari. Sari Listen to the crashing waves and spread your toes in toasty sand, the salty spray. Jared I'm already there. Sari The salty spray rarely behaves where humans lay to become tanned. But lo, what's that volcanic glass, the striking green of olivine, red from an iron oxide mass or garbage worn down till it shines. Pentagonal poles of basalt stand tall or a half-worn-away limestone cliff, concretions sticking out like balls, low tides revealing petroglyphs.

From scattered seashells to glowing tides, no two the same on which we roam. So really, what is a beach besides a rocky threshold some call home? Hot damn. Nice. Geological. That was a real poem, man. Thank you. Yeah, I felt inspired. Yeah, sometimes we do real poems and it's like, I don't know, can we keep going? No, we never can. The topic for the day is beaches, not the movie,

but the, I guess, geological formation. I never thought about it like that until just now. Is beaches a movie? Is it? It's a resort too. I feel like I've seen the commercials. The very... You were not, definitely not born when the movie Beaches came out.

No, no, I was, but I was was eight so I wasn't like super into it One years old Also, not really watching that one. You know this song when beneath my wings. That's what I'm seeing right now She's fast she's fast One, Under the Boardwalk. Is that one a hit classic too? Well, that's a really, really old song. Okay. Two, Wind, Mini, That Wings. Three, I've Still Got My Health.

All by Betty Midler? Betty Midler! Is that your name? Oh my god. Oh no. You don't know movies either? No, I don't. Well, no, Bette Miller is.

Oh, Bette. Yeah, it's Bette Midler. She's both. You've seen Hocus Pocus. No, I have. You've never seen Hocus Pocus? I've never seen Hocus Pocus. Oh my God, the topic of the day is beaches.

No, it's Bette Midler now. Say she's about to call me a beach. Bette Midler now. Safe is about to call me a beach. Bette Midler would not hesitate. Yeah. So, Sari, what is a beach? So it is, as far as I can tell, coastal zone.

So in between water and land. So you can have a lake, beach, you can have a ocean beach. You can have a river beach. I've been to one. Yeah, you can have a river beach. Back out on them all the time. Between water and land. And it's where sediment is accumulated and deposited. And sediment feels like a loose word geologically, because you can have rocky beaches, you can have very

big sediment, you can have like meter law, big rocks. And that's still a beach? That's still a beach. That's not a beach if they're meter large. That's just a coast. Like a cliff isn't a beach. That's more than one meter. Yeah, there's a line between cliff and beach, but I have to be able to lie down on a beach I disagree you can walk on a beach But not lie down on it because there's some beaches that are like jaggedy rocks Yeah, not on it your butt would hurt your back would hurt. I just don't know that that's a beach anymore

I think you look at it and say that beach sucks Yeah, I think I disagree. I think that the sediment has to, you have to be able to pick up the sediment. That's the line. If I can no longer lift a piece of the beach, it's not a beach anymore. What if the strongest person on the planet

could lift up a rock on the beach? That'd be fine. If like Magnus Magnuson or whatever. So there's more beaches to Magnus Magnuson in the world than there are to you. No, no, no, no. He is the person who defines the beach. His current level of strength defines all beaches. I like we all have different things

that we can call beach. A different threshold for beach. Uh-huh, yeah. Like we're not allowed to call beach. The older and weaker you get, the fewer beaches there are in the world. That used to be a beach back in my youth, but now I can't bend over.

They're also, I think there might be a size at which the sediment can be too small for it to be a beach. Bang. And then it's just mud. Oh, yeah. Yes. There's like marshes or swamps that are by oceans. But I think, yeah, it gets so small that it's dirt or mud. Yeah, then it's apparently an important part of being a beach Is that there's no plants or like there's an area? That's not very planty. Yeah, I agree that because otherwise you're like, that's just a wetland uh-huh, the sand is gets there by by transport from rivers and And one of the scary things I learned I don't know if I don't want to ruin your

facts or anything, one of the scary things I learned about beaches is that they take time of stability to form and so if the ocean gets much higher than it is right now, you don't just like get a new beach further higher up, it just eats the beach and you don't have a beach for a long time unless you make one artificially. So a world where the sea level increases substantially is a world without natural beaches, which is a bummer. Not the biggest of the bummers that will come along with that world, but one of them. Sari, do you know anything else about beaches? Sari- I know where the word beach comes from.

Jared- It was invented by Bette Midler in 1988. Sari- Yes, and then she sang about it. She was like, let's go to the beach each, whatever the Nicki Minaj song is. Yeah, Nicki remade that Bette Midler song. Yeah, she did a cover, right? There's only been one song about a beach in the entire history of music, and that's it. And it's just been covered and recovered. I like that Sarah is starting to get into music, so she doesn't know that one Nicki Minaj song. You gotta start somewhere. Beach actually came before Bette Midler, and it was used in Old English, came from, I tried

to look up the pronunciation of this, B-E-C-E, which is Bisha, I think, like somewhere between close, close to what it was. That meant stream and eventually meant like the pebbles that you can find in streams or along the seashore. So beach was used for rocky beaches in Europe, which there are a lot of. What do you think about that, Hank? Look, I agree that if you can pick it up, it's a beach. Oh, yeah, all right. But a strand was used to describe what we would now,

like, if you picture a beach, you're expecting small sand that can, like, run through your fingers as opposed to petals. And that's what, in Old English, they called a strand as, like, a shore, or the border between the land and the sea, which comes from the root S-T-E-R, which means to stretch out and it's there in stretch. Hmm. And also in strand. And also in strand, yeah. Like the current definition of strand.

And so I thought that was interesting because you usually say something like in my head, beached and stranded are synonymous and I never thought to connect those. But like that's like the lingering meaning of strand is like, oh, you're stranded ashore. But it's because the beach used to be called a strand. I mean, but you can be stranded anywhere now. You don't have to be stranded on a beach. Yeah, that's true.

In fact, all of the places I've ever been stranded were not beaches, unfortunately. Usually airport, which is kind of the beach of the air, isn't it? It is an air beach. Yeah, airport or gas stations are my main places I've been stranded. And gas stations are like the beach of the road. That's absolutely true. Sidewalk is a little closer, but a gas station is like the dock of the road.

Yeah, it's a road dock. Yeah. Ahoy. We could call it that, and everybody would be like, yeah, seems right. That seems cool. I like that, yeah. That's better. Excellent.

I feel much more informed about beaches than I did a mere 15 minutes ago. Would you guys like to play a game? Okay. Yeah. I've been looking forward to it all day. Oh, really? Yeah. That feels good. That's so nice.

We're gonna play a game of Tangents, Truth, or Fail today. It's gonna be about beaches, because when you think of beaches, you probably think of summer and warm weather. But even when the weather turns cold and people are not flocking to the beaches, they are still there, and they're maybe even going through some excitement of their own. The following are three stories of wintertime on the beach, but only one of them is true. Which one is it? Winter Beach. You know, think about Winter Beach. We went to Amsterdam for VidCon a while ago and we went to like a resort town and the beach was, it was freezing and we were all wearing huge coats, but there were Dutch people frolicking around in their

swimsuits and I was like, this is a cold beach. This is the life that you live. Yeah. I like a cold beach, honestly. I don't like to get baked. Waste of a beach. Beach gotta be hot. It's still a beach.

It's still a beach. It's still beautiful. But which one of these things is true? Are you ready? Yes. Fact number one. Next to Lake Michigan, the combination of snow, wind, and shoreline creates sheets of ice that stack up on top of each other until, eventually, enough pressure builds up underneath

that it erupts into a volcano of ice. Or it could be fact number two. A current called the Kuroshio Current transports sand mixed with algae from beaches to the northern Pacific Ocean, and in winter, those bits of algae and sand begin to ice together, creating a frigid beach in the middle of the ocean. Or it could be fact number three. Off the coast of California's beaches are forests made of kelp that house a massive amount of wildlife.

And as the cold sets in and the kelp begins to die off, it's good news for the local sea otter population, which uses the dying kelp to create floating mats to insulate them like adorable little otter sleeping bags. I was really excited to hear what word you were going to come up with. I couldn't remember what that thing was called. So it could be ice volcanoes along the beach. It could be the beach in the middle of the ocean, or it could be little comforters for sea otters sourced from a kelp forest.

So the first one, we have a mutual friend, Alexis, who lives in Michigan and does science communication and posts a lot of pictures of Lake Michigan or videos of how icy it gets. And I feel like if there was an ice volcano, she would have gotten a picture of it because she's on the lake all the freaking time. And I've seen those big ice sheets and they are quite dramatic and crashy, but never an ice volcano. Yeah. I got really hung up on this one because I lived in Chicago by, I think like Michigan, that's like Michigan, right? It was hell in the winter. It was like another world over

there. It was like you were on Venus or something. It was just like wind, ice. So I could totally believe that that would happen, but I feel like I'm too hung up on that one just because I lived in Chicago. So I gotta, I gotta open my mind. I don't think it could be the otters though, because I don't think they need to be insulated. Number one, I don't think they're that smart. Number two. Oh! Well, I was with you on number one. I was like, look, maybe otters are so amazing. Who knows? I don't think they need to be smart. They're like a cat have so many abilities and powers cats are also smart they have so many abilities and powers that they don't need to be

that smart otters are smart and they're every bit as smart as you that well okay I don't think they do they they did you pass AP calculus? No. Neither did an otter same. What if I had said yes? Neither did or not or the same. Oh, shit. Right? What if I had said yes? You picked one you knew I didn't do. Yes. Look at that.

Yeah, you could have gone for AP art history or something like that. I didn't do that, no. There were some AP classes I did pass, but that weren't. So, what do you think? So, I think it's pretty much got to be number... The middle of the beach in the middle of the ocean. I think I would have seen that. Volcanoes on the beach.

I think I would have seen the ice volcano on the news when I lived there. So I think it's number two just by process of elimination. I think it's the otters. As much as you are against the otters, I feel like we talk ourselves out of the correct one every freaking time. Okay. I'm not going to argue with you because you're a nemesis, but... Well, now we're not working together this episode.

No, no, that didn't work. No, we both failed. Yeah, I'm going to say the otters at the kelp forest. Well, I'll tell you what, you two do tend to talk yourselves out of the right answer because ice volcanoes, Google it, it's real. No! That doesn't necessarily happen every year, but in February of 2020, you could find ice volcanoes along the shores of Lake Michigan. They're not actually

volcanoes, but they sure do look like them. They're cone-shaped mounds that form under very specific conditions that Lake Michigan happens to provide. Very cold temperatures, a lot of snow, and a lot of waves. So, as snow falls on the lake, it begins to form like a slush, and then that eventually gets floated to shore, and then mounds of slush begin to accumulate, and then eventually the water pressure builds up underneath the ice to the point that it erupts and it shoots like water up like 15, 10, 15 feet. According to one meteorologist, the eruption sound like a slurpy getting dropped on the ground.

I should have known there was no amount of weather-based depravity Lake Michigan wasn't capable of. So as far as the beach in the middle of the ocean, not that beach in the middle of the ocean, but in 2006, when on a boating trip in the South Pacific, some people happened upon what looked like a beach in the middle of the ocean. It was actually a floating mass of pumice stones that ended up there because of an undersea volcanic eruption further out. So basically, rock got gas from the eruption trapped inside of it, floated up, and became

this big mat. Sadly, these kinds of islands don't last very long. A year later, it was mostly gone. The last one, kelp forests, definitely a thing. There are definitely sea otters that like to swim around in them, but they do not make blankets out of the kelp, despite how- Why? Why don't they? Because they're stupid and they don't need to. That went in dignity and became. I'll give you they don't need to.

I'll give you they don't need to. Go visit Monterey Bay if you haven't been able to. Go to the aquarium and check out the otters. You can see them close up at the aquarium and you can see them out in the wild in the kelp forests. And they'll help you with your math homework apparently. No they won't. They didn't ask either.

They'll only do art history. Yeah. All right. So it's a tie ball game here at Zero to Zero, and we're going to head out for a short break, and then we'll be back for the fact off. Hello, everybody! Welcome back! It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have all brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind.

And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks to the one that blew my mind the most and also that I would be most inclined to make a TikTok video about. But to decide who goes first, we have a trivia question. In 2013, Canadians were facing a major challenge. Large flocks of Canada geese would show up at beaches and poop so much that the water was becoming a public health threat. So the city of Ottawa decided to turn to drones to scare off the geese. The drone was designed and run by Steve Wambolt, who equipped it with lights and audio recordings of goose predators like foxes and eagles. Wambolt would show up to the beach at 4 a.m. to ward off any initial geese and then return throughout the day to run the drone again.

And his efforts paid off. At the beach, he was working at, a flock of 150 geese would usually show up each summer, but with his goose-fighting drone, that number went down. On average, how many geese showed up once the drone started to do the drone work? I like how we never named scientists on this, but we named this guy who flew the goose drone. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Very important job. He just sat at the beach all day and flew his freaking drone. If that's the fee, like, look, we don't need universal basic income. We need universal basic goose scaring drone jobs. Yeah, everybody. Like then everybody be like, all right, I'm set.

I like my life. Yes. I get to scare geese with drones. The economy is based on terrorizing geese now. Yeah. Yeah. So there was 150 on a normal year. How many were there on the goose year or the drone year?

What? Like how many? They would just land once? Oh, well, I'll just guess. I think the answer is a big goose egg. Zero. Can't go below that, Tariq. No. I want to say, I don't know, 30?

Can you say any other number besides 30? No, I don't want to win. I'll say maybe 32. All right, Sam is the winner. The answer is 15, which was exactly between zero and 30, which you would know, Sam, if you took AP Calculus. Yeah, I did those integrals in my head and was like, I don't know what makes time.

Sam has no choice. That's not calculus, is it? No. No, it's not calculus. It's just division. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's part of the reading, writing, arithmetic, Sam. Well, look, I thought maybe if that was calculus, I'm really good at math and I didn't know

it. Yeah. All right, so, Sari intentionally threw it, which means that Sam gets to decide who goes first. I'll go first. Ready? Yes. Yeah. Per and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFASs. Is there an easier way to say that?

PFASs? Can I say PFASs from now on? Yeah, PFASs. I think that people say PFASs. Are chemicals used in a variety of products? It's super hydrophobic, so it's used in stuff like waterproof fabrics and paints, and it's super heat resistant and tough, so it's used in firefighting foams and nonstick pans. PFASs are made up of carbon and fluorine bonds, and carbon and fluorine bonds are one of the

strongest bonds in chemistry. So the chemical will basically exist in nature forever. So PFASs have been dubbed the forever chemical, which is great for waterproofing and nonstick pans. It's a wonder chemical of the mid-century. And like so many other wonder chemicals of the mid-century, it's got a lot of fucked up stuff going on for it too. For one, it's been linked to all sorts of health effects like ulcerative colitis, infertility,

and cancer. Generally, exposure to them is pretty low, but they tend to stick around in the body and accumulate and cause problems if you just are exposed to them too much. Another issue, the forever part of forever chemicals, becomes an issue when they end up in the environment. So people throw things with PFASs in them away, or they pee and poop out PFASs that end up inside of their body, and then those end up in the water, which end up in the ocean. And there the PFASs stick to plankton, which get eaten by fish, which get eaten by whales and seals and bigger fish

and all the guys in the ocean that eat fish. And that is not good for them because it impacts ocean life's health, just like it impacts ours. But honestly, it sort of seems like we took the sucks to be them approach to this whole situation. So the PFAS genie is out of the bottle, they're in the ocean, and if they're in the ocean, at least they aren't floating around

in the atmosphere for human beings to breathe in and ingest. So the prevailing theory was that they would end up stuck to debris and drift to the bottom of the ocean and just get sealed up in a watery grave. Immediately adjacent to the ocean is, you guessed it, the beach. So let's picture the beach. We've already done this with Sarah, but we'll do it again. Warm sand, bright sun, gulls flapping in the salty breeze. A little crab is maybe walking around. And the waves breaking against the shore, a misty spray shooting up into the air

and gently messing you with toxic chemicals. Oh no, I was enjoying my book. In December 2021, the least beachy month of the year, a team of scientists from Stockholm, Sweden released a paper, the findings of which suggest that a not insignificant amount of PFASs were not ending up in Davy Jones's locker as hypothesized, but actually being re-released into the air by the aerosol spray of waves breaking against the shore. So previous samples by the same team had found PFASs in the atmosphere around the ocean. In this newer study, they took 100 air samples from two beachfront towns in Norway between 2018 and 2020.

One was right on the shore and one was 12 miles inland, so not beachfront, but near the beach. And they found PFASs in every single one of them, along with sodium ions indicative of the PFASs being carried in by a spray-filled ocean breeze. And the higher the sodium in the air sample, the higher the PFASs were too. So the team concluded that somewhere between 284 and 756 US tons of PFASs could be being released into the air every year and be blown far enough inland to contaminate water sources in more places than just beachfront cities. Plus almost half of humans live within like 50 miles of the ocean anyway, so they don't even have to blow that far. So I guess the moral of the story is, I don't know, the earth's a closed loop and we live here, so maybe be careful about industrial waste. That's why we live in we live here. So maybe be careful about industrial waste. That's why we live in Montana, Sam. Yeah.

We're far enough away from them, maybe. Good luck. We're just peeing and pooping them downstream for other people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just licking my Teflon pans and peeing for everybody else. Take that, sea otters. That's a bummer. I feel like these chemicals aren't new. They're from the 40s.

Yeah. Okay. We've just gotten like better at both detecting them and maybe being worried about them. Yeah. Yes. I think like we figured out the health problems associated with them. I don't think you can even manufacture them in the US anymore. Oh, okay.

But you can import them and use them and stuff. So they're still around they're not like Feel like if you gotta say like you can't make this anymore. You gotta say you also can't use it Yeah, it does seem a little like like it's okay to Destroy the planet just like the other part is like it's not other part It's just one planet as I was reading this there was a lot of moments where I was like, well other part, it's just one planet. As I was reading this, there was a lot of moments where I was like, well, they're just going to go in the ocean and we're okay with that.

It's just like, they're too useful for us to do anything about really, is what it seemed like. So we ruined the beach. It's okay. We'll get another planet eventually. Okay. Zari, what do you got? Are you going to uplift me a little bit? A little bit. And then we're going to come back down a little bit at the end too. But there'll be an uplifting part. So, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is a loosely defined geographic region in Washington and Oregon in the US and British Columbia in Canada.

And all my formative memories of beaches didn't involve palm trees and leisure. They involved rain jackets and a strong sense of wonder because of rocky tide pools and marine life. And so, to describe a beach for the third time this episode, but crabs and anemones and gulls, so two of the same animal sand mentioned- I have some of those too. Yeah. Were it the only animals that made their home in these damp sands? For thousands of years, there were also fluffy, white domesticated dogs raised for their companionship and shorn regularly like sheep.

So the Coast Salish is a group of indigenous peoples that live along the coastlines of the Pacific Northwest. And before European colonizers wreaked havoc and displaced them, many Coast Salish nations had a close relationship with different types of dogs, including hunting dogs and these so-called Salish wooly dogs. And a lot of what we know about Salish wooly dogs is through indigenous oral histories. They were raised on small islands separate from other canids so that they would selectively breed with each other and maintain their long fleecy coats. They were groomed, cared for,

and ate seafood-based proteins from near shore ocean fish to marine mammals. And they either indirectly hunted and ate scraps because of their closeness with humans or were fed directly like treasured companions. Every so often, the Salish Woolly Dogs would be shorn for their fur, which would be traded or mixed with mountain goat fur and plant fibers, spun into yarn and woven into fabric like blankets or clothing. Now, there's only one Salish woolly dog pelt in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History or any museum because some European dude named George Gibbs was doing anthropological surveys of the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1800s, took or bought or somehow acquired a dog, named him Mutton,

and then donated his pelt after he died. And when this pelt was excavated from a filing cabinet, textile conservationists were extremely excited because it's basically impossible to tell what furs are interwoven into a blanket or something just by looking at it. But with mass spectrometry, researchers could closely analyze the proteins in various fiber samples, including mutton's fur, and more decisively determine which coast Salish fabrics in various museum collections were made with Salish wooly dog fur. And this is where it gets kind of a bummer. I wish I could tie this up with a happy ending, but colonization sucks for a lot of reasons, especially because of how many indigenous ways of life were criminalized from languages

to domesticating cute fluffy island beach dogs for fabric weaving. And because of that, Salish wooly dogs went extinct sometime before the 1900s. And we've not only lost cultural information, but also knowledge about how dogs got domesticated in North America. And we're left to piece it together from oral histories or archeological dig sites and canid bones that we find inside. And one single filing cabinet pelt.

Yeah, and that one, and mutton. Thank you. Don't need to just like the signs. Mutton the little doggy. When he named him mutton, I was like, oh no. Yeah. He did not eat him.in, I was like, oh no. Yeah. He did not eat him. Yeah, he just like, I think Muttin like chasing sheep and like ate the head of a sheep pelt or something like that at some point. Okay.

I mean, there's pictures of Salish Woolly Dogs, which is wonderful because they look very cute and I love that they were actually used as a as like a textile source Would never have thought of dogs being used in that way where it's like you get Companionship and you get like a like a guard dog effect like a barking alarm But you also have fabric. Yeah get a little thing to spin in the yarn What does that have to do with beaches? They like live? get a little thing to spin into yarn. What does that have to do with beaches? They like lived on the beach. They lived on the beach. They ate seafood.

They were island dogs. They lived on the beach. That's what they're, they were beach dogs. They hung out on the beaches. And this was part of how they were bred is like their little island lifestyle. Yeah, so they, the coastal Salish were not only on islands, but like along the Pacific Northwest, but they specifically kept these dogs on really small islands so that they could roam freely, like without being caged, but also like hang out, do the dog stuff, but also not mix with wolves or the hunting dogs that were on the rest of the land.

Little special boy island. A good special boy island. Good boy island. Ah! Sam. Yeah. Are you willing to concede defeat to the Salish Woolly Dog? Why are you asking me? Because I think that we all agree that that's really great.

And I got to have to give it to that one because there were islands full of little dogs. Yeah, it's like, but you're making me concede because you know you're making the wrong choice No, no, it's because I think that you agree with me. I absolutely don't it's bare so barely about beaches It's about dogs. He already barely you are right that it's barely about beaches and yours was very beach tide beach centric But also I don't want to think about the fact that I'm gonna poison myself I go to the beach Not a good reason to make a decision, but I can see defeat Hank There are so many cute pictures of dogs people are gonna look at his tick tock and be like, oh what a good dog

Oh, I'm gonna listen to tangents That's that is a nice thing. That's a really good to remember It's all about getting people to listen to tangents. Anyway, congratulations, Sari. That means you're the winner of the episode because of how you guys got no points. And the first part. Just eek and bye. That's my motto.

Now it's time to ask the Science Couch, where we ask some listener questions to our virtual couch. You finally honed scientific minds. At judacraz asks, how do whales get beached? How do they get pushed so far up inland? Is a great question. I think it's probably, it's a bunch of different things. But one of the things is that tides happen. And so, so like, you start up maybe not so far up the beach, but then you're like, oh, not so far up the beach, but then you're like, oh, I'm way up the beach now because the tide went out.

They're not ramping? They didn't do a ramp. Okay. They didn't do a sweet trick and then miss the landing. As for the question of how do whales get beached generally, how do they get them into a situation where they are so far up onto the beach that they can't get off at all?

And then the tide has a chance to go out while they can't move. That is a question of some confusion. Like many things, scientists are like, we have some guesses, but are not entirely sure. So one of them is just general topography of the seafloor and getting confused, because sometimes beaches drop off so quickly that when the tide is deep enough, the whales don't properly sense the seafloor or the cetaceans because dolphins get beached as well.

And so they basically make certain regions more dangerous for deep water marine mammals because they're not as used to sussing out the seafloor. They just have this, researchers think they have this assumption of safety. So when they get too close, and this can be because they're in an unfamiliar place or because they were driven there by a lack of food because of pollution or overfishing or other things, then they swim into areas that they're unfamiliar with, and then as the tide rushes out, then they're beached or stranded. Part of it might be because of interference with sonar, whether it's because of sickness

and pollution in chemicals like Sam's fact or noise pollution, like sound pulses generated by human equipment underwater. They just get disoriented and end up headed in the direction of land. And then a lot of the mass strandings, so when you see, I think anything above one adult whale or cetacean or a mother and child is considered a mass stranding, so anywhere from two to hundreds, is because these animals are so social, which is very heartbreaking and very sweet, that if one is sick and beaches itself, then their instinct is to help or to follow or to like stick together as a pack. And so whether they all headed into an inlet and then the tide went out,

or if one of them got beached or is on its way to getting beached, then they follow anyway to be like, maybe we should stick together. We should try to do something. I don't want to anthropomorphize animals, but like there's some herd mentality there. And then once you're on land, then it's a race against time because the cetaceans are usually supported by water and in air, their body weight often like crushes their internal organs. Toxins can build up and if like technically they're mammals, they breathe air, so if water gets in the blowhole, then they can drown, which is why conservationists say to like wait for or like call for help or call a volunteer because there are procedures like keeping it wet but not suffocating it or like making sure it's protected from the sun because it

doesn't have sun protection naturally and can get burnt and whatnot so Oh gosh the fact that they like Accidentally or on purpose kill themselves en masse when they're trying to be like our friend our friend Yeah, beaches are sad. I don't like I don Never! We started out thinking beaches were great, turns out they're just a source of great horror and sadness in our universe. If you want to ask the Science Couch one question, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to Marinara on Discord,ara on Discord, Bill on Discord, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like SciShow Tangents and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents where you can be able to patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. You can also leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and it helps other people know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. And you can watch us on YouTube and subscribe to the channel. Like

and subscribe everyone. Leave a comment. I read all the comments because there aren't that many and so I can. I read them, you can reply to a lot of them. Thank you for joining us. I have 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 Dowsder. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish, our executive producers are Caitlin Hofmeister and me, Hank Green, and of course 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. If you ever see a little pile of sand on the beach that looks like a coiled squiggly poop emoji or some spaghetti noodles. It's probably

not just a coincidence and it didn't come from anyone's butt above ground. But it did come from someone's butt. It did come from a butt. Lug worms are actually hiding just beneath the surface on lots of coastal beaches and are big parts of ecosystems. They have u-shaped burrows and they eat microorganisms in the sand and then they poop out all of the rock they can't digest as a cast onto the surface of the beach and that's the little squiggly poop. So if you wanna see one for yourself,

dig down in the sand when you see one of their poops or just Google a picture. Or if you're watching on YouTube, we'll probably just show you one right now. Yeah, here it is. If it's not there and I couldn't find a picture of it, who knows what I'm showing right now. Got a here it is. If it's not there and I couldn't find a picture of it, who knows what I'm showing right now. That was all copyright's fault.

Mr. and Mrs. Copyright causing huge problems. I have a big picture of Mickey Mouse showing right now instead of... Take that, Walter! We'll now watch the entirety of Star Wars, Episode 6, whatever one that is.