SciShow Tangents - Trick or Treat Month: Gourds with Jackson Bird!

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Tangents' annual descent into horror returns with Trick or Treat Month! And this time, we brought some fiendish friends along! Join us for a whole month of spooky themes and special guest stars!From out of the pumpkin patch rises author, YouTuber, and podcaster Jackson Bird, here to thrill us with terrifying tales of the scariest produce of all: gourds! From pumpkins to watermelon, this versatile family of fruits nourishes and terrifies in equal measure!Get your extra-scary SciShow Tangents Halloween Decal here! Tell 'em Spooky Sam sent you!Looking for more Jackson Bird? You can buy his book, Sorted, listen to his podcast, Cool Stuff Ride Home, or check him out on YouTube! And if you want to know what this waffle business we were talking about is, check out his series Will It Waffle?!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Truth or Fail]Squash bees and poison pollenhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7033150/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666515821000147https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33998650/https://lopezuribelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SquashBeeBooklet-WEB_VERSION_FINAL.pdfField mice and cool cucumbershttps://horticulture.oregonstate.edu/oregon-vegetables/cucumbers-slicing-fresh-markethttps://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/tn/sfsm_opguide.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC396419/pdf/plntphys00196-0020.pdfCrickets and bottle gourd instrumentshttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00606086https://www.amentsoc.org/insects/glossary/terms/stridulation/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-are-cricket-gourds[Ask the Science Couch]Gourd cross-pollinationhttps://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/newsletters/hortupdate/hortupdate_archives/2005/apr05/Melons.htmlhttps://extension.sdstate.edu/saving-seed-pumpkins-squash-cucumbers-melons-and-gourdshttps://hortnews.extension.iastate.edu/cross-pollination-between-vine-cropshttps://hortnews.extension.iastate.edu/faq/will-cucumbers-cross-pollinate-other-vine-crops[Butt One More Thing]Aardvark cucumbers & dung pileshttps://ulovane.co.za/2017/03/16/ulovane-update-aardvark-cucumber/https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA00423203_2648

Hello, and welcome to SciShow Tangent, the frightly competitive science knowledge screamcase. I'm your ghost, Hank Gangrene. And joining me this week, as always, is mad scientist Scary Riley. Creak! And our resident Everywolf man, Sam Skulls. Grr. The old calendar on the wall says it's Halloween time.

And as you know, we here at SciShow Tangents love getting into the Halloween spirit. So this year is no different. October is Trick or Treat Month, and Sam and Sari have invited some ghoulish guests over to Tangents Manor to join us. In fact, I hear one of them approaching the door now. Trick or Treat! Well, it's Jackson Bird. it's youtuber author and host of the podcast cool stuff ride home thank you for having me hi everyone excited i feel like it's been literally literal years since we hung out literal years which to be fair is kind of yeah most people in my life what is everybody's favorite thing to get trick-or-treating?

I have a child, so I still get to get some candy when it's trick-or-treaty time because he has to pay taxes. Oh. Does he need his cast-offs as well? He tithes to the green family. I do also get the cast-offs, but they're not necessarily the best also maybe now

but in previous years he definitely had no idea of like day-to-day what was left of what he had he wasn't like i counted and i had eight snickers no weak object permanence yes yeah those those days are going to be limited do we have do we have any favorites i do like a three musketeers i like a three musketeers. I like a Three Musketeers. I think it's underrated. And I feel like it's a good like trick or treat Halloween one, like the little snack size, you know, that's like perfect bite of it. Yeah. Like if I want a whole candy bar, I kind of want a Snickers, but a little one I could do with Three Musketeers and I'd be very happy.

When you're a kid, you're like, oh, fun size. What a rip off. Then when you're then like you slowly are like oh i can't afford my own candy bars but then now they were grown-ups fun size is about all i can handle of any candy bar really yeah i like yeah i need a fun size coke uh i can't i can't take into a full coke i feel very uncomfortable even the little ones kind of yeah yeah you kind of just want one sip sary do you have a favorite i always was really excited for a Crunch Bar. I think I never got them very often, but a little crisp rice and a little chocolate was just always so satisfying.

Yeah. Do you ever have those knockoff Crunch Bars that are shaped like Halloween characters with the foil around them? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think I still love them too. I think I really liked them too. Just like, I think I really liked Rice Krispies,

which is the core of this. I would love a bowl of Rice Krispies for Halloween, but with some chocolate in there. But they're not giving that out,

so you have to do with what you got. Yeah. I'm a ride or die Reese's peanut butter cup guy. You can't get that. I mean, that's a boring take,

but I get it. All the different, like all the different sizes too are just like delightful in their own way now the tiny ones have a great ratio the middle ones have a great ratio huge ones and it's all different you know what i don't think that the ratio on the eggs is good no i love the eggs yeah there's there's not enough chocolate in the eggs the egg slash pumpkin like does the pumpkin have a better ratio is the same way no it's the same way it's too too too much peanut butter i have a pumpkin one in my refrigerator it also seems like maybe pumpkin things just sort of meander into your home yeah it's uh it's

a big theme in my life i'm gonna i i i agree with all of you but I want to pick one that's from the other category of candy. There's chocolate, then there's sugar. Just sugar things. And the sugar thing that I loved growing up that I don't ever get anymore is the bottle caps that taste like root beer and grape soda. Those are so good. Those were my jam. I don't even know where to get those. You can get them right now.

You can get a big box. You could subscribe to them on Amazon, which I want to talk to every single person subscribed to candy bottle caps. Yeah. Give me that list. Jeff Bezos. I want to make a podcast. All I do is I interviewed those people. They're going to be weird.

I don't know anything about them, but I'm confident that they're going to be strange. I don't know anything about them, but I'm confident that they're going to be strange. I would listen to that. So here on SciShow Tangents, every week we get together to try to unnerve and disgust and horrify each other with science facts, while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for gory and for candy,

which we will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of us will be crowned the king of Halloween. And if the guest is the treat of Trick or Treat Month, here's the trick. A regular panel will take turns presenting games this month, and I will be playing along. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Jackson. Pumpkin, pumpkin, you are to me the greatest gourd that could ever be. Though gourd is not your whole story. In truth, you're a squash and botanically a berry.

Whatever your classification, my love will never render. I do not judge based on gender. But pumpkin, pumpkin, with shells so round and bright pulpy guts, your wonders abound. Whether spiced, pied, or jack-o'-lantern, your costumes bewitch us as the leaves begin to turn. From towering cucurbita maxima to tiny baby boo, oh glorious pumpkin, I love you. It's just like a Shakespearean sonnet. Well, I don't know how sonnets work.

For poems. For pumpkins. For pumpkins for pumpkin yeah thank you after i wrote that i was like oh i uh i might need to reevaluate my life priorities of my love affair with pumpkins absolutely not we're approaching the age in our in our lives where we need to pick something and be like obsessed with it for the rest of the time what are you picking i think signs signs like like road signs like road signs yeah yeah are you are you like the sort of like moms who buy all the signs for inside like the hand-painted clothes oh yeah it's. It's a sign that was made to try. This kitchen is made for love. Yeah, it's a sign that was made to try and get people in the world to understand things.

And I think that there are so many great examples and so many terrible examples. Like one of my favorites of the genre is yard sard, which is a sort of a category of yard sale sign that doesn't say yard sale.

Like they got confused halfway through one of the words. And so you got Yale sale and yard sard and you got uh just y'all sale if i've seen i saw one that said once i said yard yard oh they got really mixed up yeah sorry i was the topic for the day is gourds so so sari we got a little confused by jackson's poem what is a gourd one of the words that i didn't hear was peepo okay which i i believe that gourds are peepos which is one of my favorite words in the english language before you logged on sari was like hank's Hank's going to talk about peepos. Yeah. Yep. That sounds right. Yeah.

So, okay, we'll get to peepo. I'll trace through the lineage of gourds to get to peepo. Okay. So, the gourd family of cucurbits, also known as gourds or cucurbits, are the cucurbitaceae or cucurbitaceae which includes lots of different genera including cucurbita and part of that is cucurbita peepo which is particular kinds of winter squash pumpkin and summer squash so the peepo is the fruit of those specific plants. Those specific gourds are peepos. And those are one cell, many seeded berries.

That's the kind of fruit they are, as Jackson's poem said. It has a hard rind. And it's like the quintessential fruit of the gourd family. But there are also other gourds like watermelons are gourds technically cucumbers are gourds bitter melons are gourds but those are you don't see those on our doorsteps on halloween they're less too bad iconic but they're not the platonic ideal of pumpkin i'm curious what everyone else's favorite gourd is butternut squash that's a good one i guess watermelon if watermelon counts i think watermelon watermelon's very good butternut squash as as famously seen in the

hit youtube series potter puppet pals playing the role of neville longbottom that's right did you ever waffle a butternut squash or any kind of squash i have not waffled a butternut squash on my my youtube show will it waffle however i have carved or attempted to carve a butternut squash with the potter puppet pals for like in some instagram content one year but it uh it was very difficult it didn't work out so well yeah yeah i think i think you need like a very like some specialized tools for that it's possible we did not it's also it's also possible to like drill miles into the earth so it depends on what tools you have um i have a couple fun facts about the etymology of various gourds.

Of various, okay, gourds. I think I got watermelon. I know where that one came from. Watermelon, I'm skipping a couple of them. So, cucumber has a mysterious origin. We're not entirely sure, but I think it came from Latin cuc, Q, Cameram, uh, and generally is like the root word for any sort of gourd,

which is why all the, um, all the genus and family names are based off of it. But for a brief period of time in middle English, they were called the cow cumbers and the pronunciation cow cumber was standard instead of cucumber because you didn't want them they were just in the in the freaking cow field they're those old cow cumbers this is like like like that part of the season where you're like what am i gonna do with all these

yes they're only fit for animal fodder you gave give them to the cows eat these crunchy watery gourds that aren't sweet and can be made into pies and things like that what changed we just liked we liked snacking more later i bet we made it taste better yeah i bet oh yeah probably brought a better cucumber they were probably bread a better cucumber say that like the other ones that i have squash uh this is our first one that i can trace back to like a native american word which is exciting in all these episodes it's from the uh narragansett uh algonquian word a scuta squash which means uh things that may be eaten raw or uncooked and then we just were like ah yes squash so they were they were probably describing

very much detail of like oh yes you can eat these squash like uncooked or cooked and they're like and then the white people went up and were like ah squash i get that i think there's something with um the etymology or at least like at various points so much with like the pumpkins and the squash and stuff there's like very confusing um etymology, or at least at various points, so much with the pumpkins and the squash and stuff, there's very confusing etymology with it, in part because they are actually indigenous to the American continents. And so then when the colonizers came over,

they had never seen pumpkins before, which, granted, did look very different several hundred years ago, but they kept thinking they were types of melons. And so I think at some point there was like weird hints of melon language in the pumpkin language. I know they called them like pompions for a while. They're pumpy melons. Yeah, that's it. That's why.

And that means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show where Sari is going to kick it off with it. that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show where Sari is going to kick it off with it. So the premise of Truth or Fail, I don't have it written in front of me, but I'm going to give you three stories, specifically three relationships between gourds and animals, but only one of them is true.

If you guess it right, you get the point. If you get it wrong, I get the point. The candy, I guess. Sure. And here they are number one most squash plants are pollinated by just a few specialized bees the squash bees time their mating with the flowers blooming and while they're tumbling around in there the relatively big spiny pollen grains cling on to their extra fluffy leg hairs. Plus, while generalist species of bees seem to get lightly poisoned by squash pollen and or can't digest the nutrients as well, squash bees and larvae are just fine. Or is it number two? Besides being a crunchy source of water, field mice sometimes chew out a chamber in field cucumbers, also known as slicing cucumbers, to avoid the heat.

Because of the cucumber's thick skin and the plant's big leaves, this hidey hole can be up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the air temperature, letting the mice hunker down for the day and move on at night to scatter seeds in their poop. Or, is it number three? Most male crickets use stridulation to woo their mates which is rubbing specialized organs on their wings together to make that chirping sound but there is a species of cricket in china that instead thumps its wings against the thick smooth skin of the bottle gourd also known as the calabash to make a fluttering or wrestling sound and stand out from the chorus of other insects. Ooh. Is it, number one, squash bees and poison pollen,

number two, field mice and cool cucumbers, or number three, crickets and bottle gourd instruments? Those all seem totally plausible to me. Oh, I think they all seem ridiculous. No, no. I think they all seem like they no i think they all seem like they could be slightly wrong yeah it's a little bit wrong made a mistake i like the idea that that like that these cow cumbers sometimes cow would eat it and it'd be a cucumber and

sometimes a cow would eat it and it would be a cucumber mouse burrito oh no just get a little extra protein in there oh uh but i love i think it's a very cute idea to have field mice hiding from the heat and inside of a cucumber and that's why they call it cool as a cucumber oh okay well that might convince me yeah i was wondering with that one if like it wouldn't be maybe like this is true, but it's a bigger gourd that it happens with. I will say for the first one, I have grown pumpkins and squash before. And the different types of bees is not something I ever came across. But you know, maybe I just didn't do my research on it. So this could be learning a new good thing to know. But yeah, it's not something that I noticed or read about while growing pumpkins and other squash.

My wife grows lots of squashes and stuff, and I feel like all kinds of bees are getting in there. I don't think there's just one type of bee getting in there. Yeah. And then the last one, I'm always skeptical that bugs are smart enough to do anything, but could they do this yeah they'll have to be a really old relationship yeah for bugs to get there's crickets to get good

at flapping but i'm gonna go with that one i like the idea a loud little bug the problem with that i'm not talking myself out of it now the problem with that is that like how often is this gourd dried on the tree like it when it's growing it can't be loud and hard it's got to be yeah and then eventually it would get loud and hard because i know that a lot of people use gourds as musical instruments and so i'm but i'm still going with it i said it so i'm stuck okay i i was i was kind of leaning towards the the cricket one um oh gosh what was the second one it completely left my brain the mouse the mice that live in cute oh yeah yeah yeah even though i said i think that it might be a bigger gourd i think i might still go with that one um because i i think i can

kind of see that that happening and because also what Hank just said about like, for the cricket one, like you have to like time that so well, but for this one, it could be like an abandoned cucumber that fell off a while ago. Like there's a longer period of time with which this could happen. So maybe I'm going to go with number two.

I think I'm making a big mistake, but I think I'm going to go with the cricket one as well. What do we got? I get all the candy, baby. It's the beans. Yeah. No, that did not seem like it to me. It's very weird.

Yeah. I was really on board with this cricket you made up. Well, yeah, I can talk about my lies first. So the cricket one, I just made up the thumping because I talk about my lies first so the cricket one i just made up the thumping because i thought that'd be a little cute that'd be cute little playing the the squash drum yeah but it the the grain of truth in it is that in china um crickets like the songs of crickets the chirping of crickets was wasn't i think to some degree is seen as like very cute very good uh decorative um almost like music and they would grow special shaped calabash gourds

bottle gourds that were in clay molds or bound with ropes and then dry them out and carve really intricate designs to make little cricket houses over the winter and then they would make little beds for their crickets and cleanse them out with hot tea and that way their cricket pals could sit inside the gourd and chirp and then it would echo and make a louder sound and so you can find these like decorative chinese cricket gourds in museums and they're very cool looking they're amazing just for a little that's really cool yeah the cucumber mice one so the the the seed of the lie was cool as a cucumber because i found this factoid that was passed around the internet so So many people say, according to a study in 1970, the inside of a cucumber can be 20 degrees cooler than the outside air.

I dug into this. There's a CDC pamphlet that says it. So many blogs say it. The only thing I could find was a 1970 study called Oxidative Activity of Mitochondria Isolated from Plant Tissues Sensitive and Resistant to Chilling Injury. 1970 study called oxidative activity of mitochondria isolated from plant tissues, sensitive and resistant to chilling injury. So that's like temperature and,

uh, and plants. And I can find anything about these plants being like cooler than that on the inside than the outside. And maybe it's folk wisdom. Like if you bite into a cucumber, it feels cooling and refreshing because of the water yeah i guess my question is who who cares if they're cooler inside i don't

know they just like love it as a fact people are like you know what cucumbers aren't very interesting but but one cool thing about them is that they're so cool on the inside cdc can't shut up about it yeah he needs everybody to to know about the chili inside of a cucumber. If you ever are very hot, just cut one open. Eat healthy. Cold cucumber. On your skin. Your finger.

Okay. Yeah. Stick your finger in a cucumber. A whole cucumber just on your finger. Put one on every finger. Yeah. Ah, refreshing. Edward Cucumber Hands.

Yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the real one is squash bees, which I had never heard about either, which is why I thought it was so surprising. Yeah. So other bees, so honeybees, bumblebees can go to squash flowers, but there's this paper published, and it was also pretty recent, in February 2020, about how the pollen defenses of cucurbits in the flowers, both physical and chemical, so the fact that they're huge pollen grains and that there are weird plant metabolites in there, impact like survival of generalist bees they created micro colonies of these bees and fed them cucurbit pollen and more larvae died and they had more like melanized skin patches which is like a defense response an immune response to them but for the squash bees specifically there are a couple different genus but one of them is eucera purinosa purinosa are just fine they they seem to change they they seem to have co-evolved with squash specifically they don't pollinate any other plants um and they are both resistant

to whatever toxins are in the squash pollen and uh are like structured physically to be able to collect the grains and i'm so confused what what yes why do Yeah, why do that? Extra work. Uh-huh. I think part of it is evolution is weird. But the second part of it, if we want to apply reasoning to it, it's that generalist pollinators go to so many different plants. And squash plants, like any plant, need to be pollinated by other flowers of the same plant um and so by evolving with co-evolving with a specialist bee there is this bee that will almost entirely go from uh male or female squash flowers and hop around and so you're you're not going to get squash pollen let off in an apple tree where it's not doing anything. But instead, the pollen will always make it to another squash plant to be able to hybridize, to be able to make more seeds.

That is why they do it, so that you don't waste pollen on a bunch of just pollinators going willy-nilly. I need to learn more about botany. There's a lot there. Plants are cool. I feel. I also, I need some, we just did an episode of SciShow on

lion's mane mushrooms and how they're good for your brain. I definitely need something that's good for my brain. All right. I definitely need help. Let's go to the commercial break

before I cause a problem. And we're going to take that break and then, then it'll be time for another game. All right. See you later. Okay. We're back. Everybody.

Okay, we're back, everybody. Sari has three points because she successfully confused us with squash pollinators. And now it's time for game number two. And it's me with an episode of This or That. So gourds, as you have experienced in your life, can be great for eating. But they have plenty of uses outside of being digested. And while we may not be able to turn pumpkins into carriages humans have been finding many creative uses for different types of gourds which we've talked about some already and that means that they've popped up throughout history and in archaeological findings in surprising places so we're going to be playing this or that gourd edition I'm going to describe two archaeological finds for you. And you have to guess which one involves a gourd.

Are you ready? Yeah. Okay, round number one. One of the handy things about gourds is that they are easy to carve up into useful accessories or toys. Which one of the following was carved out of a dried gourd? A 16th century miniature Japanese sculpture used to hold medicine, or a set of 6th century Viking board game pieces. You said toys so, like, prominently.

I'm going to guess the board game pieces. Board games are not a toy. You say it. What are they? What else would be a fence on your face? They're a sophisticated mechanism for exploring strategy and puzzle solving techniques, Sam. Okay, sorry. I feel like they'd be too big.

We didn't invent giant Jenga until recently, so I'm going to go with the medicine bottle. Yeah, I'm going to go with the medicine bottle as well. bottle yeah i'm gonna go with the medicine bottle as well that's a point for sari and a point for jackson because it was the miniature japanese sculpture why do you emphasize toy so hard hey i did what i did so in the 16th century japanese men would carry around little pockets that hung from a sash and on the other other side of the pocket would be a miniature sculpture called a netsuke that acted as a counterweight to keep the pocket in place they were often decorative carvings made from a variety of materials including dried gourds but there were viking board game pieces made from whale bone and they have helped archaeologists potentially date viking whaling back to the at least the

sixth century ce which sounds challenging to be a sixth century whaler. I'm glad that that's not my job. The usefulness of gourds also extends back beyond the living and various gourd derived items have been uncovered at burial sites. Which of the following items found at a burial site was made from a gourd? Was it number one, a bronze age flute found in the grave of an adult male near Stonehenge? Or two, a 4,000 year old carving of an Andean God. I'm not going to get any points this episode.

Well, I'm definitely not. Cause I literally can't. So I'm ending it. You didn't write your game. Good Hank. Wait. So was the,

the car, like the, the God was carved into the gourd. Yes. I'm going to guess the god carving, because Jackson said the gourds are native to the Americas. Well, that was specifically pumpkins. I will not go on record claiming that for all gourds.

Okay, well. Which is what has been tripping me up as well with this game. I keep being like, oh, oh, no. A pumpkin fact. That's what happens when you have too much logic in your head. Okay, well, I'm going to go with it anyway. I think I'm going to go with the flute. You're going to the flute?

I think so. I can see, you know, a guy from back then playing a little ocarina. Oh, yeah, that's kind of cool. I'm going to go with the carving as well, the sculpture. Sam, another swing and another miss in 2003. Archaeologists announced that they had uncovered a carving of a god with fangs holding on to both a staff and a snake edged onto a softball-sized gourd. What the hell? They were able to date the gourd to around 2500 BCE using radiocarbon dating, making it the oldest carving of the staff god found up until that point. The gourd was likely a funeral offering and its discovery helped archaeologists piece together a timeline of organized religion in South America.

The flute, by the way, was carved out of a human thigh bone. Oh, that's pretty cool too. That's different than a gourd. Very spooky. Round number three, container goids. Goyards? Goyards. Goyards.

As we've seen, gourds have been used as storage devices for many things. Which of the following was uncovered in a dried out gourd a sample of the world's oldest cheese discovered in a 3300 year old ancient egyptian tomb or an 18th century handkerchief thought to have been dipped in the blood of the executed king louis the uh 16th i had to do some roman numeral translation there I was gonna be like

One of these is gonna make way more sense than the other Neither of them They're both bad Is it the oldest cheese Or a bloody handkerchief Okay if you had a gourd What would you hide in there I think I'm gonna go with King Louie

Just cause I think I would rather store a handkerchief in a gourd than cheese also. So I'm going to stick with it. I would stuff it there. Uh-oh, I've got blood. No one suspects the gourd. Yeah. That one's so specific.

I think I got to go with. I mean, either it's a devious trick. Seems too specific, though. I'm going to go with the blood-soaked handkerchief as well. Yeah. You also, after all this, you got to go with these two. Because soaked handkerchief as well you yeah you gotta you also after all this you gotta go with these two because they seem to know what they're talking about and they are indeed right when king louis was executed in france in 1793 a lot of people showed up to

watch and then after he had been executed they dipped their handkerchief in the king's blood for a little souvenir more recently an italian family found a handkerchief stored within a dried squash that had faces of revolutionaries carved into it as well as an inscription that said on january 21st maximilian bordelieu not gonna even try dipped his handkerchief in the blood of louis the 16th after his decapitation however figuring out whether the handkerchief was actually dipped in Louis XVI's blood has been difficult because we don't have a lot of family DNA history to compare it to.

At first, scientists thought that it was his blood because the DNA indicated a man with blue eyes, and he had blue eyes, and it seemed to match the DNA from mummified head of one of his ancestors. What? But other work done around the same time has found that the genes

didn't support the claims supporting to a northern italian ancestry in the blood claiming a much lower probability that the blood came from someone with blue eyes i'm i'm mixed here i don't think that we know enough one of the things that it like when you're like can we trace a direct line of lineage from this person to this person who this and I'm like, people get up to all kinds of business. Like, you don't know what they got up to. Like there probably are a fair number of secrets being kept in that sort of situation. It's pretty easy to dip something in blood, though, and lie about it. Also, that's also true.

That's also true. So the last articles we found for when we're from 2014 uh not really didn't seem like any conclusion had been reached but we've had quite a bit of time to continue looking into it i don't know what we've been so distracted by since 2014 i think this should really be top of our priorities right now frankly uh the cheese was found in clay pots in the tomb of tom tom thomas tommy's um so an actual situation researchers took a sample of the cheese back to the lab to confirm the presence of milk proteins they also found proteins associated with a highly contagious bacterial infection i'm glad they didn't i was gonna ask if they ate it but i'm glad they didn't eat it it's good thing that that's not the first thing that archaeologists

try you know is just eating anything they find that's what i do that's why i'm not an archaeologist sometimes they do though sometimes they do yeah Sari has six. And if we add up everybody, we would beat her. But no other way. Oh, no. I'm sorry. My torp is too hard with my bees. No, I'm sorry. If we added up everybody, we would tie.

Yeah. I guess I got two points out of that because Sam. Yeah, let's say you got two points out of that one. There you go. I appreciate that. Thank you. Now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got a listener question for our finely honed couch of finally honed scientific minds. The couch is not finely honed. The couch is just a normal couch. Imagine it in

your brain. At the giant cloud or on Twitter asks, I've seen multiple videos recently about accidental cross pollination of cantaloupes creating hybrids such as a cucumber cantaloupe hybrid can you explain this sort of phenomenon i don't is that real is that i don't know if that's real if it's real look they're close enough related that the that the genes did the gene thing have you ever seen have you ever seen a uh corgi rottweiler mix? Because, wow. I do feel like the cantaloupe cucumber hybrid is like one of the most boring hybrids you could do. Like, let's take a really boring, tasteless vegetable and mix it with a really boring, tasteless melon. But what about, Jackson, does this change your mind? Cantaloupe-cumber.

Yes. 100% changes my mind. They are two of the funnier words. words so maybe someone knew what they were doing tragically there is no cantaloupe cucumbers or it's fake? cucamelons or any sort of melons

because they're different genuses so you can't you gotta you gotta be in the same genus i think as far as as far as i can tell for plant cross-pollination i'm also not a botanist but that is seems to be the summary of my research so um for example cucurbita peepo contains things like zucchini acorn squash spaghetti squash delicata squash pumpkins um and so you could have like a a pumpkini or uh that's fun yes uh i don't know del uh delicate delicate corn uh you can you can crossbreed those because they are similar enough genetically i'm gonna posit what happened here which is that there's a some weird people out there that looks

that if you cut it open it looks weird enough that people are like that looks like a cucumber on the inside and then somebody made a tiktok were like, this is lied about it. There it is. Like, that's it. That's what happens if you cross a cucumber and a cantaloupe. Yeah. It's a cantaloupe.

Yumber. And then all of a sudden the CDC was saying, that's what's. Yeah. Adding it to their cool as a cucumber fact list. Put it on your fingers. If you want to ask the science couch, your questions,

you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Zangulo, at Tig Heernan, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. Jackson, if people are as delighted by you as I am, where do they get more of your content? Well, thanks, Hank. am where do they get more of your content oh well thanks hank um you can uh tune into my daily

podcast every weekday about cool and interesting things in the news called cool stuff ride home uh if anyone's gonna be in new york city in in the november-ish time uh i'll be doing some experimental theater in the east village with the neo-Futurists in the Infinite Wrench so if that's your kind of thing It is I actually, no, I am in the Neo-Futurists now but I first saw them at NerdCon Stories

so thanks Hank Thanks for my new job unintentionally years ago and yeah, you can follow me at JackIsNotABird on YouTube, Twitter, all the internet places. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. You can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash scishowtangents.

There, you can become a patron. You can get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes and other un-normal things. And we have a tier where you can get a special in-episode shout-out. That's the tier that patron John Pollock subscribed at. Thank you, John. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. If it allows you to leave a review, some places don't.

But that's helpful. It lets us know what you like about the show, and it lets 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. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz.

And I've been Jackson Bird. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billa. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Trucker-Vardy. Our sound design is by Joseph Muna-Medish.

Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and Hank Green. And we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on Patreon. Thank you and remember, our sound designers by joseph moon or menish our executive producers are caitlin hoffmeister and hank green and we couldn't make any of this without our putrid patrons on patreon thank you and remember the mind is not a coffin to be filled but a jack-o-lantern to be lighted But one more thing. Ha ha ha ha ha! Aardvarks are known for digging up termite mounds and anthills, but they've also been seen eating one specific plant, an odd species of cucumber that grows

baseball-sized gourds around 20 to 30 centimeters underground in the sandy soil of southern Africa. The aardvarks dig up these cucumbers, eat the watery flesh, poop out the seeds in dung piles near their burrows, and then bury their poop. These cucumber seeds wouldn't germinate without them, so it's an extremely weird plant with an even weirder symbiotic relationship. You know, they did not cover this on Arthur. I would love to see that episode.

We don't talk enough about Arthur's poops. Time for dinner, son, and then they go out in the backyard and start digging. Feet underground.