SciShow Tangents - Trick or Treat Month: Slime with Alexis Nikole Nelson!

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Trick or Treat Month returns... and this time it's personal! Join us for another month of spooky themes and special surprise guest apparitions! Try not to get too scared!And so we close the ancient, flesh-bound spell book on another Trick or Treat Month... but we're going out on top, baby! Alexis Nikole Nelson has appeared, as if by magic, to lead us into the deep, dark woods and point out all the slimy, sticky, gross stuff on the ground that she says we can eat. I guess I trust her! 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! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!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[This or That]Round 1 - Blue glowing slimehttps://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/tube-worm-slime-displays-long-lasting-self-powered-glowhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103273/Round 2 - Eating parents’ slimehttps://animalmicrobiome.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42523-023-00243-xhttps://www.wired.co.uk/article/caecilians-limbless-amphibian-skin-feeding-young-cloacahttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101029104603.htmhttps://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pmic.200500591Round 3 - Snottiteshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3246232/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/see-the-ugly-beauty-that-lives-in-a-toxic-caveRound 4 - Mating plughttps://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/218/9/1410/14572/Size-dependence-in-non-sperm-ejaculate-productionhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1005596707591https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1564092/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/mrd.22689[Trivia Tiebreaker]Hagfish slime on roadhttps://www.southernfriedscience.com/your-car-has-just-been-crushed-by-hagfish-frequently-asked-questions/[Ask the Science Couch]Slime molds and biocomputershttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/physarum-polycephalumhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55749-9https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5755296/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12668-014-0156-3https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23713-slime-mould-could-make-memristors-for-biocomputers/https://techhq.com/2023/04/biocomputers-an-alternative-to-quantum-computing/[Butt One More Thing]Bird nestling fecal sac / mucus membrane https://www.audubon.org/news/what-are-fecal-sacs-bird-diapers-basicallyhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jav.00353

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the frightly competitive science knowledge screamcase! I'm your ghost, Hank Gangrene, And joining me this week, as always, is mad scientist, Scary Riley. Wa-ha-ha. And our resident every-wolf man, Sam Skulls. I want to learn some stuff. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. As you know, we here at SciShow Tangents

just love getting into the Halloween spirit. And this year is no different. October has been trick-or-treat month, and Sam and Sari have invited some ghoulish guests over to Tangents Manor to join us this month. In fact, I hear one of them approaching the door now. Knock, knock, knock. Who is it? Who is it?

Hi, it's me, Alexis Nicole Nelson. It's botanist, cook, and forager, and genius behind the TikTok account, Black Forager. It's Alexis Nicole Nelson. Woo! Hi, it's spooky in here. Well, yeah, it was spooky, and then it got very hyped up. Then it got really jubilant, yes.

Alexis Nicole Nelson. Yeah, there it is. alexis nicole nelson did they cast you to make the the target toys that make the noises when you walk past them how did you know oh god it's a good gig i bet i've always wondered how you get to do that because i would love to be the big skeleton that's like, hey, everybody, I'm a skeleton. Yeah, he talks for a long time. You know, I've never seen the one that just goes, hey, guys, I'm a skeleton, but I'd want to buy that. Okay, I have a question that I desperately need to ask all of you.

If you had a little toy plushie that was you, what would it say if I squeezed its hand or belly? I don't know where this button is. I feel like maybe- Where would you squeeze it and what would it say? Yeah, Sari just squeezed the whole head. I feel like, I just don't know. I feel like Sari would, one of the sounds would be like,

oh, like a Marge Simpson, like a sad Marge Simpson sound. What do you think Sam would say, Sari? What would Sam say? Be careful. I'll get hurt feelings. I know. like you would say the thing that you do that's most like iconic is correcting people

me specifically my knowledge of comic book characters or things like that so it would be like you know the real Wolverine is yeah I guess you're right there are 27 Spider-Man

there's way more than 27 Spider-Man there's thousands of Spider-Man. There's way more than 27 Spider-Man. 27 Spider-Man. There's thousands of Spider-Man. That would be the sound bit. There it is. You got the sound bite. There's thousands of Spider-Man.

I'd have to be like AI or something where I could hear the thing that you were saying that was wrong and be like, eh, sorry, but. How about you? Alexis, what would yours be i feel like if you if you squeezed my hand and like pointed my stuffed animal at something i'd be like you can eat that or be like no don't eat that yeah that would be great if you could like hook it up to i naturalist or something exactly i would buy that and i just like pointed at things in the yard be like this is a berry don't eat that don't eat that also in the same vein hank i know that i was not asked to choose yours but the first thing i think of when i think of you is that specific

sound bite of you screaming don't eat eat grass! Don't eat grass! I really made a moment for myself there, didn't I? Yeah. So you could tell people whether or not to eat stuff. And I tell people to not eat one specific thing. But also, I have to say, I desperately want to do this and to have little plushies of us. And what they actually do is play a whole episode of Tangents. They have to hit all their hands at the same

time and then like each one does it. But if you get it a little bit off, it's like broken and you like have to wait the whole hour for it to end. Yeah, okay. Or you could just squeeze one in it. You could have a talk. You could talk to them and pretend like you were part of the show. Pretend like you're on the podcast.

And it would just be me going oh uh-huh those would be amazing when they get to like the dying batteries furby under your bed stage i didn't think this was gonna be such a good idea looking forward to all the plushies we're going to make you guys. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to unnerve, I forgot that it was creepy, unnerve, disgust, and horrify each other with science facts while trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for gory and for candy, which we will be awarding as we play. At the end of the episode, one of us clowns will be crowned the king of Halloween. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic of the traditional science poem, The Suite from Alexis. It's not just a toy that the youths love, what we dump on stars at Kids Choice Awards. It's also a short story by Chekhov. That's true.

The goop from seaweeds found in seas or fjords. Sometimes a rubber polymer that flubs. Made with borax and also PVA. Sometimes it's left behind in trails by slugs. To lessen friction as they crawl away. There's slime molds which aren't fungi but protists. They decompose things like a champ, you know. A lot of tasks this gloopy stuff permits.

The fishies even wear it as a coat. You've likely figured it out by this time. my wibbly wobbly subject here is slime there's so many facts in there so many real real sciencey things yeah yeah hopefully you didn't ruin the whole rest of the episode i know i did not think about that until like 10 minutes before. The topic of the day is slime, which definitely does not have a definition. Yeah, it's one where I got to try my best. It's like what you think of when you hear slime. When you hear slime, yeah. So like anything like viscous and watery and sticky and slippery at the intersection of all those adjectives.

Sometimes it's made by living things. So like animals or plants or bacteria or protists or the decay of those things. So when a living thing dies, then it kind of becomes slimy and goopy. But then also there are synthetic slimes, whether it's, I guess the Nickelodeon slime is organic. Isn't it like oats and food dye and stuff like that? You could say that. Yeah. Not naturally occurring, but sure.

They go to the slime forests and harvest from the slime trees. But there are like synthetic slimes as well like the i don't know lubricants that plumbers use or like orbeez the sodium polyacrylate like blobby balls and gels that absorb a lot of water that people use for absorbency for fun or for practical uses like those are slimy too i think that's a bit of a stretch, but okay. Okay. Well, what do you think? Where's the line between slime and not slime?

Uh-oh. I guess that's more of a blob. Yeah. You can't spread an orby. That's more of a blob than a slime. Yeah. It's just like a jello ball. Jello's not slime.

They are. It becomes slime eventually. They are slimy, but they're not slime. I do think they checked all of the adjective boxes. Okay, okay, you're right. Sorry, Sadie. No, is it spreadable? Is it like

it can't be a solid object? I think it has to, yeah. I think it can't be a solid. If I put on chapstick, is it slime? I think it's slimy. I think it's slimy. And if it's slimy i think it's slimy and if it's slimy then what's keeping it from being slime i feel like once you hit the adjective then you're the noun automatically yeah right that's how that's definitely not if you're dusty then you're dust automatically so the like the closest i think more scientific word which is one of our original episodes uh like the 11th episode we ever did was mucus but i think like slime and mucus they overlap

but i think it's kind of a rectangle square situation sure i would argue where all mucus is slime. So you've got like mucus is just like water and macromolecules, especially mucins, which are the type of glycoproteins, like the sugary proteins. And mucus is secreted and it's goopy and viscous and sticky and slippery.

But not all slime is mucus. I would think. I think you can like have slime that is non-mucus but but usually when you talk about like animal slime or animals secreting slime we're talking about mucus sorry do you know where the word slime came from yeah it's been pretty consistent it's old english it was still slime i guess slime isn't like slime feels new because there's like nickelodeon slime and there's like toy slime but slime's not new we've been sneezing we've been yes yes oozing stuff from our bodies we've been looking alexis knows more than anyone else we've been looking at plants

i'm out there there's slime out there there's slime out there alexis can i can i eat that which slime there's some slimy plants that you can eat the slime from doc stems you can eat that the slime from aloe you can eat that oh yeah that's definitely slime oh yeah oh yeah but like the goop and a jewel eat stem don't eat that so yeah i think we had to figure out what how to talk about that stuff so that you could say could you eat that could i eat this slime so you needed a word for that i think it was slime and it was like very related to nature so the going back slightly further the latin word is limus which usually meant like mud or mire. And the Greek limni meant marsh. So like goopy places were the origins of it.

Like swamp, yeah, swamps. Shrek. Shrek and stuff. The original source of slime. Shrek. Yeah. If you squeeze a Shrek hard enough. Oh, for sure.

Sari knows one thing about swamps. That's where Shrek hard enough. Oh, for sure. Sari knows one thing about swamps. That's where Shrek comes from. I learned that as a kid in my extracurricular activities. That's one way to call that time you had fun once. That was mean. I'm sorry. You're a very fun person. that's my little squeeze toy i had fun one time i had fun once uh okay so i feel like we're well defined and we know what we're talking about except that not really but like were we ever

no which means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing a little game called Truth or Fail. So slime is always inspiring us humans, whether we're playing with it in toy form or watching organisms make it in nature. And of course, the more we play with slime, the more we come up with more ways

to use it in novel applications. Sometimes some very strange novel applications. The following are three stories of slime technology, but only one of them is true. And y'all have to figure out which one it is. So story number one, one of the most pressing issues facing mankind is finding a way to make ice cream

so that if it melts, it doesn't refreeze back into crystals. It refreezes back into ice cream instead. One ingredient that could help is okra slime. Scientists extracted the mucilaginous part of okra pods and added it to ice cream and found that it was able to serve as an ice cream stabilizer. But that might be a lie. It could be story number two. Hagfish are not particularly beautiful creatures and their slime is super gross to look at

and famously slimy. But scientists have been developing ways to convert that slime into something more beautiful, developing a process to dry out hagfish slime so that it solidifies. The structures within the slime crystallize and form synthetic gems that can be used to make hagfish slime jewelry. That one might be a lie, and it could be this one. Maize in

Waxaca produces a mucus substance from their roots that makes them distinct from conventional corn. And scientists studying the role of this muucous substance in helping the corn grow found that it helps keep the roots actually warm. So they used that to create a lightweight insulation material that can be grown in fields. So is it the okra ice cream, hagfish jewelry, or corn insulation?

I was watching Alexis all the time for the plant ones to see if your face betrayed anything. I mean, mallows, of which okra is one, do be getting very slippy. You know, I always kind of thought that I just imagined that about okra. I thought that okra, I was like, okra feels very slimy to me, but people love it. They all love it. And so I'm like, I must be imagining this.

Oh, I think okra's divisive. Oh, it's very divisive. And I feel like I can't in good conscience tell anybody to try it for the first time anywhere other than the South or in the kitchen of someone from the South. Yeah, I was raised by an Alabamian. Oh yeah, that'll do it.

Alexis, you said it was a mallow. Is it related to like marshmallow marshmallow yeah yeah they're in the same family malvay cae see now now for a moment there you had me thinking that marshmallows came from plants but marshmallows are a separate thing from marshmallows marshmallows are what the ancient egyptians used to make the early predecessor to the confection now known as the marshmallow. Good. Well, I'm just glad that marshmallows don't come from a plant. They kind of do.

They come from corn and sugar. Yes. Now, instead of mallow goop and honey, it is egg whites and high fructose corn syrup. Yeah. I love them. I love them i love them they're good but i feel like so okra is slimy we agree i feel like okra doesn't have a super i might be wrong about this but doesn't have a super overwhelming taste so i could see this as being a good a good thing like people people a person i know drinks ok over water oh wow and yeah she says it's just uh thick and slippy it doesn't really taste like anything so is that good for the digestion

or something yeah it's supposed to be like soothing for the digestive tract theoretically i don't think i could do that even though i have a digestive tract no i don't think I could do that. Even though I have a digestive tract. No, I don't think I could either. That's up there with the people who drink raw eggs. No, thank you, please. Also slippy. Also slippy and goopy in there. I don't think I need to be that lubricated. All right.

So, yeah, there's the ochre one, and then there's that weird corn insulation one. And that is not something I've never heard of a plant insulating its own roots like that. But, well, maybe. I know, maybe. Okay, you've never heard of it either. So that's... Well, it's corn. A big lump with knobs.

It's got the juice and maybe the slime and maybe the slime i feel like the hagfish we're usually looking for like the strength of the hagfish slime like there's something about like how those proteins polymerize and they get really long and they're strong and so like how how do we also make silk but from a fish yeah yeah and so like that's the thing it took so much self-control after you said long and strong to not say and trying to get the friction off. But thank you for bringing it up, though. The hard work that you did. Yeah.

You restrained yourself and then you let it fly. And then I let it fly anyway. There's plenty of other stuff to make jewelry out of, though. I don't think we need hagfish jewelry. I don't think. Right. I feel like we have so many sources of not jewel jewelry. I really want it to be the corn roots.

I just, I don't know if the polysaccharides in okra would stop water from forming crystals again when it refreezes. And suddenly, I wish that I had taken more semesters of organic chemistry. I don't know that it would have helped as a person who took a number of those. They didn't cover in my semesters of organic chemistry. They didn't talk about okra once. So, very good. But you said polysaccharides, and that's what like frogs use as antifreeze.

But that's free. Okay, I'm going to say okra ice cream. I'm also going to say okra ice cream, but not because Sari said it. I was already going to say it. Oh my God. I'm so torn between the corn roots and the okra ice cream. Would corn need insulation in Ohaka, though? Would its roots need it?

That's where it's from. Would it need to develop that? I just talked myself off the ledge. I'm also going okra slime. We have, I think maybe for the first time in SciShow Tangents history, a three-way win! Yes! Yes! Woo-hoo! So that tells us nothing.

It's going to give us nothing. It's all down to the next one. And Sari, I don't even know if there's a chance for Sari to get points, but we're going to find out after we take our short break. And then Sari will have another devious game for us. Welcome back, everybody. Sari, what are we going to do now? Yeah, so today we are going to play a slightly modified game of this or that,

where the rules are simple. I will describe a kind of slimy thing or slime-related behavior, and you have to guess whether it's something that land creatures, sea creatures, or creatures in both biomes do. So land, sea, or both. And if you get a question right, you get a point slash candy. I have four rounds total, so we'll keep the guesses snappy. So round one is when some creatures are surprised or threatened, it's slime time. And it turns out that some of this defensive mucus can generate bright blue bioluminescence on its own rather than relying on glowing symbiotic bacteria. Scientists

haven't figured out the exact biochemical reactions or light emitting proteins involved, but it seems like an iron storing and releasing protein called ferritin is a key part of it. And ferritin is produced by most living things because regulating iron is important to life but in this kind of slime ferritin basically acts as a molecular battery because when iron is added to the mucus a persistent blue light is generated so is this blue glowing slime created on land in the sea, or both? Sea, please. Yeah. I was also going to go sea. I am too. I've never seen the guy walking around glowing blue on the land.

I think it's glow on the land sometimes. You're all locked in and seeing. That's correct. Hey. Can I say why I answered so fast? Yeah. Because comb jellies do it when you jostle them in the seaw fast. Yeah. Because comb jellies do it when you jostle them in the seawater.

Oh. Interesting. So it is a sea organism. The one that I was researching for this question was the marine parchment tube worm, which also is very mucusy and secretes a lot of things. It constructs its tube out of mucus.

And we studied its mucus. It glows blue. And it's like in the cells doesn't glow blue. But once it's shot out from its body and the ferritin is doing its thing, it's blue. Very weird. But good, good, good. Guessable questions are good.

Okay, round two. We're going to be tied this whole game some animal parents leave their young to fend for themselves while others are super self-sacrificing including letting their babies literally eat a slimy fatty mucus or skin layer right off their backs until they're able to forage on their own this extra goo obviously provides nutrition to the babies but it also helps prime their immune system and gut microbiome to get ready to survive as an adult. So is this eating your slimy parent behavior on land, in the sea, or both? I know I know who does this. Like I made

a SciShow episode about who does this. Yeah. I was just watching a little TikTok I made about this. Oh no, and you can't remember i'm like caught up and yet and yet i'm still having a hard time answering the question because i don't precisely know what sari means by sea i don't have a core do you mean or just water water yeah i water let's say water i want to say both then i'll say both then i'll just say both in two you guys are smart both then. I'll say both then. I'll just say both then too. You guys are smart. You're all right. Do you want to guess what

they are? It's a Sicilian. The Sicilians, they're an amphibian. I was like, this is giving big amphibian vibes. So it is. So there is Sicilians. Sicilians feed. Different from sicilians sicilians are human beings sicilians are amphibians are amphibians they're like they

look kind of like a big worm kind of they're limbless limbless but also the discus fish which is a type of cichlid um does, is one of the only fish that demonstrates this advanced mode of parental care. Okay, okay. So it was both land and sea in that there was a fish. There was an ocean. There was an ocean one, but I figured both water. But like Alexis said in her poem, fish have little mucus coats. But like Alexa said in her poem, fish have little mucus coats and the discus fish specifically bulks up its little mucus coat so that its baby fish can eat it.

And then when the babies grow up a little bit more, then they start swimming away faster from their babies. And they're like, no more. You can't eat my mucus anymore. You got to forge for yourself. Which I think is very funny. They just decide at some point right call for sure okay ready for round three so sometimes bacteria assemble together into biofilms where the individual cells stick together thanks to a slimy extracellular structure one type of biofilm called a snotite is especially goopy and weird. It has the consistency of snot, hence the name, and a pH of zero or one. So more acidic than stomach acid and similar to

battery acid. And that's because the bacteria that make up snotites are extremophiles that metabolize sulfur compounds, including hydrogen sulfide. So are snotites found on land, in the sea, or both? I think that what we will discover is that they exist under the icy surface of Enceladus. And we don't know that yet, but we're going to get there and we're going to be like, we found alien life! And it's like terribly toxic acidic snot. Everyone

abandoned ship, but put a cork in that hole we drilled and I'm sorry, we shouldn't have looked. Well, space wasn't one of the options. Dang it! Then I'll go with C.

I'm also going to go with C. There are a lot of deep sea worms and stuff that can survive in similar situations. I'm going to say land. Just so we're not all tied the whole time. Brave. Brave and correct it is yes i feel like if it was in the water it would be floating around too much it needs to all be together it can't be floating around too much i was thinking like yellowstone national park yeah yeah it is kind of yeah like

that but just on on land in caves um so they form on the walls and ceilings of hydrogen sulfide rich caves specifically researchers studied um a cave system in italy where these snotites are hanging down from the like ceilings kind of like stalagmites but just they look like snot i love that you can run into a snotite and it could like literally burn your that feels like something out of like the expanse or the twilight zone oh my god yeah so gross and they're mostly um when they analyzed the bacteria, they were dominated. Like 70% of the cells or more than that was acidothiobacillus thioxidins. So you got the thio in there twice.

They're super sulfur guys. And just like live in these hostile environments, but in caves, which is very weird. I'm embarrassed that when you said what the pH balance was alexis and hank both went and i was just like so pretend you still got it sam but you still got it it's true okay final round uh sam pulled ahead a little bit with the snot knowledge. Okay. So during sexual reproduction, some creatures deposit way more than sperm in the reproductive tracts of their mates. Specifically, they excrete a gelatinous mixture of fatty acids along with other things like hormones that forms a goopy physical mass called a mating plug or copulatory plug.

that forms a goopy physical mass called a mating plug or copulatory plug. Researchers speculate that these slimy plugs could optimize sperm delivery and prevent any backflow. They could keep other males from adding their sperm to a vaginal pouch or canal or whatever, or provide important extra nutrients for reproduction. So are mating plugs created on land, in the sea, or both? That feels like a both to me. That feels like you would convergently evolve toward mating plugs created on land, in the sea, or both? That feels like a both to me. That feels like you would convergently evolve toward mating plugs over and over again, honestly. I bet it's evolved multiple times.

That'd be my guess. I am leaning toward, you know, I'm just going to say land, maybe just to be contrarian. But also also I feel like that's not conducive to a water-surrounded situation. I was going to say it sounds like something a fish would do. Sea. Ooh. That sounds like something a fish would do. So the answer, Alexis, is right. It's a land thing.

Wow. The sea is too damp for it. But yeah, they're used by lots of species, including several primates, a lot of insects like bees, rodents, anyone who has worked with lab mice and mating lab mice. You see those little copulatory plugs. One of the biggest ones in reptiles specifically are red-sided garter snakes. So for Halloween, you can look up a picture of that where the copulatory plug material is. It looks like, I don't even know how to describe it, like a chunk of ice or a chunk of slime goo is sticking out the side of the snake. Because it's such a huge lump in there um to really block uh reproduction and on the average like larger male snakes deposit slightly larger plugs and and whatnot so lots of lots of land animals just sticking the goo we gotta write this book i'm ready i've got my facts this is my audition for you once again

can do plant sex too which i'm sure is also very weird uh yes so our candy cat for the episode sam and alexis have both come in with four total points, whereas Sari and I are under that number. Sari, though, didn't get a chance to get more. So... But it's not a well-designed game, and no one cares. But some people care a little bit. We do have a trivia

tiebreaker. So this question is about hagfish again. Sometimes hagfish get transported in trucks, and sometimes those trucks tip over and spill the hagfish all over the road. In 2017, a truck transporting 13 containers of hagfish hit the brakes to avoid a construction zone and in the process spilled one of the containers of hagfish onto the road. The hagfish responded the way they do in any sort of scary situation.

They released their slime all over cars surrounding the truck so how many pounds of hagfish was that truck transported oh this is the kind of thing i'm the very worst at is knowing how much stuff weighs uh one ton how many a thousand pounds is that one ton a thousand pounds of hagfish i'm go i'm gonna guess i'm trying to spatial sense this but i don't know how much hagfish slime weighs so this is not helping at all or how big a hagfish container is is exactly you know what i'm just gonna say two tons it's 7 500 pounds alexis is the winner of the queen of halloween this is maybe the most productive hour ever in my entire life.

So now it's time to ask the science couch for a listener question for our couch of razor sharp spooky spookytific minds is what it says on the show flow. Sam, what's the question? At Lauren R 842 asks, what uses do slimes have for biocomputers?

Biocomputers? Biocomputers? I don't know. I know that slime molds do things that seem computery. Like they can remember and it's weird. So maybe that's where we're headed. Because I got nothing else on this topic. They use them to like find there's that thing that i don't know if it's real or not where they found like the fastest route to make

like a hypothetical train system or something like that yeah yeah yeah they had those slime molds that like made the little diagram that was really similar to the train system of tokyo because it was also primed for maximum efficiency. And I sometimes see TikToks about that. And then the TikTok says, and that's how we know that the universe has a brain. Oh my God. That's not the way. With those ones, I'm like, oh, you have me. And you lost me. Dang it. 90% there.

Yeah. So that is where my brain at first went to, like, reading this question. So the specific slime mold that we study a lot, it's called Fiserum polycephalum. It's relatively well studied because it's bright yellow. It's a plasmodial slime mold, which basically means it's like one huge cell, like goopy cytoplasm, which is the stuff inside the cell surrounded by a big membrane and lots of small nuclei rather than a bunch of individual cells that have clustered together. It can be microscopic.

That cell can shrink down really small if there's not very many nutrients. But when nutrients are abundant, like in lab conditions, when you're putting food like major metropolitan areas in Japan, then it will expand outward and be visible by the human eye. They can do tasks that we traditionally associate with computing because they are responding to stimuli, solving mazes to reach a food source or that model that you were talking about. But as far as I can tell, that is maybe one chunk of, well, we could just get the slime mold to do math for us based on how it responds to the environment. But the other piece of it is their electrical properties. So anything alive kind of responds to electricity in some way and kind of relies

on electricity in some way. Like the way our neurons in our bodies generate electrical signals to transmit information, create memory, move our muscles, and any sort of thing that moves, even when you look at Venus fly traps closing, then that has some electrical impulses related. There is this theorized and made a couple times electronic component called a Memrister. It's a horrible name, a horrible portmanteau of memory and resistor. And it's like a fancy resistor. So they change their resistance based on how much voltage is applied. And they can kind of remember what the last resistance was when there's no more electricity happening. We've mostly understood them in relation to living things. So like our sweaty skin kind of acts like a memristor or slime molds.

When they connect two points in a circuit, kind of act like a memristor rather than like a resistor. And so basically the point that we've gotten to is what if we have a slime mold this this yellow p polycephalum slime mold connects two electrodes and run a current through it and it's like well it seems to behave like this electronic component that we haven't been able to create otherwise with metals so what if we we use it in a broader computer situation? And I don't understand how computer chips work. But it's like, what if we use a biological component instead of a metal to create this complex electronic thing?

I love that idea, but I have seen the expanse. And so I feel like you shouldn't do it. And so I am fearful. Of wetware. Yes. So researchers actually did this. I don't think they were studying it as a memorister. But in 2022, researchers, I think they're part of UChicago, created a Tamagotchi-like watch that required you to keep a slime mold fed to create conductivity.

And so it kept, I don't know, measured thing and kept time and whatnot. But in order to read your heart rate, you needed to feed a little slime mold friend in your wrist so that it connected to electrodes. Feed it what? I love that. Yeah. And I think it was more of a social of like, would people feel connected to their technology if in order for it to work, they had to feed a little guy? And how, like what feelings came up if the scientists told them, you got to stop feeding it. Like you got to starve your guy and your watch can't work as well. So then like interviewing the people.

But he's just a little guy yeah they felt guilty they felt shameful um by not taking care of their little guy i know for sure that if i had to feed my phone i would have it would be worse for me i would like really that's wild and weird yeah it's very weird that we uh put electrons across rocks and then it can do with phone stuff and then we can talk to each other and do a podcast it's very weird i love these electronic rocks yeah i mean there's there's some fancy rocks that we make these days if you want to to ask the Science Couch a word question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week.

Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to GigglingGeekette on Discord and at InsertCoolPun on Twitter. And everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. Alexis Nicole Nelson, what are you up to these days, and where can we see you and read things and buy stuff from you? These days, I am looking forward to the plants going to sleep for the next few months so I can rest. We love rest.

We love rest we love rest um but if you want to see how i'm keeping myself busy during the colder months you can find me on tiktok at alexis nicole that's a nicole with a k thanks mom or you can find me on instagram at black forager do you have a book i am working on a book i literally turned in the manuscript yesterday oh congratulations thank you thank you i'm so glad that we're doing a podcast today instead of the day where you were super stressed out about your deadline yeah when i when sam when you said it was going to be today i was like oh i'm, I'm going to be on Cloud 9. Let's go! Let's go! Very excited.

We'll be keeping an eye out for that, for sure. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's so easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangent to become a patron, get access to our newsletter and our bonus episode, and our upcoming review of a Minions movie. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen.

That's very helpful. It helps us know what you like about the show. Finally, what is 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 Sam Schultz.

And I've been Alexis Nicole Nelson, that weird plant girl. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Spooky Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Wittgen. Our story editor is Alex Billio. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz DeZio.

Our editorial assistant is Timothy Chakrabarty. Sound design is by Joseph Boone, on that ish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney 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 coffin to be filled, but the jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing. Baby birds often stay in the nests where they hatched for a few weeks,

and it would be unsanitary for them to spend all this time in a mucky pool of excrement. So some species of baby birds produce slimy white fecal sacs, kind of like a gusher or mochi or diaper, where the outside is a mucous membrane and the inside is poop. The parent birds can easily grab these fecal sacks with their beaks and dispose of them to keep the nest clean. Or sometimes they eat these slimy blobs as a snack, especially when they're in need of some extra nutrition. Nature, sometimes it's gross. I found like a baby bird on the ground one time and it did this. And I was like,

I thought like it's like body was coming out of its butt. But it was a poop sack. To pop it in your ex-mom. To pop it in your mouth, Hank. Yeah, and then I had like a little bit of diaper mochi. He made you a little sack. To pop it in your ex-mom. To pop it in your mouth, Hank. Yeah, then I had like a little bit of diaper mochi. He made you a little treat. Uh-huh.

Here you go, Dan. I don't think, I don't think he made it. Honestly. Oh. Oh. I'm just guessing. I bet by now he's dead.

I love, if this is any comfort at all his average lifespan has since passed everybody poops everybody dies that's the main two things happy halloween everybody