SciShow Tangents - Vegetables

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

In the immortal words of Brian Wilson: "I'm gonna be round my vegetables, I'm gonna chow down my vegetables, I love you most of all... my favorite vegetable"And he's right, too. In this episode we get down in the dirt with our favorite veggies. Carrots... broccoli... and all the rest. All that, and Ceri tries out a fun new pun![Truth or Fail]Sponge gourdshttps://www.lewisginter.org/luffa-plant-exfoliate/Grasspeahttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6422318/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214514116300629https://www.cwrdiversity.org/the-curious-case-of-the-grasspea/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20510335/https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/CropFactSheets/grasspea.htmlWild carrotshttp://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/wild.htmlhttps://www.canr.msu.edu/news/poison-hemlock-identification-and-controlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150177/[Fact Off]Spinach and growing organs https://www.wpi.edu/news/wpi-team-grows-heart-tissue-spinach-leaveshttps://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/news/2017/03/human-heart-spinach-leaf-medicine-science?utm_source=reddit.comhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/27/scientists-convert-spinach-leaves-into-human-heart-tissue-that-beats/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a63bdefdc2b4ac54c102232/t/5a90cfc0ec212d945185b364/1519439811042/CYSJLabWinter2017.pdf#page=6Beet smell geosmin[Ask the Science Couch]Asparagus peehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1379935/pdf/brjclinpharm00087-0116.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1715705/pdf/brmedj00052-0020.pdfhttps://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/36/1/9/442551https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140818-mystery-of-asparagus-and-urinehttps://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6071https://www.livescience.com/57199-why-some-people-cant-smell-asparagus-pee.htmlhttps://theconversation.com/that-distinctive-springtime-smell-asparagus-pee-94696[Butt One More Thing]Beeturiahttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537012/https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319447#Beetroot-pigments

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 Chen. Hi. What's your vision numbers? Do you know? What's a vision? Oh, like 2020, 40, 70. They always tell me that with glasses, I have 2015, but it is the blurriest 2015 you could possibly have.

I think I'm just really good at guessing blurry shapes. Ah, that's what it is. And so, I don't know, I fooled them. You just cheat. You're a cheater on your vision test, which is the one time you definitely shouldn't cheat. I actually remember as a kid, like, wanting them to think I had better vision than I had.

What a terrible instinct. No, get the glasses you need, child. Stefan, what's your tagline? Fidget spaghetti. Ooh, it's one of the greatest fidgets. Sam Schultz is also here with us today. Hello, Sam. Hello. Are you the imposter? Oh, I'm so freaking bad at that game.

Yeah, I'm always the imposter and I'm always voted off first. I'm incapable of lying or deceit, so. What's your tagline? I'm the baby, gotta love me. Sari Riley is here with us as usual. Sari, what's your tagline?

Sitting under a mango tree. Nice. And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is, they gave me this bracelet and I don't know why. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory,

but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging by our previous conversations, we will be bad at it. So if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care.

Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem, This Week from Sam. With apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson. Wait, is his middle name Lord or Lloyd? There's a comma in there. Okay. He's the Lord of Tennyson, perhaps? I'm not sure.

I think he's Lord Alfred Tennyson, but I'm not sure. Maybe there's many ways to say his name. That's what the Wikipedia page says. Alfred. Lord. Was he both? Is that,

is like, sometimes you can call me Alfred but if, but like not unless you're my friend? I think he's both. Yes. Okay. Well, anyway, here I go.

Cabbages, radishes, green beans and more all piled on my dinner plate. Drown in ranch dressing. Eat them, you naughty lad or no ice cream, she said. All piled on my dinner plate. Drown in ranch dressing. Eat them, you naughty lad. Or no ice cream, she said. All piled on my dinner plate.

Drown in ranch dressing. Eat them, you naughty lad. Is this my awful fate? To put in my mouth and chew food so nasty and distressing? A grody bell pepper, broccoli with no cheddar, an eggplant, not much better.

All piled on my dinner plate, drown in ranch dressing, beets to the right of me, parsnips to the left of me, lettuce in front of me, healthy and disgusting, close my eyes and take a bite, I fight to swallow with all my might, all piled on my dinner plate, a truly horrid sight, drown in ranch dressing. Gulp down the stinky kale and turned a shade of greenish pale. Saw the spinach and let out a wail from the table I did wish to bail. But my ice cream awaits. Plunged in the split pea soup, mashed potatoes, took a scoop. Zucchini and pumpkin shoveled into my mouth, shattered and sundered.

I ate it all like a good lad, drown in ranch dressing. Cucumber to the right of me. Tomato to the left of me. Scallions behind me. Healthy and disgusting. Closed my eyes and shoveled in my gob. Daikon radish and broccoli rob. Ate them all. Tried not to sob.

All piled on my dinner plate. It was a truly horrid sight. Nothing was left of it. Drown in ranch dressing. Now what is this? Oh, joy of joy. It's still going! Tasty ice cream for a good boy.

Delighted, I lick. What the heck? It's made of soy. It might as well be. Drown in ranch dressing. So I assume that Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote something like that. It's Charge of the Light Brigade, except it's about eating vegetables. Except it's about you hating and being really mean to every vegetable, even the good ones.

Yeah. Are you a veggie hater? No, I like vegetables just fine. Oh, gosh. So our topic for the day is vegetables. And there are many of them, and they are weird, and there's so much to know about vegetables. But I guess I was wondering if, Sari,ari you could tell me because this is a topic of much debate among the people of the world what the fuck is a vegetable basically we use vegetables as a catch-all term to mean plants that we eat but

then we're like but not a fruit and fruit is like a plant that we eat that tastes good. Yeah. So fruit has a botanical definition. Yes. Biologists and scientists can point to an ovum of a plant that grows big and swells up and gets fleshy and say, that's a fruit. It has seeds inside and it's like a little squishy container for them. But vegetables don't have a similar botanical definition. It's basically just a term that people use to label leaves that they eat as opposed to leaves that they don't eat or like stalks that they eat as opposed to stalks that they don't eat or to govern those things. Like any court case that involves the word vegetable involves people like paying money to do something

with vegetables and not fruits. So like there's legal definitions of vegetable as well, because there would have to be because there's always rules about things. Yeah. So like, for example, a famous court case in 1893 is Nix versus Hedon, which is a Supreme Court of the United States decision that under U.S. customs regulations, the tomato is a vegetable rather than a fruit because it's used in savory ways and it matters as far as tariffs. Which is why

the legal definition of anything matters to me not at all. I think a tomato is a vegetable. I think scientifically, a pear is a vegetable. I i think i think in like scientifically a pear is a vegetable i think that that fruits are vegetables because they're like they're parts of plants that we so that's how i feel but i understand that like we have we've got these artificial categories in our minds that there's like a savory vegetable and there's a sweet vegetable and the sweet

vegetables are fruits because even sometimes when there's a thing that isn't a fruit, we still think it's kind of a fruit because it's super sweet. I don't have an example of that, but I'm sure there is one. Yeah, must be. I like our artificial categories though.

It's much more fun to say, eat your fruits and veggies. Like if you cut off the fruits and they're all veggies, how boring. I guess we could ask the etymology of the word vegetable. It is actually a lot more interesting than I thought. Vegetable has arisen in two different places.

First, there is vegetable from old French and medieval Latin, vegetabolus, which means growing or flourishing or living or fit to live. And so it just meant like living things was vegetable. And so then in the 15th century, vegetable started coming into the English language and acquired a different meaning. So instead of just living in general, it meant specifically non-animal life. And then in 1767 was the first recorded use of vegetable, meaning plant cultivated for food, because there was competition between vegetable as the idea and word and the word wort, W-O-R-T, which is from Old English wort, which means root or herb or vegetable or plant or spice. So we were referring to things like, oh, cabbage is like a type of wort. I'm so glad we took referring to things like oh cabbage is like a type of wart I'm so glad we took the direction

we took remember to eat your fruits and warts that would be way better I'm going back in time and this is the thing I'm changing well they had good names because they wart was like attack on to another word so like cabbage is coal wort

and thyme was brother wort and catnip was cat wort. This is interesting now. I like this. So you have your different types of wort. So you could have like your long wort, your short wort, your fun wort,

and then- Your sweet wort. Yeah, sweet wort, sour wort. And then instead we were like, nah, vegetable. And now it must be time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts

for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The rest of the panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. If they do, they get a sandbuck. And if they are tricked, then the presenter, in this case, Sari, will get the sandbuck.

You can play along at home at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents, where we will have a poll for you to click on the thing that you think is the true fact. Sari, what are your facts? So sometimes even the most useful vegetables have a downside. So which of these is true? Number one, sponge gourds are kind of related to zucchini or cucumber, and they can be harvested young and eaten as vegetables. They're great because when these gourds fully ripen, they become so fibrous that they can be used for a cleaning or exfoliation sponge. But you have to be careful to soak them really thoroughly before using them. Otherwise, your skin will blister and scar in a poison ivy-like rash due to an oily urushiol-like chemical

that forms as it matures. Number two, the grass pea can be a life-saving vegetable because the plant can grow in harsh conditions like without much water, and it's fairly nutritious protein-wise. So eating grass peas in things like porridges and baked goods has helped people survive through times of scarcity. But if you eat it for over three months straight, as could happen in times of scarcity, a neurotoxin called beta-ODAP can build up and cause paralysis of the legs, making it harder for people to be mobile and likely harder to survive during and after these famine times. Or number three, wild carrots were a staple of foraging vegetables, but for the wealthier folks in the 1700s to 1800s, they were mostly used to

dye fabrics in vibrant yellow and orange. Because of the way chemical dyes were processed, though, these carrot-based dyes ended up having traces of an alkaloid called conine. After prolonged exposure through breathing, like when making the dyes or contact with skin, like when wearing an outfit dyed with these, this alkaloid could cause nervous system damage and specifically breathing and heart problems. So it was better to just eat them. Oh, I have so many questions, but let's go over them. We've got sponge gourds, which can be used as sponges, but only after soaking them to remove a chemical that will give you a poison ivy rash, which is not what you want when you're trying to clean off your butt.

Or number two, grass peas contain a neurotoxin that can build up when eaten and cause paralysis of the legs, which is a problem, even though most people wouldn't eat grass peas unless they really needed to. And number three, dyes created from wild carrots can contain compounds that cause nervous system damage. And I'm going to start there, Sari. Like, how do these dyes go from being in a carrot where they are safe to being in my shirt where they are dangerous? So carrots are in the same family as plants like poison hemlock. And so these like root vegetables have latent chemicals inside them. And during the dyeing process, you have to add chemicals that help fix the dye to the cloth. Because if you just

stick carotene, like beta keratin, into a clothes, it won't necessarily like stain with the richness. So the dye manufacturing process involved a lot of like organic chemicals, additives. And so those ended up taking the precursors to the toxic chemicals in the carrots and activating them. Well, now that sounds extremely real.

If you're lying, you're a genius. Yeah. Hank seemed to follow along with all that chemistry talk, so that seems true now. You say precursors, I'm on board. I feel like sponge gourds would have come up on Instagram by now. Somebody would be using a sponge gourd. There'd be sponge gourd threads warning you about the dangers of sponge gourds. Would have been a TikTok thing. Sponge

gourds are a thing. They're just loofahs. People say they're sea sponges, but they're actually gourds. And we just get them so far down in the manufacturing process that we're just like, oh, it's a loofah. What? Loofahs aren't sea sponges? No, they're a plant. They're gourd. Are you lying? You're not lying, right? No, she's telling the truth about this.

So the question is if they can kill you or not. Well, or just give you a rash. Give you a horrible rash. Okay, okay. Grass peas also sounds totally possible to me. Yeah. I know that there are things like this where there's like, it's not a big deal if you eat eat it for a day but it is a big

deal if you make it a big part of your diet. Gosh I don't know I think Sari could have turned used the dye language that she used from some other thing that wasn't carrot based at all. And I've talked about carrots being dangerous in other ways like they

can make you blister with their chemical. I think I'm going to go with sponge gourd. Whoa. It's SpongeBob's cousin, sponge gourd. Yeah. Frick, Sari. I really have no idea. So I'm going to go grass peas.

I don't know. I cannot believe in a dangerous gourd, a chemically dangerous gourd. Oh, I can. This world is designed to fuck you up. I'll go with the wild carrot dyes. Let's do it. The chemistry got me. It just seemed too good. It was like she was selling it too well.

I couldn't believe it. Alright, everybody vote at twitter.com slash sideshow tangents before you find out. Now, Sari, tell us, tell us, tell us the real answer. It's grass peas. Hey! Well, at least, tell us the real answer. It's grass peas. Hey! Well, at least it wasn't dangerous gourds. Yeah, that would have been

really embarrassing for you. Tell us how you made up this amazing lie about the carrot dice. It was truly just out of my butt. I panicked, and then you asked about it, and I was like, oh, shoot, how would a carrot be dangerous?

And I started like saying words. So I'm glad they were convincing words. You are a genius after all. But it is true that wild carrots are often confused for poison hemlock because the plants look pretty similar. Like they both have clusters of white flowers and the stalks look very similar and the root systems look very similar. And so I read a lot of foraging guidelines where it was like very similar and the root systems look very similar. And so I read a lot of foraging guidelines where it was like, look for the purple splotches. So Socrates famously died because of poison hemlock.

Not accidentally, for clarity. And so I just made up the stuff about wild carrots. And then as far as the luffas go, I just thought that was really cool. And apparently I could have used that as my whole torf, but I thought that that would be too well known. But apparently not. They're just a gourd. And it's very cool because you eat them when they're young and they apparently taste like a squash or zucchini like any other gourd. But then when they're fully ripe, they just become so fibrous that they can't be eaten.

And people whack them to get off the skin and then rinse it off. And then you got a loofah. And you just scrub things with it. They look like freaking zucchinis now that I look at them. Yeah. Who knew? I've never loofahed in my life. I'll get you all sponge gourds for Christmas.

So people would eat grass peas, but they shouldn't. Shouldn't is a strong word. I think from my research, it seems like a pretty staple food in particularly rural regions and regions where it's harder to grow other crops. So eating grass peas is a common part of some people's diet as like a grain or a vegetable. Because we've been eating it for so long, like throughout human history, the disease latherism, which is the paralysis of your legs because of eating too much grass peas or other related species, is one of the oldest neurotoxic diseases that's been recorded in human history, like from ancient India and ancient Greece before the common era. And it's really weird because we've just been eating this vegetable over time.

And it's been a great nutritional source, but it led to impoverished people or prisoners being paralyzed from the waist down because of this beta ODAP neurotoxin. It should definitely not be the only thing that you eat. Yes, definitely not. Some places have regulations on it and just like try to discourage people eating it because this disease could happen. But we don't really have a good way to counter any of this because we haven't found a good animal model yet for this neurotoxin. And we haven't studied it enough in humans, probably because it affects impoverished populations. And so like all the rich scientists in other countries are like,

we don't need to worry about it. So if I haven't found a good animal model, do you mean we haven't found an animal that reacts to it the same way we do so we can study it? Yeah. I read something about horses also having their hind legs be paralyzed if they eat too much feed with grass bees in it. But yeah, we don't have a great consistent animal to study that behaves in the same way. So we think it has something to do with affecting motor neurons or the lower spinal cord because it's only the lower half of their body, which is like a weird phenomenon. But there's a lot that we don't know. And so I thought it was very interesting that there's this seemingly very powerful vegetable that we just know so little about. A sinister pea.

Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it will be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals series on top with three. I and Sam have won. Stefan is behind with nothing. But now is your chance, Stefan, because it's time for the fact-off, where Stefan and I have each brought facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds.

The presentees each have a Sandbuck to award to the fact that they like the most. And to decide who goes first first we have a trivia question nasa's vegetable production system or veggie for short is a small garden aboard the iss that allows astronauts to study plants in microgravity and supplement their diets with fresh food the first crop in space was red romaine lettuce and was harvested on a strict schedule how many days How long does it take to grow lettuce? Not long. Because it's space, I'm going to say 28 days.

What does that mean, because it's space? Do you think it takes longer to grow in space? Because of radiation? Or maybe cosmic dust helps it grow? I don't know. And you have no idea how long lettuce actually takes to grow. Yeah, well, I'm going to say 14 days. Let's go.

The answer is 33 days. Oh, hey! So I think you did pretty well. I think I was basically right. Well, Stefan, I'm going to make you go first. Okay, well, we're going to start this tale with human organs, which are not vegetables. If you're trying to grow or 3D print tissues or organs to implant into people's bodies,

one of the things that you run into is that it's really hard to get a good branching network of tiny blood vessels and capillaries if you need a thicker piece of tissue. And so you can 3D print a really thick piece of tissue, but if you can't deliver oxygen efficiently deep into that tissue, a lot of the cells will just die. And heart muscle specifically is pretty thick. And our current technologies are not great at making this dense enough to actually be useful for replacing damaged heart tissue in patients. But one thing that is really good at building vascular networks is spinach, which is a vegetable. So they took spinach leaves that they bought at the grocery store and decellularized them. So they used a detergent to break down and remove all the plant cells. And it left behind this transparent cellulose framework that included all the vessels that the plant would use normally to shuttle water and nutrients to its cells. And then they bathe the framework in human heart cells, and the cells grow on this scaffolding surrounding all the little tiny plant veins.

And then after five days, the heart cells started beating, and then they kept beating for three weeks in their little test environment. They also pushed a red dyed liquid so that it looked kind of bloody and cool through the veins. But with like a bunch of 10 micron diameter beads through all the veins to show that human blood cells could actually fit.

And they think that if they do that process while layering the spinach leaves, you could make these thicker pieces of tissue. At first, I thought they were just growing it on the spinach leaves, but the spinach leaves are part of the tissue then, and if you implant that, you're tying these spinach plant veins into somebody's actual vascular network, which is kind of weird. But cellulose, as they point out, is fairly biocompatible, so

that should be okay. And spinach is really cheap, which is useful. They also noted that they could use other plants to make different kinds of tissue, so spinach was really good for heart tissue because of the vascularity in the leaves, but you could use wood for bone, maybe,

or broccoli for lung tissue, or there's a jewel weed plant that has these cylindrical hollow structures that they think could work to replace an artery using the same like decellularization process. So there are no cells left. It's just the cellulose frame, which I feel like isn't like a permanent structure. I'm not clear on whether that structure is retained or whether it eventually degrades

and then those vessels are still there. That's super smart and super weird and cool. I want to be a veggie man with wooden bones. That sounds fun. It's hard to beat, Stefan. Yeah, that was very cool. You want to see if I can do it? No, let's just give me the points.

Yeah, I don't know. What are we supposed to say? I think we can move on. As you may or may not know, beets have a smell and taste of earth. When you eat them, you're like, wow, this tastes like dirt or soil or a kind of like mud or something. And I love that about beets, but not everybody does. But here's the thing. They kind of shouldn't smell of that smell.

And the reason that they do smell of that smell may be because our ancestors needed to be able to smell rain from a very long way away. So we're going to take a long journey to talk about how those two things are connected. So have you heard of the word petrichor? Because it's one of the best words. I had a Tumblr account where I'm sure image graphics of what words do you love? The smell of the rain on the ground, petrichor. And I reblogged the shit out of that being like, I am an angsty teen. An angsty science teen. Petrichor being the word for the smell of rain. So when it rains, there is a smell. That smell is different in different places, but in particularly in places where there is plenty

of soil and dirt. That word comes from rock and ichor. And ichor is the blood of the Greek gods. So that's the, it's basically earth blood. But it turns out that there is a chemical responsible for the smell of petrichor. And it's called geosmin, which again has good etymology. It just means earth smell. So geosmin is a cool chemical. It's just like a little two-ring system. And it's an organic compound produced by tiny microorganisms, mostly cyanobacteria, but a few others. And when it rains, that chemical is like tossed up into

the air a little bit. One thing that we know is that a shark is really good at smelling blood. A shark can smell one part per million of blood in the ocean. And there are things that we're even better at that than smelling. For example, hydrogen sulfide, which is extremely toxic compound, smells like rotting eggs. We can smell that at five to nine parts per billion. So like a thousand times almost better than shark smelling blood. Geosmin, we can smell at five parts per trillion. What? It is one of the chemicals that we are most sensitive to. So there's like five chemicals that are on the order around there and none that are like blowing it out of the water. So it's like down at the base level of what is possible with our noses.

We can smell juice better than we can smell just about anything else, except for like ozone, which is also a hazardous chemical. The skunk spray smell, maybe we can smell just about anything else except for like ozone which is also a hazardous chemical the skunk spray smell maybe we can smell better than geosmin and also the smell of oranges weirdly enough so basically beets smell like earth because they have a tiny like should be imperceptible amount of geosmin in them, but it is perceptible because we have this ridiculously good nose for it. And we think maybe we have such a good nose for it because it was really important for our ancestors to be able to smell water. You kind of can't smell water because your body's full of it.

You can't like have a receptor for water because you'd just be smelling it all the time. And so it might be like one way of being able to smell like that. There might be a stream nearby or when you're digging that you're getting closer to getting to where the water might be under the ground or to be able to smell if like there's a light rain in the middle of the night so you can run out and like capture the water because that might be the difference between your entire tribe dying or not. We're not sure that that's the thing. It might be the difference between your entire tribe dying or not. We're not sure that that's the thing.

It might just be a weird quirk of human physiology that we can smell this so well, but it turns out a lot of other organisms can smell geosmin really well as well, including fruit flies. So we think that it probably has something to do with like it being correlated to the presence of water that we are so good at smelling this beet compound that we know mostly from like smelling dirt and eating beets. And that's my beet fact. What does water smell like? Now I want to smell water.

We can't smell water. So like an alien might land on this planet and be like, oh, your planet's covered in fart juice. This stinks. I am deeply curious about, this is a tangent, whether my nose is broken because I can't smell skunk most of the time. Oh. So like it's interesting that that is one of the most recognizable smells. I can smell oranges and I can smell after rain, but usually if we're driving in a car on a road trip and everyone else in the car is like, oh, gross, skunk, then I don't smell anything. Because you're always smoking so much weed.

Yeah, that's me. Well, I guess you guys are going to have to pick a fact that you liked the most. Is it going to be Stefan building heart flesh out of the scaffolding left behind from vasculated spinach leaves? Or my fact about being able to smell the smell of beets better than almost anything else in the world.

Three, two, one. Stefan. Oh, fuck you! Better than anything else in the world! I haven't spent enough time around beets for that to really mean much to me. I've never even had a beet. Beets don't have any razzle dazzle.

Are you serious? You gotta pick one of the sexy vegetables. They're brightly colored. The color, most colorful fruit there is that's a vegetable. And now it is time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This is from at Cody the Smiley. Why does asparagus make your pee smell so gross?

First of all, is it gross? I think it just has an asparagus smell. It's not gross. No, I would not want an asparagus pee scented candle. No, I agree with you there.

Can you all smell asparagus pee? I don't think I've ever smelled it in my life. Wow. You can't. You do have a weird smell. It's a damn thing. Yeah, I can't think I've ever smelled it in my life. Wow. You do have a weird smell. Damn thing. Yeah. I can't describe how it smells. It smells singular. There's nothing else that smells like it. It doesn't smell like asparagus either.

That makes sense relative to the science of it. So the smelly compound in asparagus is called asparagusic acid, asparagusic acid, because people were like, we only found it in asparagus. So let's call it asparagus. And it has a disulfide functional group. So like a lot of stinky compounds that Hank was mentioning. So sulfur is usually a part of them. What's interesting about asparagus pee is not everyone can make asparagus pee and not everyone can smell asparagus pee. Some people's bodies can take asparagus acid and turn it into sulfur compounds like methane thiol and dimethyl sulfide, which are like the smelly things in asparagus pee. And others, they don't excrete that compound at all. And it seems like scientists don't really know, even though we've understood that some people are excretors and

some people are not since 1956. We don't really know what happens to the asparagusic acid, what it gets broken down into if it's not methanethyl or dimethyl sulfide, which is interesting to me. So it's like this mystery in metabolism. Like we just don't, I don't know what it does. It like breaks down, but it doesn't make a stinky thing. Later on, a researcher decided to look into like whether people could smell it around 1980. And then he found that some people have specific anosmia, which is where one of their smell receptor genes is turned off. And so they can't smell specifically these sulfur compounds that make asparagus pee stinky. It's just like a series of flukes related to chemicals that just make this one thing make our pee smell.

Yeah, it's just chemistry being weird. A 2017 study tried to do genetic analysis. being weird. A 2017 study tried to do genetic analysis. I think there are some sort of correlations between people who could smell and not smell it or produce it and not produce it. And an article about this research, apparently it just came up when a group of researchers were at dinner together and American scientists were like, oh man, smell the asparagus pea. And then their Scandinavian Irish colleagues were like, what are you talking about? And so they were like, no, pee smells. And so then they were like, we'll have to do a study on it. And they started smelling each other's pee. All right. In that study, they found that all of the mutations seem to be on chromosome one

and genes related to olfactory receptor two, but just like certain smell genes. I also thought of this pun. I'm going to run it past the three of you. How is asparapis? Yes? No? That's good. That works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I bet if I search Twitter for that, somebody's said it before. Yeah. I intentionally did not look it up because I'm sure I'm not the first person, but... There were five people who tweeted the word asperapist in October of 2020. So the last month that we have full data for.

Never mind then. I take it back. That's pretty good. There's only five of hundreds of millions. It's not trending. What I want is the tweet that has a spare episode in it that has the most likes so i'm gonna go ahead into twitter advanced search if somebody else could take it for the podcast that'd be great okay um oh boy if you want to

ask the science couch follow us on twitter at scishow tangents where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week thank you to at the tiny vegan at J Trey Nold and everyone else who tweeted us your questions this week. JT Reynolds. Oh yeah. Final sandbox scores. Hank and Sam tied with one Stefan Sari tied with two. Congratulations.

Which brings our season scores to me in last place with 69 points. Hank, second to last place with 72 points. Sari in second place with 82 points. And Stefan in first place with 83 points. It's anyone's

game between Sari and I. Sari, if you wanted to know the most famous person who's ever tweeted a sparapiss, I do have that information. It was the bass player for the band Lifehouse, which is a band that I have not heard of, but they had a hit in 2005.

Oh, Hanging by a Moment. Hanging by a moment here with you. That's the most famous person, the guy who played that bass line. Wow. The most famous person, aside from Sari Reilly, to say the word asparapist.

I bet you're more famous than that guy, Sari. Well, let's see. I'll tweet it right now. No context. You can beat the bassist from Lifehouse with two likes. Because he got one. Oh, no.

Okay, I've tweeted it. I already have two. 13 seconds in. Yes. Oh, wow. Sari, the power you hold. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's real easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen.

That's super helpful. It lets us know what you like about the show. 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. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Kaylin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also 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,

so thank you so much to them. And thank you to the rest of you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. If you've eaten beets recently and noticed that your feces or urine has a reddish tinge to it, you might be experiencing something called beeturia. Beeturia happens when a person's body doesn't readily break down the red

pigment betanin in beets. The pigment keeps traveling through the person's body and ends up

in their waist or peepee and poo poo. Bituria is estimated to occur in around 10 to 14% of the population

and while it's harmless, repeated occurrences may be connected to an iron deficiency or low stomach acidity.

That's definitely happened to me. I had a very bright red poo once that was from eating a whole tub of red vines. I would think there wouldn't be enough in red vines to even digest out. You're just pooping a red vine out.