SciShow Tangents - Water

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Time to take a big ol’ sip of science knowledge as we dive deep on that good, wet stuff we call water! Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to see some great pictures from Ceri’s Fact Off fact, and 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 Eclectic Bunny and Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreen[Fact Off]Wet water (to fight fires)https://www.biolinscientific.com/blog/what-is-a-wetting-agent-and-where-are-they-usedhttps://www.fireengineering.com/leadership/fighting-fires-with-wet-water/#grefhttps://childrensmuseumatlanta.org/blog/how-does-water-put-out-a-fire/http://fcfsd.com/wetting-agents.htmlhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-016-0640-0Water to air communicationhttps://news.mit.edu/2018/wireless-communication-through-water-air-0822https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/489210[Ask the Science Couch]Water conducting electricityhttps://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/conductivity-electrical-conductance-and-waterhttps://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-universal-solventhttps://www.sciencealert.com/after-centuries-scientists-have-finally-figured-out-how-water-conducts-electricityhttps://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6316/1131[Butt One More Thing]Hippo poop waterhttps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/hippos-poop-so-much-that-sometimes-all-the-fish-die/560486/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04391-6 

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is our science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. What's up? Everybody in the room knows that I got everyone together so that they could watch me write an email in a panic.

We get, it's like a private Hank's channel live stream, productivity stream, except we've already done our work and we're just watching you do yours. It was a little bit understood because the person I was emailing who desperately needed the email is Sam's partner, Rachel, who works at DFTBA. That's just the way you're justifying it to yourself, though. That's, yeah, because that way it was like at least one person aside from me is going to benefit from me sending this email though i'm sure as soon as this podcast ends

rachel will be like i cannot believe what hank did to me today yeah probably to create a bunch of extra work when i have been working so hard to not have extra work oh it's my fault but it's more past me's fault than current me's fault isn't it always though isn't it always yeah i feel like past me is like the ultimate he's got he's just like full of power moves yeah where he's like oh you didn't want to do that well you have to because i didn't past me is also uh over ambitious i think like thinks too highly of future me future me is also overambitious, I think. Like, thinks too highly of future me. Future me is just kind of regular, just kind of okay. But past me is like, oh, you got this. You can wake up early for the first time in your life and do all that homework.

How is your past self, Sam? Awful. I have been trying to wake up early for like two years. How do you do it? Do you have any tips? Oh, me? I've got to, this will kill it. There's no way. If you do this one thing, you will absolutely wake up early every day. Oh no, I know what you're going to say. All you have to do is have a child. No. Shit, okay. Yeah, no, it's the only thing that ever worked for me, but I get up every morning at seven o'clock And today I got up and my son was yelling help, which wasn't great.

Help, help, help. And I ran into his room and I was like, it's kind of think this is funny, but it's not. And I was like, what's wrong? And he's like, my tummy hurts. And then he puked a bunch. Oh, no. He needed actual help. And it was very sad.

And he's been pathetic all day long. There it is. That's the reason I didn't send the email until SciShow Tangents time. Because I have a sick child. I'll blame him. All is forgiven. Every week here on SciShow Tangents we get together to try to one-up, amaze,

and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. And I got some doozies today. Our panelists are playing for Glory, but they're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And I got some doozies today. Our panelists are playing for Glory, but they're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner.

Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sam. Step right up and rest your peepers on a liquid that'll make you say jeepers. It may look plain and unassuming, but what if I told you it could get your plants a-blooming? And that's not all.

You ever had a thirst? I tell your friends, ain't that the worst? Your mouth's all dry, your spit is sticky, but this potion will fix you in a jiffy. It goes great in soups from chowder to bisque. You can drink it hot or have it brisk. Is that all it does? Why don't be a fool?

Heck, you can use it to fill your pool. Too runny, you say? Well, here's a trick. Put it somewhere cold. It gets hard as a brick. Or maybe gas is more your scene. Simply give it a boil and now you've got steam. Most amazing of all, and I'm not telling you fibs,

all living life needs this stuff to live. It's everywhere from the sky to your cells, from the tip of your tongue to the bottom of wells. What's this miracle substance you all want to know? The stuff that is made with two H and an O? Well, pay attention and go with the flow. It's hydrating, condensating, precipitating, evaporating water. That one's going in the book.

Oh, my God. I like Carnival barker Sam. Yeah. He's a real everyman kind of guy. I can't talk loud enough to be a carnival barker, but I would love to be able to. Yeah. I need one of those megaphones, I guess. Or just a filter.

Tuna can do it. Okay, cool. Our word for the day, children, is water what which is one of the very best liquids also one of the only ones if we're gonna look around uh at standard temperature and pressure anyway uh but maybe the best i'm just gonna say it it's the best liquid well once you get past water you're into like molten metals and stuff right that's not very good like oil yeah that's a liquid oil alcohol gasoline there's not very many, but there are some. Yeah.

But yeah, oils are great. Olive oil, great liquid. Not as good as water. Would give up olive oil before I gave up water. You'd have to, or you'd die. Sari, what is water? I mean, Sam Spiel really covered it. He was the salesman for water.

Yeah. Well, the great thing about water is that it is clear what it is. There is a hard line there. That's why I love chemistry. Yeah. Water is the name for the liquid phase of H2O molecules. I think like technically you can use it to apply to ice, which is solid water and steam, which is water vapor. So like water is a component of those names as well. But usually if you say, give me some water, you don't want a block of ice or you don't want some steam blasted in your face.

You want the liquid stuff. Yeah. I guess you have found a fuzzy spot, which is that water technically can be any of those three phases. But usually when we say water, we are asking for the stuff that we can take a bath in. Do those two things have a different chemical formula? No.

They're all made of molecules of H2O. So one oxygen with two hydrogens sticking off of it. It's just how close those molecules are spaced together. Yeah, how they're interacting with each other. Yeah. So like in a gas, they basically aren't, they don't have any bonds between them. In a solid, they have many very rigid bonds between them. And in a liquid, they have sort of like wibbly bonds between them.

Okay. It's how close they're partying with each other, basically. Yeah. How many kisses they get. Molecules, all kisses. Yeah. We can't say ice water because that's a thing. That's water with ice in it.

Water ice. That's what it's called. Water ice is just water molecules that never stop kissing. Oh, that's cute. But they kiss in lots of different water molecules. They each kiss a bunch of each other. Well, that's okay. At the same time, because they have more than one mouth.

Ew. That's less okay. They each have like three mouths, so they can do some fun kissing. I think oxygen does have four bonding orbitals but yeah because it's the orbitals it isn't just two orbitals and then the two hydrogens yeah yeah so it's four and two mouths are invisible okay well now it all makes sense to me there's kind of an in mouth and an out mouth too there's like you can't have two of the same mouths kissing and really the mouths are just kind of like the idea of a mouth distributed across

the general region outside of the molecule. There's like a solid mouth. Yeah, it's also important to note that any individual mouth exists in a probability field that could stretch as far as the entire universe, but it's just a very low probability once you get more than a fraction of Angstrom. Oh, okay.

Doesn't that clear it up, Sam? Yeah. It's quantum kisses stretched across all of reality. Yeah. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. All right.

Okay. So, Sari, I imagine that the etymology of water goes back as long as human time. Yeah, it's water all the way down of as far as words go. We've identified things as water or wet. And so I decided to bring some other words that are related to water that might be fun. Oh. Like whiskey, which is water of life

from old Irish. Ah. Or vodka, which a lot of people know or have joked that in in russian vodka just means water but it does mean little water oh it's a diminutive of voda which is water okay vodka my little water um and then my surprising word is that's not alcohol related is redundant is related to water what which means as opposed to like happening over and over again like superfluous so exceeding what is what is necessary that meaning of redundant comes from to overflow or pour over which comes from andare and re which

is like again so like a rise in waves again and And so it's just like, ah, the waves got too big again, and they float over. And that's like a very weird word to come from water. Yeah. Yeah, no, I don't hear it in there. No. God bless it. We need that wet stuff.

And now that means that it's time for us to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing... Truth or Fail. All right. So I have three facts for you. This is how truth or fail works. But only one of those facts is true. And this truth or fail is about water, but a specific kind of water, because we were talking about water is H2O, but there's different kinds of H's. So I'm not talking about like a vitamin water or alkali water or whatever special new health

water there is. This is a water that is actually chemically different because instead of two hydrogens and one oxygen, it has two deuteriums and one oxygen. And deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. So chemically, it behaves very similar, just one proton and one electron. But deuterium also has a neutron, which a normal hydrogen doesn't have. So because of that extra neutron, deuterium weighs roughly twice as much as normal hydrogen. So water made with deuterium is literally heavier. So it is called heavy water. Now, heavy water is useful in all kinds of physical applications, but biologically, it's

kind of dangerous. It acts a lot like water, so it is uptaken into our body just like water, but it's not exactly water, so it can just kind of mess with stuff. Which of these three ways can heavy water mess up a living organism? Are you ready? Sure. I think so. Fact number one, heavy water makes you have to pee a lot. Because deuterium forms stronger hydrogen bonds, your kidneys filter out more of it on every pass.

So you need to drink more heavy water to stay hydrated. There's also some thought that having a literally heavier water in your bladder could make you feel like you have to pee more than you actually do. Makes sense. Or it might be fact number two. Bacteria grown in heavy water are able to survive just fine. But as all their normal hydrogen gets replaced with deuterium, something very strange happens. Their flagella stop working, which would be a death sentence. But then they begin to rotate the other way, which has no effect on their survival.

It's just really weird. Or fact number three could be the true fact. Scientists have given heavy water to a bunch of different organisms over the years. And one of the most consistent effects from hamsters to fruit flies to house plants is that it slows their circadian cycle, lengthening their day.

Heavy water appears to just slow all biochemical reactions. So the body's clock on heavy water just ticks a little more slowly. So, which is it? Is it fact number one, it makes you have to pee? Fact number two, it makes bacteria's flagella go the opposite direction? Or fact number three, it makes your body clock tick more slowly? This is interesting. I've never thought about drinking. I've known about heavy water's existence, but I think this is how you can tell I'm a science nerd and not a normal person because I've never posed the question like, oh, what if you just drank a bottle of heavy water? Yeah. There's some YouTube videos of people drinking heavy water, which is a bad idea. You can have a certain amount of it, but it does eventually have some clear negative consequences oh boy okay have to pee make the guy's propellers go backwards or what was make your day shorter make your day

longer day longer it makes your body think you're the day is longer than it actually is that seems like something somebody would have tricked people into thinking was a health thing somehow drink heavy water you never have to sleep again. Also, you move. Sarah, do you have any thoughts on this? Not really, because I don't know enough. So the circadian rhythm one feels true-ish because so much signaling, like chemical signaling, is involved in circadian rhythms. And because water is is basically like its key role in your body is as a solvent it like dissolves other things into it it like lets your blood carry so many different things because your blood is watery and lets your things move around your cell because they're just

like moving around in an aqueous environment and so it would make sense that the hormones that control your circadian rhythm would move differently if that solvent were different and same goes for the flagella i accept i don't know how it would affect like that feels like it would be very weird because it would affect motor control in some way yeah and i feel like as we like i can't think of a single thing that goes backwards bacteria flagella are very weird they spin How does motor control work in something that teeny? Wouldn't it just be like some kind of chemical exchanging? I mean, a bacteria flagella is basically a stick that sticks into a wheel and the wheel spins.

Then the flagella spins around in the water, pushes you around. That seems quite plausible to me. The P one feels like it wants us to choose it, which is making me very much not want to pick it. Why does he think that it wants you to choose it? Because it's heavy and sits in your bladder heavier and makes it to pee more.

Yeah. That sounds too good to be true. It sounds also too obvious. It feels like a punchline. What happens if you drink heavy water? Oh, you pee more. And it's like, good job, five-year-old. You came up with a good joke. Not really that good of a joke, but... I guess I'm going to guess circadian rhythms, but not for any particular reason.

It just feels more correct. I think I'm going to go with the flagella one because it seems nice and clean. Nice and clean, just like how you feel after you drink a bunch of heavy water because it makes you pee. No, actually. That was going to be so bad. I made that one up completely because it seemed like if there was

heavier water in your bladder, you might have to pee more. So you were exactly right. Well done on your reasoning. So one of you is correct and which one is it it's sari that's so weird yeah it is super weird and it is it is a well understood effect that or as a well proven out effect it's not super well understood it just seems like all chemical processes happen more slowly because it isn't just the water. The water's deuterium gets incorporated

into the rest of the chemistry of the organism. So those hydrogens start moving around and they end up inside of all of the different chemicals and those things just, it just goes slow. Everything gets gummed up and that seems to happen universally in life. If you have deuterium, your body moves more slowly. This isn't the only problem. As if you have deuterium your body moves more slowly this isn't the only problem like as the level of uh deuterium increases like you end up with all kinds of bad stuff basically your organs fail um but you're like at lower levels this is one of the first effects and you can see it pretty clearly and uh do people act like do you actually move slower i don't think that they have noticed that the movement of the organism is more slow, but like, maybe.

Like, it's certainly possible that like muscles would fatigue more quickly as you're consuming something that does eventually lead to organ failure. Sure. Seems like a thing that would happen. That makes sense. I found something out that was fascinating, which is that unlike large organisms, bacteria, you can stick them in 100% heavy water, and they'll just work it out. They don't care. And all of their hydrogens will eventually be replaced with deuteriums, and they'll just be fine. What? Weird.

Weird little guys. All right. We're headed into the break with Sari at one point and Sam with zero. After this, it'll be time for the fact-off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought in science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them, and harshly, and award them hang bucks any way I see fit. To decide who goes first, though, I have a trivia question.

When tardigrades were first described by a German zoologist in 1773, he called them Kleiner Wasserbar, or in English, little water bear. And while they frequently live in water, different species of these little water bears have been found in every type of habitat on Earth. How many different species of tardigrades have been described by science? Oh, this feels like a trick. Does it? One. Is there one? Sam's going's gonna go with one it's just

the one guy i'm gonna go with 10 well sari was always gonna win that one because you could have gone with two and still one there are about 1300 oh my gosh that's way more than one and that means that sari gets to choose who goes first. So I will go first with my very sad guess of ten. So when humans have to put out a fire in many but not all situations, we generally put water on it. It's what Pokemon

teaches you. Fire is weak to water. But the real life chemistry is pretty interesting too. To create a combustion reaction, fires need fuel, oxygen, and heat. So to stop this reaction, you need to deprive it of one or more of these things, and water is great at this. When you spray water on a fire, it cools down the system. The water droplets basically steal the heat and evaporate, lowering the temperature of the burning reaction, kind of like sweat evaporating off your skin.

And water is pretty good at coating things, so it covers the fuel and prevents it from getting oxygen, keeping the components apart so they can't react. Kind of like throwing dirt on a fire to smother it. And water is nicer than dirt because it's easier to pump a liquid than to move around a solid like dirt. But with some fires, the problem is water is only pretty good at coating things. That's because water molecules make really strong bonds with other water molecules, so liquid water has a high surface tension. This is why it beads up into droplets or water insects can skate on top of it. And so instead of spreading far and wide over the fuel to smother it, plain old water could still clump up into bigger droplets, especially on fuels that have a lot

of airspace in them like wood or hay or forest floor junk. So that's why firefighters may use what's called wet water instead of normal water. Wet water? Yeah. And wet water has chemicals mixed in called wetting agents, which interfere with the bonding between the water molecules a bit and decrease the surface tension. This makes the water spread out more easily and seep in more deeply rather than forming big droplets. And a 2017 study found that some wet water formulas seeped into loose rotting wood up to 68 times faster than normal water. And it's not like we figured out the magical formula for the best or wettest water. So this is an active area of research in putting out wildfires, figuring

out how to get wet water that will put out fires on different kinds of vegetation the best. Wet water. Sam, you're up against wet water right now. This is great. Can I drink it? It sounds quenchy. It would quench your insides, but my guess is the surfactants inside would be not good for your digestive system. Maybe give you a bit of diarrhea. Right. So these chemicals are probably not super different from just like soap. Yeah, I don't think so. I think they're fairly simple chemicals and like not a whole lot of

them too. It seems like the percentages that they put into water, it's like pretty dilute, but it has a huge effect on how big the droplets are that form. Okay. Well, I won't be drinking it then. Yeah. You can look at wet water, but don't drink wet water. So do you know like sort of some of the mechanism of how you prevent water from clumping to itself? So like surfactants in my sort of like vague chemistry understanding basically have sort of a polar end and a nonpolar end. And so like the polar end hangs out with the water and then the other end is like, no, you can't because I'm nonpolar.

So you don't it doesn't allow the water to get to sort of like hang out with one end of the water sort of like gets in between. I think that is my understanding of how these wetting agents work as well. They like provide physical slash chemical barriers to prevent the water molecules from getting close to each other and bonding

so that they can't have that strong of an interaction. Yeah. There's less kissing. Yeah. They're like the chaperone at the water dance. All right, Sam.

We've got wet water. What do you got? All right. right all right so submarines are renowned for their ability to be underwater and airplanes are of course the exact opposite of submarines known for their ability to fly around in the air so with that in mind let's say the airplane fell in love with the submarine and it wanted to stay in touch while one was in the air and the other was underwater with our current technology that love would be star-crossed big time because it's basically impossible to perform wireless underwater-to-air communication. And underwater-to-land communication ain't that easy either if you're wireless.

So a sub and a car would also be doomed. They would not be in love either. And that's because of the very different properties of air and water and the methods that we use to send info across those mediums. So radio waves don't make it very deep into water before fading away, I guess, because water is so thick compared to air, probably. And wireless signals sent from underwater devices mostly just bounce off like the underside of the surface of the water and back down into the briny depths before they can escape. back down into the briny depths before they can escape. And obviously this is not ideal for things like military submarines that want to stay hidden because they have to come very close to the surface to talk to the above water world. But it can also be pretty annoying for researchers. Like

you can transmit data acoustically from a research sub to a boat, but the boat's got to be pretty close to the drone in order to receive the data and the rate of transfer isn't so hot. So that's bad. But also like if you have a drone out in the ocean and you're in a building, you can't really talk to it or anything like that. So it just slows everything down. But a team at MIT is working on a way to finally bring a plane and sub together. They created a system called acoustic RF communication or tarf for short

that uses the air water media mismatch to its advantage so it all starts with what's pretty much is an underwater speaker attached to your drone or your submarine or your scuba diver or whatever has the data collecting device it translates the ones and zeros of data into pulses of sound and shoots those sounds toward the surface of the water and when the pulse of sound hits the surface, it makes teeny tiny ripples that are just a few micrometers in height. So on the surface, you have a high frequency radar that's either attached to a plane

or directed at the surface of the water from the land. And it can see these pulses and it's also sensitive enough to detect the minor differences in the height and angle made by different frequencies. So like if this thing was shooting 100 hertz sounds for zeros and 200 hertz sounds for one, it can pick up like the couple micrometer difference

between those two types of ripples and then translate that data back into ones and zeros. So it's just all happening right on the surface of the water. So right now, this is mostly just useful in relatively calm waters with waves up to only 16 centimeters high. So maybe not the best yet, but it's been tested in situations where there's like people swimming around in the way of it and like drones zipping around in the way of the pulses being shot out. And it still worked fine. So it's semi promising.

So this technology could speed up the rate of data collection and underwater research, increase the range of underwater to above water communication, keep military submarines safe if you're into that kind of thing, and it could help lovelorn planes and submarines finally connect with each other. So, I mean, I guess this is a really big problem and it makes sense that people would be thinking hard about how to solve it, but that like a big ask yeah waves like there's gonna be it's the ocean yeah that's a problem so i don't know what they're gonna do about that maybe make bigger ripples i guess but yeah but then maybe if your submarine's making big ripples then the other army or whatever is gonna be like hey what the hell is that i mean in general I think you just get quiet if the other army is or Navy, I guess, in this situation. Well, OK. So like sometimes you'll see submarines with live stream video, but I don't know how they do that. I definitely found

a few instances of submarines live streaming, but not very many. And I couldn't figure out how the heck they were doing it. Yeah, no, you're right. There's that YouTube channel that's like all live stream. There must be a wire that just goes all heck they were doing it. Yeah, no, you're right. There's that YouTube channel that's like all live stream. There must be a wire that just goes all the way to the surface. Yeah. Because that's like a science vessel. It's not like they're trying to hide. Right.

So, yeah, they can do stuff like that. But it just didn't occur to me that you can just shoot wirelessly your data to the boat, basically. Yeah, it wouldn't have occurred to me either. Especially that barrier. Like, the way that wireless communication works is that you're transmitting through a roughly homogenous medium. And when that is like suddenly there's this barrier where it's just a complete difference from one to the other. It's amazing that they could solve that problem at all. All right.

So here's how I'm thinking about judging these. I don't, I've never said this out loud. Which one of these would I make a TikTok about? Oh my gosh, this is illegal. So I think that the one that I would be most likely to make into a TikTok is wet water. Because it's got fire, which is a problem we're dealing with now.

I get to say, did you know that water can be wetter than water? And people would be like, what? What? Is he, man, Hank? I guess I'll watch it. Hank's on his shit again. Hank's on his shit again. Hank's on his shit again. Well,

this is a fun new metric to think of my facts by. Just being a content machine for Hank Green Incorporated. I love it. Congratulations Sari on your win and that means that it's time to ask the science couch where we've got some questions for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. At CrystalR99

says, why does water conduct electricity so well? Sari, I don't know if I'm going to make a fool of myself out of myself right now, but does it? So pure water doesn't. Yeah, there's not a lot of, there's no ions. There's no shared electrons. The things that do a very good job of conducting electricity, basically, instead of having like electrons around the atoms, just sort sort of share them in a soup, which is what metals do.

And that's why they're shiny. And that's why they're good conductors of heat and electricity. But water, I don't see why it would conduct electricity well unless there's a bunch of ions in it. Yeah. So that's the tricky thing about this question. It's like, is it? Kind of. But we've been talking about water.

The water molecules, H2O, are polar. So there's a positively charged N and a negatively charged N. But in liquid water form, those charges balance each other out. So they're basically neutral. And so that's in like distilled water or deionized water, which you can process in various ways, either like condensing it from steam or pushing it through a semi-permeable membrane to remove all the impurities. Like this stuff takes a lot of effort to generate because water is such a good solvent.

It's known as the universal solvent because it's so good at dissolving other things. So there's almost always stuff floating in water. If you like run it out of your bathtub or out of your sink or even out of your bitter water filter, like there's stuff in there. Yeah, there's still going to be ions in there, yeah. Enough to make it conduct electricity well. Yeah, well, it wouldn't be like a good insulator. Like I wouldn't want to be in it with a toaster, you know?

Oh boy, yeah. Yeah, that's why it's like, do not drop your hair dryer into the bathtub, for example, because like that water is good enough at conducting because there's just so much other stuff in it. Like the ions that we were talking about, minerals, just all kinds of stuff. Yeah. And let me go ahead and shout this out.

Don't take a bath in deionized water and think I can put my hair dryer in it now because Hank Green told me, no, there's still, your body will introduce ions. And even if it's perfectly deionized, I still don't trust it. It'll jump across the surface and get you. Electricity is dangerous. Electricity, very dangerous, especially like I'm going to be a little hand wavy around the electricity part

for reasons mentioned in past episodes, mostly that I'm not a physicist, but like any sort of moving of charged particles is what's creating the electric current. And so like ions moving in the water creates an electric current or when lightning strikes a lake and there's electricity flowing when there's this charge flowing throughout

it, then that's creating an electric current, which is very bad for your body because so much of it is electrical, your muscles and your brain. And like you depend on electric current and so many other living organisms do. Don't take a bath and drop a toaster and deionize water. Also take cover if you're in a lightning storm or whatever. So, like, all these asterisks. Protect yourself. But depending on the amount of stuff in the water, it can actually be safer for you to be in, like, salty seawater than freshwater during a lightning storm, for example. for example, because there are so many ions in the water and saltwater conducts electricity so well that the electric current sticks to the easiest path.

Like it is harder for it to go through the human body and so it'll go around you. Don't do it. That's the thing. It's like electricity will always go by the easiest path. And oftentimes human bodies are a fairly easy path for it to go through. But in a very ion rich solution, you might not be. You might. That's interesting.

But in any case, don't be out on the water when it's lightninging. Immediately come in, even if it seems like it's far away. Public service announcement from the team at SciShow Tangents, mostly trying to knock it soon. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we will tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Devin Parham, at Bike Commuter, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, super easy to do that. First, you can go to Patreon.com slash SciShowTangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen.

That's super helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna Medish, and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons

on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. In the Mara River in East Africa, sometimes hundreds or thousands of fish die all at once. And according to a 2018 research paper, these mass deaths are because of hippo poop. During the day, hippos hang out in rivers to stay cool and take care of all their waste dumping needs. This poop is an all-you-can-eat

buffet for aerobic bacteria who use oxygen to help them digest. But when this oxygen-poor water flows downstream, like during heavy rains, it engulfs any fish and starves them of oxygen, so they can't breathe and die, basically drowning in poop water. No. There's no good ways to go, but blech. Yeah, drowning of asphyxiation in poop water. Low down on my list. Ha ha ha.