SciShow Tangents - Wings with Stefan Chin

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert Sari Reilly. Hello. And also sitting in for Sam is our different resident everyman, our old other resident everyman, Stefan Jinn. I thought I was going to get introduced first for some reason. So when you said resident science expert, I was like, oh. No panic.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Wow. I have to live up to that now illustrious old resident uh everyman that i can live up to hey you two what are you thankful for oh god that's a hard question oh no um there's so many things what about just like i just think that it's so great that humans are like let's make a music in fact i was just inside of my house and my son we have a piano and my son uh started to play three i think just two notes in a three note group and then he made it faster and faster and it was really low down and it sort of felt like the beginning of a heavy metal song and he like his tempo just kept increasing until finally it got too fast for me he just like slammed on the bottom path and i was like you've done it

Starting point is 00:01:32 you've written your first song so i'm thankful for that well i'm thankful for all of you i gotta see stefan's face i've seen stefan's parents before a little more recently than i've seen stefan what i'm genuinely not muscially thankful for is public transportation i love living in a space now where i can take a train a bus uh any number of the a ferry i can take so many different forms of public transit alongside my fellow humans who are just and yes there are a lot of things wrong a train several trains caught on fire this year a line was shut down for a month but when you like walk on a train with hundreds of other people and walk out and everyone disperses

Starting point is 00:02:18 into their relative directions it's like i feel like a little ant and everything is so perfectly coordinated and how does this even work we created this infrastructure where people can get to where they need to get to without hopping in our individual cars yeah it's super like i love feeling like part of a system i am i know like i objectively know that i'm always part of a system but when i'm in a city i feel i feel it more i am the blood in the blood vessel traveling around making society function i think i actively avoid that feeling yeah i don't want to be the in the blood vessel uh what am i thankful for uh taylor swift's midnight

Starting point is 00:03:01 oh is that the new one yeah the. The 3 a.m. version. Have that on repeat. That's way, like, not midnight. It's the same time of night, roughly. I mean, it's not. I feel very different at 3 a.m. than I do at midnight. Oh, well.

Starting point is 00:03:18 I feel like I have the same vibes at midnight versus 3 a.m. I mean, at this point in my life, I'm more likely to be waking up at 3 a.m. than staying up to 3 a.m. So that's really different from a lot of the previous years I've lived. 3 a.m. feels more chaotic to me where you've been working really hard on something and you're in a flow state. And then all of a sudden you look up and it's like, oh, it's 3am or you're doing something with friends and you're like, Whoa, it's 3am. And midnight's like,

Starting point is 00:03:50 just midnight. I'm watching Netflix. Yeah. 3am is like, I'm a little bit further in the video game, but I've, I've still been playing since before midnight. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Yeah. 3am is like, is like, is like civilization five times. Probably like 20% of the times I've been awake at 3 a.m. has been because of Sid Meier. Oh, man. Anyway.

Starting point is 00:04:16 Oh, this podcast is brought to you by Sid Meier's Civ 5, a game that they're actively not promoting anymore. Anyway, I am also grateful for all of our SciShow Tangents listeners. Thank you so much for showing up every week here on Tangents. We get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory.

Starting point is 00:04:37 They're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of you two will be crowned the winner. And they're not chin bucks anymore. No. I got shafted on the name after I won. I believe you decided to leave the podcast.

Starting point is 00:04:53 That is true. The truth comes out. This is Stefan's little, you'll never guess what happened on my science podcast. I got kicked off. I don't know if that ever seemed that way to anyone, but Stefan didn't do a bad thing that we kicked him off the podcast for, just so you know. That's not what happened. I feel like if people thought that, somebody would have come at me on Twitter. Somebody would have said something probably, yeah. Somebody would have said something. Now, as as always we're

Starting point is 00:05:25 going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from stephan wings wings those beautiful things oh wow oh what lift i love it sorry i'm sorry i interrupted okay okay wings wings those beautiful things oh what lifting a true wing can bring yes the tip of a wing sends air spiraling in mesmerizing swirls of vorticity but the thing about wings is their great diversity birds and bats yes but also some seeds propellers race cars and f-16s winged things move aerodynamically now flight was a dream to which humans would cling until flight was made right eventually but if you instead leave the dreaming up to me i wish for wings boneless and very spicy oh boy i think the meter got kind of borked in the middle there but you know i think this is

Starting point is 00:06:28 classic stephanie classic stephanie it feels none of us can recreate it yeah yeah it's like it leaves you a little bit at moments sort of feeling like you're you've teetered over the edge and you don't know what's happening but then it catches you as you fall like a like any good emily dickinson poem is i think you're just like that so the topic for today though it's wings um which apparently lots of things rhyme with and wings are and it's interesting stephan out like outlined in his poem several things that i would not have thought of as wings including seed like propeller seed wings and also like the spoilers on a race car which is i guess a wing like it's trying to use air to influence lift but not to create lift to fight against it so i don't even i don't know if we should should consider that as a wing yeah it's just you just flip it

Starting point is 00:07:20 upside down so that the lift is pushing you down instead of up. That's true. But if you put a cup upside down, is it a cup anymore? Yeah. Yeah, it's just an upside-down cup. No one questioned me. There was a wing. No, it's a weird thing called a blorable. No liquid can hold more than that. That's not a cup anymore.

Starting point is 00:07:45 Before this episode, I was like, oh, there are are two kinds of wings there's the wings on the birds and that like vertebrate wings and uh airplane wings and that was it but as stefan's poem highlighted as samara is a type of is like the winged seed or fruit it has a name and then i don't know i'm building off of stefan's poem mostly uh got the the classic edible wings muscle from chickens and other birds presumably and the most controversial thing that i saw besides besides the idea that airfoils are potentially upside down wings, as Stefan mentioned, is that wing is a subset of fin. So whales have fins, which are any sort of, I'm just going to define it with my own body, like an appendage that is attached to a larger thing that produce some sort of lift or thrust. So like there's a physical force going on and wings are specifically producing lift through air rather than other fluids.

Starting point is 00:08:55 But then I don't know, you can get kind of technical there and be like, well, air is a fluid, water is a fluid. And then I feel like you can have a water. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like there's water wings do like does a whale's flipper is it producing a lot

Starting point is 00:09:13 of lift through like aerodynamics or do because they do kind of do a flapping thing too they propel themselves with it so it's definitely threat i don't know enough about physical forces can i interrupt and tell you the list of things that people on twitter who follow me have informed me are not themselves once they are turned upside down that was fast did someone say cup a number of people did say cup. But I think someone said if you turn a bowl upside down, it's now a cloche. And I don't know what a cloche is, but okay. It's like things in hotels where they're like, your food, sir. Oh, I see. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:56 Thank you. That's exact. Everyone understood that. Yeah. Even the people who couldn't see you doing the gesture understood your food sir yeah so things include a bucket hat which presumably just becomes a bucket if it's upside down a handstand which is no longer a handstand if it's upside down the life of the fresh prince of bel-air which did get flipped turned upside down and was quite different before

Starting point is 00:10:23 that a stalactite which becomes a stalagmite. I don't know about that one. The letter M great one. That's now definitely a W. This was one of my favorites, a hammer with an ax on the bottom. If you heard it upside down as an ax with a hammer on them. No,

Starting point is 00:10:42 this is a horrible question. This is going gonna be your new question for p for a and i hate it already the most common one which is totally true a frown i can get behind most of these okay yeah but the but the cup is still a cup because when you do that when you're one of those con artists on the street and you have the three cups with the little the P underneath and you have people guess it's it's a game of cups. It's not a cloche game. It's a game of cups. Sherry, do we know anything about the etymology of wings? There are a lot of ways to refer to wings i think it was something that we very obviously

Starting point is 00:11:25 pointed out on an animal because birds are very obvious and then we're like what do we call it so the latin word for for feather and or wing was pinna uh which gave us the word fin because it sounds like it also gave us the word pen because we used feathers as pens. The ancient Greek patera, terra, with a P, meant wing. And so that's where we get a lot of our animal taxonomy suffixes. So hymenoptera, or helicopter, or other things. Or just like pterodactyl.

Starting point is 00:12:03 Pterodactyl, yes. And the modern word wing didn't come along until the late 12th century um and it specifically referred to uh wenga i think is how it was pronounced w-e-n-g-e which is the forelimb of a bird or a bat that was related to flight. So at some point in the history of talking about flying animals, we went from the thing with feathers and had a lot of words around the fact that wings had to have feathers. And then we realized in the late 12th century that bats were a thing. We were like, damn, we we gotta call wings something else and so then i think i don't know from where you just made it up it is generally an unknown origin of

Starting point is 00:12:52 where wing came from so it was probably just some guy who was like well that flying critter don't have feathers it's a special word for that yeah a, I need a special word. So I think we have a fairly good idea of what wings are, even though probably not, as is the way of these things. So we're going to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing Truth or Fail Wings Edition. Obviously, wings are very good for helping animals take off into the air, but there's more to life than flying. And there's more to wings than helping animals move around. In fact, nature has found some other creative uses for wings. The following are three stories about additional talents

Starting point is 00:13:32 exhibited by animals and their wings, but only one of them is true. Which one is it? So here's story number one. Bats like to eat moths using echolocation to find them. So to avoid detection, moths have special scales on their find them. So to avoid detection, moths have special scales on their wings that are able to absorb sound, making them harder for bats to find. But it could

Starting point is 00:13:52 be fact number two. Bowflies like to colonize the carcasses of dead animals, but that means they end up competing with each other for space. So after landing, blowflies will extend their wings to make as much space for themselves as possible and keep other blowflies will extend their wings to make as much space for themselves as possible and keep other blowflies away from their precious meal. Or it could be fact number three. Butterflies migrating long distances have to be able to adjust to different climates on their journeys. So their wings are equipped with microscopic structures that respond to changes in wind speed by making tiny adjustments to the shape of the butterfly's wing so they can fly more efficiently. Which is it? Is it story number one,

Starting point is 00:14:31 moths have soundproof scales on their wings to avoid bat detection? Fact number two, blowflies use their wings as a fence to carve out a space on animal carcasses? Or fact number three, butterfly wings shapeshift at the microscopic level to adjust to changes in wind speed. Starting with the moths. I feel like I've heard this before, but that's always deceptive. It's tricky. Yeah. Because I also, I'm like, I saw something about moths one time, but who knows?

Starting point is 00:15:00 Well, I don't know. I could totally see a wing doing something, like changing shape in a way that would, because like you have like, I don't know. I could totally see a wing doing something, like changing shape in a way that would... Because you have, I don't know, they design planes and stuff that can't be seen on radar or whatever because it's shaped in particular ways to repel the signals away from the source. So it seems plausible that a moth could do could be doing something like that are their wings like fur furry feather not really feathery but well yeah they're certainly not furry or feathery but they they look that way they look yeah they look fuzzy i mean that that also feels like it could trap echolocation pings in some way as well yeah we got sound yeah you know sound yeah it's like sound foam yeah i agree and it seems like a very obvious evolutionary advantage any moths that had this ability would survive because they are not being eaten right but i think that also applies to the third one which is the butterfly morphine wing where if you don't can't survive the heat if you can't beat the heat

Starting point is 00:16:14 you're just gonna die uh so that i don't know how an insect would morph their wing in that way. I don't know enough about insect wings, but it feels like once the butterfly wings unfurl, they're just there. And then you can extend them out, flop, do the wing thing, and then close and open. That's it.

Starting point is 00:16:43 Well, they got like a limp flowing around in there. I don't know what they do, but it feels like they could do something. And then I think it's also an evolutionary advantage to stake out your claim on a carcass, you know? I like the idea of them with their little shoulders out. Like me on the train, throwing my shoulders out so people won't stand too freaking close to me. Public transportation is like a carcass but for but in a poetic way yeah yeah and a really beautiful loving way that i'm thankful for where we're all competing for space and resources but we're just glad it's there in the first place

Starting point is 00:17:17 this does not make any scientific sense but when i imagine flies in general i sort of imagine that they are very welcoming to other flies in terms of food, because the food sources are so much bigger than they are usually. And so they're just like, we're all here on this giant peach or whatever. Like, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:36 come on down. They're happy to share a meal. You know, I love that. I love the idea that like flies seem gross, but actually they're the most sharing of all the organisms. They're like, there's always enough. That's how it works.

Starting point is 00:17:50 When you're a fly. I'm going to go with moths, I think, because I have this nagging feeling in my brain that if I don't choose it and it's right, I will be so frustrated with myself. That's a good way to choose, I think. I'm also going with moths. I feel like while I was looking around,

Starting point is 00:18:09 I saw something about moths and something about butterflies. So I feel like it's one of those. But I also, moths is the only one that, is the one that makes the most sense to me scientifically, I guess. And so we'll go. Well, I'm going with that, but yeah, we'll see. You don't have to justify yourself anymore stephan because you're both right i was

Starting point is 00:18:30 hoping to maybe throw you off because their their bodies are definitely sound sound confusing like they're like stealth fuzzy that's why they're that's why mods are fuzzy and butterflies aren't because moms are out at night and they have to confuse echolocators um which is wild that there's such an obvious reason for their fuzz um so they have a few different methods to avoid detection by bats and that includes the furry layer on their body it absorbs bat ultrasound also the flapping of their wings like the actual way that they flap their wings reflects echoes in um confusing. But the researchers studying moth wings have also found that their wings have scales that are designed to absorb sound. So naturally, that made them curious about whether these scales could be used to make

Starting point is 00:19:14 soundproofing materials for us to use. So scientists have tested out how the scales worked when attached to a surface that reflects a lot of sound. They found that the scales could reduce sound by as much as 87%. And now we're going to harvest moths like crazy. Just nail them up all over the recording studio. My moth tapestry. Do we know, are the scales like, is it like a porous thing or like?

Starting point is 00:19:41 It's almost like the scales, individual scales are almost like layers of flame shapes so there's like papers to each one and i think and there's depth to it so i think that that lets the sound sort of get in and then not come out it's like a bunch of iron thrones yeah just made of it looks to me like ghost hands. Just picture ghost hands, everyone. That's what it's like. So blowflies have been observed using their wings while colonizing carcasses of dead animals to ward off fire ants. But not by just shoving at them. They actually buzz their wings at the ants.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And other insects also turn to wing buzzing as a defense against predators. So that is a thing that is true. And butterfly wings protect butterflies from rain. So they don't do this cool shape shifting thing, but they do protect them from rain using microscopic structures on the wing that can break raindrops as they land. Which is very important for butterflies, given how heavy a raindrop is to a butterfly wing. One scientist studying the raindrops compared a raindrop landing on a butterfly to a bowling ball falling on a human. So to study how the butterflies survive, researchers used a high-speed camera to watch water drops as they hit a butterfly. And the structures on the

Starting point is 00:20:59 wing break the water droplet into smaller drops, and that lessens the amount of impact on the wing and keeps the wing from getting cold as well. So that means you both come out of that with one point. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it'll be time for the fact-off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit.

Starting point is 00:21:43 But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The Burke Museum in Seattle has the largest collection of spread wings from birds, which is exactly what it sounds like. Wings spread out so that you can see them in full. The wings are carefully separated from the body of dead birds and then air dried and stored in bug free storage to keep them safe. The collection is used by wildlife artists, as well as by researchers studying things like feather-melting and wing shape. How many wings are currently in the museum's collection? So it's like just the wings.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Just the wings. Not separated from the bodies. Took them off. Took them off. Weird. And had just a wing museum. This is not fair. This is Sari's home turf yeah but i didn't

Starting point is 00:22:27 do you did sari didn't count the bird wings i did not go unfortunately i was not a bird nerd as a child maybe she has a better sense of the scale of this museum it's like pretty big so imagine how many birds would fit into a museum and then double it. That's how I'm doing it. Because wings. I'm going to say 2,000. Oh, 2,000. Okay.

Starting point is 00:22:55 I'll say 20,000. The answer is 40,000. Whoa. Double it, Sari. Double it. Yeahari! Double it! Yeah, you gotta remember, it's not like, at a museum,

Starting point is 00:23:08 almost everything's in the back. Yeah. And they just got, just got racks and racks that they can pull out and be like, what bird do you want? I got a wing from everybody!

Starting point is 00:23:19 And I bet it smells great. Well, wings don't have that much to rot on them, I feel like. Do bird feathers smell bad? The thing that was stinky in the museum at the university where the brain scoop was filmed was the water birds. Because they had a bunch of oils in their feathers to keep them. So that oil got rancid and it just stunk.

Starting point is 00:23:40 When I was there, there's not much of a scent. Well, I feel like once things get dried out, it's like, eh. So that means that Stefan gets to decide who goes first. Oh, I guess I'll go. So I'm going to talk about parachutes, which are kind of wing-ish. They don't do as much lifting, I guess, but it's in the same vein. So we've had the idea for parachutes for a long time of course uh apparently there's light evidence that around the year 1100 uh there were chinese people jumping off of things with rigid umbrellas and uh surviving but that's

Starting point is 00:24:31 uh survive it but that's uh i don't know if we know much more than that okay um and then like da vinci of course sketched an umbrella or not an umbrella a parachute um but it was like pyramid shaped which is an interesting choice um and then i guess the first successful jump with a like fabric parachute without a rigid frame so something more like what we would think of as a parachute was 1797 which was earlier than I would have expected the thing about traditional parachutes is that they need a lot of uh you have to jump from high enough up so that you have enough room, enough time for the parachute to open. And during the early 1900s, when flight was just sort of becoming a thing, they already knew about these like a general parachute design, but they didn't have a design that would work for pilots who are in an emergency and possibly at low altitude. And so that leads us to Franz Reich, Reich, out,

Starting point is 00:25:29 right. Shout. Uh, who's also known as the flying Taylor. Uh, and he was, he was trying to design. I know,

Starting point is 00:25:38 I know. Kind of one, you know, the story. I don't. Yeah. So he was trying to design a parachute wingsuit type thing that would be like a parachute that was integrated into the pilot's flight suit. So if they needed to, they could just sort of jump out and be good.

Starting point is 00:25:57 And he was testing his design on dummies by like throwing them off of his apartment building, which I think was five stories up. by like throwing them off of his apartment building, which I think was five stories up. And I think he had like some initial success, but then like as he kept going, like it was not really working out super well. And like his original design used a ton of fabric and weighed 150 pounds. So it's like not super practical.

Starting point is 00:26:22 This makes you fall faster. You've increased your terminal velocity oh no but uh franz was very very confident in his design and so he moved on to doing some test jumps himself uh and so one of his jumps was from 26 feet up and that and he ended up with a broken leg and the lesson that he took from that was that he needed to jump from higher up um because the shoot yeah like the shoot needs more time to deploy so uh and when i first read that i was like what the hell are you thinking but like it makes sense why you wouldn't want to go higher a base jumper has to jump from a certain height

Starting point is 00:27:03 and that's with like modern materials. He ended up spending like, I think, over a year trying to apply for permission to throw a dummy off of the balcony of the Eiffel Tower. Or the low, I think it's the lower balcony, which is 180 feet up. And so they kept rejecting him, but eventually he did get permission to do that. So, of course, he called the press because he's like everyone needs to come see this um because once they see the value of my design i'm gonna get like i think there was a cash prize that you could win if you if you designed a parachute that could fulfill the needs of pilots but of course mr franz uh pulled a little switcheroo and he showed up to this this event wearing the suit himself

Starting point is 00:27:45 uh because he had fully intended the whole time to do the jump himself even though he was like no i'm gonna totally just throw a dummy guys so he did he did the jump and it did not deploy correctly and he ended up falling to his death uh in front of a crowd of press uh which is not a fun story what was wrong with his design obviously many things but was it impossible with the materials at the time or was it an engineering flaw or i don't know i'm i'm trying to get into his head yeah as far as i saw i didn't see like a ton of details about his specific design like you can kind of see pictures of it or of like at least

Starting point is 00:28:31 one of the versions of it where it does have this sort of like rigging that looks like it's trying to splay the material out a bit but it also i think was sort of um sort of looked like like the modern wingsuits where there was some fabric that was meant to to sort of balloon out between all the limbs and things like that i know that what during his his jump it didn't like he it got he got kind of tangled up in the fabric so it might have been like the deploying mechanism was just not reliable or like it was probably no matter what even if it had worked it probably would not have been great uh but it seems to have been an engineering problem where it was not it did not deploy even though he had plenty of time for it

Starting point is 00:29:16 to deploy sari what you got for me i'm lost in the yeah yeah mine's uh very different the club-winged mannequin which has the excellent scientific name machiropteris deliciosus is a cute little south american bird with bright red and black coloring so we're a little we're in the cheerful zone now and while most birds have hollow or partially hollow bones, because that's a helpful adaptation to stay light for flying, these birds are unique. A research team used high-resolution micro-CT scans, which is basically where you take a bunch of x-rays to see slices of an object

Starting point is 00:29:58 and then put them together to make a 3D image, to look at the bones of two male clubbed-wing mannequins. And they published a paper in 2012 showing how the ulna and humerus bones were much more solid than similar size birds. Specifically, they had bigger volumes and higher tissue mineral densities. They were really chunky bones. My first thought was that these unusual hefty wing bones are where the club winged name comes from, but it's not because we didn't know about these chunky bones until relatively recently the club actually comes from the weird shapes of several

Starting point is 00:30:31 of the biggest feathers on each wing i think there are three different feather shapes in total and each looks like some sort of cave person or medieval weaponry doodle with a narrower base and a lumpy tip and these specialized feathers attach directly to the ulna bone, which is one of those extra dense ones. And when a male is trying to woo a female, they lift their wings up and rub these feathers together, vibrating their wings at around 107 cycles per second, which is more than hummingbird wings or rattlesnake tails. It's one of the fastest muscle twitch vibrations that we know of. And in the same way that a cricket rubs its wings together to chirp,

Starting point is 00:31:10 but in my understanding, way more technically complicated because of the ridges on these three pairs of feathers, this makes short bursts of a high-pitched buzzing sound that is full of raw sexual energy. And to me, it kind of sounds like letting air out of a latex balloon. So instead of being the best they can be at flying, though I think they're still small enough that they can flit around, club-winged mannequins have wings with bulky muscles and solid bones that are specialized to be strong little instruments. And that's just weird because evolution decides to, well, doesn't decide.

Starting point is 00:31:48 Because the randomness of evolution prioritizes eccentric mating rituals over everything else. You've evolved these things meant for flying, and now we're going to make you bad at that? But good at making a sound. Do you know what the fastest twitching muscle is like is this uh is this pretty high up there for the vertebrates i think this is pretty pretty high up there i don't know what the fastest but here here are some other other flaps and muscle movements a sparrow flaps its wings at 30 beats per second a relaxed hummingbird is about 65 beats per second. An excited male hummingbird is 75 to 90 flaps. And a rattlesnake is about 90 shakes per second.

Starting point is 00:32:35 So it makes me think of the it's like when you're playing Mario Party and you're playing one of those games where you have to like click or or press the button faster than the other person and so you get like you get in there and you're like like you're not even like controlling around you're just sort of vibrating because yeah yeah very sexy everybody knows that mario party is the human's metabolically expensive mating ritual. All right. So now I have to choose because that's my job. I'm obviously dude jumping to his death is a pretty good tick tock. That's a pretty good tick tock. People love that.

Starting point is 00:33:25 But I think that starting a tick tock off with what's the fastest any vertebrate vibrates? That's good. Somebody's going to stick around for the rest of that video. And also, I hadn't heard about it already. So, Sari's the winner of the episode. I'm sorry, Stefan. That's all right. So, now it's time to ask the science couch.

Starting point is 00:33:42 We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. Valkylius asks, if planes are able to fly because of the specific shape of their wings, how do they fly upside down? From what I understand, there are two different things that affect this. There's the angle of attack and there's the shape of the wing. And so you can change the angle of attack so that it overcomes the, It's still dramatically less efficient, but you can change the angle of attack so that you can fly a plane upside down perpetually, even though the

Starting point is 00:34:10 wing shape is wrong. But it's just way less efficient. I mean, the only thing I have to add to that is that some... There are different acrobatic maneuvers that stunt planes can do. There's like a loop-de-loop, flying upside down, and like rolling, barrel roll.

Starting point is 00:34:27 There are plenty of planes that are not designed to do this. So you wouldn't necessarily try this with a passenger plane because by the time you flipped it upside down and then tilted the nose to an angle at which the wings would give you lift, I think that would take way too much time and the physics would be working against you. But a lot of stunt planes that are meant to fly upside down have symmetrical wing shapes.

Starting point is 00:34:51 So in addition to adjusting the angle that the plane is flying at to maximize lift or match the lift of a right side up plane. By making the wing shape symmetrical, it easier to do that right upside down without throwing off the balance as much so you even when you're flying right side up your wing shape is the same as when you're flying upside down so yeah just to prove that it's not just the wing shape you can fly a plane with a symmetrical wing i'm just thinking about the passengers they don't want to be yeah yeah that's another huge thing there's a bunch of people in the plane and they also don't want to be upside down yeah and if i've ordered a sprite yeah and i go upside down is it still a cup i don't know i can tell you what it's not a cup of sprite like it's now it's just a cup

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Starting point is 00:36:59 And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Engineers rely on really precise measurements to design and build things, so there are standard ways to describe diagrams of vehicles like planes. A common XYZ coordinate system has the Y-axis extend from the nose to the tail of the plane, and it's often called the butt line or buttock line. So it just makes sense that the place where the wing joins onto the main body of the plane is called the wing butt line, and it can be attached with structures like wing butt ribs, which can also be called wing roots. But, you know, that's less fun.

Starting point is 00:37:55 Would you eat a wing butt rib? That does sound okay. All of those parts are tasty. All of those parts are tasty. There's also, there's a thing in a plane called the auxiliary power unit, which is just an engine that creates all the electricity on the plane. There's a little generator in the back of a plane, and it has an exhaust that comes right out the butt of the plane. And Catherine, my wife, once looked at that, and she pointed at it, she said plainness well it's on the butt line so it's definitely correct

Starting point is 00:38:30 yeah a little farting too so every time I look at the exhaust of an APU I think plainness every time

SciShow Tangents - Wings with Stefan Chin

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