SciShow Tangents - Wood

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

If you look out a window right now, you're probably going to see a tree. And that tree? Why, it's made out of wood, friend. And that's where things start to get interesting... Get ready to meet Hank's newest alter-ego: Mr. Wood. He's basically Hank, but he just can't stop talking about wood! I had to cut like 3 different, very long stories he told about wood! The man LOVES wood!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: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Shipwormshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShipwormsDynamitehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/tunneling-clam-bedeviled-humans-sank-ships-conquered-oceans-180961288/Bounty Gaminghttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902[Fact Off]Super WoodArticle: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180207151829.htmPaper: https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2018/fpl_2018_song001.pdfScrewdriver test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BStJLI7WQ8g&ab_channel=VOANewsBallistic test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVbczXDFe1Q&ab_channel=MarylandNanoCenterMetallic Woodhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-01/uop-pe012819.php[Ask the Science Couch]Splintershttp://www.aafp.org/afp/2003/0615/p2557.htmlhttp://www.aafp.org/afp/2007/0901/p683.htmlhttp://www.the-dermatologist.com/content/treating-rare-fungal-infections-sporotrichosishttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4082545/[Butt One More Thing]Toilet paper https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/622513/reason-toilet-paper-always-white

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 Chin. You like citrus? It's fine. Citrus is okay. I'm not like a citrus fanatic. Yeah, honestly, it's mostly the drinks for me.

Yeah, like a good, like a nice strawberry lemonade or something. I'm down. Interesting. I consider citrus the top tier of fruit. Yeah, me too. I'm down. Interesting. I consider citrus the top tier of fruit. Yeah, me too. I'm like very enthusiastic about citrus. Wow, I should have asked anyone else. I wouldn't even know what would be above citrus

in terms of the fruit flavor. No, apples. Apples are good. Apples, boring. What about pears? Pears are good. Pears are all right. They have a fun texture.

Pears above citrus. No. I put pears above citrus as well. You guys are out of your gourds. Also pineapple. I'm here with Stefan. It's about pears and it's about pineapple. Pineapple might as well be a citrus, in my opinion.

Yeah, it's sour. It's tangy. Ew, you're all canceled. Stefan, what's your tagline? Chalky smoothie fiend. Sam Schultz also joins us here today. Hello. And what's your tagline?

Five gold rings. Because we're in that season now apparently. Sari Riley is here as well. Sari, what's your tagline? Grasshopper bubble boy. Good one. And I'm Hank Green's your tagline? Grasshopper Bubble Boy. Good one.

And I'm Hank Green and my tagline is Made of Bars. Every week here on SciShow Tangents we get together to try to one-up amaze 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 here on Tangents but judging by the name

of the podcast we won't be great at, but judging by the name of the podcast, we won't be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems your tangent unworthy, we'll 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 Sari.

Hello, friends. Come take a seat. The different types of wood are pretty neat. There's eucalyptus, cedar, ironwood, or chestnut, ash, birch, and black bean, aspen, and walnut. Keep a buckeye on your cherry tree. You don't want to confuse it with mahogany. Don't sassafras me just because you know you're maple. There are plenty of species beyond those staples, like moringa, or cowrie, or nutka cypress.

You all do pay attention to these ones that impress. Willow, won't you take these names to Greenheart? It's okay if all this knowledge bamboozles you to start. I'll live another day to learn science online. So now it's time for us and to ponderosa pine for sweet gums and dragon trees and cottonwood creations. I'm done coach-wooding you through these imaginations. Wow.

Very good. I would pay for a whole book of that shit. Oh my God, it was wonderful. Is bamboo wood? I don't know, it's a tree. It's a grass. It's not a tree. It's a grass.

Yeah, write a new poem. It's woody. Does it have to come from a tree to be wood? Since our topic is not trees, but wood. Yeah, so the topic for the day is wood. I's woody. Does it have to come from a tree to be wood? Since our topic is not trees, but wood. Yeah. So the topic for the day is wood. I forgot to mention because I was so overwhelmed by Sari's poetry. And we have not yet asked the question.

Maybe Sari has the answer for us. What is wood? Well, wood is structural tissue. It doesn't necessarily have to be from trees. Like there's a class or group of plants that are not necessarily taxonomically closely related called woody plants and i just googled bamboo the first line of this science daily article says bamboos are a group of woody perennial evergreen plants in the true grass family all right all right i'm in it they're woody they're they're woody grass

yeah so like woody is an adjective you can apply to other plants if they have got like bark or strong or on a chemical level different they're like different kinds of structural chemicals in plants cellulose is the most common one cellulose is i think the most common organic compound on the planet. But wood is a different kind that is not made of cellulose. It's lignin, which is a different compound that is much weirder than cellulose. So cellulose is a very regular glucose polymer. Lignin is entirely irregular, but lignin makes no sense. It's amazing. And it's extremely strong. My question is like, is bamboo made of lignin? Which it kind of feels like it must be just by touching it.

Is lignin cellulose adjacent? It is made of sugars. So all of this stuff is like basically saccharides, where we usually think of saccharides as stuff that's like sweet to taste. There are things you can make out of sugars that are deeply indigestible. Cellulose being pretty indigestible, but lignin being extremely difficult to digest, though some organisms can do it. Bamboo does have lignin being extremely difficult to digest, though some organisms can do it. Bamboo does have lignin.

Makes sense. It's way, it's too strong to not, because that's the big, like leveling up from cellulose to lignin is that your structural tissue becomes much stronger. I feel bad making you define wood when I'm like, that was my specialty. Yeah, you're the wood man. That's what they call me, the wood man. Somebody's got to do it. Do you have any other wood information for us? Softwood and hardwood just have to do with the type of tree that they're from,

which blew my mind a little bit. Like we didn't categorize them based on actual density of wood necessarily. That probably had something to do with it at some point. But hardwood comes from deciduous trees, so the ones that lose their leaves annually, and softwood comes from conifer trees, which usually remain evergreen. So like pine is a softwood, but beech is a hardwood. Are there like hardwoods that are softer than some softwoods? I think so.

My guess is that there was a general pattern as they harvested some trees and they were like, all these evergreen trees, kind of softer than all these other trees. But then we named them and then the pattern was broken after the fact. That tracks with how we name stuff. It's like not paying any attention and they're like, oh gosh, we've put ourselves into a pickle here. But I guess there's no way to fix it. And I imagine that wood seems like one of these words that's just like, we've been calling it wood forever. Yes, that's true. We just noticed trees and then had a word for them that became wood.

What was very interesting to me is that there's an adjective form of wood that is now obsolete. That means violently insane. And it came from like mad or frenzied. Because when I think of a tree, that's very unpredictable. Yeah, things must have been a lot different back then. I don't really know how they both came to wood. I think they're just short words that start with W,

but it's like the origin of the adjective of mad or frenzied wood comes from the same root as Odin. So like Wednesday for like a raging or mad or inspired. Because when I think of a Wednesday. Truly though. Okay, so they're not related to each other. They're just the same word. Yeah, they're just the same word.

And I thought that was fun because I like combining them as meaning because, I don't know, trees are kind of boring. Yeah, I mean, trees are boring if you live at human timescales, which is the only option available to us. win timescales, which is the only option available to us. But I think if I got to live for 20,000 years, I'd be like, wow, look at that forest go! And now it's time for Truth or Fail.

Where one of our panelists, it's me, has prepared three science facts for your education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The other panelists have to figure out either by deduction or a wild guess, which is the true fact that if you do, you get a Sam Buck. If you're tricked, then I get your Sam Buck.

You can play along at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents where we have a Twitter poll where you can choose the fact that you think is most likely to be true. Or if you know it, maybe you know it. Are you guys ready for my three facts? Yes. All right, good. Because otherwise this would be a huge problem. you know it. Are you guys ready for my three facts? Yes. Alright, good. Otherwise

this would be a huge problem. As we have discussed, wood can be delicious if you have a stomach for it, which almost nobody does. But, I was surprised to find this. There are animals in the ocean that have evolved ways

to eat and digest wood. Are there woody plants in the ocean or is it not really wood? Yeah. Like driftwood and also like trees that have gotten, have fallen in the water or the water moved into an area where there was once trees. So there are, there are these wood boring animals that like live in the ocean and they are

called woodworms and They are not worms. They are bivalves. So they're like a clam, basically. And they have special enzymes and symbiotic bacteria that help them consume these pieces of wood. And over the centuries, they have been one of the most feared animals in the ocean because they can eat your boat. It appears in Norse lore, it's in the Iliad. It's in Moby Dick. And also it is in real life. So this saltwater clam can latch onto the wood.

And then this two to three foot long fleshy tube extends into the wood. And because it can self-fertilize, one worm can become a very costly infestation that can ruin a wharf or drown a ship. And over the centuries, cities and engineers have attempted to deal with shipworms in many different ways. And these desperate times have led to desperate measures. Which of the following is a real but failed strategy attempted in the name of fighting shipworms? strategy attempted in the name of fighting shipworms.

Fact number one, the city of Los Angeles went pretty low tech when it paid a fleet of divers to swim the length of ships with knives, stabbing and chopping at shipworms to get them out of the hulls of ships. And they would pay the divers based on how many worms they killed. Unfortunately, divers ended up pulling shipworms from easier to find places that were not ships and then cutting them into sections and claiming that each section that they had chopped up was one worm. Fact number two, the port of San Francisco

decided to deal with their shipworm problem by dumping sewage into their port with the goal of increasing the acidity of the water so much that the shipworms would die. The shipworms did not seem to mind them doing this, unfortunately, though lots of other marine organisms did die. Or fact number three, engineers in Virginia

decided to just set off dynamite to try to concuss the shipworms to death. The shipworms, unfortunately, didn't care. So if you want to play along at home, we've got the city of Los Angeles paying divers to chop up shipworms, the port of San Francisco dumping sewage to poison the shipworms, or engineers in Virginia exploding the shipworms with dynamite. Where did they put the dynamite?

They put the dynamite in the water, not obviously near enough to the wharf to do damage to it or near enough to the ship to do damage to them, but just far enough that the shockwave, theoretically, would hurt the shipworms. So they would be like, whoa, and then just drop out of the hole. Ow, my ears! Well, it is a thing that you do with fish.

It's a fish gathering technique where you set off a charge, like drop an M80 into the water, and then the fish all sort of float up because they get dazed. I mean, this obviously wasn't that long ago because we have Los Angeles and San Francisco and dynamite. Los Angeles and San Francisco and dynamite. All those things existed around the same time. Yeah.

And like depth charges feel like a thing that'd be like, okay, yeah. Instead of blowing up our enemies, we'll blow up these worms. That makes sense. I really don't want to believe that the city of San Francisco is like, let's dump sewage into the ocean. But also, people have done such stupid things. Like, I just, for my hope in humanity, I wish that didn't happen. So I'm just going to write it off completely in my brain. I feel like San Francisco is new enough in history that maybe they would know not to do that by then.

It's not that new. I don't know. It's not dumping tons of poopy in the water all day, is it? We were dumping poopy in the water in Missoula, Montana

in the 1960s. That's true. But like using your poop as a weapon against shipworms that are actually clams. Would we be like vengeful and dumb enough to do that and be like, it won't hurt anything

except for these clams that we don't like? Yeah, I think you guys are way overestimating the amount that we cared about anything except our wharfs in the past. But I understand why Sari wants to write it off. I think even now, we would still pay people to go do it. in la there's a lot of starving actors there i would get paid an hourly rate to hop in the water and pull out some worms that seems fun like it could be like an iphone app or something where

you get a job to to like a task rabbit to be a worm getter. Task worm? Yeah, I like task worm. And now it is time before these people start voting for you to vote so your vote isn't influenced at twitter.com slash SciShowTangents in our Twitter poll. I feel like the Los Angeles one

is too humdrum, but I just don't believe the other two. So I'm going to go with that one. Sam's on LA. I'm also going to go with Los Angeles. I think it just feels true. If you create a system, people are going to game the system. Yeah.

And that's what's going on here. And I like that. So I'm going with it. Now I don't know if there's something I'm it. I'm just going to go with dynamite. I don't want to believe the second one's true. It doesn't make sense to me, but that is its merit of a fact. Well, the true fact

is dynamite! Yes! And this was attempted not just in Virginia, but also in Canada and Northern California, despite the fact that it did not help

in any case. So yeah, it definitely did ecological damage though. You can't set off dynamite underwater without hurting some things, but it did not seem to have any impact on shipworms at all. But this is the weirder fact that I kind of could not incorporate. I couldn't figure out how to make it work is that in some places they did not have problems with shipworms. And they were like, we just don't have problems with shipworms. And then they cleaned up the river. So this happened in the Hudson River and New York Harbor and Los Angeles Harbor.

There was industrial pollution and they were like, like, oh, this, there's just not shipworms in this part of the world. But it turned out that like, as soon as they stopped disgusting waste from being dumped into the water, they began to have shipworm problems and they had to mitigate in other ways. Wait, so the sewage might have worked. Yeah, no, absolutely. And the deal was that like they didn't need to dump the sewage in because they were already dumping much more hazardous things into the water in those places. This thing about the divers stabbing was false. There is a long history of bounty gaming,

where when you have people pay a bounty for something, they find ways to make two rat tails out of one rat tail or whatever. Or just make fake rat tails and deliver 100 of them, but 30 of them are fakes. So that is a thing that has happened, but did not happen here. But they did. So this was interesting. One of the main ways to get rid of shipworm is to coat something with creosote. So that's what we did for a long time.

It's pretty toxic and like difficult for shipworms to bite through. But it's also toxic. So they did in Los Angeles and other places in California, for a long time, they were paying divers to wrap the legs of wharfs in cling wrap, basically, so that the creosote wouldn't leach into the water. So they did the first thing to prevent the shipworms, and then the second thing to prevent the thing that they used to prevent the shipworms

from poisoning everything else. Well, did the plastic wrap help stop the shipworms and then the second thing to prevent the thing that they used to prevent the shipworms from poisoning everything else well did the plastic wrap help stop the shipworms too and the plastic wrap also stops the shipworms except that you don't really need to stop the shipworms because there's creosote between the wood and the ship they should have just skipped it gone straight to plastic wrap plastic wrap your plastic wrap didn't exist then it was the 1870s well time to build the new pier that is a that's a big pain in the butt or just use a time machine yeah bring them back and be like hi i have the solution to your pier problems that's my that's my that's my first stop with my time machine it's like i know the biggest problem you didn't have enough plastic for your peers The cling wrap baron of the 1870s.

How does he do it? All right, now it's time for a short break, and then it'll be time for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals. Sari has two for the poem and getting the fact right. I have two for these two jokers getting the fact wrong, and Sam and Stefan have nothing. So now it's time for the fact off where you guys have a

chance to redeem yourselves. Two panelists have brought in science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow our minds. And we each have a sandbuck to award to the fact that we like the most. Trivia question to decide who goes first. We usually think of wood as being able to float, but iron woods are woods so dense that they actually sink in water. Approximately how dense must wood be to be considered an ironwood? It's in kilograms per meters cubed. And I know that you have a great sense of both what a kilogram is and what a cubic meter is. Yeah. If I think of Sam and Stefan, I think experts of density. Sam, do you want to go first?

No, I don't want to go first. 225 kilograms per meter cubed. I'm going to say 500. 500 is closer. What? But amazingly, and everybody put this in your head now, a meter cube of water weighs 1,000 kilograms. I should have guessed. It's metric, so it's got to be some kind of nice round-ass number.

Jeez. Stefan, you go first. All right. My fact today is about wood densification. Are you familiar with this, Mr. Woodman Hank? Wood densification? No, I don't. Oh, okay.

Okay. A fresh wood fact. So this is a process for making wood more dense. That's what my guess was. Yeah. As it sounds. It's like a guess was. Yeah, as it sounds. It's like a process that we were already aware of,

but this team at the University of Maryland took it to the next level. So just in general, to do this, you boil the wood in a solution for many hours to remove some amount of the lignin that's in it. And the lignin, as we talked about earlier, is very important and sort of makes the woody tissue woody, separating it from other kinds of plant

tissue. And it's part of what gives the wood its rigidity. So once you remove about half of that, you cook the wood at 200 Celsius while applying a ton of pressure to the wood. And since there's not enough lignin to keep the structure, all the cells collapse. And so it compresses and becomes much thinner to about 20% of its original thickness. And then you've got this like plank of densified wood. So this team, their version is about 12 times as strong and 10 times as tough as the original wood. It's about as strong as steel, but it's much lighter and cheaper.

So you could use it as an alternative construction material. It is biodegradable, so I don't know how that plays in. But they were saying that they could see it being used in place of steel in all kinds of things like cars and planes, which is kind of weird, like a wooden plane. You could use this like a densified softwood, which now that we went through the definition and like it totally broke down what a soft versus a hardwood is. I don't know how much this matters, but they were saying that in things that require harder woods, you could replace that with densified softwoods like pine or balsa, which grow faster

and are more environmentally friendly. They're also really insulating. There's videos of the researcher stabbing the densified wood with a screwdriver, and it just doesn't seem to care about that at all. They did a ballistic test also to see how it would fare as armor. And so they shot these metal cylinders at regular wood, a single layer of the dense wood and like a five layer laminate of the dense wood. In the regular wood one, it just like shoots right through and you have all the shrapnel coming out the back

and then against the single layer of the dense wood, it goes through, but you can see it's like much slower. Like the wood absorbed a lot more of the projectile's energy. And then- Yeah, so if, you know, that way the bullet just stays in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe not quite ready to be body armor yet.

Well, yeah, maybe not body armor, but if it's like, if your car is made out of it, you know, got at least slows it down and the projectile gets stuck in the layered dense wood. But yeah, so that's so that's their super wood. And the whole team seems pretty fascinated by wood in general. They also have made transparent wood and wood batteries. And this like densified wood you can buy from a company that is like, it's like a spinoff company from the University of Maryland. And they apparently sell this wood.

So this has made me want to redecorate my entire office. spinoff company from the University of Maryland, and they apparently sell this wood. So this has made me want to redecorate my entire office. I want tripods made of densified wood. I want super thin bookshelves that are very strong nonetheless. I want my chair to be made out of it. So redecorate the office. It'll be a surprise for us when we go back in after quarantine. We'll all have super wood. Yeah, and lower salaries maybe i just don't know enough about construction can you do everything with this wood that you could do with steel so like i imagine a piece of metal you can like bend pretty easily or you can like weld it together would you need special tools to then like do woodworking on this I like I'm using my hand like

an axe because that's the closest thing I know the only thing I know is that you can shape the wood part way through the process and then like I think you'd finish the densifying and then it's like whatever shape

you put it in I watched this guy shoot it with a bullet and I'd be worried about what it would do to my axe. Or to my saw. I wouldn't want to put that on a table saw. It's just like... All right, Sam, what do you got for us? As Hank has mentioned on Tangents many times before, human beings have not figured out how to make wood.

But that doesn't mean that we can't take a really close look at what makes wood so good and woody and try to figure out ways to copy that with other materials. Enter metallic wood. Okay. So we just got another weird wood. Well, so many metals are strong. And I started reading about why some metals are stronger than others

and got instantly confused about why that is. So I will just leave it at some metals are strong. But when you're manufacturing things out of metal, the randomness of the ways that the atoms are stacked can leave defects and weak points. So researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were looking for ways to control the manufacturing of metal at a more atomic level,

and they used the cellular structure of wood as inspiration, specifically its ability to be very strong while being not particularly dense. So to replicate the structure of wood with metal, they did some cool stuff. They took a whole shitload of tiny plastic balls. Each one was only a few hundred nanometers in diameter, and they floated them all in water. Then when the water evaporated, the balls had stacked themselves into like a perfect ordered

pile with like a crystalline structure. Then they fused all the balls together, like with a microwave or something, and poured in a nickel solution and used electroplating to get the nickel and all the teeny tiny little gaps between the balls. Then they melted the balls. And what they were left with was a chunk of porous nickel about the size of a dice. And that chunk contained one billion little metal struts inside of it. So they found that their metallic wood nickel dice, at least at that scale, was as strong as titanium, but four or five times lighter than titanium. And it was also the same density of water. So if you made like a brick out of it, it would float.

And since it's really porous, they think that they could fill it up with battery stuff, battery goo. I don't know what's in a battery, but that stuff. And they could make things like prosthetic legs or like cars that were their own battery. So some people research 3D printing to create similar metals with wood-like structures, but this team's method

takes a lot less time and could potentially be way more scalable. And scalability is a part that they're trying to figure out right now. They want to make larger pieces of metallic wood so they can get a better idea of its tensile strength. Because one of the researchers said that it's entirely possible that once you make a big piece of metallic wood, it would just shatter like glass. So it's not perfect, but it's cool and sometimes that's what science is all about i've said it enough but like wood is amazing yeah and it's just like we have no like we are so bad at making things compared to cellular machinery which is why i maintain i don't know i've said this on Tangents before, but I think that by the time I die, almost everything will be made by bacteria.

Food, for sure. The things that cars are made out of. We are like working with wooden clubs and they've got like 3D printers. Could we make a bacteria that could make wood? If a tree can do it, a bacteria can do it. Do they have ideas for like what kinds of applications? I saw airplanes and I saw prosthetic limbs. Those were the two that came up in all the articles that I read.

I think it would be so cool if we could do airplanes better. I know they got like the 787 Dreamliner now and it's like, it's a little better. It's got LED lights. The TV screens are bigger. Not that I've been on a plane in a fucking year but but i'd love to get on a plane where i'm like this is a fundamentally different experience and if they made it out of metallic wood if it was like super light or the windows were extra huge or something like if it if it shimmered transparent dense wood just something i want to get on a plane and feel like, ah, the future.

But instead, I only feel the future in our communications technologies, which are terrifying. It's like, oh, I see what the future is. It's everybody being able to talk at the same time loudly. Once upon a time, you could have a grand piano in an airplane for some reason. They don't do that kind of stuff anymore. That's right.

They're too heavy. You have to make them out of densified wood. All right, Sari, what do you want to root for? Do you have it in your head? Yes, I do. So it's either Stefan with heating and compressing wood

and removing some of the lignin, creating a super wood that's as strong as steel, or SAM, researchers replicating the structure of wood using nickel to create a super strong, super porous metallic wood. Three, two, one, SAM. Stefan.

Oh, I'm shocked. Part of me was like, that's not really wood. That was my logic, yeah. But I liked it because it was like metal, which we always think of as superior to wood, being like, actually, wood, you got some good stuff going on. There are some things I really like about you.

And I'm like, I want to see more appreciation between different materials. Yeah, we need more cooperation in the world. Hank's in the pocket of big wood, so wants everything to like trend towards wood. It's time to like trend towards wood. It's time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds.

This one is from at Jim Jam James. My theater tech teacher used to tell me that you don't have to remove splinters because they're biodegradable. Is there any truth to that? Uh, no, I get like, you don't have to remove a splinter. And I can say that with confidence because I had a splinter in my ass for like three straight years. Well, why did it get removed? It removed itself. Why didn't you remove it? I was embarrassed. I was in that age where you're embarrassed of everything. So I was like 12 to 15. You would have needed

assistance. Someone to pull it out of my ass, yeah. So did your butt just hurt for three years? Well, at first I didn't think that it was a splinter in there. I just thought that I had cut myself. Uh-huh. Because I couldn't see it. After a while I was like, still hurts and it's been a while. Oh no. And then there was like a bump but it didn't hurt as After a while, I was like, still hurts, and it's been a while. Oh, no. And then there was, like, a bump,

but it didn't hurt as much anymore, and so I was like, well, I guess I'll just live this way. Turn into a pearl. Yeah, and then... And then one day, I... It was like a scab suddenly, like, after years, and I just, like, picked the scab, and there was wood inside of it.

What the hell? The human body. Particularly my human ass. I hate that. So there is truth to the fact that a splinter is biodegradable, except you wouldn't want something biodegrading inside of your body, right? In order to degrade wood needs,

I mean, I guess probably eventually just solar radiation would be enough to do it. But like in the short term, wood biodegrades through the action of fungi mostly. And you do not want fungi in your body. Unless you're eating a mushroom pizza. Right. Yeah. Having it in your digestive tract, that's cool. Yeah. Your digestive tract is very strong in a way that getting it in your bloodstream or something, bad. Your immune system has ways of protecting your body by surrounding stuff that isn't supposed to be there and ejecting it eventually. Or just surrounding it and leaving it there. stuff that I have read in the past day has said that splinters made out of organic matter like wood are oftentimes more of a problem than splinters from inorganic material like glass or

metal. Mostly because wood has oil and resins and is more likely to be covered in bacteria and fungi and other things than a glass or a metal splinter. And so you're not only getting a splinter of wood, you're getting a splinter of other stuff in your body like we've been talking about. It's just more dangerous because you can get a secondary infection. So you can get more inflammation, but with particular fungi or bacteria on it. So like tetanus causing bacteria, or there's like a fungus that grows on rose thorns, which are a woody plant. And so there's like a common fungal disease that people get by getting pricked by rose thorns. So you're saying I should have gone to a doctor and not just left a splinter in my ass. Correct. Yeah. If you have a splinter, you should probably remove it.

Either yourself, I'm not a doctor, or go to a medical professional and have it removed. All right. So I'm glad that we got that all squared away for you. I hope that we can continue

to be dispensing good medical advice here on our Science Fact Podcast. But also, theater tech teachers should also not be dispensing medical advice here on our science fact podcast. But also, theater tech teachers should also not be dispensing medical advice. If you want to ask a question of the Science Couch, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics

for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Norma15, at 13 SerenityMay11, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final scores. Sari and Hank tied with two in the lead. Sam and Stefan with one. And that means that Sari is within one Sam buck of reaching Stefan.

Creeping up. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. You can also 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. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stephen Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents

is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer

is Paola Garcia-Pietro. 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.

Toilet paper is made from plant material, so it includes some cellulose fibers, but also ends up containing some lignin, which, as we talked about, is the structural material that makes wood strong. But no one wants rigid toilet paper to wipe their butts, so manufacturers bleach the wood pulp mixture to make the final tissue softer and last longer. And that's why toilet paper is white instead of beige wood colored. Can they add some color back in. Maybe some wood grain. You know, so it just looks a little more natural. Maybe you could get some little ridges in there.

This is the next stage of toilet technology. How do you want ridges? What? Like hard ridges? To capture. Well, it's somewhat pliable, but, you know. Okay. You know, a little texture to increase the cleaning power.

You just want a stick or something.