SciShow Tangents - Big vs Small with Tiny Matters

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Sam's out this week, but worry not: he found another Sam to replace him! Sam Jones, host of the podcast Tiny Matters that is! Sam and her co-host, our own Deboki Chakravarti, join Ceri and Hank in our first ever team-based episode of Tangents! Two teams enter, one team leaves! What more Tiny Matters? Check out the podcast here: https://www.acs.org/pressroom/tiny-matters.html! And check out Deboki at https://twitter.com/okidoki_boki , and Sam at https://twitter.com/samjscienceSciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Glenn Trewitt for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Truth or Fail Express]Project Gasbuggy https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/22/archives/project-gasbuggy-and-catch85-thats-krypton85-one-of-the-radioactive.htmlhttps://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,899941,00.htmlhttps://books.google.com/books?id=g9QDAAAAMBAJ&dq=%22project+gasbuggy%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage&q=%22project%20gasbuggy%22&f=falseOperation Big Itchhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13623699908409460https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/biological/bigitch.pdfOperation North Pole (Project Cirrus)https://www.ge.com/news/reports/cool-science-vonnegut-ge-researchhttps://alachuacounty.us/Depts/epd/EPAC/General%20Electric%20History%20Of%20Project%20Cirrus%20July%201952%20ORIGINAL.pdfBrilliant Pebbleshttps://www.llnl.gov/archives/1980s/brilliant-pebbleshttps://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/clementine/in-depth/https://highfrontier.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/The-Rise-and-Fall-of-Brilliant-Pebbles-Baucom.pdf[Ask the Science Couch]Smallest organisms: ultramicrobacteria and Candidate Phyla Radiationhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9297842/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S0026261712040054https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC243725/https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsme2/16/2/16_2_67/_articlehttps://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7372https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/27/ultra-small-bacteria/  [Butt One More Thing]Big-bottomed ants (Atta laevigata / hormiga culona) https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/big-bottomed-ants-hormigas-culonashttps://books.google.com/books?id=NebIEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT187&lpg=PT187https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/ark-of-taste-slow-food/da-tradurreformica-culona/

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 we have fellow science experts, Deboki Chakravarti and Sam Jones. It's just an all-science episode today on SciShow Tangents. Know every person. We've got a bunch of extra PhDs here today.

Way more than usual. Infinitely more. These are the hosts of the podcast tiny matters which i have been on and love so recently i right now i'm getting radiation treatment for my cancer and before doing that yesterday i decided to go do my very first CrossFit class. And that's how I know I'm an idiot. CrossFit normally is already bad news. I'm really curious about the steps that led to that.

So like there's a CrossFit gym very, okay, it's very close to my house. All the other gyms would require that I get in a car, but not this one. And so I thought maybe that would be the way to go. And honestly, it was like, I think for CrossFit, pretty chill. There was a sign on the wall that said, do the fucking work. But none of the people were like the sign. That is a hard launch back into exercise. We've all been idiots at one time in our life.

Speak for yourself. I've only ever been a genius. Have any of us ever had, I know that this is this crowd, but like a fitness goal that we went for? I know that Sari has done some running. Yeah. I've done some running. Yeah, I have run to the point where my body collapsed, which was I did the dopey challenge, which it's right there in the name. It is run by Walt Disney World. Yeah, and it's a bunch of idiots that do it together. I did it with our friend, Nicole Sweeney. And you run a 5k one day and then a 10k the next day and then a half marathon the following day and then a full marathon the following day wow so all four days in a row you just keep pushing

your body to further and further distances and after the last day after i finished uh i just started sobbing because i didn't know i'd put my body through so much um and my partner sylvia was like would you would you like me to come back to the hotel with you and then i broke down crying i because I didn't know. I put my body through so much. And my partner Sylvia was like, would you like me to come back to the hotel with you? And then I broke down crying. I was like, yeah, that would be nice. I didn't know. But you did it, though.

That's amazing. Can you enjoy Disney anymore? Or is it like, did you ruin that forever? I think I can enjoy it. That was only my second time at Disney, I think, ever. And so it is a core Disney memory now. Anybody got any other fitness challenges they've done? Because no one's going to beat Sari's. Yeah, sorry, I started. I cannot beat that. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I'm still getting up to being able to run. I'm happy that I can last more than a few minutes.

When I was in college, I was a sprinter. And now as an older person, you can't really sprint the way that... There's not a show up and run 100 meters until you're 35 and they start doing master's races. So my only choice for running is to start running 5Ks and up. And I don't believe in those distances, but that's my option. So funny. I have a sort of athletic challenge, but it's more like an athletic challenge paired with a food challenge.

Way better. So I swam. I competed through college. So we'd swim a lot. Every day, I was putting in like, depending on the day, you wake up, you do a morning practice, you're in the weight room. And then in the afternoon, you come back for like two, three more hours. So you're swimming a lot of miles and you're very hungry. And so somehow that like sometimes would just end up as trying to see how we could, how quickly we could eat different types of food, which is disgusting. we could eat different types of food, which is disgusting. And so I think like my most impressive one was probably, I think the challenge was like, how quickly can you eat six hot dogs? And I think I did six in like less than two minutes. And I think that was a high point for me in my college career. I thought you were going to say like five

minutes or something like that. Leave it to college students to take like the healthiest possible lifestyle and make sure that they can find ways to make it very unhealthy yeah like i don't know what i was thinking but oh i do you're thinking i need to eat a lot of hot dogs right now and i mean the best part of doing crossfit was afterward i was so hungry and i felt like hungry in a good way yeah i hadn't felt because I've been sick for so long where I was just like, I'm hungry and I want to eat like healthy food. I want healthy food. That's what my body is telling me to eat rather than hot dogs, a lot of chips, which is mostly what it's been telling me to eat.

It doesn't help that my doctor keeps telling me or during chemo was like anything you want to eat, you should eat. And I was like, thank you. I've been waiting my whole life to have a doctor tell me that. At least that's what we usually do. But years ago, when we started to do this podcast, our resident everyman, Sam Schultz, gave me this sealed envelope. And it says to be open in the event that Sam goes on vacation. And he told me, you'll know what to do with this when the time is right. Well, Sam is on vacation now. So I opened it and inside there was a VHS tape, which I'm going to play for you now. Hello, it's Sam. If you're receiving this message, it can only mean one thing, that I'm on vacation. And without my cool, calm, but firm leadership, I expect that SciShow Tangents is on the verge of chaos. That is why I have devised a secret plan to be executed in the event of my absence. I call it the Spider Initiative. You might notice that there are two guests on today's episode. You already know Deboki Chakravarti, Tangent's esteemed research assistant and co-host of the podcast Tiny Matters. Joining her is Sam Jones, the other co-host and executive producer of Tiny Matters. And you might know these people as colleagues, peers, even

friends. But today they are your mortal enemies. As everyone knows, science podcasting is, at its heart, a competitive endeavor. Only one science podcast can be the best and the most smartest, and that is exactly what the SPDR Initiative was formulated to determine, because SPDR, you see, is an acronym. You are participating in the first-ever Science Podcasters Invitational Deadly Educational Rally, big versus small edition. here's how it works from all outward appearances this is a normal episode of scishow tangents sari and deboki will alternate presenting games that the rest of you will play points will be awarded to participants as normal

but under the surface a meta game is roiling the podcast co-hosts have been divided into teams sam and deboki are team small because they host a podcast about small things. And Hank and Sari are Team Big because Tangents covers big, broad topics or something like that. As you gain points as an individual, you are also gaining points for your team. And at the end of both games,

Team Big and Team Small's points will be combined and one team will experience the sweetest victory while the other experiences the most bitter defeat. And in order to kick off this most auspicious occasion, I will now present the traditional science poem. Behold the vast galactic plain where galaxies roil and stars combust. But take a closer look again. It's all made up of cosmic dust. The blue whale glides beneath the sea, surveys the murky world he rules, the largest beast to ever be.

Even he is made of molecules. A universe comprised of layers from big to small and back again. With this in mind, prepare yourself, players, for big versus small. Let the games begin. Thus it is spoken.

Let the spider initiative, big versus small, commence. And like text me if you get confused about the rules or something. Have fun. I love that. I feel like I also should have signed like a waiver coming into this. You know, when the word deadly comes into the. Yeah.

You didn't know. No, it's good to be surprised by a deadly event. So I guess that's what we're doing. And the topic for the week is big versus small. It's I Show Tangents versus Tiny Matters. I know this is a surprise to you as well as to the rest of us. But can you tell me like what big and small are? Yeah, I can do that softball question i mean no no because sometimes

big things are small like the biggest thing on earth is very small in the universe well we won't think that hard okay we just we just say if a kid can learn big and small we can learn it too they're they're opposites and i think that that is what frames this episode we are pitted against each other big and small are our opposite terms to describe things so something can be small relative to something else or something can be big relative to something else um and because there's also like kind of just a size of things that are around usually and some things are bigger than the average thing that might be around and some things are smaller that is true frame of reference yeah i like the idea that there's like a kind of normal size for a thing somebody's got to have done this research where like you sort of like

bring by just gray orbs and you're like is that orb big or small and then people be like that was kind of not either they're like we found it like this size so i was like trying to figure out if someone's done your gray orb experiment and apparently there is i this is not the experiment but apparently there's something called alice in wonderland syndrome um that is a neurological disorder that distorts your perception of things um oh i was walking with my future wife down a road in florida and i saw a squirrel and i said holy holy shit, that squirrel is huge. It's like the size of a corgi. And Catherine was like, that's a normal squirrel. And I was like, no, it's huge.

Like it's a world record winning squirrel. We need to chase it. We got up to it and it was precisely squirrel sized. Was it next to like a miniature home? You know, those small homes? That's what it was. It was the tiny house. It was the dollhouse it was standing next to.

It's all about perspective. Tyrannosaurus Rex squirrel. So yeah, big and small. I don't think we need to get any deeper into it. Big is like large, small is like little. And that's it. Today we're going to learn about how we all perceive things. Like whether or not we agree that something's big, whether we agree that something's small.

Whether that squirrel in the distance is a normal sized squirrel or not we agree that something's big, whether we agree that something's small, whether that squirrel in the distance is a normal sized squirrel or not. Do you have etymology of big and small, Sari? I do. And they are quite different, even though they kind of lump together in my brain. So big, completely unknown origin, which happens pretty rarely, I feel like, in a word. happens pretty rarely, I feel like, in a word. It appeared sometime in Middle English to mean powerful or strong and maybe came from like North-ish Scandinavian areas. But before this, in Old English, the word for like powerful or bulky or large was mickle,

which is a very funny word. It's like, oh, that's mickle. We could have had mickle and small instead of big and small. And eventually mickle, like that word became much in linguistically. But big came out of nowhere, squashed mickle right out of here.

Yeah, I wonder if people were just like, we like the sound of big. It's just like a fun word to say. There's a B and a G, like those are not commonly. Same as big to say. There's a B and a G. Like those are not. Yeah. Same as big to me. Commonly. Yeah. Small word.

Smaller than little. But it feels big. Feels big. Feels powerful. Feels right. They like the mouth feel. They stuck with it. And then small, we do know where it comes from.

It's from like Germanic-ish flavored languages. from uh it's from like germanic-ish flavored languages um and it used to be used to describe animals or livestock um in addition to like slender thin or narrow things but any sort of like like a small thing or a small like small was used to describe like a small animal as a concept which i think is very interesting which also brings in this question of what's big, what's small. And a small was just like when you thought an animal was smaller than a normal one, that's a small. Yeah, I feel like an animal is small if I can't be afraid of it. Once I can be afraid of an animal, like a goose is big

because I can be afraid of a goose. I can definitely be afraid of a goose. Yeah, but like a small snake is to me just as scary as a big snake. Yeah, like what about a deadly jellyfish? That's all the venom is in its own category. Just physical trauma. Oh, no, no, but I'm not just afraid of venomous snakes. I'm afraid of all of them.

But only because your brain has been trained by the venomous ones. What about like a really gentle elephant? Are you still scared of it? It could definitely. It could hurt you if it wanted to. All right.

I'm changing my mind. A small animal is one that I can easily kill. I'm switching it around. It's not about what they can do to me. It's about what I can do to them. One you could pick up.

You could have had like, like, a dental. Yeah, I assume it was, like, carry. Yeah. Violence. You're really ready for this death match. Yeah. Primed ready. Yeah.

So that means it's time that we're going to move on to the quiz portion of our show with our first game and our big versus small death rally presented this game by Sari. What are we going to do? While declassified documents can be fodder for conspiracy theorists or in some cases, super valid disillusionment about the lack of consent in so many experiments, U.S. government projects are full of big budgets, big ideas, and big mistakes.

So this is a truth or fail express, big weird government science, aka, while I could have talked about whales or trees or exoplanets, for some reason, my brain was like, wow, you know what would be great for a science comedy podcast? Talking about the enormous hubris of powerful white Americans in the 20th century. And this is the game I have, so there's no going back. It's the one we're going to do. This is what I've chosen to encapsulate the idea of big. This is our Barbenheimer.

Yeah, this is, maybe that's it. Barbenheimer has infiltrated my brain. Right. And I was like, this is great. So there'll be four rounds of this truth or fail express the first story is natural gas is a hydrocarbon fuel source that's mostly methane and generally we mine it from reservoirs in sedimentary rock by drilling holes or making cracks somehow but in 1967 project gas buggy detonated a 26 kiloton nuclear device underground in New Mexico to extract a lot of natural gas all at once from a sandstone well.

So the question is, is Project Gas Buggy real or not? It's got to be real. We were doing, well, it was definitely proposed. Because they proposed using nuclear bombs to do everything in the 60s. They were like, problem solved. You want a new, like Suez Canal bothering you? Let's do a new one with nuclear bombs. Do it through Israel. It'll be fine.

What was the year again of Project Gas Buggy? 1967. Oh, okay. Interesting. What a funny name for a project. You know, I think they probably didn't end up doing it. I also kind of think not, mostly just because the name is so funny. It's the name.

The name's getting me. I'm going to say false, but this is totally something that would happen. But the name is throwing me off. Did we all guess no? Yeah, we all guessed no. You're all wrong. It is real. It did happen.

We blew up the crack tool ground? So the Atomic Energy Commission was a program that was organized in June 1957 to develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives, which I think is the funniest tagline. It's like an oxymoron. Yeah. And now with that context, the name makes sense.

The name is the branding thing. It's like, we gotta make it sound cute and fun. A cute little gas buggy. Yeah. It became the Division of peaceful nuclear explosives in 1961. And they, like Hank was saying, came up with ideas to use nuclear blasts to build harbors or dams or highways or canals and stimulate the economy. commission combined efforts with the el paso natural gas company because of course it's a corporate thing also to blow up a sealed well and try and harvest natural gas from it but they didn't really think the plan through because once you detonate a nuclear bomb beneath the surface

of the earth even if that radiation doesn't spread if you then try to harvest the natural gas uh it is irradiated and that's a problem you can't use that burn it it's still irradiated like you don't burn away the atoms it doesn't go away um and they did this multiple times too like there is a a project roulison uh named after the the community in colorado i think that's what you say it roulison, Rulison, where they did it again. They were like, let's harvest more natural gas by detonating a nuclear device. Very dumb.

Yeah, and then we can transport the radiation out of the well to places near people and burn it. Yeah, horrible. You all got that one wrong. We're off to a strong, I feel- I didn't, we didn't even really have the right reason to get it wrong. Like we should have said no that's stupid why would you take irradiated gas out of the ground yeah story number two we got we got three more of these uh ready

um so story number two is the rat flea xenosila chi, is small in size, but it has a big impact on disease transmission. In 1954, to see whether fleas could be a possible biological warfare agent, Operation Big Itch dropped groups of 100,000 to 200,000 fleas from planes onto a bunch of literal guinea pigs in the Utah desert. Is Operation Big Itch real or not? The guinea pigs is the part this time that's getting me, and that I'm going to find out is like the reason I should believe this. I think Operation Big Itch is real. Because they definitely want to drop fleas on people. I just feel like they would have gone straight for humans.

It's just fleas. I'm going to say false. I feel like there are a lot of things that have a lot of attempts at dropping things on other countries that are like microbes or insects, things like that. But I don't, I've never, never come across fleas. And I feel like maybe I would have in my research for some of the episodes we've done. Yeah. I mean, one vote against this is that you don't need to drop fleas on soldiers. They already got them in the trenches. I see what you're saying.

It's not a good vibe already. The misery is close to peak. But I'm still saying it was real. I'm going to say it's true just to spread out just to do a strategy because i don't know the answer thanks to bokeh yeah for the gameplay um yeah well this is real it is oh my gosh wow the naming of these is just mind-blowing to me yeah i found some fun this is like what spurred the game in my late night delusions. These are so funny and weird.

It's comedy, guys. All this warfare. So these tests in Operation Big Itch showed that fleas could survive the drop and would soon attach themselves to these animal hosts on the ground. They were literal guinea pigs in a 600 meter-ish in diameter circular grid. But part of the problem of these tests, they were trying to figure out the best encapsulation of these fleas, were that they didn't create good enclosures. And in 200 000 flea cases the pilot the bombardier and observers on the planes were also bitten many times like the fleas escaped which like they probably deserved it but that made me like god like 100 000 fleas manageable 200 000 fleas

unconscionable like we can't do it too many physics breaks they yeah and the guinea pigs get their revenge all right all right okay

so we're doing all right here here on team whatever I am big we're big big yes please thanks

there's only two options um okay so story number three is that there have been many efforts to try and control weather, such as by scattering a dusty substance in a cloud to act as nucleation sites for rain. But in 1946, Project North Pole had a more specific goal. Using 20 tons or around 40,000 pounds of granular dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide, they brought snow to the Florida panhandle to try and break

a deadly heat wave. Well, this is the least stupid name, so I don't think it's real. I know. How are you going to break a heat wave with just dry, just like spread it around? Did they put it in the sky? Did I miss this? They put it in the sky. Yes. Yeah. So it was like a cloud seeding.

So they wanted to seed the clouds so that there was snow falling. I have no idea how well dry ice does at certain elevations. Like I don't know how much. Like how much would that. The problem again is like that just because it doesn't make sense doesn't mean that it's not true. I know, like, the nuclear... Yeah, the nuclear bomb thing. So, yeah.

I shouldn't use logic with this. I should use feelings. My feeling is that it's false. My feeling is also that it is false. Me too. But, Deboki, should I just say true? Can we sidebar for a sec? Yeah.

All right, I'm gonna say true. Do we play with strategy a sec? Yeah. All right, I'm going to say true. Do we play with strategy? Go to the confessional. I think you should go with your feelings. Yes, I agree. I feel like it's false. You're all correct. It is false.

This is a brain invention of my own. I like that, though. It was based in a little bit of truth. in in a little bit of truth so in the 1940s or so there was research done at general electric on cloud particles and cloud modifications and the reason i found this fact was because kurt vonnegut like the author he had a physicist brother named bernard and bernard vonnegut was a physicist at ge working on weather seeding and like cloud particles and whatnot very weird um and so he like collaborated with an atmospheric scientist and a noble laureate or nobel laureate um to like try to figure out ways to control weather and as one of these experiments very small and in Schenectady, New York,

like upstate New York, they made a little bit of snow at one point using dry ice in a cloud, but there was no like grander purpose to it. It was just like, can we make weather in some way? Yeah, that's gonna be like the whole future. It's going to be real messy, you guys. Okay, this is the last one.

So story number four is before the United States Space Force even existed as a branch of the military, there was obviously tons of experimentation with space technology for exploration, defense, and the like. the like in 1987 a project called brilliant pebbles began the research and development of small lightweight spacecraft that were meant to orbit the earth in fleets of up to a hundred thousand detect any missiles launched outside the atmosphere with infrared sensors and destroy them by colliding with them at high speeds is the project brilliant pebbles real or not how is the project brilliant pebbles real or not how would the pebbles move around their spacecraft oh it was small lightweight spacecraft i got confused by the name pebbles yeah yeah it's a tongue-in-cheek name you know just like picturing fruity pebbles like aiming at a asteroid or something or a missile they're going fast enough i'm going with my name thing, which is like if this feels like a government name, like it's got to be a government project and this feels like a government name.

I feel the same. They want to make it sound like a breakfast cereal, but actually be a military project. I'm going to go true on this. Both going true. Yeah. I could take the risk. You sure could. But I think it's real though

so i should go with my gut well yeah yeah it's real we're idiots and you are all right it is real uh brilliant pebbles did exist sometimes i'm like hoping we're wrong because that just seems so unreasonable but that that's fine. This one I was hoping was right. I liked this one. I like this idea. It just, again, the name, I like the idea that there's a file somewhere that says Brilliant Pebbles. So this was part of the strategic defense initiative in the Reagan era of presidency. Cold War tensions were going on and they were like, how can we defend ourselves? And of course, the scientists came up with a solution of like, let's launch 100,000 little spacecraft. Because why not?

Because then we can constantly monitor whether a missile is going to come and deter it. They developed these like little light spacecraft or like looked into what it would take to build one, but they never actually, obviously, I think we would know if there were this many like small things orbiting the earth all of a sudden. But the technology was actually used in another way, which was a little bit surprising. In 1994, a US spacecraft called Clementine was launched to the moon. It was the first since Explorer 49 in 1973. And it was designed and built to image the moon. And so it transmitted about 1.6 million digital images of the lunar surface. Yeah, we got the most brilliant pebble of all.

Yeah. A little guy. Good little rock. Doing his best. Well, we've come out with Team Little with five points and Team Big with just three, but we didn't have a lot of opportunities to get points in that game. Next time, Team Big has its chance for a comeback. Well, first we're going to take a short

break and we'll be back for Team Small's game. break and we'll be back for team smalls game and now deboki please me, what do you have for us? Okay, well, sometimes the goal of science is to make things big, like some of what Sari was talking about. But also, sometimes science wants to do the complete opposite and take things that, like, maybe exist at a certain size and make them even smaller. So today, we're playing This or That Small Things Edition. I'm going to tell you about some kind of wild scientific feat of miniaturization. And then I'm going to describe that object. And then I'm going to describe some other object.

And it's going to be up to you to figure out which one is smaller. So in 2021, researchers found a way to make tiny human hearts using stem cells that had been exposed to proteins and other molecules that are known to shape heart development in the womb. Within a week, the cells created a chamber-like structure similar to the left ventricle, and the walls began to contract sort of like a heartbeat. The scientists named their tiny hearts cardioids. So, which is smaller, the diameter of one of these cardioids or the diameter of a typical mouse heart? I mean, I assumed in my head, cardioids were way smaller than a mouse heart. Yeah. I'm going to say the cardioids. That is my instinct too. Like I'm thinking like,

not like an M&M, but like a runt. That's how I'm feeling about cardio. Not to imagine eating them. I wasn't, but now I'm going to go with my heart. I'm going to say the cardioid is smaller because you can make it out whatever size you want. Well, you're all correct. So a mouse heart typically has a diameter of around six millimeters. The diameters of these cardioids were around one millimeter. So like still kind of tough to eat, but like super small and cool. So the scientists made these cardioids so that they can actually study how congenital heart defects develop in human embryos, which I thought was really neat. Like, obviously it's kind of hard to like peer into a human embryo to see what's going on. But like being able to kind of build

these little cardioids and see them develop lets us like know more about how the heart develops and hopefully will help us understand more about how heart defects develop in the womb. They actually also tested it further by using a steel rod, a cold one, to freeze parts of the cardioids. So like that some of the cells would get damaged

and they actually could see cells coming in to repair those bits so super cool like just really interesting i mean it turns out that mouse hearts are super are like runt sized you could eat a whole handful of them if you wanted like a like a box of runs you tip it back and you go that's yeah that's actually what runs are they're candy coated hearts. Little did you know. Okay. So hearts are not the only organs that scientists have tried to shrink. Scientists have also designed miniature brains for various purposes, including my favorite one, which able to make a miniature brain that they called Dishbrain, which used a mixture of human and mouse neurons grown on an electrode array. And with their design, they were actually able to teach Dishbrain how to play Pong.

So what was smaller, Dishbrain or a CD-ROM? Ooh, I feel like Dishbrain and a CD-ROM are very similar sizes. I was definitely picturing just a Petri dish, which is smaller than a CD-ROM, but not substantially. Do you mean diameter? Yeah, sorry, diameter. Yeah. Dishbrain. I know that it's interesting and we got to keep learning things about the world.

But sometimes I feel like we shouldn't make a mouse human hybrid play Pong. What do you think we should make it play? If not Pong. Yeah. Mortal Kombat, probably something really violent. Yeah. As long as it's still small,

which means Hank can kill it. Then we're safe. I also think I'm picturing, I'm going to go with my gut instinct. I'm also picturing a Petri dish. So I'm also going to say it's smaller than a CD-ROM. Yeah, me too.

Yeah. Well, you're all correct. Again, a standard CD has a diameter of around 4.75 inches and the dish brain had a diameter of two inches. Oh, at least based on what I could find.

So like they, they weren't using a petri dish from what i understood they were like using like a specific array that's basically kind of designed to hold these electrodes um so there were 1024 active electrodes surrounded by around 800 000 neurons which is apparently roughly the same number of neurons in a bee's brain and so they basically created the system where the electrodes were creating signals that are sort of like pixels, like in terms of like, if you imagined like the ball, except instead of it being like light, it's just electrical signals. And so you can move that around to

create this sense of a ball moving through the dish that the neurons are interacting with. And then the system in turn had like a, what they call kind of like a game controller system where the neurons are responding with their own signals that are then get interpreted as a sort of paddle movement. And so that the program would process what the neurons responded with and then send a second signal back to basically be a feedback that would let the neurons know, like, were they successful with the ball? The neurons were able to get better at pong

within five minutes. And after 20 minutes, they were up to doing short rallies. I do like that they saw this like two inch thing and they were like, that's a dish. We're using the ultimate human method of bullying to put down the thing that we're scared of and say, oh, you're a dish brain.

As opposed to like this incredible terrifying mutant human mouse neuron thing yeah yeah all right well geez we some people we gotta start getting some of these wrong you guys somebody does particularly sam okay so to study 3d vision like if we want to study it in humans we have to be able to show independent images to our left and our right eyes so we can understand how the differences in those images they're receiving helps our brain construct the three-dimensional image that we then like see and one way to do that is with your standard old school 3d glasses that have those red blue lenses, but that's kind of hard to do. If you're a scientist who wants to understand 3d vision

and praying mantises, they need something a little bit smaller. And so some scientists were like, Hey, we know how to do this. We're going to make miniature 3d glasses for praying mantises. So what is smaller, the diameter of the lens on a praying mantis 3D glass or the diameter of a new pencil eraser? I'm going to say the mantis glasses that's smaller. I'm going to say the pencil eraser. I feel like they got big old eyes and I don't know. Have you ever met a praying mantis?

No, I have not. Well, it seems like she still has knowledge of their eyes because the pencil eraser is the smaller one. Pencil erasers have a diameter of like around five millimeters. The lenses for these mantises, they're shaped like a teardrop but i decided to pretend that they were a circle and their widest diameter was around seven millimeters uh to actually put these glasses on the mantis the the scientists would put the mantis in a freezer for five to seven minutes and then put them under the microscope lens with and like put the mantis in like modeling clay so like they're kind of frozen now they're stuck in clay and then they they put the

glasses onto the mantis using beeswax and rosin to like hold them in place i was like i don't think a mantis has a very good nose bridge so i was just kind of curious how they yeah no it's glue you just glue it basically onto them yeah okay and you can see them they took pictures he looks what like basically he's saying why is this happening to me? Yep. Yeah. I don't like I never thought I could see despair on a praying mantis's face, but you can see it. Okay.

So our last one in 2022, NASA launched nachos into space. Nacho stands for nanosat atmosphericmospheric Chemistry Hyperspectral Observation System. And it's an imager designed to help us find trace gases in small areas on Earth with the hope that it will help us study pollution and volcanoes and other gas emitting things. So what is smaller, the volume of nachos or a jar of queso blanco from Target? of nachos or a jar of queso blanco from Target. Do I get a free pass because I'm lactose intolerant or like is that not?

Yes. Queso blanco is very I know exactly the size of that. I'm very familiar with the size of that. And it's not very big. I have to say that queso blanco is smaller. If I were a scientist coming up with a nacho satellite, how small would I make it? I'm going to say the satellite.

I feel like they're really trying to make things small these days. Yeah. I'm going to go satellite as well. Well, so we have satellites. Hank, what was your answer? Queso blanco. Okay, you're doing queso blanco. The satellite is smaller.

So at least the jar of Queso Blanco that I found on Target's website is 15 fluid ounces or 27 cubic inches in volume. Nachos, the nanosat atmospheric chemistry hyperspectral observation system, is 18 cubic inches. Wow. And this is pretty exciting. Like in general, like there are satellites that people use to monitor trace gases, but the instruments on them are really big. They need a lot of power and they're not usually able to gather a lot of super fine detail about where the gases actually are that they find. They're usually finding them more in kind of like a course regional basis, But the technology

underlying Nachos comes from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. And it uses this thing called hyperspectral imaging, where you're getting kind of like all of these pixels of information, but instead of having colors in those pixels, you have like hundreds of wavelength bands that are the spectral markers of different gases. And so then you can sift through them to find the gas that you're particularly interested in. And so they launched it in 2022. And at the time they said it would probably run for about a year so that scientists could see whether or not it works well. So hopefully, hopefully it did. Awesome. Now, how big was the queso blanco jar that you saw on target.com? It was 15 fluid ounces.

I think that's the average size yeah all right well tuna while we've been chatting has done the math team big comes out on top with nine points just above your eight points there's only one science podcast that reigns supreme and just like just like uh the emperor of the the ottoman empire upon seeing people drinking illegal coffee in the streets i must now behead you uh by surprise with a broadsword man games are really going to be different on tangents going forward yeah yeah the vibe is going to change a lot. Also, we won't have you to like help out with the show. It's just going to make it harder.

Yeah. But what has to be done has to be done. It's true. And now it is time to very quickly ask our newly enlarged science couch

because we've been going for a long time. We've got a question for this illustrious group of finely honed scientific minds. It's from Chris on Discord and from at Maya B, my yard.

Yeah, that's as good as I'm going to do. They both ask, what is the smallest single-celled organism and how does it exist at such a small size? Now to Boki and Sam, you got to know that always we begin with me trying to pull the answer out of my butt. But like this one, I don't.

It's got to be a bacteria or archaea. Yeah. One of you guys. I know. I'm like, what is the smallest, though, of the bacteria? I don't know. What situations would it be good to be small in? I think it's more what is the naming that they would use that we can guess.

And then we can sound like really smart when we guess the right name. Small in Latin. Harvest bacteria. Yeah. Okay. Is it a bacteria or archaea? It is both of those. A bacteria is what I found most of, but we have very small archaea too and

deboki you were right with the the nomenclature that you were headed down uh not 100 but bacteria are super messy genetically taxonomically etc um how they're related to each other it's hard for us to tell so there's a pretty big group of related bacteria phyla called the candidate phyla radiation or cpr for short and basically that means they haven't these candidate bacteria are well characterized genetically but haven't been cultured we haven't grown them in labs and just know that they exist because we found their dna And the CPR group contains some of the smallest living organisms we know of called ultra micro bacteria. So they just took two words for small or super small. And then we're like, that's the name we're going to call them. Man, but Parvus would have been so good. And it's possible that there is a specific bacterial phyla or phylum that has that name.

So from what I can tell, ultra micro bacteria in general, the first time they were described was in a 1981 paper studying tiny colonies of bacteria in seawater. proliferating cells, so like healthy growing bacterial cells that were less than 0.1 micrometers cubed in volume. And they have really small genomes like 3.2 to 0.5-ish megabases of a genome. And they're missing a lot of proteins, particularly ribosome proteins, which are helping with protein synthesis. So our guess is that these ultra-microbacteria rely on other bacteria to help them survive. So some sort of parasitic relationship, they might have some external structures to help them take nutrients or, I don't know, fill in the capabilities that these minimized genomes don't let them. And they have weird names.

So all of these CPR group bacteria, from what I can tell, they have like an acronym name based on where they were found. And then if we like them enough, we give them a fancy name. So in a 2015 study from UC Berkeley, they actually imaged three ultra-microbacteria phyla from groundwater samples. And the three that they imaged were WWE3, which was named from wastewater of every three, because it was from every France and collected from municipal anaerobic sludge there. And they were like, oh, WWE3. But then it was later named Catanobacteria from the Hebrew word Catan, which translates to small. And so that's why I think, like, with your Latin, there must be one. I don't know why we always have to, like, go to other languages.

I think that we could just call it, like, Actinobacter baby. Small Bacter. A smallobacter. So if you want to ask the science couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you could join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. upcoming episodes every week, or you could join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at Triscuit Bells, Mike 2369, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. Deboki and Sam, how can we find Tiny Matters? Tiny Matters, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, wherever else you listen. All the podcast places. And we

also have transcripts available for all of our episodes at acs.org slash tiny matters. Where would I start if I was going to watch some tiny matters? So we did do an episode on the huge potential of psychedelic assisted therapy for mental health. Yeah. So, you know, drugs like psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, how they're already being used to treat conditions like anxiety and depression, and then also why psychedelic research was on the rise in the 60s, but then all but vanished in the 70s. So that was a pretty fun one. We had Hank on the show back in February. We talked about communicating science and the millions of things that he does, including

psychotangents. So definitely check that one out. The main thing that I do is work as exec producer of Tiny Matters and co-host it with Deboki, but I do a bunch of other writing and things. So you can find me on social everywhere at Sam J Science. There's a lot of Sam Joneses out there. So I feel like I have to just a lot of Sam's one. Yeah. The science one. There's only a few Deboki Chakravartis, but I go by Okidokiboki on the internet just to make it harder. But you're the best. You're the best at them.

Thank you. Thank you. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents to become a patron and get access to our bonus episodes and our newsletter.

And don't forget, when we hit 700 patrons, I swear it will happen, we will do a Minions movie commentary. Or maybe we've already hit 700. We're very close. And Sam's not here to tell me. Either way, go subscribe because the only way you can hear that is if you're a Patreon patron.

And I know that it's the only thing that's missing from your very rich life. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and helps other people find us. 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.

I've been Deboki Chakrabarty. I've been Sam Jones. And I've been Hank Green. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced usually by Sam Schultz. I guess he still produced this episode. It certainly was in charge of it. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt.

Our editor is Seth Glitzman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Debuk Chakraborty. Our sound design is by Joseph Dunamedish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. but one more thing leaf cutter ant ada levy gata has lots of names in various south american spanish dialects which in english roughly translate to big-bottomed ant or the slightly raunchy fat-ass ant.

And they have so many names because they're a seasonal delicacy in many cultures. Their massive nests are 10 to 20 feet underground and contain millions of ants. And during late spring, when there's heavy rain, a bunch of queens emerge from their colonies with huge butts full of unfertilized eggs. They're ready to seek out mates, but many of them get snatched up by predators, including hungry humans. Then these small ants with big butts get soaked in salt water, roasted or fried, and eaten as a crunchy, protein-rich snack. You know, I thought it would just be raw was my thought. But now that they're cooked, I'm kind of interested. Now, my question is, is a big butt ant's butt smaller or bigger than a cardioid?

What does that mean? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.