SciShow Tangents - Color

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Click here to check out the limited-time-only Tangents t-shirt inspired by this episode!Color: it's not just for art anymore. From red dwarfs to green algae to... uh... brown squirrels, science is chock full of color, too! SciShow 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!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley, Mike A, and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreenSources:[Trivia Question]Longest-lasting rainbowhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/9-hour-rainbow-sets-new-guinness-record-180968527/[Fact Off]Crustacean larvae camouflaged glass eyeshttps://slate.com/technology/2023/02/shrimp-larvae-eye-glitter-nanotechnology.htmlhttps://www.sciencenews.org/article/glassy-eyes-young-crustaceans-predatorsBrainbows (fluorescent cell visualization using lots of colors)https://blog.addgene.org/evolution-of-brainbow-using-cre-lox-for-multicolor-labeling-of-neuronshttps://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-1352-5_6https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/698637https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/619298[Ask the Science Couch]Color psychology and emotional responseshttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00368/fullhttps://isom.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/JOM_1979_08_4_01_Tranquilizing_Effect_of_Color_Reduces_Aggressive-.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4880552/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1612362/pdf/brmedj02002-0030.pdfhttps://www.nature.com/articles/435293a[Butt One More Thing]Caca-dauphin, the fashionable baby poop color https://theconversation.com/fornication-fluids-and-faeces-the-intimate-life-of-the-french-court-71982https://www.vanityfair.fr/actualites/articles/au-temps-de-marie-antoinette-le-caca-dauphin-etait-la-couleur-a-la-mode/54212

Have you ever been laughing along to one of SciShow Tangents' signature of funny jokes and thought to yourself, I really wish I could wear that joke around, maybe on a t-shirt or something? Well, if you have, you're in luck. Go to the link in this episode's description or head over to DFTBA.com and search for SciShow Tangents to check out a very special, limited time only shirt based on a joke from the episode that you're about to listen to. I won't spoil it, but I'll meet you in the ad break later in the show to tell you more about it. See you there. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase.

I'm the host of this tremendously popular, internationally successful show, Hank Green. And joining this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello, I'm world renowned. World renowned. I'd say so. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi, I'm a local boy done good. That's more correct for you, yeah. Yeah.

What a pleasure it is to be back with all of you today. Back here in the podcast studio because my office is still being renovated. Oh. And I love it. It's nice to come in and see the people. You look like you're really relaxed. But Sam Schultz knew exactly what he was doing when he,

an hour or two ago, tweeted a picture of Smokey the Bear and Winnie the Pooh. Two bears who wear either a shirt and no pants or pants and no shirt. Yes. And asking which of these two bears is the filthiest?

Who's the lewd bear? A bear with no pants or a bear with no shirt? Because the weird thing is you'd think it'd be the bear with no pants. It should be by all logic because the man with no pants would certainly be more lewd. Certainly be the more lewd. Yes. And yet you look at Smokey and you're like, sir, stop looking at me like that. He's always looking at me like that for people at the video podcast.

He's got a big Smokey in his podcast studio. I don't know how you work under those conditions. Because I think Smokey is as lewd as you can get. The mystery of what is under those pants. Yeah, we know exactly what's under Winnie the Pooh's pants. Nothing. Nothing. No.

Winnie the Pooh is stuff and fluff and a honey belly. Can't get more pure than that. Donald Duck is just some angry little feets down there. Flailing all around. And his big funny butt. He's got a really big funny butt. He's got a really big funny butt. Yeah, he's got a funny butt. There's never been poop.

No poop has ever come out of that funny butt. Don't cover that funny butt up. It's too hilarious. No, it's a great physical comedy. But Smokey the Bear, the way that he's holding that shovel. Also partially obscuring his... You don't know what he's got in those pants like why is he he's showing off the shirt and the things he's hiding in the pants make him feel very dangerous

to me yeah it's like it's like by putting on pants you're just saying i'm a man i'm a bear man i stand on two feet i'm a bear man and i need to wear pants. Yep. I look at this picture and I think to myself, well, it's obvious this is how I feel. That Pooh is being more lewd because Pooh is not wearing pants. Okay. But Smokey is by far sexier.

And that is the more upsetting thing. That is the lewdest of all. So you think Pooh is making the conscious choice not to be wearing the pants and is like, heh heh, look at me,

or what? It's a little bit weird to walk around with a shirt. Like if he was wearing nothing, then I might be on board with you. But he put on a shirt to cover up his... Maybe he's cold. Just a little fashion. Like that's it. Like you never put on, if you were to put on either a shirt or a pants when it's cold,

I think I'd put on a shirt or like a sweatshirt. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. But I tweeted that to you, my feeling about the lewd versus the sexy. And someone responded, I thought it, but I wasn't brave enough to say it. I hadn't really thought about it, which I feel like says something about me. But you're right. And it made my poll feel like a sham poll as so often they do.

How did the poll go, though though who was the more lewd it's still going because i gave it 24 hours um so 133 votes after a couple hours it's almost 50 50 which is shocking oh wow it's 51 pants with no shirt is looter but it's a couple votes away from it being which is surprising i think if the if it's pants with no shirt or shirt with no pants i think that that makes sense that it would be 50 50 in this situation but with the particular photos if you go look at the pictures yeah smoky definitely has had thoughts before that poo never yeah who who is that clip from the the barbie movie trailer where they're like oh let's go let's sleep over for what i don't know that's who's brain that's empty but before smoky gets him betty unzips that big long zipper on his pants we get together to try to one-up, amaze,

and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory and also for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic

with a traditional science poem. This week, it's from Sam. Green, purple, yellow, gray, and electric blue, just to name a few of those beautiful hues. They warn us, entice us, they tell us a lot. Like that frog is poisonous, that pepper is hot. Or they're just simply pleasing, like when you go to a fancy museum

to look at works by Van Gogh. So stop to smell the roses, but also spare a thought for that fantastic spectrum which makes those roses pop. Thank you. please remember you see all of this because of beams from outer space bouncing off of stuff and going into your face the topic for the day is color which seems like such a beautiful subjective experience or objective experience but it's not and i think that i know what color is sari what's color i think we have a pretty good boundary on color at least for human experience yeah yeah it gets messy when you're like other animals experience colors and you're like well is that i mean is that the same thing yeah there's like two pieces to the color experience one there, there is the wavelengths of light, of electromagnetic radiation that we deem to be the visible spectrum. That is visible to us.

That is visible to us as humans. And the specific wavelengths or frequencies that we have defined to be different bands of color from red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo. So there's like a real physical, like the wavelength of a photon, like a wave of light. And then there is the thing that I see, the color. Those are two different things, but they are closely related. Yeah. And then color vision, the thing that you see that is the color is where it gets kind of mushy because that is post those wavelengths of light mashing into your face, specifically into the back of your eye and specialized retinal cells called cone cells that have photoreceptors in them that take that light energy those wave wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and translate them in your brain and then you perceive colors you perceive

uh sometimes a single color but usually a mush or a blend of them um and your brain does some interpretation in that process of things that are brighter, things that are darker. This is how optical illusions happen because our brain does so much processing on the wavelengths of light that reach our eyes that it makes assumptions. And sometimes you see a picture of a dress and you think it's blue and black, and sometimes you think it's white and gold. Oh, no no and then you argue with your friends about it yeah because the red you see is not the the red i see yeah yeah once it gets to perception it gets tricky and and of course there's always the sort of universal question of is my orange your orange?

And like, you can't know, I guess. It seems like probably it is, but you can't know for sure until I can beam my consciousness into your perception, which is a ways away. So people are working on it. When you talk about like other animals and the colors they see, can we only glean that from like looking at their rods and cones and stuff or is there a way to like plug a usb port into a dog's eyeball and be like yeah there we go i don't know how they do it but i know that you could do it either of those way

ways like you could you could have the like vision center hooked up to something um and be able to tell when it's being activated. You could show them a wavelength of light that we can't see, and you would be able to see that it was seeing something. But I think that that's not how it's done, and that it is done by looking at the molecules themselves and seeing that when a photon with a wavelength of a certain wavelength hits it, it activates. That is my understanding. A lot of it is math and estimates of figuring out if it contains cones and rods, what those are, what colors those molecules can detect and get activated by,

detect and like get activated by and then counting the number counting the location to see what kind of vision they have in front of them in their periphery and whatnot and like again comparing it to what we know about human vision so we know for example that our cones are concentrated in the center of our eye in an area called the fovea. And our peripheral vision, we don't see color very well, but our brains kind of fill it in for us. So we can see, okay, that's like our experience of vision. Now, where are cones concentrated in an animal's eyes and what do they see? What can we guess that they see based on that? All right. So I think I know what color is now. This sounds like a word that has a cool origin, though. So color, the root word for color, as far as I can tell, comes from the same Indo-European base as hull, like the hull of a ship, and means a sort of covering. And so the color, the idea of color first applied to someone's complexion or their skin color or their appearance of something as opposed to like the colors around us in the environment.

So like a covering or a paint or a skin. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And then I think, I don't know, I tried to do some research about what we call pigments and dyes because humans have been making art and things like that for longer, like so, so long that it seems like we should have had a word for that. I couldn't find the word for that, but I assume it was something related to like, it wasn't color. It certainly wasn't color. And color is now the word that encompasses them all. After we used it to refer to complexion, then we're like, we kind of need an umbrella term for all this other stuff,

all these pigments, all these like the hue or the tint or the visible aspects. But there's so many times you have to be like, what color is that thing? What were they saying before? How do I know which berry to eat? What color is the berry I'm supposed to eat what are they doing i don't know what they'd say they probably say ripe like they'd know yeah boy this very good that's it this one this one here

sam this one uh all right everybody that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show where we're gonna play a little game called Colors Where's the Lie? Colors, as we've been saying, are very good, but they can also be deceptive. For example, the dress debate of 2015. So today, in honor of all the colors

that have tricked us before, we're going to play Where's the Lie? I'm going to tell you some kind of science story, and everything in that story is going to be true, except for one thing, and it's up to you to figure Where's the Lie? I'm going to tell you some kind of science story. And everything in that story is going to be true except for one thing. And it's up to you to figure out where the lie is. The dress was in 2015. We're old, Sam. We're all going to die.

That was almost 10 years ago. All right. Story number one, picky plates. Researchers have studied how smell and food texture can affect picky eaters. But in 2022, a team of researchers from the University of Portsmouth wanted to see whether color could play a role. So they recruited 50 people and divided them into two groups based on how picky they were about food. And then they served them a snack in different colored bowls and found that the picky eaters tended to find food sweeter in red and blue bowls compared to food served in white bowls. So it's not that they thought it was sweeter in the red bowl.

They thought it was like more savory or something because it's like red blood. It has to do with if the food contrasted with the plate more than it tasted worse because they were like, man, I'm eating a green broccoli out of a red bull. This is a sensorily bad experience. Yeah, that doesn't sound good. Sam sam you got that very close to correct they found the snack saltier in the red and blue bowls not sweeter versus in the white bowls so i don't i don't know also like that probably depends on what the the snack is uh like if it was ice cream they probably didn't find it salty at all yeah but it But it was a snacky snack. Yeah. Now we've got story number two, color changing minerals. The mineral hackmanite is white until you put it under a UV light, at which point it changes color and turns purple. The process is reversible. So when you

take it out of the UV light, it will change back to white. Researchers from the University of Turku in Finland found that the color changes thanks to movement of silicon atoms. And when comparing it to other color-changing minerals, they found that the speed of the color changes correlated to how far those atoms move from their original spot in the mineral. This game's for smart people. I can't even remember everything you just said. So it's irreversible. How about that? You can't reverse the process. Oh, good, good, good.

That's a great one. I'm going to say it changes from white to like green instead because ultraviolet purple seems too convenient. God, you're both very far away. Keep fighting it out. Keep fighting. Because it is true that if you put it in sunlight, it turns this beautiful purple color. It's also true that it is reversible. And it can make that change over and over again without that color structure being destroyed. What do you think? the color change i think it has to do with like the rotation of the silicon atoms so that there's like a structural color element involved um because if light is bouncing around in one way and then bouncing around another way in the way that like if you shift a prism the light splays

out quite radically different it's not silica because that's not colored like nothing. So that can be it. How about that? That's it, Sam. Yes. It's actually sodium atoms, not silicon atoms. It's movement of atoms around in the mineral. The amount of color change is actually correlated

to how far the sodium atoms move around. Now, the part where you said, because that's not purple, I have no idea what determines the actual color because sodium atoms also don't seem very purple to me. No, but I guess when you're shining

all like different lights on stuff, you're getting all kinds of crazy reactions, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, so the way that color happens, Hank can correct me because I'm rusty.

I'm always rusty on chemistry but it's like the way that electrons are arranged and if you can excite them so the ultraviolet light like inputs energy into the system makes the electrons jump up an energy level and then when they relax back down relax in quotes back down to a lower energy level they spit out the color um and so yeah it doesn't particularly matter what the the atoms are like it does to some extent but more like what where the electrons are in that bonded compound and like to what levels they can jump and fall to that that like produces those wavelengths of color that enter into our eyeballs. The jumping and falling thing is why I failed chemistry and all those other classes. I don't really get that stuff.

I loved doing it. You draw the little half arrows. No, thanks. Color is very weird. All right. Your final story, you guys, is about zebra finch beaks. So young zebra finches have pink beaks. And as they age, their beaks change color.

Male zebra finch beaks turn bright red, a color that plays a role not only in mating, but in asserting their place in the male zebra finch hierarchy. To see how these beaks are affected by environmental noise, researchers raised finches for 90 days under one of the following conditions. Under constant exposure to urban noise under pink noise or to the sounds of a normal aviary and they found that male zebra finches raised with urban noise had less bright beaks compared to their counterparts raised in the other conditions interesting i think that if they were raised with urban noise they had brighter beaks because cities throw everything out of whack

they got to be more assertive that's exactly what i was gonna say pretty much oh nice so wait now i gotta read it again and think of a different one well i'm i'm over two so far so whatever you land on will probably be it sam uh 90 maybe 90 days isn't isn't long enough maybe it was two years well having a 90 day time point uh is a good is was their their time scale and that is what they used um and uh also that they did have less bright beaks so so far both of you have not found the lie. Okay. It wasn't the sound of a normal aviary. It was a weird aviary. It was a rowdy aviary.

Yeah. Full of birds with pants. Pants, but no shirts. The opposite of Donald Duck's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you have to think, what's under those pants? I'm out. Young zebra finches do not have pink beaks. There it is.

Young zebra finches have black beaks. Everybody knows that. What? Obviously, you know, that black to red pipeline. They have black beaks. At about one month in, their beaks start to change color and they'll reach their adult color when they're around 65 days old so sarah you got a point there was there any like is that why they is there any idea why their beak color was different based on the sounds being

pumped at them just that they were less uh they were stressed maybe Is it less bright in that it maintained more of the black? So like it was that dullness. Oh, I see. They just want to be baby. When I'm stressed, I just want to be baby too. No, thank you. Adult Sari. Yeah.

Just pretend my beak is black right now. Thank you. Please feed me a worm. Next up, we're going to take a short break. Then it'll be time for the fact. Hey, it's me again, as promised, to tell you more about the SciShow Tangents t-shirt for this episode, available for a limited time only. Click the link in the description or head over to dftba.com and search for SciShow Tangents to find a handsome t-shirt illustrated by me featuring a bear wearing

a pair of very fitted jeans with the caption, I'm a bear man and I need to wear pants. Amuse and confuse friends and enemies alike as they stop and ask you, Hey, what's your shirt? And you say, Oh, this shirt? Why, it's a very funny joke from my favorite podcast, SciShow Tangents. But the thing about this t-shirt is, you'll only be able to order it between now and May 8th. So don't miss your chance to own a shirt of a bear with very tight pants. Like I said before, head to the link in the description

or go to DFTBA.com and search for SciShow Tangents to get your limited time Tangents t-shirt today. Welcome back, everybody. Get ready for the fact. Our panelists have all brought, have all, both of you have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. Sam's coming in with a slight lead. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for y'all. In 2017, the longest lasting rainbow ever was recorded in Taiwan near the Chinese Culture University in Taipei. The area could get long

rainbows thanks to the combination of monsoon systems and slow winds that keep moisture trapped in the air. This particular rainbow lasted so long that professors at the Department of Atmospheric Science told their staff and students to take photos every second to try and capture the entirety of its stay, resulting in at least 100,000 images in the department. How long did this rainbow last? I feel like there's a clue in there. The 10,000? Yeah, sure. 10,000, Sari. That's what he said.

Well, that doesn't seem like it could possibly be true because that would be 27 hours. But sun goes down, sun goes down sun's got a sun's got to be up got to be less than 24 hours okay i'm gonna guess it's uh arctic i'm gonna guess a good solid 12 hours i'm gonna go low four hours you guys made me too mad oh no we got the math wrong last last episode yeah Yeah, somebody said that everybody's mad at us because you picked the wrong person last time. It was, did you say 12 hours? Yeah. It's Sam. Okay.

It was eight hours and 58 minute long rainbow. Wild that they told their staff and students to take photos every second instead of just like setting a camera. Maybe they don't have a camera ready to just. They had nine hours to get a camera ready. All right, I'm going to go now. When you're a very teeny tiny delicious little creature, like say maybe the larva of a crustacean floating around in the ocean, it would be handy to be pretty much completely transparent. And wouldn't you know it, a lot of them are. But a baby crustacean's got to eat. And something that doesn't wouldn't you know it, a lot of them are. But

a baby crustacean's got to eat. And something that doesn't work so well when it's transparent is eyes. For an eye to work, light has to hit some sort of light-sensitive receptor. And if that receptor lets light pass through it, that's not really doing a lot of recepting. So for the most part, an animal's light-sensing organ is basically like a dark spot of some sort. So if you've got to eat, but if you're counting on being basically transparent in order to not get eaten, a dark spot is essential, but also sort of going to fuck up your whole strategy. But those baby crustaceans I mentioned earlier seem to have landed on a really clever workaround. So in the past, crustacean researchers have noted that many

types of crustaceans have very vividly colored eyes in their larval stage, but they lose that eye color when they grow up. And a paper published in February 2023 looked into what exactly was going on with these larval eyes and figured out that what they were looking at wasn't exactly their eyes, but actually a dome of reflective organic glass that was sitting on top of the eye. Looking at this dome with an electron microscope revealed that the domes were made of crystalline nanospheres described as being disco ball-like and that they're coated in reflective molecules. Across different crustacean species, these little disco balls are

different sizes and the different sizes causes them to reflect different colors. So the smaller they are, the more blue they reflect and the bigger they are, the more yellow they reflect. So the smaller they are, the more blue they reflect, and the bigger they are, the more yellow they reflect. And there seems to be a correlation between how clear, blue, clean, or grimy and yellow the water that the creatures live in and the color reflected from their eye domes. Some even seem to have domes that can rearrange themselves a bit to reflect differently depending on how much light is hitting them so i guess what i haven't actually come out and said yet is that using these reflective domes the larva can reflect back the color of their surroundings obscuring their eye spots and making them almost invisible but how you might be wondering can the larva still see with a reflective dome over their eyes well the dome has little holes in it so they can just see through it so they figured that part out too i thought it was gonna be a one-way mirror no just holes that would be really cool but nature ain't cracked the one-way mirror yet i don't think

so when they grow up the dome goes away but the adult crustaceans have that mirror in the back of their eyes that like dogs and cats have that make them glow in the dark and that mirror is made out of the same stuff as the eye dome it's not like the the same exact dome it's just the same structure but in the back of the eye instead and that's how they do it and that's the end of my story it's not easy to be out there i like my great hope for all these tiny animals that get eaten all the time is that like evolution didn't provide them with a strong sense of like uh just fear of mortality yeah i think about that a lot too a lot of pain receptors that they're not swimming around the ocean like the whole time they couldn't possibly be i hope like is that what a life of a mouse is like just constant screaming

maybe mice i could see mice. I'm in danger. And what do these things turn into? I mean, crustaceans could be anything. It's just a bunch of different kinds. It's not every kind, but it's across the whole kingdom or whatever crustaceans are. Are they a kingdom? It's probably a phylum.

Kingdom is an animal. Subphylum. It's a subphylum. Under arthropods. Yeah, we just had to sneak in an extra layer right there are arthropods i hang up my hat i can no longer be a science man i do like the the idea that some but because the the diverse group of arthropods including things like krill shrimp makes sense also barnacles and so now I like the idea of baby barnacles. I don't think they got an eye anywhere.

Maybe an eye spot if they're lucky, but a little reflective dome just as they're sticking out their tongues. Oh man, we've found so many different ways to do life. I hope the barnacles last forever. Yeah. But I'd prefer this lifestyle. Yeah, barnacles can't podcast no but they also can't mess up phylum and sub phylum and just be thinking about that all night

tonight they also can't perceive smoky the bear so that's what they got compared to us if they saw smoky the bear then it'd be like that's not food food. Yeah. They wouldn't be like, what's in his pants? Anyway. We're cursed. Your turn. So we use color in lots of different ways to visualize and study cells, especially with really complex things like the nervous system. There are historical processes like staining neurons with silver nitrate to make them easier to see in light microscopy, or more modern ones like injecting dye that selectively binds to certain parts of cells. And while these methods can be valuable, neurons are so dense and interconnected that scientists are always looking for other ways to try and untangle

the mysteries of the nervous system by imaging them. And in 2007, two researchers named Joshua... Oh, I didn't... Josh and Jeff, because I did not look up how to say their last names, though other folks, I'm sure, contributed in their labs, published a paper on a neuroimaging technique that they called Brainbow, which is very, very tongue-in-cheek, because Brainbow allows us to color neurons with anywhere from like 10 to 160 distinct colors, like a rainbow.

And with this variety of colors, we can more easily watch individual cells and see how they grow and change and intertwine in a way that isn't possible with those simpler techniques. So Brainbow works because of similar color mixing principles as a digital screen. So pixel colors are generated by mixing together red, green, and blue lights of various strengths. And the neuron colors are generated by mixing together three to four different fluorescent

proteins, which are activated when they're energized by UV light. So for example, Brainbow 2.0 uses red, yellow, cyan, and green fluorescent proteins as its color palette. And Brainbow 3.0 uses coral M. orange, which is orange, jellyfish EGFP, which is green, and sea anemone MKH2, which is red. So more complicated names, but more stable proteins. And you have to breed transgenic animals for it to work. But the process of generating this rainbow of colors from just a palette of three to four is very cool. You start out with a mouse with stem cells that have one full set of fluorescent protein genes each. They start out with this palette. And if

you were to energize these cells and make them fluoresce, they'd all be the same color because they'd all be expressing the same palette of four colors. So what you want to do is jumble them all up so that you get like a screen expressing different amounts of each color. And you jumble them up using a tool called Cree-Lox recombination. And those are just two names of different genetic markers. So LOX sequences are kind of like a cut here symbol in DNA. And the lock sequences tell Cree enzymes, which you can think of as like a craft kit, which pieces to cut out, swap, and stitch back together.

So for example, if you have a red gene surrounded by two lock sequences and a green gene surrounded by two lock sequences in a cell, then dump in a bunch of Cree enzymes. They are going to switch those two around. They're going to swap red and green. And if you have a bunch of genes marked for cutting and pasting, if you have a bunch of reds and yellows and cyan and green and dump in this enzyme, they're going to cut and paste all over the place. And with this recombination, you could end up with some neurons with like three

greens, some with two greens and one red, some with two reds and one cyan. And that, like those pixels, creates this rainbow of color. And because genetic engineering is imprecise and weird, it's not only those combinations, but sometimes you get extra colors thrown in there. And that's what makes the brain bow. And so, of course, there are drawbacks like all this randomness in generating colors, meaning that you can tell neurons apart, but you can't label specific neurons with specific colors because you're relying on the system to just kind of like jumble the fluorescence. But it has already led to some new understandings of things like retinal nerves and how certain neural pathways get reinforced or pruned down because we can really tell the difference between so many like tens or hundreds or thousands of neurons because they're all slightly different colors and the images are really pretty they're also they look really cool could i have a brain bow with no negative repercussions well you'd have to have a child with brain bow i think okay um

i don't think we've figured out how to do it. Yeah. That's disappointing, but acceptable. I mean, you'd have to, like, cut open your brain in order to image it at some point. Like, you can't take this picture without, like, taking a slice of your brain. In my will, all right, you can cut my brain open and take a peek at it, because it's going to look cool. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, like, looking at, like, a live mouse brain right here. No.

Let's see. Sam was ahead. Sam was ahead coming into this. But Sari has pulled into the lead. Just understandable. I loved that fact so much. And now it's time to ask the science couch, where we've got a question for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. Virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. At Angel Pixie Dream asks, why do some colors make me happy while others make me sad? Can you talk about the correlation between color and emotional response? What I told Sari when she suggested this one was that it seems not real to me, but I'm probably wrong. No, it seems like it's real. It might be cultural.

No, it seems like it's real. It might be cultural, but it definitely, like, we've done, you know, you paint a hospital and people, like, feel different on the inside. and the way that a lot of these studies are conducted. So there's like two pieces to this in the way that color has two pieces. There's like color is a certain wavelength of light and it interacts with our bodies in measurable ways. Like we know that our cones and the photoreceptors inside them process light in certain ways. In similar evolutionary biological ways,

different colored light affects us differently. So a good example of this is blue light. It messes with our circadian rhythms. There's a whole reason why doctors, especially eye doctors, recommend blue light blockers as you go towards bedtime because that blue light simulates daytime, messes with the circadian rhythms in your cells, and affects your sleep-wake cycle and how you're resting. And that's the color blue. It may not look blue necessarily. Is looking at a blue wall the same as being exposed to blue light, or is it different? That's a great question. I don't think it's exactly the same. Yeah, I think that it's a lot less i don't think it's exactly the same yeah i think

that it's a lot less but many fewer photons but if you shine enough light at a blue wall especially you got a blue light baby what's the difference it will be the same as a blue light okay if i had to guess and and like this is where i guess like the other piece of it is like what like social cultural expectations do we have based on a certain color? That's the way a lot of these studies are conducted, which is why the research is so scattered. Because we don't go, okay, let's stick these humans in a dark room and then blast one wavelength of light at them at a time and see how they feel. It's more like we want to get a goal, like make hospital patients feel more relaxed or make incarcerated folks feel less aggressive or do some.

And so like, we're just going to paint a bunch of walls pink and see what happens. Or we're going to like use different lighting and then ask people how they feel. So there's, there's not this like control with a lot of these color psychology studies that have like the same rigorous methods as, I don't know, like an experiment where you have a lot of compare and contrast, like the study with the different bowls and plate and foods where it's like you have a red bowl or a blue bowl. But in this case, you're like choosing red and blue.

You're not testing every bowl in every color of the rainbow and then asking people how their food tastes. Yeah. And it might just be things like if you have a hospital that's painted all beige and then you come through and you paint it and you paint the doors different color, it's like a contrast. It might just feel like someone cared more. There's all many confounding factors there. Right. It's just like, oh, it feels as if someone is treating this like a place where people are.

This is a freshly painted door. Rather than a place where we store human bodies. Right. A lot of people study the color red. Not entirely sure why, but maybe just because there's science already about it. And so people are like, oh, there's been some science about it. So I'm going to study the color red. And also because it's like the color of blood, the color of vascularized tissues.

Yeah. Humans turn red. Yeah. There's a lot of like red warning signals in nature. That is thought to be a combination of this biological evolutionary impulse of like when people get aggressive or when people are physically exerting themselves they turn reddish um and so there is this like physiological response associated with the color red that could also correlate with the color red being involved psychologically with things like health or um winning So like, for example, there was a study on the

2004 Olympic Games where contestants in four combat sports, boxing, taekwondo, Greco-Roman wrestling, and freestyle wrestling were randomly assigned red or blue outfits. Color had no effect on the outcome. They expected like 50-50. These are top tier athletes. no effect on the outcome. They expected like 50-50. These are top tier athletes. They should shake out evenly. But consistently across rounds in each competition, all the rounds had more red than blue winners. So the people who are wearing red outfits won their one-on-one combat sport matches more than people in blue outfits. And this is repeated in like video game studies, other athletic studies. It was even in a small study about like placebo pills where the red placebo pill, as opposed to like green, blue, and yellow made people feel like slightly better.

So there is something to do at least, or like there's a lot of literature specifically around the color red um and like trying to understand in more nuanced ways than than just painting walls certain colors why it feels to be like vitality and strength i can be an olympian now i just have to wear some kind of red unitard and I'll destroy everybody. I'll get them out there on the wrestling ring. I'm not sure that's not what they call it. And then just absolutely get my knee bended backwards. The shortest and most embarrassing career in Olympic history.

But we got to let him do it. He's Hank Green, for God's sake. I'm just thinking about how I wear a lot of blue and my wife wears a lot of red and she kicks my ass up and down the street every day, so I gotta change some things. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter,

where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week, or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to on Twitter, on Discord, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's real easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents, become a patron, get access to all of our amazing

stuff. We've got newsletter bonus episodes. We've got a special thanks also shouting out John Pollock and Les Aker. Thank you to you both. We've also got a new thanks also shouting out john pollock and les acre thank you to you both we've also got a new patreon goal we hit our last goal we did a movie commentary of cars 2 which we in which we tried to figure out a bunch of different scientific mysteries of the cars universe yeah for our new goal once we hit 700 patrons we're going to be watching the movie minions to see if we can determine just how much those little guys are pissing. I'm finding about this right

now. So if you haven't already, become a patron at patreon.com slash scishow tangents. Get us in that Minion booth. And if you're already a patron, please spread the word. We have to see that piss. That's what my show notes said. Oh no.

Second, that was just the first thing. Second, you could lose a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show, and other people get to find out about us, too. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green.

I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Faith Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Thank you, Seth. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Metish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister 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. When Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI had their first son, he became the Dauphin of France, which is a title that meant he was the heir to the throne, even though it sounds kind of silly and like dolphin.

And even in the 1700s, people were curious about any shred of news about the royal family. So when baby Louis Joseph was born in 1781, he became famous thanks to the royal family's trendiness. The color, coca dauphin, grayish greenish brown that was the same hue as his soiled diapers became all the rage with french aristocrats and even though this kid died at the age of 77 years old because of surprise surprise tuberculosis his poop lives on thanks to uh fad colors and also the french chemists who made it possible caca dauphin a fashionable baby poop color. Do we know what color it was still? I mean, you've seen baby poop, right?

I'm looking at it right now. Not baby poop, just a swatch. Just a swatch. It's a nice color. Always got a baby poop folder.