SciShow Tangents - Dust

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Head to factormeals.com/tangents50 and use code tangents50 to get 50% off! ----------------------------- Use promo code TANGENTS to get 50% off up to $10 value, when you spend $15 or more at convenience, grocery or retail stores on DoorDash. The universe is dusty AF, frankly. It's on your body, in every nook in cranny of your house, some planets are just made entirely of dust pretty much, and space is full of it! It's everywhere, so I guess we might as well learn something about it...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! 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[Trivia Question]Apollo 11 moon dust sample at auctionhttps://www.bonhams.com/auction/27937/lot/21/a-unique-opportunity-to-own-a-nasa-verified-piece-of-the-apollo-11-contingency-sample-5-scanning-electron-microscope-sem-aluminum-sample-stubs-each-topped-with-approximately-10-mm-diameter-carbon-tape-containing-apollo-moon-dust/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/apollo-11-lunar-dust-auction[Fact Off]Spiderwebs collecting microplastic dust as sensorshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722021015https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/spider-webs-record-severity-of-microplastic-pollution-in-cities/4015800.articlehttps://phys.org/news/2022-06-microplastics-spider-webs.htmlhttps://edu.rsc.org/science-research/spiderwebs-used-as-microplastic-pollution-screens/4016071.articlehttps://www.sciencealert.com/microplastics-are-so-pervasive-you-can-even-find-them-stuck-in-spider-websMartian concrete made from dust, blood, and urea (also potato starch and salt)https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/3/62/2868070/Building-on-Mars-with-human-blood-andhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590006421000442https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018EGUGA..20.4453Z/abstracthttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/982978https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/eng-2022-0390/html[Ask the Science Couch]House dust mite allergenshttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11845577/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7464922/https://www.jacionline.org/article/0021-8707(67)90045-7/fulltext  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12016-018-8693-0[Butt One More Thing]Fecal dust air pollutant from cow and horse manurehttps://fee.org/articles/the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urban-design-great-horse-manure-crisis-1894/https://www.texasobserver.org/cafos-panhandle-tceq/

Hello and welcome to SciShow, Tangent's Delightly Competitive Science Knowledge Showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Now, as our co-hosts know, I've broken my headphones by dropping them one too many times, so they sound in my ears like just a bunch of bugs. But I would like to become a tech review podcast just real quick and tell me what the best headphones I can buy are, because it's time. I know the answer to this. The free ones I got for working here. They're Audio-Technica's. Audio-Technica headphones, huh?

You know, we have a sound expert on the line right now. Hey, Tuna, what kind of headphones should I buy? My go-to's are Sony MDR-7506. That's a lot of MDR-7506. That's the first one that comes up. You know, you sounded so smart. You did really. You just said so many letters and numbers like you were nothing. Yeah, they're not that expensive. They're expensive, but they're not that expensive. I will say that just the ear cups cost as much as some headphones I've bought. But I've only had to buy one of these. Are you saying that I can drop them an infinite number of times?

Because I will. I've dropped one a lot. Like, location sound people use them, which is how I got into them. And so you're out there. Like, you can buy replacement cups that are a little nicer because these ones dissolve in sweat a little bit, like just the protective covering. The cups melt in sweat?

The standard ones do. If you go hard enough. You mean you don't have acid sweat, Sam, like the rest of us? You're not a lizard person? Thank you, Tuna. And thank you to the entire audio engineering profession for really putting it through the ringer. And everybody, Sony MDR 7506.

Yeah. That's the ones that Tuna thinks you should get. And send us a pair. We'll wear them on a video podcast. I'll go like this every episode so you can see the logo the whole time. Showing the logo? Yeah.

A very natural podcast stance to not be looking at your co-podcasters because you're too busy showing off the brand. It says on the side of them, professional. Oh, that's how you know. It says it on the headphone. That's how you know. Right on the side.

That's how you know. I love when things say good or. These ones don't say that. I don't know how I even got these headphones. They seem like the worst ones so far, maybe. You get compliments on them on the live streams a lot, though. Do I? When we do the premieres, people are like, Hank has such cool headphones.

I think people just like how shiny they are. They're very big. That's for sure. Yeah, they're quite large. That's saying they're good. But they don't say large on them. So how do you really know? Well, you know, they have a lot of positive reviews.

And if you get them on Amazon, they are $14. That's a great price point. So, you know, they're available to most. So every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory, but also for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. At the end of the episode, we'll have a winner. But first, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem. This week, it's from Sari. Sometimes we come across a word that means too many things, a catch-all term for lint or cells

or stuff in Saturn's rings. We clean dust from our houses, but we put dust on our faces. It flakes off from our roads or trees, no matter what the place is. Dust piles up in nooks and crannies of our universe. It just is like light or foam or ice, for better or for worse. Dust coats us and it's from us. It combusts and it shines. It's a menace to our spacecraft, our human lungs and minds. It's helpful till it's harmful. It's organic and it's not. But I know for sure we see lots more when

it's freaking hot. Dust whips up from the desert, circumnavigates the earth. Seeding clouds and feeding life is where it gets its worth. Dust. Dust. The topic for the day is dust. And we're going to have no idea what dust is i bet sari what's dust it's stuff you know it's little stuff little stuff heavy enough to like settle

build up in layers see it usually when it's when it's in certain quantities but also light enough to be kind of blown around carried by by the wind or a gust of air. I feel like that part's key. Even if it's not like wind strength. It has to be able to be blown around. Maybe, but also they talk about like interstellar dust and there's no wind out there. If there was though,

it would be blown all over the place, right? I don't know how big dust gets in the universe. Oh, interesting. Is dust, when they talk about clouds of dust in the galaxy, is that really little? We think that would be something I'd Google for the definition section. No, there's so many dusts.

You hit me with so many dusts already. How big is space dust? What's the dust we put on our faces? I didn't, that part tripped me out. Like makeup dust. Oh, right, right, right. Old timey,

you use coal dust and mascara, but you got a little powder puff. I got you. Cosmic dust is very small. It's between a few molecules and 0.1 millimeters. Oh, wow. So even smaller than dust here on Earth. Because I think that's something that is a few molecules. We wouldn't even call that dust.

No. It would just be a particle. We'd call it nothing. Yeah, I think that's because when you get kind of small, I was looking at like particle pollution and things like that because they've got a really great scale of dusts. It's usually PM, which stands for particular matter and then a number. And so PM10 is like 10 micrometers in diameter. And that's like dust or pollen or mold.

It's even dust in the definition. And then PM 2.5 is the stuff that we're talking about with like wildfire smoke. So combustion particles, organic compounds and whatnot. And that's 2.5 micrometers. Those are smaller? Is that smaller? Those are smaller than dust. Okay? Those are smaller than dust. Okay.

But bigger than space dust. Sure. So between the two dusts. It's a great title for your novel. So, and when you talk about, like people will sometimes ask, like, what is the dust in my house? And it's like, well, it's a bunch of things.

It's not, it's definitely not just one thing. For a while, everybody was like, it's skin cells. It's like, well, that's among the things. it's not it's definitely not just one thing for a while everybody was like it's skin cells it's like well that's it that's among the things part of it depends on where you are depends on you know if you're in a dry dusty area it's going to be like a lot of inorganic stuff if you live near a road it's going to be a lot of brake and automobile stuff it's always going to have some skin cells but there's just dust man yeah it's a lot of textile so like dust bunnies are usually like fur clothes couch paper fibers etc and that's what makes it stringy and fluffy um that carpet all things that we have in our homes

yeah are you a dust minder or a dust not minder? Like, do I care about dust? Yeah. If it's sitting around your house. Well, when you have a person you live in a house with, the amount of anything that builds up is really the tolerance level of the person with the lowest tolerance. And our tolerances are so far apart. I have not seen dust since getting married. Well, even in my office, I don't see dust, which is wild because I don't clean out here. Oh, neither does anyone else.

Maybe I just like have like a static electric charge all the time. It could be. You're attracting it all. Oh, you're repelling it all. Or it's all stuck to my body my body yeah you're real dusty i have some kind of dust related superpower in that i nothing gets dusty around me you don't shed skin i think is what we're learning maybe could be that yeah yeah that could could be that i just am really good at not noticing things yeah or if somebody cleans your office and they're listening to this right now

being like what he doesn't even know my office no one cleans no i'm the only one who cleans this place yeah what if orin's dusting if orin is dusting my office i will puke a million gold bricks whoa hey sherry do you know where where dust comes from it's not super interesting as far as i've tried to find something interesting okay okay it's from old english german danish they all sounded kind of the same dust dust dust very similar words in proto-germanic that all meant some form of smoke or vapor or mist or dust so any kind of small particulate you can just barely see it floating through the air we called that all all dust so the smoky in a place in old english you'd say it's real dusty in here yeah i think so that's that's my impression of it i wasn't i't time travel to see, but it was a catch-all kind of word. It's just kind of anything that's kind of cloudy and in your near vicinity is dust.

The definition on this website that I found is fine dry particles of earth or other matter so light that it can be raised and carried by the wind. That's what I said at the beginning. I've seen the movie Twister, and lots of particles can be carried by the wind. A cow could be dust. Yeah, cow dust. And if there's enough of them, it's like in a fine layer over the whole landscape. It's a sliding scale of how windy. Depends on how windy it is. What's dust?

Depends. Depends on how windy and how much of the stuff there is because i feel like in order to find the layer of it you need a lot of cows so you need a herd of cows to be swept up and then redeposited luckily they usually come in herds that's true uh you say oh it's dusty in here when you walk in and there's a bunch of cows have slammed through the roof of your house. Maybe not dry at that point. I do have a fun word. I left a treat for myself that I just forgot about it.

From the same Proto-Indo-European root comes the word fume, which makes sense because a cloud of dust, a cloud of fumes, basically the same thing. But then from the word fumusous meaning smoke or steam or fume came the word fumet which means excrement or poop of a game animal especially a deer because they would do a little deuce drop a deuce and then it would do a little stinky steam like in the cartoons um and they would call it a fumet and the only reason that this word has kind of like carried through to modern times is because of fantasy novels which i think is very funny

because it sounds fancier than a fancy word for poop a fancy word for poop that also means vapors yeah yeah well that means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show which i have open here um so dust in addition to being really interesting kind of sucks it can make your home feel grimy and the back of your toilet look gross can make your allergies act up so humans have spent a lot of time over the centuries doing a lot of things to try and decrease the dust in your home from just whacking your rugs with sticks to inventing robot vacuums. So today we're going to try a game of truth or fail about the technologies in between those two.

I'm going to present to you three stories of incredible dust busting technology, but only one of them is going to be true and you're going to have to figure out which one it is. Are you ready? Yes. Story number one. In the early 1900s, the British vacuumuum Cleaner Company would clean the homes of wealthy Londoners using a horse-drawn carriage, which carried a long hose that would be sent through a window to suction dust from surfaces.

Which is amazing. But that might not be true. It could also be story number two. In the 1950s, the Electro- Alkaline Company released a liquid rug protector that after drying down kept rugs dust-free by dissolving dust particles. It sold well until reports of skin irritation on the soles of customers' feet were traced to a solvent in the product that was also used in paint thinners. Or it could be story number three.

The origins of the handheld vacuum go back to the 1960s when NASA asked Black and Decker to design a handheld tool that would allow spacecraft engineers to easily clean parts of their spacecraft that were hard to access with normal vacuum cleaners. So is it wealthy Londoners calling upon horse-drawn vacuum cleaners to clear the dust from their homes? A dust-dissolving rug protector that was also dissolving people's feet or the handheld vacuum

cleaner that was originally designed to clean space shuttles what you dissolve in dust into it's already freaking dust how much how much littler or whatever could it get you know maybe it's like a little damp like you spray your rug and then it just gets wet and then it dries out. And then the dust, it gets less dusty. It's like the opposite of cleaning it. You just make it sink deeper into the rug so you don't see it anymore. That's not dissolving it. So the word dissolving it, I think.

No. Well, so it's like skin cells, right? So imagine that you've got to break those cells apart. Yeah. I've got to break all the little flakes of skin into pieces so small that it just is is isn't isn't detectable anymore i'm writing that one off personally i don't think it could be wow sam he's bold he's brash i can't picture a horse drawn vacuum cleaner what would it even look so easily can big hose okay then you have a big then you have a big bellows and you go and it sucks in the the stuff if this is so i'm so torn because if they didn't

do this they should have the only thing that is they just didn't think of it what do they do they just like brought the bellow to the home and then went well i think the idea is that like whatever is doing the sucking is too big to fit in the home yeah yeah because it's like pre-electric motor that's what's in the horostron carriage so they had to you know have it outside and it would just shoot the dust like outside because who cares it's out of your house wild to think there'd be that much dust which of course there probably would be in london it seems like it was maybe the capital of dust. They had to have chimney sweeps. Dust is a great word. There's so many

fantasy novel dusts. Magic dusts of various kinds. Also, it's a drug. That's kind of what I thought you meant when you said the powder you put on your face was maybe. Angel dust? PCP? Sam, my head is too empty for that. I made a drug joke on twitter the other day and

like i think nobody noticed because it's me they're like that couldn't have been that i said that tweet tweeting on x i thought would be more fun than this i was gonna ask if we're gonna start calling it x absolutely not and then you have to say not and you have to say tweeting on x what a crazy thing yeah yeah which sounds like you're on drugs. Like imagine if Google tried to change their name too. Oh no, I just, I just, I just K'd that. I just, I just G'd that. Even just G. Everything on the website says Twitter still. They're like, we've been planning this for months. And I'm like, you have not. You have not. you didn't think of a new word for the thing you do on the website oh yeah you can't call it a zing i'm sorry oh well anyway who knows in three and four weeks when this airs the whole thing

gonna just collapse absolutely we're dating ourselves a different world changed his mind and then the last one i feel like i've just heard that story before so pretty sure that's the right one but i don't know interesting i also feel like i've heard it but i i know they invented a lot of stuff for space travel dang so like why not handheld vacuums why not i guess is what i'm you kind of need one i would assume your hair gets out of everywhere what else are you gonna do do? You can't sweep. So this is embarrassing, but Sylvia has a picture of me vacuuming my own feet with a handheld vacuum because it was not. I was like cleaning the house. And then you know how when you sweep the house, then the bottom of your socks get dirty and do that.

You can just do that in space too. Like, oh, yeah, notice something on your space too. Just vacuum space vacuum yourself too exactly so handheld vacuums more than just for surfaces can be for anything that being said my whole heart is with horse-drawn vacuums i need that one to be true so i'm gonna go with that one all right what do you think sari maybe this is boring i think it's a handheld vacuum cleaner i'm gonna go with my, your gut is great, but the truth is even cooler than that because NASA did ask Black & Decker to design a tool for them, but it was to help astronauts collect samples from the moon to design a drill that was powerful but also compact that would be able to work with its own power source. And they got a battery-operated drill with magnetized motor that ended up serving as the

basis of the design of many other cordless devices that black and decker went on to make including the dust buster that's so cool interesting but that means i'm wrong that does mean you're wrong unfortunately and the good news for sam is that indeed the british vacuum cleaner company was the work of one hubert cecil booth who designedoth, who designed Ferris wheels and suspension bridges. He was also intrigued by cleaning machines that worked by blowing air from surfaces and then used a collecting bag to try and gather up the dust. He saw that and he was like, maybe it'd be easier if you could just suck the dirt directly up through a filter. And he demonstrated the idea by placing a handkerchief over his mouth and trying to suck up dust from the arm of a chair.

He's the first guy who ever did that? I guess somebody has to be. Yeah, everything was so dusty, but it ended up being really big. So it was originally a petrol-powered motor connected to a long hose, which drew dust through a filter. It was later changed to an electric one, but because of the size, it couldn't go into the house. So they would,

you know, pull it up to the house. Uh, it was bright red. It had gold lettering and trim, and it was just an advertisement for the service. And it stood outside of the home as the hose was inserted through a window and into the house where I could just suck the dust up from everything. So yeah, it was, it was it was great uh marketing because every time somebody ordered the service everybody saw it and was like man I want to be cool like those people and it must have been successful because the the cleaner was used to clean Buckingham Palace the Royal Mint and Crystal Palace so congratulations on your success dead Hu Hubert. Did he invent the word like vacuum cleaner?

Was it? That was like a concept he thought of? Oh, okay. How has nobody ever like eaten popcorn before that and going

and sucking it off their hand and think I have an idea. Maybe they did, Sam. I don't know. But look, you got to give him credit where credit's due.

Hubert was just better at branding himself. And maybe he did invent the vacuum cleaner. Who coined vacuum cleaner? Herbert Cecil Booth. What a thinker. And also American inventor David T. Kenney.

How did two people come to the word vacuum? Well, the word vacuum already existed, I think. Oh, you're right. I was like, if I was to come up with a word for a dust sucker, it would not be vacuum, but the emptiness of vacuum. There's definitely debate, but it seems like Booth has the best claim to having coined the term. But then they don't even call them vacuum cleaners in England. They don't? What do they call them? They're not even honoring their own man.

They have to call them Hooverts. They could call them Huberts instead. That's right. That would be really nice. Show some respect. Make the change right now. You know what? I bet that guy never did anything questionable.

We trust him implicitly. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it will be time for the Fact Off. Get ready, everybody. We're the Fact Art. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have done that, I will judge them and I will award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. To decide who goes first, though, here's a trivia question. In April 2022, Bonham's Auction House put Moondust up for auction. But not just any Moond this was moon dust collected by

neil armstrong as part of the apollo 11 mission how much did these samples end up selling for i don't know how much money is worth stuff and that's my like how sara doesn't know dates i don't know money i mean with stuff like this it is is always wild. Like, it could be, like, several orders of magnitude apart. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it was $50,000, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was $5 million. I'm like, I don't know how much a rich person would pay for dust. If it was $50,000, I'm going to be like, oh, that's it? That's a little disappointing. Yeah, but, like, a rich person could be a space enthusiast, or the space enthusiast rich person could not be paying

attention to the auction for whatever reason yeah i feel like if you're the kind of person who spends a lot of money on space dust it probably when it comes up you know somebody tells you you got a google alert you got a guy for that yeah i'm gonna guess conservatively000. I was gonna guess $100,000. It's dust. It's just dust. It's just dust. It's just dust.

It's not like some guy would pay $504,000 for it. What? What does that have to do for it? That sounds about right. I guess that's right. I mean, you can't go to the moon. That's true. I mean, like, I, like i yeah no i think it's worth it you know i bet i bet 10 years from now it'll be worth that and more probably would

have been better invested in the stock market but you know whatever the bag holding the samples was mislabeled as coming from apollo 17 so the bag and the trace dust inside were then sold in 1975, passing through a few hands until it ended up at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, whose president ended up in prison in 2015 for stealing and selling museum artifacts. Oh, no.

The moon sample bag didn't actually end up being one of those items. So instead, the U.S. Marshals put it on auction to pay for restitution for the guy's crimes. And that auction, a lawyer bought the sample for about a thousand dollars, thought it might've been from an earlier Apollo mission.

So she sent it back to NASA. NASA realized it was from Apollo 11 decided the samples belonged to them. But Carlson was like, no, you can't say that it's yours. It's mine. I paid for it. They went to court. A judge ruled that it belonged to them but carlson was like no uh you can't say that it's yours it's mine i paid for it they went to court a judge ruled that it belonged to carlson she then ended up putting the bag alone uh for 1.8 million dollars and the dust that was cleaned from it is what ended up being put on auction here so she managed to sell the bag and the dust separately. But the clean bag?

The bag was worth more. I think maybe it had Neil Armstrong's handwriting on it, maybe. A very cool bag, I guess. But a clean bag, a not dusty bag. Maybe they didn't say. They were like, here's a moon dust bag, and people assumed it was going to have the dust in it. And then she was like, ha ha, I just said bag.

Dust will cost you extra. That dust will be an extra half a mil yeah well i guess you can't completely clean out the dust like what do they do turn it inside out and run it under a faucet or something like tissue up to their mouth and suck on it there's probably some dust in there even if they tried a little bit it went to the moon but that means that sam gets to go first sorry to take up so much time with moon dust stuff so when when humans invented plastic we must have felt pretty cool at last we had jugs to transport milk more efficiently than ever tires for our cars we can make toys out of plastic so

that kids didn't have to play with boring wooden toys anymore. Truly, plastic is humanity's friend, ushering in the world of tomorrow. On the other hand, when people see spiders, we think, eek, eek, a horrible creature with too many legs. Some of them are poisonous. They pop up where you least expect them. They don't even help us transport our milk more efficiently. Truly, spiders are humanity's enemy, offering us nothing but misery. But what if I told you it was actually

the opposite? Plastic, in fairness, is pretty good in a lot of ways and has done a lot of great things for humanity, but it does have one nasty, unforeseen side effect that we're just kind of starting to understand the implications of microplastics. So officially defined as fragments of plastic less than 0.2 inches in diameter, microplastics are basically plastic dust containing things like microfibers from clothes, the little scrubby beads and like soap and body washes, just little flakes of plastic falling off of shopping bags or car tires. These things are in the air and the ocean and the soil, and they're small enough that they can get inside of the bodies of living things and do things that are probably not good. Like, for instance, how we talked about how they mess with the brains of hermit crabs recently. So maybe plastics aren't very friendly after all. So tracking and measuring microplastics in our environment could turn out to be vital for the health of the world. But since microplastics are basically dust in the wind, it's not really super

easy to track airborne particles without the right equipment. And it's really hard in places where it's impossible to access electricity like mountains and stuff. But in 2020, a team of scientists in Germany devised a cheap, easy method for tracking microplastics. And this is where we must return hat in hand to the lily spider. So one of the most famous things about spiders is that they spin sticky webs to catch bugs with. And just because they're sticky and out in the open, spider webs also happen to catch lots of dust in addition to bugs. So these scientists thought, hey, I bet there's microplastics in there. And they went to bus shelters in the German city of Oldenburg, collected a bunch of spiderwebs and ran them through like a mass spectrometer or something.

And boy, were they right. It turns out that on average, 10% of the mass of spiderwebs that they collected were made of microplastics. A majority of them seem to be fibers from clothes made of the plastic PET. And the second most was vinyl particles from car tires, which makes sense because they were bus shelters. And they could even tell how busy the streets were based on the amount of car tire microplastics, which seems to mean that spiderwebs are a precise enough detector of airborne

microplastics in an area that they could be adopted as that cheap easy way to collect samples without having to bust out lab equipment or worry about plugging anything in so it turns out spiders aren't that bad after all but surprisingly none of the articles that i found seemed all that worried that a tenth of each web was microplastics or like what that means for the spiders i feel like that's not good yeah i feel like as a spider i'd be like that's annoying my web's like part of the whole point is that i'm trying to get strong and light yeah and suddenly my my webs are 10 heavier than these it's like litter we're littering on the poor spider's lawn but that seems bad to me but nobody was mentioning it i wonder if the spiders are changing their silk based on it, too.

They're like, we need an extra sticky because it's going to be, you know how like when you put tape on a surface once it gets kind of worse. Yeah. And they're like, oh, man, our webs are getting slightly worse. So we need to do extra. I think that bus station spiders are like the me of spiders. Okay. They're just like by virtue of where they're living yeah they probably don't think they care that much about that they gotta change their

standards a little bit yeah they just don't notice yeah i bet there's some spiders that would be more sensitive but they don't live in the bus station and they can always just go down and get like a bite of a corn dog or something, probably, if they're really hungry. Yeah. Yeah. So instead of like, what's your dust tolerance? What kind of spider are you? Are you a bus station spider? Are you like an idyllic pond in the forest spider?

I love that, Sam. And I love that scientists are so smart. And I love that spiders are helping us out in the ways that they can. Sarah, what do you got for us? So everything we launch into space is super expensive. So when scientists think about how humans would construct shelters on the moon or Mars, they got to get creative about utilizing resources that are already there. And mostly what's there is dust, space dust.

And so we found ways to use dust in construction here on Earth. It's not a wild concept. We mix limestone or other minerals with water to make cement, which is basically rock glue. And then cement can be mixed with bigger chunks like sand to make concrete, which is more structural and mortar, which is like fancy rock glue. So it seems like the go-to research strategy here is to recreate space dust using what we know about the composition from Mars landers or samples from the moon. I guess you could take the Apollo 11 sample, use it in the lab too. And then you can see how strong we can make space concrete.

Or at least that's the approach a team of researchers at the University of Manchester does. And they seem to be dominating the recent studies everything i found i was like that's these guys again same same folks same guys um so one of their concrete recipes is straight out of a hank green mad libs which is why i chose this fact it contains martian dust plus human serum albumin, which is a protein in our blood plasma. Okay. Plus urea, which is a waste product in our pee. And their logic is, hey, the crew will already be there.

So why not have the crew literally become a part of their buildings through their blood and pee? They're making it anyway. Well, if it, if it, yeah, if it helps. Yeah. And as an aside, various cultures historically did use animal bloods like oxblood in mortar to make their masonry more sturdy or used animal blood in wood composites. So this isn't completely out of left field. It's just out of left field to my brain.

And this blood piss Martian concrete isn't half bad. While the typical concrete on earth has a compressive strength that ranges between 20 and 32 megapascals. The best formulation of this material had an average strength of almost 40 megapascals. It could be molded or 3D printed. So it's like on the upper end of regular concrete. And this concrete is the objectively funniest choice for Mars habitats, like making people live in piss house. But the same team does do rigorous science and has explored other options, too. I can't do them dirty on this podcast.

They've considered additional binding materials like spider silk, actually, because it has similar protein structures to human serum albumin. Two recipes that sound like they're from a cookbook. Martian dust plus potato starch plus salt and to be fair the best batch of potato concrete had a compressive strength of 72 megapascals and would be using crew food rather than crew bodies as ingredients so it's overall a better and simpler and less invasive option but that wasn't the fun one. It's only kind of fun. Potato concrete, blood piss concrete. I'm totally down with piss because like that I need,

like I'm not doing anything with it. I'm sure that like maybe the scientists got other things they can do with it, but with blood, you're taking out something I need. So you might as well use a potato, which is something I also need, but like haven't turned into anything yet.

You don't gotta poke a hole in yourself to get it or they gotta bring an ox with them to mars you know the bleeding ox yeah that's the solution can't can't afford to bring bricks but we can strap an ox to the the space shuttle look it just keeps churning out more blood it's amazing bring a baby ox and by the time you get there i don't know maybe just a really little one it's a little big and then just keep giving it potatoes until it's just turned just like it's just a big blood all over the place it can't even keep all that blood inside itself i feel like potatoes is better am i right i think i think by all measures yeah but they didn't try potatoes and urea so who knows and if it's if it's if piss is best, then you just bring a minion with you.

Exactly. Because we all know they're full of piss. Yeah, you bring a little ox and a little minion, and then you're set. You got infinite concrete. That's the cheat code for infinite concrete. Yeah. So here's what I think. I think, think first sam's ahead already and also sam's like the interesting part of you of sari's fact is the piss blood whereas the interesting fact of sam's fact

is kind of more like the dust like it seems to have more to do with dust great point great point so i this is my thinking yeah um and i also think like it's kind of i think it's cute i think it's nice though i'm sure the spiders are like why did you take my house and it's like don't worry it's for the environment congratulations sam yeah i'm running away with this episode of sideshow tangents i would like to make a tiktok out of those, though. But will I? Probably not. I'm too tired. The kids will love Piss House, though. Come on. Do you want to live in a Piss Blood House? You can today.

Start collecting. If I know one way to get blocked on TikTok by the TikTok censors, it's by starting out with the words Piss Blood House. All right. Now it's time to ask the science couch where we got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds straight from the hot new website x we got a question from at mice and pumpkins they ask when when people are allergic to dust what part of the dust are they allergic to that's a great question i think i might be wrong about this but i think that usually when you're

allergic to dust you are allergic to the leavings of insects yeah or and or bugs just bugs because arachnids because i think it's a lot of mites. That's it. Question answered. You got it. Yeah. You strayed when you said insects, but then you brought it back home with bugs. Because it is dust mites or storage mites are the two. And mites are eight legs, so they're arachnids. When I Googled house dust mites, I thought I would find one species.

There are a bunch depending on where you live. There's like an American dust mite and a European dust mite and tropical storage mites that live in various darkish humid environments. That's the thing that they have in common. Dust mites tend to live in more fabrics and like soft things and storage mites tend to live in like kitchen cupboards or food storage areas, which are soft in their own way. Is it, they're crapping? They're pooping. Yeah. Yeah. But they're just like, they're existing. So dust itself doesn't necessarily have a lot of proteins in it. I guess there's like the decaying human skin cells. There's often like some organic material in especially house dust, like bacteria,

anything that we or our animal friends shed as part of it. But then dust mites, they really like the junk and dust because they eat that dead stuff. They eat dead skin cells. They eat any, any little thing that could give them nutrients as part of it. And we recognized in the 1920s that house dust was causing allergic reactions. People were sneezing when dust was knocked up from soft objects. And then in the 1960s, we realized that was probably house dust bites we

probably like got better at magnifying things we found these little critters inside and then it was in 1981 that they were like it's the poop it's the fecal particle that is causing these allergies we could have lived in a simpler time you guys like there was a time when we didn't have to know that we were always inhaling massive amounts of feces fairly new piece of information yeah and so they like extracted various bits from the mites and and amplified those proteins and then tested them as allergens when they're testing for allergens um immunoglobulin immunoglobulin e um is the one that you test for for like house dust allergies because it's a specific kind of hypersensitivity it's usually one that um develops later in life

like once you get sensitized to the stimulus once you experience house dust mite poop then you develop the allergy to it you don't you aren't like born with allergy necessarily um and you can't have like genetic predispositions to it but um if you get like exposed to house house dust poop house dust mite poop then you experience your wheezing and sneezing and whatnot and there's like some evidence that proteins in the mite exoskeletons or dead bodies, like little bits of their casings, like they molt as part of their growing up process, or they just like die because their lifespan is around 100 days max. So in addition to living mites in all this dust, there are also dead mites in all this dust.

So it's possible that some of the sneezing comes from that as well, but that's it. Those are the proteins that you get sensitized to. That for some reason grosses me out more, that inhaling the corpses. I don't know why. It's all bad. Yeah.

One line from this paper really made me giggle. It was, in keeping with their cosmopolitan nature, dust mites or mite allergens have been found in submarines and even in the space station. So, you know, in like clean, sterile environments, they still got dust. They still got dust mites.

So you don't have to feel so bad about yourself in your house. Definitely not. They're literally everywhere if you want to ask the science cat your question follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet at topics for upcoming episodes every week or join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us

on our Discord thanks to at LauraStar2009 at MuppetLamp 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 really easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash SciShowTangents to become a patron and get access to things

like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. We currently are at 680 patrons, so we are tantalizingly close to discovering just how much piss a minion can really hold. Second, leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glixman. Our story editor is Alex Pillow.

Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is Alex Pillow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. 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 microscopic to make fecal dust, or if you prefer the more colorful term, shust, which is the contraction of shit dust. If the air is hot and windy enough, any poop can get dried out and blown away and inhaled by unsuspecting people. The stink and respiratory issues from shust were problems in cities like New York and London

in the late 1800s, when horse-drawn vehicles were all the rage and horse poop was all over the streets. And these health risks are still a reality for people who live near cattle feedlots in the state of Texas where there's basically just cows ready for slaughter and lots of dry, dusty dirt. So everybody watch out for the shust. Is shust like a scientific term? Who's saying shust out there? I am. Okay. Did Terry just make that up?

No, the people in Texas are saying shust. Oh, that makes sense. In the deep investigative journalism that I found, I don't think they were saying that in 1800s London when Schubert was walking around. Yeah, please, could you vacuum up my shit dust? Yeah, if he heard somebody say that, he'd pass out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was that guy's name?

Hubert? My house is full of shust. It's no good. That's the Queen of England talking. It's no good. Come on over to Bognum Bodice. Clean up my shust out of my fabrics. That's what she sounded like.