SciShow Tangents - Gas

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

From precious oxygen to the lowly fart, every day we’re all wallowing around in an invisible soup of gas! Exciting, isn’t it? Tune in to go into an exciting adventure into the world of gas with Sam, Ceri, and Dr. Tubeboy!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 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: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]Horace Wells and Nitrous Oxide/Laughing Gashttps://pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology/article/119/5/1014/13670/Horace-Wells-Demonstration-of-Nitrous-Oxide-in[Fact Off]History of the storage/transportation of gas (cylinders, gas holders, bamboo)https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/natural_gas_basics.htmlhttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/0471238961.0701190519160509.a01https://www.apga.org/apgamainsite/aboutus/facts/history-of-natural-gashttps://www.jstor.org/stable/24969284https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_2603https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/349362https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/professional_theses/147/https://www.nortegas.es/en/our-business/distribution-of-natural-gas/history-of-natural-gas/Canaries to detect carbon monoxide in mines & resuscitating them with oxygenhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/story-real-canary-coal-mine-180961570/[Ask the Science Couch]Fart/flatus noises from anal sphincterhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8601379/https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19545944/fart-noises/https://flatology.com/consider-the-sphincter/https://urogynecology.nm.org/anal-incontinence.html[Butt One More Thing]Snake cloacal popping https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/377052

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 riley hello and our resident everyman sam schultz hello so how are we feeling about new year's resolutions in the scientific community because i've heard that they're not much there's no there's not much that recommends them i thought you meant like we as the three of us, how are we feeling about New Year's resolutions for us and our brains in this? How I feel about it is that the like the evidence suggests that this isn't the way to do it.

So I'm trying to not even though my brain says you should probably do that. Have some have some goals. I think you told me this last year. And so last year I didn't make any goals. And I kind of felt bad about it. I kind of felt bad about it all year. Well, don't worry. You would have felt bad when you didn't meet your goals. Yeah.

So I guess you just feel bad no matter what you do. We should stop ending years. Or you could set little goals. Little goals. Yeah, I think I might make some. This is a good idea. I think I might make some this year. Super achievable things.

Yeah. That's my general strategy is like, whenever I feel a burst of motivation, you know, you know, the one like January, it's never it January. I'm tired. It's cold. I just want to be warm, but like April, that's a good time. October for me. Oh, great time. I love the beginning of October. An October resolution. There's kind of that breeze in the air and it's bracing you. Yeah, it's a little bit colder. So then I don't feel like I'm hot all the time.

And so I can exercise without sweating too, too much. So I recommend resolutions intermittently, just when you feel like you can do it. So we need Halloween resolutions. Yes. Turn your favorite holiday into a motivational one also, Sam. What's the smallest thing that still counts as a resolution? So it can't be something I'm already doing, but it has to be so achievable that I'm definitely going to achieve it. This is what I'm looking for. I have one. Mine is that whenever I get a haircut,

I want to leave the haircutty place with an appointment for my next haircut, which is something that I have heard a lot of people do, but I have never done. I kind of feel like it's way weirder that you don't schedule your next one before you leave.

I don't know. I've never done it. Did that guy just leave without scheduling his next one? I think I'm so strange. I've never done it. I'm just going to do that. That's the thing that I'm going to change about my lifestyle, and it's very boring. I think those are the best kinds of resolutions, because those are the sustainable changes. Sustainable changes. This is what we're looking for. I'm not trying to revolutionize my life. I'm just trying to make one thing a little easier.

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 they're also playing for Hank Bucks, and one of them will win at the end of the episode. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, it's from me. I'm sorry if this seems icky, but everything's a little bit sticky. Particles, they stick together like hooks in a bird's feather. There's a tiny invisible force tether, describing it's a little bit tricky. Now, different particles stick different amounts, and depending on that, they can stick or bounce or slide past each other like a basket of balls, and some particles barely stick at all. Sticking, sliding, and bouncing mass is solid,

liquid, or finally, gas. With enough energy, it's a no-brainer. They bounce off each other and fill their container gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas gas i felt like they needed like a last couplet to make to round out the poem but i couldn't figure it out i feel like it was done but like in terms of the vibe it wasn't done so i just said gas a bunch of times forget physics class or whatever just listen to that poem you can skip that's right it's all done great or something i did it i did all of 10th grade i did states of matter plasma don't even think about it that's a different thing don't worry about it it's for tvs only right that's right and blood that's different stuff right is that two different stuff the plasma and blood

from blood. That's the secret that big TV doesn't want you to know. That's how they do it so cheaply. They just take people's blood. So the topic of the day is glass? Hope not. It's gas, which is a state of matter. And I tried to explain using our traditional Sideshow Tangents balls in my poem what gas is. But I'm sure that there are some edge cases that are going to mess this up.

Sari, what is gas? I didn't want to think about the edge cases. Good idea. Let's not do it. There are the states of matter, like you said. Solid, liquid, gas, plasma. We can dip a little bit into plasma if you want. There are the states of matter, like you said, solid, liquid, gas, plasma. Yeah. We can dip a little bit into plasma if you want.

But basically, gas is generally neutrally charged particles that are far apart balls bouncing off of each other. They're so far apart that in most cases, we can't see them. They're all around us in the atmosphere, scattered about. Yeah. And when you see something, so like if you say you see steam or smoke or something, there are gases as part of that. But the steam, like the opaqueness, is condensed liquid water. Very, very tiny droplets. So when you see like steam in the shower, you're not really seeing steam.

That's little droplets. And you see like steam in the shower you're not really seeing steam that's that's little droplets and there's like humidity around when and like in a power plant where they're using steam like actual water vapor just like pure vaporized water to drive turbines that is entirely invisible and you would only see it as heat and it is so dangerous that it's a it's like a concern that sometimes there can be a steam leak and you can't see it and all it would do is just completely destroy your body yeah so gases are weird if you think about because i feel like a lot of people would say oh i've seen gas i've seen steam there are some visible gases yeah there are like light, light yellow. Yeah, like yellow, like a bromine gas is orange. But for the most part, gases you sense with your other senses.

So either the temperature of them, if it's exceptionally hot, you can smell some gases, but not others. So like mercaptan is a gas that gets added to a natural gas pipe because that methane is generally odorless. But then you can smell mercaptan. So you can't see it. You wouldn't be able to smell it, but we add a smelly gas so that you can whiff it. But otherwise, gas is a pretty undetectable or hard to study thing, which is really interesting. We know so much about it now. It was kind of a long time before we were like, I bet that stuff's the same stuff as the other stuff. That was a big insight for humans.

It's weird to stick your hand out of a really fast car and be like, wow, gas can be pretty hard. Like a hurricane force wind. It's just gas. Just gas hitting you. It's just real fast gas. Yeah, it's fast gas. And so then there's like more of it in a smaller place, kind of. Yeah, it puts pressure.

You said it was a long time before you figured that out. What's a long time? Yeah. So the origin of the word gas comes from the 1650s or so. Oh, wow. There's a Flemish chemist named Jean-Baptiste van Helmont. Nice. Who was an earlier chemist experimenting. Definitely not a vampire. Don't worry. He could have been a vampire hunter, okay?

One of the two. And instead of studying blood, he was studying gas. And he was just like looking at chemical reactions that produce gas. He especially was perplexed by carbon dioxide because he couldn't get it to condense. And so he made up the word gas probably from the Greek word chaos, meaning empty space. Wow, what? Which is very cool. He's probably influenced by the 16th century physician and natural philosopher Paracelsus, who used chaos to like spirit things. Like we just don't

understand. There's spirits. And so this chemist was like, well, gas? I don't know. It's a mystery. But he didn't really know what gas was, but that's like the origin of the thing. Yeah. So it was in a book that was published posthumously um and he said this vapor he wrote this in latin i think um but this vapor hitherto unknown i call by a new name gas like here's this weird thing here's this weird thing i'm gonna call it a gas it's wild that like we spent uh you know hundreds of thousands of years existing in a soup of particles that we cannot live without. And we didn't think to give it a name

until like 400 years ago. So what did we think farts were? What did we think was going on there? Yeah, I don't know. Bad air. I think that there was the word air. My guess would be that air, air was like hank said early medicine was like bad air is bad for your your soul or whatever and we knew that you had to breathe and i was reading something but air was probably

separate from the state of matter that is gas of like a chemical thing that is gas yeah okay like anybody who's got a name like paracelsus where you're just like i renamed myself a word those people are great like carl and i've ever heard of him he's just gonna like car yeah he's gonna be like you know my name's carl but i'm going to change my last name to linnéas because my whole thing is lineages like would that be fun yeah be like i'm gonna be hank simon hank youtube it's your ass boy mr tube boy thank you for joining us today our keynote speaker today mr tube boy it's dr tube boy i changed it sam to answer your question about the word fart it was apparently one of those um imitate imitative words so It comes from old English

fjorten F-E-O-R-T-E-N which I guess is what they thought farts sound. They were like oh you're making a fjorten out of your butt.

So it's a sound word rather than a gas word. That sounds about right. I like that. Yeah. Farts are they're kind of more

about the sound than the smell. Like they're definitely of two parts. Yeah. But the sound more about the sound than the smell. Like they're definitely of two parts. Yeah. But the sound is the part that is. The smell ain't funny. Yeah, the sound is like fun.

Yeah. The smell can be pretty bad. An expert opinion from Dr. Video Boy. So that means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This week, I've got a game. We're playing a game and it's called Brainstorm. So Brainstorm is a pretty simple game. I'll ask you a question. I'll give you a number for how many possible answers there are to the question. And you'll have two minutes to guess out loud, trying to avoid interrupting each other if you can.

You'll get a point for any answer you get correct. And there are no penalties for wrong answers. Round number one, we're going to talk about helium. So helium is used for a bunch of stuff, more than just filling balloons. And it can be used to achieve cold temperatures for scientific applications. It can provide an unreactive environment for manufacturing certain technologies helium is great because referring to the the poem earlier it's like the least sticky of the particles

so it stays a gas and so until very very low temperatures to that end because it is so useful some countries have national reserves of helium extracted from natural gas. And the U.S. has one of the largest with helium extracted from plants around the country. In 2022, the U.S. Geological Survey said that there were 15 plants across seven states that extract helium from natural gas to produce crude helium. What are those seven states? Bonus points if you can guess the state with the largest number of helium plants.

Go! Helium plants? I've never heard of one here, so I feel like there isn't one here. There's helium in Texas. That is correct. They got everything out of the ground in Texas. Great. Nevada.

That is not correct. Colorado. That is correct. What? Oklahoma. Correct. Ooh, goes that way too, eh? What's the one that Bill Clinton used to be the governor of?

Arkansas. No. Shoot. Mississippi. No. Alabama. No. Kansas. That's the the one that's the one with the most map of u.s new mexico yes oh shoot that was an obvious one uh north dakota no i think that's too far up for helium in my opinion utah does utah have helium yes what about there's something oh it's all over everybody you only missed one you did a great job you really

sort of centered in on the areas where helium comes from quite quickly you missed uh arizona which was is around those other states all right round number two. This one's a little different. It's going to be a matching game. One application for noble gases is to make neon signs. You put a noble gas in a tube, apply an electric voltage, and watch the color that forms as atoms bump into each other and excite their electrons.

So for the noble gases, neon, helium, krypton, and argon, which each produce the following four colors, green, blue, pink, and red pink and red no oh i used to know this argon is red no is that right oh no helium's blue helium's not blue blue oh no neon is green nope oh no neon is red yes is helium helium pink? Yes. Well, krypton is green. Krypton is green. Makes sense.

Like Superman. What's left? Argon is blue. Oh, wow. Sari caught it right before you. Oh, come on. From my perspective, we tied. So Sari got three out of that one.

Good job. That was great. That was fun. All right. That was not going to take two minutes. And round number three, we're going to talk about lifting gases, which are gases that have a lower density than the air around them, which lets the gas rise. That property has been very useful in designing various aircrafts like balloons and blimps. The National Aviation Academy describes six lifting gases that have been used to fly aircraft. What are they? Go.

Helium. Is helium one of them? Hydrogen? Yes. Oh, God. I don't know any of this, and Sari's going to know all of them. Have we used water vapor?

No. What's this stuff? Natural gas. What's that made out of? Methane? That's correct. Sam gets that one. I'll let you have that, Sam.

Nitrogen? Gas? No. There's so much of one. I'll let you have that, Sam. Nitrogen? Gas? No. There's so much of it. I will give a hint that it doesn't necessarily have to be a pure gas. Oh. Carbon dioxide or monoxide. One of those.

No. Both. What's the laughing gas mixture? Ooh, nitrous. Oxide. Good guess, but no. Tough luck, nitrous. Oxide. Good guess, but no. Tough luck, Sari. Yeah.

We wouldn't do anything dangerous, I hope, of like, not chlorine gas. Whether it's dangerous or not does not matter. I don't think that matters. But chlorine is not one of them. There is a dangerous gas or two on this list. I'm running out of my gas knowledge.

Ethylene? Nope. You guys are going to kick yourselves. I don't know. With one of these. Ding, ding, ding. Time is up. The one that you're going to kick yourselves about is hot air.

Oh, shit. Oh, no. You know, the classic gas, air. I told you it could be a mixture. The classic thing that's inside of almost all current lifting craft. Yeah, there's a whole balloon named after hot air. Oh, no. Yeah.

Wow. But, Sari, let's see if we can do it this way so so a gas is going to be lighter if it has if it if it's a gas that is a molecule not an atom but it has connected to it light atoms so hydrogen but not a hydrocarbon that already makes you feel sound very smart yeah well hydrogens are, they bond to anything. They're a little, they hang out. They saturate. Nitrogen, ammonia. That's it. There it is.

Wow. Very, very good. Ammonia. And then the last one was, you weren't going to get coal gas, which was used for a while. It's got hydrogen and a bunch of other stuff. You heat up coal and the gas that comes off is is uh lighter than air all right i have no idea what that did for the scores but hopefully faith was paying attention and sari is at seven and sam is at six very close you guys neck and neck not as dumb as i look huh next up we're gonna take a short break and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the

Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and I will award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. Laughing gas, as we discussed earlier, is nitrous oxide, N2O, a colorless gas that was discovered by Joseph Priestley at the end of the 18th century. But its use as an anesthetic wasn't discovered until later

when an American dentist named Horace Wells attended a demonstration where a volunteer was given the gas only to injure his leg on some nearby benches without feeling any pain. When Wells realized

that nitrous oxide seemed to have been, seemed to have pain-k to have painkilling properties, he decided to put it to the test while having his tooth extracted by another dentist. Okay. That's great. I love that.

Try it out. Also. I love like, if you're going to be on nitrous, I'm not surprised that you injured your leg walking at a science demonstration, but what year did Wells discover that laughing gas could be used as an anesthetic? Could this be like disturbingly late?

Could this have been like 1955 or something like that? Could be. Is that your guess? That's my guess. Okay. I think it's earlier than that. I think it's, um, we just didn't know a lot about gas. Uh, 1880.

1844. Sarah coming out on top gets to decide who goes first. Oh, I'll go first. And I will listen with rapt attention as you attempt to blow my mind. The substance that we call natural gas, as we've talked about, is mostly methane, which has the structure CH4 and other hydrocarbons, which are all molecules made of various carbons and hydrogens bonded together. It's one of those straightforward chemical names, which I'm grateful for as a science communicator. And natural gas is used as the fuel for lots of things like heating or cooking, in part because it's very flammable. And a big part of why many people still use it is that a huge infrastructure of pipes and whatnot exists to carry the gas to homes or factories or whatnot. And that got me thinking, it's not easy to capture and control and move around gas.

The people who sell farts are probably lying because there is definitely not an airtight seal. So you are mostly paying for an expensive weird jar of normal air. So basically, what I have brought for a fact off today is an abridged history of gas storage and transport, which I think is more exciting than it sounds. Wow. Hank Hill's freaking out out there, you know. So a lot of gases today are stored in various often metal, often cylindrical containers.

I'm oversimplifying a lot. Where the gas is squeezed in at a pressure way higher than the standard atmospheric pressure. This saves space, helps with transportation, and is a consequence of having the knowledge and technology to heat and cool and separate lots of different gases and then cram them into these containers. Yep. Before gas cylinders were the vaguely named gas holders, which were mostly large chambers, like the size of a farm silo for natural gas or coal gas, which we talked about, which is made when coal is heated in a vacuum, were stored at atmospheric pressure. We didn't figure out squeezing until the 1900s, really.

It's tricky. And from my understanding, there were a lot of these gas holders in Europe and or wherever chemists were. Around the 1800s, when Lavoisier was alive, he developed a desktop device called a gazometer. Yeah, yeah. That's great French.

Never try. That's what i do with french i can do spanish not french he made this gas meter gas gasometer uh out of glass and some metal bits so that he could produce and weigh gases and slightly before that my boy jean baptiste van helmont from the etymology section was just experimenting with gases like carbon dioxide in closed vessels, but not necessarily transporting them around. And what I am most excited to share, but I felt like I needed more scientific and historical context to make it a fact off, is before that in China, somewhere in the 900 to 200 BCE years, people were drilling for both brine, because salt is useful, and natural gas, because

fuel is useful. And as far as I can tell from secondary sources, the main way that natural gas was drilled for, stored, and transported was through bamboo stalks, which I guess makes sense. You punch a hole in the earth and then seal up and use that same hollow tube to collect gas and prevent it from mixing with the atmosphere. And then you move it around as best you can to where you need fuel for fire. And then you light it on fire, et cetera. Before that,

all I could find was anecdotal accounts of people finding natural gas reserves because they were set on fire by lightning or some other environmental phenomenon, but not harnessing the gas in any way because it's invisible and hard to fathom much less control and capture so all that to say i'm sure there's more history of of gaseous fuel but it's not readily googleable so you'll have to just send it to us or go on an adventure yourself do we know like what exactly they were doing with the bamboo? It was just like, what were they powering? I think using it as fire to boil water to extract the salt from the brine. Mainly for heat, I think. Heat or cooking. So similar things that we use natural gas for today, instead of a infrastructural system they just

were like oh i punched a hole in the ground have some gas in it in a tree that i chopped down and i'm gonna bring it wherever i need it would you like fill up a wagon with bamboo full of gas a lot of people described it as using bamboo pipes but that doesn't make sense to me as like forming a seal or there's no nothing to put pressure on so i think yes my my impression of it is that you would use it as what later was like a gas holder like a vessel or a gas cylinder and stop it up some way and load it onto a cart and then bring it wherever you needed it and then somehow tap into it and let the gas out they had their own little hank hill back then yeah propane accessories bringing his wagon around there you go so here's your bamboo so sam what do you got mining is dangerous and coal mining is even more dangerous because coal and the gases that seep out of it are poisonous and explosive.

And throughout history, sometimes coal mines would explode or coal miners would drop dead for kind of mysterious reasons. So in the 1890s, a scientist named John Scott Haldane set out to investigate what undetectable thing was killing miners and causing explosions. And he quickly discovered the culprit to be carbon monoxide. But just knowing what was causing these accidents wasn't enough because unfortunately, in addition to being toxic and flammable, carbon monoxide is odorless. So you pretty much can't notice it before it is too late. So Haldane started experimenting on himself, hoping to find ways to detect carbon monoxide before it made him pass out and die and experimenting on himself was something that haldane was famous for like in world war one he designed the first gas mask while experimenting on himself with gases used in gas

warfare and he pioneered a lot of research into what happens when your body gets too high and too low like the pressure is too high and too low the like the pressure is too high and too low. The dude just loved breathing weird stuff and breathing in weird ways. But anyway, I guess in this case, Haldane couldn't figure out how to detect carbon monoxide before he passed out. So he started experimenting on small animals. And eventually he found that canaries were 20 times more sensitive to carbon monoxide than people. So they would pass out in places with low enough carbon monoxide concentration to warn miners that things were getting dangerous so the miners could get out of

there so based on his findings miners all over the world started carrying their own personal canaries in cages down into mines with them as like an advanced warning device and you might think as i did uh mostly because of cartoons that this was sort of a cruel practice because the canary would drop dead. But John Scott Haldane was, it seems, sort of a bleeding heart when it came to animals. So he tested on them, but he allegedly didn't like to do anything to them that he

wouldn't do to himself. And so as part of his canary coal mine discovery, he also invented a sort of comedically complicated device that you could use to revive passed out canaries. So the contraption was like a steel and glass box with a grate on one side and a little oxygen tank on top. So once your canary friends started to show signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, like it stopped singing or it just like falls off its perch, you could swing the little door closed and like seal it up and turn the oxygen tank on and bring your little guy back to life.

So you can feel sorry for canaries and invent cages to keep them from dying all you want but that doesn't mean that miners or mining companies will actually use them and for that matter a lot of images of canaries and coal mines do show them like in normal cages but there are also photo evidence of miners actually using these resuscitating cages and that might seem like a lot of trouble to go through for just a little bird but there are also accounts of miners being like super into and loving their little canary friends so i guess it does kind of make sense that you wouldn't want them to die and canaries were used in coal mines until 1986 when a portable gas detector was introduced to mines which i thought was just crazy that it took so long to get anything besides a bird. I mean, I guess I knew that it wasn't just a saying,

but I didn't realize how institutionalized and widespread the practice was. I knew they used them because I come from Butte where a lot of mining happened, but I thought for sure they just croaked and the miners were like, eh, whatever. Everybody go, leave the bird.

Yeah. The bird's like, leave without me. But yes, it's a little bird in a little cage. Now I want to know all about this person

and his relationship with this canary. Yeah, would they bring him home or was there like a canary keeper at the mine? So many questions. I bet they brought him home or was there like a canary keeper at the mine so many questions i bet they brought a cool job like a little intern at the mine yeah all right so you were really close coming into this and both of those facts were very good but for pure ability to make a great tiktok out of it sam's gonna be the winner of this episode

congratulations sam thank you i humbly accept glad that would be really weird if you didn't so now it's time to ask the science couch where we got a question for our couch of finally honed scientific minds napoleon on discord asks what makes farts so loud great question an all-time question an all-time question a real everyman kind of question i feel like i'm not sure i think things that make sounds loud are usually some kind of resonance where you know like our face is full of resonance chambers so we can make louder and richer sounds and you know your guitar's got a big resonance chamber in it. Butts don't have a resonance chamber. So they can't be that.

Is it vibrating butt cheeks? Yeah, I wonder to what extent, like, I feel like there's two potential fart noises. There's like a noise of the actual cheeks. And that makes, so like what's happening in that situation is a pressure builds up until the cheeks separate and then the pressure is released and there's no pressure anymore so they slap back together yeah and that happens over and over again because the pressure continues to rebuild every time the cheeks slap back together but i think that also happens with the anus itself where the anus kind of can do some slapping uh and so i wonder i don't actually

don't know if there's like two different fart noises like in two different mechanisms or or if they sort of like happen together somehow because i it seems like the kind of thing that i would have thought about before but i don't i don't feel like i put a lot of mental energy behind sarah sarah nodded during that which makes me feel good so the butt cheeks one the jury is out uh i think most people say no i think most people say no butt cheeks don't vibrate fast enough to like like this motion that you're going to your butt cheek the the way that gas comes out it's not going to go more than a little bit in a cartoon the butt cheeks are vibrating all over the place because

that's how they show the fart but in real life the gas comes out fast enough that they're the the noise isn't coming from the butt cheeks this is shocking together i can't believe it you heard it here first sam's whole whole vision of the world is changing right now yeah so it's just anus it's an it's all anus as far as we can tell where kind of like how uh like trumpet players use their their mouth or as like an, yeah, make the buzzy noise, make the vibrations. Your anal sphincter does that little vibration and that noise is affected by the velocity of the gas as you push it out, the volume of gas. And then your natural personal shape and size of your anal sphincter. Everybody's got a different fart voice, huh?

Everyone. Yeah. Much like everyone's got a little different hole on the face. People have got a different hole on the butt. And that changes your resting tone of fart. And so you can manipulate the sounds of farts by like tightening or releasing so as you like anyone has tried to hold in a fart or release it gradually over time and that can change the volume and pitch of a fart because it changes the way that that muscle vibrates

and i don't know if if you're trying to have a fart not make noise what you want is for the pressure to be enough to overcome the tightness of the sphincter and and enough to keep it open and not to have the thing happen where it's opening like the pressure opens it and then the release of pressure closes it again so that the pressure builds up again so you so and that's a function both of like the pressure and of the looseness or tightness of the sphincter and so so those of us who can do a good job and i do do think that like what it makes it seem like it's the butt cheeks is that if you lean off of the of the thing you can make it so that the fart noise but i think that that's actually loosening not the butt cheeks but

it's loosening the sphincter because when you're sitting on your butt you're you know that you're that you're putting pressure on that muscle i feel like i'm in college right now well yeah and like you also have to consider all of what i read is specifically about the sphincter and right its vibrations like more more air coming out at once tend to be louder less air coming out like seeping out tend to be not from swallowed air but from intestinally generated air so those are like the silent but deadly stinkier they're stinkier but like louder ones are like you swallowed a lot of air you drank a soda drink a coke yeah so silent but deadly is scientifically accurate is that what basically you're saying wow yes but yeah there's like your pants to think about other layers that

that create that there's always your pants you gotta think about your pants please yeah the squeaky chair beneath you that may or may not be causing the fart or if it's just a plasticky chair is it echoing up i don't know or does the chair become like a resonance chamber and i wonder if like the colon like a colon full of gas is its own resonance chamber where that's amplifying some of the sound that i'm not sure of but there's some most of that study of like echoing farts comes along with some sort of bowel loss of bowel control where like you can't hold in a fart because you can't control the sphincter and so that usually is like both fart and stool and all kinds of gastro related issues and so at that point if you can't hold in a fart and the air is just coming out then

probably the colon's gonna echo it some more too because it's just like it's all coming out i know that there are some uh younger listeners to scishow tangents and to them i want to say i hope this has been a lot of fun your parents are just really working through it right now. And also, I hope that you just learned the word stool and that Sari worked really hard to not say the word shart. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter, at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on Discord. Thank you to at Yaidi and at Liz Does Museums and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode.

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And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Because how else are they going to find out how farts truly work? Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our editor is Seth Glixman. Our story editor is Alex

Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hofmeister 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.

Animals make all kinds of noises when they're surprised. And we know of two species of snakes, the Sonoran coral snake and the Western hooknose snake, that use a technique called cloacal popping, which is basically farting that's supposed to be scary. The cloaca is a multipurpose hole that- Not like our farts that just are scary. That's not the intent. Our farts, terrifying. They can be.

The cloaca is a multipurpose hole that deals with waste and reproduction, so there's some muscle control involved. make these low frequent popping noises these snakes rhythmically contract and release their cloacal sphincter muscles to compress the gas inside them and squeeze it out in sudden bursts just like a fart we were talking about and if there's other waste up in there, it might fling out with the expelled gas too. Undignified. Undignified. Look.

But scary? There's no dignity in life and death. You're already a snake. You're scary. You don't have to shit and fart. Pop pop. Pop pop.