SciShow Tangents - Growth

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Spring is upon us, which means a whoooole bunch of junk is going to start growing, such as flowers, grass, and little baby animals. So this week, Tangents is hacking into that growth mindset being displayed by mother nature to talk all about the science of stuff getting bigger! 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]Nishinoshima meters of growth spurt in 2020https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146935/nishinoshima-belches-ash-and-lava[Fact Off]Jackalope myth from Shope papilloma virushttps://gizmodo.com/rabbits-with-horns-meet-the-human-papillomavirus-5795996http://www.medirabbit.com/EN/Skin_diseases/Viral_diseases/Pap/Papilloma.htmElectroculture: lightning strikes helping shiitake mushrooms growhttps://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6463/ab7627https://phys.org/news/2010-04-lightning-mushrooms.htmlhttps://physicsworld.com/a/artificial-lightning-strikes-encourage-growth-of-shiitake-mushrooms/https://www.ishs.org/ishs-article/29_34https://www.jstor.org/stable/2255657[Ask the Science Couch]Measures of growth in kids (bone age or bone plate closure, sugar preference)https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2021.580314/fullPicture: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/580314/fped-09-580314-HTML/image_m/fped-09-580314-g001.jpghttps://www.hopkinsallchildrens.org/Patients-Families/Health-Library/HealthDocNew/X-Ray-Exam-Bone-Age-Studyhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4397276/https://training.seer.cancer.gov/anatomy/skeletal/growth.htmlhttps://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/09/26/140753048/kids-sugar-cravings-might-be-biologicalhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2764307/pdf/nihms100732.pdf[Butt One More Thing]Bat guano pile growth over 4,300 years https://news.agu.org/press-release/poop-core-records-4300-years-of-bat-diet-and-environment/https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JG006026

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 our science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. I'm smiling because I had an idea. Uh-oh.

That's never good for us. So here's the idea. So there's a little bit of a delay when we record this podcast. Just like if we all clapped at the same time, you and, to me, you and Sarah would clap together, but I would clap like a second and a half earlier. I think that right now, we should all try and sing Smash Mouth's All Star together. Oh, Hank.

And I'm not going to give you a chance to back out. It's like jumping into the pool. Let's go. Three, two, one. What's the first word? Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me. to the pool let's go three two what's the first word what's up i love that thank you for that i love that thank you you really made my day everybody people are gonna be projectile vomiting all over the place listening to that so thanks it's great to see y'all i i'm uh in our podcast studio at work right now which we used to record the podcast in this room you're on the old

science couch i'm on the actually i think i'm on the you're on the everyman couch yeah couch i've stolen it it is very nice in here it's a nice little place to get set up make a podcast it's almost like that's what it's for i did a tour earlier with a student group of the studio and this was the room they liked the most they were like wow it really looks like podcasts happening there weird like yeah it looks like that yeah, it looks like that, doesn't it? And yet... This is the first one recorded in there in several years. Yeah, yeah.

It is nice to be in here, though. And it's nice to see the two of you. So every week here on 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, Sari and Sam, are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I'll 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 from

Sari. What's huge around us was once very small, including the world that houses us all. These mountains and canyons were once swirling dust, accreting and heating and shaping a crust. Inorganic shapes ebb and grow with time as rivers erode or deposit more lime. But even more wondrous than the birth of a creek is the life that's inside it,

organic and sleek. An egg becomes tadpole, which then sprouts some limbs. Or there's sedge grass that sways in the wind's fickle whims bacteria that fester and then split in twain or thirsty fungi that swell with the rain there's growth all around us it hums and it sighs and we must not discount what's behind our eyes the growth of ideas or dreams or of us that which makes you you and me me and thus although at some point we crumble

to bits in the meantime we laugh and we sharpen our wits and make haste and make joy and make podcasts and so one goal of this life then is to never not grow oh yeah oh man really got me with the end there everything Everything. That was about the universe. That was beautiful. Yeah, to never not grow. I did while you were talking, Google, and a blue whale when born is about 1,300 kilograms. But there was one point at which it was a cell. Yeah.

Just an egg and a sperm. yeah just comparatively it's small it's all in scale you know yeah i asked the internet what the biggest baby was i said hey google what's the biggest baby and uh and it told me about a huge a very big human baby which isn't what i was going for i had to be more clear. I mean, chubby. A honking baby. I just saw a picture. I didn't see the numbers. Well, I wouldn't call it small. 22 pounds. 22 pounds, 8 ounces.

Okay. 22. Good job. That's a biggisy baby. But yeah, but even that baby was, I don't know, just some carbon flex at some point. That's right. So the topic for the day is growth, which seems to me like something that is possible to define. I think, I mean, it's less precise than if we're defining a chemical on a periodic table or something like that.

But I think we have a pretty good collective understanding of what growth is well there's like metaphysical growth where like i read i read camu or whatever but but mostly we're talking about uh you were once smaller and then you were bigger yeah so like increases in cell size or number or complexity sometimes development is what is used to describe increases in complexity, but you can lump that under growth too. I love that there are some animals that get bigger by adding more cells and some animals that get bigger by just having bigger cells. It's so weird. Yeah. So weird. Who does that?

Tardigrades are the one that I know of, but there's a few, I think, teeny tiny organisms that start out quite small and then get, you know, double, triple, quadruple in size, but have the same number of cells they have. Eventually that doesn't work. You can't go from an embryo. We'd have really big cells. We'd be such big, we'd just be a bunch of water balloons packed together. Big blobby's all squishing around. Yeah. So it's mostly like, yeah, like Hank said, single-celled organisms. Elephants do not have giganto cells. No. It would be very funny if cell size did increase with bodies.

We do have big cells. Like humans do? Yeah. Right. Like compared to bacteria, our cells are huge. I was going to ask, are we all working with about the same size cells or no? No. No.

Yeah. Okay. I think that like in terms of eukaryotes, well, no. I was going to ask, are we all working with about the same size cells or no? No. No? Yeah. Okay. I think that in terms of eukaryotes, well, no. I mean, there are some eukaryotes that have massive cells that you can see with your eyes. Eukaryotic growth can also mean growing in population. You say population growth is increase in number, but it's just of things instead of cells. You can also have a growth. It's true. But that's not really what we're talking about. But there's more of the instead of cells. You can also have a growth. It's true.

But that's not really what we're talking about. But there's more of the thing than there was before. And I think when it's metaphysical growth, you got more of the thoughts than you had before. That's right. And when it's a growth, you got more of whatever that is. Yeah. You don't have any other way of describing it besides, oh, it's a growth. Like, I don't know what it is.

It just grew there uh yeah uh man aging tell you what it's just a whole process i'm not getting those quite yet but i have noticed my parents they got some they got some extra things going on when am i gonna get my skin tags i'm just waiting around for them yeah yeah yeah you sort of like uh every morning you're rolling the skin tag dice yeah i haven't i haven't gotten the skin tag dice but i did go to the dermatologist for the first time in many many years and they were like we've gotta we gotta cut you up and oh just get a bunch of uh biopsies which is good because then i'll know. Yeah, yeah.

I got one. I got one of those ones. He looked at my foot and he said, this does not this looks bad to me. And I was like, I stepped on a pine cone when I was nine and it's been there ever since. And he was like, I don't think that's true. I think that I need to take a biopsy of this because it looks like it might be a skin cancer. And I was like, well, if you think it might be skin cancer, you should absolutely cut it out. But I'm 100% sure that's been there since I stepped on that pine cone when I was nine. And he came back and he was like,

that was some pine cone stuff. Wow. Wow. He even, he said so. You know, he didn't. He said that it wasn't cancer. He didn't. He didn't. I know, I know it was pinecone stuff. That's Dr. Hank speaking that it was pinecone stuff. Does the word growth come from anywhere in particular? Is this one of the, a caveman word as well? Yeah. So we actually talked about the same root word when we did our episode last season on green. Green and grow come from the same root. That just sounds our episode last season on green green and grow from the same root uh that

just sounds kind of like gruh uh which yeah same root as the the the protagonist from despicable me yeah uh-huh yeah he very big man started out really small really small yeah we saw like minions three he got bigger after that and he grew yeah so grew grew grew and grass grows and other green things grow and so we're all just like let's let's call them the same thing um and so it was originally used for vegetative growth like plants and then i think humans because we are very self-centered and we talked about this in the aging episode we thought of humans in terms of like lifespan and animals in terms of like aging growing older lifespan while plants were growing and then at some point we just merged those those concepts together but one thing that i found that i really enjoyed that is also tangential is that growing was set is separate

from blooming so like a flower grows and then it blooms um and you used to say that something grew and then it blew when it was done and so instead of it it blo, that's our modern parlance. And then somebody's like, we can't say that. Yeah, it's grown and blown. It grew and blew. And I like that. I think it has a nice ring to it. Sounds like a weed shop or something, right? Grown and blown, man.

Grown and blown. I feel like I know so much more now than I did before. That's what I like about SciShow Tangents. All right. And that means that it's time to head in to the game show portion of our show. So lots of things grow. Like, for example, this podcast. Thank you to all of our new listeners as we grow.

I know that grew is one of them. Oh, my God. Where am I? The number of games. Was that you stalling for time or what was happening there? Let's go through all the minions that listen to this hot... Steve, Bob...

Kevin, Bob, all of them. You know they're all listening every week. You know they're all listening. So today, we're going to do some incremental growth by trying out a new game that Sam came up with called Truth or Fail Express. It was really hard sam came up with called truth or fail express

so you can think of it's like a truth or fail meets this or that i know that you're a connoisseur of the games that we play on this show so you definitely know what both of those are right or just more simply it's like a true or false section on a test but more fun disgusting oversimplification i'm gonna tell you uh some kind of story uh today about growth in the animal kingdom it's up to you to figure out whether or not that story is true if you're right you get a point so are you ready hell yeah choo-choo hop on the truth or fail express i'm really stuck on grew right now. That's the problem. I just got like, it wasn't funny in the beginning. It's not funny now.

So to start out, we got pregnant turtles, which can lay their eggs in multiple nests. But the nests that get laid are not necessarily all equal. Scientists have found that the eggs that are laid in later nests are also given more time to develop before they are laid, and as a result, more eggs successfully hatch from them. Is that true or false? Sari knows a lot about turtles, I think. I think so too, but I'm not sure why. I think this is true. I feel like I have this conception in my head from somewhere that turtles lay some dummy eggs at first they're just like oh i gotta poop out some egg and then they get to a point where the eggs are actually viable i feel like that's not quite what he said so maybe that is what it's based on and i'll say that's false

oh sari as often happens you know too many things this is loosely inspired by the very thing that you're talking about turtles uh are able to pause egg development by releasing a mucousy substance in their reproductive tracts to reduce oxygen and that lets the female turtle be a bit more particular about when she will lay her eggs but that does not uh let them have multiple nests with different amounts of viabilities. Harumph. Why even know things? Like, why even? Why did I spend all this time knowing stuff?

Why did I spend? I could just not. I'm just copying off your test, basically. You did all the work. And we're getting the same grade. All right. Story number two. European moles are found throughout much of Europe, except in southern areas like Greece and Italy.

And that means that they live in places where they have to deal with winter. So to deal with colder temperatures, European moles conserve energy by shrinking their brains, which means they also have to regrow their brains in time for summer. Is that true or false? I think I'm going to say false because I think this is a different animal that does this. I'm going to say true because it sounds so weird. Just like, I don't need that brain. I'm sleeping. I'm going to regrow it.

So short. They've got a point. That's how I'd do it if I could. European moles shrink their brains about 11% for winter and then regrow them by about 4% for summer. Wait a minute. Oh! brains about 11 percent for winter and then regrow them by about four percent per summer now i that math doesn't sound yeah what's gonna happen every year it gets smaller and smaller i don't know this is just what my notes say they're not doing it right so they're not the only animals to do this in the 1950s scientists found out that shrews

shrink their brains a process called denel's phenomenon other mammals like stoats and weasels also engage in this and scientists recently confirmed that european moles shrink their brains using uh skulls in various museum collections so they were looking at different skulls to figure this out and interestingly when they looked at Iberian moles, ones that live in warmer climates, they found that Iberian moles didn't change skull shape throughout the year, supporting the idea that this change is driven by the weather. And it's very interesting to scientists who want to know how mammals can regenerate both bone and brain tissue and what the implications might mean for various disease treatments.

So if you can regrow some brain, we want to know how that would work. Hopefully you're going to do that. But not very much percentage of brain growth. Yeah. We want to grow just a little bit of brain. Maybe it keeps growing throughout the summer and then. I hope so. Before the summer arrives, they get to 4%.

But I can't tell you for sure because I don't have that information. Story number three, though. We'd all probably love a few extra neurons, but probably not the way that female mice get them. In experiments, scientists found that presenting soiled bedding from a male mouse to a female mouse stimulated growth of new neurons in her brain. Is that true or false? Can you expand upon soiled? Is it a little poopy? A little...

I think it's probably... I think that it's got at least pee on it. So now the moles made so much sense. This, I cannot think about any reason why smelling piss would make your brain a little bit bigger. Well, maybe you got to start being like, okay, where is this guy? Got to look for him. So you're going more looking for himself, you know?

You got to be on your game a little bit more. It's like a Cinderella situation. How so? What do you mean? I don't know. Instead of a lost slipper, it's like a lost pea situation of like, we gotta go smell all the peas and find. I suppose that makes some amount of sense. I'm going to say true because I think, you know, there's procreation on the line.

So you gotta really sharpen up. I'm going to say false because this seems silly. Well, just like when Gru Gru, you got to choo-choo-choose true on this one. Oh, wow. In 2007, researchers reported that when female mice were presented soiled bedding from dominant males, it stimulated the production of neurons in the olfactory bulb of the female mice. So it wasn't really in, I mean, I guess that's the brain. In their work, the scientists were able to link growth of these neurons to a few hormones in particular. Interestingly, there was no growth in the neurons when the female mice were presented with soiled bedding

from subordinate male mice or castrated male mice. In 2013, another group of researchers found that there is a similar pattern of neurogenesis in male mice exposed to female mouse pheromones. So it goes all the way around the tree and the circle, et cetera. Is that different than how other brains work? So that it's actually growth of more neurons as opposed to just more neural connections? Because when we get exposed to new stimuli, right? Yeah.

Okay. And that's what's different about it. Yeah. More cells. Eventually, we'll be able to regrow brain tissue more effectively. And if we have to sniff a mouse bed to do it, I think that's worth it. Sniffing something. If I have to sniff piss to get smarter, sign me up i'll sniff it all day long that's how grew got so big yeah that's why

he's the minion piss that's why he's the genius he is yeah it stinks in there it's stinky stinky in his lab so much minion piss yeah it's a huge amount of minion piss. It's just nuts how you wouldn't believe how much a minion can drink. It's just a mess in there. You ever wonder why they're yellow? All bladder. Oh, my goodness. All bladder. Those little guys.

They're big bladders with eyes. Yeah. Or just one eye sometimes. Sometimes just one eye. You know, evolution is a fickle thing. You need more room for the piss. Yeah. Yeah. That's why they stopped having two eyes. That's right. You only need one eye. You need more room for the piss. Yeah. That's why they stopped having two eyes.

That's right. You only need one eye. You need more space for piss. I love our podcast. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back. Now it's time for the fact off. Our panelists have brought in science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. They're not going to do better than reminding me that minions are just full, full, full of piss.

But they do have other facts that are at least a little bit close to as good as that. 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. In 2020, NASA reported that a young volcanic island called Nishinoshima in the Pacific Ocean was going through a vigorous growth spurt thanks to the volcano. On July 3rd of 2020, the plumes from the volcano rose as high as 4,700 meters above sea level, and as the volcano spewed ash and lava the island itself grew the geospatial information authority of japan reported that the southern shore of the island had grown at least a certain number of meters between june 19th 2020 and july 3rd 2020 so not

a very long period of time how many meters was it just Just gonna Google meters to feet. And here we go. Gosh, this sounds really familiar. Really? Yeah, I feel like I remember this happening. And it was, you know, it was maybe like 300 meters. What? Is that a lot?

That's a lot. It is a lot, but I a lot? That's a lot. It is a lot, but I guess they spew... But there's a lot of lava down there, you know? They're spewing a lot of stuff. I was going to say something like 20 meters. It was at least 150 meters. So that one is going out to our friend Sam. Sam, what do you got for us?

I'm sort of Tandents a resident voice of folksy country westernness being as i was raised in montana and all and as such i will regale you with the tale of the jackalope jackalope is a mythical creature of the american west looking for the most part like your run-of-the-mill jackrabbit except the majestic pair of antelope antlers sticking out of its head legend has it that these creatures are so fierce that jackalope hunters wore stove pipes over their legs to avoid being gored by their horns their favorite drink is whiskey and old west cowboys reported that jackalopes can mimic the human voice and can be heard singing along to campfire songs at night in reality old west cowboys and the myth of the jackalope didn't really overlap, as the creature was actually invented in 1932 by a pair of brothers slash amateur taxidermists from Douglas, Wyoming.

They stuck some antlers on a mounted rabbit head and sold it to a local hotel where it was displayed for decades and gave rise to a legend that spread through a lot of the American West, mostly as a way to sell souvenirs to dumb tourists. Can we wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Do we need a mascot for this podcast and can it be the jackalope? Because it can't be Gru. Yes. It cannot be. I think that's a great idea.

It's already taken. It can't be minions. They're full of piss. Yeah. But absolutely, I think it could be a jackalope. I think it could be too. I'm just out there saying. I'm sure we can think of something

that symbolizes in retrospect too. Yes. You know? Perfect. Maybe after my fact, you'll be able to think of something. Doesn't someone else have a jackalope mascot already? I'm sure. Why?

Of course. It's a cryptid. You can't copyright a cryptid. Excuse me. It's folklore. Okay. But weirdly enough, the idea of a horned rabbit appears far from and way before 1930s Wyoming. of a horned rabbit appears far from and way before 1930s wyoming they've appeared in medieval folklore renaissance books of natural history and the myths of indigenous people of central america

horned rabbits were seemingly even presented as real animals in various scientific texts until around the 19th century but rabbits having horns was maybe not so impossible after all in 1933 right around the time that those wyoming brothers were sticking antlers on a taxidermied rabbit, a scientist named Richard Shope was hunting for horned rabbits of his own after hearing rumors about horned rabbits on a hunting trip. Eventually, a hunter captured one of these horned rabbits and sent it to Shope, who observed that the horns were actually tumors. A colleague told him about a virus that chickens could get that caused similar growth. So Shope ground up some of these rabbit horns, filtered them through porcelain in order to trap any viruses that might be in there, and slathered the filtered horn goo onto the heads of healthy rabbits. And guess what? They grew horns.

Shope then shared his research with another researcher, Francis Rouse, whose further research showed that these horns were a type of cancerous growth caused by papillomavirus and rouse's research into virus caused cancers led to the discovery of papillomavirus and lots of other animals including people and eventually won him the nobel prize what so uh from like a modern standpoint historians think that the more ancient stories of horned rabbits could have possibly come from people seeing rabbits with growths hopping around. However, it's not generally thought that the jackalope was inspired by the same sort of thing, but really was just a couple of dudes gluing some horns to a rabbit because they had dead animals laying around. But it's still pretty weird that both of these now famous horned rabbit events happened within like 12 months of each other in the 1930s i would i would not think ah maybe i should if i put this like i would not think that's a contagious disease i guess is what i'm thinking

yeah i would which is like just like cancer you're like cancer is not a contagious disease, usually. It's very, very rarely. And so the idea that it could be is so far out. It's just so far out that it's astounding to me that that is a thing that someone tried and that it resulted in a pretty significant medical breakthrough and a Nobel Prize for research that feels a little bit lucky, just like you got real lucky for that one. I think, yeah, there was just a guy who knew about the chicken tumors, and I feel like he's the real key to this. He's like, hey, I saw this on a chicken once, and then they were like, ah.

You just gotta be paying attention. Yeah. It's the number one rule of science. Just look everywhere. You never know when it's the chicken tumors that are gonna get you that Nobel Prize that nobel prize yeah share your research with other people too talk with other scientists because then maybe some other guy maybe the chicken tumor guy will have the key yeah but you think the first guy saw the nobel prize and was like hey come on i could have a little bit of that nobel prize please doesn't say that he was ever acknowledged in any way. Nobel Prizes are full of injustice.

I've learned anything. That's very cool. And not where I was expecting this to go. Well, I almost wrote about how they can grow horns on mice now. Like in China, they've been growing horns on mice. So, you know what? We might actually have real jackalopes too that are hopping around and goring people. Oh, yeah. Any day now. Yeah. All right. Sarah, what do you got? Sometimes electricity can seem like it bridges the gap between science and magic. Even though

we kind of understand how electrons work, or at least well enough to harness their energy for our cities and our cell phones, when you get down to a subatomic level, things get a little sketchy, including how electric potentials work in living creatures. And this sketchy space is where science fiction thrives, like how Frankenstein's monster is reanimated from dead body parts with a lightning strike. But it has also led to real-life investigation into electroculture, or using electricity to help encourage plant growth. The general idea is a direct lightning strike can set a tree or any plant on fire, so that's too much, but some atmospheric electric energy or a strike on

nearby dirt may somehow kickstart physiological processes in plants that encourage growth. And electroculture, as far as i can tell isn't a super common area of research in part because it's hard to have controlled studies of things like thunderstorms and in part because there's a blanket skepticism around the general mystery of the mechanism yeah it seems like it's it's hard to have a lightning strike but it's easy to just zap it. Yeah. Just tase it.

Tase the ground. We're going to zap it. And there's a recent study that did just that. And it seems kind of legit to me, a non-expert in electricity or agriculture. So over four years, a team of scientists at Iwate University in Japan wanted to investigate the folkloric wisdom that mushrooms grow like wildfire around areas struck by lightning. And they published a paper with their results in 2020 in an applied physics journal. So to get a sense of how mushrooms grow normally, typically shiitake mushrooms are grown in hardwood logs. First, they grow through vegetative growth for months, where they grow thin filaments

throughout the wood. And then farmers can force the mushrooms into their reproductive growth phase, which is where the mushrooms push out the caps that we eat. From what I can tell, this forcing is usually done by submerging the log in water for 24 hours or so. And that switches something in the mushrooms to change them from creating filaments to creating the mushroom caps that we eat. So these scientists wanted to use high voltage electric shocks to see if they could switch mushrooms from that vegetative growth to reproductive growth. Extra good. And they created an impulse voltage generator, which is a fancy way of saying fake lightning machine. And then they exposed shiitake logs that had gone through

vegetative growth and been soaked in water for 24 hours to a few sequential, extremely short bursts of really strong electricity from various distances away. And I'm talking like a 10 millionth of a second and a hundred thousand volts. So equivalent to a large lightning strike. And they found that these fake lightning strikes caused about twice as much growth on mushroom logs three meters away, which is relatively close, than logs 12 meters away, which they used as a control. They were beyond the radius of their fake lightning. So not only did electricity trigger reproductive growth, but distance from the lightning strike seems to matter quite a bit. And on top of that, there were a set of three meter away logs that were exposed to daily fake lightning strikes for a week

instead of just one blast. And they produced even more mushrooms. So like more lightning equals more mushrooms, which is very cool. And their hypothesis is that the jolt of electricity helps disrupt the filaments more evenly and thoroughly than just the soaking alone and maybe it's specific to mushroom farming rather than an electric thing that affects all plants but still it's very weird zap a log with some lightning you get some mushrooms uh and there

might be more real electroculture experiments out there if we can find other ways to innervate plant growth so instead of putting the log in water they can zap it or do you have to do both i think they do they do both for the for the sake of this study they did both because they wanted to control for just the electricity presence um and more mushrooms grew with electricity this they didn't say this in the study but my guess is like so many people talk about, well, maybe the thunderstorm, it's just the rain that causes the mushroom growth. And so it's like the combination between the water and then the electricity gives it that extra. That log's going to be wet anyway. Yeah.

I just want, I wrote down something here that electroculture is the new hottest club in New Jersey. It has electrified shiitake mushrooms, wet logs, minions full of piss, rabbits with antlers, and also papillomavirus. That's this episode in a nutshell. Sam, you said you were making t-shirts. That's the t-shirt. Yeah. Okay, I'll write it down. Electroculture.

That is a really great name for a club. Yeah, it is. I don't want it to have any of that stuff. But if it had that name, I also wouldn't go. Well, those are all the drink names. Electroculture. Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are all the drink names at Electro Culture. Make a minion full of piss.

I don't think a drink named Papillomavirus would be a minion full of piss. I would drink a piss minion if it had like banana vodka in it or something. Absolutely. We have a live show whenever we go out to the bar afterwards. We'll make sure that they're pre-prepared to make the piss minion for us. You're going to gonna need a lot of bananas how many you got you're gonna

need more than that yeah when we do our live show at the taco bell cantina in butte yeah we'll be like get ready that's gonna be so weird there's probably only so many bananas in putte so we might have to bring some of our own. It's a little banana concentration. Yeah, I can import some bananas from Massachusetts. Okay. Just a suitcase full of bananas. Mm-hmm. It's another thing they have at Electroculture. So, this is, it's always hard.

It's never easy. But ultimately, grinding up weird tumor antlers and discovering papillomavirus and winning a Nobel Prize is just weirder. That's going to be our winner for the day. But coming into it, I have no idea what the score was. Hey, I won the first game, so. Yeah, Sam swept this episode. Sam swept the episode.

All right. Thank you. Congratulations, Sam. And now it's time to ask the science couch where we have a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. At Space Wizard 360 asks, is there a way to tell if you stopped growing for sure? Oh, I don't know the answer to this question. I guess it's just when you're standing on the thingy and they measure you and it's the same.

Yes, it's just when you're standing on the thingy and they measure you and it's the same. But like you keep growing older. Like you keep looking different. Yeah, growing old is a weird thing because that does not require you to grow physically at all. You grow older, you could be getting smaller and you're growing old. But am I growing? Am I growing if I'm growing old? I don't think so.

I interpreted this question as how can you tell a child has stopped growing if you're looking at a little one and you're like- Like when your bones are done cooking, kind of, right? That's right. Yeah, it's like the moment when you start shrinking. Once you've reached your peak height. Yeah. Yeah, well, Sam, I don't know if you were just saying that out of

every man i just say a lot of things you just say it is like it is when your bones are stop cooking oh that's that's when how we measure when you stop growing which i thought was very weird and cool how do you how do you measure a bone cook cookiness so you it's a bone age study and apparently uh the easiest way to do it or the most regular way people have done it historically uh is by doing an x-ray of one of a child's uh wrist hand and fingers because there are a lot of bones in that area and by taking a look at bone age, which is what they call this, as opposed to, I don't know, age, age, you can see how mature the growth plates specifically are. So we have metrics for what a four-year-old hand looks like, what a six-year-old hand looks like. And there are these cartilaginous areas at the end of your bones that aren't quite fused together that when you have reached your full height, usually at the end of puberty,

because of a lot of other factors, like it coincides with hormonal changes, it coincides with hormonal changes, other body changes, growth, like height, but also things like stress in your environment. And that's where the measurement gets a little bit more uncertain is like when someone's growth is abnormal or like bone growth doesn't match the records that we have of like what a hand looks like at certain ages, then like what piece of the system is unbalanced. But yeah, you look at the bones, you look at where your bones stopped cooking. And it's called endochondral ossification, I think, is what I could find. Or chondrogenesis is when when the cartilage and all the stuff around your bones kind of develop. And then the ossification is when everything locks into place. Did you say when? Like what age? Like, is there a chance of me at 35?

I got a little bit more to go. That would be great. Usually it's like teens. People stop growing. There have been anecdotal reports that in like 20s, there are still some growth plates that haven't quite fused yet, some bone. But I think in your 30s, you pretty much don't hold out your hopes for another little growth plate. You're kind of Sam-sized now. That sucks. This is the size of a Sam. Yeah, your oven timer went ding and your bones came out hot and fresh. Yeah, and you got hot, fresh bones, Sam.

Thank you. I don't want anybody to tell you different. I don't think you're right. I can feel what they feel like. They feel hot, but they don't feel fresh. They're so hot. Just hot and wet and a little bit softer than they should probably be yeah all right well if you want to ask the science couch your question you can follow us on twitter at scishow tangents where

we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week we'll be on your following page but maybe not your for you uh tab on twitter or you can join the scishow tangents patreon and ask us on discord thank you to Lee Larson on YouTube, at CrystalR99 on Twitter, and everybody else who asked your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that.

First, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents to become a patron and get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes, and special thanks to our patrons, John pollock and les baker second you can leave us a review wherever you listen that's very helpful and it 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 like this person on twitter who said hey scishow tangents i'm a

delivery driver slash grad student this show over the months since being told about it so thank you to someone for telling them about it they did what we said they did it has ranged from unexpectedly sweet to funny to interesting and genuinely informative i'm so happy that this week's guest judge this was back a little while ago delivered the most baffling fact yet uh and that was the episode with maddie sophia so thank thank you for telling 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. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz Bazaio. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish.

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 in. But one more thing. Some kinds of growth, like layers of sedimentary rock or Antarctic ice, take place over thousands of years. And in March 2021, researchers published a paper analyzing a two meter tall pile of bat guano in a Jamaican cave that amassed over 4,300 years.

By analyzing the poop layers, they learned that there have been different kinds of bats who lived there during different time periods or that the bats may have changed their diets from insects to fruit

and back again over the centuries based on things like the climate or what food may have been available to them. That's a lot of shit. That's a lot of poop. And an archaeological gold mine.

If only people did this, sitting in one place, pooping in the same spot for 4,300 years, we could learn so much. Let's all start pooping in the same place. Everybody. Poop in the same place. Bring it in.

Giant human poop pile for the next 4,300 years. Yeah. You have to poop in the same place. Bring it in. Giant human poop pile for the next 4,300 years. Yeah. There's no time like the present. Someone will thank us eventually for it. It's going to get way bigger than two meters tall. Yeah, that's for sure. That's going to be a problem real fast.

Yeah. We'll figure it out. We have to hang from the top of a cave while you're doing it. It's going to be great.