SciShow Tangents - Monster Month: Monster Mash

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Monster Month meets its ghoulish end, and we’re throwing it a swinging wake! This week, all the monsters we didn’t talk about during the rest of October come together for a great big Monster Mash...!Halloween is my favorite time of year, and this one has been more than a little weird. But working on Monster Month helped make up for some of the creepy fun I'm missing out on, and I hope it did the same for you!RIP Monster Month! For now...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: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links: [Truth or Fail]King Kong suit experimentshttps://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00946-Xhttps://www.livescience.com/52209-apes-remember-ancitipate-scary-movie-scenes.html Thieving puppet experimenthttps://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/research-with-thieving-puppets-demonstrates-toddlers-caring-sides/Parrots wasting foodhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/science/why-parrots-waste-food.htmlSocial interaction puppet experimenthttps://munewsarchives.missouri.edu/news-releases/2015/0210-babies-can-identify-complex-social-situations-and-react-accordingly-2/ [Fact Off] Birdcatcher treehttps://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-tropical-ecology/article/dispersal-and-germination-of-seeds-of-pisonia-grandis-an-indopacific-tropical-tree-associated-with-insular-seabird-colonies/60178D05BB8FFDED4565F2EB72E9061Dhttps://www.sciencealert.com/this-tree-seems-to-kill-birds-just-for-the-heck-of-ithttps://www.academia.edu/16969627/_Birdlime_Sticky_Entrapments_in_Renaissance_Literature_https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/this-tree-lures-birds-with-a-free-lunch-and-then-kills-them/2017/03/31/27aa04c0-1309-11e7-9e4f-09aa75d3ec57_story.htmlhttps://www.theargus.co.uk/news/16882829.birds-killed-illegal-glue-traps-horsham-nature-reserve/ Bloodsucking (Capri Son) anthttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-12/uoia-dap120618.phphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9dsINb64Q0&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=AntLabhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dracula-ants-snapping-jaws-are-fastest-known-appendage-any-animal-180971061/#:~:text=According%20to%20Hannah%20Devlin%20of,them%20%E2%80%9Cfull%20of%20holes.%E2%80%9Dhttps://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/shadow-labyrinth-mirror-new-species-of-child-eating-dracula-ants-get-cool-ninja-names/https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-03/pp-snd032814.php [Ask the Science Couch] Organ transplantshttps://www.cedars-sinai.org/programs/transplant-center/programs/kidney-pancreas/abo-incompatibility.htmlhttps://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/programs/reconstructive_transplant/hand_transplant.htmlhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-019-0215-3https://jbioleng.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13036-017-0089-9 Blood compatibility https://www.rch.org.au/bloodtrans/about_blood_products/Blood_Groups_and_Compatibilities/https://www.cedars-sinai.org/programs/transplant-center/programs/kidney-pancreas/abo-incompatibility.html [Butt One More Thing] Yeti poop actually bearshttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/11/yeti-legends-real-animals-dna-bears-himalaya-science/  

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly horrifying, novice screencase starring some of the ghoulish geniuses that bring the YouTube series SciShow to life. This week, as always, I'm joined by the abominable Dr. Stefan Chin. Stefan, what's your tagline? Tootsie rolls by the pound. Sam Schultz is also with us today. Sam. Hello.
Starting point is 00:00:38 What's your tagline? The taste you can see. Oh, creepy. And Sari Riley has also joined us today. Sari, what's your tagline? Big ol' noggin. Nice. And my tagline is beef? Can you believe? Every week here on SciShow
Starting point is 00:00:56 Tangents, we get together to try to freak out, frighten, and terrify each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding sandbox from week to week. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but we're not always
Starting point is 00:01:07 great at that. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, you have to give up one of your sandbox. So tangent with care. And for this most horrifying month
Starting point is 00:01:16 of them all, we'll be doing things a little differently each week in October. And this is the last one. We'll be talking about science related to, inspired by,
Starting point is 00:01:22 or just sort of vaguely reminiscent of classic horror monsters. And now, as always, we will summon this week's monster with the traditional science incantation. This week, and finally, from Sam. While listening to
Starting point is 00:01:35 Tangents on this month of fear, you may find yourself wondering, what's going on here? I thought this show was about science and facts, not creepies and ghosties and blood-sucking man bats but i hope you see it's not such a departure that these ghoulish topics reveal something larger that monsters and science they go hand in hand because monsters are things that we don't understand from the earliest man seeing shapes in the night to swamp gas inspired stories
Starting point is 00:02:01 of goblins and sprites to To mold covered bread that brought visions of demons, the natural world with horrors was teeming. But then science and medicine gave us solutions and cleared up some of our more eerie delusions. Then as man began treading in God's own domain, new stories conflated learning with something arcane. Men of science pervert nature with unholy aims, digging up bodies and tinkering with brains. But society progresses and helps us to learn medical breakthroughs aren't something to fear and to spurn. But atomic power, now that's a different story. Our minds invented new tales of horror most gory, killed by radioactive avatars of death, or vaporized by creatures
Starting point is 00:02:43 with fiery breaths. And while splitting the atom does have a dark past, it also improved our lives Thank you. just like your neighbor, Bob. But we went to space and came back pretty unscathed and developed technology worthy of praise. Then public health crises and bad mental health systems inspired sex-hating psychos and their teenage victims. But thanks to scientific inquisition, we developed more empathy for the human condition. Now there's AI, fascists, and face-scanning drones, creeps on the internet, and cameras in our homes to give us fresh fodder for stories of fright and keep us awake through the long, shadowy night. And while fear seems to have a dastardly grip, on everyone's lives may you now be equipped with knowledge that we hope these episodes imbue.
Starting point is 00:03:39 Science create monsters, but it helps kill them too. That was my really long pause. That was the whole history, yeah. That's the whole episode right there. That's it. See ya, folks. Yeah, Sam was like, I think a poem, but also just a short history of everything. Just the human story.
Starting point is 00:03:58 And so our topic for the day is the monster mash. Yes, it's all monsters, great and small, that didn't fit into one of our previous categories. Great. Sari, what's a monster and what is a mash? I don't know. Anything strange, I think we categorized into monster. They've been created as parts of myth, but also as adjectives to describe the weird or the arcane in the everyday life, like a two-headed calf that's born.
Starting point is 00:04:31 It's like, ah, it's not regular. It's a monster. I guess there's something animalistic to me about the word monster that, like, I don't know, like a ghost doesn't quite. You've got to be able to slap it. Yes. Or even like a witch where it's like a human based. Is a vampire a monster?
Starting point is 00:04:54 I don't know. Well, I'd say one kind of like way to describe a monster is something that exists singularly. It's like one of a kind. So like Frankenstein's monster is a monster because he's the only Frankenstein's monster. But like like a vampire there's a bunch of vampires or a witch there's like a coven of witches so yeah i think i think in a way technically speaking you could be right about that i like the idea that a monster is singular that's one it is the only of its kind
Starting point is 00:05:20 but i don't i think that that could very well be a definition but certainly doesn't need to be also apparently people can be monsters too people are the only real monster in fact sari is there an origin to this word monster it seems like there would be yes so monster probably derives from latin words um monstrare which means to demonstrate and monere or monere which means to warn so they're like portentous i think they reveal like our fears and our fears made real that's sort of the origin of it then a mash is just what happens when you squish a potato. Potatoes. That was a dance craze of the 1960s also. Was it actually? Yeah, the mashed potato became the monster mash.
Starting point is 00:06:11 And now it is time for... I have brought in three facts with which to torment my co-podcasters. Only one of those facts is real. The other panelists have to figure it out either by deduction or wild guess, which is the true fact. If you do, you get a Sam Buck. If you're tricked, then I get the Sam Buck. You can play along at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents
Starting point is 00:06:34 where we will have already posted a tweet where you can vote on the fact that you think is the most likely. And I would like to tell the three of you three facts in which monsters were created for science and not in the Frankenstein's monster way, but in the real world way,
Starting point is 00:06:52 because scientists can take inspiration from movies when they're conducting their experiments. So which of the following experiments using a famous monster to study animal behavior is real? Fact number one, scientists filmed a short movie featuring King Kong who burst into a room and then attacked a human actor. And that movie was shown to apes. And then a day later, it was shown to the apes again to test whether or not the apes could remember what happened in the movie. Fact number two, scientists wanted to test whether or not the apes could remember what happened in the movie. Fact number two, scientists
Starting point is 00:07:26 wanted to test whether parrots were more likely to eat faster if they were faced with a novel threat. So they placed food on a rotating table and then they used hand puppets to rotate the table around toward themselves to steal the food if the birds didn't eat it fast enough. And they used hand puppets to do this. And the hand puppets they bought were yes licensed aliens puppets from the movie aliens just to make it really creepy or fact number three scientists created a maze for rats to solve but once the rats learned how to solve the maze they introduced a robotic robotic toy Godzilla that would move around the maze and push walls around. And then they would study how the rat's brains handled a physical space that they had already learned about, but that was actively changing while they were moving through it.
Starting point is 00:08:17 So number one, we've got scientists using a King Kong suit to make a movie to study apes' memory. Fact number two, scientists using an alien puppet to study how parrots would eat when faced with a threat. Or three, scientists using a Godzilla robot to destroy rats' reactions to chaos and a space that they understood changing as they moved through it. The Godzilla doesn't seem necessary to the last. Yeah. They all seem unnecessary.
Starting point is 00:08:47 That's my problem. It's like they all seem so fake. The King Kong movie makes some sense to me because it's like apes watching an ape. I don't know. Yeah. If you had access to gorillas, it seems like eventually you'd wonder
Starting point is 00:09:00 if they would like a gorilla suit. Yeah. And you'd just go, you'd try it out. Or they'd like, you know, just play them the, what was that series of movies? Planet of the Apes and see if they like it. Don't play them that one. Don't learn too much. Don't teach them.
Starting point is 00:09:14 Oh, no. Would it even look like a monkey to them or an ape to them? Because like if someone was in a bad human suit, that wouldn't be. No, that wouldn't be good. Well, yeah, I guess that's not the point of the research, just if they remember it. Do animals experience the uncanny valley? They'd be seeing it all the time, walking down the street, seeing cartoon dogs and stuff. They'd be like, ugh.
Starting point is 00:09:37 But yeah, I also don't know for the last one about the rats in the maze. I don't know. This study confuses me. This sounds fake because I'm confused. So they're able to like study mice, like what's happening in a mouse brain or a rat brain in this case, while they're moving around a maze and learning it.
Starting point is 00:09:55 And they're able to study what it looks like to them as they're moving through it after they've learned it. And they're able to study what their brains look like when they're thinking they're going to move through a maze, but actually encountering chaos. Is the idea. And it gets a Godzilla robot. There's too many variables.
Starting point is 00:10:12 Yeah. He would muddy the scientific process, I think, for he to be there. Yeah. Maybe the scientists didn't want to have like a human doing it. The rats know about people, but not about Godzilla robots. And then the alien hand puppets. That feels fine. I do also feel like I've heard a story of like a bird that fell in love with a puppet or something like that.
Starting point is 00:10:34 Or it was like its little baby. Weird. Maybe that's what it is. But I think I like the sound of that one. I feel like birds could fall in love with anything. Wow. Jeez. I guess I'll go with the King Kong suit.
Starting point is 00:10:50 I hate all of them. I'm down with the King Kong one. I don't have any information here. That one just appeals to me. Don't you think that now that you're locked in, that that's just a retelling of the story with the tape of the ape that comes in the back and like beats his chest. I was thinking of that, too. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:08 Like a psych experiment about ignoring the monkey. Yeah. All right. The votes are in. And now it is time for you to cast your vote at twitter.com slash SciShow Tangents. Let us know what you think. Sam, you should have said that thing about the famous ape science experiment earlier because that would have helped me because that was the true fact. That's the true one?
Starting point is 00:11:31 That's the true one. What the hell? I'm bad at this game now. Yeah, I feel bad at it too. I only got one point. So like basically a guy in a gorilla suit or a King Kong suit like busts in through one of the doors and then and then like attacks a person. And there were two doors. That was important.
Starting point is 00:11:50 There are two doors. And then when they showed it to them again, all the apes looked at the door before the guy busted through. They looked at the door that he was going to bust through. They did it a second time where they had a shot of two like weapons, like fake weapons that the human then used one of them to attack the King Kong. And then when they showed the movie to them a second time, they swapped the location of the weapons and the apes still looked at the weapon that was used,
Starting point is 00:12:19 not the location of the weapon that was used. Cool. When they were remembering it. Can you watch this movie anywhere? I don't know. I didn't see it, but my guess is that it would not be deeply entertaining. It sounds like it's pretty simple filmmaking.
Starting point is 00:12:34 It sounds pretty good to me. I think it would be more interesting to see a movie of the monkeys or the apes watching the movie. Yeah. The one that nobody went for, which was about Godzilla running through the maze, I just made that up.
Starting point is 00:12:48 That was not real at all and it was based on nothing and you got me. The other one was based on an experiment that was done with puppets and kids, human kids. There was a table that would rotate and they'd put the candy down
Starting point is 00:13:03 in front of either the kid or a puppet. And then a second puppet would rotate the candy around and steal it. If the candy was placed in front of the kid, the kid would keep the candy and it was stolen from the kid. If the candy was placed in front of the puppet and the puppet stole it from the other puppet, the kid, upon being given the candy, would then give it to the puppet. What? So there's like a mean puppet and a nice puppet? Yeah, and would then give it to the puppet. What? So there's like a mean puppet
Starting point is 00:13:25 and a nice puppet? Yeah, and it would give it to the nice puppet. That's sweet. It's nice, right? We're not so bad. I hate this experiment. Just being mean. I like it better than with birds. I feel bad for the birds. I don't feel as bad for the kids. I'm sure they got some candy in the end.
Starting point is 00:13:42 And the birds you shouldn't feel bad for because it didn't happen. Oh, that's true. There is a video of this ape movie. It's great. It shows where their eyes moved. The movie was less entertaining than I had imagined. I liked it. I think it's good.
Starting point is 00:13:59 All right, we're going to take a quick break now, and we'll be back with the fact off welcome back everybody sam buck totals everyone is tied with one now sari and stefan have a chance to become the winner because it's time for the fact off. They have each brought science facts to the others in an attempt to scare
Starting point is 00:14:30 our pants off. The presentees each have a sandbuck to award to the fact that we are terrified by the most, I guess. Trivia question
Starting point is 00:14:39 to decide who goes first. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the origins of the modern haunted house can be traced to London and most notably to an exhibition
Starting point is 00:14:49 by the artist Marie Tussaud of decapitated wax figures. What year did Tussaud first display her macabre showcase in London?
Starting point is 00:14:59 So I feel like sealing wax. This is useless. Never mind. Because like when they stamp their letters, I was into that for a little bit. That was like, I feel like sealing wax. This is useless. Never mind. Because like when they stamp their letters, I was into that for a little bit. That was like, I think the 16th or 17th century where they stamped letters. So you think we had wax fever back then?
Starting point is 00:15:17 We were just making everything out of wax or what? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe like that's why I was just trying to explain my logic. I'm going to just go with 1831 Stefan I feel like it's later but then we had the Civil War there was no time for wax
Starting point is 00:15:32 I'll say 1890 the winner is Sari Riley it was 1802 wow yeah they got tired of sealing letters.
Starting point is 00:15:45 And then they just were like, what do we do with all this wax? And Marie Tussauds was like, I have an idea for you. Well, apparently some of the figures that she made were Louis XIV. Is that the one? Louis XIV that got his head chopped off? Yeah. Marie Antoinette. She went to France during the French Revolution, made
Starting point is 00:16:08 death masks of their faces, and then went back as fast as she could to display them all over Europe for people. So that's pretty grotesque. She's like a sensationalist journalist. Yeah, basically. But just with people's dead faces.
Starting point is 00:16:24 I'll go first. Arguably, as we've been talking about, some of the most monstrous things are those that harm other living creatures without a care in the world or seek power and success no matter what the cost. So by that logic, one of the most overlooked living monsters, in my opinion, is the birdcatcher tree. overlooked living monsters, in my opinion, is the birdcatcher tree. That's a common name that refers to several different species like Pissonia grandis, which have evolved sticky hook-like seeds that make sense evolutionarily as birds or insects sit and munch. Maybe a seed gets stuck to their bodies and then it gets carried away and planted in a new location wherever it falls off. It's like, sow your wild oats strategy., lots of trees do it, plants do it. But the problem is, evolution took the stickiness of these seeds
Starting point is 00:17:12 and dialed it way up to the point where birds get caught in clusters of seeds and die in the trees like morbid decorations. And they just like rot up there or pile up as corpses on the ground oh i i if this was a truth or fail i would not go for this and so some people have hypothesized that the bird corpses decomposing provides fertilizer to the tree but scientific studies around 1999 and 2000 have found that bird guano provides more nitrogen than bird corpses. So that's not a good reason. That's ruled out.
Starting point is 00:17:49 And then someone else hypothesized that the dead bodies with seeds could maybe like float like a morbid kind of raft across the ocean to spread the seeds farther. But then people tested that too and just like dunked the seeds in salt water and found that they have lower germination rates after five days and none after 12 days. So the trees need a live seabird to spread their seeds., which is a now often illegal category of gluey substances that humans spread on branches and use to trap and hunt birds. So they would like get birds to land on branches and then just stick them. And as far as I can tell, they are banned because it causes such immense suffering to the birds. So this is a monstrous tree, if there ever was one. You guess evolution created a bird death tree. What do you do when a tree just starts killing birds for no reason? As a human, trees are extremely easy to defeat.
Starting point is 00:19:02 So, I mean, you could chop a tree down, I suppose. I could totally defeat a tree. I'd probably be pretty sore afterward. It might take me a week, but I could do it. The birds would thank you, Hank. There are some people that are trying to clean off these birds. So when they see a stuck bird that's alive still, they get the sticky stuff off. So you could probably, I don't know. I feel like my hair would get stuck in the tree.
Starting point is 00:19:21 So the tree would have a one-up over me because I'd be in pain. But I don't know. There are people helping the birds from these mean trees. I can't believe that I still there are still facts that are that good that I've not heard. All right. Stefan, how could you possibly outdo it? You think that was horrifying? Just wait until you hear about Dracula ants. Okay.
Starting point is 00:19:47 All right. These are kind of horrifying ants because they get their name from the fact that they eat or they feed on the blood of their babies. What? That was the twist that I was not expecting. No. Not even Dracula would do such a thing. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:07 So I guess ants don't have blood. They have hemolymph. So it's like, but it's a similar fluid that transports nutrients around the body. And the adult ants apparently can't eat solid food. So they go out and catch prey and bring them back and feed them to the larvae. And then the larvae get all juiced up with delicious blood fluid and then the adults capri sun them and they poke a hole and like sip nutritious liquid from them why to eat this is how they feed the queen too because they'll drink from the larvae and then regurgitate some of that for the queen and that's just how they eat i don't know it's apparently works and so it's like it's like um well i don't know what it's like it's like if you suck a straw in your child it's called non-destructive parental cannibalism so
Starting point is 00:20:57 and they do they they tend to drink from the larvae that are almost fully developed so that they're like extra plump but the larvae are not like they're not affected they see they grow normally they they can they go on to live their lives with they all just have some scarring from all this puncturing yeah that's going on wow and if the colony is not doing well, then the ants will target larvae that have already been punctured so that they're like sacrificing specific ones so that maybe the other ones will will have a better chance. Oh, no. Capri Suns. Capri Suns with an O. That's good.
Starting point is 00:21:46 I did not think of that. But so, okay, so there's like a follow-up thing here, which is that I mentioned that they catch prey and bring them back. And the way that they do that is also kind of weird because these ants have big arm-like mandibles that they can snap really quickly, and that's how they stun or kill their prey. And in other ants that have big mandibles like this, usually they look more like weapons.
Starting point is 00:22:12 They're like pointy and sharp looking. But the Dracula ant mandibles have adapted to be much flatter, more like curved boards. And so they press them together to build tension. So if you imagine like you're preparing to snap your fingers like when you press your fingertips together that's the same kind of thing that they're doing except in this case your fingers are like a bow and arrow bow so it's like a flat board that can hold tension as you're like putting pressure on it and then they like let one slip past the other like when you snap your fingers and it snaps their jaws.
Starting point is 00:22:46 And we had no idea how fast these things were happening until these researchers took a 1 million frames per second camera and recorded them. And they found that the mandibles reach 200 miles per hour, but apparently that's enough for us to knock out these other arthropods that they're hunting. Although in the, there's a video of it and they're like poking at the ants with like a ruler or something. And when the ants try to bite the ruler, they, they end up flying off really violently. So it doesn't work out well in that case.
Starting point is 00:23:17 But it turns out that this is faster than other like trap jaw ants that have like snapping jaws. And then also the mantis shrimp punch, which is sort of a notorious example of fast appendages. So this is currently the fastest known animal appendage. Whoa. I mean, that's great. But like, I don't know why you thought you had to add to your fact. When they do drink their babies. They do drink their babies' blood.
Starting point is 00:23:45 I don't, like, you feel, like, it's like, I don't, there's no analog. Like, you have, like, part of your life cycle is, like, your baby eats food for you. Yeah. It's like an external stomach, sort of. But it's your baby. Oh.
Starting point is 00:24:00 No. But then you are the external stomach for your queen. So it's a whole. Yes. it's a whole yes there's a whole there's layers big chain it's a it's a circle of life wait does the queen drink out of them the regular ants no they regurgitate there's not as much there's not another capri sun yeah right okay that's good only the babies are juice boxes yeah yeah but again it's non-destructive sure but what's the rest of that of that phrase non-destructive. Sure, but what's the rest of that phrase? Non-destructive what?
Starting point is 00:24:27 Parental cannibalism. But then the larvae grow up to be, you know, they become stronger for their experience. I suppose that's true, yeah. Oh, right. Wow. Okay. So we've got Sari's fact that there's a tree that kills birds for no reason. We've got Sari's fact that there's a tree that kills birds for no reason.
Starting point is 00:24:50 Or Stefan's fact where ants turn their babies into Capri Suns. They're both horrid. Sam, are you ready? I think so. Three, two, one. Stefan. Whoa. Sorry, Sari.
Starting point is 00:25:00 Your fact was so. Yours was so good. I was 95%. There was no way Stefan was going to beat you. But then that shit's just wild. He knew too. He was so smug because he knew. I thought he was faking it. Me too.
Starting point is 00:25:18 Wow. Oh, Lord. Well, now it is time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our crypt of finely honed scientific minds. This one is from Allison Shortow 2, possibly, who asks, would all of the monster's parts have to be from donors of the same blood type for Frankenstein's creation to actually be alive? And she's written it so that I had to say it.
Starting point is 00:25:47 Boy. That's a good question. Does Frankenstein's monster have blood? Yeah. I don't know. He does. He's got a. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:25:56 Does he? If I. But if you get an organ transplant, does it have to be from a. I don't think it has to be from a person with the same blood type. Not the same blood type, but it has to be compatible blood type. Right, okay. Right, right, right. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:07 That is the case with blood transfusions too. So basically it's the same as a blood transfusion. That is my guess. Like barring the many, many difficulties of sewing together body parts for this. And assuming that Frankenstein's monster has blood and a circulatory system that works, then I think you would have to be compatible blood types. So that's in with the ABO antigens and then the RH factor, the positive negative thing.
Starting point is 00:26:38 Does it matter what kind of bones Frankenstein gets? Because that's where the blood comes from, yeah? If he had arms and legs from all different people, would his blood be weird? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a number of problems standing between Frankenstein's monster and reality. And having, you know, bone marrow from half a dozen different, like, genetic lineages,
Starting point is 00:27:03 I feel like it's probably gonna be up there like i think the immune cells produced by like one though i guess there are people with bone marrow transplants and they do it they they they survive so maybe that isn't a problem and i like the idea that if you like um if you if like frankenstein's monster killed somebody in like modern day now and they do like a they like swab around for DNA, like the crime scene investigators. And they'd be like, there was like 12 people here. The root of this question is really, does Frankenstein's monster have an immune system?
Starting point is 00:27:34 Because like skin has immunological responses too. Like skin grafts are very difficult. If you're trying to take skin from another person that's not yourself and putting it on, then there's a lot of immune cells. I think a lot of T cells in there and, and a lot of challenges that can happen with acceptance of that. So like at the seams of whatever,
Starting point is 00:27:56 an arm and a shoulder from two different bodies, will there be an immune response at all? If like he just doesn't make immune cells, then everything's out the window. I think. That seems right to me okay yeah was was frankenstein's monster healthy i know frankenstein's monster was very strong but i don't know if like there was kind of a clock ticking that was like there are like right now this is working but this is not going to work for long yeah that's a great question i don't remember how it ends i feel like he was killed by something it was like something Like right now this is working, but this is not going to work for long. Yeah. That's a great question.
Starting point is 00:28:25 I don't remember how it ends. I feel like he was killed by something. It was like something happened in the Arctic and I don't think. He just wanders off into the Arctic. Yeah. I don't think Frankenstein's monster died because his blood clotted or something. He did want to mate. So that must mean that he had reached a certain threshold of health.
Starting point is 00:28:41 Like all of his Maslov hierarchy, what's that called? Yeah. His hierarchy was met. He was okay enough that he was horny. Exactly. He definitely didn't have the flu because you don't want to do it when you have the flu. So everything was actually
Starting point is 00:29:00 probably fine with Frankenstein. Did all the parts work? We don't need to get in. He never got far enough to figure that parts work? We don't need to get in. Well, yeah, he never got far enough to figure that part out, I don't think. Woo! Alright, everybody. I didn't expect us to go here. If you want to ask the
Starting point is 00:29:14 science crypt your questions, you can follow us on Twitter, at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics from upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at SpaceHikes, at ManicMissMay, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final scores three-way tie for last and stefan wins with three which means stefan is pulling into the lead with a fairly substantial gap there if you like this show and you want to help us out it's really easy to do that you can leave us a review wherever you listen that lets people know that you like the show it lets want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That lets people
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Starting point is 00:30:02 It's the only way that we grow. It's the only way that we get to keep doing it. So thank you all so much for doing that. And thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. I've been Stephen Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz.
Starting point is 00:30:12 SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Haruka Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia-Pietro. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you! And remember,
Starting point is 00:30:33 the mind is not a coffin to be filled, but a jack-o'-lantern to be lighted. But one more thing. Scientists at the University of Buffalo gathered 24 samples of alleged Himalayan Yeti skin, bone, teeth, fur, and poop from monasteries, museums, and private collections around the world and studied the DNA. In a paper published in the Proceedings
Starting point is 00:31:12 of the Royal Society B in 2017, they reported that, with the exception of a tooth that came from a dog, all of the samples came from bears, specifically brown bears and an Asian black bear subspecies found in the Himalayas and Tibet. So they basically concluded that yetis are probably bears, unfortunately.
Starting point is 00:31:32 Some watchers aren't real, sorry. Halloween's canceled. Halloween's over with the end of this episode. I still think there's Bigfoot, though.

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