SciShow Tangents - Pee

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

Get ready for the podcasting event of the year, and it's only March! This week, we're talking urine in all sizes, colors, and consistencies! Better yet, you can watch us talk about pee over on SciSh...ow Pee!  Follow that link to see the full, uncut, hour-long recording session we did for this episode! Witness what a mess we are before I edit us down into something listenable! Thrill to Hank drinking a big old soda! Scream at my disgustingly long hair!Head to the link below 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! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsThank you to Patreon Patron Eclectic Bunny for helping 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: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Astronaut urine in concretehttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/f-sf-aut032720.phphttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619340478https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/12/19/217244/purified-urine-in-space/https://www.cement.org/cement-concrete/cement-and-concrete-basics-faqshttps://web.archive.org/web/20080316071908/http://www.admixtures.org.uk/publications.aspSugar ants eating pee, fighting climate changehttps://cosmosmagazine.com/sugar-ants-love-pee-and-it-might-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions/https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-02/uosa-sap020620.phphttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200206102706.htmhttps://cosmosmagazine.com/sugar-ants-love-pee-and-it-might-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions/[Ask the Science Couch]Pee across the animal kingdomhttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/569521/do-insects-peehttps://www.welcomewildlife.com/spider-basics/https://cdn.ymaws.com/arav.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/Files/Proceedings_2000/2000_35.pdfhttps://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/when-should-i-be-concerned-about-the-color-of-my-urinehttps://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-the-color-of-your-urine-says-about-you-infographic/https://jeb.biologists.org/content/221/6/jeb151894[Butt One More Thing]Dinosaur cloacahttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/dinosaur-cloaca-fossil.htmlhttps://slate.com/technology/2020/10/dinosaur-butt-fossil-discovery-cloaca.html

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I am your host, Hank Green, and I'm joined as always by resident science expert, Sari Reilly. This is the sixth episode in which I've called you our resident science expert. Are you comfortable with this title yet? I feel like it's starting to wash over me a little bit and just nodding as you speak through the intro, but the imposter syndrome is strong, where I am not an expert in science. I am just good at Googling things sometimes and I fact check you both when I can, but not always.
Starting point is 00:00:51 Gotta love being good at Googling things. We are also joined by our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Who was always here to be like, that didn't make any sense at all. Yeah, please explain. We're recording this episode as a video that we're putting up on our YouTube channel
Starting point is 00:01:06 SciShow P, which hasn't had an episode of content posted to it in two years. So it is an Easter egg. But if you want to see us in real life where you can see Sam's cute office and Sari's weird towel, then you can do that. Sam, I know that
Starting point is 00:01:21 you were raised in Butte, Montana and Sari, I know that you've been a nerd for your whole life. So I kind of want to hear the wildest party you have ever been to. Oh, I'm going to get in so much trouble. Do not tell me if you're going to be in trouble with the law. This is going to sound absurd absurd but in high school in my opinion i would very frequently have parties that were pretty much like the kind of movie high school parties i didn't see yeah red solo cups and allison hannigan and all that uh-huh my parents
Starting point is 00:01:57 were divorced and one of them was always out of town so weekend, one of my houses would be free to just get so, so drunk. I mean, if this is tying into peeing, there was pee everywhere, I'm sure. Yeah, I feel like the wildest party I've ever been to has either been, was definitely as an adult, and it was either VidCon or our staff retreat. Like that's, I'm just a boring man.
Starting point is 00:02:28 Yeah, I feel like I'm also fairly boring. I was often the friend who, if I would get really drunk, then I would put myself to bed or would like take care of my other friends. Like I had a store of Otter Pops for when no one wanted water. So I'd be like, here here suck on this sugar stick and then
Starting point is 00:02:46 get hydrated but in college my freshman year i was went to when i first real college party at a frat house in boston and i played beer pong for the first time and was like good at it and so i played a lot uh and i remember very distinctly walking back to my dorm in the winter and stopping to pee several times just like in random behind a bush patches of snow where I was like I don't want to pee my pants but everyone else was walking ahead
Starting point is 00:03:16 I'd be like one second and I'd just run behind a bush, pee and then run up, catch up with my friends and then keep trotting through the snow How long did it take you to get home? Yeah, what kind of walk was this? It's probably like a 30-minute walk. What the heck's going on, then?
Starting point is 00:03:30 I don't understand. Once you break the seal, once I start peeing after drinking, my bladder's just like, wee-woo, wee-woo, let's go. Well, that was Sari Reilly with the science poem, All Done. She just performed it.
Starting point is 00:03:49 So every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts. We're trying to stay on topic, but we're not always great at that, which is why we call it Tangents. We're playing for glory, but we're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play, and at the end of every episode, one of you
Starting point is 00:04:04 will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from me. Here's one thing, you know, it's no mystery. Everybody pees. Everybody pees. On into the future and in deep history. Everybody pees.
Starting point is 00:04:19 Everybody pees. When you have a cup of coffee, do you know where it goes? Everybody pees. Everybody pees. It's the reason that you never eat the yellow snows. Everybody pees. When you have a cup of coffee, do you know where it goes? Everybody pees. Everybody pees. It's the reason that you never eat the yellow snows. Everybody pees. Everybody pees. When you have a Coca-Cola and you feel something
Starting point is 00:04:32 stirring, everybody pees. Everybody pees. It's probably your body made a whole lot of urine. Everybody pees. Everybody pees. From your blood to your kidneys to your bladder to your urethra, everybody pees into the sewers down beneath you the structure of that one was puzzling
Starting point is 00:04:51 uh yeah it kind of overstayed its welcome uh yeah it felt like so our topic for the day is pee uh urine um i don't know what else we call it. It's the water part of our excretions. And I guess I should stop talking and let Sari define what pee is. I mean, you were doing great. It is not always liquid, but in mammals, like humans, urine is the liquid form. In birds and reptiles, it's solid or semi-solid because it gets mixed up with other stuff. And I think also just like the urine containing compound is a little bit chunkier. From what I can tell, pee or urine is
Starting point is 00:05:33 any excrement that is formed by the biological system that includes the organs that you listed. So like kidneys, urinary, bladder, ureters, urethra. Instead of like defining it by its components or by its state of matter, we define it by it's the stuff produced by the kidney and the bladder. Yeah, it's the stuff that goes through these particular tubes. But birds don't have all the same, but I guess they do have bladders. Yeah, so they don't have all the same piping, but like the cloaca collects the waste, but there are three main sections of it. There's the coprodium, the urodium, and the cloaca collects the waste, but there are three main sections of it. There's the coprodium, the urodium, and the proctodium, which-
Starting point is 00:06:09 What's the proctodium for? So the urodium collects urine from the ureters or bladder. The coprodium collects fecal matter from the colon, and then they both empty into the proctodium before being excreted outside the body. Mix them up. So if you hated someone, would you call them a procto-what? That one? Or would you call them the copra one? Like, which one is worse?
Starting point is 00:06:34 The poop bucket or the poop and pee bucket? I think the one where they both get combined. Yeah. That seems more disrespectful to me. Okay. Because then you're all the waste. All the garbage possible. And that one is the proctodium're all the waste. All the garbage possible. And that one is the proctodium.
Starting point is 00:06:47 Yes. You are all the garbage possible. I love it. Yes. Okay, I'm putting that one in my back pocket for when I insult people, which happens never. Only us on this podcast. Yeah. It's true.
Starting point is 00:07:01 Oh, God. That's great. That makes perfect sense to me. And I'm sure never has any kind of fuzziness to it at all. Just like its etymology has no kind of fuzziness to it. Parentheses, it does. But pee, the word, came out of an abbreviation because we know as humans, we don't want to say long words when we could say shorter ones. And so pee did come about fairly recently, meaning to urinate is from around 1879. Wow.
Starting point is 00:07:30 And the noun meaning active urination was first recorded around 1902. Wow. So like very, very recently, within the last couple of centuries. And it is a euphemistic abbreviation of piss. Okay. And it is a euphemistic abbreviation of piss. So we stopped wanting to say piss. And we thought, you know, it would be simpler.
Starting point is 00:07:51 We just say P. So like the letter P for piss. And then somebody tacked an E on to the end of it. Yeah, you had to spell it somehow. Why would you want to stop saying piss? That's like the point I had to say. I assumed that piss would be the slang that came later but no humans came up with piss long time ago it was um oh it's from vulgar latin so the the official latin verb meaning to urinate was mingare or mean i don't know if there was a
Starting point is 00:08:21 soft g but mingare which gives us medical words like micturition don't know if it was a soft G, but mingare, which gives us medical words like micturition. Don't know how that related to urinate because that came from the same stem as water. So separate tree channel altogether. But then people were like, that's not the sound it makes when you pee. That's like piss. And so then there's the Volger verb, pissier. Piss. And so then there's the vulgar verb pissier.
Starting point is 00:08:53 And then that became piss, which was used like commonly through the 13th, 14th century through a couple centuries ago. I would have not have gotten there, but it's onomatopoetic. It just that's what it sounds like to piss. Piss. They're not wrong. Okay, great. I mean, that was the one I've liked the most so far of all of the etymologies that we've done. Oh, good.
Starting point is 00:09:09 Well, I'll try to get some more vulgar words in there. Yeah, we're going to have to start covering some more nasty stuff. That's exactly the problem. Got to keep it spicy here on SciShow Tangents. So now that we're done shooting the piss, I guess we will move on to the quiz portion of our show. I've got a game for you. It's called
Starting point is 00:09:29 Recipe. Fun. So urine is a waste product. It's made of nitrogenous wastes and other chemicals that our body doesn't need. But just because our body doesn't want that stuff doesn't mean that no one wants it. Human creativity knows no bounds. And that
Starting point is 00:09:46 involves exercising some chemical creativity with urine. The following are recipes that involve your pee, and you will have to guess what you might be making with that pee. There are three of these, so you can get three points or you can get no points. Let's see how you do. They're multiple choice, so wait for it. Question number one. So imagine you've been exhibiting your wares at the market for some time, but the flowers, the bark, and the berries that you've been using to make your goods, they're not cutting it anymore. Never fear. This industry favorite recipe is here. Collect some good old-fashioned urine in a chamber pot mix it with some alum and then combine with your favorite vibrant natural ingredients to bring out their natural beauty are you making
Starting point is 00:10:32 a watercolors b fabric dye c lipstick or d potpourri all i know about alum is that in looney tunes when they put alum in their mouth, their mouth gets really tiny. I think it is fabric dye. I was thinking fabric dye also, because if they have it around in Looney Tunes time, that seems like the most logical thing to be using it for. You are both correct. One point to each of you.
Starting point is 00:11:02 Urine is a good source of ammonia, and ammonia is good at getting the chromophores in a dye to bind.2 each of you. Urine is a good source of ammonia, and ammonia is good at getting the chromophores in a dye to bind to a piece of cloth. That is a property that is so useful that there's a bunch of different compounds like this, and there's a name for it. They're called mordants. And in the 16th century, so significantly before Looney Tunes time, specific chamber pots and urinals were actually set aside to collect urine so there's like a special pot for just pee and then barrels of that stuff were sent to yorkshire to age and mix with alum minus the alum and mordant recipes urine has also been used to directly make dyes woad is an
Starting point is 00:11:38 indigo like color it can be made from fermenting the leaves of the woad plant in urine. Is dye making still a urine-heavy situation? I do not believe so. I think that we have eliminated urine from the dye making process at this point. Question number two. Now, it may seem strange to use urine to make this powder, but sometimes you make do with what you have. Just take all your starting materials, sprinkle with a bit of ash, and then add just enough urine to keep it moist.
Starting point is 00:12:07 Stir it weakly until you start to see your desired whitish powder forming on the top. Are you making A, topsoil, B, ceramic coating, C, toothpaste powder, or D, gunpowder? Oh, no. This one I don't have such a strong feeling about. Those are all powdery. Well, yeah, I wouldn't have such a strong feeling about. Those are all powdery. Yeah, I wouldn't have said powder if I wasn't going to give you four powders. Yeah, well, could have caught you
Starting point is 00:12:31 on a slip up there. I've made dumb mistakes in my answer choices. I've heard of people using urine for toothpaste purposes, like ancient Rome or something like that. So that seems, by deduction, I'll just go with that one because I have no idea. Sam's in for toothpaste powder.
Starting point is 00:12:50 Okay, I'll go for gunpowder just to diversify because those were the two I was caught between two and I have no idea. The answer is gunpowder. Though, Sam, you were right that urine has been used as a mouthwash. But they didn't do anything to it before they used it? I think that they may have let it sit around for a little while to increase the ammonia content. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:13 So one of the main ingredients of gunpowder is potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, which you can find in natural deposits. You can mine it or you can make it. Before we learned how to synthesize saltpeter in large quantities, sometimes we mixed pee with manure, ash, and leaves for months, and the ammonia in the pee would react with oxygen to create the nitrates that then bonded to the potassium in the ash, creating potassium nitrate. Useful stuff, that pee and poop.
Starting point is 00:13:38 Yeah, that one had pee and poop in it. Final question. Humans don't produce the only valuable urine out there, which is probably good for you in this story because you work in an industry known for its discerning customers and selective ingredients. What better helper than the rock hyrax, which looks like a medium-sized rodent but is actually closely related to the elephant? But you don't need to find the animal itself. You just need to find the ancient petrified mixture of
Starting point is 00:14:08 their urine and feces called Hiracium. Inside you will find an oily mixture that will help balance out your final product. Are you making perfume, wine, face cream, or cheese? I wouldn't
Starting point is 00:14:24 think you could eat it The world is a many and varied place I guess so Perfume seems like the obvious choice to me Yeah Because they make perfume out of all kinds of wild stuff Like that comes out of animals' butts and stuff You're right
Starting point is 00:14:39 Like weird sacs and glands Oh, I'm going to go with my gut and say perfume Okay, Sam saying perfume I'm also going to go with my gut and say perfume. Okay, Sam saying perfume. I'm also going to go with perfume because, Sam, your logic convinced me. That's good logic. My gut? Is that what the logic was? Okay.
Starting point is 00:14:53 And you are both correct. Hiracium is used to add a dirty note to perfumes, which makes sense because it is the combined urine and feces of a rock hyrax. it is the combined urine and feces of a rock hyrax. So the situation here is that colonies of rock hyrax tend to poop and pee in the same spot over centuries and the waste products can petrify into a brittle rock-like thing and the oil
Starting point is 00:15:13 inside has been described as having an intense, complex fermented scent. I bet it does. Oh man. And that, Sari, means that you got all three correct, and Sam, you got two correct. So Sari is currently in the lead.
Starting point is 00:15:29 But it's okay, Sam. There's a chance for you to come back after we go on our short break when it's time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. It is time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank bucks as I see fit. And to decide who goes first,
Starting point is 00:16:09 I have a trivia question for you. Cats of all sizes are well known for using their urine to mark territory. When a male cheetah marks, they will turn their back to the object they want to mark and either point their penis horizontally backward or upward by how many degrees? What?
Starting point is 00:16:30 Where's zero degrees? Where is zero degrees? Where is, I think zero degrees is horizontal. And they can point it behind them. Yeah. We need a chart. Just picture if it's shooting straight back, that's zero degrees.
Starting point is 00:16:47 If it's shooting straight up, that would be 90 degrees. It's somewhere in between those two things because you can't really go more than 90 degrees without pissing on itself. I'm going to just go for a nice, even 45 degrees. Every time it marks, it's just like perfect slope, right triangle,
Starting point is 00:17:03 going to shoot P in an arc an arc man i think they can go i think they can hit 60 if you ask me they can get way up there sam it's 60 what the heck sam cheetah p expert now everybody opens some tabs and look at those cheetah peeing it's wild i don't know how you make a penis do that but you do if you're a cheetah all right uh so that means sam you get to decide who a cheetah. All right. So that means that, Sam, you get to decide who goes first. I think Sarah should go first, personally. It's all that matters.
Starting point is 00:17:31 Be expert, Sam Schultz. So because bringing anything up into space is expensive, it's important to find ways to reuse or repurpose waste products. And turns out urine has a lot of potential, as we learned from Recipe. And one of the most obvious uses in space is finding a way to recycle and purify the water
Starting point is 00:17:51 in pee or fertilizing plants because of the nitrogen content in addition to water. But those are boring. Everyone knows about that. So I came across a paper that argues we could be using pee to construct moon concrete. Concrete is a really common material on earth. It's made of a bunch of gravel or rocks or stuff held together by a paste of cement, which is various blends of dust like limestone, chalk, and other things, and water. So in space, scientists think that moon dust could work as cement and we could get water from ice or possibly pee, but that's not the most important part, because a really tricky balance in concrete manufacturing is the ratio of cement to water, because more water means less strong concrete, but less water means the concrete is hard to mix
Starting point is 00:18:35 and pour because it's not pasty. So instead of just adding a ton of water, we can add a tiny bit, like one to three percent per unit weight, of chemicals called plasticizers, which, to my understanding, are basically compounds that can break certain chemical bonds and or push cement particles away from each other using repellent charges to make the paste more goopy and easily moldable without sacrificing the extra strength
Starting point is 00:19:03 in the final concrete that's been cured and dried. So on Earth, we have synthetic plasticizers that are like waste products from the paper industry or specially manufactured, and hauling them up to make moon concrete would be added weight. So that brings me back to what scientists from Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy have been working on with the European Space Agency in a paper published in 2020 using urea from pea as a plasticizer in moon concrete. The urea did better than one common earth plasticizer and no plasticizer trials, and it did the same as another common earth plasticizer in bearing heavy weights, keeping its shape, and surviving through simulated freezing and thawing cycles,
Starting point is 00:19:43 which would happen on the moon. So they say it, quote, exhibits promising properties as a super plasticizer for 3D printing of lunar geopolymers. But also, as scientists do, they don't want to promise anything before doing more research. And it's going to be more complicated than just peeing into the concrete mixture because ratios are so important. And the plasticizer they tested is specifically just like a little bit of urea,
Starting point is 00:20:07 not all the things that come in pee. But who knows? Maybe pee concrete will be a thing on Earth someday as a new eco-friendly construction option and on the moon. I mean, for some reason, it's much more impressive if we do it on the moon. But also, like, hey, it's just hard to make anything on the moon to get stuff there. So anytime you get to use something that you already have is great news. I never thought about how hard getting water to the moon would be.
Starting point is 00:20:36 Yeah, I mean, luckily there is some water on the moon. And we think maybe more than we, certainly more than we thought. We will probably also not get it to the moon from the earth because there's water in space and it's much easier to move stuff around in space than it is to move stuff off of the earth because it's heavy here. Cool. Well, we're going to have to build some moon buildings, so we might as well be figuring out how to do it right now. Sam, what do you have for me? Animals pee a lot and they pee all over everything, especially on the ground, which is basically the one place that animals of all shapes and sizes can reach.
Starting point is 00:21:09 And you might think when you pee on the ground, like Sari did in Boston, that the ground soaks it up, and that's it. End of story. And usually, you're right. But there are some creatures out there who can make use of this pee-soaked ground, and what they do with it could give us a new weapon in the fight against climate change. In 2019, Sophie Petit, a scientist based on Kangaroo Island, which is an island off the coast of Southern Australia, has lots of kangaroos on it, I'm pretty sure, made a strange observation completely by accident.
Starting point is 00:21:39 Kangaroo Island is really sandy, I think. And when you add pea to sand, sand does the same thing that it does whenever you add any other kind of water to sand, it gets all clumpy. So one night, Petit observed some nocturnally scavenging sugar ants swarming a patch of urine-soaked, clumpy sand. Hmm, that's interesting, she must have thought to herself, because she continued observing over the course of the next few weeks and found that the ants would return like in greater and greater numbers every night and basically mine the pea sand like they were little pea miners even after it all dried up. So Petit and a team then ran tests to see what the ants liked so much
Starting point is 00:22:17 about the pea. They soaked sand with human urine and kangaroo urine and sugar water and concentrated urea and there's other documentation of ants being attracted to urine, especially urine that has extra sugar in it because of complications like diabetes. But what this team found was that the ants consistently went for the sand soaked in whatever compound had the most urea in it. And why would the ants be so into urea? Well, many ant species, including these specific kind of sugar ants, have a bacteria in their digestive system that allows them to process urea into nitrogen, which is a vital part of lots of functions of life,
Starting point is 00:22:54 like making proteins and probably lots of other ones. But we knew about the ants' ability to process urea. But this is the first time that we've observed them excavating dry urine for its urea content, which seems weird. They must just always be doing it. We never thought to look at pee pee ground. So being able to process urea means that the ants can survive in harsh places like deserts and sand dunes that don't have as many resources because as long as there's kangaroos and other
Starting point is 00:23:21 weird Australian animals to pee, then the ants have an easy source of nitrogen and they can live their little lives. But how can this help against global warming? Another compound present in urine is ammonia, which breaks down into nitrous oxide. And nitrous oxide has 300 times the heat trapping potential of CO2. And it depletes the ozone layer, but it isn't banned or like it doesn't have any official sanctions on it or anything like other ozone destroying chemicals do. And emissions of it have gone up substantially because of increasing not very regulated use of fertilizer and people just peeing everywhere in my backyard and stuff. So researchers speculate that sugar ants could be
Starting point is 00:24:04 used to incidentally gather the ammonia while they gather urea before it breaks down into nitrous oxide. You just like throw it on a field, I guess, and the ants would just eat all the urea up and not let it escape into the atmosphere. So thank you, sugar ants. And in return for this, we promise to keep calling you sugar ants, even though you are more like pee pee ants. So here are my choices i've got space buildings made of p that's pretty cool pretty cool or i got where i got ants that like to eat p yeah pp ants cute
Starting point is 00:24:40 and i don't i don't know if there's like a big come from behind moment here for you this episode sam what why sam and the sugar ants are crying but with hers you're you're going to a distant world and building on that and with mine you're saving the one we already have man and beast to join together to save the planet. Come on. I was wanting you to fight for yourself a little bit. So thank you for doing that. Regardless, Sari is the winner of this episode of SciShow Tangents.
Starting point is 00:25:15 Why? You just wanted to see me wriggle around like a worm or? Yeah, you proctodium. Jeez, Sari just called you a proctodium. I know, I know. You're both getting meaner and meaner to me everyum. Jeez, Sari just called you a proctodeum. I know, I know. You're both getting meaner and meaner to me every episode. Oh, no. Sam, you're a sweet sugar ant, but really that means you eat pee-pee.
Starting point is 00:25:34 Oh, no. This is the meanest I've ever seen Sari. For sure. This is great. Well, now it is time to ask the science couch. We've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from at rmlin24, who asks, is pee consistently yellow across the animal kingdom, or is that just a mammal thing? I know that it's definitely not consistent across all animals, but I do not know if it's consistent across mammals.
Starting point is 00:26:05 There must be some mammal that has got weird colored pee. But birds basically have white pee, technically, right? Yeah. It's urine or something. I guess it's piss. It's bird piss. So the reason why pee is yellow is because of a compound called urochrome or urobilin, which is what hemoglobin gets broken down into and like becomes the waste product. And that's like yellow pee. So if you have hemoglobin in your blood, which I think most animals do with some very few exceptions, then pee is going to be at its
Starting point is 00:26:38 standard color yellow. And I tried my best to look for non-yellow peas. I recruited Deboki and we both used our Googling powers. Like scientists don't document pea colors. I would imagine that somewhere there should be a spreadsheet that's just like, what color is this animal's pea? No one has made that. And it could be you. Yeah. Please do because the descriptions across the internet are wildly inconsistent. So don't just mess around.
Starting point is 00:27:06 This is serious business. I couldn't find anything about mammals. Deboki found something about tortoise pee. Urine was mostly clear or colorless to pale yellow. So you got the clear side of the spectrum with small amounts of white urates. Caterpillars, to pivot in a different direction, poop little black bags, which I assume also includes their urine inside.
Starting point is 00:27:29 I don't know. Spiders, there was a website that described the little uric acid spots as either white or colored, which is not helpful. Tell me about spiders.
Starting point is 00:27:40 The two options. Yeah. Human urine can vary in colors depending on other byproducts that are in it. SciShow has a great video about it. And I really, really tried to look into an organism like a horseshoe crab, which has blue blood and hemocyanin in it. And I learned that I don't know about horseshoe crabs, but a lot of crustaceans have their pea glands by their antennae, so they spit pea out their front. But I guess because that pea goes straight into the
Starting point is 00:28:10 water, no one's ever collected a vial of it and been like, oh, this is weird green pea. But I imagine that the byproduct of hemocyanin breakdown is different than hemoglobin. Well, we just need to grab a lobster, and we need to strap some bags to its head.
Starting point is 00:28:26 Put a diaper on his face. Yeah, a little piss diaper on his little piss face. It looks like snowshoe hares have orangey red pee because of the vegetation that they eat, maybe. Oh, yeah. These guys are all on the warm end of the color spectrum. I want some blue pee. Well, you might have to go to a different planet. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question,
Starting point is 00:28:45 follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. That's at SciShowTangents. Thank you to at CatherineShue47
Starting point is 00:28:53 at Little Chris and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that.
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Starting point is 00:29:42 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 Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by
Starting point is 00:29:57 Joseph Tuna-Medish, and 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. The Psittacosaurus was a small dinosaur that lived about 100 million years ago. But just recently, scientists were able to use fossils and comparison with existing species to create a 3D model of its cloaca. That not just butthole used for reproduction and urination in addition to defecation.
Starting point is 00:30:42 That's an amazing headline to be able to write. Like we have the first detailed image of a dinosaur butt. Do you think one of the scientists stuck his finger in the 3D model of the hole? Oh, yeah, for sure. Wait a second. Can I put my finger in a dinosaur butt? How much? I think you could probably just show up and be like, hi, I'm Hank Green, premier TikToker
Starting point is 00:31:02 and science communicator. May I stick my finger in the butthole? I need you to 3D print every butthole. Because putting my finger just in a dinosaur butt, that's not going to tell me anything. I need something to compare it to. It's like there's a pain index, that guy's pain index.
Starting point is 00:31:25 Yeah. You have the Hank Green index for how far Hank Green's finger can go in.

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