SciShow Tangents - Speed

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green. How did you guys convince him to do this when I can't get him to do Dear Hank and John? Well, I felt bad that day and I felt better today. What if you do like the first 20 minutes and then you let Sam take over? I just leave and I'm like, bye. Yeah, I think I might be good. What about if John took over?

Starting point is 00:00:36 Okay, John's just going to sit in the room with me, which will be very awkward for me. I think he's going to have to listen to your poem too. He is, okay. He is. Okay. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. I'm worried about how to cut whatever just happened, but okay, hi.

Starting point is 00:00:58 You'll figure it out. Since none of us have our siblings actually in the room with us right now at all, let's talk about our siblings what do we got and how do we feel about him i have an older brother he's three years older and he is a bit of a pain in my neck sometimes oh my god are you actively asking me to justify my when i am the opposite of a pain in the neck you can just sigh heavily over there. That's all you're allowed to do. How do you feel about your sister, Sari? She is three years younger than me. And I think we are also very different.

Starting point is 00:01:36 But I don't have a longstanding creative collaboration with her. And I think as many siblings do, actually got along really really well growing up and then we stopped talking once i was in high school and moved away and only recently we've started trying to do phone calls again so that's it's possible after a decade to like and you can also always start a video blog project with them and that that will really really bring you together yeah maybe then she'd be closer by maybe even in the same room with me if you had a video blog project with your sibling what would it be about oh it would probably be she's really into video games like she wants to be a programmer and this has

Starting point is 00:02:17 been like working towards that and so the only videos we have creatively collaborated on are Super Smash Brothers based, in which I was just like the second person as she demonstrated various techniques. That is big sibling behavior. You were getting big siblinged in that moment by her. I probably deserved it after being a big sibling for my entire life and a little bit lossy. Sam, if you had a sibling uh podcast or video blog what would it be about i have tried to get him to stream with me so many times in my life so that's what we would stream because he's fun he's a fun little guy and we play fortnight together all the time but that wilbur is a hell of a guy he's my best bud his

Starting point is 00:03:02 name's wilbur yeah his name's Wilbur also. Isn't that great? I'm the only little brother in the room? You guys are big siblings, and I'm a little sibling, but I feel like I'm the one that's in charge all the time. Maybe I'm overcompensating for something. Are you ever in charge of your big

Starting point is 00:03:20 sibling? All the time. Oh, okay. Though recently he has become in charge of me. If you're not aware of what's going on, I'm going through treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is the best kind of lymphoma to get. And it's going well. And I'm feeling well right now. It's been like 10 days since my last treatment or my first treatment. And so I'm pretty well recovered from the chemo, and so wanted to make a podcast, and my friends got together to do that with me, so thank you for that. Every week here at Dantids, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other

Starting point is 00:03:54 with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding to them as we play, and at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. But first, we must introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, because of the scheduling piece of confusion, will be delivered first by Sari, and then a second one by me. The record books are littered with distance over time, the fastest car, the fastest bird, the fastest rock wall climb. And we need the speed of light to understand the universe. But I fear that move fast, break things can sometimes bring out our worst.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Sure, we also have a record speed for the slowest of the slow. Sloths go about their day without thinking of that, though. You need not be the mostest when going for a run to stretch your legs and stretch yourself and just enjoy the sun so speed can stay don't go and throw all physics in the trash it's useful as a quantity not an excuse to act all rash the ever ticking clock leads us to measure thought or art but to take the steps to know and grow you don't need a breakneck start. Lovely. Bit preachy, wasn't it? Okay, okay. Tell me how to live my life. I was super confident that we were going to go in different directions on this, and I was

Starting point is 00:05:13 correct. Here's our second science poem for the day. I'd like to introduce you to the story of Howard Payne, a man who didn't want to bomb a car or plane or train. No, he wanted to bomb a bus, which is very good news for us, because the story became a classic of our day. But he was far too diabolical to just let the bus explode. No, he had a grander plan for his cinematic episode.

Starting point is 00:05:36 Once the bus hit 50, things got risky swiftly, because the bomb was armed and it would blow as soon as the bus slowed. He didn't count, however, on two people we'd all need. A dramatic couple thrown together and now they must succeed. Sandra and Keanu Reeves, I

Starting point is 00:05:52 need to see them, please. Delight my senses on the screen in the hit movie, Speed. Hey, you. That hit, come on. The topic of the day is speed uh sari what's speed it's pretty we've hit one that's easy to define there was there's

Starting point is 00:06:13 going to be very little to say here which is wonderful yeah it's great and you gave me knowledge too this is a little a little trade-off i know now know the plot summary of the movie speed have you ever seen it no did you know it existed before this exact moment yes but This is a little trade-off. I now know the plot summary of the movie Speed. Have you ever seen it? No. Did you know it existed before this exact moment? Yes, but only because I googled what is Speed to do the definition, and then Keanu Reeves' face came up. And I was like, hmm, that must be a movie that's not The Fast and Furious, but also has to do with fastness.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Great film. to do with fastness great film but speed the the physics concept is the uh rate at which some an object anything's position changes it's distance divided by time is the equation to calculate it and that's super easy as long as you don't have to define distance or time which we're not going to do. Yeah, a distance is like you walk a certain amount, time, you know time. You know time. It marches on. The SI units are meters per second. And so that's the easiest way you can define distance over time. You know, throw a ball a certain number of meters, it flies for a certain number of seconds, and then you can calculate its speed. That's a textbook problem right there.

Starting point is 00:07:30 And you don't have to care about direction. Like speed is one of the simpler physics quantities where velocity, you need to know what direction something's going. Speed, don't have to worry, just needs to be moving. And that's it. and speed can be slow too can't it yes it can be extremely slow even the slowest things have speed yep even the weight the small small wiggles because nothing is absolute zero and so that's right absolute zero would be zero speed but the wiggles around us have a tiny tiny bit of speed do we know where this word comes from yes this is actually surprisingly interesting um so speed for most of its existence in the english language meant not uh the the fastness of something it meant a lot of other things though it meant it meant things like power or might it meant things like abundance so the

Starting point is 00:08:26 speed of something is the abundance of something and most significantly it meant like success or prosperity um or help or good fortune things like that the phrase godspeed is like it came from that definition of speed of prosperity, Godspeed to you. So, I hope God gives prosperity to you. And then, at some point in the 1300s, scientists started getting more science-y. And we were like, I guess we need something for when things go fast. And they just claimed speed for that word. And starting in around the 1300s, that started meeting the rate of motion or progress.

Starting point is 00:09:09 And I think that has eclipsed these other meanings of speed. But for a very long time, it didn't mean that. It just meant like, good on you. Good job. I love it when there are those weird things that hang about forever uh like godspeed where it you're like that doesn't make any sense and turns out that it made perfect sense like i like by jove no one knows what jove is uh but it's the jupiter god it's god it's the god jupiter god jove and so it's by god but that other god uh so we have all these words that we say but we don't

Starting point is 00:09:46 know what they mean but they're because they like hung out as part of a phrase that we still use but i used to think godspeed and i've used it as like hope you go fast yeah that fool can probably really move yeah go to your next destination godspeed but really it means like it's those little wing shoes and godspeed to you but it really means like good luck well i feel like i know a bunch of things now more than i did before and that means that it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show this week we're going to be playing this or that speed edition because when you think of speed, you probably think of races, car races, running races, swimming races, anything that can be put into a lane or a starting block of some kind, and then you get put to the test. But the world is full of things that can't be physically pit against each other in a race for our viewing pleasure.

Starting point is 00:10:40 So to fill that void in the market, we have science trivia games. More specifically, it's this or that i'm going to describe two things that exist in the universe and it's going to be up to you to decide which of those things is faster that's easy to know how this works which of these is faster so first thanks to uh our many creative approaches to transportation, humans can travel very fast. But which of the following is faster? The fastest recorded submarine speed or a car driving at the maximum speed in Montana? Montana specifically? Yeah, specifically Montana's maximum speed limit. 90 miles per hour? No, we're not. 85? Completely out of our minds. miles per hour no we're not completely out of our minds used to be none used to be used to be infinite but that is that that changed the federal government

Starting point is 00:11:33 made us change it reasonable and prudent is what the science said yeah it was great i never got to experience or enjoy that but my dad did i think we should put some real money on this area you think what do you mean like how like betting on real races you know 100 bucks 100 i was gonna say one dollar the sam seems confident i would not bet with him right now the same have like a bunch of weird submarine knowledge we don't know about no i bet submarines are i do like the idea though of giving you guys money every episode. But not real money. Would you give us real money? Just I'll just like bust open my wallet and I'll Venmo you at the end of every episode.

Starting point is 00:12:13 Me and Terry would be at each other's throats. We wouldn't be friends anymore. Just last episode, Hank, you missed it. I told Terry officially she was my friend. And now you're trying to tear us apart? Yeah. I'm officially friend and family. And family as well

Starting point is 00:12:26 sam was had just watched fast and the furious and he's feeling extremely sentimental so it was a big i'll take it though okay i think submarines are slow as hell so i bet cars faster i think cars faster too i bet yeah i think so gooey down in the ocean, you know, they just got to bloop around. Cars are so dry. That's speed. Best feed, baby. You are both correct because those submarines are faster than I would have expected it at the top speed of 51 miles per hour. Designing fast submarines is hard because you get a balanced speed with keeping them quiet so you can sneak up on enemies.

Starting point is 00:13:07 In 1959, the Soviets decided to see if they could strike that balance with a project design, a high-speed submarine. They could sneak up and shoot missiles that American carriers and then speed away. And they used a titanium alloy instead of steel to keep the weight lower. And the submarine was powered by two water reactors that helped move it really quickly. And the final submarine was around 107 meters long and it held 82 officers and seamen. And during a test run in the 60s, they were able to go 51 miles per hour

Starting point is 00:13:37 at 100 meters under the surface, which remains the underwater speed record for submarines that we know of. Because there's a, you know, top secret things always happening. The Los Angeles class attack submarines today have an official top speed of 23 miles per hour. Pathetic. So there's animals that are faster than that. Is being secret definitionally part of a submarine?

Starting point is 00:14:02 Or is it just that no one will fund a non-secret submarine? Because I feel like you could try to go faster if you really wanted to, but someone's made the rule that you've got to be quiet and secret. Right, right. Well, it's not the rule. It's like what you want to do. Yeah. You know, that's your goal. Otherwise, you just put it above the water, and it'll go way faster.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Might as well as have a boat or a plane. You might as well have a boat. If you don't want to hide, just be a boat. And it turns out that at its maximum speed, it was extremely loud and it made it unusable as an attack submarine. So that's why that isn't a thing anymore. Round number two, though. Let's see if we can get some differentiation here.

Starting point is 00:14:39 An egg of the African clawed toad will end up facing the same dilemma that many other eggs do. Will it get fertilized and divide, or will it remain unfertilized and die? Scientists have measured the speed at which the signals driving either fate travel in the frog's egg. So which is faster, the signal for mitosis or the signal for cell death? That's not where I thought the question was going. I thought it was like the egg is going to fall off a cliff or something. No, yeah. It's literally the speed of signals within the cell.

Starting point is 00:15:13 Egg's got to be one of the least fast things on Earth. Yeah, but inside it could be quite quick, maybe. Death has got to be faster, right? You get the cell death signal and then mitosis is like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I actually want to fix things like that feels easier maybe i don't know they're both this is a toss-up i can't apply any of my biology knowledge for shame when i get it wrong but i'm gonna say death and i don't have any biology uh knowledge so i'm just gonna say the opposite of what Terry said, which is life. The answer was mitosis.

Starting point is 00:15:45 So mitosis travels at 60 micrometers per minute and apoptosis 30 micrometers per minute. So mitosis is twice as fast. The egg cells are around 1.2 millimeters in diameter. Just for clarity, this is the faster version of this is 0.00013 miles per hour. So it's not super fast, but it doesn't have to go very far. So this is pretty big. 1.2 millimeters, pretty big for a cell, of course. And because of that size, scientists have wondered how all or nothing decisions like mitosis or apoptosis get signaled and synchronized throughout the whole cell.

Starting point is 00:16:23 Theoretically, you could have a signal molecule or an enzyme diffused through the cell. And for a small cell, that's not a problem. But for a big old egg ready to go through mitosis, that enzyme would need two hours to diffuse throughout the cell, which is slower than the speed at which mitosis happens. And what scientists have found is that in the egg, processes like mitosis and cell death involve various feedback loops that create trigger waves that allow the signal to travel over large distances at a constant speed. And those waves exist in a lot of different contexts, including action potentials or the way that fire spreads through a field. So just like is also an example of a trigger wave. And so they were actually able to measure this in one of these frog eggs undergoing mitosis in 2013, which is remarkable

Starting point is 00:17:12 that you can figure that out. Yeah, what did they do? Stick some kind of metal thing into it, I bet. A speedometer, obviously. Yeah, they shot it with one of them radar guns. A speedometer, obviously. Yeah. They shot it with one of them radar guns. Yeah. All right. Our last question here, what is faster?

Starting point is 00:17:35 So to report a speed, it helps to know the frame of reference, especially when we're talking about things in space. So I'll give you a frame of reference for this one because it's going to be space. Which of the following is faster? speed of our galaxy relative to the cosmic microwave background or the speed of a recently discovered runaway supermassive black hole relative to the home galaxy it was ejected from i have no context for things in space correct yeah and i feel like so the way i'm gonna play this one is by metagaming it it feels like a super massive black hole being ejected from a galaxy seems so fast and it seems like oh just the milky way wow we live here i don't experience us hurtling through space i mean we've had the entire big bang and all of galactic history or universe history to to expand away from but you're right they're both very fast i think it's the milky way because i like the idea that we are unknowingly well we

Starting point is 00:18:36 already are kind of unknowingly besides seasons and whatnot hurtling through space so why not super super fast yeah i have no freaking idea. But it does seem like a trick question to me. So I'm going to say the Milky Way also. You're both wrong. It is very fast. The Milky Way relative to the CMB is 1.3 million miles per hour, which is no joke. Whereas that supermassive black hole is going 3.5 million miles per hour relative to its home galaxy. Oh, my God. So it takes a lot of energy to get a black hole going at all, but getting it going 3.5 million miles per hour does not seem doable, and yet here we are. In April, a team of researchers who had been using the Hubble telescope to study a dwarf galaxy, 7.5 billion light years from us, reported that they'd found

Starting point is 00:19:31 a supermassive black hole roaming interstellar space after getting ejected from its home galaxy. And it's around 20 million times the mass of the sun, this black hole. It appears to be traveling away from its galaxy 3.5 million miles per hour, which is fast enough to go from the Earth to the moon in 14 minutes. Scientists were able to calculate the speed of our galaxy relative to the cosmic microwave background because of a weird quirk in the CMB. It's the microwave radiation left over from the Bigarius constellation and a slightly warmer temperature around the Leo constellation. And scientists realized that those temperature dipoles are the result of our movement relative to the CMB. And we can use them to calculate how fast our local group of galaxies is moving relative to the CMB. Based on those calculations, about 1.3 million miles per hour.

Starting point is 00:20:29 Wild, weird. I don't know. We figure out so much stuff just by looking up. Where's that black hole going to? Just around. Just the next spot, you know. How long can you go 5 million miles a second or whatever? Forever?

Starting point is 00:20:42 Yeah. Oh. Okay. As far as we can tell everything's just going to go to kind of keep going roughly in the same direction it's going forever well that's weird that's the most normal reaction to space uh just like a where is it all't know. Well, Sam, you came out of that with two points. Sari with one. Next, we're going to take a short break. Then we'll be back for the Fact Off.

Starting point is 00:21:32 Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. On January 28th, 1896, Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent was given the first known speeding ticket ever issued for an automobile driver

Starting point is 00:21:52 in the world. How fast was Arnold driving? Arnold, you bad boy. You bad boy. Gosh, 1896, they could probably go like 12 miles an hour, i bet he was going 13 miles an hour crazy no he's probably going 22 i'm gonna say 22 trying to think how fast is a horse it's not just

Starting point is 00:22:16 how fast is a horse but like how fast should a horse be going yeah in kent in kent and then he was like i got my little automobile. I'm going to guess like 10 miles an hour. I feel like he was very slow. Well, Sari, that is very close. He was going eight miles per hour. The speed limit was two. Two?

Starting point is 00:22:39 The least bad boy speed out there. Yeah. What the heck? So he was supposed to be going two miles per hour which is so i like that is below walking speed yeah why would you even have a car at that point i need well to carry all the stuff i guess so that's true okay carry all that stuff supposedly uh in the story as it goes the local constable had to bike five miles before eventually catching arnold it was also the first high-speed chase what you bike so much faster than eight miles an hour don't know right maybe it was really muddy i don't know a really bad bike

Starting point is 00:23:18 yeah really bad road they should have had someone run the local constable should have just hoofed it an eight mile an hour car chase for five miles that's why you can you can people can run eight miles an hour yeah um not me though so that means sarah gets to go first in july 2012 experimental and theoretical physicists alike celebrated because evidence of the higgs boson, casually known as the God particle from a 1993 pop science book, was announced to the world. And we learned about it by smashing other particles together at really high speeds in the Large Hadron Collider. But before the LHC was in operation, and even before the book that gave the Higgs boson its nickname came out, there was a different superfast particle detected on Earth that captured everyone's attention, or at least scientists' attention. On October 15, 1991, the Oh My God particle flew through

Starting point is 00:24:18 our atmosphere. This particle is considered an ultra-high energy cosmic ray, which is anything above one exaelectron volt, or EEV, which in turn is around a billion times the average energy level of most cosmic rays. And it was detected by the FLIES-EYE Cosmic Ray Detector, which was operated by the University of Utah from 1981 to 1993. By analyzing the faint glow from the particle's interaction with air molecules in the atmosphere as captured by the detector, physicists calculated that the oh-my-god particle had an energy of 320 exaelectron volts. That's faster than anything the LHC can accelerate nowadays and is closer to the speed of light in a vacuum than we had ever seen before and, as far as I can tell, have ever seen since. To put this in perspective, even though the Oh My God particle was subatomic and thought to be like an atomic nucleus or proton, but we couldn't tell exactly,

Starting point is 00:25:15 it packed the same kinetic energy of something macroscopic like an over 50 mile per hour baseball throw. Huh? What? like an over 50 mile per hour baseball throw. What? Yeah. So like absolutely wild amount of speed and energy in this very, very. What if one hit me?

Starting point is 00:25:34 I think it'd be an ouchie. I think it'd be a big ouchie. And it flew through the atmosphere. Yeah. Right above Utah. It was a proton and it hit as hard as a baseball. Yeah. I'm having a hard time with this. It was a proton and it hit as hard as a baseball. Yeah. I'm having a hard time with this. It is.

Starting point is 00:25:48 Could this happen to me at any moment? It's very, very rare. So from my understanding, this is so rare and had never occurred before that these scientists did the calculations again and again for like a year to make sure that what they detected was real because it was outside of the realm of cosmic rays we ever expected to detect. Specifically, the oh my god particles energy levels smashed through a theoretical cosmic ray speed limit called the GZK cutoff, named after the three physicists who calculated the speed limit, which said that any particle in space with more than 60 exa-electron volts would slow down because of interactions with space radiation. And this, again, was 320. And since then, though, we've built fancier particle detectors and noticed hundreds of ultra-high energy cosmic rays above the GZK cutoff, though only a handful of events,

Starting point is 00:26:40 like 10 to 15, that even approach the fluke speed and energy of the oh my god particle if it hit you would you explode or would you just go i'll give it here in the gut i don't know like it has a lot of kinetic energy but i don't know like what happens when it interacts with another thing because we usually see it fly through the atmosphere i don't know if it like disperses that energy somehow, that kinetic energy. I think that there must be, it must be that because it's so small, it would have few interactions with the molecules or with the actual atoms. It'd have to actually hit a nucleus. It probably would just fly through you.

Starting point is 00:27:20 And if it hit an atom, it would probably ionize it really significantly. It'd probably destroy the molecule, definitely destroy the molecule. But I don't know that it would like hit with a physical force because it's a subatomic particle because it wouldn't be able to impart its energy, all of its energy into you. It's not a baseball. Yeah. It's not a baseball. Flying from space. You were going through, I think, the same things that these scientists went through, which is like, what the heck is this?

Starting point is 00:27:54 But the fact that they exist also means that they had to come from somewhere, which is an even bigger mystery. Yes. Because high-speed cosmic rays or cosmic rays in general usually come from events like supernovae, which are explosive and act like natural particle accelerators. And to achieve these speeds in Earth's atmosphere, the origin of these particles must be relatively close by. And as of a 2017 study, we know they're not from within the Milky Way galaxy, but that's about all we've narrowed down. So where they come from theoretically should be something flashy and high energy and obvious and like it is obviously this very energetic thing nearby us but we know the direction it came from right but stuff's moved so if you don't know what happened i forgot stuff moved damn yeah yeah speed that's super massive black holes are flying even faster than these

Starting point is 00:28:44 particles through space so I think this one's gotta be an alien and he's like yeah but yeah we don't know where to look because space is too freaking big and so the oh my god particle remains a mystery and I can't believe

Starting point is 00:29:00 I hadn't heard of it before researching this episode because have we found other ones in anywhere else? Yeah, they just don't have a name like this because this is the first and highest energy. But the next highest energy is in the 200-something exoelectron volts range. People are now specifically looking for these ultra-high energy particles because they are so weird. We've detected a handful of them. I forget what the statistic was.

Starting point is 00:29:28 I did not write it down. It was like something per square kilometer per century is, is like the rate of it. So like very, very infrequently, like things will happen. Frequent enough though. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:42 That like, maybe we will someday be able to use them to find out something interesting about something yeah john is back in my room hello hi how's it going good as tangents good i just found out about a high energy particle oh no traveling so fast that if it were to be able to impart its energy to you it would be like getting hit by a baseball going 50 miles per hour and it's uh the size of a uh atomic nucleus i think i could take that yeah i could yeah i could i bet he could do it on the arm yeah i'm just gonna stay here for the next 10 minutes don't do that oh i'm so scared that's gonna make it that's definitely gonna make

Starting point is 00:30:17 it take more time thanks tangents fans i'm wait you're not cutting me out are you i don't think i can i don't think it's possible to cut you out at this point yeah yeah you're, you're not cutting me out. Are you? I don't think I can. I don't think it's possible to cut you out at this point. Yeah. You're not, you're not going to hold the whole, I thought this was my tangents debut. I was very excited. It is.

Starting point is 00:30:33 We haven't even seen your face. I'm very excited about the concept. Yeah. Close the door all the way though. You left the door open. He just, he just left the door open. Okay.

Starting point is 00:30:43 Well, I guess that's how it's going be all right well sari that is a mind-blowing fact sam what do you have for us i don't want to do mine anymore needlefish are a family of very long pointy faced fish ranging in size from one inch to three feet that live pretty much all over the world in shallow and surface waters their relative longness is in fact so pronounced that they're commonly called long toms needlefish travel around shallow waters in schools hunting for schools of smaller fish which they can catch with 1.5 foot lunges which is all very normal fish behavior but in 2015 biologists off the coast of australia's heron island observed needlefish hunting prey and doing something very abnormal as far as fish behavior goes.

Starting point is 00:31:29 About half of the attacks on the prey fish were done by leaping out of the water, traveling almost six feet, and then plunging back in to catch the prey from above. Like they could see it six feet away and they jump out of the water and land six feet away? I don't think anybody's really figured out how they're doing the math on that one, but they are catching them. So needlefish jumping isn't weird at all because they're part of the same order of fish that includes flying fish, which are famous for their ability to jump out of the water and glide almost 200 feet through the air. And in fact, it seems like all the fish from this order like jumping a lot.

Starting point is 00:32:02 They do it to escape predators or maybe to travel or maybe even just for fun. I don't know. But none of the rest of them do it for hunting. In fact, these jump hunting needlefish are the first fish of any kind ever observed jumping out of the water to attack prey that is also under the water. So some jump out and get birds, but no other fish jump to get other fish. So the reason they do this isn't really as exciting as the fact that they do it i need to interject here okay and i need to tell you that these fish are not small i thought that they would be small some are they're called needlefish

Starting point is 00:32:34 yeah there are some that are very big there's something over a meter long yeah yeah and they have really funny pointy mouths that look very happy. Bad, bad, would be bad to get hit by. Just wait till the end of my fact. Okay, all right. Okay. Oh, no, oh, no. So the reason they do this isn't as exciting as the fact that they do it in the first place,

Starting point is 00:32:56 but it's not that the leap gives them the element of surprise. And also most of their prey jump out of the water to avoid getting lunged at. So coming in from above, you can't jump out of the water away from that. But maybe the deadly nature of the needlefish jump isn't so surprising. If you already knew something about them, these guys aren't just doing your classic lazy fishy flop out of the water to catch a bug or whatever. These fools are going really fast when they break the surface of the water,

Starting point is 00:33:22 like 40 miles per hour. And because some of these guys can get up to three feet long, these jumps aren't just dangerous to fish. Over the years, there have been several instances of severe human injury and even death caused by schools of needlefish swimming past swimmers and people in small boats, including people being stabbed in the heart, through the eye and into the brain, in the spine, and in the neck. And there's lots of gross pictures, so don't Google it unless you want to see gross pictures. All the places, basically, you don't want to be stabbed by a fish.

Starting point is 00:33:51 And then some. I don't have any. I don't have any places I want to be stabbed by a fish. Well, you know what? It's going to happen sometimes. And light seems to get these guys jumping even more. So night swimming or fishing with some kind of light can put you at even more risk. So I guess next time you're swimming or fishing like anywhere in the whole ocean,

Starting point is 00:34:12 keep an eye out for these speedy jumping fellows with a unique hunting style, but maybe don't keep too close an eye out or maybe one might jump right in your eye. And I've just found out that sometimes they do this in whole schools because I'm watching a video of it happening where a bunch will jump all at once and you'll be in a kayak like this man in this video I'm watching and just getting very lucky is what's happening to him. Yep, right past you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Jeez. 40 miles per hour, three feet long. It's like getting hit by a baseball traveling at 50 miles an hour made of knives. Yeah, knives and fish yeah nature's lawn darts or jarts what do they eat other just other fish not people they're not like i got one no i think i think when they get uh into a person maybe their lives into there is my guess i don't

Starting point is 00:35:04 think a lot of people are pulling it out and throwing it back in and being like, see you later. You'll get it next time. Little guy. Well, Sam, that is a very good fact.

Starting point is 00:35:17 I like both of those very much. And like the, Oh God, they will both make great tech talks, but I have to, just like Sari said, I kind of can't believe I didn't already know what the fastest ever thing was. Yeah. And now I do, if you only count things that have mass. And that seems very important for a science guy to know.

Starting point is 00:35:41 And the fact that we have no idea where they come from. Sari's going to pull away with that one. That's fine. But she did come into it losing. Yeah. So it's a tie. Y'all tied. Oh, thank you.

Starting point is 00:35:54 Because Sam's fact was so good. It was a good fact. Wow. What a nice ending for us. What a nice ending for us. Except it's not the ending. It's time to ask the science couch where we got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. All right.

Starting point is 00:36:09 At Scrandle Randall asks, what's the fastest a human can go before the body can't handle it? Scrandle Randall looks no good. Scrandle Randall is a very fast kind of name. He's building a rocket in his garage and he's getting a little concerned about how good a rocket he's building. I mean, my body can't—the thing is, bodies can go any speed and be fine. Because speed is relative, and we are all going very fast right now. The hard part is accelerating to the speed. And that even goes for me trying to run and like pulling my quad.

Starting point is 00:36:45 I could be going just fine as long as I'm already going. But the part that I'm going to hurt myself doing is the speeding up, not the being fast. But the big concern is acceleration, which there is an acceleration that no human can handle. Above 10 Gs is definitely

Starting point is 00:37:01 starts to be where you can't do it. But if you just spawned into existence going incredibly fast, you'd just- We are, we, that's what happened to you. You spawned into existence going incredibly fast. Okay. We learned how fast the- 1.3 million miles per hour. Yeah, the Milky Way is going.

Starting point is 00:37:19 I guess I am on that, huh? There you are. But yeah, yes, it is it is acceleration is the problem and we we talk about acceleration in terms of g like that's the easy uh one one g is the acceleration of earth's gravity which is 9.8 meters per second squared so like drop the apple on earth falls at one g we're all experiencing 1G in general. Yeah. The weird part is that currently you are accelerating downward all of the time, which does not seem correct, but is correct. And that is you are currently feeling that

Starting point is 00:37:57 acceleration. The danger when you change the amount of acceleration that we experience, particularly increasing the amount of acceleration, one experience, particularly increasing the amount of acceleration. One is that we are squishy. We have a lot of water and we have a lot of soft organs, and dealing with aggressive acceleration along axes we're not used to can result in shifting shifting of organs or things bursting in weird ways. And when it comes to vertical G-forces, then the main concern is how our blood is flowing through our body. Specifically, our hearts have evolved to pump blood to our brains under the acceleration that we're currently experiencing. And so if that gets any more or less,

Starting point is 00:38:53 but particularly more than the blood will start pooling in places of your body that are not your brain. And then your body can work harder to some extent to try and keep up. And, but after a little bit, your, your brain just doesn't have enough oxygen to survive. You will black out and die. And so the speeds, and specifically the accelerations that you've got to worry about.

Starting point is 00:39:11 3G is pretty fine. That's like a rocket launch. That's the Gravitron at the fair. You can experience about the same as a rocket launch and what astronauts experience. It's not pleasant. You get a little dizzy. I don't like that. But you can you can

Starting point is 00:39:25 survive that pretty pretty okay but once you start getting up to like nine or ten that's where you can't last very long like maybe a couple seconds to a a fraction of a minute but you can't stay under that very very long without your blood pooling a dangerous amount like anybody like like even a very highly trained person could not in with like help yeah couldn't survive that yes and there are seconds are some like for setting land speed records or air speed records um sometimes there are g suits that help mitigate the effect of acceleration on people's bodies. But I think the fastest recorded acceleration that I could find someone experiencing is on December 10th, 1954, a colonel of the United States Air Force named

Starting point is 00:40:20 John Stapp came to a stop and started just as fast on a rocket sled and experienced 46.2 g for a couple seconds and he was bruised and badly shaken and was okay though yeah he said he felt a sensation in the eyes somewhat like the extraction of a molar without anesthetic which is absolutely awful there are pictures yeah had that also happened to him i don't know i guess the 50s were bad i love modern medicine i doubt i could survive like six that's like uh i think the highest g force on a roller coaster is around six so yeah i'm sure i could do it for a little while yeah but i think that if you did it to me for a couple minutes i think i'd be done if you want to ask the science catch your question follow us on twitter at

Starting point is 00:41:16 scishow tangents we will tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week or you can join the scishow tangents patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at Eric Amir, at Daniel Brotman on Twitter, and everybody else who asked us questions for this episode. If you like the show and you want to help us out, you could do that in a bunch of different ways. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents. Become a patron.

Starting point is 00:41:37 Get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes. And I've got to send out a special thanks to our patron, Les Aker. Also, don't't forget once we hit 700 patrons we're gonna do a minions movie commentary so go subscribe be a part of the we're almost there uh and so you could be the reason we get there so if you haven't already become a patron at patreon.com slash scishow tangents uh do that because we have to see

Starting point is 00:42:01 the piss minions second you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's super 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. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz.

Starting point is 00:42:17 SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our associate producer is Faith Evelyn Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Tabuki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Our executive producers are Nicole Sweeney and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Skippers look like a cross between a butterfly and a moth.

Starting point is 00:43:06 They're active during the daytime, but have a fat, fuzzy body. Skipper caterpillars are small and green and make little shelters by rolling themselves up in leaves. That's really cute. And in order to keep their leaf rolls clean and avoid attracting predators, they poke their butts out of one end and fling their poop far away. Specifically, they have an anal plate that covers their butthole that's held shut by an anal comb structure. When their hemolymph pressure builds up enough, the anal comb latch bursts open

Starting point is 00:43:31 to shoot a pellet of frass, aka poop, away at a speed of around 1.3 meters per second or more, which is pretty dang fast given their tiny bodies. Oh! They're just dull poop shooters. Pew pew pew i love that for them get away that's not going to be good for anybody is that like fast enough to kill a bug if it hits a

Starting point is 00:43:54 bug it's it's like it's like a baseball going 50 miles an hour

SciShow Tangents - Speed

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