SciShow Tangents - Spit

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

You need to clean a smudge of your glasses? Use some spit! Gotta make some food moist so you can swallow it? Why not try spit?  Lips too dry to whistle a tune? My friend, spit is the bodily excretion for you! Spit: don't leave home without it!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]Minor salivary glandshttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-may-have-discovered-new-organ-set-salivary-glands-hidden-your-head-180976104/[Fact Off]Bowerbird making “paint” out of salivahttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3996615/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2005.0908-8857.03549.xhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347213001097?via%3Dihubhttps://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0325https://australian.museum/learn/animals/birds/satin-bowerbird/https://australian.museum/learn/animals/birds/satin-bowerbird/Spitting cobras evolved to defend against hominids throwing rockshttps://www.newsweek.com/how-it-feels-acobra-spits-face-revealed-excruciating-detail-1749490https://www.earthtouchnews.com/discoveries/discoveries/spitting-cobras-may-have-evolved-unique-venom-to-defend-from-ancient-humans/https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/01/study-did-cobras-first-spit-venom-scare-pre-humans[Ask the Science Couch]Compressing salivary glands aka “gleeking”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542272/https://www.health.com/mind-body/what-is-gleekinghttp://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/pregastric/salivary.html [Butt One More Thing]Dung-spitting competitionshttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/dung-spitting-contest-northern-ireland_n_55ae6aebe4b0a9b9485290c1https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/bokdrol-spoeg/https://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2014/8/1/5960987/spitting-antelope-poop-is-a-sport-kudu-bokdrol-spoeg

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Do you guys want to tell people about the cutest thing that you do? I'm a 35-year-old man, Hank. I want to tell people. Yeah, I don't even know. Sam's like, I'm a 35-year-old man. I do so many cute things. Which one do you want me to pick? That's true.

No, I'm talking about in our Show Flow document, this cute thing that you did. Oh, that's Faith. AP Faith does the cursor part. That's her signature move. To explain what it is, it's basically a little part of the document that we use the Show Flow to follow the show

that has trees. It's a square of tree emojis. And inside of it are various little animal emojis and other tree emojis. There's like a squirrel right now and a bee and a dog, and you can put your cursor. You can just click and your cursor can hang out in the cursor park, or you could maybe find a meat emoji and feed one of the little animals, some meat or something.

And it is very cute. Every time I open a dock and see it, it makes me much happier than I was before I saw it. Yeah. Well, the thing is, it's weird that the thing shows everybody what you've recently clicked on. You know what the worst part is?

When you have to highlight and search something because you don't know what it is, and then everybody in the writing pitch document can see you don't know what this thing is, and in the writing the writing pitch document can see you don't know what this thing is and then you're like uh sorry guys i'm stupid but i'm gonna have to copy paste this real quick you know what's even worse editing a script live while people are watching and accepting your suggestions or rejecting them or like leaving comments on it and it's like i cannot work under this pressure.

Why did we create this terrible system? I cannot write if I know someone else is in the doc. I open a copy and I start writing in the copy. I'm like, I cannot think about someone watching me write. I just pretend they're not there. I have, I've had to, as a consequence of my writing jobs, to just be like, they don't exist. They're not there i have i've had to as a consequence of my writing jobs to just be like they don't exist they're not looking they've just like walked away from their computer i've got to do it now but then you see their cursor move and you're like panic leave then i go into the chat

and say please i'm working here i'm working here i'm working here oh I'm working here. I'm working here. Oh, that was the guy from the Patreon-only tangents. From the Patreon bonus episode, yeah. He came back. Only the patrons, but all about that guy. Yeah, you can write messages in the cursor park, but mostly you put your cursor in the cursor park. Yeah.

So you don't have to worry about other people thinking about where your cursor is. It's like the stupidest concern, but I have it. It's legitimate. You know what actually is really helpful? It's really helpful to hear you say that because I do too. And now it's just out there

and I know other people think about it. Thank you. I just wanted my cursor to hang out in the cursor park, which is a nice place specifically for cursors that has squirrels and dogs and a flamingo. All right, every week here on SciShow Tantrums, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other 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 as we play. At the end of the episode, one of them will be the winner. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week is from me. It's extremely important, I'm sorry to say, that your food hole is always wet. It simply has to be this way, though I think you might rather forget. When it gets dry, it's very uncool. You can't eat the food on your plate. But I also think that all of that drool really just isn't that great but there is no doubt i think we all know we'd be quite lost without it

lubricating our mouths digesting our food please let's just accept our spit as spit is the topic for the day do you hate i don't love it look i don't i don't i don't hate spit, but I hate thinking about the fact that I have a wet hole in my face. You have several. Like your eyes are wet holes too. Your nose. Your ear can get quite wet if you allow it. Yeah, I guess. Your ears are mostly not wet.

Your nose holes, I don't know. Mine aren't usually wet, which can actually be a problem for me. They're not adequately wet. It's Montana. I like spit because it's like you have a little cleaning solution everywhere you go. Just have a little drink wherever you go. A little drink. A little refresher.

Yeah, you thirsty? Swallow. That's how it works. that's how it works I do occasionally though I'm not proud of it get it on the glasses for a good clean spit shine no shame in that

well I think what I really don't like is when I lick my finger to do it now I've only done one lens so now I have to take my finger that I just put on my wet, dirty glasses back in my mouth for the second lens. Yeah. You know you have nine more fingers. I forgot.

That's what I do. It's like, oh, that one, I've used it. Next one. You got so many little cleaning surfaces. This is already a classic episode of Tangents. Sari, what is spit? So spit or saliva. That's what you'll find when you try to Google it more academically.

It is produced by salivary glands, usually in the mouth region mouth hole area cell uh oral cavity slash throat is it produced other places i don't think so i don't think they'd be called salivary glands if they're in other definitely wetners all over the body but but these specific ones uh for saliva which is a compound that is mostly water. I think it's like 90% water. And it has other little things in it that help with digestion. So enzymes that start breaking down some food in your mouth. It helps lubricate your throat for swallowing. It helps with pH buffering and general hygiene, like keeping good bacteria around, killing off some of the bacteria or other stuff that we don't want around. And it's produced

by three main glands in humans. I'm not entirely sure how this translates across the animal kingdom, like if there are these three specific types of glands. But there are the parotid glands, which are found below your ears. Those are the biggest ones. There are the submandibular glands, which are right below your jaw. And then there are the sublingual glands, which are right below your tongue. The Gleekers. That's what they call the Gleekers.

We're going to learn so much about Gleeking eventually, Hank. You'll see. Okay, we'll pull back for now um but they all contribute different percentages of saliva to your mouth at different times so like most of it comes from the submandibular uh when you're just hanging out but then when you start eating then the parotid starts gushing into your mouth to make it wet. I don't need you to use that word. The audio, painting the audio tapestry.

And the parotid gland are mostly like thin serous, S-E-R-O-U-S secretions, while your sublingual and submandibular glands are more mucousy. So there's different textures of spit, depending on what proteins are involved. And they all help you do what your mouth does. And that's just humans. Other animals have all kinds of other compounds.

They have anticoagulants if they drink blood, or they have saliva that is sticky if they catch bugs or need to stick out their tongue like a Yoshi and eat some leaves. Or like a chameleon. Yeah, or like a chameleon, you know.

But modified salivary glands act as like venom producers in certain animals for spit. Okay. So do we know where the word spit comes from? Cause I feel like it's nice to be able to define spit just for humans and be like,

I'm not going to think about whether this like bug thing counts. I don't care. Let's just sum it up, feel nice and good about it. Cause I learned a lot about spit just now, but do we know where spit the word comes from? Yes also keeping it very human centric it is a word made by humans for the human experience of what is this stuff in my mouth uh and it is another one of those imitative words where the act of spitting uh you spray as you say the word spit.

And so it comes from words like spew or spittle or any version of that. Spaten, spattle, any kind of word that sounds like spit was probably used at some point in proto-Germanic languages or Old English or variants of that to describe the action of spitting and then also the stuff itself. I think that's just great. I think that that's great as well. I like the idea that the spit in my mouth was named after the action of spitting. Yeah. Not the other way around, which makes sense to me. You know what I love about SciShow Tangents, you guys?

It's the amount of stuff that I learn. Yeah, like how many fingers you have to clean off your glasses. I have these two just for you. Wow. For audio listeners, Hank just made a heart with his little thingies. All right.

And now it's time to move on to our quiz portion of the show where sam and sari get to fight against each other to see if they can acquire some points the little advantage before moving into uh the fact off so i've got a truth or fail free off the spit is as i've said a little gross which means that humans have made all sorts of strange objects that revolve around it, some of which are even preserved in various museums and archives around the world. Am I the only one who's just extraordinarily conscious of the spit in their mouths right now? Because yikes, it sure is in there.

So today, I'm going to tell you the story of three objects that have been built for spit, but only one of them is real. I do feel like every time you say it, and more, it comes out of my mouth, though. Just gushing as there is. So in the British Museum, you can find a locket once owned by Marie Antoinette. And when you open the locket, you will see a portrait of her husband, King Louis XVI. And on the other side, you will see a clear inset, which holds a saliva sample from the king as well. Just carry that as well around. But that might not be the true fact. It might be this one.

In the archives of the United States House of Representatives, you can find a metal bowl covered with a lid that has a hole in it. This bowl is from the late 19th century and was one of hundreds like it that was spread around the Capitol that were available for tobacco-chewing congressmen to spit into. Or it might be fact number three. At the University of Oxford, you can find a pig bladder attached to a goose quill. This contraption was a 16th century syringe that was used by the English doctor Nicholas Robinson, who relied on it to collect saliva from different farm animals that he thought could be used to make medicine. So it's either Marie Antoinette's spit locket, the House of Representatives spitting bowl, or the doctor's saliva syringe? The first one I feel like is just Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, you know? She had his blood in a vial around her neck.

I feel like that's what's being adapted here. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, okay. I don't know either. Celebrities are just like us. They are. The second one is just a spittoon, right? Basically, you just said there's a spittoon in Congress.

They're in cartoons all the time, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So certainly that is a thing. That's probably true anyway. Even if it's not true, it's true. Yeah. The saliva syringe sounds so weird. This is like two very normal things.

A locket, a bowl, and then a pig bladder attached to a goose quill i'm having trouble even imagining what that looks like it seems too late like it was 1600s is that you said 16th century so okay that just seems like we would have wired in what like cow spit was by then be like there's no use for this but specifically this was used by this doctor who thought that there were medicinal benefits to animal spits. But also, part of me is like, if Deboki made this up,

that seems really weird. I could see it being used for something else, maybe. Like, not spit. But I don't know what it would be. That's a good point. Like, blowing air into something, maybe? Oh, maybe. Maybe it's like a test,

you know, like, yeah, yeah. It was just like to get the crumbs out of your keyboard. Yeah. Your 16th century keyboard. I'm going to say it's the spittoon because I think I'm,

it seems so obvious and I feel like I always trick myself out of it. Yeah. Maybe I'll just, I'm pulling this area this time. I think the saliva syringe thing is just so specific. I couldn't imagine it can be the product of anyone's imagination. Well, I am here to tell you that Sari has gone in the right direction with the correct strategy, finally not convincing herself out of the true fact.

So spittoons in general date back to the Tang dynasty. So been around for a long time. And they're often like, you know, beautiful objects. They wanted them to be nice spit holders. They're found in many places. You know, you got them in your bars and taverns. But they were also in the various chambers of the U.S. government. And there is one known as the speaker spittoon.

Probably stayed near the speaker's podium, but doesn't seem to have been super popular. There was a report in 1880 wrote about congressmen spitting all over the floor instead of the spittoon. So we provided them. And yet they were like, look, I spit it at my floor at home. I'll spit on the floor in the sacred vaunted halls of the US government. I'm also like 90% sure that maybe Deboki just hadn't heard of spittoons until she read about them here. It's totally possible.

You think that could be the case? Yeah. So the thing that happened was that tuberculosis started to get people thinking we shouldn't be spitting on things. This is a contagious disease. And spitting in particular was seen as a potentially a really significant way that tuberculosis was transmitted. It doesn't seem to have actually been, but it became like really quite taboo because people were like, that's how people get sick. So there was all these like anti spitting campaigns and stuff. And now you don't have public spittoons though.

There was once a kid behind me in a movie theater who was spitting his dip into the loudest possible object, which was the small open end of a Coke can. Yeah. Oh no. That's just what you do in Montana. Come on. You can have like a paper cup, like a free paper cup for water or something.

You just use whatever you got on hand. And he wasn't good at it either. So he was like, he was new with the whole idea of dipping. Anyway. So, yes, y'all were all correct that the saliva syringe was based on a couple of real things. The first is that there was a 19th century medical writer, Nicholas Robinson, who wrote about the virtues of spit, especially saliva gathered in the morning before eating. This would be human saliva. We're pretty sure.

He suggested mixing chewed bread with fasting spittle to relieve inflamed eyelids. So fun. That doesn't work. Don't do that. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think you put it on the eye. The second is a actual syringe developed by Sir Christopher Wen that used an animal bladder connected to a hollow goose quill and he used that syringe

to inject various substances into dogs in his experiments, including alcohol and opium. So wild, wild, wild, wild. Having a great time over there. That we live in. Yeah. And no, there were not,

were not spit lockets. That was entirely made up. That was Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie. Was that like in a movie or is that something that they actually did? They were married and I think they each wore a locket with their blood, each other's blood in the locket. It's very romantic, I think. Is it?

Why don't you do it? Were Billy Bob Thornton's entire body to be destroyed, she could clone him and bring him back. body to be destroyed, she could clone him and bring him back. We should lock our blood with records of burned versions of Saisha Tanchin for the future so they can revive clones of us to continue

podcasting once this becomes the most beloved media source. Well, I mean, I just don't think it's going to be that hard to recreate us. We have so many hours of us talking. You could be an AI right now, Hank, and no one would know the difference. I got to vary my speaking patterns up a little bit so people know it's really me. Start talking like this.

You got to grow a mustache. You should grow a mustache. That would be a really good way to stop it. I don't want to do that. That's the saddest you've sounded in a really long time, I feel like. Yeah, you know you have to do it. That's why you're so sad. All right.

Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then we'll be back for the fact off. welcome back everybody before we left we were talking about whether or not i was going to have to grow facial hair to prove that it's me and not an artificial intelligence deep fake but instead uh of worrying about that anymore we're going to do 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 i will award hank bucks any way i see fit uh but probably to the one that blows my mind the most. So get ready to have me get my mind blown. But first, to decide who goes first, we have a trivia question.

In 2020, scientists from the Netherlands Cancer Institute reported that they had discovered a pair of salivary glands that were previously unknown. These glands are situated at the point of the nasal cavity where that hits the throat. The glands are part of a group of salivary glands, including minor glands that cover your mouth and throat. Roughly, how many of those minor salivary glands are there? I can't believe my definition is already outdated by halfway through the episode. We can't trust anything you say anymore i'm gonna say it's always more than i think it is 80 i was gonna say 10 000 and heck i'm sticking

with 10 000 i thought sarah was gonna say 80 000 baby plants need a little bit of space i feel like yeah you know there's a lot going on right there you who who knows but the answer it's frustrating it's frustrating to have to have sari win with 80 when the answer was 1000 like should i be judging on like an exponential curve because in that case sam would have won but no it we just do it by raw numbers. And so Sari wins, even though she was very off. Sam was fewer orders of magnitude off. So Sari, you can decide who goes first.

Even though I've just spent a surprising amount of time dissing your correctness. Yep, yeah, dishonorably, I guess I'll go first. So the bowerbird is found in Australia and New Guinea and named after the stick structures the males make to impress females, as we always talk about weird mating rituals. Their eponymous bowers aren't exactly nests. They're more like caves or arches made from twigs with a bunch of stuff on the ground around them. This stuff is a horde of treasures like rocks and bones and plastic, all arranged to impress. mixing those with saliva to make a kind of paint, and then coloring the inside sticks of the bower up to chest height or so with a thin, pasty layer that is often around 0.5 millimeters thick.

So quite thin. It's not like honking smear. It's enough to decorate, but not enough to be structural support or glue. We're not entirely sure what is so biologically appealing about this spit paint, but we know that when researchers remove paint from the bowers, then females returned less often. And for some reason, more time spent painting also corresponded with more mating success. So really love a painterly male. It could add to the visual spectacle of the bower in general or act like an optical illusion. For example, there's a lot of red paint inside the bower

that can make the female's eyes as she sits inside less sensitized to red light because there's so much red light, the red cones are being activated. So the green objects around the bower look more brightly green as the male is showing off his collection of treasures. Or it might be a smell or taste signal because female bower birds tend to take a little nibble at the spit paint and have been seen swallowing it in videos. Also, males seem to care more about protecting their gooey wet paint from researchers who are trying to scrape than older

dried paint so like a lot of things there is a lot more research to be done but even animals are doing art to impress each other and when you don't have fancy tools some good old spit and berries will do just fine they can make it different colors did i miss that part yeah like with based on like what they chew if they chew a blueberry then they'll be blue they chew a blueberry, then they'll be blue. If they chew a red berry, they'll be red. I think it's whatever is around. What are they painting onto? They're painting on the inside walls. Yeah, the inside walls of the sticks to about chest height.

Kind of like you'd paint an accent wall in your house. Not go all the way up. Not fully. Have a little Wayne's coating.oting yeah that's very weird very cool i've definitely seen bower birds bowers not have the paint on them they just have like they're like surrounded with cool colorful stuff it'd be so frustrating to have a scientist come scrape your paint off i feel like i'd be pissed maybe they go by after they're done with it they've done the work they've done the work. They've done the mating.

They've succeeded. Or maybe they just don't care about it. It does seem like the papers I was reading, they interrupt the mating. And they're like, you're working really hard on this thing. Other bowerbirds are going to mess with you. And now we as humans are also going to mess with you because we got to know. We just are so curious. And look, you're not going extinct or anything yeah sam what do you have spitting cobras are one of those animals that seem like they should only exist in pokemon animals with projectile venom that causes extreme

burning to the eyes that can lead to necrotization and blindness if not treated just seems like super fake but they're real and they're so real that spitting cobras have evolved two separate times in Africa and Asia. And a species of rinkgalls, another type of snake, has also evolved venom spitting power. So spitting and snakes, it's just a natural match. It's that meme where the guys are like that, you know? Another weird thing about them is that their venom is for defense and not hunting. So most snake venom is used for hunting and contains chemicals that cause paralysis,

but a spitting Cobra's venom has a way higher concentration of chemicals that cause pain in their targets. So it's definitely a, please leave me alone thing and not a, I would like to eat you kind of thing. And scientists have known that already, but what's less clear is why these guys even evolved to spit in the first place and why it evolved independently three different times

so obviously so the snake can avoid getting hurt or eaten and they do use their venom against things like birds and mongooses and other stuff that wants to eat them but i was looking at like an article of their predators and it was hedging a lot as to whether or not the spit was very effective against any of those animals like it was talking about secretary birds and mongooses, and it was like, well, they're both like too fast and too small. Like secretary birds' heads are too small for them to really be all that scared of the spit. There's stuff like crocodiles that just don't give a shit about getting spit on.

Or they just close their eyes while they're eating the snakes. And basically, these snakes basically have to get venom in the eyes or else it doesn't do anything. It doesn't really affect your skin. Another thought is that it's to keep hooved animals far away so that they don't step on snakes. But again, they're really big and their eyes are really high up. So the spit is cool, but maybe it's not very useful. However, in 2021, a team of researchers proposed a new theory for the evolution of spitting cobras that suggests a much more familiar target for their defensive behavior.

Us. So primates are hardwired to be scared of snakes. And a lot of non-human primates and human primates, like humans too, I guess, will preemptively kill a snake that they see, even if it's just chilling. And lots of them will try to kill them from far away by like throwing rocks at them or hitting them with sticks. And eventually, in the mists of history, primates evolved into pre-human forms and started to get really good at throwing rocks and even started inventing longer and pointier stuff to kill snakes with.

And a pair of fangs and quick reflexes doesn't do much against a pointy spear. So the thought is, as humans evolved and spread around the world, so too did these disparate groups of spitters learn how to spit and to make their desire to be left alone very clear by making their spit hurt really bad and the cool thing is that the fossil evidence seems to back this up so spitting cobra teeth have been found near populations of ancient hominins in africa and the evolutionary history of spitting cobras in Africa seems to have started 7 million years ago when human ancestors were differentiating from

apes and Asian spitting cobras seem to have started evolving after the arrival of Homo erectus in Asia, 2.5 million years ago. So snakes just don't really like people. They learn how to spit on them. And in conclusion, I think this is cool because it's an usual an unusually direct example of animals having to adapt to us and our skill set just

like they would any other animal because we're animals too that's cool like i don't know of i mean i should but i don't know of that many examples of animals that aren't like livestock or pets evolving in response to hominin hominid pressures. Yeah. Snakes were like, these guys suck. We gotta do something about this. Well, yeah. It's wild to think that, were we hunting

them? I guess. They're food. We were just smushing them. We were like, snake smash. Right. I don't like smash. That't like the paper yeah oh so it's not like they were being hunted it was like i don't want you around and so we're just gonna you gotta go away because apes have been squishing us for millions of years and now they learned how to make like pokey sticks oh man that's a really good fact i'm sorry sari i know you just came in one point up but that's so good i need this sari please i know it's a good fact i'm sorry sari i know you just came in one point up but that's so good

i need this sari please i know it's a good fact you did good that is like because the thing is i kind of you know we've extincted so many animals of course this is all still you know kind of theoretical but there is a huge huge amount of animals that were not able to evolve their way out of us hunting them to extinction. And the idea that snakes were able to, like they were able to evolve fast enough to create a defense against us being like, I'm going to club you so that you're not in my campsite. That's really cool.

Pretty cool. Well, I love it. Same. Congratulations. You're you. I give you, I give you all the Hank bucks. Wow.

Every single one? Yeah. I'm saving some for later. I get a bunch more every week. So I'll give you all the ones I have right now. And that means that it is now time for Ask the Science Couch, where we ask a question to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. Becca D on YouTube asks,

why is it that we, or at least I, will occasionally spray spit from the back of the throat by accident if my mouth is opened just right? AKA, why do I gleek? I've never heard of gleeking before dating Sylvia. I had never experienced it. I had never. And since then, that's all I hear about.

That's all. Yeah. No, she did it. She was like, yeah, sometimes when I yawn, spit flies out and I can't control it. And I was like, that's weird. That's really never happened to you before? No. I mean, I don't think it had happened to me.

Like, it doesn't happen to me very often, but then it does sometimes. And I'm like, I feel like a freaking spitting cobra right now. Yeah, it yeah pretty cool and also when i was in like seventh grade there were just people who knew how to do it and that was like the cool thing to do for like the bad kids this is wild to me i not another human being in the whole planet i lived under a rock a spitless rock yeah sarah wrote us the email to help us so like we could pick the question and she was like apparently some people call this gleeking what the heck and then me and faith and tuna were all like you fool well do you want to explain how it works then

experts in gleeking i've no idea some of your tongue goes up and i guess it's it's it's pushing the saliva into your mouth but it doesn't hit the mouth and so it just hits the air from my understanding i don't think people study this in great detail because it's not medically harmful it's important to everyone in the whole world it's really important to seventh grade boys it is just if you put muscular pressure on a salivary gland in a weird way because salivary glands are used to both uh like produce and store a small amount of like your spit secretion and so if you put pressure on the the ducts that secrete it into your mouth uh whether it's, I think people experience, so like if it's coming out from under your tongue, I'm like speaking about this, not knowing how people experience this.

Like when you yawn, it's probably the back of your throat. So probably the parotid glands. No, it always comes out of under the tongue. Under tongue? Always under tongue. Yeah. That's what I'm experiencing. I'm sorry.

It's wild that we're having Sarah answer this question about a phenomenon she's entirely unfamiliar with. Yes. This is like... Okay. Well, it's all tongue then.

So then it's all sublingual, probably, and maybe a little bit of submandibular because that, the mylohyoid muscle, I'm guessing that's kind of like jaw area and it needs to secrete somewhere in your mouth so as you move your mouth then your tongue is just one big old

muscle squishes down on the gland and squeezes it out like a little squirt gun or sam's over there trying to gleek right now i gotta do it if i have a child someday i have to be able to teach them how to do it so that'll be cool in seventh grade can you do it sir absolutely no i don't know what it's supposed to feel like this feels like it's a very different experience but this feels like me as a fifth grader in sex ed being like you do what but like with your tongue and with the saliva i'd be like you do you push it down and then saliva comes out. I don't know. Yeah. I can't.

You were up in your ivory tower at MIT while we were down here gleeking on each other. Yeah. I was a child too. I spit on people the normal way with like a raspberry or like sucking pool water into my mouth and blowing it out. I don't know. Horrible. That's like. Good.

This is the, this I think is the proper reason to be feuding with one another and judging one another is our various systems, whether they be bourgeoisie or not of spitting. Sarah and her, her bougie spits pool water. Exactly. P don't know. Pond scum.

So what I get from this is that we don't really have the great idea of how gleeking works. Maybe at least in this room. You just push on the glands, I think. You push on the glands. Yeah. But I'm sure someone could teach me how to do it. And I wish someone would. Oh, yeah.

I would not be their teacher. I think you've got to learn how to push on the gland good. Yeah, there's got to be somebody that's on Fiverr or something. Oh, there's a wiki how about how to Gleek. So everybody look that up. But I don't need a wiki how. I don't need to just know how to Gleek. I need to be in the top 1% of gleekers.

You want to be able to hit people in the eye? And, oh, ow. Yeah, I want to get a cobra back. Like, it spits at me, I spit back. So the first four steps is just generate saliva. Which is the problem right now, yeah. Well, I have... But then step five gets really confusing.

Flex your tongue and extend it against the roof of your mouth. Press your tongue in the area between your upper teeth and the skin on the roof of your mouth. Make this motion in one action as quickly as possible. Your tongue should stiffen as you flex it, and you'll know that you're doing it right if it feels rigid and stiff in your mouth. Oh. Stiffen as you flex it, and you'll know that you're doing it right if it feels rigid and stiff in your mouth. Ew. The people watching on YouTube are getting a freaking show right now. Everybody else is like, what are they doing? Nothing's coming out.

It's getting wet down there, but no shooting is happening. Okay. People are going to clip parts of this episode and make us going to be in a lot of trouble. Yeah, we're going to be in trouble. All right. If you want to ask the Science Scout your question, and at this point, I don't know why you would,

you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at Lost in Novels, ePalmer5002 on Discord, and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode.

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That's very helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz.

Our associate producer is Faith Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glixman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trocker-Vardy. Our sound design is by Joseph Tunamedish. Our executive producers are Caelan Hostmeister and me, Hank Green.

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 lighten. But one more thing. Humans find all kinds of weird ways to entertain ourselves, including putting things in our mouths and spitting them back out for sport.

From cherry pits and watermelon seeds to crickets and, of course, animal dung. No. Specifically, there have been records of sheep dung spitting competitions in Northern Ireland and antelope dung spitting competitions, or possibly just pranks on tourists, in South Africa. The goal seems to be to use a drier pellet and spit it out quickly. But if the poop touches your saliva, I'm sure you'll get a lovely grassy poop taste. But why? But why? You can spit any. There are so many things to spit just use a rock yeah

rock i was gonna say just find a rock you can use it over and over again too i don't know yeah at this point i'm i'm i'm not sure about humans