Welcome to scishow quiz show
We're real smart people test their knowledge about all kinds of science and win prizes for two of our supporting patrons on patreon
I'm Michael Aranda your host and today's contestants are Colin Hickey who happens to be executive vice president of VidCon
and
Hank green who may or may not hold the world record for drawing fish I
Definitely have the world record for drawing fish ABS like I cannot imagine anyone has drawn more fish than me
I cannot imagine I have drawn so many fish. It's true. I have a question regarding the intro to this episode are we?
Real smart people as and we are smart people who are real or are we people who are real smart
ambiguous okay either
As long as I'm both real and as long as you stay smart
I don't want to be a fake smart purse
There is no - er between real and smart don't know what that means which makes me think that they're saying that you are
Actual smart people smart people ok yes. We'll see so as a special. Thank you to our supporters on patreon
We've selected two of you at random to win some prizes Hank
You're playing for florian Filip hello, Florian Colin you're playing for Alesha, Granger hello, Alicia
We got this good names today Stefan show our audience what our prizes are today
Florian and Alicia one of you will be a winner today
And one of you will be a loser but both of you will get an autographed card from our final round
So don't worry about that
But the winner will also get an I won scishow quiz show pin and some swag from dftba.com
the loser of today's quiz show will
Actually, end up being the winner because they will of course be receiving the pin to end all pins. It's ultra rare
It's printed in full color. It's made of solid gold except
It's not it's the I lost scishow quiz show pin and it is very nice
Good luck to you both back to you Michael
So you're both starting out with a thousand scishow bucks each time you answer a question correctly
You'll win some more if you get it wrong. We'll lose some if I've learned anything from this game
It's that just don't answer questions stick with your thousand scishow bucks and leave. Yes, I'm gonna lie about my money
You're gonna double your money
Right okay addiction bold prediction okay here we go Colin
I've been told that you are an expert when it comes to ghost busters is that correct this is true
okay, weird tie-in with science so
Our first round is all about the Stay Puft, Marshmallow Man
Okay, more specifically the science of marshmallows
So here's the question people have been eating marshmallows for thousands of years really
But they weren't always the manufactured sugary pieces of foam that we know and love today
The original marshmallows came from a type of mallow plant that grows in marshes
Which is where the name comes from you are messing with me
Do you not this isn't the part where it's true false? This is this is true. You are telling you the truth right now
specifically
Marshmallows were made of a gooey secretion from the plant called Musil itch you know and for a long time
They were more than just a tasty dessert. They were used as medicine
Okay, these days
We have better alternatives
but olden day marshmallows were probably a pretty effective treatment to the question is what were they used as a treatment for was it a
cough a headache
constipation or mosquito both
Eschete Oh bites, I'm sorry
Not doubling your scishow books. I'm gonna go with
Constipation because I feel like eating a bunch of marshmallows gonna make you poop that's also incorrect
I think it's gonna make you poop anyway. I think I'm right. It. Just wasn't used for that was the answer
ghostbusting
No the answer was cough
It's from me some marshmallow, I'm still available right like this loath plants still grow somewhere
the answer is a a cough by
2000 BCE the ancient Egyptians were making marshmallows out of the marshmallow plant by extracting Musil is from the plants roots and mixing it with
Nuts and honey, just like the modern kind these marshmallows made a sweet dessert
but they were also used to soothe coughs and sore throats because they're gooeyness formed a kind of protective film that film made marshmallows a
Useful treatment for all kinds of other things too like stomach pain and rashes and unlike a lot of old tiny medicine
There's evidence that
Marshmallows might have actually helped especially with coughs there haven't been too many studies on it probably because we have more effective options
But researchers have found that syrup made from marshmallow Musil ish is pretty good at soothing coughs on a cellular level
They think it works because the complex sugars in the Musil which help keep the cells in your mucus membranes alive
That soothe the irritation in your throat so you coughed less unfortunately
There's no evidence that eating peeps when you're sick will help the next question
Okay is about a key ingredient in modern marshmallows so none of this is gonna be about the Stay Puft, Marshmallow Man
It's just about marshmallows or ghosts not about ghosts either. Who knows. I haven't read the rest of the class
I may be in for a surprise
Modern marshmallows contain gelatin sure the jelly-like stuff, that's made from boiling the collagen in things like pig skin or cow bones
Uh-huh it's also the main ingredient in jello an experiment published in
1976 that freaked a lot of people out a Canadian doctor named Adrian Upton attached electrodes to a blob of jell-o and
Showed that by one measure it seemed to be
alive nice
Well I get what did he detect that made the jello look like it was alive
Respiration brainwaves a heartbeat or blood pressure
Can't I should have let Colin go first. This is a pure blind guest I feel like maybe you can get some brainwave
wave signal, but oh
Good good. Yeah, yeah the answer is B brainwaves. Okay first things first. Jello is not actually alive
We are very very sure of that, but when Upton attached electrodes to it
He found a pattern that looked a lot like alpha brainwaves
The kind of electrical signals your brain sends out when you're relaxing with your eyes closed. There's nothing that special about jello though
It was just reflecting electrical signals from other things in the hospital room where Upton did the test like IVs and respirators
And that was exactly why he did it
Doctors often look for brain waves when they're trying to figure out if someone is clinically brain-dead and his argument was that you have to
Do more than just one test there are electrical signals everywhere
And they can easily cause interference so much interference in fact
They can make a lump of jell-o look like a living resting human brain that or some day
We're going to find ourselves living in a terrifying remake of the blob so maybe you've noticed a theme here our bodies are
Super weird, and that's what our next round is about
Strange remedies why why is that a theme?
Just reading the card where the theme my god. Just helped me out a lot so far
So our next round is about strange
Remedies one of the most commonly asked science questions is how can I get rid of the hiccups?
Thank you even hosted a scishow about it months you get the hiccups when your diaphragm the muscle that controls your breathing starts to spasm
Your diaphragm is controlled by the vagus nerve that runs from your neck all the way down to the base of your spine
So the most effective hiccup cures tend to involve stimulating that nerve which kind of jolts it back into working properly again
But we didn't mention in that old episode was that in
1988 a doctor published a letter in the journal annals of emergency medicine
To report that he'd found a cure for hiccups that worked when nothing else did of emergency medicine so like emergency hiccups
Which I'm not saying can't happen
So was this unusual cure
Turning the patient upside down
covering them in ice
giving them an orgasm or putting a finger up there but
Putting them in ice I was gonna say I
Let you go, oh well now. I have to say something about butts or orgasms. I feel like oh those were both wrong
So you're saying one of them was right
I'm gonna go high mmm orgasm with orgasm in Korea. Oh, no, it's but you got a stick a finger up your butt
Really the answer is D
finger up the butt the doctor who published the letter named Francis fest Meyer was working in the ER when a patient came in because
He'd been hiccuping about every two seconds for 3 days straight fest Meyer tried every cure
He could think of including some weird ones that doctors use because they stimulate the vagus nerve making the patient gag
Pressing on his eyeballs and pulling on his tongue
None of that sounds especially fun
But the poor guy was pretty desperate unfortunately nothing Fesmire tried worked the patients hiccups would slow down
But what's the tongue pulling or whatever stopped?
They'd come back full force then he remembered reading about a case study where a digital rectal massage
Aka a finger up the butt
Slowed down a patient's heartbeat by stimulating the vagus nerve so he decided to try it for the guy's hiccups
Massaging his rectum and what he described as a slow
circumferential motion and
He recommended that other doctors
Try it when they couldn't cure a patient's hiccups before prescribing medications that can help like
Anticonvulsants if you want to try this at home the next time you have hiccups well, that's your business
I had a number of things I was going to say while I was at OU and I didn't say any of them, okay
so coca-cola uh-huh
By a pharmacist back in 1886
It was marketed as a cure for all kinds of things like headaches and fatigue
And considering that it had cocaine at the time it probably did cure people's headaches and wake them up yeah in exchange for things like
Addiction paranoia irritability and plenty of other harmful side effects these days coke might still help you if you have a headache
Or if you're tired because of the caffeine in it
But even caffeine free coke is known to be an effective treatment for a much more serious condition
hmm
So what do doctors use modern-day coke to treat? It's just a regular not diet regular coke keep going?
uncontrollable diarrhea a
blockage in the stomach
Second-degree burns or a type of skin infection how he was right under me right under there blockage in the stomach
That's what I was that is correct
That happened in doc Hollywood the the that would Michael J Fox great
Movie is the new doctor in town
And then he thinks that there's like something terrible
Wrong with this kid and the old doctor from the little small town was like just give him a can of coke. He's got gas
You got a good duck Hollywood
The answer is B a blockage in the stomach in patients with stomachs that are impaired in some way like after gastric
bypass surgery
the indigestible
Parts of plants can collect into a hard lump called a fight obese or when the lump gets big enough they can start to cause
symptoms like nausea stomach pain and weight loss
It's better to avoid doing a risky surgery if you can so doctors tried to dissolve the fight obese or first and they found that
Coca-cola is really good at that a 2012 review of studies on this found that Coke on its own cures fight obese
Or is half the time and when you combine it with an endoscopy
Where the doctor puts a tube down your throat to help break up the lump it works more than 90% of the time
It's thought that Coke is so good at dissolving photo bezoars because it's super acidic with a pH of 2.6
There's no obvious reason why doctors specifically use Coke, but there's barely any research on using other kinds of soda
Just a couple of case studies or doctors use Pepsi instead alright. What's the score? I got a point oh?
Dang we are back where we started
How do I develop my fluent in a four by five it was super bad?
You can still double your points cuz at the very end you could bet all your points
Oh, so as long as you have a thousand points at the end. Yeah, no pressure
Now Coke is specifically used to treat fight Obi's ores which are made of plant material
But these ores can be made of lots of different kinds of indigestible things like hair or see your own abuse auras
nope
It's like a thing that gets stuck in your body like an indigestible mass gotcha
Most people probably know about them from Harry Potter where bezoar is from a goat's stomach are said to be an antidote for almost any
poison and in real life ancient medicine doctors also thought that bezoar could cure most kinds of poisoning as well as things like
Epilepsy the plague and jaundice it turns out that goat's stomach stones aren't actually great medicine
But it is possible that bee's oars were an effective treatment for at least one thing
because of the reactions with the minerals and hair inside
so not just because like it's really gonna making you puke because you just ate a
Lump of undigestible mass from the inside of a goat. I cannot speak to its efficacy in that manner but
Did they use it to treat the plague
jaundice
arsenic poisoning or snake bites from the common European fighter hmm
I have no idea none of those seem like they would work hmm. I'm gonna go though cuz Colin was waiting too long
I'm gonna go with whatever the third one was Michael arsenic poisoning her yes
The answer is C arsenic poisoning
There are no studies that have actually tested this by giving someone arsenic poisoning and trying to cure it with a bezoar for obvious reasons
So it's hard to know for sure whether it works
But based on what we know about biology and chemistry researchers think it might arsenic poison generally comes in one of two forms arsenite
Which is made up of an arsenic atom bonded to three oxygens and arsenate?
Which has four oxygens arsenide could have bonded to the sulfur containing compounds in the hair in the bezoar
Neutralizing the poison before I got a chance to harm the victim arsenate on the other hand could have bonded two phosphate ions produced by
A mineral often found in bees ores called brush I'd similar reactions happen in the ocean where algae neutralized the arsenic produced by things like
And hot springs that said please don't try this at home
Whatever the third one was Michael. I'm very sure of that
Yeah, okay
It's time for our final round and all I can tell you about the final round is that it will be about an animal ghost
animal
Now you place your bets on how many points you wish to wager Colin you have a thousand points Hank you have 1,200 points
Mmm wager as many or as little as you wish and we'll be right back after these messages
Whew a thousand points seven thousand four years good double like my prediction could come true
Okay
No pressure
So thank you blue
Whales are the biggest animals on earth they can be up to 30 metres long and weigh more than a hundred fifty?
Metric tons there used to be hundreds of thousands of them in the oceans
But they were almost driven extinct by whaling before it was outlawed in
1966 since then their numbers have started to recover
But we know that they're affected by other things too like pollution and noise from human activity in
2013 researchers announced that they used something from a blue whale to put together a timeline of the chemicals it had been exposed to and
The levels of stress hormones over the course of its life
Kind of like how you can learn about a tree's history by studying its rings so the question is
What part of the whale did they use to figure this out?
Was it its earwax?
its feces
The baleen plates that used to capture food or its blubber
Now you just write it down on the thing oh oh I wrote down
Do you watch them for Jeopardy ever I
Got I know it's one of these two dang
Really want to win this
Really really want to win this it's ghostbusters versus doc Hollywood
One great movie versus one horrible movie Oh
Shots fired I think I've seen at the one time
So you guys ready huh? We are show your answers. I went with your wax
I went with the baleen thing you just broke ghosts on there someone number three and then
So Hank is correct
The answer is a it's earwax
Whales ears aren't open to the environment like ours are but they still produce?
Earwax so over the course of their lives their earwax. Just builds up forming a huge plug
You know how shrek pulls a plug of earwax out of his ear and uses it as a candle
Will earwax plugs are pretty much exactly like that and as each layer of earwax in the plug forms it includes some of the toxins
And hormones that are circulating through the whale at that time the research for the 2013 study started in
2007 when a 12 year old blue whale was killed by a ship off the coast of, California
The researchers decided to extract one of his 25 centimeter long earwax plugs and study the different layers
They found 16 types of pollutants in the air wax with the highest concentration during the whales first year of life
Probably because his mother's milk was more contaminated than the stuff
He was exposed to after that they also found that his average levels of cortisol a stress hormone
Doubled over the course of his life although
They couldn't tell how much of that came from natural factors like sexual maturity
And how much came from things like pollution or noise marine biologists have been analyzing pollutant levels in whale blubber for a long time
But they couldn't use it to get a timeline of exposure throughout a whales life the 2013 study showed that with earwax
You can since then researchers have started analyzing more
Whale earwax plugs including some that have been stored in museums for decades so it turns out that earwax plugs can be pretty useful
But I'm glad humans don't build up giant sticks of earwax with no way to get them out that seems really uncomfortable
799 so that if we both got it right you would win
What a gentleman
But I want anyway cuz you're at zero you have zero signs like you nation did not come true
That was the other one that I was gonna guess, but I'm basically I was down to like do whales have earwax
And I decided they probably did
Well, it's been an emotional roller coaster
Yes, basically, it's it's similar to how like when your mom cuts your hair
And she's like well like why don't just cut my hair. Anyway. She's like oh no real reason. She's gonna test it for drugs. Oh
Yes, never had that experience. You know what you were going with that definitely had that experience me, too
Okay, no episode. Thanks for joining us for this scishow quiz show
Thanks to all of our patrons at patreon if you want help support. The show you can go to
Patreon.com/scishow, and if you want to see some of the awesome stuff that Colin does you can go to VidCon?
Calm yeah
Well, I didn't I need them in know more about marshmallows now, right?