SciShow - 2020-11-25
This episode is sponsored by Awesome Socks Club, a sock subscription for charity. Go to http://awesomesocks.club/SciShow to sign up between now and December 11th to get a new pair of fun socks each month in 2021. 100% of after-tax profit will go to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone, which is one of the most dangerous places to be pregnant in the world. It's really difficult for life to create blue pigments, but the color can appear in a handful of compounds that create just the right conditions to reflect blue photons. Hosted by: Hank Green SciShow has a spinoff podcast! It's called SciShow Tangents. Check it out at http://www.scishowtangents.org ---------- Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scishow ---------- Huge thanks go to the following Patreon supporters for helping us keep SciShow free for everyone forever: Jb Taishoff, Bd_Tmprd, Harrison Mills, Jeffrey Mckishen, James Knight, Christoph Schwanke, Jacob, Matt Curls, Sam Buck, Christopher R Boucher, Eric Jensen, Lehel Kovacs, Adam Brainard, Greg, Ash, Sam Lutfi, Piya Shedden, KatieMarie Magnone, Scott Satovsky Jr, Charles Southerland, charles george, Alex Hackman, Chris Peters, Kevin Bealer ---------- Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet? Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scishow Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scishow Tumblr: http://scishow.tumblr.com Instagram: http://instagram.com/thescishow ---------- Sources: https://doi.org/10.1093/mollus/eyi062 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz0421 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-019-5436-4 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.062302 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00217-013-1932-y https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-313X.2008.03447.x https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11803417/ https://doi.org/10.1039/B800165K https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M314251200 https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.C400337200 https://doi.org/10.1086/692661 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22438844/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22811668/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28157151/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28533449/ https://doi.org/10.1021/bk-2013-1138.ch008 https://doi.org/10.5772/32410 https://doi.org/10.1021/bk-2013-1138.ch008 https://doi.org/10.1021/jf501419q https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-0491(84)90283-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2017.11.020 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.364.6439.424 https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.12001 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/11/12/347736896/how-animals-hacked-the-rainbow-and-got-stumped-on-blue Image Sources: https://bit.ly/33dn4mv https://bit.ly/35ZGpZY https://bit.ly/3pXTI5g https://bit.ly/2J9ZbVs https://bit.ly/39biyIK https://bit.ly/3pXDOaS https://bit.ly/3fsKrNK https://bit.ly/36037Ba https://bit.ly/3pVTbAF https://bit.ly/3l3h5H1 https://bit.ly/2J9HZQl https://bit.ly/2UVpscS https://bit.ly/39gu1H4 https://bit.ly/35ZLrpu https://bit.ly/35YBLeS https://bit.ly/3fujmJY https://bit.ly/3pYyFPV https://bit.ly/33bhuAL https://bit.ly/33ey02W https://bit.ly/2V2boy8 https://bit.ly/3pYyQL5 https://bit.ly/33h2UYD https://bit.ly/3fvwfU8 https://bit.ly/3m80Aus https://bit.ly/2HwUiFC https://bit.ly/3fDBOjy
There are more native Australian blue flowered plants than the rest of the world combined.
Australia is a different planet.
We also have a bee with a blue bum.
Suuuuper cute
I think if you say Australia has or is the most of some nature thing everyone believes it.
Things get pretty weird down under
@Coaster Blocks I have an ant allergy and green ants put me in hospital.
I'd rather deal with some of the ridiculous animals than anaphylaxis
Bilirubin and biliverdin is also why your bruises change color! A hematoma (bleeding into tissues, i.e. a bruise) is cleaned up by white blood cells as they eat up the red blood cells. The heme molecules in RBCs are broken down first to biliverdin, and then to bilirubin within the WBCs. This is why your bruise starts from red, and then changes to purple, blue, green, and finally yellow before disappearing.
The bilirubin is finally peed out in the form of urobilin, which is why your pee is yellow!
@FriedEgg they also make green bile
Why is this not a pinned comment?!
It's fascinating, informative, and (while not directly related) ties into the video beautifully!
P.S. As is many of the amazing and interesting responses in this chain. Thank you all.
So manys bins
This is a fascinating tidbit. Thank you for sharing. :)
So biliverdin is blue, with etyomology that suggests green, bilirubin is yellow with etymology to suggest red. What's the story there?
Nature is like "No more pigments. Frankly it's a heck of a lot easier to just build nanoscopic structures that just reflect back blue that make pigments."
@Naruto Huntmen Demon I just came from a post that was debating on correct grammar usage. Thought I'd join in by correcting your post: Everyone's weird in their ways.
All in good fun. Happy Thanksgiving Day!!!!
@Archetypal_NPC Does that mean I’m cuckolding science then?
@Jonathan Eaton it's vouyerism
@꧁RoadJuice꧂ that’s not correct. Everyone’s weird in their own way.*
6:30 I love the Idea of nature being like "alright guys we managed to barely make this work, NO ONE TOUCH ANYTHING"
wrg
cat juul
@TheBanjoShow Things always change even for the worse because of mutations. Perfectly viable creatures can live for millions of years and then go extinct.
@TheBanjoShow It seems like most you ignore the fact that living things have desires. Mechanism is a very useful idea but like all useful ideas it has limits. Evolution as a theory or a physical process can have no desires. But living things have desires as evidenced by their behavior. If an animal suffers from a genetic mutation that no longer allows him to digests plants he may very well try to eat meat because he wants to live. Moreover humans desire outcomes all the time about most everything that they are aware of. if humans didn't desire that evolution produce desirable out comes like flowers no one would debate the topic. This dispute like many philosophical disputes are caused by people unconsciously having different definitions for the same words.
@Loiso Pondohva You have have said what evolution isn't but you haven't said what it is. Evolution isn't a behavior. It isn't something that living creatures do. Evolution isn't a process because it's a set of instructions. "Emergent" is a weasel word or hand waving to avoid having to deal with inconvenient truths. It seems we have no common divination for the world "evolution."
Fun fact: Bilirubin is one of the molecules that makes poop it’s distinctive brown color
Oh, it turns mine yellow and green 😅
@Gilli Fish That's cos you're a fish!
I'm now creating a petition to make the term, "Cellular shenanigans" a legitimate scientific term!
I'm up for that
Yeah but umm... Who's gonna get this petition?
As you can see , Blue is indeed a captivating color.
@The Buck with dislexia and eats lemons like orange deleted the comment i just made, sorry about that if you saw it
wrr
@Arolema Prarath we won a war that says we dont have to listen to you anymore. btw, i put ice in my tea and then the tea in the HARBOR
@Arolema Prarath ur just mad that Ameruca left England and is the soul super power in the world with leading science 🤣 with that being said I think you're doin it wrong
@The Buck with dislexia and eats lemons like orange that's a good draw then,
to be honest that's all kind of cool to me, tho i know that's such a rude thing to say
anyways, you like sunrises and sunsets?
Hank is my favorite host. He is just so fun! He also seems to improvise more than the others.
He's also the boss AFAIK
This episode needs a blooper reel of Hank learning the protein names.
5 of the channels i watch have posted something about the color blue in the last 48hours. i feel like a guy that lives in a blue world
And all day and all night and everything i sees is just blue
Like me, inside and outside
I'm blue da ba dee da ba daa
Da ba dee da ba daa, da ba dee da ba daa, da ba dee da ba daa
Da ba dee da ba daa, da ba dee da ba daa, da ba dee da ba daa
There was one from It's Okay to be Smart from 2 years ago that showed up in my feed one day after this one was posted, which absolutely makes sense as a YouTube rabbit trail from this. But they didn't show me this video until one more day had passed.
Yo Listen Up, here's the story
You had me in the first half, chief.
Nice da ba dee
This is the comment that I was looking for. 😆
I remember how my high school chemistry teacher told me how if we wanted to be rich, all we had to do was come up with a non-fading red dye. Now I understand why
People: I want blue colors.
Nature : We don't do that here.
Perfect timing! I'm supposed to be studying optics, but find it hard to focus and used to be obsessed with blue eyes hehe.
@FriedEgg haha, I have interesting eyes. Hazel- brown pigments around pupil, greenish color around that, and dark outer iris rings. They look boring lightish brown normally, but photos with flash show lighter spirals, and one eye has a small freckle just outside the iris, I call it colored outside the lines. My mom claims her eyes were like mine and turned blue in her twenties, dad has blue eyes, I'm 23 and waiting lol.
Interesting, i have dark eyes, and Hate it. I hear they can laser them out these days
@Science Nonfiction I've never encountered someone who knows their own eyes in such intricate detail...
@Chad Howarth lmao I said it was an obsession
“Hard to focus” pun intended?
"To understand blue we need to talk both biology and physics"
Fade to black. Music swells. Title card: The gang talks chemistry.
PSYCHE! 😝
Awe gee I, I, I dunno Rick
we've been tricked, we've been backstabbed and we've been quite possibly bamboozled
ASAP Science: Blue doesn't exist
Sci show: Blue is pretty Special😂😂
I was aware that blues are typically uncommon in nature due to structural and/or molecular complexities but I'm glad this video goes into more detail for why.
This was a good episode! I could be biased though, since blue is my most favorite color, haha. ^^;
This was really interesting. It was a nice example of how a seemingly simple question can lead down a path where surprisingly complex knowledge is required to answer it. Also, the thing about many chemical blues being toxic is probably a clue to why animals and plants might use that color to signal that they are poisonous and not good to eat. I'm thinking of the blepping blue tongued skink that animalogic had a video about the other day. Anyway, it's a working hypothesis. And also, I feel this video is for me, because I remember leaving a salty comment on an earlier scishow video about the same subject that didn't really touch upon the answer. So thank you, scishow!
"If you want to find one you can ask your liver about it."
HELLO LIVER CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT BLUE PIGMENTATION
Everyone gangsta until the liver talks back
I've had my hair cyan blue for almost 5 years now and I'm always looking for more natural ways to keep it this way and I love learning about the color itself
Thanks for the video! Fascinating indeed! I'm glad you went into detail about why blues are rare from a physics and chemistry perspective. Most don't do that.
Seriously this was just a really good video.
Biology and physics that just sounds like chemistry with extra steps
The ladder goes from math to physic to chemist to biology to humanity to economy to math again
Yes Inknow you talk in context of color
biology is a subset of chemistry, chemistry is a subset of physics, physics is a subset of math, math is a subset of philosophy.
Interesting and great explanation. My chemistry teacher was awful, she always tried to impose this topics by force nearly. She made me hate the chemistry and of course my notes were also terrible, It never interested me, she was a terrible teacher. This guy is the opposite, I get very curious, amazing. If this guy were my teacher, things would run totally different
SciShow always brings the info we didn't know we wanted to know.
3:08 the company I work for makes metal orthopedic implants, they are almost all cobalt and titanium. One of the interesting things with these metals, they have to be encased in something before they can be put into a person, usually a type of cement or porous coating, which also assists in the bone adhering to the implant. I've never heard of anyone getting cobalt poisoning from a hip implant, but I suspect doctors are careful to check their products are sufficiently coated before putting them in someone lol
thank you very much for explaining these things, which seldom are included in online articles about why blue pigment is rare in nature. never have i read about the energetic instability of blue, nor the bile aspect, nor the boiled lobster color change! thank you, thank you.
I am super excited that someone finally explained to me how color works on molecules! I still don't understand how dyes work, and how the light bouncing of the blue part of my shirt behaves so differently from the light bouncing off the red part of my shirt, because I see the physical properties of that fabric as identical, but I feel like now I'm halfway to that basic idea of "light interacts with tiny molecules." Maybe one day rainbows will make sense to me!
Bilirubin is the yellow pigment that gives your skin and eyes their color when you have jaundice, right?
Yep!
I see a subliminal message here 😁
The excess is also excreted through both the intestine and the kidneys, so when you go to the toilet, all the yellows and browns you see are bilirubin and its bacterially transformed variant, urobilin.
Occasionally newborn babies will build up too much bilirubin which gives them a pretty, golden color right before rushing them back to the hospital.
I remember sitting in the garden with hubby watching a blue butterfly, and hubby said "I thought the colour blue didn't exist in nature" and I laughed at him. Turns out he was partly right. Way to go, hubby
I recently read about the quest to find the source of the blue (תכלת) color used anciently in a thread of a tzitzit. It turns out to be made from a secretion of Hexaplex trunculus, a snail in the murex family, by a process involving exposure to sunlight, which makes the brominated indigo molecule lose one of its bromines and turn blue.
Wow, what an excellent video. So happy I've been studying optics recently!
Ah brilliant! I knew this was a thing but i couldnt remember the details. Thanks Hank!
They did it!! They made a charity sock subscription!! I've been waiting for this since they mentioned months ago on Dear Hank an John. ❤️❤️❤️
You guys should do an episode about how most ancient plant life may have been purple rather than green.
They have done at least one, and possibly two, episodes about the purple earth.
Close. The purple was from bacteria rather than plants. As far as we know, there are no plants or algae that use purple photosynthetic pigments...red, orange, yellow, brown, bluish green, and of course, green, but purple and true blue photosynthetic pigments appear to be missing from the palette. When you stop to realize that blue and purple light is more energetic than the other colors, it makes sense that these colors would be "missing", since they'd be absorbed (rather than reflected) to provide more energy for photosynthesis.
I've been wondering, for some time, why the standard blue/red/yellow primary colors don't work for inkjet printer dyes, nor for color laser toners. What started me thinking about it, was when someone asked about the primary colors on some forum or other. Someone answered yellow/cyan/magenta...not, apparently, understanding that it isn't true in all cases. This video seems to be giving clues, but doesn't quite get me there. It'd be nice to see something that directly addresses this.
The best explanation for this question I've come across.
It's about time. In other words, thanks for the explanation. I love you guys! Really blew my mind today. And don't you dare call me a pundit.
“Anthocyonin” 😆 it’s so funny how fancy these names sound - when in reality it just means flower-blue 🤪💙
I love how I cam always tell it’s going to be a “Hank video” just by the title!
I'm trying my best to keep up by trying to remember my biology, physics, and chemistry lessons back in highschool.
Oh, fun times.
Dude that was pretty dense but you pulled me through to the end. Billirubin and Bilverdin sound like a legal firm.
"Look how blue AND healthy I am. I'm a great partner to consider."
I appreciate the disclaimer about evolution not being a sentient process. Concise but precise. Well done :)
So reds and yellows require less energy and so are in a way, more relaxing colours? That's interesting, because typically when animals flash reds, such as chameleons for example, it's to signal that they're in a more agitated or excited state. Maybe animals use red as a warning colour, because it allows them to conserve energy so it can be used for defensive purposes.
I heard biliverden is why the pacific lingcod sometimes has blue flesh. It's totally ok to eat and changes color to white when cooked but when fresh caught it's a distinct bluish color.
Would you guys be willing to do an episode on partial color blindness, in particular blue. Apparently its quite rare to have and I can't see part of the spectrum. Thanks
I watched something today about blue being the last color societies embrace with a name because it's one of the rarest in nature or something like that.
Could you do a video on why humans can have different types of eye color? Like why did we evolve to have different variations of eye color? I can make guesses, but I think it'd be very interesting to know it clearly and I'd definitely watch a video about it.
Idea for a SciShow episode: Comparing the primary colours (yes I used a 'u' in colours) in the art world with the primary colours in the electrical and electronic world, explaining why they're different.
There is a structural yellow that might be worth discussing: the chrysalis of the tithoria butterfly and other golden looking insects. Gold is just a shiny yellow!
"low energy red" is now the best biology mnemonic
Ulfstag - 2020-11-25
I'd be interested in finding out about the blue in a blue ringed octopus, especially considering their skins properties
iMW3BK - 2020-11-28
@Sailor "just wave and let them be" great way of wording that sentiment
Refined Insanity - 2020-11-30
skins' * 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
guess it depends on how many octopuses you're talking about
🤣💥🤣💥🤣💥💥💥
Melody - 2021-03-24
I don't know why but for some reason I think that it is a physical structured blue rather than a pigmented blue.
Louis Valentino - 2022-01-20
Chromatophorez,and irritaphorez.
The colour changing skill cellz that make their ringz brilliant blue.