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Do you guys see what I mean?
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Hi, I'm Lindsay.
And I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery.
Guess what?
What?
This is our last mailbag episode before we start an all-new season of Tumble.
Oh, I was going to guess that you had a fish behind your back.
No, it's that season 11 of Tumble is launching on Friday, October 17th.
We're going to give you all the details.
Plus, we have a special guest to answer your questions about the nature of the universe.
Stay tuned.
Okay, so we have been saying all summer and now into the fall that we've been hard at work on new episodes for season 11 and it's almost finally here.
Finally!
I have had a lot of fun doing these mailbag episodes and I think we're going to keep doing them when we have some extra time, which is like always right.
Always extra time.
And I think one of my favorite things about what we've discovered through doing these is that listeners are really into the Easter eggs.
Yes, I've gotten some crossword puzzles.
I'm going to make a quiz at some point.
And then if you get all the answers right, something will happen.
I don't know what.
Perhaps the world will end.
Wait, we wouldn't want that.
Oh, right.
That's right.
I'm supposed to keep the world going.
I think we get entrance to the magical portal into Tumbleland, where we live.
Well anyway, I got a bunch of explanations of a plant's vascular system which shout out to Ivan, our winner on that, and to everyone else who wrote in.
Great answers, y'all.
I thought I'll maybe try it myself.
I'm going to drop in some Easter eggs for season 11 right now.
Well, you know, you're supposed to hide them at the end, but go ahead.
Okay, these are like the ones that the Easter eggs that you find first.
Not a well-hidden Easter egg.
Got it.
Yeah, they're just telling you there's Easter eggs in this area.
Okay, so I'm going to read the titles of the scientific papers that inspired the first three episodes.
And I want our listeners to write in and tell us what these episodes are going to be about.
So we get to learn about scientific papers and do some Easter egg hunting.
So that's cool.
Yeah, so the key behind this is that the titles in scientific journals can be hard to tell what the thing is actually about.
And your job is to decode them and explain to us what they mean in words that anybody could understand.
So these are like the words that we carefully shield you from.
And parents, if you're a scientist, if you know what these words mean, don't cheat.
Just help along the way.
Yeah, this isn't like one of those things like did your PhD level parent do this science fair for you?
Kid.
No.
I noticed you used a particle accelerator.
Yeah, exactly.
They don't give nine-year-olds access to that, I don't think.
Not on a usual basis.
Anyway, so what are these article titles?
Okay, the first one.
The first one is titled, A Cloacal Opening in a Non-Avian Dinosaur.
All right.
I think we know what that one might be about.
That's the easy one.
We know what dinosaurs means.
Do we?
Yeah.
Okay, the second one is photographic plates and spirit fakes.
Remembering Harry Price's investigation of William Hope's spirit photography at its centenary.
Oh, boy.
I don't even know if I pronounced centenary right.
Yeah, that's the kind of word you read and don't say.
I've never seen that word before.
Yeah.
Okay, and the third one is a quantitative inventory of global soniferous fish diversity.
You know, there's kind of a lot of words that you read and don't say in these titles.
I really smushed over soniferous.
Soniferous?
Soniferous?
So I think it's got to be Siniferous.
Siniferous.
Anyway, kids, if you know how that word's pronounced, write us and tell us, please.
Send in a pronunciation guide with your answers to TumblePodcast at gmail.com.
You will find out if you're right when the episode airs.
So we're going to really like trail these out, and then we'll send some kind of prize to those who get it right.
There we go.
Well, so for those of you who are, you know, longtime listeners, you might notice that this season coming up is going to be a little bit shorter.
And you might also notice that we've got a few more ads than we usually do.
The main reason why is that it costs us a lot more to make this show than can support us with just ads by itself.
So we really depend on the support from our listeners and lots of other areas to keep going and making these shows every two weeks, like we have been.
But there's a really good way that, if you want us to make more Tumble, you can help us support the show and also listen to fewer ads.
It's just...
A dollar a month to get an ad-free version on Patreon.
So that's just $12 a year to not hear the ads.
Yeah, and if you pay annually, it's only like $10 a year.
Oh, there's a little bit of discount.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's $10.
Not bad.
And, as you know, because we talk about it all the time, at the 5 a month level you get a birthday shout out.
And there's other benefits like special recording requests and things like that that you can enjoy on our Patreon page.
I think it's now time for us to do our review of reviews, and also I think we have some emails we want to share.
Yes.
And I also want to say, like writing reviews and these emails also like really help the show because they can help us share with others who might want to support the show what they mean to the people who are listening, who are you.
It really makes me feel like we're doing something special and drives us to keep doing it.
All right.
Let's hear some reviews.
What have you got for us?
So this review comes from Talia, and I'll try to do justice to the amount of caps that she put in.
Oh, dear.
The title is, This is an Amazing Podcast.
Okay.
First of all, Capybara!
Second, this show is amazing.
I personally think How to Catch a Happy Cappy is how to catch a giant cappy, a giant rodent, zips and zappies is literally so amazing.
Also, octopuses are better okay.
So i agree with the happy cappy song bit, which you can go hear that song on youtube, by the way um, or support it on bandcamp or stream it wherever you stream music.
Um, I agree with that commenter's opinion on the song, but maybe not on Octopuses.
Octopuses are better.
I agree with you, Talia.
Thank you for supporting my side.
All right.
Next one is from SNB2016.
More songs, please.
Please make another song album.
P.S.
Cats are not evil.
Okay.
Another song album.
Well, I will try.
It takes a lot of time to write a song, to tell the truth, and I'm not one of those people who can just crank them out.
So I'll see what I can do.
Awesome.
We'll do what we can.
Yes.
All right.
This review comes from user CatNotEvil.
I wonder what their opinion is going to be about that issue.
Well, the opinion is only encoded into their username because...
The title is amazing and the read is Me Give You More Star, followed by a long scroll down of star emojis.
All right.
I guess that's as many stars as you can get.
All right.
Well, thank you all for all those great reviews.
Please keep them coming and we'll keep trying to read them whenever we have one of these mailbag shows.
Yeah, and I want to give a shout out to a parent email.
This is one that made me cry.
Oh, did it?
Yeah.
All right.
It came from a parent who is signing up from Patreon.
And they said I also want to take this chance to say a huge and heartfelt thank you to you and Lindsay.
I think it's addressed to Marshall.
It's addressed to me.
For the incredible work that you do.
The way you bring science to life with such curiosity, clarity and joy has been such a gift to kids everywhere.
Our child has been a loyal fan of tumble science for a long time.
And through your podcast, he has discovered so many wonders of science and developed a true love for learning.
That's great.
You know, when I was a teacher, that was like That was the main thing that we would talk about.
Is we really want to inspire a lifelong love of learning in everybody?
So it feels really good to know that we've maybe played some small role in doing that for somebody in a faraway place.
That's great.
I'm still choked up.
Let's move on.
Well, there's one more thing we wanted to talk about while we're still in kind of this like housekeeping little area of the show.
I wanted to mention some live events.
So I just got back from Princeton, New Jersey, and I had a great time performing at the Princeton Public Library and also at the New Jersey Abacus Bee, which is an amazing math competition for blind and low vision kids.
We also have an upcoming performance in just a few weeks, on October 11th, which is a Saturday, at the Connecticut River Museum.
So come out there in Essex, Connecticut, at the Connecticut River Museum.
We'll include some information in a link.
We're going to do a live performance all about birds and bird songs.
So come check it out.
Learn about birds.
See us there.
We'd love to see you all.
Yes, I'm excited.
I've heard the town is really cute.
So maybe worth a day trip if you're in like the New York City area too.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I think it's time for us to take a quick break and then we'll be back with universe questions.
We're back and we're super excited about the scientist.
We have to answer questions that arrived in our inbox, because he's kind of a celebrity scientist to us.
I think not just to us, too.
I mean, he's just generally a celebrity scientist.
Yeah.
So Hakeem Oluseyi is an astrophysicist who describes himself as a detective for space, which probably means he wears a cool hat.
He solves mysteries about black holes, exploding stars, and how galaxies are born.
And he's the host of a new Nova video podcast, Particles of Thought.
Yes, it's also an audio podcast.
And the reason why he's a celebrity to us in particular is because he was a judge on the Netflix show Baking Impossible, which I describe as like nailed it for engineers.
Yeah.
And it's really good.
I think it's that the listeners of the show would really enjoy this show.
All right.
Well, anyhow, we sent Hakeem three questions from our listeners.
And let's start with the first.
My name is Thomas and I'm six years old and I live in Massachusetts.
How does your body know you're in a black hole?
How does your body know if it's in a black hole?
Well, in many cases, it probably won't.
You won't notice anything different.
You have to get really close to the center of the black hole before you begin to notice that there's anything strange.
So if the sun were to become a black hole, it would only be around four miles across, right?
Right now, it's 100 times bigger than the Earth.
But it would be, you know, smaller than your town if you shrunk it down to the size of a black hole of equivalent mass.
So yeah, if you're four miles away from the center of the black hole, you'll know that you've approached a black hole.
If you go to the black holes that are the centers of galaxies, which are millions of times the mass of our sun, they're much bigger.
And so you'll be very far away from that center when you enter that black hole.
And so you won't even know that you've entered a black hole.
Everything will be just like normal.
So the bigger the black hole, the safer they are and the more mysterious they are.
You won't know you're there.
I mean so wait.
So he's saying just like you, go to a black hole.
And it's just like humdy ho every day.
Well, I think he's saying that a black hole like the center is the place where you start to feel the major effects of being in a black hole.
But like, it's kind of like wandering away from the shore into the ocean.
It's like you're not going to go to the center of the ocean first.
Yeah, I guess it takes a long time to notice that you're like completely out to sea.
Yeah, yeah.
I think there's been many stories where that's happened.
I turned around and could not see the shoreline.
Yeah, it's like the beach was just over there.
Now it's gone.
And so I guess his answer is basically like your body wouldn't know and neither would you.
See, here's my thought is like, aren't you like, oh, the sun became a black hole.
Things are different now here on Earth.
Or I am journeying to another galaxy and there is a black hole in the middle of that galaxy.
Wouldn't that be part of your preparation as a space traveler?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm overthinking this.
All right.
Well, are we ready to go to our next question?
Yes.
Our next question from Annalise is how do asteroids form?
How do asteroids form?
Well, you know, there are things that happen when a planetary system is forming.
The first thing that happens is a disk forms around the forming star and material in the disk begins to stick together due to static electricity.
And then they begin to collide with each other.
And as they grow bigger and bigger and bigger, eventually they get to the size where we call them protoplanets.
And at this size, they will begin to do what's called chemical differentiating.
What does that mean?
It means that they melt and the dense stuff, like the metals, sink to the center and the lighter stuff, like the rock, rises to the top.
And now what happens is those protoplanets collide with each other and they break apart.
And so a lot of the objects in the asteroid belt are the results of those collisions.
So that's why there are asteroids like you will find at Barringer Crater.
The asteroid there is a big, giant chunk of iron.
You go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Same thing.
Big, giant chunk of iron.
They were made because they were once at the core of a proto planet that was broken apart.
Now, there are other types of asteroids that are called carbonaceous chondrites.
And these are not... uh, material that have been incorporated into a proto planet.
They're much more primordial is the word that we use.
And, you know, they grow just like planets grow, right?
Stuff colliding and sticking together, perhaps some melting.
So it's a process that takes small things and builds bigger things.
And those bigger things could get blown apart by collisions and then fall to earth billions of years later as asteroids.
One time I was in third grade and I fell off my bike and collided with the ground.
And that felt to me at that time like a pretty dramatic collision, but it didn't destroy a planetoid and send giant chunks of iron everywhere.
So really, all of our dramatic collisions aren't that dramatic.
Very, very true.
All right.
The next question comes from Felix, age nine.
And he asks, why don't we get dizzy as the earth is spinning?
You asked, why don't we get dizzy as the earth is spinning?
Well, that's a very good question.
If the earth was as small as a merry-go-round, you would.
But as an object gets bigger and bigger and bigger, when it's rotating, the surface seems to not be moving very fast at all.
And not only that, it's a really big circle, right?
This circle that you're going around in 24 hours, right?
That's a long time to make one circle, 24 hours to make one complete turn.
So try that.
Try standing.
And, you know, if you stand and you spin by yourself, you'll get really dizzy.
Right.
But if you spin more and more slowly, you get less and less dizzy.
So imagine it takes you 24 hours to make one rotation. you won't feel that at all.
And that's what the earth is doing.
It takes 24 hours to make one rotation.
So if someone was looking at you, do that on your own feet, it probably wouldn't even look like you're moving.
I can just imagine a kid doing this experiment, the patience that you would have.
Yeah.
If anyone can manage to spin one rotation in 24 hours at a constant rate, I don't know.
I'd be super impressed with that.
Yeah, incredible.
I think that, well, I think that explanation makes so much sense.
It definitely does.
I think if you spun that slowly, you probably wouldn't get dizzy.
All right.
I...
Snuck in a quick question of my own because, as mentioned, we are huge Baking Impossible fans.
So I asked Hakeem, what kind of dessert would he like to eat in space?
Thank you for watching Baking Impossible.
I loved making that show.
That was a lot of fun.
Made some great friends that are still friends to this day.
And what dessert would I eat in space?
The same ones I love to eat here on Earth.
One of my favorites is sweet potato pie.
And I really love me some milk and cookies.
I love to dip my cookies in the milk.
And that is a great dessert after a meal at the end of the day.
If you drink milk in space, isn't it just like a floating sphere?
Isn't that what happens to it?
See, that's a good question for the baking impossible of baconeers.
Can you make milk into a sphere that floats around and then try to dip a cookie in it?
I feel like the hard part would be catching the milk.
Yeah, exactly.
How to have the milk like, not just be in some kind of like strip across the spaceship and be able to dip.
So maybe more complicated of a dessert than it sounds.
All right.
Well...
Thank you for listening, and we'll see you back here next time with an all-new original episode.
What is that episode about?
You'll have to guess based on the paper title.
In the meantime, don't forget to keep sending us your questions, reviews and comments, and your Easter egg answers.
Thanks today to Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi.
His new podcast, Particles of Thought, is great for older kids and grownups and it can be found on YouTube and any podcast app you prefer.
If you want to help us keep making this show, just support us on Patreon.
You'll get ad-free episodes, special chances to be on the show and, of course, birthday shout-outs when you sign up at the 5 level or higher at patreoncom.
Slash tumblepodcast.
Grownups.
You can find out what we're up to, from live events to merch drops to more, when you subscribe to our newsletter on SciencePodcastForKidscom.
You can also follow us on Instagram and subscribe to us on YouTube at AtTumblePodcast.
Just click on the links in our show description.
If you want to listen to this show in Spanish, you should check out Tumble en Español, adapted and hosted by our friends Nuria and Alvaro.
Find it at tumbleinespanol.com or search for Tumble en Español wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lindsay Patterson, the executive producer of the show, and I wrote this episode.
And I'm Marshall Escamilla, and I made all of the music.
Thanks for listening and join us next time for more stories of science discovery.
All right, everybody.
So here we are at the end of the episode, and that means that it's time for our Patreon birthday shoutouts.
So here we go.
Happy 9th birthday on October 1st to Ryder.
Your parents are so proud of how adventurous and inquisitive you are.
Please continue to be curious with love from Mom Dad Amelia Reagan Charlie Ruby, Maggie and Stripes.
That's a pretty big family, and I imagine one of them at least is an animal.
Anyway, let me know.
A happy birthday on October 9th to Eli.
Never stop asking questions.
Mommy, Daddy, and Aviva love you so much.
To Matthew, Mom, Dad, and Stella, always love you.
Keep loving science, and may you always find happiness in learning new things.
And I hope you have a happy birthday on October 11th.
To Jamie, a happy birthday on October 15th.
To our growing explorer, Dad, Mom, and Joe, love you so much.
A happy birthday also on October 15th.
To Annabelle, stay curious and keep exploring.
To Florence, we know you love science and hope you have a happy birthday on October 17th.
Thanks so much to all of you and to everyone who supports Tumble on Patreon.
We really do appreciate it so, so much.
And I hope you know that we couldn't keep making episodes of Tumble without the support of our subscribers on Patreon.
And remember the Easter egg.
Do you think you can tell us what our first three episodes of the new season are about?
Let us know by sending us an email at tumblepodcast, at gmailcom, or by supporting us on Patreon by going to patreoncom, slash tumblepodcast.
We'll see you next time.
