How Genetics Determine Ear Wax Type | Experimental

welcome to experimental The Science Show

that collects ear wax and creates boy

[Music]

bands in a moment we'll be sniffing a few cows in California helping Billy grow his hair with stinging nettles finding out how Nelson's wee wee

got into to's wine and making a mechanical bird or two in deepest Florida but first have you ever wondered

why ascian women have small breasts Chinatown in London the experimental team is getting to grips with a sticky problem that's right the

ear wax of Southeast Asia this one that one it's like that say that one that one half half half and half really yes there's a difference

between European ear wax and that found in much of Asia and the world expert on the subject is this

man Dr kashiri yoso from the University of nakasaki his work with ear wax is helping us to understand how early humans conquered the world

ear wax and global [Music] domination uh there are two types of axx in the human being one is uh dry type

like this a powder likee substance that is frequently seen among East agents and the other one is with what typ sticky

like this yeah uh this is uh common among uh Caucasians and black Africans yeah sound intrigued by this geographical

phenomenon Dr yiro asked colleagues around the world to collect nail clippings and blood samples from just about every ethnic group on the planet they analyzed the DNA from each sample

fed it into a computer and look to find out if there was a genetic difference between people with dry ear wax and people with wet wax we found that the single Gene

determines the visible human genetic trait that is ear wax yeah that is surprising I think yeah but the amazing thing was the

distribution of this Gene it supported a controversial theory on how humans first conquered the Earth well the human being originated in

Africa they started to move uh from Africa to all of the world that was uh 100,000 years

ago somewhere along the line the dry ear wax Gene became dominant amongst humans living in China Japan and much of

Southeast Asia then around 85,000 years ago something happened which made some of these people cross to North America the first of the waves of immigration

that brought the dry awax Gene at least as far south as Bolivia our experiments showed that the

the Chinese Japanese Koreans Native Americans and some bivans have a common ancestor they were living

around Lake B 20,000 years ago rather surprisingly the dry ear wax Gene is responsible for some other

rather personal traits do you use the odorant no you don't use the odorant no uh no you don't no yep you've guessed it in the same way as the gene blocks the

production of ear wax it also blocks the production of stinky sweat this might explain why deodorants don't sell too well in Japan okay I smelled your under

here no okay but Dr yiro believes that his ear wax Gene has something even more surprising up its sleeve I be that Asian

women have a smaller breast size than other uh women for example cagans and black people so the uh the size of the

breast uh tissue uh I believe that this is uh related to uh dry ear wax but how to prove Dr Yo's Theory

could I um touch your uh not even just a little bit I'll go on it's I'll pretend no no definitely not [Music]

not still to come on experimental how to turn instant boy bands into instant fighter pilots and how these birds might help them get better planes to fly in but

first let's see just how stupid Billy bunter is prepared to be in the name of science every now and again in the life of a scientist young and not so young one comes across the work of a colleague

that will literally change your life and this is that moment for Billy [Music] bunter you see he's just come across US

patent number 659 6266 a potion to cure male patent boldness using Nettles it's just what Billy needs perhaps that highly strung

demonstrator Karina will fall for him with a full head of hair true to the test Department's ethos why buy it when you can make it Billy high tails it off to the the Garden in

search of the ingredients and soon he's boiling it all up and dreaming of a new [Music] quiff but what is male pattern

balding well it seems to be a genetic characteristic and it's caused by the hormone that makes men big and hairy in the first place testosterone there are enzymes in the body which change

testosterone into another hormone dihydrotestosterone and it's this hormone that leads to the hair follicle shrinking and ultimately falling out there's a chemical in Nettles that's

part of this potion which claims to prevent the change from testosterone to dihydrotestosterone and perhaps result in a healthy head of hair so let's see

if it [Music] works ah well Billy if you'd bothered to

read the whole patent you'd have noticed that the required chemical is found mainly in the roots not the leaves and is only part of the Brew coming up later on experimental the

planet killing cows of California and the airplane that thinks it's a bird but first a tactile vest from [Music]

Holland at experimental we heard that a Dutch company tno were working on a new system that could help both boy bands and jet fighters strut their stuff so we

headed to suberg in utre as fast as we could when we looked through the door it blew our

[Music] minds these three boys only met 20 minutes ago and already they've got a dance routine worthy of the Eurovision

song contest this impressive feat was all down to their attire this little number the tactile vest

brainchild of yan van her with this man hendrik Yan vanine the tectile vest is a display for your skin very similar to

the way a monitor or a set of headphones is a display for your eyes or for your ears experimental has come across one or two things like this in the past the

hugging shirt of Rome or the Singapore chicken vest but this seems to be taking the idea to a different level these guys are being controlled by

a computer switching on and off more than aund of these little vibrators all you have to do is react and you can

dance well sort of luckily inflicting the world with pre-programmed boy bands is not the only use for this tactile vest thanks

boys Yan hopes that his electronics will soon be found in one of these fighter pilot is a very busy pilot he has to pay attention to many different systems and has to perform

many tasks at the same time uh obviously he has to fly the aircraft uh when it's not on autopilot but he also has to deal with lots of different types of information

and it means that is I are really occupied by reading this place looking outside and doing different things by bringing touch into the equation with the tactile vest Yan hopes

to bring another sense to the fighter Pilot's weapons if their eyes or ears Miss some Vital Information like an incoming missile a vibrating widget

should alert them to the [Applause] danger the principle we're using is the same princi ible as the one that you're used to which is a tap on the shoulder

somebody Taps you on the shoulder you know which way to look well done bigles but what's this chap doing in the shorts well it's just another of Yan's

uses for his tickly little vest by hooking up his vibrators to a GPS system he's managed to create a navig device for CrossCountry Runners no more losing

your Rhythm checking the map just keep jogging until a little tickle send you to the right or left but whilst controlling Butch men with vibrators might get some people excited it seems

that experimental finds tickling boy bands the most [Music] fun don't try this at home in a moment we'll be trying to lift

a test Department tester with a glass of water going bird watching in Florida and sniffing cow whff in California but first let's head to the test Department

to take mathematics a little too far down at the test Department Toby is getting all morbid it's the birthday of his greatest hero the British Admiral

Lord Nelson who died over 200 years ago hello still he's trying to convince Horus that it remains possible to be at one with a great man Toby's argument is based on the

following facts every time Nelson breathed out approximately 2.4 * 10 22 yes 22 n molecules of gas came out of

his mouth the fact that there are about 1.04 * 10 to the 44 molecules of gas in the Earth's atmosphere Toby has worked out

that this will mean that approximately 5.4 molecules of the gases that were once in Nelson's last breath will be in

each breath of his [Music]

whilst he's feeling a bit chuffed with himself Horus is doing some calculations of his own given the fact that there are about 5.7 * 10 46 water molecules on

Earth and that Nelson would have drunk about 52,000 L of the stuff in his life there's a good chance that Toby's glass

of wine will contain an awful lot of the atoms that were once part of Nelson's

[Music] urine on its way the ultimate boy's toy

the plane that thinks it's a bird and fun things to do with a hot water bottle but first what's choking the planet

this might seem a green and pleasant land but it's not look up to the hills and you'll see there all clouded in the asmatics favorite smog a nasty mix of

gases made up of what scientists like to call volatile organic compounds welcome to the most polluted Valley in California San Wen and what's causing

all that yellow muck well there are the common suspects heavy industry plus six Lane highways choked with SUVs but there are some who claim there's another

villain it's Daisy the cow and over 3 million of her ruminating friends who also live in the valley that's right 3.2 million cows means 3.2 million bums

doing this according to some each of the cows manages to push out as much polluting gases as what one car two perhaps well

no the annual figure banded about for the output of Daisy's gastric tract is said to be the equivalent of the output of no less than 85

cars and it's not really her fault like any mammal the amount of wind she produces is influenced in part by her diet and unfortunately for her she mainly eats grass which is one of the

hardest foods to digest so hard that if we saw Daisy in half we'll find a stomach with four parts each filled with billi of bacteria which ferment all that green stuff until they managed to turn

it into something that Daisy can actually digest and it's all that fermentation that produces the nasty gases that pass from Daisy's front end to her rear

end so far so repellent but can we really blame cows for producing all that nasty yellow Haze well that's what this man Frank mow from the University of

California Davis wanted to find out the figure for Daisy's polluting habits comes from a study done way back in 1938 at the time they thought the smog

was largely produced by methane and since cows produce a lot of methane the blame was laid on them but now we know that smog is made up of a cocktail of

volatile organic compounds or voc's and they are found in everything from exhaust fumes to paint or underarm deodorants and yes they are found in

stuff that flies out of the back of Daisy so what we are doing is we are trying to measure these hundreds of different VOC volatile organic compounds

that form smoke welcome to the world's largest fart chamber the UC Davis biob bubbles the Bine equivalent that old Jam Jar in the bath trick if you don't understand

that ladies just ask your boyfriends about it we use the biob bubbles uh to house animals to measure air quality impacts we have one air Inlet on the one

side and an air outlet on the other side and the difference between outlet and Inlet is uh what the animals and their waste and the animal feed uh produces by

means of air emissions so what we finding uh is that in general our total emission numbers

are uh much lower uh those that are currently on the books how much lower well Dr mower's provisional results indicate that in one year one cow does

not produce the same amount of voc's as 85 cars no it's closer to 10 cars which is still a lot but hey if you want cheese milk and yogurt you're going to

need cows so if you're concerned about the smog why don't you carpol take the bus or better still walk but whatever

you do lay off the beans yourself still to come on experimental the morphing spy planes of California but first to the test

Department water is such fun often at test Department Towers the team will Frolic in it play with it and make drinks with it sometimes they'll even

cook up new and Innovative uses for it like using it to lift a person how can this happen well as you can see

water on its own is not very good at lifting anything in fact it's rather good at allowing things to sink through it but if we were to put it into this

fancy water bladder 3000 machine and all of a sudden water's lifting properties are revealed to get the pressure up all we have to do is pour the water into this

pipe at a great height there [Music] so why did she rise well it's all to do with the weight of a column of water

imagine our little tube went all the way to the bottom of the deepest ocean as our submarine drops Into the Depths the pressure of the water increases the deeper it goes by the time it gets to

the bottom at 10,660 M the pressure is a staggering 1,68 kg per square cm enough to crush

all but the toughest of Subs [Music] even with the pressure of a 3 m column of water pressing down on it the

pressure in a hot water bottle Rises to3 kg per square cm not only enough to lift a person but also to blow holes in

[Music] it meet Dr Rick Lind and his team big boys with a Little Dream the ding spy

plane they want to make a plane so maneuverable that it can fly over a city and ultimately swoop down and into a room the real application for aircraft

is in urban operations or flying within a city we can imagine if someone released a dangerous gas in towntown Los Angeles we could have a small aircraft that could fly throughout the city into

parking garages between alleys inside of buildings even to look for this dangerous substance the plane needs to be not just small it needs to be birdlike

too our real objective is to build airplanes that actually can do what birds do they can fly where birds fly and do Maneuvers like birds can maneuver aeronautical Engineers have always been

inspired by birds but until now most Wings have been rigid and fixed like this but Dr Lynn's wings are flexible and for good

reason we have large airplanes that fly above the cities and high in the sky but we need airplanes that can operate at Treet top level or even car level and

that's where all this flexibility comes in it's about making the wing adapt to different situations in both birds and plains the shape of the wing determines what the

Beast can do long thin wings are great for distance flying but pretty useless when it comes to dodging around in small places for that you need short wings but

they're only for short flights to make the ultimate flying machine you need a wing that can change to suit the conditions long and thin to get you there and short and stubby to whis you

around King of the wing change is the seagull one of the first things we looked at was what shapes does the seagull change into during its flight

how does a seagull change its shoulders elbows its muscles and its feathers when it wants to land versus taking off how does a seagull change its shape to fly

into a strong wind to find out exactly how they did it Dr Lynn sent out a spy of his own who took thousands of pictures of birds in all aspects of flight the photographs that we're

looking for are gliding pictures of birds so you'll see that as the birds attempt different Maneuvers they'll change the shape of their wings to change the aerodynamics and this is a particular interest to us because then we can mimic these shapes using

mechanical actuators on our morphing airplanes and try to accomplish the same type of gliding capability once they knew the wing shapes they wanted to mimic the hard part really

[Music] began well as you can see we've installed Motors Electronics on the airplane that will physically cause the wing to bend and rotate about the shoulder and elbow just like a seagull

would change its wing in flight but the real key to getting a wing to flex like a seagull wasn't so much the actuators our wi design differs from

conventional airplanes mostly because it's a very very thin Wing because I have that thin Wing our wings can bend

and twist in ways a large aircraft could not okay but can it actually [Music]

fly pretty impressive in fact the boys are so confident that they've cracked bird flight that they're beginning to get a bit more relaxed about the type of birds they're observing down at the

[Music] beach and finally on experimental a cooking lesson from the test Department Toby here is Keen to find out

if eating asparagus can make your urine smell of the green fingered vegetable within 15 minutes so let's see if it's true well now we've got a sample that yes

seems to smell of asparagus Let's test it out on a random selection of the Great British public sadly the first two seem only to smell that standard urinal whiff but the

third who does seem to be a bit of a plant is convinced of the aroma asparagus asparagus I very interesting interestingly horis has been in the test

Department Library digging out a few papers on the subject you see in 1952 scientists shoved asparagus tinged Wii

under the noses of 115 people in the UK and found that only 40% could smell the whiff the abilities seemed to run in families if you can smell it it's quite

possible therefore that your dad and Granddad can too which suggests that genetics might be involved even stranger Studies have shown that Israelis and

Chinese people are far less likely to be able to smell asparagus in the Wei Wei even when it's definitely there than Europeans are however despite over A

Century Of Studies no one seems to be sure exactly what it is in the asparagus that makes the whiff the [Music]