Summary
How do suction cups work? Did Caligula get murdered due to remoras? Are remoras good or bad for their hosts? Find out on this episode of Species.
Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y30oSBdF0feRKLpSOVYBZ3PFlHtqSaQ9u25dqBwaPCY/edit?usp=sharing
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Do you have any clue how a suction cup works? |
| 0:04.1 | It's a little bizarre when you think about it that pressing a flexible cup against a solid surface can allow that cup to stick to said surface. |
| 0:16.0 | If you'd never seen a suction cup in action, you wouldn't guess it's something that it'd work. |
| 0:23.3 | You'd assume it'd just fall off, right? You'd be surprised that it can stick, let alone stick and support weight. |
| 0:30.9 | I think you'd be very surprised to find yourself fighting to unstick the cup from where you'd pressed it. And the reason we wouldn't |
| 0:40.4 | predict a suction cup would work is because suction cups take advantage of some wonky phenomena |
| 0:47.4 | that we don't normally utilize in day-to-day life. Let me explain it to you, so you can be a know-it-all next time you |
| 0:55.9 | see someone using a suction cup. When you press down the cup flat, you squeeze out many of the |
| 1:02.9 | air particles and whatnot inside of it. And when the cup reclaims its natural shape, there are |
| 1:09.4 | less particles inside the cup, per given area, than there are |
| 1:14.3 | in the atmosphere outside of it. So there are some particles bouncing around inside the suction |
| 1:20.3 | cup, but there are way more bouncing around the air outside. Each particle is shooting around all |
| 1:26.8 | over the place, as gas particles do, and |
| 1:29.1 | bouncing against the suction cup on both sides. But the difference in relative numbers makes it so |
| 1:36.3 | that way more particles are bouncing against the exterior surface than the interior surface. And those particles on the outside, thanks to their |
| 1:47.3 | superior numbers, are able to pin down the suction cup. On the macro scale, in simple terms, we would |
| 1:56.5 | say that there is less pressure inside the cup relative to outside. I know this is a little |
| 2:04.2 | counterintuitive, but the cup is actually being pressed down upon by the particles in our |
| 2:10.9 | atmosphere. And it stays put because there's not enough on the other side pushing back. |
| 2:17.1 | The pressure is higher on the outside of the cup and lower on the inside, |
| 2:21.9 | and the difference means that the cup is held in place. |
| 2:26.0 | For this reason, suction cups don't work in a vacuum. |
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