474: No Such Thing As A Remote Controlled Cabbie

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Hey, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we get going, I just want to let you know a couple of things.

Firstly, the episode you're about to hear is the last ever episode to be recorded at the QI offices in Covent Garden as we pack up, shop, and move on to our new offices in Hoburn.

So, we thought, you know, if we're gonna go out, we should go out strong. So, we reached out to Nerd Royalty, and fortunately, she said, Yes, it's Hannah Fry.

My goodness, we are such huge fans of her at the QI office. I think every elf has probably read her books.
Hello World, if you've not read that, by the way, is an incredible book.

I'm sure you've all seen her TV series, which was out November of last year on BBC2, called The Secret Genius of Modern Life. It was absolutely phenomenal.

She makes incredible TV, she writes incredible books, and she is such a good guest on this week's episode. You have to, by the way, check out her latest show.

You can find it on bloomberg.com and it's called The Future with Hannah Fry.

It is a look into the world of scientists and inventors who are changing the way the world is going to be over the next century.

These are people who are looking into seeing if we can live a life beyond 150 years old, who are working out whether or not computers will be able to read our emotions and trying to find out if they can make a planet that will be utterly transformed by unlimited clean energy.

So do check that out. It's on bloomberg.com or you can find the entire series on YouTube as well.
And otherwise, you know, next time you happen to be in Covent Garden, do take a walk down Maiden Lane.

And if you look above the barbershop that's called Ruffians, you'll see a window there. That's where we were.
For nine years, James Andy, Anna, and I just sat there dorking out.

And we're going to miss the place, but we're looking forward to the next chapter, and that will be next week's episode.

But for now, let's give a good old goodbye with Hannah Fry to the QI offices in Covent Garden. On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Colvert Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Hannah Fry. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is hannah oh me quite her uh okay here's my facts the malliard reaction so the thing that makes your uh bread turn brown when you toast it is actually the same thing that makes fake tan work

interesting okay

so do you want more do you want more yeah so you're being you're being you're underimpressed you are being toasted no it's just so weird as in i just i i try to make the connection between you've been toasted effectively.

You would think, like, if you had a normal suntan, you're like, you'll lay in the sun, you would think that's being toasted. That's toasted, exactly.

But this is a spray on, or this is a cream, right? So there's no toasting. What if you put fake tan on bread? That's what I wanted to know.
Good question. This is a great question.

Someone needs to experiment. Yeah.

Perfect toast every time. Okay, so the best thing about this, my favourite thing about this, is this was discovered completely by accident.

So there was a researcher called Ava Wittgenstein, and she was looking into, there were some children who were having problems, their bodies were having problems in breaking down glucose.

There's a sort of simplified sugar that you find in the body, which is called dihydroxyacetone. Easy for me to say.

And she was seeing if you could feed them this sugar, whether their bodies could break down that sort of simplified sugar.

And every now and then, some of these kids would like accidentally dribble a little bit of medicine down their chin. And when they did, they would have a perfectly orange stain

of dribble.

And then she was like, oh, what's going on here?

And what she realized is that you have these amino acids in the skin, and when that reacts with the DHA, the dihydroxyacetone, it creates that sort of reaction that is the same thing

that ends up turning your skin brown in the sun. It's the melanin in your skin.
Anyway, this idea was picked up by copper tone and then released into fake tan.

And it's still the same thing, still the same stuff, the DHA, which is the thing that's actually so funny. But they've just become much better at making it less smelly and less orange.

So did Eva Wittgenstein, did she see this little bit of orangeness and think, what if that was my whole face? Or she's more of a scientist and someone else picked up on the idea.

She's more of the scientist.

I mean, you know, look, who doesn't want to have an entirely orange face?

I'm sure she had ambition. Here's the question that I've got.
I spent ages, hours, trying to find anything about Eva Wittgenstein. There is nothing that I could find.

Were you you trying to find out if she was related to Ludwig? No, I don't. No, no, no, because I did.
Right, and did you find anything? No, exactly. There's nothing about.

So she does this in the 50s, and then she kind of disappears. And I asked a friend who knows how to go into sort of American records just to see if he could find her.

And he searched the whole records. All he could find was an Eva Wittgenstein who died age 97 in North Carolina.

We don't know if it's her, but she showed up as being on a government watch list. Oh, so it's kind of a cool idea that maybe Eva

became a

spy and could like change her disguise by going orange and then back to white. That's the original mission impossible.

That's right.

So have any of you guys ever been fake tanned? At all?

Almost non-stop.

I'm not joking. Do you like my skin is okay, it's important for anybody who doesn't know what I look like.
I am the most ginger person that a ginger person can be, right?

Like I am fully ginger, which means that my skin is not just white, it's like translucent with a hint of blue.

And so

I put on fake tan just to make my skin look like pasty skin. Wow.

Do you have it on right now? I don't actually, but I have got bronzer on. Can you not tell? Well, you just, you look, no, your skin looks fine.
It looks normal.

Interesting though, that that's okay, that you can be kind of under pale. Like, you're not even pale.
No, I aspire to be pale.

So have you tried that? Because I know there are loads of different methods you can do. There are the beds, and then there are the booths with panic.
Oh, no, so beds are not fake tan.

So, the beds, you go in that's a real tan. That's very, it's very considered, it's looked down on.
Oh,

it's not very

easy.

It's a little bit skin cancery. Right.
So, I didn't realize that these, the spray that you can put on, is also a risk. Is it?

Because, well, no, I mean, not, sorry, okay, just for any big tanners listening or sort of like legal teams, whatever. Point is that I think

big tan might be coming to get you it's actually good it's actually good for you it's actually

no it's it makes you look like you are protected from the sun but you're not i see it hasn't had the actual effect it's reacted with it's produced these pigments these melanoidins in your skin but you are then totally unprotected from so some people would think you and i don't think this is even proper but some people think you get a little bit of a tan and that will protect you from other you know stronger from the sun yeah stronger sun which it doesn't this definitely doesn't this is just yeah and doesn't it, this is a bit science-y for me, but doesn't it in in sorry, doesn't it actually kind of make you more susceptible to having the suns harm you?

Don't know. I think Tan's come up for me now.
Okay, on that.

I mean, I think no. I think no.
Okay. There was a study that was done in 2007 which showed, and this was by Katinka Jung.
I don't know if there's any relation to Carl.

Don't know if the Wittgenstein situation. Yeah.

And this was in Berlin, which showed that 24 hours after having the tanner on, ultraviolet, you become more susceptible to it in a 24-hour period, according to this study in 2207.

Interesting. Look, all I know is I never leave the Blooming House without Factor 50 on.

I was once you've been coffee as well. Oh, godga.
So I was once in Cuba. Don't like to brag.

I was wearing Factor 50 and sat in the shade all day. And I was burnt so badly from the reflection of the sun on the sand that I got blisters.

That's the sort of situation where you people without ginger hair, you don't know. You don't know how we suffer.
I do have transparent skin as well actually.

I like Irish skin, even though I have dark hair.

Like when I was in a similar part of the world, I put sun cream on Factor 50 every 20 minutes and one of the times I didn't put it on properly and I blistered in the shape of a handprint on my chest.

Oh god.

I went to a pig farm in Scotland recently.

It says all these showbiz anecdotes that we've got coming

again. Again, don't like to brag.

What I hope you're going to say is you realise that pigs shelter from the sun by rubbing themselves in mud and you did the same.

I mean, close, close. It's because you said Irish skin.

And when I was going around this pig farm, I realised just, I mean, genuinely, these pigs have identical skin to me.

Identical skin. And I was like, why do all these pigs have Irish skin? And as you say, it makes them really susceptible to sunburn.
So that's why they have to keep them in sheds.

But actually, the reason for having Irish skin is a bit grim is because when you are breeding them for meat, you can see if there's bad meat much easier through see-through skin. No.
Wow. What?

Is that true?

That is super fascinating. So, look, you and me, if we ever get hung up for meat.
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. Do you both have any advantage to having pale skin? Can anyone see something?

We are vitamin D superheroes. Okay, right.
Like, that's genuinely a superpower of pale skin people. What does that mean? We make

it more easily. Yeah.
So not enough that you can come in and, you know,

extract it from me. No, no.

You can't make a vitamin D farm out of us.

We haven't tried yet, but

I read an article that said the Mayad reaction is by far the most widely practiced chemical reaction in the world.

Hang on, what about breathing? Breathing. Oh, that counts as a chemical reaction, yeah.
Well, this was at the 100-year anniversary of the MyAd reaction,

which was a huge

skin in the game. Yeah, exactly.
And it was a chemist who said it. Nobel Prize winner, Jean-Marie Lynn, who said it.
But there was a huge conference. It was like 100 years since it got discovered.

And there's a group, the Mayad Reaction Group. The Mayad Reaction Society have conferences just about the Mayad Reaction.
And

as you say, James, they were established in 2005, and it's just food-browning scientists meeting up and

having a weight of a time, I bet. But actually, I think James's case that it's the most practiced chemical reaction on the planet is a very important thing.

Well, this this was Jean-Marie Lynn I'm supporting it James because not only is everyone who's ever made a slice of toast engaged in it but also the murder reaction is happening in our bodies all the time okay and so when you toast something it happens at a very high temperature yeah but generally it's it's a reaction between amino acids which are you know the building blocks of proteins and we've all made of lots of proteins and sugars so that is constantly happening in the human body anyway but at a very slow rate much much more slowly than toasting or all the fake tanny thing.

Are you saying I'm orange on the inside too? I'm afraid so.

And it's bad for you though, because when you make toast, you know, the mad reaction produces about a thousand new molecules. It's really complicated.

One of the chemicals it makes is acrylamide, and acrylamide is carcinogenic. You know, if you have just a slice of toast every day, it's not nearly enough to be a problem.

But they found that the myad process that they use in highly processed foods, so if you're making some some really highly processed food and you want it to last for ages, one way to do it is to heat it up really, really quickly at a massive, massive temperature.

And that kind of myad reaction gives this acrylamide. Yeah.
You know, talking about processed foods, though.

So, okay, if you're like home cooking and you're browning off the chicken and then browning off this thing to try and get loads of flavor, something I've discovered recently, don't bother doing any of that, right?

You can get MSG from the internet, right? You can buy it, right? A little sprinkle of MSG makes everything taste amazing. Okay.
And because I am scientific in nature,

I've A-B-tested this stuff with guests coming around my house. Oh, right.
Sorry, what's A-B testing? It's where you basically have one bowl with, one bowl without, and see which one goes down quicker.

Oh,

wow. Did they know they were in an experiment when they came round? They did not.
Tend to come to my house.

I would say it's an assumption. If you ever go and visit Hannah, it's like you're probably in an experiment.
You sign this release form at the door, is it? I can't really explain, but it's.

What was in the bowls? Do you mind me asking? I made a chicken curry. Look, don't get me wrong, my chicken curry is absolutely delicious.

Both bowls were finished eventually. The one kraken.
The wops.

Was more enjoyed, yeah. I mean, MSG is my.
I grew up in Hong Kong. That's my life, MSG.
I'm very excited to see. Do you have buckets of it that you like spoons?

I do get pot noodle and I collect just the sachets so that I can use it on other things. How are sachets of MSG that come with pot noodles? You know,

MSG is inside the actual powder that you get get of the I actually know that. I can't remember when I last had a pot noodle, but it's been a while.
Yeah. Some of us are like

moved past two noodles.

Sorry. This is my version of I was in Cuba recently.
I don't have a pot noodle in the last few years.

Can I tell you something about

airline food, specifically relating to myard. So myad,

you can't do the myard reaction on a plane. Okay.
That's interesting.

Most planes these days don't have stoves. Well you need an open flame.
Hang on. Or open flames.
Sure, yeah. Sure.
So how do they heat the food? They microwave it. Yeah.
Okay.

What's the maximum temperature microwavable food gets up to? It's 100 degrees because it's heating the water molecules, which get to 100, blah, blah, blah.

So you can't,

that's part of the reason why plane food tastes bad. I know it affects your taste buds being adapted.
If I brought a Bunsen burner onto a plane,

it would be possible. Yeah, unfortunately, it's actually on that little card at check-in.
They do say, have you brought a Bunsen burner for your toast?

There's a picture of a guy with a medieval toasting fork as well. Yeah, pretty strict.
Yeah, but no, but if you put it on those little plastic bags, you can get that through. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, but some of lots of food is pre-myaded before it's loaded onto the plate. And then microwaved.
And then it's microwaved, and then so you get a bit of the flavor still, but yeah.

The myad reaction works on poo,

and that's why we have that's why we have coprolites. Oh, what? Yeah, so if you a coprolite is a fossilized poo, right? Our listeners will know that.

Of course they will. Of course.

But basically, let's say you have a dinosaur, they do a poo. The myad reaction works on the surface of the poo.
That's what crusts it over. And then eventually that's what helps it become a coprolite.

Wow, cool.

So if I take my dog out for a walk,

spray the result with fake tan. Yeah.

Sprinkle a little bit of MSG on it.

Come back millions of years later. There's a chance.
Leave a sign near it. Do not touch.
Experiment in progress. One of Hammer's experiments.
Yeah. Oh, fuck it.

Just leave it alone, right? Don't you said Hong Kong? Because we were talking about MS Chip. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Have you heard of wok hay? Is this a familiar concept to you? Yeah.

It's the breath of the wok.

Right? Oh, okay. It's quality that if you're cooking in China and particularly in Hong Kong, it's like the perfect seared taste of the rice that's been cooked in a wok.

And it's because the rice gets tossed

really fast, loads of times, a few times a second, it uses the mild reaction. And if you get the trajectory of the rice right

and it's cooking at the right temperature, it's absolutely delicious, apparently. And there's a restaurant called The Chairman in Hong Kong, which is one of the top restaurants in Hong Kong.

And chefs there have to spend a year practicing the tossing of the rice in the pan. They're only allowed to cook for other chefs, they're not allowed to cook stir-fries for customers.

They're not allowed to cook a stir-fry for a year so they can get the tossing right. Well, that's amazing.
I have heard about you know washing woks being a

bad thing, right? Like,

you're not supposed to wash a teapot kind of thing as well, right? Yeah, that's just lazy people.

Yeah, I seasoned a pan recently. What does that mean? It's where you get a new

fried on your face.

It was quite the thing. Well, it really was.
It was kind of, yeah, I'm living that Fraser life now. I really am.

Nan's what noodles for you.

You toss your pot noodle for a year before you eat it.

It's where you get a new like a cast iron pan, no non-stick stuff, just pure, you know, lovely cast iron, whatever.

And then you put this tiny layer of oil in and you cook that very slowly, and then it kind of bonds with the pan, right? And then you do that a few times again and again and again.

You do it all over the pan, you're kind of lathering the pan and then making a tiny thin layer, and it makes it really good at cooking,

I don't know, more stuff. And it's usually very private.
That's as personal a thing as we've got allowance on the line. I feel like I've learned a lot of it.

Can we cut that bit out? Actually, sorry, I can't give you as much weight. I feel gonna bet.
I'm exposed.

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.

That can't be right. Look, just get Rocket Money.
It shows you all of your expenses in one place and even tracks your subscriptions.

And if there's a subscription you don't want, which for you, you, there are a lot you don't need, you can just cancel right in the app with a few taps.

So you mean I don't have to call anyone to cancel? Nope. No hold times or anything.
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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that Japan has just found 7,000 islands that it didn't know it had.

Japan's doubled, basically, in one specific respect.

Not in size, just a number. It's still exactly.
Wait, how many did it have before?

It had 6,800 before that. Oh,

it's more than doubled. Yeah, yeah.
It's a good day, isn't it? It's a great day. Because it would be great if one of them was like

Honshu or one of the islands.

Yeah.

But they're all small, right? They're all super small. Unfortunately, I feel like we need more detail.
Where were they? They were all around the main ones, you know, and

offshore mostly.

Did they find them all in one day, in one go? Well, they've been doing some digital mapping.

Japan, since 1985, has had the same set of maps, which I think are based on older maps, whereas now you can survey much more accurately.

and so there are now 14,000 Japanese islands are any of them in like the South China Sea and claimed by other people do we think I don't know how many are totally undisputed

because you know the Kuril Islands which is in the north of Japan which is claimed also by Russia yes that is a dispute that's still been going since World War II and which means that technically World War II hasn't finished because Japan and the Soviet Union haven't agreed on who owns these islands and it was part of World War II.

Seriously,

no, like the last time they talked about it was like, I don't know, 10 years ago or something like that, and they didn't agree with it then. And I can't see them agreeing with it now.
That's amazing.

What amazing tourist attraction that you can go there and you're in World War II. Yeah, yeah.

And so one of the other things to say is that Japan's major landmasses, like the four or five islands, I think predominantly four are 90% of the landmass.

So that's, we're talking about the final 3% here that make up the 14,000 extra islands that they have.

Are any of them big enough to put a house house on? Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah.
You might not want to put a house on them just in case of sea levels. Yeah, I mean, if you're a short-term list about it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you're a dodgy property developer, this is a boon for you. This is great.
But it also depends on what you call an island, right? What's the difference between a rock and an island? Size.

But where does one end and the other one start, right? And in Scotland, they had a traditional thing which was if you could keep a sheep on it, it's an island.

And if you can't keep a sheep on it, it's a rock. But and that, when you say keep a sheep, you mean can the sheep, is there enough grass for the sheep? Can it survive for a few years?

I mean, because presumably you can keep a sheep on basically any rock, yeah, depends on the level of cruelty you're willing to go.

If it's spiky enough, yeah,

but yeah, so like what I'm saying, I guess, is like a lot of these islands will be super small, and whether they are officially rocks or islands,

we don't have a way of deciding.

That's why you can't say how many islands there are in the UK or how many there are in Canada, or even which country has the most islands because different people count them in different ways.

You also couldn't say the circumference of the rock to give you a definition of whether it's a rock or an island.

Because you know this, that if you measure the circumference or the length of a coastline, it depends on how big your measuring stick is as to the answer that you get. Go on.
Okay, you guys.

You're about to get maxed.

Buckle up.

Okay, so if you just have a map, let's say of the British coastline and you get like a 30 centimetre ruler and you go right how long the coastline, da da da da da, like, you know, whatever.

But then if you've got a more accurate measuring stick, right, so one that you were measuring to the millimetre, you could kind of get in there in the nooks and crannies a little bit more and go all around them, right?

And actually, you will get longer and longer and longer each time because every time you add in a little crevice, a little nook and cranny, you're kind of adding length to it.

So in the limit of an of an of like looking at an infinitely detailed ruler and the infinitesimally small nooks and crannies, you have an infinite coastline. Wow.

And it's so interesting. Can I tell you a story about my favourite island in the world? Yes.

Okay, so

there's a little place in France. This is not my favourite island in the world.

There's a little lake and it's got a little island in it, right? So you cross over a little bridge and then you get there. And then when you're on the island, it's got a pond in the island.
Okay.

Right?

Or maybe sort of like a small lake, pond to lake, how to lake.

In the middle of the pond, there's a little island, right? So, you've got an island in a lake, and on that island, there is a lake which also has an island in it. Wow.

So, essentially, recursive islands. Now, there are a few of these places around the world.
Okay. But the best one of all is called Vulcan Point, and it's in the Philippines.

And it's a tiny little island that is inside a lake.

Oh, okay. Okay.

It's a very, very small little island. It's like a little rock.

And that lake is inside a volcano. Wow.
Cool. Which is

itself surrounded by water, which is on an island. Yeah.

In the lake.

And it's in the Philippines, which is in itself an island. Wow.

Now, the thing is about Vulcan Point is that unfortunately the volcano exploded and Vulcan Point was destroyed. But

there is nonetheless photographic evidence of the point where there was this level of recursive islands. Wow.
And you know what? I think you could put a sheep on it. Really? Really?

It had a great big spike in the middle. You can keep a lamb kebab on it.

Yeah. Wow.
That's so cool. That's extraordinary.
That's so cool. I love that.
There's a really cool island on Japan, which is called Gun Kanjima Island.

And what's amazing about this is it was once the most densely populated place on our planet.

It's quite small. Does that mean there's a lot of people or is very, very small? A lot of people for a very small island.
It's a mixture of the two. So this is the 1900s.

And this island, there was Mitsubishi. They They looked at it and thought there would be a lot of rich submarine coal deposit underneath.

So what they did was they built these buildings on top of the rock. They fitted 6,000 people.
There's nothing else you could do but just be in these apartments and then drill downwards to get it.

And they were right. There was stuff down there.
You'll recognize it, by the way, possibly, if you like popular movies. It's in James Bond's Skyfall.

It's where Bond goes to this weird island where it's completely abandoned and so people go there now. It means Javier Bardem.
Yes, exactly.

Why was it abandoned?

Either they mined enough of it or

I think that Japan switched to petrol. Tragically.

Tragically. Sorry.

Giving away.

Sorry, if you don't know Hannah, I've got substantial interests in coal.

We really are finding out. What about you?

Wait till you hear they've gone to electric.

No.

Anyway, no, no, no, Japan just had a big switchover.

I think the most populated now is Mong Kok, isn't it, in Hong Kong, just because we were talking about that.

I think so.

That was always intensely populated.

I think this island was 216,000 people per square mile, which is because it was a fraction of a square mile. Feels like a lot, yeah.
Give us a comparison, though. What is it like in central London?

Ooh, I don't.

I know that the least densely populated countries are places like Mongolia, which have about four people, I think, per square mile. And this was how many? 216,000.

But it's quite a lot more. Quite a lot more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I went to an island in Japan that has all the rabbits on, and it's just like you walk and there's just rabbits everywhere. And you walk down and they follow you.

Are these naturally occurring rabbits or have they been placed there for the interest of tourists?

The story goes that there was a chemical weapons factory and they were used as experiments and they were let go and then they proliferated. But spread like rabbits.

Well, yeah, exactly.

I can see why they went with the lizard for the Godzilla Origin story.

But what we think actually happened is there are a load of school kids nearby and they put some rabbits on there. And then the rabbits did what rabbits do and became more and more and more rabbits.

And now, because it's known as Rabbit Island, kids will just come and put their rabbit on there because it's where rabbits live.

And it's like, it's almost advertised as this wonderful place where rabbits roam free and far. It's sort of like where your dog's gone to the farm.

It's like we're just putting them on a rabbit like that. Are they fed?

By tourists.

And that's the problem, really, because the tourist season is quite seasonal. And so for some of the year, they don't really get fed at all.
Oh, oh, okay, yeah.

You'd think that that would be a natural population control, though, wouldn't you? I think it is, but the population is quite high still. Yeah.

And you walk around and there's a few rabbits there and they're chasing after you because they know the tourists feed them. And then you walk and then you turn around and there's a few more.

And then you walk a bit further and there's like 20.

It's the scary. It's like a bad thing.
It's like the birds, but rabbits. Yeah.
Cute animals are fine, but when they accumulate, that turns to scary. There's a number where it gets scary, isn't it?

When you turn around and there's four. For me, it's like if there's only two and then you turn around and there's like six, I think that's scary.
Oh, yeah.

Did you, um, have you ever heard the work of Greg Gage? Greg Gage. So, this is a guy, he has this amazing stuff.

You can put a device on your arm that sends little electric sensors and moves your hands for you, right?

So, you can sort of stand there with this thing on your arm and with his eye patch, he can like move your arm. Oh, wow.

He created this thing, which actually school kids around the world can do, where you can operate on a little cockroach and insert a little wire into their heads, right?

And then essentially control them using a PlayStation controller. Oh, my gosh.
Right? It's absolutely wild.

Anyway, the thing is, is that you know, you can you've got this like remote-controlled cockroach.

I always thought that he was missing a massive trick, though, because what he should do is get sort of uh gloves which can tell where his hands are, those you know, those kind of gloves that are connected to the internet, and then have an entire army of cockroaches behind him, right?

Like a rabbit, and then summon them by like lifting his arms up. And then the cockroaches are not.
Like a Marvel superhero for cockroaches. Wow.
Maybe, maybe next he can do rabbits.

Yeah, I'm up for it. The rabbits, I don't think, like me because I accidentally kicked one.
No,

they just ran around your feet. Accidentally, here he is, getting his defense in first.

They just run around your feet the whole time. Sure, sure.

Wow. That'd be a great idea.
And yet, you converted it through a rugby post that was nearby.

So

I was just looking up things that are going on in Japan at the moment. Oh, yeah.
And have you heard of the sushi terror?

There's a

Japanese in the grip of a... Right now, as we're recording this, there's a huge problem because there's a craze that's developed.
It's an online craze and it's spread to offline.

You know, the conveyor belt sushi restaurants. Yeah.

People have started mucking around with the stuff on the belts. Not in Japan, kind of.

Touching the things. What? Licking bottles of soy sauce.
No. It's very bad.
And filming themselves as they do it. And this is

obviously really bad, you know.

Can you just have a little quiz for you guys oh cool great when did the first conveyor belt sushi restaurant open what year 1990 in new york very nice oh nut and a location very nice

wrong though well look at it's not saying until we've got a look at space no please i'm very good at it the first escalator came in harrods in the uk around 1920s or something like that not really playing the game to use previous knowledge but okay i like it yeah yeah

so i'm gonna say it was in harrods they decided to open one they took that technology and

just put little sushi on it. Okay, and a year?

Probably 1927, I should think. Right.
Dan?

Oh, there's not much nowhere for me to do. It's not happened yet.
Brilliant. It's

2029. 2029.
20 day now. It's all an illusion.
A bit mad.

Well, okay, it was interesting to me. James has low-balled it so much.
Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's quite all right, but it's 1958.
Okay. I am surprised by that.

That is quite a long time time ago. It predates Cliff Richards' first album by a year.

And that is how we judge everything. Just Hannah, you haven't been on the show before, but that's online.

That is a long...

I'm surprised. Yeah.

I was going to say, I don't know if we've ever mentioned it, I don't think we have.

The first ever English teacher who was of a foreign country teaching English in the country was a guy called Ranald MacDonald.

He was the first person to teach in Japan, which would be a great, nice coincidence if Ronald MacDonald, who is a character in McDonald's in Japan, was called Ronald McDonald. But he's not.
What?

It's called Donald McDonald. What? Who? What? Yeah.
Is it because the letter R is difficult to say? Exactly. And it's interesting looking at it online when people have written about it.

There's been tweets about it. And if you go to the replies, there's a lot of Japanese people who are like, you know, in their 30s, going, he's called Ronald?

Like, so it's like it's a genuinely amazing thing that over there, he's Donald. Did you say you were in Japan recently? I was in Japan, yeah.

I was in Tokyo, but the good bit, I got to go inside the the exclusion zone in Fukushima which was

wild the whole place is it's extraordinary there are these buildings there's one sort of town hall that we went to and the doors are locked but inside you can just see everybody's slippers and there was like a kid's toy on the floor and then

you know like beer bottles right they'd had a party or something the night before and there's like a crate with sort of the empties that they hadn't got rid of and just like everybody left in such a rush because of the tsunami but one of the reasons why we were going there, we were looking at wildlife and how wildlife has changed.

And there were reports before we got there that there were radioactive bears inside the exclusion zone,

which I was obviously very excited about. So we got there, we started, like, right, we're literally on a bear hunt.

And we're all scared.

Yes,

many of the radio shows are, you know,

anyway, we went and talked to a researchers and we're like, okay, tell us about these bears.

We couldn't find any bears.

Okay, so how much have you seen these bears? And then it transpired that

the bear researcher

themselves had only seen one bear once.

Right, okay. Actually, it wasn't radioactive bears at all, it was radioactive bear, which may or may not be.
Wow, yeah, I'd love to find that bear. That sounds amazing.
The radioactive bear.

I strongly suspect it was a boar, just you know,

right.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that if you grew up in a city, then you have a worse sense of direction than someone born in the countryside.

Though it doesn't seem to work if you're from Hungary.

Okay, again, we're gonna need more detail. So this is a study published last year in Nature, and it assessed the navigational skills of 400,000 people across 38 countries.

And what they did was they asked people to memorise a map in a video game, game and then once they memorized it they got them to get their characters to go through this map and they worked out how good everyone was at navigating and they found that it was very clear that people who grew up in cities tended to have a worse sense of direction, people who were in the countryside had a better, and people in the suburbs were always in between the two.

So it was a real good correlation.

And they said it was strong in places like Argentina, the UK and the US, but there were countries like Hungary, for example, this is a quote, where there was no real difference, but on average the trend held.

So is that because Hungary has very simple cities or complicated countryside?

Well, I've been to Hungary, and like, for instance, in Budapest, I would say it's not that different to London, because it's an old, very old city that's built up. It's higgity-piggity.

Yeah, not like New York, which is in like a

grid. And that's what you said.
The worst, people with the worst sense of direction were people who grew up in grid cities. Yeah,

they tend to be the worst. Yeah, I mean, well, that makes sense, right?

And they kind of speculate slightly that, you know, you don't have as much like signposts telling you which way to go and that kind of stuff it's pretty amazing that so the game that was created for them to do this is called um

is it quest it is it's sea hero i need to tell you about

do you know yes keep going um so this game as of april 22nd 2022 has been now played by over 4.3 million players not necessarily all for this exact thing that you're talking about james it's just an incredible way of gathering data is this a particular thing that's used in science to yeah it's like this amazing kind of of game that is fun to play, but then you're also collecting data from it.

But the reason why I love it so much is that, okay, so there are particular cells in your brain that help you with navigation. And they found these in mice and rats.

So some of them are called place cells.

And essentially what happens, right, if you, let's say you put a rat in a rectangular room, okay, you can put a kind of cute little hat on the rat that will measure what's going on in the brain.

And you can work out when particular neurons neurons are firing.

And it turns out that in, let's say, the northeast corner of the room, if there's one neuron that fires in this rat's brain while it's in that location, it will not fire anywhere else.

It's like a specific neuron that is like, this is the northeast corner, a place cell.

And actually what you can do is you can elongate the zone in which that neuron fires by putting a rat into an identical room that is just stretched out longer.

So it's like the northeast corner becomes bigger. And so where this neuron fires fires also becomes bigger.

Anyway the thing is is that they have to do this while the rats are going around in little rooms but it's quite hard to hook up this rat to the hat that's measuring what's going on in their brain.

You're not going to put a spike in it like the cockroach, are you?

I was squeamish about that and I was like. It's only tiny.
The cockroach is fine. The cockroach is fine.
Okay, okay.

No, so what they do is they put these, the little hat on the rat and then they put the rat on a ball and then the rat can like run around and the ball moves underneath them as though they're running freely.

and then they put it in front of a computer and get it to play quests yeah

yeah so the rat's like running around playing this computer game

yeah it's almost like vr for the rat right totally thinks that it's in this world though i don't know totally probably doesn't even know it's a rat but it's like you know it's like it it imagines that it's actually going around right yeah and it's the screen it's like a little a rat rat sized imax amazing

well one more thing about this study and why it might be important is because poor navigation skills are sometimes used to help identify dementia in people

and so you need to know what your base level of navigation skills would be for a normal person.

So if you live in the city or the countryside and you have poor navigation skills, it could be because you have dementia, but you need to know what your original thought is. I see that's clever.

I read that if you follow Google Maps, if you follow the blue line, your sense of direction gets much worse over time. Yeah, well, it's like your brain's like a muscle, right?

You've got to practice it. So I turned it off yesterday.
I turned off the blue line. I had to get somewhere.
I had to walk for about half an hour across London. And I turned it off.

And it was only about three corners in the whole journey. So that was really.
What is the blue line? Sorry. On Google Maps, you know, there's a blue line.

You put in directions to somewhere, it gives you a little blue line. Right.
You follow that line and then you get to the place you go. Okay.

I got lost on the way between Holborn and Conk Garden just now. I mean, that's that's what I was saying.
It was like,

I know. And I've lived here for 20 years.
I used to have an A to Z in my pocket. I used to be able to, like, I was fine.
Now I just can't do it. Do you know what though?

So there's a cabby who I use quite a lot. And I have a a game that I play with him where I'll be in a part of London and I'll just send him a photo of like a door

and it's unreal. Sorry, you've got your own personal cabby.
No, not my cabby.

We say chauffeur normally.

You'll never guess who I had in this car.

It was you, yeah.

No, he's not my personal cabby. He's like, he's a tame cabby.

I think that's still very impressive. Like, I've never...
Yeah. Like, first you give up pop noodles and then

this is the next step. Has this cabby feels got a spike in in his head? And you just raise your hand and he arrives.

Wow.

Sorry, you send him photos and he just says, that's where you are. Yeah, he does cool.

That is very cool. Yeah.
Do you want to try now? Shall I take a photo?

Don't put a street sign on. That's great.
Anna's just hanging out the window of our office right now.

We could even say where we are because this is the last time we're ever in this office. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so let's see if he comes back with this, but we're on Maiden Lane.

Let's see if he gets Maiden Lane. So exciting.

It's extraordinary. I used to live on a street where, which was in the Cabby's knowledge exam, and that was really useful because you didn't have to give them anything.

You just say you're on that street, and they'd be like, Oh, yeah, we know what that is.

I did too. So I lived on Sandwich Street.
And they always do Bacon Lane to Sandwich Street.

Lovely.

What was your one? It was Digby Crescent, but I don't know where they would have gone to. Everard, Digby.
Everard, yeah, yeah. Everard Roads to Digby Crescent.
Yeah.

Oh, he's tight thing, tight thing.

Okay, hold on, hold on. That's quick.

Okay.

He's too quick. I'm going to have to edit in a space.
Exactly. Yeah.
He says, is it an official test? I think yes. Yes.
Yes. We revoke your license if you.

Well, let's do a bit of talking and then see

to give it some space.

Just very quickly, you mentioning you got lost from Holborn to Covent Garden. So I've discovered and made contact with a guy called Tristan Gooley, who's an amazing guy.

He writes incredible books about how you can anywhere in London orientate yourself by various things.

If you're in the morning, go against the flow of people walking towards you because predominantly that group will be coming from a tube station.

And if you need to find a tube station, at the end of the day... Not if you live in a commuter town, they're all going to the tube station.
Sorry, this is London, central London. But

you've woken up and the kidnapper has told you you're in central London, but I'm not going to tell you where.

And you say, which zone is like one or two.

And at no point to this day, just ask somebody where you are. Well, his idea is that you shouldn't ask someone where you are.
You should make the challenge of working out your navigation better.

If you see a tree in London, look if it has a tilt on it, because if it has a tilt, that will be pointing to the south. I always think in London, go downhill, you'll get to the river eventually.

Yeah, right, okay. I don't know if that's true.
That feels like it. I mean, there are local maxima, though.

I was reading a book called The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, which is by an author called John Hough.

And he was talking about urban myths of navigation, how, you know, there's one of, it's not the tilt on the tree, you know, the other one of of the tree? It's the moss on one side of the tree.

Moss grows on the north side of a tree because it's cooler, darker, shadier, and not on the south.

And it doesn't, it only happens in mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, so you need to know which hemisphere you're in. So it's not a perfect test.

Can you flush a toilet first and see which way the water?

No, no, no, no, there's a toilet next to a tree, so you do know that here, yeah. But also

what hemisphere you're in, though. I think you're in a lot more trouble.
Look at the stars. Okay,

how long was I blindfolded for? Was it enough to do a 16-hour flight?

Should we look at at the phone? Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Let's have a look. Let's see.
Okay. What's he saying? We've got a response.
Okay, we sent this at 12.37 and he replied at 12:39 Maiden Lane. Oh my god.

I want to know how he did it though. What's in the photo that you can? Should I call him and ask him? Yeah, go first.
Put it on speaker. Yeah, well.

Hang on. It was the moss on the north side of the room's restaurant.

Subscribe.

How did you do it? I knew roughly where you were because there's a safe door. Oh,

yes.

And

there's no traffic in that street, so I know it's somewhere in Noyne, like Soho or Covent Garden. Right.

And then

I just used my powers of deduction.

Wow.

Hi, so Richard, Dan Schrover here, no such thing as a fish. Thanks for being on the show.

Is that genuinely the final guess? Was a punt, or did you know it? I did recognise the street, but I did use the stage door.

And the fact that I can tell there's no traffic in that street anymore, and I'm not allowed to drive down it. So

it did look familiar, and I kind of worked it out from that yet. Amazing.
All right, cheers, Rich. I'll talk to you later on.
That's amazing.

Thanks, buddy.

Oh, I wish he ended up by going. Oh, gotta go.
Professor Brian Cox is calling

a picture for me to analyse.

That is

good. Yeah.
Yeah. Wow.
He's never not got one. It's one day.
One day. That's so cool.

That's very cool. We were talking about Holburn earlier.
And do you remember when they changed the rules that you're allowed to stand on both sides of the escalator? Yeah, Holburn.

It's a very long escalator. Were you angry about it? Yeah.
Why? You know, I'm going to tell you, you're incorrect to be angry about it. I know, I do know.
Okay, just warning.

TFL's justification for the trial.

So, just to explain, sorry, in London, when we go down an escalator in the underground, you have to stand on the right-hand side and you're allowed to walk along the left-hand side.

But they said, from now on, everyone's standing on both sides. Yeah.
Right. My problem with it is, I know what you're going to say, Hannah.
You're going to say it's it's mathematically more efficient.

You will get more people on and through the escalator

if everyone's just standing. I will say that.
Okay. My perspective is:

as a commuter, it's less pleasant. It's okay standing and there are people moving past you.
If you're standing with people in front, behind, and next to you, it's a bit of a squash.

And there's this awkward thing where you might have to make conversation with someone, or you'll make eye contact, or

they'll start a fight, or they'll say, what are you saying? Start a fight.

It's too tight.

I would would accept that as a response. And I would accept that you would prefer to have a slower journey time to avoid that.

But for the fact that you're just about to slam yourself into a tube carriage with 50,000 other people into their armpits. Yeah.

You know, it's definitely no more Saladini than when you get on the tube. It feels impersonal and cold.
I love the freedom of just running up those escalator steps. And, you know, it's just,

you know, you feel like you're really getting somewhere. Like, oh, these are these slow coaches standing on the right.
You're just putting it. Chucks on the right.
Yeah.

Chucks on on the right, legends on the left, is what I would have the time for. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you know? Well, basically, a lot of people felt the same way as you, Andy, but like Hannah says, it was successful and way more people could get down the escalator. People don't like maths, James.

Forget about the maths, just think about the gaps. If you were like looking down on it, say you were like, you know, in the control room

looking down on the escalator,

if people are walking down, there's much bigger gaps, which basically means you've got all of that wasted space, right? So you get a much higher flux. It's not wasted space, it's the hero's aura.
It's

you're spotting who's a drone, who's willing to do what the system tells them. Please stand on the escalator.
The sheebles. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I like standing in the fast lane when there's no one there.

Only when there's no one there. How many when there's no one there? Yeah, and that's because

you like to play with norms. You subvert, you twist.
Exactly. You kick rabbits when

is that still in place, that law in Holborn?

Which one? The TFO, the tube law. No, no, no, it was a trial, the double SO thing, and it didn't really take off.

Thanks to my letter writing because

yeah, I was going to say, the QI officers, we are moving, and we're moving to Holborn, and it just, the sadistic bit of me would love to know that that's now your tube station.

I sabotaged it by leaving small pieces of sushi, which I had left on every other state.

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. That can't be right.
Look, just get Rocket Money. It shows you all of your expenses in one place and even tracks your subscriptions.

And if there's a subscription you don't want, which for you, there are a lot you don't need, you can just cancel right in the app with a few taps. So you mean I don't have to call anyone to cancel?

Nope. No hold times or anything.
And they'll even try to get you a refund on some of the months of wasted money, which is a lot of money for you. Okay, okay.
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B21.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that an inventor called Yi Fei Chen has designed a gun which collects tears from your face so you can shoot them back at the person who made you cry. Tears,

even if you're really upset, it's not a super soaker, is it?

No, it's not, but have you seen it? Have you seen a video of it?

It shoots out with more force than a... She's built it, hasn't she? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like to the point where it would hurt. Do you know what? We've got to backtrack on that.
It's got similar force to a Super Soaker.

Because what it does is it collects the tears, but then there's a sort of canister that freezes it. So it kind of turns...
What? But what does it do, Andy? Because it's still liquid.

It's not ice particles. So it's not like, it's not tear bullets.
It's still the tears of cold.

It's kind of what it is, weirdly.

Yeah.

But then the time it takes to freeze. I know.
Are you still going to be upset at the person who no, exactly? So

it's not an immediate... I wouldn't bring it to an actual gunfight

because it's like your tears are best served cold right yeah yeah yeah exactly and often often you know one finds that you you're actually the one who's made yourself cry

you know you have control over whether you're crying ugly goes home has a little cry and then fires them at himself

this is all your fault that's interesting that you think you have control over whether you cry in a situation yeah i'm now thinking about my tear ducks so much you look like you're crying i know i definitely do not have control over crying crying.

Very involuntary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I cry all the time.
I try not to. Yeah, because I'm often I'll watch like a really, like a really heartfelt, like Oprah Winfrey, the YouTube clip on the tube or a frame,

and

it gets me every time. And it's embarrassing because you have people next to you, right?

So hang on, is that why you don't want this escalated thing? So then you can have that moment in privacy. Is it really? Yeah,

length of the Holborn Escalator is about one classic clip of Oprah length of time.

So random.

Do you watch the Tom Cruise jumping up and down on her social media? No, it's not emotional. I like the emotional stuff.

Do you like Dr. Phil? No, I don't watch Dr.
Phil. I like military homecoming videos or pregnancy announcement videos.
I quite like

homecoming. Yeah.
The other one I really like, when I just want a really good cry, is a dog rescue. Oh, nice.
Yeah, because sometimes you get the dogs and they're in such a little state.

Oh, I haven't done that. And you know, like, whoa, they'll often have like, you know, loads of lice and loads of like ticks and things and horrible and like scaly skin.

And then what's really nice is when they patch them all up and then they're ready to be rescued by, you know, go to an adoptive home, they're all fluffy again. Oh my god.
Well, you need to.

You do this to yourself. I do.
It's very therapeutic.

There's a Venn diagram that you, I'd love to introduce you to, which is military homecoming videos, but where they come home to the dog and the dog reacts.

That's a new level of emotion. Whoa there.
And you do that on the tube. Yeah.
You just go on the tube and you just want to cry when you're on the tube. Well, I just suddenly have a hankering to...

It's the algorithm you know i'll be watching something but i've watched so much of it i'll you know it'll be like a comedy clip of a someone i want to watch in an underneath it's like oprah gives sixteen thousand dollars to a desperate mum who lost her house in a hurricane is this actually just to stop people sitting next to you on the tube

andy what do you watch to make you cry on the tube

i i don't i don't i think i've i don't think i consciously watch things that will make me cry. I've seen, sometimes you'll see a clip that's doing the rounds online and you find it very clear.

I just think about my career.

I would say for me,

the only thing really that makes me a bit like that is sporting events when people, you know. Like a classic turnaround, like a last-minute Hail Mary.
Yeah, someone who's like reached life's ambition.

Right. The Olympics, oh man, crossfest.

I'll tell you what you'll love then.

It's called the knock. It's when the NFL players are told they've made it into the Hall of Fame and someone goes around knocking on the door.
Oh, the emotion in that.

Especially when there's a dog involved.

The poppy volley craft in the hall of fame.

Anyway,

gosh, we've learned a lot.

So, how damn. Yifei Chen.
So she's actually,

we say inventor, she's actually a designer and she was at a design school.

And this was a thing where she grew up in Taiwan and you're trained not to return anger towards authority, your school teachers or your parents or so on.

That's just part of the culture a bit so much there.

Less so when she went overseas and she was studying in the Netherlands and she noticed that she was being told off and she watched someone step up for her, but she realized she couldn't do it for herself.

So she had a cry and she thought, I felt really weak, so I want to use my weakness and turn it into power. What if I invented a gun?

The most punishingly literal interpretation of it.

It's very cool. It's an amazing looking invention.
It's beautiful.

It has these tear collecting half moons under the eyes and it and a little pipe that then leads down into the cartridge or chamber or whatever you do. Yeah, and she did it as part of her course.

She designed the gun. So on her graduation, she actually went up and she fired the gun at the head of the department.
Jan boldly. I know what you're thinking.
Did I cry six tears or only five?

Do you feel weepy?

I'm going to tell you about another inventor or invention or that.

Have you guys heard of the knee defender? No. I think we're about to.
Yeah. If you're on a plane,

you fit this to the seat in front of you, to the back of the seat in front of of you, and it means the person in front of you can't recline their seat.

Oh, wow.

And then they're banned on a lot of airlines.

They're a controversial contraband thing. And the inventor is six foot three.

And he says that it was more to start a conversation. I bet it does.

So it's, basically, it comes with a little card for your fellow passenger if you get one of these. And it reads, I realise that this may be an inconvenience.

If so, I hope you will complain to the airline.

Maybe working together we can convince the airline to provide enough space between rows so people can recline their seats without banging into other passengers. What a dick.

Yeah.

Annie is you have got some of these, haven't you?

I mean, it's like I fundamentally agree that you that the airlines do put them too close together and it means that actually you can't, you have to, one person has to sacrifice their comfort and that seems unfair.

But him being like, one of us has to sacrifice their comfort and this time it's not going to be me.

And in fact, on no occasion it's going to be me.

What he needs to do is fly business like I do. And you manage to do that by eating nothing but pot noodles and saving your money.

If you fly first class like I do, then you all recline and, you know, you don't have to. It doesn't look so bad that sometimes I get cabs now, does it?

I actually have my own airline pilot.

Take photos from Sky.

Oh, it's New Jersey, isn't it?

Lovely.

We got an email in the fish inbox about

this is about innovation rather than about inventions exactly but it's just so interesting because it was a guy called Mark Emmerton who sent in a fact about something a nuclear nuclear test okay and he said I have a fact from my late great uncle who actually worked on the nuclear test program the British nuclear test program in the 50s and he says this is probably classified for all I know but fuck it

so my kind of guy yeah right The UK and US used to share test sites in the Pacific, but each would bring their own instruments to measure the power of nuclear tests on the ground.

The US had very sensitive state-of-the-art pressure transducers, but they kept getting broken or having their readings wiped by shock waves and radiation. Okay.

The UK, with a much smaller budget, realized that you could measure the pressure of a nuclear blast just by getting a squeezy tube of toothpaste,

taking the cap off, and then placing a ruler next to it. The pressure of the blast would squirt out toothpaste proportionally to the blast strength, and there were no electronics to go wrong.

They worked. Genius.
Oh, that's amazing.

I mean there is a story about this, about Fermi. Do you know this story? So Fermi, this amazing, amazing physicist, and he had

Enrico. He had a reputation for being able to do calculations in his head.
And during the first test, he decided he wanted to try and work out how strong the blast was.

And so he stood in the observation tower, which I think was some distance away from the blood. I mean, you would assume it was

away from the blast. And he he tore up a tiny bit of paper, sheet of paper into tiny little bits and he held it in his hand.

And then as the blast um exploded, he opened his hand and then paced out how far they'd uh been blown across the room and then got within I think a factor of two of the the equivalent in dynamite.

So I think you I mean it's totally legitimate that you can do this. You don't get like perfectly accurate results, weirdly enough.

But yeah, you can get really close. That's really cool.

Just on um classified stuff, I read the other day about a girl in America who went to her school show and tell with a load of classified US government documents.

Well, from like her dad or mom. No, it was even worse than that.
So there'd been, someone from the government had been at something and then had lost their briefcase or just left it there.

And their dad, this girl's dad, had found it and sort of just picked it up and looked through it and it all said classified and stuff.

And then he just took it home and then they kept it in the attic and never did anything with it.

And then like five or six years later, she's like, I need something for show and tell, went up, and then, oh, I'll take this, and then took it down. And it was like all stuff about Iran and

Bolivia and Syria. Oh, God.
Was she detained? Well, yeah, she's in Guantanamo.

The teacher got in touch with the CIA and, is that the right person or the FBI?

Yeah, yeah. And said, we have this.
And they came and sent some people in dark glasses to retrieve it.

Quietly waiting at the back of the show and tell while Blumming Tilly Tilly talks about her conch that she's found.

And I think probably the person who lost it might have got killed or killed.

It was all a happy ending in that song. Amazing.
That's so cool.

Here's another new invention. This is from, I think, 2022, which I've mentioned it to my wife, and she's looking into getting one.
It's a motion pillow 3.

Is it a mega hanky?

It's a YouTube Prime account. I can get rid of all those nasty ads getting in the way.

It's a what, sorry? Motion Pillow 3, it's called. It's a pillow, right? And the snorer.
Damn it. Is that where we're going? Oh, yes.
I thought of it. Does it smother you?

Yeah, my wife is very keen on getting well. It's a weighted blanket for the face, is how it's sold.
Yeah. No, is it a pillow that moves under you?

It undulates under you to keep you asleep. No.
Does it massage you? No. Does it do what Andy said, but to stop you from snoring? Exactly.
I can't believe that you didn't build on the snoring thing.

What it is, is when you're laying down, if you're snoring, there are four airbags inside, and it's AI kind of generated.

So it inflates to move your head around until the position where the air waves are opened up properly and you stop snoring. And it means that you just reduce snoring.
No way.

Yeah, that's this is an ocean blow thing. You were going to say you're not waking up when someone is.
Your pillow is slowly grinding your head in the middle.

Does it make a noise? Is there a

noise? When your neck snaps, it does.

It's a way to assassinate someone.

Is that why motion pillow one and two didn't make it to the one?

Can I tell you about the Corby Trouser Press?

Yeah. Just while we're on game-changing inventions of the 20th century.
Yeah, yeah.

We're losing a lot of inventors now who invented really big things. And I'm not saying the Corby's.

But like the inventor of the kettle off switch, for example, is still alive. Oh, yeah, it's a young professor of invention in Oxford or something like that, Cambridge.
John Taylor.

This is a slight tangent, or I've tangented it myself, but it's. Do you know how the kettle off-switch works? It's a bimetallic strip.
Yeah. I just love biometallic strips.
What is that? What is it?

That's interesting. I haven't thought about this before.
I do remember trying to buy a kettle which didn't have one, and it was really hard. Really? Yeah.
Why were you trying to.

I don't remember, but I think it was something to do with stamps and illegal activity that the post office can't find out about.

So, a bimetallic strip is, but you got it, it's as it sounds, it's a strip of two different metals

all the way along, right? Yeah. And they expand and contract at different temperatures

because of the chemical composition. So, as it gets hot water on it, the strip, it will bend because one side is expanding more than the other.

And you can develop those, and it snaps the kettle off at a certain temperature. Yeah.

I think that I love bimetallic strips is the most dandy sentence I've ever heard you say.

Well, we had one in the house when I was growing up, and it was a very cool scientific experiment to do.

That's for all those pot doodles you have in it.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, and Hannah, Fry Asquared. Fry Asquared, yeah, nice.

Um, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com. Check it out.
All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as merchandise.

Do have a look. Uh, but most importantly, make sure to watch Hannah's latest show.
It's called The Future with Hannah Fry. It's on Bloomberg, or you can find it on YouTube.

It's uh, the whole series is up now, right? You can take it all in one go. If you finish that and you're on YouTube, why not check out some Oprah clips? There's really good ones to watch.
watch.

Anyway, that's it, and that's it from us from this office. This is where QI office was for the last nine years of our existence.

Fish started here nine years ago. This is the last ever episode we're doing in our HQ.
So we'll be from somewhere new next week. So thank you for being our final guest ever, Hannah.
Thank you.

In our HQ. And yeah, we will be back again next week in another building with another episode.
We'll see you then. Goodbye.

hey this is sarah look i'm standing out front of a mpm right now and well you're sweet and all but i found something more fulfilling even kind of cheesy but i like it sure you met some of my dietary needs but they've just got it all so farewell oat meal so long you strange soggy break up with bland breakfast and taste AMPM's bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit made with catry eggs, smoked bacon, and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit.

AMPM, too much good stuff.

If a baby is giggling in the back seat,

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It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly, so get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave.
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