440: No Such Thing As Death By 1000 Scallops

Hi, everybody.

Just to let you know, we've got a very special guest on the podcast today to replace Dan Schreiber, who has momentarily disappeared.

And that guest is the fantastic Steve Mold, very much a friend of the podcast, friend of QI.

Actually, I think has made an appearance on QI.

He's science presenter and communicator extraordinaire.

He's one-third of the brilliant troop Festival of the Spoken Nerd.

Please do check out his work, go to his YouTube page.

it's full of amazing, mind-blowing, bizarre, extraordinary science videos.

It really is a great place to hang out online.

And definitely listen to the Festival of the Spoken Nerds podcast, which is called a podcast of unnecessary detail, where they take subjects you might think are boring if you're a fool and show you that they are, of course, fascinating.

It really is worth a listen, and we had a great time having him on the show.

Okay, here we go.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm joined this week by James Harkin, Anna Tazhinski, and it's our very special guest, Steve Mold.

We have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Steve.

My fact is that protons taste sour.

How do you...

You can't get the cutlery small enough for that.

How do you taste a proton?

So actually, every time you taste something sour, you're tasting protons.

Oh, okay.

Is that a different fact or the same fact?

I would say it's the same fact.

Steve, doesn't everything have protons in it?

Oh, I see what you mean.

Free protons.

Everything's got protons on their own.

So, you know, you have five taste senses on your tongue.

Sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami.

And your sour taste, it just works in a completely different way.

So, like, your sweetness taste, it's the old lock and key thing.

You've probably heard it a thousand times in biology.

So, just in case I've forgotten

literally everything I learned.

Yeah.

So, you've got this gustatory cells on your tongue, and on the surface of those cells, you have these big molecules, complicated shapes.

They're proteins with a complicated shape, and that's the lock in this analogy.

And there's one molecule that fits perfectly, that's the key.

And in the case of your sweetness receptors, it's the sugar molecule, it's glucose that fits perfectly.

And when they combine in that way, it causes some chemical reaction to occur inside the cell, and that leads to a signal going to your brain, and you experience that as something sweet in your mouth.

Nice, right?

But when you taste something sour,

it's because you're tasting something acidic.

So, sour is just your like acidity detecting mechanism, right?

And something is acidic if it has a high concentration of hydrogen ions.

Okay,

and if we forgot all of our chemistry,

can we get on to physics actually?

Because I feel

safer ground there.

Can we get onto literature?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew,

so what is hydrogen?

You can tell me what hydrogen is.

Hydrogen is, yeah, it's an element of a periodic table.

Very early on.

Is it element number one?

It's the earliest one.

So what's it made of, then?

Hydrogen.

I mean, what's inside?

So it's made of an acid.

So the molecule of hydrogen is one.

It's the central bit.

I don't know what I'm expecting about, Andy.

What's the fact about hydrogen?

No, neutron.

It's a neutron.

No, I think it doesn't have a neutron, isn't it?

The one without a neutron.

Does every other molecule in reality have a neutron?

I've got bad news for you, Andy.

You're currently naked, but the good news is you're asleep.

So it's a proton with an electron orbiting around it.

And that means it's neutral, it's balanced.

Yeah.

So

it's not a charged particle.

Hey, what's another word for that?

What, a charged particle?

It's called an ion, isn't it?

Oh, there we go.

We just mentioned mentioned ions before.

That was like the...

Is this your card, sir?

So, to turn a hydrogen atom into a hydrogen ion, you strip away the electron.

Okay, leaving just the proton.

That's right.

So a hydrogen ion really is just a proton.

And that tastes sour.

And that tastes sour.

So when you're tasting...

an acid it's because you're tasting protons in the liquid or in the food or whatever And so these gustatory cells, instead of having like some complicated molecule lock and key thing going on, it's just a hole.

And it's a special kind of hole in the cell that accepts protons.

It's called a proton channel.

So cool.

Yeah.

So bizarre.

So it's not a special shape.

It's not one of those like when you're a kid and you fit bricks into holes.

It's not that perfect shape.

It's just a big cavern and it accepts protons.

Sounds like my tongue is like something from back to the future, doesn't it?

This is like taking protons.

Yeah.

How?

Okay,

right.

So, a few questions.

Do electrons taste the opposite?

As in, do we know what electrons taste like, or do we have a receptor that reacts to that?

If an electron falls into this hole, this is a reaction.

Well, electrons wouldn't fall into the hole.

No.

Oh, yeah.

Interesting.

That's your answer, Andy.

I don't think we have receptors for electrons, to my knowledge.

They wouldn't necessarily taste of anything.

So we wouldn't taste of anything.

Unless you put some jam on them.

Okay, question number two.

Follow-up question number two.

What is the smallest number of protons that we would be able to taste?

Because obviously the tiny question.

Would you have to have five hydrogen?

If you just licked one hydrogen item, it's not going to taste any good.

Exactly.

Yeah, so what happens is the concentration of protons in the cell builds up until it reaches some limit and then it sends an electric signal to your brain.

I don't know what that limit is.

That's okay.

No further questions.

What I find really interesting about this, I was reading, reading, is that possibly sourness might be the earliest taste that any animal had.

And the reason being that animals are living in the deep ocean, and the danger in the deep ocean might be acidic stuff coming up, and you want to get away from the acid.

And so, perhaps that we learned how to taste this sourness before we learned anything else because it would stop us from getting fried by the acid.

Nice.

So cool.

That'd be good, wouldn't it?

Actually, the way I like to think about taste is those five taste taste senses that we have on our tongues, you can think about them as chemical detecting mechanisms that we've evolved for survival.

So, like, sugar is really important because it's a source of energy, so it makes sense that we would evolve the ability to detect that.

Bitterness is your poison detecting mechanism,

and actually, there's a few different receptors for that because there are a few different poisons that we can detect.

What's really interesting about

the bitterness receptor is that it's really in flux, in like an evolutionary point of view because we're in an arms race with plants like plants don't want to be eaten except for fruit you know they don't want to be eaten and obviously anthropomorphizing the plant we're allowed to anthroporphize so

i draw faces on all my plants

um

so plants are producing poisons to stop us from eating plants but then some plants are producing molecules that interact with our poison receptors, poison detecting receptors on our tongues.

tongues, they're not actually poisonous, but we react to them and decide not to eat them because they taste bitter.

Whereas with sourness, you like it naturally from birth.

I mean, no one likes sour sweets more than kids, and yet sourness in a way denotes that something's gone bad.

Like if milk goes sour, that's bad and that's disgusting to us.

But then if certain fruits are sour, then that's really good and it actually can show that they haven't gone rotten yet.

Yes, that's yeah, I love that.

So it's it's the sign that there's a particular kind of acid there.

Citric acid provides the sour flavor in fruits and and actually those various acids prevent really harmful bacteria from growing, meaning that, you know, lots of primates will enjoy fruit that's slightly spoiled because it means that it's safer.

That's why

orange juice tastes bad after you've cleaned your teeth, because toothpaste tends to have sodium normal sulfates in it.

That binds to the sweetness receptors in your mouth and stops them from working.

So when you have orange juice, then you can't taste the sweetness of the orange juice.

You can only taste the bitterness and the sourness and that's not so nice.

I did not know that.

Interesting.

On sourness and children and stuff, those sour candies you can get.

Yeah, yeah.

They're basically sweet candies but then they put some acids on the outside.

So they put like citric acid, tartaric acid, fumaric acid on the outside.

And they also have malic acid which they put inside palm oil.

which means it's like a slow release.

So it kind of very slowly comes out.

So the sourness kind of stays in your mouth for longer and longer.

But the interesting thing about those candies is something called sour patch kid.

You know that?

I love sour patch kids.

You love sour patch kids.

Okay, so the sour patch kid is also a medical term.

Can you guess what the medical procedure is that is known as the sour patch kid?

Is it you?

I do know this one, you coat the child in sugar

and then you remove their appendix.

It's kind of close.

The kid has gone sour, so the kid is covered in some kind of acid.

You put one of those sour astro belts, like a patch, on a blister or something,

and it

cures it on the bottom.

On a wart.

No, you can't do this.

I mean, you're not going to get this in a million years.

It's prolapse dangles.

So, God, wow.

I think that might be something to do with what they look like.

I don't think I've ever had.

So, I've eaten quite a lot of Sour Patch Kids sweets in my time.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't think I've ever come across one.

That's the point.

You're not saying there's a team of surgeons in the Sour Patch Kids factory.

Just casually pushing back in.

It's just a nickname.

Basically, what happens is if you have a prolapse anus, sometimes to get it back in,

basically your intestines have come out of your rectum slip.

So to get it back in, you need it to shrink.

And one of the ways to do that is to remove some of the water from it.

And one of the ways that they do that is to sprinkle some sugar on it.

No.

tenus.

And you put the sugar on, and it kind of goes down slightly, and then you give it a little prod, and it goes back inside.

And the technique is sometimes known as the sour patch kid or otherwise sugaring the rim.

That, I believe, is in Mary Poppins.

A spoonful of sugar helps the prolapse tenus go down.

Yes, go back in.

Why is it called sour when it's putting sugar in it?

Do they pull acid down on it?

I don't know what sour patch kids look like.

They're not relevant to this.

Would it work as a home remedy if you've got a Sour Patch kid?

Medical professionals do this.

They're coated in Chocolate.

They're coated and trucked.

Especially at the end of the packet, there's that kind of dusting, fine dusting that's fallen off the original sweets, and that's obviously the best bit.

Because they're quite glutinous, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And some of them red in colour.

Some of them are red?

Could it be

a bit like a Sour Patch kid?

Do you know what?

For the benefit of my future enjoyment of Sour Patch kids,

maybe we could draw a line on this

Have you guys heard of Eli Metshnikov?

You might well have done, actually.

So he was

a famous, he was a Russian biologist in the early 20th century.

He was working, and he effectively launched the yogurt craze in Western Europe.

Yeah, this is on soundness.

So he was especially interested in aging and the science of aging and also in the gut and digestion.

And in 1904, he was in Paris and he delivered a lecture claiming that aging was partly caused by harmful bacteria in the gut and that you also had to eat foods like yogurt to cultivate those friendly bacteria, beneficial bacteria.

And he suggested that sour milk

didn't spoil because of that lactic acid in it, so it sort of kills off the really the rottenness germs.

And he said, hypothetically, maybe if that's happening in the lab to sour milk, the microbes might stop internal putrefaction in you and prevent aging.

And this turned into a huge thing in Paris.

Like there was this mad yogurt rush, basically, where people were rushing to shops and queuing up and saying, yoghurt is the thing that's going to keep us.

When was this, did you say?

This was 1904.

Oh, wow.

And he slightly clarified the next year.

Look, yogurt is not the elixir of youth.

But it was too late by that point, basically.

The press had reached.

Everyone in Paris was covering themselves in yogurt.

The great yogurting of 1905.

And then John Harvey Kellogg, who, you know, the very famous dietitian.

Oh, God, anything he latches onto, you know, it's going to go a bit weird.

He started feeding each of his patients a pint of yogurt.

I mean, I appreciate that's a useless, which I don't know.

There was like a huge craze, wasn't there?

And I think like one petty faloo went for 200,000 euros.

There was the yogurt bubble.

Yeah, the yogurt bubble burst.

Everyone was coated in yogurt again.

Just made the bubble burst.

Yeah, the nightmare.

Well, one other thing to say.

So, like, sweeteners, artificial sweeteners, are tricking your sweetness receptors into thinking you've got sugar in your mouth when you haven't.

And there are examples in nature of plants that have done that.

So there's a berry in West Africa that has evolved the ability to make this molecule that binds really strongly to the sweetness receptors of primates.

And they bind so strongly to those sweetness receptors that they only have to make a few of them.

They don't have to spend loads of energy making loads of glucose molecules.

They just make a few of these trick molecules.

And all these primates are going mad for these berries.

They're running around eating them and they're getting no benefit from it.

There's no energy content in it, but they're still going around and pooing out the seeds.

So the berries get the benefit of having their seeds dispersed, but the primates don't get any benefit from it.

And there's one gorilla that has evolved a slightly different sweetness receptor that isn't tricked by the berries molecule.

And so

they do a lot better because they're not running around chasing these berries anymore.

Are they miracle berries?

Are they?

Is that what they're called?

Miracle berries?

No, miracle berries is something different, actually.

Miracle berries is something that binds to your sweetness receptor, but in an inactive way, it doesn't do anything.

But then when you introduce an acid, it activates the molecule in such a way that it then stimulates your sweetness receptor.

So you suck on a Miracle Berry, nothing happens.

Right.

And then you drink something sour and it tastes sweet because that molecule then turns into something that can stimulate your sweetness receptor.

Like the old rumor about Uzo, where if you drunk Uzo and then the next day you drunk water, then it would reactivate the Uzo and get you drunk again.

Is that a thing?

Yeah.

Hang on.

It's not a true scientist.

If I had Miracle Berry,

then I'd brush my teeth.

Then I'd have some orange juice.

Could I make the orange juice taste sweet?

You're a true scientist, Andy, I would say, with questions like that.

Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that fans of Indiana Jones guessed details of the fourth film's plot before it was released from the expressions on the faces of the tie-in Lego characters.

Were they expressions like, oh, this is going to be shit?

Oh, where's my agent when you need him?

So this is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which is the fourth Indiana Jones film released in 2008.

I saw it at midnight in the cinema on the first night.

Good on you.

You had all the figurines already, didn't you?

I knew the whole lot, basically.

Anyway, there were these Lego figures released and

there were these little translucent skeletons and basically fans worked out, oh, there's an alien plot in the film, which there is, because of the nature of the little translucent Lego skeletons.

And they also worked out that Kate Blanchett was a baddie.

And again, sorry,

like have like a sad f like an angry face.

Yeah, she's frowned the the Lego figurine is frowning and they released the merch before the film came out so fans are able to work it out and as a result the film was not well received.

It was solely because of this

Lego thing.

I think on your head, bit as a fan, if you're over-analysing the Lego to that extent, then well, this is the thing.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, if you're a real fan, I mean, they make the merch way in advance, don't they?

I have to sign it off and clear it and all of that.

Like, it's quite hard to keep things really secret.

Although, some withhold it.

Star Wars now withholds some figurines to make sure that they don't give anything away.

Like, I think

because of what happened.

Because of this terrible event.

This is a real watershed moment, yeah.

Yeah, we all learn from the great mistakes, don't we?

I think in one of the Star Wars films, again, this is gonna be full of spoilers this episode.

I think it's released before the financial crisis of 2008.

There was a Rey, a character called Rey, who and the figurine was holding a lightsaber, which I believe gives away the fact that maybe she is a Jedi knight or master,

and you're not supposed to know that.

And so they withheld that.

Smart

until the film had been released.

And this is the thing I was most outraged.

I was looking at a list of things that Lego revealed in films, and most of it was stuff like, come on, who cares?

But in the first Shrek film...

You don't understand.

You don't understand film nerds.

What do you mean, who cares?

It would literally be like, oh, this little thing revealed that there was a scene involving grass.

Or this revealed that there were three family members.

Anyway, but in the first Shrek film, Burger King released tie-in meal toys, kids' meal toys, and there was a figurine, and I've seen it, and it has Fiona, the princess, and it has her normal head with lovely, pretty face and ginger hair.

And then, if you spun it round, it revealed her as an ogre.

Now, as we all know, you don't learn that until the very end of the film.

Yeah, is that right?

Is that a big smiley face?

Is it huge twist?

I remember being very excited when I learned that.

You haven't seen Trek Trek?

No, no.

Oh, yeah, I think you should.

Should I?

Yeah, it's a good one.

Well, I've got a child, I probably will at some stage, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

On Lego, one thing I found really interesting is that if you have an idea for a Lego set,

they might make it for you.

All you need is 10,000 supporters on Lego.com, or whatever it is.

And then if you get 10,000 people to like your idea, then they'll review the idea and possibly make it.

That's great.

So that's like the Parliament thing, isn't it?

If you get, or is it 100,000 people you need to sign a petition?

Yeah, they'll consider.

Exactly.

So they're not like, if we d managed to get all of the fish fans to say we want a no such thing as a fish Lego,

then it might get to a level, but they might just go, well, no, we're obviously not making it.

Could we ask all fish fans to make, ask Parliament to make a Lego of fish?

We could get...

Does Parliament make Lego?

No, but we could ask Parliament to put pressure on Lego to make the fish.

That feels like corruption of some sort.

I don't like it.

I feel like.

No, there's no money involved.

Apart from all the money we'll make from Lego.

Because the fish Lego experience are going to be huge.

Actually, there is money involved because if it's your idea and you get 10,000 people and they make it, you get 1% of all the money that Lego makes out of it, which is quite cost.

Alright, let's do it.

I can't wait for the no such thing as a fish ride at Legoland.

Listen to Dan explain a fact slowly and correctly.

People in the front carriage may get covered in yoga.

So

don't forget to pack your anus because

we're going to be pouring sugar all over it.

So So they've made a central perk from friends through this system.

They've made a Seinfeld in general, like a Seinfeld Lego set.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And things that are not yet approved, but you can currently go on the Lego website and approve these if you'd like.

A pirate dentist.

Currently.

A pirate dentist.

I think they would go say R.

Oh, yeah.

That's kind of a boat him at boat face kind of entry, isn't it?

It's just this one gag that we shouldn't really be.

Yeah.

uh the coronation of charlemagne is currently there

it's really going a long way from what kids want at this point isn't it but there are so many um adult lego fans and lego makers affoli

this is completely their fault this the reason that um that these stupid things happen where lots of sad adults tens of thousands of them sign these petitions for new lego pieces

might listen to podcasts too anna so

no i i i do obviously think it's very cool but um it is affoles and they were a huge deal and they used to get ignored.

You're going to get a brick throw through your window, but it'll be a very tiny plastic one.

Yeah, look out of that tiny, tiny window you've got in your flesh.

A little Lego Seinfeld banging on the door.

No, they so they there have always been adult fans of Lego and they got more and more vocal up to the 90s and the early 2000s and Lego the company thought they were quite annoying and kept getting all these letters suggesting possible design ideas and actually put signs on their website and you know on their merchandise saying we do not take ideas, unsolicited ideas.

And you know, if you speak to people who worked at Lego at the time, they'd say it was so irritating.

Adults were taking an interest in Lego, and it wasn't meant to be for adults.

And then they almost went bankrupt because they started almost childifying Lego.

So they'd sell sets that were kind of almost completely made, that were just for the play element rather than the build element.

2003, Lego was in serious trouble, and someone in the company said, guys, should we start listening to all these adult nerds?

Disposable income.

They did disposable income and they created an affole engagement team the adult fans of lego engagement team

but now there was a kind of summit where they were trying to bring that bring in the affole the affoles yeah there was actually well they lego went to one of these unofficial lego conventions and said okay guys we'll start listening to you that i guess that was their summit that was their big

disagreement did they go in disguise and sort of whip off their

robes

and it turns out it's like a massive lego minifigure exactly reveal their yellow claw hands

There is an app that was released last year.

It was not an official one, but it was a Lego app.

It was called Brick It.

Quite a good name.

And what for when you're nervous about something?

You're terrified of your Lego.

Yeah, yeah, it's a therapy app.

No, it was you photograph your pile of Lego with your smartphone camera, and it will tell you what to build, and it gives you instructions.

Like it says, you've got these pieces, you can make Father Christmas out of Lego.

And it gives you instructions about how to do it.

And then, if you see your, you know, this design and you think, oh, where's that red one that I need for the hat or whatever?

You can't find it in your pile of Lego, you go back to the photo you took that you scanned and it says, Look, it's there, it's there in the pile, you idiot.

That's it tells me that it's a little bit different.

Does this work for jigsaws?

That would be good, wouldn't it?

You just scan it and it says this one goes here.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I suspect that removes the main point of a jigsaw.

Well, maybe

this does too, but it's uh, yeah, it's a pretty clever machine learning style thing.

There's a guy called Adam Beadle on YouTube, and he's made a machine.

It's like a PES dispenser for little Legos, and it's attached to a webcam.

And the webcam is swiveled, so it can move around.

And the webcam can tell where you are, it can recognize your socks, say for instance.

And so it can swivel around, look for your feet, and then fire Lego under your feet.

So wherever you walk, you always stand on Lego.

Was this a meant by Kevin and Home Alone or something?

I wanted to build a machine learning app to find four leaf clovers.

So you take a picture of a clover patch and it would say

here's the four leaf clover.

And I spoke to a load of people about it and they said that actually for some reason artificial intelligence isn't very good at counting things.

So it would be quite difficult.

Because you've got to recognize leaves coming from the same thing and then count how many of them.

So like there's a lot of these image generation AIs out there.

You say, you know, draw me a picture of a bird with three legs or whatever, and it'll draw this picture, and it'll have like 17 legs or something.

No way!

I don't understand why, but it's an interesting thing.

You would think that would be the one thing computers are good at, counting it.

Yeah, but but not artificial intelligence for some reason.

There was, um, I remember reading years ago, there was a record for the most four-leaf clovers found in a certain area, and it was in a prison just outside London, I think.

And all the prisoners had started finding four leaf clovers because there'd been some genetic mutation.

Or I think the clovers grow an extra leaf when there's some problem, like there's some acid in the crime.

But it's just like.

And did they all magically break out of prison the next day?

Their luck really turned.

They're just not very lucky, are they?

If they're in prison already, they've been caught.

So, I mean,

that's really funny.

Do you think it's still lucky if robots find your four-leaf clover?

That feels like you're cheating.

Luckily,

I think it's fine.

Okay.

Okay, great.

Great.

That's absolutely.

I think it probably is still lucky.

I don't know.

You can buy four leaf clovers.

Oh, absolutely.

That's definitely not lucky.

We can buy horseshoes.

They're lucky.

Buy all sorts of shoes.

And they're so hard to find in nature.

That's true.

I thought they were unlucky if you hang them upside down.

Yeah, but then everyone says they're supposed to be one way, and then the other people say they're supposed to be the other way.

No one can tell whether they're supposed to be the rounded bit down or the rounded bit up.

Shaped like a U or shaped like the letter N or whatever.

It seems like different parts of the country have different things.

So I have a horseshoe in my house but it's on its side because I thought that's

catching the bets.

The place they're supposed to be is flat on the ground with a horse standing on top of it.

Like everything else is misplacing for the news.

Okay, time for fact number three and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that one of the most environmentally friendly ways to catch scallops is to set up an underwater scallop disco.

And lure them in with sounds of the macarina?

Is that seafood-based?

I was desperately graving for any songs that might be...

I was going disco.

Aqua.

Aqua's quite disco.

Aqua.

Aqua would have been a good one.

On topic.

Barbie girl.

Go on.

So

they like disco music.

They do.

Well, no, they don't.

They like disco lights.

And this is a press release from the University of York that I read, and it's about some work that they did with Fishtech Marine, which is a fisheries company from Devon.

And what they were trying to do is they were trying to put lights into crab and lobster pots.

And they were hoping that they would catch a load of crabs and lobsters.

But what they actually did, so do they think crabs and lobsters would be attracted by that?

They thought they might be.

But it turns out that crabs and lobsters, they're more of going to the movies kind of animals.

They like jazz.

They like going to watch Indiana Jones at midnight.

But actually, scallops, they love the lights.

They love the disco lights.

And they kind of went down and looked at these pots that they were expecting to have crabs and lobsters in and found just a billion scallops.

It's so weird.

And the interesting thing is that the current best way of catching scallops, and when I say best way, I mean most efficient way, very much not the best way for the environment, is to use dredges.

So you have loads of claws that go down to the bottom of the ocean and drag the bottom of the ocean and the scallops come up and you catch them from there.

And obviously this is not a sustainable way to catch seafood.

Because it drags up so much other stuff with it, doesn't it?

It basically turns over the sea bed.

It's awful.

But this could be a much better way of doing it by putting some disco lights down there.

Do you think they have hundreds of eyes?

And do you think they love the disco lights because they've got so many eyes?

It's like going to a disco that's 500 times better than ours.

There is a suggestion that it might be that.

because most animals that live under the sea don't have great eyesight, but they do have these amazing 200 eyes and each of their eyes have two retinas, one that responds to light and one that responds to darkness.

And so they have this incredible complex sight.

Perhaps that's the reason that it that they're attracted to the lights.

We just we don't know to be honest, but the fact is that it works and it could you know save the environment a little bit.

And most of the scallop that you see on your plate, if you if you order a scallop in a restaurant,

you'll get a this

sort of white cylinder of flesh.

Yes.

It doesn't sound as appealing.

They are.

They're very delicious things.

That's kind of what a sausage is, isn't it?

It's a cylinder of flesh.

Yeah, exactly.

They're the sausages of the sea.

They're nature sausage.

They're nature sausage.

So that is not the whole scallop.

That's not the whole animal.

You know, that's just the adductor muscle, which is this.

So they have this incredibly powerful muscle that they use to open and close the shell.

And you're not eating the 200 beautiful tiny eyes.

And the eyes are so small as well.

The eyes are the size of a poppy seed.

And each of their eyes is on its own tentacle.

Nice.

Oh, isn't that cool?

They can kind of peer, you know, go,

what's that over there?

Yeah.

So each of their eyes...

Because they have mirrors at the back of their eyes.

Did you say that, James?

Yeah, they've got two retinas, but each eye has a mirror, which is made of millions of small square tiles.

It's weird because it's like...

Almost like a disco bowl.

isn't inverted.

Oh my god, yeah, you're right.

They think they're seeing one of their own when they see the disco bowl.

So, okay, you're in the eye, you've got the mirror, which is made of millions of square tiles, but those mirrors are each made of 20 or 30 layers of a substance called guanine.

And so guanine is one of the main ingredients of DNA, among other, lots of other things.

It is what gives fish their silvery tint sometimes on that, you know, that sort of gleamy tint.

That's guanine, that's what you're seeing.

And it's also what chameleons use to change the colour of their skin.

This one chemical, sort of, or substance.

Yeah, it cools crystals, doesn't it?

Yeah.

In the skin of chameleons.

Yeah.

So cool.

That's what they're just scallops going around, you know.

And they have growth rings like trees.

Do they?

Yeah.

You can tell the age of a scallop by its rings.

It's sad that you have to chop them down first, though.

I know.

Yeah, each ring on their shell.

On the shell.

It's the rings that radiate out of the shell, as it were.

Obviously, so each ring represents a year of growth, unless apparently

it represents a stressful incident.

So

it might be that they've had an incredibly stressful life, in which case they're going to seem much older than they are, much like humans.

Like if they've got a lot of pressure at work or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, big report to hand in, and they're trying to raise a kid at the same time, whatever.

They've been dredged.

It is mostly the dredging.

The stressful incident will usually be you're caught in a net, and so you deposit an extra layer in your panic.

Apparently, wow.

i i read an article with some scientists who reckoned that if we mass produced oysters and mussels and scallops and stuff then that could be the way to solve the world's nutrition problems

and the main problem that they found is that most people don't like oysters and mussels

even if you mass produce anything it's the answer to the world's nutrition problem well the reason there's a few reasons and the reason is because we have a lot of coastline which is suitable for it using just one percent of the available coastline we'd be able to get the protein for a billion people bivalves have higher protein content than beef does and they also have lots of key nutrients that we need so vitamin a they have iodine they have omega-3 they've got loads of stuff like that and the other thing is they've come up with this new way of feeding them with like little they call them bullets of nutrition so they it's a really cheap way of feeding the um the bivalves they make it using algae so it's very cheap to get as well but also you can put stuff in these little bullets, so you can put flavourings in them, you can put more nutrition in them.

What flavours do they like?

Do they love sour flavours?

Does it matter what that's like?

Does the flavour end up in them?

Yes, because they're filter feeders.

So, because they filter feed, they keep a lot of the chemicals inside themselves.

So, you can put a little sour patch kid flavour

into your muscle, and then when you eat it, you'll get all of this goodness, all of this protein,

and you'll be able to

have whatever flavour you want.

I don't want to rub an oyster on my anus, though.

Well, you have to.

You always have to draw a line on a first date, don't you?

I have a related story about hepatitis A.

Oh, yeah.

So,

there was an outbreak of hepatitis A in the Netherlands, and by sequencing the genome of the virus, they traced the outbreak back to Bangor in Wales.

And

none of the people that got it in the Netherlands had been to Bangor in Wales.

The family that had it in Wales didn't visit the Netherlands.

So this one family visited the Caribbean where it's endemic and they didn't take vaccinations from.

Family from Wales?

Yeah, in Bangor.

They came back to Bangor.

They brought hepatitis A back to Bangor and they stayed at home because they knew they were ill, but they were going to the toilet a lot and they were shedding these virus particles into the sewage system.

And by bad luck, there was a lot of rain at the time, and it overwhelmed the sewage system.

So it ended up in the estuary in Bango, which is a big mussel fishery.

Wow.

We're all, all three of us are looking at it, thinking, how is this going to get to the Netherlands?

I think I know that.

Even though you're probably already there on the mussel fishery as well.

The mussel fishery was the giveaway.

Yeah, no, no, no.

And they're filter feeders.

So the tide is moving in and out.

This infected water is flowing back and forth over these filter feeders.

They're gathering

these virus particles.

We're harvesting them.

We're selling them around the world.

And that particular batch, a lot of it went to the Netherlands.

That is incredible.

That is also the downside of my plan of feeding the world with fire valves because it just takes one family from Bangor and we're all fucked up.

And a rain and a downpour.

In Poland, they use clams to automatically

regulate their water systems.

Or at least in

in Warsaw so they have these clams in a in a room somewhere but they've got water from the system flowing over them and if the clams shut it's because the water quality is low but they've got a little like lever attached to the the shell of the clam and so when it closes it hits a little button and it automates the shutdown of the so we know the quality of the water in Botticelli's Venus was good because it was open she was standing up

And if Dodgywater had entered that system, she would have been slammed down on her.

Do you know why he had a scallop shell Botticelli in that painting?

So it's a famous painting of Venus, and she's floating in on a seashell.

Yeah, implausibly large one.

Yeah.

I think of it as a giant clam.

I think she was tiny, wasn't she?

I'd think

even giant clams aren't big enough to hold an entire woman, Tiberias.

Why was it a.

Well, it was based on a Spanish shrine of St.

James of Compostela.

And St.

James of Compostela was associated with the scallop.

A few reasons maybe why.

One, because the scallop's lines represent the different routes travelled by pilgrims to go and visit his remains.

Santiago de Compostela is a pilgrimage.

Exactly, yeah, it's this one.

Yeah, it takes a month.

And also, possibly because when they got the remains of St.

James originally, they were covered in scallop shells because he was in the water.

One of those.

Why was he?

Was he devoured?

Is that how he was eaten by scallops?

Wow.

Because one of them lands on you.

You think, well, that's an irritation, but I can deal with that.

And then the second one lands, and then you see, you know, they're all fluttering through the water towards you.

It'd be a terrifying horror movie.

What is the eternal?

Would you rather question?

Would you rather fight like one shark or a thousand scallops?

Anyway, one shark-sized scallop or

a hundred scallop-sized sharks.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that scientists, stupid scientists,

still

editorializing in the fact

never done it before.

I feel strongly about this one.

Are still saying that climate change is real.

That's my fact over and out.

No idea.

No, my fact is that scientists still can't decide if hot water freezes faster than cold water.

And it's true.

It's a thing called the Mpemba effect.

If it's the case that hot water, you know, if you start freezing a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water, the Mpemba effect is if the hot water freezes faster than the cold water.

And it's bizarrely complicated to test.

I think there are lots of problems with it.

So it's hard to define when freezing starts.

Like, is it when certain crystals start to form?

Is it when the whole thing freezes?

It's hard to identify when those crystals have started to form.

Or is it when the temperature drops down to zero?

And anyway, people have been saying for thousands of years that this is a phenomenon.

Aristotle said it in 350 BC.

He said hot water freezes faster than cold.

People sort of forgot about it for hundreds of years.

So I think, you know, it was a thing with, like, Francis Bacon said it in the 17th century.

And then in the 1960s, there was a Tanzanian boy called Erasto Mpemba, which is why it's called the Mpemba effect, who noticed it again.

And we started studying it.

It's great.

This is really great, this effect.

Is it real though?

Does it exist?

I'll say yes.

Well, in order for it to work, right, when the hot water is freezing, it must at some stage overtake the cold water.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

For that to be true.

But that means that when those two waters are the same temperature, the one that was previously hot must somehow remember that it was hot.

So that was the big thing

that they've discovered that they have proved that it's possible in general for a system to behave in this way, like in a really abstract sense.

You can have a system that you know is approaching some equilibrium point, approaching some temperature, and it's possible in general that if you are further away from that point, you can get there quicker.

That's why they haven't shown it specifically for water.

It's the tortoise and the hare.

I think of it as being like

if you have to heat the oven to 180 degrees,

you can

if it was frozen when you started from frozen, it would be quicker.

That's not what I do.

I will put it to 250 degrees so that it has to get a I think it thinks I've better got to move on.

I've got to rush.

Very different to what

when it gets to 180, you just pop it back down and the light goes off.

And you've saved time.

You know, you're definitely wasting your time when you do that.

Because of the way ovens work, right?

I have a hunch that my oven knows there's pressure.

He needs to get

as he works with deadlines.

I am exactly the same as you.

You know, every time in the oven, I know it's completely illogical.

Obviously, it makes no bit of difference, but I do.

If you're in a rush, you put it on as hot as possible.

It's not going to make a difference how long it takes to get to 100 degrees.

Anyway, that is completely unrelated to the impending experience.

Agree to disagree.

Just to get back to your point of like, how can it remember what it did?

And there are various ways.

Like, for example, you know, it might be that the hotter water freezes from the outside first.

So you've got this structural difference.

You've got this casing of ice around like an unfrozen center, whereas that doesn't happen with the other ones.

It could be an actual mechanism, yeah, like of accelerating towards freezing points.

One idea is there might be more eddy currents in it, which somehow causes it to freeze quickly.

And those eddy currents remain after that transition point has happened.

Sort of mini whirlpools is an eddy current, basically.

One idea is that cold water might super cool, so it

has to go to a lower temperature before it freezes.

Can we talk about Erasto Mpemba, the student who the thing is named after?

So he did it.

He discovered this effect.

If it's real, and clearly opinion varies around this table.

But

he was making ice cream.

He was 13 years old and he was at school making ice cream.

And his method was you boil the milk to make it with, you mix it with the sugar, you put it in the freezer bit of the fridge.

But there was a rush for fridge space.

He had boiled his milk already, but he saw another boy run to the fridge.

without boiling the milk and shove his milk and thing in there.

So he and the the other boy put their milk and sugar mixes into the freezer at the same time.

I think it was, was it not that the other boy let his milk cool down first and then put it in, whereas he put it in while it was boiling?

Because you do have to boil it.

They basically put two trays of milk and sugar in at the same time.

One of the, his was boiling hot and the other's was already cooled.

And when he and the other boy went back, his tray had frozen into ice cream.

The other boys hadn't frozen into ice cream.

Ha!

It's proved.

And he took the situation to a physics lecturer at his school called Dennis Osborne, and they co-wrote a paper, which was just called Cool, which I love.

He was like, well, actually, he first of all took the situation to his teacher, who said, you're an idiot.

No, it doesn't happen.

He got ready to slide off.

He got told.

So he asked this teacher a question about it, and the teacher said, That is Mpemba's physics and not the universal physics.

And this became like a running joke at his school.

Every time there was a mistake, he would be told, that is Mpemba's mathematics.

If he made a maths error, and anyway, Mpemba's name has now been remembered, and the teacher who took a Mickey out of him, his name is now Dust.

Dead in the water.

Yeah.

Do you know by sheer coincidence when Mpemba discovered this thing about hot water, his effect, there was a Canadian scientist called Dr.

Kell who at pretty much exactly the same time wrote a paper saying the same thing.

It having not been mentioned for over a century, he discovered the same thing.

That's one of those weird things, isn't it?

Like the Dennis the Menace thing when two Dennis Menaces were created.

Were they?

That's a cool fact.

Yeah, the same week a Dennis the Menace was created in America as there was in Britain.

And they were quite so they were both both young schoolboys.

Isn't that called morphic resonance?

Isn't that theory?

That is interesting.

That sounds like bullshit.

That's Sheldrake's idea, Morphic Resonance.

And that's the idea that

he said it was in the 70s, there was a few blue tits that learned how to peck

into milk bottles.

And then suddenly, within a week, everyone had noticed that in the whole country, all these blue tits were learning how to do it.

And he thought there was some kind of special psychic way that all of these animals had managed to learn stuff.

So,

I was trying to explain Morphic Resonance to someone last night.

Oh, yeah.

But I couldn't remember what the example was.

And the blue tits and the milk bottles is a really good one.

And I misremembered it as.

So, you know, cattle grids.

This is real.

This is real.

So, well,

what I'm about to say is remember.

I remembered that cows had learned to roll over cattle grids.

You're so close.

You're so close.

Within three weeks of each other, cows across the planet were rolling over cattle grids.

You're really close, but it's sheep.

And sheep had learned how to roll across them.

And again, there was lots of anecdotal evidence from different farmers that that had happened.

But no one, even in the world of smartphones, no one has ever been able to video this actually happening.

They're not idiots.

They're very cameras.

That's what I'm going to do in front of people with smartphones.

Oh, wow.

So I got close to the camera.

I feel like a cow, once it's halfway across, rolling across a cattle grid, probably won't be be able to get the rest of the way up.

Yeah, I cannot believe you confused us, because the idea of a cow rolling across anything is...

I don't know if it can happen.

Yeah, it does explain why.

Whereas you can roll a sheep easily, can't you?

You can roll a sheep.

But can a sheep roll itself, though?

That's the question.

That's the big question.

You can't cup a cow, but you can roll a sheep.

And that's how I tell the difference between sheep and a cow.

That's why your farming career went down.

I also have an effect named after me.

Really?

The mold effect.

The mold effect.

No, you're just talking about molding.

No, no, I made a video about this thing that I accidentally discovered, which I assumed had already been discovered, but I couldn't find anything about it on the internet.

If you get a chain of beads, bead chain like the type you see at the side of blinds that you need to

get about 50 meters of it, feed it into a pot,

and then take the end of it and allow it to fall out of the pot.

The whole pot empties, which is already known and understood.

But what happens is it rises above the pot first.

It's really cool.

It's got that idea,

The further it has to fall, the higher it goes.

I got it to go two and a half meters out of the pot.

Wow.

Wow.

By chopping it back 92 meters.

Oh, it's a long story, but I was making a video about polymers.

There's a polymer called polyethylene oxide.

If you make a solution of it and start to pour it out of the beaker, it all pours out.

It's self-pouring polymer.

You don't have to tip the whole thing up.

It all just comes out in one go.

I wanted to make a physical model of that.

I'd seen it done with plastic beads before, a chain of beads.

The beads self-siphon, but it doesn't rise up if you use plastic beads.

I thought I'll use metal beads because it'll look nicer.

And I discovered this thing that goes on.

Wouldn't it be amazing if that effect, which you described, then becomes very important in something else?

It would be amazing.

And then in a billion years' time, everyone's like, did you know that the person who the mold effect was named after was once on a pocket that was?

Yeah, some idiot.

To be able to prove that part of the explanation, it'd be amazing to see the beads moving in zero gravity.

And so I put a call out, is there any way to get the beads on the International Space Station?

And it's happened.

No!

Yeah, the beads went up in a rocket, I think it was in May.

And

Commander Samantha Christophoretti has the beads.

She hasn't done the experiment yet.

She's got a lot on.

She's busy, but she will do it at the tumble.

What if it wrecks the ISS?

But they get loaded with so much crap.

I always feel sorry for them.

What are you talking about?

The old mold effect, obviously is going to be groundbreaking, but I always think with astronauts and NASA, it's like, oh, what?

I have to put this weird plant on for this kid, this globe, obviously I'm going to bring up these experiments.

I was looking at some experiments that I could try at home, and as I mentioned a few times, got a new baby.

And Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that

he thought that humans were fundamentally good as children, and any kind of evilness in humans was all society corrupting people.

And so there was a guy called Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and he was the guy who invented the conveyor belt.

What have you done, James?

He also thought that he would try and raise his son, who was called Richard Jr.,

to be like Russo said, and be permanently good.

So he wouldn't let him get involved in society, just let him run around in the garden and stuff.

Anyway, by the age of eight, he had become what Edgeworth described as an ungovernable child of nature.

and he had to ship him off to a seminary.

He's just sort of gone savage,

and there was another psychologist called Clarence Luber.

And Clarence thought that children only laughed when they're tickled because their parents laugh.

So the idea is I tickle my daughter and my daughter laughs, but she's only laughing'cause I'm enjoying it so much and basically tickling is is a learned thing.

And so he invented some cardboard shield masks that he would him and his wife would wear every time that they tickle a child

in the hope that the child would never learn how to laugh when tickled uh but by the time the child was seven months old it was still laughing whenever it was tickled and but he thought that his hypothesis was still true and maybe his wife was not fully observing the tickling rules.

Don't blame

your poor wife

for this weird man cardboard mask tickle experiment.

But Charles terrified of both of you at this stage.

Darling, we have a tickling protocol.

My ad hoc hypothesis about laughing and tickling, which means it's just an idea that I've got, is that it's a way to teach self-defense through play.

So

the sensation of being tickled is unpleasant, right?

So if kids just cried when you tickled them, you wouldn't do it.

But they laugh.

And so as a parent, you think, oh, I've got to make them laugh.

It

feels so good to make my kids laugh.

you, and you think about where you tickle kids, it's in those vulnerable places

where you could get hurt, like the neck, armpits.

So, I think it's this way of like encouraging parents to do things their kids that actually don't really enjoy, but

it's a form of learning self-defense.

So, you're saying it's like the sensation of being attacked by a wild animal, and you're kind of

self-you're not very good at self-defense when you're being tickled, are you?

Because I've never successfully fought off a tickle.

Maybe I wasn't tickled enough to hit her.

You have to go for the eyes

and the crotch.

Fish hucking and eye gouging with the main.

One theory about the tickling is that it's like if insects are getting on you, like poisonous insects, and it's the reason that it's unpleasant and the reason you want to stop it is because in the olden days before iPads, you might have been in the Serengeti and there were dangerous insects climbing on you.

Yeah, but that makes sense.

Why the laughing?

But it's not funny.

Well,

it's not funny.

Not for you.

I mean, it's funny for everyone else in the camping trend.

I think the same argument then about it being a protection thing.

It's a defense thing.

So we're teaching authority.

Why would you laugh as a defense?

You should accept it.

Defend yourself.

You're trying to stop.

You're physically defending yourself.

You're wiggling.

No, no, but why the laughing?

I understand.

You're obviously fighting off.

To encourage the parents.

I love the parents' theory.

To stimulate the child so that they defend themselves against insects.

So tickling.

No, hang on, we've got it.

It's for the child laughs to make sure the parent keeps on tickling the child to encourage the child to to learn how to fight off

the form.

That was Steve's explanation.

I completely understood that.

Although it was the parent being an idiot, because all parents remember being tickled as kids, and what they remember is this was hell.

Don't inflict this on your child.

So what you're saying, Anna, is that my experiment where my house is full of dangerous hornets

and I release them every time I tickle my daughter, this is not a good idea.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for for listening.

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

I'm on at AndrewHunterM, James.

At James Harkin, Steve, at Mold S.

And Anna.

You can hear our podcast at QI.com.

Also, do be sure to check out Steve Mold's YouTube.

He is to be found on YouTube.

If you search for Steve Mold, you will find him.

And he and his colleagues from the Festival of the Spoken Nerd have a brilliant podcast called A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail.

So check that out too.

If you'd like to go to no thingasafish.com you will find details of all of our previous episodes you will find tickets for the tour dates we've got coming up there's a tour date we're streaming live to the world so wherever you're hearing this you can get a ticket for that it's going to be great fun and you can also find the portals for our brand new members area which is called club fish we're going to be putting so much stuff in there you can get ad-free versions of the regular show there are going to be things like drop us a line which is a section where we cover all the amazing wonderful correspondence that you guys have sent in there are going to be compilations every month of all the funny outtakes and bonus stuff that hasn't been in the regular show.

You can join up.

All you need to do is go to no suchthingasofish.com and all the details are there.

Check it out.

Okay, that's it.

We'll see you next week for another episode of this.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.