436: No Such Thing As An Alexa In Heaven

Transcript

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It is the wonderful Ed Young. Ed Yong, I'm sure you must be aware of him.

We've certainly been littering his work all through the last eight years of Phish recordings and anywhere that we can get our hands on, any bit of writing from the guy we do.

Be it his tweets, his books, his articles for The Atlantic, which are absolutely

just perfect science writing. We track them all down and we mow through them.
Ed is also recently a Pulitzer Prize winner.

He got it for the category of explanatory journalism and it was for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And then on top of that, he's also a best-selling New York Times author with his latest book, which is called An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

And you've got to say the subtitle in that slightly mysterious and I hope not too creepy kind of way because the book is just awesome. It's like a science fiction book, but everything is real.

It's all about how animals perceive the world differently to us and all the incredible abilities that they have.

It's also the story of how scientists are looking into all of their abilities and trying to work out if there's any way that we can harness them and apply them to our own lives.

It's just classic Ed Young writing. It's so interesting, it's funny, it distills really hard science into really interesting anecdotes, and it's just a wonderful book to read and have on your shelf.

So make sure to get your copy today. Okay, on with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations around the world. My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and special guest, it's Ed Yong.

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, that is Ed. My fact today is that when hummingbirds drink, their tongues split split in two.

What?

Yeah, that's also what I thought.

So this was a... Hey, hang on, Ed.
You mean snakes? Now, I know you're a very eminent biological.

And the other thing is, when they split in two, if they had like a bottle of Coca-Cola and a bottle of Fanta, would they be able to drink a little bit of each?

They could not, unfortunately, because the splitting in two trick only works when the tongue actually hits nectar. So they can't like force the tongue to turn into a fork in mid-air.

It's something that automatically happens whenever they take a drink.

It's amazing. It is amazing.
And it's also completely different to how I think people thought that hummingbirds drink.

I don't know if like any of you spend much of your time going around thinking, how do hummingbirds drink?

But the traditional idea is that it worked through capillary action, which is what happens when you take a really thin straw and you put it in water. A lot of the liquid just automatically rises up.

And that was like the textbook version for a long time. But an ornithologist named Margaret Rubega realized that that just couldn't work because capillary action is very slow.

Hummingbirds are like famously very fast.

So she and her student Alejandro Rico Guevara set up this really convoluted filming system where they got these artificial glass flowers and then they used high-speed cameras to film hummingbirds drinking from that.

And when they looked at the footage, what they saw was that when the tongue hits the nectar, nectar it splits in two it's like two halves that are zipped together and then each half has like these little flanges that are like an enclosed fist and the fist opens up into these splayed fingertips and then when the bird retracts its tongue all of that closes up so the fingertips close back up and the tongue knits back together so it's like the hummingbird is reaching forward with two hands grabbing like two fistfuls of nectar and then yanking that into its face

can i ask how come scientists sort of have assumed that they used the method of what they were drinking, as you said before, was sort of like a straw, right?

Basically, are we not checking stuff out in science anymore? Like, what's going on?

Yeah, that is theoretically what we're meant to do, but it's really interesting how, like, with a lot of nature stuff, there are all these facts, quote unquote,

that get taken as dogma and that people just sort of don't check.

This isn't the first time I've written about something like this, where like a little bit of textbook knowledge gets like passed down through the generations and then someone actually goes, wait a minute, maybe we should do that step where we actually check it.

Wasn't there a thing where Aristotle wrote that flies had four legs and pretty much that just got copied down textbook by textbook for hundreds and hundreds of years until someone went, Oh, wait a minute, last one I saw had six legs.

Right. I feel like Aristotle is the progenitor of a lot of these things.
Sorry to Aristotle stands listening to this podcast, but

yeah. Is half our audience gone? Thanks, Eric.

I read that when a hummingbird drinks in a flower, its tongue goes in and out of its mouth 15 or 20 times a second. What? Is that right? Incredible.

So is that what that punch movement is? Well, you don't kiss the band. They always stick their tongue out and go in and out loads of times.
Gene Simmons, yes.

Famously, Gene Simmons has a very long tongue. And for the basically majority of his life,

once he started in the band, there's just been rumors that he's had his tongue extended in order to have that done.

So having a bit of the bottom of the tongue cut so that he can flop it out even longer. But then there was another idea that he had a cow's tongue grafted into his existing tongue.

Just on top of it. Yeah, and that was a rumor that he said it's his favorite kiss rumor of all time that he somehow had surgery.

You should get a a hummingbird tongue grafted into the end of the cow tongue.

Have you noticed my tongue can now split in half? I can't really see it, Gene.

If you were to put a cow's tongue into your body, grass, right, would taste quite good, but then other things would taste different? Or is that not true with animals? Do they all taste the same?

No, animals do taste really differently. So like cats don't have a sweet tooth, for example.

And a lot of birds can't taste sugar either.

and the the exceptions to that are hummingbirds and songbirds so like all the like really familiar backyard birds like finches and tits and all the like they can taste sugar and there was a really interesting study that came out i think last year that linked the evolution of sweet sugar tasting in these birds with like their evolutionary success so all of those songbirds originated in australia of all places and australia is a place that is just loaded with sugar in plants.

Like the flowers have tons of nectar. Some of the trees are like just, they're so rich in sugar that they're exuding it in sap from their box.

So one idea is that this family of birds, because they managed to re-evolve the ability to sense sugar,

were really able to take advantage of this like bountiful source of calories. and could then spread all around the world and do the same wherever they landed up.

So maybe the evolution of sugar sensing was one of the secrets of the success of this group of birds, which is now like all over the world and I think is like half of all bird species. Wow.
Wow.

But I'm afraid, Ed, you haven't answered the peach beans.

I really was trying to divert us away from it, but

good job on bringing us back to it. I don't know whether if you grafted a cow tongue in place of your own tongue, whether would taste differently.

It's got to be worth a go. Right.

Isn't it true? I think it's true that birds can't taste, or certainly garden birds can't taste chili. Oh, that is true.

There's anti-squirrel bird food, which does contain small amounts of chili. Wow.
And

squirrels hate the taste of chili, so they naturally don't go for the bird feeder after the first couple of times they tried it, or they can even smell it. Whereas the garden birds can't taste that.

Do they still feel the burn on the other side? No, they don't. The burn is due to capsaicin and birds are insensitive to that chemical.
So yeah, they shouldn't feel it

at either end. So is it possible? I don't think anyone's ever asked Dan.

You know, we've always pushed an idea of doing a show called Can I Ask a Stupid Question? And I feel like we're in it. We're in the show we've always wanted to make.

Anyway, where were we? Hummingbirds.

The other thing that I read, this was about a flower called Heliconia, which almost does the reverse of what what this hummingbird mouth does.

When the hummingbird goes into the plant, it kind of jumps out like a jack-in-the-box and kind of shoves its stamens into the hummingbird's face.

There's also,

I don't know if you guys saw Green Planet, the most recent Attenborough documentary, but it has this really great example of very aggressive pollination tactics.

There's this flower called the hammer orchid, which has

a little hinged bit that looks like a very specific kind of wasp and it releases a pheromone that mimics that wasp and when the wasp lands on it um it points that entire bit of flower with the wasp attached to it onto like two prongs that have pollen bits on on them and then as the wasp is buzzing presumably in confusion it then like mashes the pollen onto its back.

Wow.

It's a bit like, have you ever seen one of those, are they called squirting cucumbers or something?

They look a bit like cucumbers and then when you touch them, they just explode and the seeds go everywhere. Oh, wow.
They're really cool. Very cool.
They're really cool. Yeah.
Nature. It's awesome.

How is your narration gig going, Dan?

It's just blank footage. And at the end of every five minutes, you just say,

nature.

David's successor is obvious.

And hummingbirds, I was reading about the way that they make nests for their young. And there's one called the ruby-throated hummingbird.
It's such a cool process.

The nests are so tiny, it's like the size of a penny, the circumference of the inside.

And the way that they build this nest is that they go around and they collect weird things like tiny little animal bones and little leaves and so on. But then they get spider's webs.

And so the idea is that the spider's web not only holds it together, but as the hummingbird chicks get bigger within the nest, it can expand with them. Amazing.

I really want a pair of trousers made of spider fists now.

Those ruby-throated hummingbirds that you just mentioned, they're done, I think I'm right in saying they can bend the lower half of their beaks. Yes.

It just goes

and bends down a bit.

Do they need to press it against lizard like Charlie Chaplin's cane, or can they just do it without...

I think they don't have to lean against something to bend it down. I think they have a little bit of a

food enough. Well, I'm not sure whether there's a food thing, but I think there is a fighting element to it, which is where they're bashing other hummingbirds with their open mouths.

I think that's part of it. Yeah, and there's also a food aspect to it.

So Margaret Rubega, the same woman who showed the tongue splitting in half thing that I told you about, also showed that, like, so some hummingbirds catch insects in air as well as drinking from flowers.

And that's quite a difficult thing for a bird like a hummingbird to do.

Like, the way Margaret explained to me, it's like, it's like flying around with a pair of chopsticks in your face trying to catch a moving rice grain.

But so instead of trying to like pick things up with like the tips of the bill, what they do is they bend the lower half of the bill and then they just try and ram the insects with their open mouths.

Crazy. That's amazing.
It's a really interesting relationship they have with insects, isn't it? Because they're kind of

in the same niche. They're going for the pollen of the plants and stuff.
And they also eat a lot of insects, but then there are some insects that eat them, like prayer mantises can eat hummingbirds.

And sometimes like wasps will attack them and stuff like that. They're so tiny.
I don't think we've properly said how small these things are. It's like a bee.
Yeah. Like a big bee.
They're so small.

They're the smallest sort of living dinosaur, aren't they?

I guess if you count all birds as dinosaurs, this is pretty much as small as you get as a dinosaur, I think, from what they found, even through fossil records.

There's one smaller dinosaur, which was Oculanditavis calangraii.

which was it was like an avian dinosaur so it's like a bird before birds um but we only have a skull of it and it's about the size of a fingernail.

And we think it was possibly smaller than the smallest hummingbird, but obviously, we only have a skull, so maybe it had a massive body and a tiny head. I don't know.

It was found in resin, wasn't it? I've seen a photo of it.

Once again, bringing my theory that we should put all the important shit in resin. It's the only thing that survives.
What's the important shit?

Well, anything that we, you know, like Gene Simmons' cow tongue. There we go.

Absolutely. Oh, my God.
I don't want to see that Jurassic Park where they bring back Gene Simmons with his cow tongue.

Oh, wow.

Simmons Park, yeah. God, do you want to know something about tongues? Oh, yeah.
Okay, this is right. This is actually a bit of US news.
And it's from 2020.

There was a house in Florida, and there was a builder was brought in. The woman who owned the house brought a builder in to just look at something in the foundations.

And he was down in the

crawl space under the house. I think it's the thing that lots of US houses have.
And what he found there was, he found six gallons of human tongues.

He found six one gallon jars full, absolutely crammed with human tongues and associated matter. And it had belonged to a scientist from the University of Florida, an oral pathologist called Ronald A.

Boffman.

Come on. It's B-A-U-G-H.
I think that's Boffman. Yeah, like Fred Boff.

I know exactly he had a crawl space full of human tongues, but I wouldn't run it faster. We're not sure.
Boffman was the scientist. It's actually Boffman's monster.
Sorry.

Just made entirely of tongues.

And he'd put them there to keep them cool. And he was meaning to do some experiments on them.
This is all about 50 years ago. And then he and his wife got divorced.

And his wife was the one who stayed on living in the house. But everyone forgot the presence of these tongues and they just stayed there for 50 years.

How do you forget the presence of your basement full of tongues? How is that just a thing that just skips your mind?

I was looking at like animals tasting things and I'm currently not in the UK.

I'm on holiday and I'm being eaten alive by mosquitoes and so I was interested to see what mosquitoes can taste and it turns out that they've got like taste buds that can detect quite a few different substances in human blood apparently.

So I was reading. I saw this interview with a woman called Leslie Voshol from Rockefeller University about this.
They said, what does human blood taste like to the mosquitoes?

And she said, well, you can't really tell because like no human experience can be like a mosquito experience.

But it's kind of probably, if you can imagine something that's a bit salty and a bit sweet. So two different tastes that kind of go together really well that they like.
I like salted caramel, I guess.

Or a Snickers bar or something like that. I've actually visited Leslie's lab.
Ah, really. And yeah, so she's she's great and their labs are amazing.

And one interesting thing about mosquito tastes is that they're quite quite picky like it's actually very hard to feed like captive mosquitoes like if you just have like a petri dish of blood they won't drink from it they want like the taste of it the smell of human um they want like the heat um of human skin so one thing they sometimes do is they'll like slightly microwave the blood and then take like a bit of paraffilm rub it on hue on their own skin and then stretch it over the surface of the blood so now you have something that feels warm and smells a bit like human that allows the mosquitoes to actually like stab through.

But that's all very complicated.

And by far, the simplest way they have of feeding their mosquitoes is just sticking their arm inside the mosquito cage and just sitting there while like several hundred mosquitoes drink from them.

Oh, my God. That's the worst thing in the world.

And there's like, I think there's like a lab rotor where like people take it in turns to feed the mosquitoes on that day.

So everyone I've spoken to who's done this says that like it's horrible the first few times you do it and then you rapidly become mostly immune to it.

So it'll it'll itch a little bit but it's not too bad. It's really just the gross out factor of sit

and like the boredom of having to sit there like reading a book or like scrolling through Twitter while like your arm gets drained. Yeah.

So obviously even hundreds of mosquitoes drinking couldn't take enough blood from you to to do you any harm, right? It's not like there's a pile of like deflated students in the corner.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in London's only ketamine clinic, the ketamine is kept in a locked box inside another locked box that's padlocked to the floor.

Great fact. Where'd you get that from? Yes.
Well, when I say my fact this week, this is Anna's fact this week. Anna can't be with us

as she censors this stuff about ketamine and we haven't seen her for days. I don't know.

No, Anna is sick, so she censors this and she found it in an online magazine called Technology Networks. And it is about a clinic in London called Awaken Clinic, which is near King's Cross.

And it's London's first clinic for psychedelic psychotherapy.

And the idea is that all around the world, more in America for sure, but just starting to come in the UK now, people are using these drugs that are illegal in lots of places, but giving them in smaller doses.

And they're helping against various things like depression or addiction, lots of problems like that. Is ketamine addictive?

It can be, yes. In small doses, I think it's okay.
I mean, don't, if you're listening to this, it's illegal in the UK, so I wouldn't bother.

But if you're going to to a clinic and it's under controlled circumstances, then I think it's okay.

But I think one of the reasons we don't use it more, because it started off as an anesthetic, one of the reasons we don't use it anymore is because you need to use more and more and more because you get a build up to it and it can have psychological problems if you use it too much.

But yeah,

this is a new clinic. And actually, the exciting thing I learned about this clinic when Anna sent it round is that it's on a road called Dukes Road.

And it's just opened this spring and the one of the last people to go into the building before they put all the keton in there was me it turns out

because my wife used to work in that building and her company moved and we helped kind of clear it out and like get rid of some of the stuff out of there so just before they left we went in there and i want to know we were going to take there's a huge sort of tree stump that was like fossilized or petrified or whatever and we were going to take it but it was so heavy there was four of us and we couldn't move it So I reckon it must still be there.

Yes.

Must be, right? Yeah. I reckon you could hide the ketamine underneath that tree stump and no one would ever get it.
You don't need to.

Now it's getting a bit fantasy, right? It's like in a locked box inside a tree stump guarded by a wizard who has three riddles for you. I do love that the clinic that has

the ketamine in the locked box, in the other locked box, is part of a program of psychotherapy called Ketamine in the Reduction of Alcohol Relapse or care

but care with a k which i feel is unfortunate because everyone knows that if you take a c word and turn it into a k word it makes it evil

like with kiss immortal combat yeah kodos and kang at the same time

that's just sending the wrong volume magic with the k at the end that's suddenly dark magic

and the clinic is called uh it's it's i'm sure it's pronounced awaken but it's spelt awaken awaken because then they've they've they've knocked out the e and so it looks a bit like you know chicken that fake chicken stuff.

John Lilly, who is one of the really old ketamine researchers, he said that when he took ketamine, he could make contact with aliens

and that the ketamine told him that he was getting a lot of knowledge from it. He said the ketamine knew everything.
And he said that the ketamine told him that knowledge starts with K for a reason.

So maybe there's something in the evil K with John Lilly. Food for thought.

The clinic is really interesting, isn't it?

Because it's got to be sort of clinical and you're supervised when you're taking the drugs themselves, but it's also accessible and it's not, you don't want to be in a totally Spartan clinical environment because you perceive things differently when you have ketamine, don't you?

So your brain gets disassociated from your sensory input. So you might think that your limbs are getting longer or you might feel like you're floating or whatever it is.

So they've got to have a sofa to lie on once you've had the drugs, but also they've got to keep it it slightly professional. Yeah.

And it comes with therapy as well, which I think some clinics in the USA don't do, do they? They just give you the drugs. Right.
Oh, really? Yeah, that's what this is.

It's 11 sessions, four of which are the doping sessions, and then the rest of them are the therapy sessions.

So you break them up and you come back in and then you talk about, you know, oh, you thought you were an astronaut in that last trip, you know, kind of thing. And then your problems as well.

It's not just. There was one US researcher.
So this was some kind of help that they gave the subjects in America.

They said that the patients are seeing loads of things. Like one person thought they were hiding lemons in the room everywhere.

And there was another person who thought they could see vibrating colours and stuff. But apparently some people got really upset about it.
And, you know, the realities changed.

They get really worried about it. And they said that everyone to a person feels better if they play some Enya in the background.

If they play a bit of Enya, it doesn't matter if you're a heavy metal, if you're a Kiss fan, if you're a Maiden fan or anything. If you play a little bit of Enya, apparently, it calms you right down.

Well, that's so interesting because in America, in Fort Worth, in Texas, they actually, at one point in the 1970s, opened up a clinic for people who were tripping on LSD who needed to come down to come to, and they would just play them the Beach Boys album, Smiley Smile.

And that was the only thing that you had there. So I can see why Enya would be even more powerful than a Beach Boys app.

I love this idea that every drug has a musical antidote to it. Yeah, exactly.

So James mentioned John Lilly,

who was also really famous for doing research on dolphins.

And like some of his work was actually hugely influential and like and he inspired like a lot of modern-day dolphin researchers, but he was also

had some very like out there ideas about like communicating with dolphins. And that was, I think that was heavily influenced by like his experiences with ketamine.

But I found this vice article which talked about how Lilly's experiences with both dolphins and ketamine might have influenced the game Echo the Dolphin. Did any of you play that on?

On the Sega Mega Drive? Yeah, it's a great game. Right, so it was an amazing game on the Mega Drive, Genesis for American listeners, and

you played a dolphin and you had to go around like beating up sharks and surviving. But there was also this like...

this overarching plot about aliens who were I don't know trying to like take over the world or like kidnap animals And you, Echo, the dolphin, had to fight off these aliens.

And that's like very clearly linked to like Lily and his like his alien stuff and his ketamine stuff. He um yeah, he was a consultant on the video game.
Was he really? Yeah, yeah, they asked him.

And he did go absolutely bonkers post the dolphin experiments that he had. He did weird stuff with dolphins, didn't he? John Lily, or am I wrong? No, he did.

Yeah, it was more Margaret Howe, who was the experimenter who was living in the dolphin houses that they had.

He was part of the house. He was upstairs, but he didn't interact with her except telepathically from his flotation tank.

Wait, he was, sorry, he was upstairs in the dolphin house. There was the dolphin house that he created, yeah.
Andy wants to know how the dolphins get up the stairs, I think. Thank you very much.
I do.

Just don't get a me. Oh, yeah.
What I know it as... is horse tranquilizer.

Because that's the thing that it gets described as all the time, as in, oh, it's a party drug, but it's actually these kids are taking horse tranquilizer. And it's not.
It's not really. No.

It will knock out a horse if you use enough of it. It's used on multiple animals, including humans.

So the New Zealand Drug Foundation website, they say it's used on elephants, camels, gorillas, pigs, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, rabbits, snakes, guinea pigs, birds, gerbils, and mice.

But you never hear it described as a gerbil tranquilizer.

Like,

it's less scary, isn't it? It's also less cool, isn't it? If your friends offer you some gerbil tranquilizer.

I also feel like the situations in life when one needs to tranquilise a gerbil are probably few and far between. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, no. There's a runaway gerbil.
How are we going to stop him?

Oh, dear. So I do love that the Wikipedia entry on ketamine does end with this absolute banger of the sentence, which is, ketamine appears not to produce sedation or anesthesia in snails.

Instead, it appears to have an excitatory effect.

What? Oh, wow. That's amazing.
That's why they keep it in the locked boxes. It's in case the snails get excited.

I've not actually followed up on the source behind this statement. I want to just let it stand on its hands.
Six times.

When you say it has an excitatory effect on snails, do you mean the snails are now like zooming around like hummingbird speed? Or are they just moving slightly less slowly than before?

Having the time of its its life and the human watching it's just watching it slowly move it less slowly.

I've also got a story about that's real that's sort of related to this about like um the difficulties of scientists doing experiments with illicit substances.

And this happened sort of inadvertently. So I was talking to this guy called Matt Cassen who studies parasites and he studies this fungus that infects cicadas and it makes their butts fall off

and the cicadas fly around with this ball full of like fungal spores behind them, what Cassin calls these flying salt shakers of death.

But you might then ask, like, how is it that the cicada is okay with like a third of its body having fallen off?

And when they looked at the fungus and they did a chemical analysis of the chemicals that the fungus produces, they found that it produces psilocybin, which is the stuff that makes shrooms trippy.

So these cicadas are flying around, probably off their faces, shedding fungal spores from what used to be their butts but the the twist is like psilocybin is you can't do research on it without a very specific permit and so this poor scientist suddenly discovers that oh no I'm actually a psilocybin lab and I don't know if like the DEA is going to suddenly come in and like tow me away.

And so he has to do this like very embarrassed call to the DEA going, I don't know if you have any protocols for this,

but it turns out that my fungus-infested cicadas are full of psilocybin. What do I do?

Do we know what happened? Did they tell him to, they got him a permit, maybe, I guess? I think they said it was okay because the amount of psilocybin inside the cicadas is very, very small.

So it's not like you could crunch your way through a bag full of psilocybin. I was going to say, how many cicadas without a bum would I have to lick? to get a bit of a trip.
Right.

I actually have an answer to this because

I asked him that question. He said, based on the ones we looked at, it will probably take a dozen or more.
I think. That's actually not that many cicadas.
God.

After this podcast, forests are just going to be packed with drug dealers waiting for cicadas to be born. But those cicadas, are they the ones that come out only every 17 years or something like that?

Yeah, that's right. So,

yeah, but then they come out like en masse.

So it feels like you really should be able to, like when it happened this year, I was getting really panicked as my dog started eating every cicada he could find.

Like walking in front of him and just checking them going, does it look white? Does it? It's a spanner. No, it's not there.
You're not eating it.

Ketamin's effect on sheep is amazing. It turns them off and turns them back on again.

In a sexual way?

Not in a sexual way. Their brain activity just literally turns off.
I think this was

Cambridge scientists. Yeah, they gave sheep very high doses of ketamine.
And basically,

all electrical activity just turned off. So is it like being hit on the head in a cartoon? It's exactly like that.

She's got key information about their lives and then they hit them again and they were back.

That's amazing. Ed, is this true?

Is this true? Can a brain just shut off?

My brain's doing that right now.

You're watching it happen in real time.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact this week is that Britain has several libraries whose collections are completely invisible to the naked eye.

Oh,

very interesting.

Let's see, naked eyes.

So, okay, tidy books. Well, it's the books of life.

By which I mean microorganisms.

Or as they're otherwise known, the books of life.

So

this is these things. They're called the national culture libraries.
There was this amazing piece in The Economist, actually, about them. And

there are four national culture libraries, and each one does something slightly different. So one has bacteria, one has viruses, one has fungi, and one has cell lines.
And they all store.

various significant cultures,

cells that matter. And they're for scientists to do experiments on.
So you can, if you like, buy some salmonella or some anthrax or some cholera. You can buy some anthrax.
That doesn't sound. Yeah.

I know. I don't think you, the listener, can buy some anthrax to be clear.
You might be able to. It's only £321.
It's really affordable.

Like on delivery.

So, yeah, you're right.

Yes, you do need several layers of security and licensing. And

they need to know that you've got the right sort of fridge with the right sort of locks, the right sort of Tupperware, or whatever.

But it's really useful, and it's for researchers who want to sequence the DNA of particular diseases or fungi or whatever it might be and work out how changes in the DNA might mean they spread or look at historical examples and see how they've altered between previous pandemics and now.

And they're quite secretive, but they are, these are real organizations, and

they're quite historically quite interesting. Oh, it's really amazing.
Incredibly interesting.

and there's so much in there so that was the price by the way for anthrax you can get it for 321 pounds if you want some human coronavirus that's going to set you back 282 pounds I've got some of that left from last week

and then they have they have just amazing other bits of bacteria that you can get your hands on so there's Haemophilus influenza which they say they believe has come directly from the nose of Alexander Fleming they think that their sample is directly from his nostrils.

Probably not. That's what they say.

And they've also got a bit of his original penicillin in there as well.

That's really cool. Yeah, and this is just in North London, this particular one, the National Collection of Type Cultures.
The thing about Fleming is really interesting.

I was just reading about him because his stuff is in this place, in this library. When he got his penicillin, the first clinical trial that he did, he tried to treat someone who had influenza.

And obviously, influenza is a virus, so penicillin won't help.

but he he gave his penicillin to someone else to do some tests as well a guy called Arthur Dixon Wright

this is in 1928 and I think this is probably the first ever clinical trial for penicillin that this guy did he said that it seemed to work satisfactorily

and Arthur Dixon Wright is the father of Clarissa Dixon Wright who is one of the two fat ladies

TV presenters

isn't that amazing

and her dad did the first clinical trial in penicillin. That's amazing.

I do love that this culture library, the London one in the Economist Piece, it opened in 1920, which is actually like eight years before Fleming identified penicillin.

Like it's opening at this really weird time in the history of bacteriology where it's like only really a few decades after

like germ theory became like widely known and accepted. It's like a remarkably prescient thing to do at this time when like microbiology is still a very young science.
Yeah, that is amazing.

Yeah, and they didn't, well, obviously they couldn't do DNA sequencing

on

these samples for, what, six decades, seven decades? I guess. Yeah.
So I find that extraordinary that they want to know that it was going to become useful in that way.

Yeah, I guess they were just collecting it, right? Just for, yeah. How did they keep them alive, Andy? Do you know? Did they have to go and feed them every day and stuff?

Well, so some of the samples are dehydrated. I know that much.

But also, when they sent them out to scientists, so these days they cost a few hundred quid per sample, but in the old days they were delivered to scientists free and alive, these bacteria.

They were funded in a different way. And they sent the bacteria, I love this, they sent the living bacteria through the post on a medium that was made from Dorset egg yolks and sealed with wax.

So the bacteria had something to feed on during the journey. They wouldn't go hungry.
Through the mail. I guess I think it was just through the mail.
Oh, God.

Just sealed up. That's incredible.
I do wonder if they get submissions in the other directions, like especially now that articles like this come out. Do you think that they'll just get envelopes?

Like, I get random mail from people all the time. And I'm not like...

Do they have a protocol where if they get an envelope in someone's handwriting, they immediately incinerate it?

I wonder if Anna's sick at the moment, whether we can get her to shove something up her nose and send some celebrity bacteria over. Great idea.
Yeah.

I think they did have sort of very random contributors to the library.

I was looking on Twitter between staff members who were talking about it when one guy wrote, What was the name of John the Stuffer?

The guy who picked up Roadkill on his motorbike commute and freeze-dried it in the NCTC, the national

collection of type cultures.

You never knew what you were going to find in the cold room. And so basically there was this guy, John the Stuffer, who just used to come and bring random Roadkill.

He must have then taken it and stuffed it, right? Otherwise, why the name? Yeah, exactly.

Then then they don't know his name

the conversation ends haven't got to the bottom of who john the stuffer was or what he did um ed what's the weird post that you get are the are there any super uh strange examples of things that you've been sent as part of your career oh no

that's a good question i don't think i've ever been sent anything in the post but like Like I've just published this book and what happens when you publish a book is a million people email you to say, I also have written a book about something completely related.

Or like, you you know, that's most of it. But then there's also like, I wrote a song that I think you might enjoy.

Yeah, there's a lot of people who are like, you put this thing out in the world. I also do a thing.
Let me share it with you. Right.
That's nice. That's nice.
That's too late. Yeah.

Because you can't get in the book. That's always annoying, right? Right.

This happened recently. We got posted a penis good, Ed, because we've discussed the

podcast about five years ago, though. That's the thing.
And it's just come through from, I think, Vanuatu or somewhere. New Guinea, maybe? Was it?

We've sent it on to the bacteria library anyway, haven't we, for a scraping? Yeah, yeah. Although I am now known as Andy the Stuffer in the audience.

I'm not looking forward to the jar of tongues we're about to be sent when this goes.

Like to the question of how they store it, I'm pretty sure they've got to freeze it, right?

Like they, the, because the idea is you've got historical records of what these microbes were like at whatever decade they were collected, and you can compare that to how they are now.

Like if you keep them alive, they're just going to continue evolving and changing over that time. But like

the thing that always frustrates me a little bit with

articles about these collections is I really want to know what they're actually like physically like. So, you know, is it just a, is the collection just like a freezer somewhere?

What I really hope for is that they have actually got like a small doll's house

with like small frozen microwave slides inside it. So it actually looks like a proper library, but like on a mini scale.
Yeah. That would be amazing.

I think I read that it was a filing cabinet, which is quite now an old-fashioned thing to have. I can't remember that.
I didn't know that.

I saw a photo of that as well, from but not from the London one, from a different one, where it looked like a filing cabinet. And then these really cool fridges that they had as well.

They've also got these bit the National Collection of Type Cultures. They've got the hardest Christmas quiz I have ever seen.
Do you want to hear a sample for that?

Okay, this is from their most recent Christmas quiz. And yeah, points for the winner.
Okay.

What is the EC ACC number for the standard cell line used for producing virus stocks of SARS-CoV-2? Is it A, 85020209?

B 85020207. Or C 85020206?

C.

B.

James? Well, I'm going to have to go for A, aren't I? If the others have gone for B and C.

Well, Dan, by getting in there quickly with C, that is the correct.

You know, we all knew the answer, but Dan said it so quickly. We had to go for the other one.
Exactly. It's unfair.
I had a bit of a cheat.

I was the quiz master that year, so I did write that question.

That's amazing. At least there's multiple choice.
Yeah. I know.
A lot of the questions in the quiz are not multiple choice, and they're that hard. It's so funny.

Just on bacteria, generally, outside of the libraries and in the world, I read this amazing quote about humans and the amount of bacteria that we have on us.

So the quote goes, are we humans or just bacteria in a human-shaped sack?

Is that a quiz question?

Yes, yes. We are humans.
Okay, are we humans or are we dancers?

Okay, so quiz question then.

Who wrote this phrase? Are we humans or just bacteria in a human-shaped sack? Okay, someone 20th century, right? Yeah.

It's someone you've heard of.

How many humans are? Einstein. Ed, you can say that.
Ed Young?

Is it Ed Young? It's not a big.

Surely it's not. It's Ed Young.
Oh, my God.

How embarrassing. I'm sitting here going, I don't know.
It sounds so familiar.

It's just so profound. It must have been

one of the greats. One of the greats.
I hope it was you. If it wasn't, then it's me, I guess.
I said it.

I'll take that.

It could be someone else. Yeah.
Sorry, Einstein, if I've misattributed that. But it's incredible how much bacteria is on us.

And to the point that there's more bacteria on us basically than there is our own living cells, I believe.

Do you mean normal surface? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think you wrote that as well, Ed.
I'm just going to throw it to you for each.

There's a really common stat that it's like 10 bacterial cells to one human cell. And I think that's actually wrong.
Like

that's one of those misconceptions, like hummingbirds drinking through a straw tongue that just got passed around. But it is comparable.
I think the ratio is like 1.3 to 1 or something like that.

That was the last I saw. So it's not that we're massively outnumbered, but it is like, you know, I'm basically half bacteria right now.

When I was reading about the culture collections, you know, I was thinking that basically any kind of collection is de facto a bacteria collection.

It's just that this one happens to be very specifically a bacteria collection.

Because everything that we have is like loaded with bacteria all over it.

So wait, are you saying that basically everything is like every library, every museum is basically a collection of bacteria, but with some other

stuff around the edges?

That's really interesting. It's amazing.
You know, those fungi that kind of make cicadas do weird things?

Yeah. How much are they controlling us bacteria? Like, because your gut bacteria can change your mood and stuff, right?

Well, James, do you ever get the compulsion to eat raw Dorset egg yolks

of yourself in wax? Because that's a sign. Yeah, there's been a lot of research about this, like the so-called gut-mind axis.

The bacteria inside us are also producing a ton of chemicals that can affect our moods and our behaviors.

Like the, you know, bacteria in our guts produce a ton of serotonin, dopamine, like other chemicals that we think of as brain signaling chemicals.

And there's a lot of really interesting work on changing the gut bacteria of rodents and seeing if they behave differently.

I don't know if I've seen anything that's massively compelling on the idea that like, you know, whether there's some kind of manipulation going on

or whether or whether it's just that's just a byproduct of what they're doing.

But I wouldn't be surprised. Like there's so many examples of microbes manipulating the hosts in the animal kingdom like the fungus that makes the cicada butts fall off.

Like it feels totally plausible to me. I'm just not sure that there's actually like a firm example of that yet.
Right.

They just found a really big bacteria, the biggest one in Guadeloupe, in the mangroves in Guadeloupe. Apparently it's about one centimeter long, this bacteria.

The person who found it, I saw the quote that they said, it's the equivalent for humans to encounter another human who is as tall as Mount Everest.

Just amazing. That is how big this is.
It's visible to the naked eye, right? One centimeter.

One centimeter.

It's the size of a tiny dinosaur bird head, almost.

Is it extremely thin, though? Is it like a

bit thin? Is there like filaments?

Yeah. But that's really cool.
It's amazing. Imagine if you could lash them together, like make a rope out of bacteria.
That would be...

Or make trousers out of them.

Yes.

Pretty sexy stuff.

Can I tell you one bacteria study that's going to be going for it? This is a really exciting study. It's the world's longest bacteria study.

It started in 2014 at the University of Edinburgh by a guy called Charles Cockell, who's an astrobiologist. Nice.

And it's now started in 2014, and you've heard me say it's the longest bacteria study

ever. That's because of when, not because of how long it's been going so far, but because of when it's planned to end.
It's intended to go until the year 2514. Wow.

Has this guy got funding all the way through today?

It's basically a funding card. That's what he's doing.

It's to try and find out how long bacteria last to study their lifespans. And

it's actually got almost no funding, the experimental, because it's so basic. The experiment consists of a box, and the box contains lots of smaller boxes, which contain small vials of dried bacteria.

Every 25 years, those are the waypoints along the way, whoever has the box at that point, whichever of his colleagues or future colleagues, will take take a selection of vials to Scotland and those will be opened up and those bacteria will be compared with an identical experiment, which is happening in Edinburgh.

And then whoever has the box at that point, right, has to rewrite the instructions in modern English or whatever the modern version of English is at the time that's done and then close the box for the next 25 years.

Amazing. Because language is going to change so much.
I mean, think of what language was like 500 years ago. That's amazing.

That's the experiment.

So it's also a linguistic experiment as well as a bacterial experiment. Yeah, that's really interesting.

You can compare the evolution of the English language and the bacteria over the same time period. Oh, yeah, that'd be awesome.
What a hero. I just think that's such a cool idea.

That's an awesome idea. I wish someone had thought of that like 20,000 years ago.

It's no use to us, this experiment is it? Yeah. What's the point for us? What do we get out of it?

That's science. No immediate benefit to you.
Screw it.

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

My fact this week is that in 2014, a survey about the praying habits of Americans revealed that 7% admitted that they prayed to God, asking him to help them find a good car park spot,

and 5% admitted to praying for success in something they knew wouldn't please God.

So that's good. That's, I mean, that's useful, right? Like, like I was saying in the last fact, what's the point of praying for world peace or stuff?

You might as well pray for something that's actually going to help you in the short term. Yeah.
Well, I know you're saying, James, that God should be working on that world peace stuff anyway.

Yeah, exactly. And a God that really loved you would help you found your new religion, which doesn't worship him.

Do you know my favorite fact? The favorite thing about the survey that this fact comes from is that it found that 48% of Americans pray every day. 48%, so whoa, they're halfway there.

Whoa, living on a prayer.

I should, just a bit of background behind what this survey was. This was by a group called Lifeway Research, and they're an evangelical research firm, and it was 1,137 Americans.

What's really nice about this is that every single person in this is a religious person, so we're getting a really good idea of their praying habits. It's not atheists who are just jumping in.

But what it means possibly is that the number of people who pray for a pagan spot could be less than 7% over the whole population. Absolutely.
Yeah. That's right.
Yes.

But so, I mean, other things that were in the percentages of people admitting to what they prayed for, 5% praying for someone's relationship to end, 5% saying that they wanted someone to get fired.

4% saying they wanted someone else to fail.

And

these are very low numbers, to be honest.

It could be just like there are a couple of dozen assholes in this survey who just pray for all this stuff, couldn't it? Yeah.

Oh, they're praying for all the sort of the one person's praying for all of this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That'll be weighted in the figures.

They call themselves a Catholic with a K.

I like that. 21% pray to win the lottery, but 20% pray for success at something they put almost no effort in, which means that 1% of Americans think they're putting a lot of work into the lottery.

You're going to go to the shop, you're going to

fill those numbers in. Syndicate stuff, yeah.

And the other thing was about the results. So whether the prayers are answered.
So 25% said that their prayers were answered all the time. Impressive.
21% most of the time. 37% some of the time.

And 3% none of the time. Literally no results from prayer for them.

But 14% said, I don't know whether my prayers are answered or not, which is interesting because it implies that they're praying for things that are quite nebulous and it's unclear to them whether there are results.

Is there world peace now? Don't know. Yeah, food for thought.

If you want to pray for a parking space, then it's a good idea to pray for Saint Francesca Cabrini, who is the unofficial patron saint of parking spaces.

Unofficial. Unofficial.

Against her will.

According to one priest, the reason that she is this unofficial patron saint is that she lived in New York City, so she understands traffic.

But she was the first American citizen to be canonized by the church.

And Reverend Richard Coles says that if you want to pray to Francesca Cabrini, this is a good prayer to do. Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini, please find me a space for my parking machine.

Okay.

So

that's just what you can do. I do like you can go online and find prayers for basically anything in America.

I was looking into one woman's website where she's put up a bunch of prayers for anyone who's selling their house. And so it's not even just the one prayer for the selling of the house.

She gives this big list of multiple prayers. So the titles include prayer to sell our home quickly.

And that's sort of like, oh, Lord, mighty in power, I pray for our home to sell quickly and goes on and on. Prayer for the right buyer.
You have a prayer for smooth sales processes.

There's the prayer for endurance during the sale of our home and prayer for the buyer's financing.

Dan, is there a prayer not to find six gallons of tongue?

It doesn't work.

It just doesn't work.

One of my favorite things is to make completely inappropriate comparisons between two unrelated surveys. So for example, in this prayer one,

5% of Americans admitted to praying for success in something you knew wouldn't please God. And in a different survey, 6% of Americans think that they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight.

So are these the same people? Would it please God to beat a grizzly bear in a fight? Brian Blessed claims that he punched a polar bear in the face. So,

you know, won the battle. Was it on ketamine?

I've got a an interesting prayer thing that I've never heard of before, which is this is when Muslims are praying. It's a thing that they can develop if they pray sort of a bit too hard.

And I don't mean like the prayer itself, it's the physical thing. It's called a prayer callus or the prayer bump.

And it forms on the front of their forehead from when they're bending down into the ground. And if they're pushing too far down, it can slowly develop on their head.

So you can actually see photos online of people who've just got these giant calluses on the front of their foreheads. Dan, is it also like a good thing to have?

Because it shows how devout you are because you've absolutely

yes exactly it's it's like a sign of look how look how dedicated i am to the prayers that are going on well

dan have you heard of a prayer nut no

so this is

a it's not a medical condition it's uh it's just an it's a completely unrelated thing actually but it's a carved nut that you wear around uh your neck or you pop it onto your belt and uh it opens up it's a carved nutshell that's that has been carved on the inside with incredibly detailed scenes of, it's a Christian thing, so it's the crucifixion or Virgin Mary or Moses and the serpent, all sorts.

And these are about 500 years old.

So to put that into context, that's as long as a really long experiment into some bacteria.

I read a survey about which saints people prayed for to fight against COVID infections.

And they did a little survey and said, if you've been praying against COVID, who did you pray to?

And the number one person that people prayed to most was Saint Rita, who is the patron saint of lost causes.

She was always invoked in really difficult situations by Catholics quite a lot. There was another one, Saint Roch of Montpellier, and he was prayed to because he got the plague and then he got better.

And whenever he went anywhere in Europe, the plague would suddenly disappear from wherever he went, went, according to the stories. Wow.
Some people also prayed to St. Corona,

who it was.

Who was Saint Corona? James, can I go back to the first one? Why is there a patron saint of lost causes? As in, if you're praying to the patron saint of lost causes.

Yeah, maybe you're that 3% of people who don't get anything back from their prayers can't see their praying to. I don't understand.
I'm praying every day.

Prayer has been modernised a bit.

There was a brilliant piece in The Guardian earlier this year, and I'm just going going to quote directly from it now, right? So this is the author.

When my 87-year-old mother, Patricia Collinson, was given an Alexa speaker by my sister, she was delighted to find she could ask it to say the Hail Mary.

Every morning for a week, the devout Catholic asked Alexa to recite the prayer.

Unfortunately, what this elderly lady didn't realize was that she had ordered a premium subscription payable through Amazon to a private company called Catholic Prayers, which then charges you, I don't know, a couple of quid a prayer or a tenor a month or whatever.

And because it's a voice, voice-activated thing, it doesn't read out all the terms and conditions and say, You are, by the way, buying these prayers. Wow.
So that's a problem. But then

I would have thought, I'm not that religious anymore. I grew up religious, but I'm not now.
But I would have thought that you're the one who has to say the prayer, right?

You can't just get a machine to do it for you.

Imagine getting to the Pearl of Gates and seeing your Alexa get into heaven ahead of you.

Alexa, open gates. Alexa, open gates.

There's quite a few studies on whether prayer works or not.

And as you can imagine, and there was a recent meta-study that I read that began with prayer has been reported to improve outcomes in human as well as non-human species, to have no effect on outcomes, to worsen outcomes, and to have retrospective healing effects.

So basically, all sorts of studies saying lots of different things. But there's one idea.
I saw one study from 2006, which was quite scientifically rigorous.

And they seemed to find that patients who knew they'd been prayed for had higher rates of post-operative complications.

And the idea being that because the expectations had been increased, they perhaps got more stressed about it and

got more sick.

But also, I saw another paper which said that praying is good because it's a bit like meditation, especially if you're chanting things again and again and again.

And meditation has been shown to kind of reduce heart rate and to, you know, to increase levels of serotonin and stuff like that.

So it could be that when you're praying, it's not good for the person you're praying for, but it's not bad for you. That's such a good idea.
I love praying.

I've been getting into it recently and I'm not religious at all, but it's a nice mental space to think about people where we have no other, there's no other format of that elsewhere where you actively sit down silently and think of people.

So that must be why I've been getting all these amazing parking spots done. Thanks for that.

But is it why I've been suffering lots of complications? Corporations are having it in hand. Really? Dang, can you knock it off? Your heart's in terrible shape.

Tatters.

Andy, I'd found a thing you might like. This is, I mean, it's just, it's a religious prayer thing.

And it's, it's Casio do prayer watches. No.
Yeah. Now, they are, they are for you need to be Muslim for it to be an effective thing.

But what they come with is basically a little dial that shows you where mecca is so it can point to it should you need to yeah should you need to know where it is and also has five alarms on it for the five times of the day that you need for the prayer to go so it just alarms to let you know you look down you see where mecca is you get going yeah that's so good um so i've got something that's clearly tangentially related but this demonstrates my incredible ability to turn literally anything into an animal story um the praying mantis has a single ear in the middle of its chest.

It has like a cyclopean unpaired ear.

So does that mean that it can't, you know how you have two eyes, so you can tell depth perception? Yeah. Does that mean that it doesn't have any hearing depth perception?

Yeah, so our two ears allow us to localize where sounds coming from. And the mantis doesn't really need to do that.
So all it's listening out for is the

echolocation sounds of bats.

And when it hears that, it just drops. Like it's flying along, and it hears a bat, and it just drops out of the sky.

So, it doesn't need to know where the bat's coming from, all it needs to do is go, oh,

um, and like duck out of the way. That's amazing.
Is this the only animal with one ear? Uh, I

somewhere, I don't know. I think I'm pretty sure I've not heard of any other animals with one ear.
Okay,

Picasso, Van Goff, Van Goff, Van Goff,

he also is just like ducking whenever he hears a bat.

Whenever he saw a sunflower, he would just drop to the ground.

I just want to quickly add, because Ed, you just mentioned the praying mantis with the ear and its hearing ability to escape predators.

There was something in your new book, which I absolutely love, which is tree frog embryos and how basically they're still in their unhatched shell.

And what they can do is they can detect vibrations of an attacking predator.

And what they do is then they release an enzyme from their face and it dissolves the casing and then they can make an escape away from the predator while still in embryo. Yeah, it's amazing.

Like they can do they can make active decisions about when they're going to hatch based on stuff that they sense around the egg.

And they can tell, like, so so the thing that's most likely to threaten them is a snake and they can distinguish between the kinds of vibrations made by a snake gnawing on one of their siblings and like just wind or or even like an earthquake.

So it's not like any kind of shaking will make them go and like burst out of the egg. It's very specifically the kinds of rhythms that a chewing predator makes.

So how on earth can they know that without having experienced it? Is that knowledge?

It's got to be instinct, I think. Like it's, you know, it's got to be some like pre-programmed thing.
But yeah,

it's wild.

It's really wild that they can do that without any kind of experience, like without literally having been born yet nature

dan will be returning to bbc2 next week at 10 p.m

okay that's it that's 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 shreiberland andy at andrew hunter and james at james harken and ed at edion209 That's right.

And also, just a reminder: Ed's new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, is out now. It's absolutely awesome.

It's packed basically just paragraph by paragraph with more facts than we could ever fit into 400 episodes of this show. It's just absolutely awesome.

It's a New York Times best-selling book right this minute. Congratulations, Ed, on that.
That's absolutely awesome.

And if anyone wants to chat to the group of No Such Thing generally, go to at no such thing on our Twitter account or go to no such thingasoffish.com. Check out all of our previous episodes up there.

Uh, but you know, why not just get Ed's book instead? It's much better. Do you want to if you want to send Ed a song about something that you've done?

Yes, if you've got a spare tongue in a jar that you feel

home, yeah, Dorset egg yolks envelopes that you need to get rid of.

Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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My place in tech changes every day, but I don't fear the future because I'm with the leader, Plural Sight.

Their online learning platform has the hands-on, expert-led courses I need to master new tech skills and create bigger impacts.

So I can learn quickly and stay ahead. With Pluralsight, I don't fear what's next.
I embrace it. Tap in at pluralsight.com and see for yourself.