259: No Such Thing As Flyagra

No such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Glasgow.

My name is Jan Schroeder, and I am sitting here with Anna Chacinski, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you James.

Okay my fact this week is that there is only one person in the world who can predict the future using asparagus.

For 2019 she has predicted extreme temperatures, a recession in the US and an all-time high in asparagus sales.

So

when you say she can predict the future,

what's her success rate?

Well, it was really hot last week.

So 100%.

So far.

Yeah, actually, she claims to have a very high percentage, but these people always do, don't they?

Okay, let's see some of the other things that she says.

She says this year, fears of Brexit will be unfounded.

Yeah, maybe.

The trade war between China and the US will end, but there'll be a recession.

England's women's football team will win the World Cup, fingers crossed.

Pick your audience, James.

Pick your audience.

You know when you forget which country you're in.

James looked genuinely shocked when he saw their boat.

What happened?

Why do they hate women so much?

Yeah, not cool, Lasco, not cool.

The hierarchy is nationalism, then feminism.

Oh, God.

Anyway, yeah, so there's this lady, and she does that stuff, and it's obviously bullshit.

Well, hang on.

She has a Twitter account.

I went on it today, and one of the other predictions that she had is that she said at the Oscars this year, A Star is Born would have success, but British actors will also be in the mix.

So she was correct about olivia cole and a star is born i think won uh the best song yeah and she wrote a tweet just going got it right she's she's very proud she said another great hit success rate for the old

what she call herself she calls herself mystic veg

yes she's pretty strong yeah she's an asparomancer it's called

You can just put mansa on the end of any word and it means you tell the future by it, can't you?

And it's great.

And they've been doing this.

It was in the medieval period, I think, when they looked back over classical texts and they went, God, those old ancient Romans and Greeks told the future in weird ass ways.

Let's just call them all Mansa somethings.

And so there are so many Mansis.

There's Tyromancy, which is one of my favorites, which is telling the future by how cheese coagulates.

And yeah, I read one version of this Tyromancy, which is you get a cheese, you wait for it to go moldy, and then you look at the mold, and that tells you the name of your husband.

Oh,

I thought it was, yeah, I read something similar to that, which is it's the names of various suitors that you write onto the cheese and the bit that the mold grows over is who you're going to.

But if it grows over all the names, you're in for a lot of

weddings.

How does it tell you the name of your...

Did you say the name of your husband?

Yeah.

Unusually for this podcast, what Dana said sounded a lot more sensible than what I said.

Do you remember it's exactly like when we used to peel apples?

Did everyone used to do this and you peeled an apple and then you threw the peel in the air?

And what it is probably just what girls did in the pre-feminist world.

And the shape that apple peel landed in was the first letter of your future husband's name.

So everyone thought their future husband's name would start with S.

This is quite a cool thing.

There is a thing called alluromancy, which is not about being alluring.

It's about baking messages into little balls of dough.

And this happened in ancient Greece.

And the balls would be mixed up, and they'd have different messages on them.

And then you would pick one.

And that that is basically a fortune cookie.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

The ancient Greeks have fortune cookies, is what I'm trying to say.

That's really cool.

There's also gyromancy,

which is the idea of you just start walking in a circle and keep walking, and around the perimeter of where you're walking, they leave letters of the alphabet, so you start spelling something out.

And the idea is you keep going until you start stumbling into these letters,

and then you keep going until it starts spelling something out, and then you keep going until finally you spell out a consistent sentence.

And if you don't do that, you just keep going until either you die or go mad.

And that's that's what they used to do back in the day.

Back in the day.

Yeah,

yeah.

Back in the day.

All my notes just say it's not BC with an actual day, it's just back in the day.

I like this kind of telling the future from Iran.

It's called Falgoosh, and it's the act of standing in a dark corner and listening to the conversations of passers-by.

Oh, I didn't know there was a word for what I did.

That's great.

In 2008, there was some research that found that you can make someone like certain foods if you convince them that they loved it the first time they tried it.

So you say to them, when you were a kid, you had this and you absolutely loved it, and you can make it so that they used to hate something and now they really like it.

And that work was funded by the asparagus industry.

There is, I didn't know this about asparagus.

Asparagus can grow a centimeter an hour.

No.

What?

It can.

You could watch that.

If I had a day off work and I grew asparagus, I'd probably try and see it move.

Right.

Is that how they do it?

Do they just go boom in the space of 24 hours?

Do we get them really quick?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It grows fast.

It literally, you just pour water on it and it goes boom in 24 hours.

It doesn't make that noise.

If you spit it up, it probably does make that noise.

That's incredible.

I know.

What grows that fast?

Asparagus!

And bamboo, as we know.

Bamboo is what I'm saying.

Do you know that all the asparagus that we eat is male?

No.

Yeah, good news for this woman-hating audience.

Sales of asparagus have rocketed in Glasgow.

I don't know if that's a win.

I think that's a win for women, isn't it?

I don't think you want to be.

So basically, the male storks are a lot bigger and juicier than the female stalks, but that's because.

you're writing your own jokes now guys.

Well

the reason is because the females, they create the berries and so they need to use all their energy to do something actually useful.

Whereas all the men have to do is just grow and be juicy.

Right.

Nice.

We're going to have to move on shortly to our next fact.

I've just got one or two things.

A, if anyone, anyone, by the way, is thinking of going to the Asparagus Festival, there is exciting stuff that goes on, and there's stuff that goes on afterwards.

They had a 10-year anniversary not too long ago, and you can do tours on buses.

It's the Aspara Bus Tours.

And yeah, those are really fun.

But actually, you've got to make sure to pick the right year because a few years ago, they had to cancel the festival due to lack of asparagus.

There wasn't enough.

There was a flooding, and it kind of ruined the crops that were growing.

Yeah.

But

it turns out that asparagus played a very important role in the formation of Darwin coming up with the theory of evolution.

Yeah,

it was part of the evolution of the theory of evolution.

What it was is Darwin kept wondering why things can be seen, you know, certain type of lettuces can be seen in places halfway across the world.

How do they get there?

How do they travel?

What goes on?

So he had a butler called Mr.

Parslow, and Mr.

Parslow and him filled a tub full of salt water to replicate the conditions of the ocean.

And they put a bunch of seeds in to see if the seeds would would float and how long they would float for.

So they had cabbage seeds, radish seeds and so on.

They lasted for 42 days, which was really impressive.

However, asparagus seeds lasted for 85 days.

They would float for that long.

But the important bit was they then took the seed out of the seawater tub and buried it and it grew into asparagus like literally

straight away.

And so that meant that it could travel, that they could still germinate once they were in the soil.

So then they put the seeds inside a bird and then they killed the bird and they threw it in the bathtub.

What is the story?

This is the worst bedtime story.

Dun's child hasn't slept for three weeks because she's doing this story.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star or shoot the bird with the asparagus seed in its tummy.

So then what they worked out was the bird, still you could take the seed out of the bird all those days later and it would still grow.

So the asparagus seed helped Darwin to realize it could travel via bird or via ocean.

Do you know, can I just make sure that you know that has nothing to do with evolution?

What you just said.

That is not.

Do you think evolution is the proof that stuff can travel long distances?

That sounds like just an idle side project, the whole drowning a bird in the bath sea for Darwin.

You let me tell that whole story?

He still did it.

Just another famous person who looked into asparagus was Benjamin Franklin, And he formed a theory based on the fact that it makes your wee smell.

Although, does everyone have the...

Because I don't think that asparagus makes your wee smell.

You are wrong, because it does.

Well, no, some people can detect it and some people can't.

It's not my fault.

Not many people can't detect it.

I think if you can't detect it.

I'm special.

You have a thing.

Yeah.

You've got a thing called specific anosmia.

So that's why you can't smell a particular smell.

The asparagus wee smell.

Yeah.

But the asparagus does, other people claim it makes your wee smell.

And Ben Franklin wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels using asparagus as an example of how what we eat can impact the smell of what we excrete.

So he was saying, asparagus makes your wee smell kind of gross.

Well,

how about we work on this?

Because farts smell gross.

And if we know that stuff we eat can make what comes out and change the smell of stuff that comes out of us, why don't we work out what we need to eat in order for farts to smell nice?

And it was actually, a he thought it was a really big idea because he was saying it causes disease because well-bred people hold their farts in solely because they're going to stink the place out if they let one rip.

And so he said, if we could get a pill or something we could feed people to make your farts smell like perfume, then people would actually want to do it.

And that's evolution.

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

My fact this week is that the composer Haydn's wife cared so little about her husband's work that she used to tear up his scores to use as hair curlers and pastry underlays.

That's crazy.

And was this sort of before

he sold them to anyone or before he or was it just thinking about it?

It was just throughout his life.

So actually he was very, he wrote a lot and she just found them lying around and and she knew nothing about music and did not care.

Haydn once said, it makes not a blind bit of difference to my wife whether I'm a musician or a cobbler.

And so she'd find them and she'd be like, oh, that looks handy.

I'll put a pie on that.

Yeah, well, I mean, he did, he wrote 108 symphonies, 20 operas, 47 sonatas, 68 quartets, 178 trios, 14 masses, and six oratorios.

So, I mean, that's a lot of paper.

Yeah, isn't it?

It's recycling.

It's recycling, yeah.

She didn't like him very much either.

Oh, that is true.

I think she was doing it deliberately.

They had a very sad marriage.

So he basically fell in love when he was very young, Joseph Hayden, with a woman called Teresa.

And she couldn't marry him.

And so her father said, do you want to marry her older sister, who's this really unpleasant woman called Maria Anna?

And he felt bad.

So he was like, okay, cool.

I'll marry her and said, that sounds great.

And apparently, she had a very domineering and unfriendly character.

She used to spend all of his money very freely, so he went to great lengths to hide his income so she wouldn't know about it.

and when she died he was completely indifferent apparently well they lived apart didn't they for towards the end they did yeah

for 40 years well the last 40 years

he was housed uh he had a job where he was housed at uh this prince's castle where she did live with him quite a lot of the time but then yeah towards the end he was in london and she sent him a letter saying she used to send him letters saying things like by the way if you die tomorrow there's no money to bury you uh really nice love letters like that when he was away and she wrote him a letter in London saying I really need money because you're gonna die soon and I need a house to live in as a widow so can you please buy me one and he did I read with the letters that it got to the point where they were communicating just by sending each other's letters but Haydn never opened the letters that she sent and he was convinced that she didn't either.

So they were just sending each other these things that remained completely unopened.

No idea what was being said.

Yeah, no communication.

Wow.

yeah pretty crazy Haydn was very influential he's not very well known these days I think unless you're a classical music fan he's less well known than like Beethoven and Mozart yeah exactly yeah but he was he was great friends with Mozart

in his life yeah

and I really like I've just been reading a tiny bit about Haydn's music so he wrote his his string quartet in E-flat is known as the joke because he put basically he practical jokes in this string quartet because it's got lots of false endings to catch the audience out.

That's quite cool, isn't it?

Yeah.

And he wrote something called the Surprise Symphony, which is really cool.

We used to just turn up at people's houses and play that, didn't he?

It's really, really quiet apart from one very loud bit.

And then it never gets referred to again.

It doesn't get repeated as a motif.

It's just really, really quiet all the way through.

It goes, whoa!

I like there's also one he wrote, which is called The Palindrome, which starts one way and then it just goes back on itself as a musical piece.

Yeah.

But the first one, one, the joke is amazing because it was, he would literally, the piece would finish and the audience would go, and then he'd play again and the whole thing just has the audience go

to applause.

He was like Les Dawson of his day, wasn't he?

He was actually, he was a prankster.

I can't remember any of Les Dawson.

I've got to say, that is not exactly a 2019 reference.

It's a great reference.

No, it's a problem.

He got kicked out of his choir when he was very young because he chopped off one of the choir boys' pigtails.

Wow.

Just as a prank, just as a fun prank.

He was very good-natured, apparently.

So he was known as Papa Haydn.

And yeah, as you say, he was best friends with Mozart.

There's a really moving moment when he was called to move to London when he was about 60 by that point.

And he suddenly got this invitation.

And Mozart walked into the coaching station to say goodbye.

And then they had a moment where Mozart said, I suppose this is the last time we'll see each other in this life.

Because Haydn's, you know, in those days, that was getting on a bit.

And Haydn said, Oh, don't you worry about me, I'm feeling pretty strong.

But then, actually, Mozart obviously died at the age of 35 that year.

So he was.

I thought you were going to say that Haydn got into the coach and drove off, and then he came back a minute later with a surprise!

It wasn't the last time we'll see each other.

I'm here.

Have you heard?

Did you guys read about his boss, Haydn's boss?

No.

He spent 30 years working for a royal house because that was how you made your living as a musician.

You didn't have really big mass concerts, you had a private patron.

So his boss was Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy, or Esterhazy.

Esterhauser.

Esterhauser, sorry.

And he had total control, basically, of Haydn's life.

So he could dictate how he dressed.

Haydn wasn't automatically allowed to send anybody new works.

He had to submit them all to His Highness.

And he was partly paid in semolina, beef, cabbages, and lard during his work.

He wasn't allowed to eat and drink with the other musicians in case they stopped respecting him because he was the kind of he was the boss and every morning and afternoon he had to go to the prince and say would you like to hear a concert or an opera tonight?

And if the prince said yes, he had to go and prepare one.

Wow.

Yeah, he did insist on being paid partly in wine as well, which is along with other nasty stuff.

But he did he lived in this place and Prince Esterhauser had this weird castle that he built, like a fantasy castle, which sounds awful in this big swamp where they had to spend about 10 months of the year.

And he built this huge opera house where Haydn had to to compose these operas that burned down.

And he immediately built a new one.

And Haydn was still very popular there, and he had this team of musicians around him, and they all did indeed respect him a lot to the extent that the musicians used to go to the tavern, which also the prince built on the land.

And they used to get really pissed, and they weren't allowed their wives there, so everyone was getting a bit antsy at month number nine.

And there was a moment where the cellist punched an oboeist in the face when they got a bit pissed.

And he had a pair of paper.

And the trombonist went,

it's actually a really serious incident

so

it's really unappreciated that trombone moment he punched him in the face and he lost an eye because he was wearing this ring that not missed

he was missing an eye and he was a bit pissed off but Haydn stepped in and managed to make them settle it amicably so this guy has removed the eye of his co-worker and they worked together happily for another seven years.

And then he took the other eye, and that was too far.

That was not funny.

We should say, should we say what happened to Haydn after he died?

Oh, no, yeah.

I think we should.

It was very bizarre.

So, he died finally, quite old.

And then, as soon as he died, his head was stolen.

And it was stolen by a guy he knew, actually, whose marriage he'd helped to set up.

So, it was kind of a slap in the face.

This guy called Rosenbaum, who was very interested in phrenology, which was the study of skulls and what that meant about your intelligence.

And so, he stole his his head with his mate and it used to be displayed in his mate's house in this little box which had a little glass window and it sat on a cushion.

And imagine going to your friend's house and they said, oh, you should see something really cool.

And then you just got the dead head of your former mate sitting in a display case.

Yeah.

They didn't know about it until his patron, who was a new prince by this time called Nicholas, he decided, you know, the the burial we gave Haydn, it wasn't good enough.

He needs a more dignified burial place.

So they wanted to reinter him somewhere grander, and they dug him up, and they found his head was missing, and it was incredibly upsetting.

So the authorities, you know, prompted by the prince, they searched the home of Rosenbaum, and he gave them a different skull.

I don't know where he got that one from.

He collected skulls.

And then they got wise to it because they looked at the skull they'd be given and he said, this is a young man's skull.

Haydn was very old when he died.

And he said, all right, you got me.

Here's Haydn's skull.

And they gave him another fake skull.

So there are now three skulls in circulation, one of which is Haydn.

Do you know how they hid Haydn's skull?

No.

It's very cool.

So, they had Haydn's skull in the house and they hid it inside the mattress.

And then he, Rosenbaum, made his wife lie on the mattress and pretend to be menstruating.

And everyone searching the house was too afraid to go near her.

And so they didn't buy the skull.

Quick, pretend to be menstruating.

I know that's not what happens.

You're confusing menstruating with being on a ghost train.

I like the way that these guys looking for Haydn are basically playing hide and seek.

Wow.

Okay, we need to move on.

Did we get to the end?

That's all right, we did.

Okay, let's move on.

It's time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that to stop people stealing American road signs with the number 69 on them,

Washington State has replaced many of them with signs that now read 68.9.

That was their big plan.

So, this is a big problem in America.

This is a thing called mile markers.

So, when you're driving, it tells you either how many miles you have to get to somewhere or how many are left, and these keep getting stolen.

And it's not just 69 that gets stolen, there is also the 420.

And yeah,

420 is a

police have been notified of everyone who just

yeah so 420 is a is a drug reference um for the 20th of april it's it's international cannabis day i believe it is so smokers day yeah okay um so those have been replaced as well so those are now four 419.9 right um and this is a this is a big problem in america because they have uh they've had 200 stolen over the last since about two 2012.

they do cost a lot there's a whole Wikipedia page on street sign theft.

So for instance, there's a big list of them.

Richard Bong State's Recreation Area keep having their sign stolen because it has the word bong in there.

Ragged Ass Road in Yellowknife.

They had to keep changing their signs.

Butthole Road in England,

and they had to keep losing that.

They eventually renamed it to Archer's Way.

So this is happening all over the world in hilariously named places.

Do you guys guys know about a place called Burgolts in the US?

Nope.

No.

No, you wouldn't because it's made up.

But this is a place.

This is a pair of men called Mika and Mont who have been trying to redesign America's road signs.

And they finally confirmed that they'd redesigned them recently.

And they've invented a fictional town called Burgoltz, B-R-G-A-U-L-T-S, because it involves some of the hardest letters to sign.

And that's all those vowels, apparently.

They look really blurry.

They fill in a bit when you're far away the g always difficult why does a g look completely different types than it does written and so they have that as their archetype of amazing observational coming it's like peter k was in the room wait till you find out about a it's only g I'm stuck on g okay

so yeah and they they would do it by they'd make signs saying burgots and then they'd lean them against fences and then they'd like walk up a hill or walk 500 meters away and then they'd see how clearly they could see them compared to our normal signposts.

And in this manner, they've convinced American Our to change all of its road sign fonts, and they did that in 2004.

Oh, but there's a lot of controversy about this.

Yeah.

So the original American font on all American roads was called Highway Gothic.

That was the name, which is pretty cool.

Wow.

And then their font is called Clearview.

Yeah.

And there were all these studies saying it was much clearer to read, Clearview.

And you could see it if you were driving at night and you saw a sign that was in Clearview, you could read it 74 feet further away than Highway Gothic.

Wow.

So that gives you a couple more seconds, let's say, of reaction time.

So it will stop you having a crash, perhaps.

And that could actually save lives.

You know, more or fewer people could die on the roads, depending on whether you choose Clearview or Highway Gothic.

But there have now been more studies saying that Highway Gothic is better.

So Clearview has just had its approval removed.

I think

this year it's had its approval put on hold.

The Highway Gothic factions have come out.

Right.

They're leaving it down.

But it's all in caps like Highway Gothic.

It's so weird in America.

They have all their signs in capitals, which is terrible for signage because capitals, you can't distinguish shapes.

It just looks like one big rectangle.

So when you're far away, you can't tell as much.

Whereas on our signs here, then you know, you see the little tails of the G or the Y or the other tailed letters.

You all know what they are.

R, G, Y, P, P.

P is another good one, and Q, of course.

What was that?

J!

Jade!

She's right.

Anyway.

Maybe we should play this.

No, no, I think we're on the brink of something.

No, sorry.

Oh, I found out a fact.

Mice make signposts in their fields and they make them out of leaves and twigs so they don't get lost.

Oh,

do they?

What font are they using?

And is it caps like?

This is wood wood mice.

They move objects, like a leaf or a twig, to mark a site that interests them.

And they regularly, when they're exploring around it, they rear up on their hind legs and they look to make sure they can still see their little street sign before they explore.

One place which has problems with losing signs is Fin Glass in North Dublin, and that is because that is where Bonno was born.

And so, a lot of U2 fans go and steal the road sign from his road.

So, literally, the streets have no name.

Is that it doesn't sound it?

Sounds like I made it all up just for the punchline design, but no, it really is true.

It really is true.

They were first designed for cyclists, road signs in the 19th century, to warning road signs.

But I want to test you guys because there was a study done recently that showed that most people can't identify most road signs now.

And even actually, this is going to be hard because you've probably read it, but there are three basic shapes.

So the circle, where it's like a red circle with a white band in the middle of it, that means shortcut.

There are three types of road signs.

There's a circle, the triangle, and the rectangle.

Oh, yeah.

Does anyone know the difference between what those things mean?

Is it the circle?

Was it circle, triangle, and triangle is warning?

Yeah.

And circle is.

Circle is banned.

Do this now.

Whatever it says, you must bloody well do it.

And then the square is, there's a nice castle over there.

Yeah.

Okay, that's sort of one is very wrong, so I hope you're joking.

The circle is absolutely don't do it.

Please don't.

But people don't understand that.

So anything in a red circle means this is banned, but I think because it doesn't have a cross through it, no one realises.

So there was this survey done that said, what does a sign mean?

That has a red circle and it shows, it's known as the low-flying motorbike sign, I think, because it shows a car and then on top of it, a little motorbike.

So that means no vehicles.

It means no vehicles.

Most people who did this survey said, well, it means only cars and motorbikes are allowed.

People have no idea.

That's the problem in Italy.

There's a town that has started, they have a big problem in this one town where there's a lot of prostitutes on the side of the road and they're trying to not encourage people to stop and do business with them.

So they created signs, again, with a pictogram on it, of what was a prostitute, and it says underneath it, prostitutes.

But most people didn't know if it was sort of saying, oh no.

So

they actually increased traffic because most people were slowing down.

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

Andy.

My fact is that flies like to date the same sort of flies as their fly friends.

I don't even know where to start with that.

Do you mean fly friends are really cool friends?

No, I just mean flies who are flies.

All right, yeah.

So, this is really cool.

It's all about how flies choose which other flies to court.

So scientists, they painted a load of male fruit flies different colours.

Okay, they painted some pink and some green.

And they set up a date between one female and two males, one pink and one green.

And then behind some glass, they had another female fly watching this date.

This sounds like a Channel 5 show, doesn't it?

And so the female inside chose one of the males.

She chose pink or green to mate with.

And then the observer female flies who've been been watching this whole rigmarole were given the chance a day later, which is quite a long time in fly years.

That's like, you know, three years later, they get the chance for a date of their own.

And when they were given the chance, they almost always picked the color that the female the day before had chosen.

So they remembered this.

And, you know, even when they were presented with two male flies that were apparently hideous.

Yeah, I mean, because they probably in real life don't see many flies painted pink and green, do they?

Yeah, yeah.

So

that's very strange.

And so what is the, you know, what does this tell us about flies?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Okay, well I thought you did and that's why I asked you.

So the idea is that because the flies are passing on behavioral traits between each other, they might have some kind of culture.

As in, a culture is where someone does something and then they kind of talk everyone else into doing it and then you become kind of, everyone goes to Glastonbury.

Right.

They then got female observers, again, behind the glass, to watch a fly orgy between lots of males and lots of females.

These flies really locked out, didn't they?

They must have been bragging to their friends.

I've been involved in this study.

You have no idea.

I never need to pay for porn again.

Just interesting thing about fly sex, because if they're having this big orgy, the problem is, is flies have sex while they're flying.

So they, flies, certain flies, have special kind of genitalia, gonads, that just have have to just move around to wherever the female fly is flying.

Yeah, so if she banks left and he's like, well, I got to go, his gonads can go and just can go from anywhere from 90 to 360 degrees just around to just be making sure that the sex continues while all this very, you know, flying stuff is going on.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

Because it's hard to seduce the woman as a male fruit fly, this is, that you're talking about.

But they sing songs, so the males chase the females, and then they will extend just one wing, so they'll put like put one arm out, and they vibrate it, and it produces a song.

And the song has two modes, so there's just like two types of sound they can make, and you have to amplify it by more than a million times to hear it with human ears.

But we've done that, obviously, because scientists are bored.

So, they've got the

sign and the pulse, and the sign sounds like the whine of an approaching mosquito, apparently, and then the pulse sounds like a cat's purr.

So, if you're being seduced by a fly, it's a combination of a buzzing mosquito and a purring cat.

But then,

once the female has accepted the male, the male licks the female for two minutes, and then they mate for about 20 minutes.

And some scientists, who I think were really bored, they scrambled a fruit fly's courtship neurons in its brain so that they tried to copulate, lick, and play the love song all at the same time.

And what would normally take a four-minute, quite delicate mating process was reduced to 10 seconds.

we've all been there

who's your green friend

they have the only known aphrodisiac uh fruit flies oh like a proven one you mean a proven one

And now they've got their PR guy, which is good.

He's going to need a job after tonight.

They have the only aphrodisiac that scientists have ever proved exists

that actually makes you want to have sex, only works on fruit flies.

And it's the scent of rotting fruit.

So if they smell rotting fruit, that actually turns on their bits of their brain pathways that are the courtship initiating.

So they scent rotting fruit and they immediately want to have a shag.

And that is useful, I think, because rotting fruit is a good place to lay eggs as a woman.

So if a man fancies you when you're near rotting fruit, that's handy because then you can put your babies in fruit.

Speaking of the chemicals, if you have a fly that falls into your glass of wine,

one single fly is enough to ruin the whole glass of wine, okay, but only if it's a female fly.

And it's because it's the pheromones in the fly that cause the wine to taste a bit skunky.

If the males go in, actually, it will still taste the same.

And they tested this by getting the pheromones out of the flies and then putting it into some wine and getting people to taste it.

And they found that just 10, just one nanogram of a pheromone was enough for a small glass of wine for them to be able to taste the difference.

One nanogram, which is like, I don't know, I think it's like a thousandth of a millionth of a gram or something like that.

In a small glass of wine?

In a small glass of wine.

Sorry, hang on.

Anna, a small glass of wine is something that

is what you've got left.

Mine's become small.

It always goes through the small phase.

So I worked out what the equivalent of this is, and

it's the equivalent of putting one pedal bin's worth of Ribena into Loch Ness

and the whole lake tasting of blackcurrant.

Wow.

That's great.

It's quite people must be wine snobs who are tasting that one tiny nanogram of female pheromone.

I think it adds to the flavour of anything.

I stirred flies into this before I came on.

There was a study on flies' response to carbonated beverages and their attraction to carbon dioxide.

And the Sky Report about it was headlined, Why Do Flies Suddenly Appear Every Time You Open a Beer?

We're going to have to wrap up soon.

So, before we do, you guys got

I can tell you about dung beetle sex.

Yeah, please.

That is an unbelievably niche porn subject, isn't it?

What do they do?

You need to delete your history immediately, whoever that was.

No, what's interesting about them is that they get STDs, but actually it's a good thing for them.

If you're a dung beetle and you get an STD STD, this is really good for you because they get this kind of nematode worm and it helps to get the right kind of bacteria.

It eats all the bad bacteria in their body, which means the good bacteria can come in and it means that then they can eat their food properly.

It's like if you have sex with someone and feed them yakult at at the same time.

Wow.

Another niche kind of form of reference

for that bit of advice.

So let's wrap it up, I reckon.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

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At James Harkin.

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Yep.

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We have all of our upcoming tour dates for the tour that we're currently on and future tours, all of our previous episodes.

Thank you so much.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you later.

Bye.