142: No Such Thing As Edward Binbag-Hands

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Shaczynski, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the White House's oval office is a giant weighing scale.

What do they use it for normally?

Weighing the president.

No.

It's to see how heavy he is.

No, it's not.

That's why you weigh thing.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Yeah, it's to see that he's there full stop.

So the Secret Service needs to monitor where the President is at all times.

However, they're not allowed into the Oval Office.

He doesn't want them in there, so they have to stand outside.

Now, when the door is open, they can see where he is.

But when the door is shut, they can't see where the president is.

So if you look at pictures of the Oval Office, there is a giant oval carpet that literally spans the entire office room except for a few inches to the wall.

And underneath it are weighing pads that are connected to a line that goes outside, so the Secret Service can see where he is in the Oval Office purely by where he's standing.

I think I would get a load of objects that weighed exactly the same as me and just keep moving them around the office just to wind up the Secret Service.

Like Indiana Jones at the beginning of the first film.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's kind of like if you've seen Harry Potter, the Marauders map, where they just follow the footsteps on the map.

That's what the Secret Service have to have.

Except it's not a Marauder's map because the things aren't labeled as the president.

It's just someone who weighs roughly the same amount as the president, right?

So it's definitely Obama's in the Oval Office or someone who is also human-sized is is in the Oval Office.

Yeah, or two people in the Oval Office.

It's just a way of making sure that no one kidnaps him through a window, maybe.

Are they allowed into the Oval Office?

I don't know, actually.

This is a fact which I haven't seen in many places.

It's from Brad Meltzer, who is a best-selling novelist, but also works at the White House and gives tours.

And he did a Huffington Post piece where he said, here is Secret Service Secrets.

And that was the top one.

Because he invites lots of randomers into the Oval Office.

I'd be a bit insulted as his Secret Service if I wasn't allowed in.

Well, I think it's more, they're probably allowed in at some point.

I don't think it's like a total ban on secret service people.

I think when he's working on a day-to-day basis, he doesn't want secret service people.

Let's say they're doing something really important, which is quite classified, and only the people who need to know are in there.

So the other guys just stood outside, like playing cards or something.

Do you think if he puts on a bit of weight, they start giving him sly looks?

I reckon.

Are you sure about that biscuit, Mr.

President?

This article by Brad Meltzer also mentions that anytime we hear about the White House going under renovations of an old room, it's actually that the Secret Service are conducting an investigation and it's the only way of giving an excuse to allow for the first family to be out of the White House while renovations are going on, but it actually means they're conducting an investigation.

Is that right?

It can't always be that way.

No, no, but I think there's been a few cases.

It's a sort of like inside knowledge thing that if there's an investigation by the Secret Service, they will say currently under renovation.

What are they investigating?

I mean, who needs the president to be away?

It's hard to research them because they're quite open about some things, but then other things they're surprisingly secret about.

It is surprising, isn't it?

Bizarre that they would want to keep anything from us.

It's controversial.

Are they telling the truth?

Is the author telling the truth?

We know a bit too much about the Secret Service, it seems, recently.

I thought it would just be called the service.

Exactly.

Yeah, the open service.

Do you know we have a lot of presidents and leaders who like exercise and like jogging?

Obviously, when they go out on a jog, they have to be accompanied by the...

by their little Secret Service cabal who have to jog with them.

And so, for instance, there was an article, I think this was in The Atlantic, by someone who'd been in the Secret Service under Clinton, and he said it was a complete nightmare because Clinton loved running.

And they even built him his own little running track inside the White House grounds, but he didn't like it.

He liked to be out there with the people.

So, whenever Clinton went for a run, a bunch of them all had to go for a run as well.

But not just for a run, they had to go for a run carrying all their guns and weapons and be super alert and always be ready to attack someone if they attack the president.

And so, it sounds like absolute hell.

Imagine if Mole Farah became president.

Oh my gosh, who would you?

That's true.

There are five people disqualified from being president, and they're the five fastest people in the world, because surely you need five people faster than the president.

But Mo's not in the five fastest people in the world, is he?

For running distances, which is what Boeing was doing.

I mean, it's hardly...

You say Boll becomes president, and you can only run 100 meters and 200 meters.

What trouble could he get in?

But he won't be able to get away, because at least the Secret Service can bus in more people to start running after the first 5,000 meters that President Farah has been running.

So when President Farah is running, what they'll do is they'll all be running in like a relay

and they pass the gun.

Yeah,

they do have to.

It's quite funny when you look into sort of odd little things that they have to prepare for in the safety of a president like Clinton going for his runs.

So do you remember that famous incident where George Bush swallowed a pretzel and started choking on it?

Apparently that was a thing that they had to try and work out how to avoid from ever happening again.

But did they all like suck the pretzels?

Suck all the pretzels first.

Exactly.

What do you do in that situation?

So the owner.

He just elects a new president eventually.

The only thing that they could come up with was a sort of emergency push button, which I assumed he should have had anyway.

What the pretzel button?

No, it's not exclusively for pretzel.

It's a pretzel shaped.

I hope they made it pretzel shaped.

Some of the presidential secret service things, I read in one book called Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House, don't know if it's true, that Gerald Ford, whenever he farted, would blame the Secret Service who were around him.

God, Jesus, guys, can you not keep a bit of decorum?

That's amazing.

Apparently, that's true.

I guess that's true.

Who was the...

We spoke about this before on the podcast.

There was one president.

I think it was Johnson, who would just, if he was taking a piss, would just urinate on the Secret Service member and say, I can do this.

I'm the president.

I think the story went something like: it was LBJ, wasn't it?

And I think what happened was he went for a piss on the side of the road when they were driving somewhere, and they kind of did like a human wall around him.

And then there's like a gust of wind, and it blew the pee onto one of the guys.

And he said, Excuse me, Mr.

President, you're peeing on me.

And he said, Well, it's my prerogative to do that.

I think that's what the story is, anyway.

Okay.

Makes him slightly less unpleasant than deliberately weeing on his

every time.

He needs to live, he calls one of them into the office.

There was an assassination attempt that was made on Ronald Reagan.

And it was made by John Hinkley Jr.

And one of the Secret Service guys, a guy called Jerry Parr, is the guy who got Ronald Reagan into the limousine and got him off to, and noticed that blood was coming out of his mouth and said, we need to get to the hospital right now.

So he's said to have saved Ronald Reagan's life.

Interestingly, he...

became a secret service officer because he had watched a movie called Code of the Secret Service years before, which starred Ronald Reagan as a Secret Service guy.

No way!

Yeah, so he ended up saving the life of the guy who got him into it through.

So Ronald Reagan saved his own life in a way, exactly.

That's incredible.

That's really cool.

That'd make a good movie in itself, wouldn't it?

Yeah.

Just one thing about the British Secret Services, which I thought was interesting.

So during the Second World War, they obviously requisitioned a load of country houses and castles and things like that and stately homes.

And one place they had was in Scotland.

It was called Inverlaire Lodge and it was used for spies who weren't good enough to spy but had already learned too much secret information to be allowed to leave.

And they had to stay there for the rest of the war.

One of them, one unfortunate man who had signed up to spy, he was refused leave to actually go and spy on the field because apparently he was outstandingly ugly.

So there was a report which said he'd be recognized anywhere, once seen, never forgotten.

He has no teeth at all

except two gold tusks and two incisors

poor man

but they must they must have been as well like by the time they all left everyone would have known the secrets that they were meant to be keeping as well

how come you're here well i got told this thing about

there's one guy going no

come on mike

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

Okay, my fact this week is that because male bumblebees rely on sight to find females, they sometimes find themselves chasing after aeroplanes.

So presumably their eyesight is not very good.

Well,

it's good for an insect,

but it's not good for like an eagle.

Bumblebees do have kind of good eyesight as in they can see lots of colours.

People didn't realize they could see colours and then Carl Frisch, is it called?

That guy who worked out that they did the waggle dance, he's quite a famous scientist.

Oh yeah, he got a Nobel Prize for that, didn't he?

Yeah, and he did an experiment where he proved that they could see colours by getting loads of grey

like grey card and then one coloured card and always put the food on the coloured one.

They could always tell where it was.

So they do have colour sight.

So are you saying we need to stop painting our aeroplane stripey black and yellow?

Well, there is

a stripey black and yellow airplane and it is the smallest airplane that has flown.

Is it the size of a bee?

It's called the bumblebee.

It's a bit bigger.

It's 8 foot 10 inches in length and the wingspan is 5 foot 6 and it's tiny.

It fits only one person.

It's so small.

Yeah.

It's a biplane as well.

Yeah.

I mean, it does not look like it should get off the ground.

The wings are so small that you shouldn't think it has enough lift.

It looks like your car has just had some wings.

And not even as big as your car because it fits five people in a car.

Yeah.

This is my arm span.

It's six inches shorter than my arm span across the whole plane.

Wingtip to wingtip.

Looking at that, despite the fact that that's black and yellow and is the smallest plane, I still think bees are idiots if they look at something that size and think it's genuinely a bee.

Do they chase after after the plane once it's in flight or is there a lot of bees at Heathrow?

It's in flight.

So I got this from a newsletter of the Bee Conservation Society.

It's all about how bees fight how male bees find the queens and there are different ways of doing it.

One way that they do it is by all load of males kind of leave their smells around in a certain area, their pheromones, and they kind of do it as a gang and they put loads and loads of stuff around and then the queen just smells tons and tons of males and then goes down and then they mate that way.

And another way is by kind of chasing after a female.

So they'll see one in flight and they'll chase after the female.

And even though their eyesight is kind of good for insects, it's not quite that good.

And so if they see something which is small looking but actually is far away and is flying, then they can sometimes, according to this newsletter, mistake it for an aeroplane.

And do we know how far they get towards the plane before they realise their mistake and then they have to casually turn around as though they weren't chasing you mean like when you tried to get onto a tube train and it goes away and you pretend you weren't bothered getting yeah yeah yeah

or do they think that there's just certain female bees out there or male bees that are extremely fast like man she was like President Usain Bolton of the bees.

No, it didn't go that far into the psychology of the bee.

Okay.

That makes more sense that it's at a distance though.

I sort of can forgive the bee slightly.

I think a plane looks like a bee from far away.

Yeah.

Sorry, just one more thing on the colours that bees can see.

They can't really see red,

but they can see things that are further in the spectrum, so they can see like ultraviolet.

They can see a little bit of yellow and orange.

They can see blue.

They can see violet.

And they can see another colour, which I saw in a website was called bee purple.

And bee purple is a colour that we can't see,

which is like a combination of yellow and ultraviolet.

Really?

That sounds really cool.

That's so cool.

Yeah.

How do we know they can see it?

Have they done paintings and there's just these big blank spots?

I don't know.

I think you can.

If you know the wavelength that something gives off, you can know that there is a colour there even if you can't see it.

Yeah, I suppose that much.

So they can tell that it's a sort of purpley-ish in the spectrum area.

That's so cool.

I didn't think you could mix normal colours with ultraviolet as well.

I guess I think that, but it makes sense that you can, doesn't it?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Maybe you think that as you mixed it, the colour would gradually disappear because we can't see stuff in the ultraviolet spectrum, so it would start.

It would be like putting an invisibility cloak on.

Manufacturers of invisibility cloaks should take notice.

I imagine that it doesn't quite work like that.

I think she's absolutely right.

See?

I'm not the only one to get slammed for my Harry Potter references not being right.

Do we know if there's anything in our day-to-day life that is actually that bee purple, but we obviously just see it as purple?

Well, there are plants which have colours that if you shine a UV light on them, you can see that they glow in a certain way

that you can't see as humans, but bees presumably can see because they point towards the centre of the plant.

So they're pointing the bee to the centre of the plant.

But if you or I were to look at it, we would never see those arrows.

Okay.

But we would see it as a different colour.

We wouldn't see it as nothing.

Yes, exactly.

It wouldn't be invisible.

Yeah.

You know, bees aren't the only things that make honey.

I did not know this.

Really?

Wasps.

Some wasps make honey.

Do they?

Yeah.

There's a particular species of it called the Brachygastra mellificata.

And apparently you can even eat that wasp's honey.

But I don't think it's farmed because it's quite hard to breed wasps.

I don't know why it's not farmed.

A single pound of clover honey requires 8.7 million flowers to be manufactured.

8.7 million flowers for one pound of clover honey.

Oh, but I go through so much honey.

That's terrible.

Flowers can do multiple pollinations it's all right oh okay have you guys heard about and i only realized as we were about to start recording that actually this article is from 2015 so potentially this already now exists but um the highway for bees in norway

no in oslo in norway um they want to make life better for bees basically and they have a lot of green spaces and the idea is that they want to create networks so that the bees can go between the green spaces through sort of like alleyways that are created in buildings and between buildings and so on that is buildings yeah so like literally tunnels not inside but like yeah like like trying to get in the lift well no imagine in this room yeah yeah they would have their own lift

yeah they just it's like tunnels and so on and the the bees can travel and find their way to the next green place that they're going to i think it might be that but i thought it would be like like rooftop gardens and stuff rather than actually inside the building.

Yeah, I probably made that up.

They put signposts on rooftops saying bees, you're allowed to fly over.

Well, what they do is that bees are in one place they might want to go to another place and they just make sure there's a corridor of green spaces where they can go.

So they put green on the rooftops.

Yeah.

And flowers that they like and things like this.

Because you can make your garden really beefly.

There are all these specific flowers that you can grow and you guarantee bees.

And London is basically covered in bees.

That's true.

Basically.

Yeah.

When you say basically you mean not.

So many rooftops.

Do you mean the hipster beehives in Shoreditch?

No, I mean the Royal Festival Hall has a beehive on top of it.

Harrods has a beehive on top of it.

And there's one specific London beekeeper who goes to all of these different places.

And is he, does he do parkour?

Does he just

jump from one to the other?

But it is a problem because it's really fashionable to have a beehive and it's really cool.

But what they haven't done is planted 8.7 million flowers.

So you get exhausted beehives and

they haven't got enough flowers and plants to pollinate.

So what you should actually do is plant a wildflower meadow.

Because that's not as sexy as getting a load of bees off the internet.

That's true.

If you do have a garden, but not many people do have gardens in London, but if you do have them, you should plant lots of flowers, shouldn't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you know there's such a thing as a bee beautician?

No.

Beeutician.

Yeah.

So her job is to brush bees' hair, to wash them with shampoo.

So bees are, when specimens are collected, then they're preserved in ethanol, and that makes them kind of soggy and slimy.

And she has to prepare them to be fit for display.

So she's got, she's concocted special bee shampoo, and then she dunks it in the bee shampoo, and then she hangs it out.

So she inserts a tiny, tiny pin, I think, at at the hinge of one of its legs um and then she's created a blow dryer for bees no yeah so she at first tried actual blow dryers but she found that they were too violent so it used to

go she's got the little legs left in the clam for the rest of the bees

she does say so it used to blow their limbs off and then she'd have to glue the limbs back on which is a whole nothing glue the limbs back on yeah but she did say something interesting about bees which is that they have lots of split ends and so that's why she has to use a special shampoo it's because they get very clumpy and frizzy when they get what is this shampoo just

it's uh

it's a mixture of

i can't remember i think it's like a mixture of water and sodium bicarbonate or something okay but wasps don't have split ends do they so if you don't want frizzy hair be a wasp it's a bit late for me really yeah you're right

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that running a leaf blower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a pickup truck 3,800 miles.

No way.

That is incredible.

It does sound unbelievably untrue, doesn't it?

It does.

I'm following the words of James Fallows, who's a correspondent at The Atlantic, which is a very reputable magazine.

And he has a campaign against these things.

Well, I guess if you were pro them, you wouldn't work out the emissions.

What he says is that about a third of the petrol they use, because they use petrol or gas in America, is vomited out in aerosol form, right?

And that gets mixed in with like tiny particles of oil in the exhaust, in the droplets.

So he has calculated that.

Which, if true, means that you could drive from Covent Garden to Jerusalem.

Wow.

I think they compared it to a particular type of pickup, didn't they?

Sorry, yeah, F-150.

Maybe it's an unbelievably.

I think it is an extremely efficient one.

But it's still good.

I mean, it's still amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I thought the F-150 was a model of Casio Watch.

Is it not?

That's the F-91W.

Great.

Anyway.

So, is he suggesting we all try and clear our leaves with pickup trucks?

Because I think that's a lot harder.

If you use the F-150 and you can blow it in the right way,

I guess you could save technically on emissions.

You could.

If the exhaust pipe pointed the right direction.

Imagine trying to dry a bee with the leaf blower.

There are legs everywhere.

Yeah, so people really hate these things.

Yeah, they're horrible.

I think they make the most disgusting noise and they should all be banned.

I genuinely do think that.

They're very, very, very loud.

And I think they're unnecessary.

Just rake your bloody garden, guys.

It must be easier to blow it than rake it, though.

But also,

you're blowing it into someone else's spot, aren't you?

Or do you blow it into a pile?

I think you blow it into a pile.

Blow it into a pile, okay.

I've got leaves all over my bloody garden at the moment.

I would kill for a blower.

Your garden's small.

I don't mean to be rude.

Well, that is quite rude.

All I'm saying is it's eminently rakable.

You couldn't fit a pickup truck in your garden.

I think kill for a blower was the most rude thing in that sentence by a long mile.

Oh dear.

Yeah, but I can see that they are.

I think my neighbours have got one.

They are pretty loud.

If your neighbours have got one, you will definitely know about it.

Well there is a big loud noise coming from my neighbours every now and then in the autumn.

That's what it is.

You don't want to pry.

Well it could be that.

It sounds a bit like an aeroplane taking off.

Is that what they sound like?

Yeah they unless do they have an airstrip in their garden?

Well, no, it's a beef.

Oh, dear.

In California, there are 20 cities that have banned.

Wow.

Yeah, I was reading an article by the Kendall family who are from California, are in a state that they where they want to get it banned.

And they were pointing out that the reason it's so annoying, and this definitely does ring true, is that compared to a lawnmower, which can be as loud but operates at the same kind of frequency and volume the the whole time, leaf blowers really go up and down, don't they?

So you can't predict it.

So you're constantly being shocked by its volume increases and decreases.

That's very interesting.

That's what stresses you out.

How long have we had leaf blowers, by the way?

Does anyone know?

Since about the 50s or 60s?

Yeah, 50s.

Except in Japan in the 19th century, we know that they used bellows that you use for a fire as leaf blowers.

Oh, weren't they?

I...

Yeah, I haven't seen a photo of the bellows.

I tried to find one, and I couldn't find a picture of Japanese ancient leaf-blowing bellows.

No, but there is an early book, but the 1950s reference is weird.

If anyone can tell us if this is true, Wikipedia claims, and this is from a book called Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Leaf Blowers, so you would have thought this would be the authority on it.

But this claims it was invented by a guy called Dom Quinto, who originally designed it in the 1950s as an agricultural sprayer.

But people were taking out the spraying device and just using it to blow their leaves.

But there's no evidence aside from this book that this Dom Quinto chap ever existed.

So if you are him or his offspring, get in touch.

Do you know who invented the rake?

No.

Is it Mike Rake?

No, it's not Mike Rake.

I mean, these are always a bit dubious, aren't they?

But apparently, the steel rake, which is kind of a bit springy and the modern-day one that's good for raking stuff with, it was invented by a guy called Chester Greenwood, who also supposedly invented earmuffs.

Really?

Apparently.

Wow.

And he's quite famous in North America.

In Maine, there's a certain town where every year they have a celebration of his inventing.

What do they do?

They put on a load of earmuffs and go around raking stuff up.

Yeah, to drown out the noise of the leaf blowers that they're trying to protest against.

They kind of do that, I think.

They kind of wear earmuffs.

They have an earmuff parade and stuff.

Ear muffed!

I think

they don't really bother about the rake part of it that much.

They're more bothered about the earmuffs because he was quite young when he invented them.

He was like

16 or 17 or something.

I thought it was 13.

13.

Yeah, it could be.

Could be.

Maine sounds like a very exciting place to live, doesn't it?

If that's their highlight of the year.

Well, the thing is, it's cold and they have a lot of trees.

So earmuffs and rakes are the kind of things you might invent if you live there.

And they have every major horror story that we know of in popular culture set there through Stephen King because he lives in Bangor, Maine.

So it, the clown, is from Maine.

Okay, you can't credit an entire state for one person that it's produced.

No, but well done, Maine.

There is a cool thing you can do with leaf blowers, which is turn them into a hovercraft.

Can you?

Yeah.

There's a very cool video online of a Texan man called Ryan Craven.

So shout out to Texas, who created Ryan Craven.

Who has strapped sort of four of them together into a kind of platform and he puts the skateboard across the platform.

And it hovers very, very low off the ground, but it does hover.

You know, on fallen leaves, I was actually looking at this for because in the TV show we did this week, No Such Things the News.

We were talking about tranomy.

Is that still available on iPlayer?

I think it might be, yeah.

And actually, if you're international, it's on YouTube.

Is it?

But that's besides the point, Bob.

But how would you find that?

Oh, you go to no suchthingasthenews.com.

Thanks for asking.

Yeah.

Anyway, we recorded a TV show this week and we mentioned Chernobyl.

And leaves in Chernobyl don't decompose because the radioactivity means that the bacteria are no longer there, can no longer survive, so they can't decompose the leaves.

And so there aren't, you know, that it's missing this fungus and the worms and the microbes and stuff like that.

And so it's just building up this huge floor of dead leaves.

And at the moment, if a a forest fire started, which can happen at certain temperatures, it would be a complete disaster and would spread radiation much, much further and wider than it is already because it would just catch fire to all these dry dead leaves that you have on the ground.

That's like in Australia, a sort of Aussie, non-nuclear version of that is the eucalyptus tree, because their

leaves, when they drop off the tree, they have a kind of sort of what's called like a toxic nampalm thing about them in that they're too hard to break down for all the insects and animals.

So they sit there dry as hell.

And if a forest fire starts and it hits a eucalyptus patch, that will just go massively up in flames.

It's just sitting there waiting to be caught on fire.

And this must be because a eucalyptus tree is one of the trees that love being set on fire because that's how they spread their seeds.

Yes, they love to be set on fire.

They sort of have an inner tree waiting to break out of the bigger tree.

And forest fires is what brings that to happen.

I think they're pretty much ambivalent about the whole thing, really.

Do you think they don't even know their trees?

In 2011, someone patented a glove rake, which is really cool.

It's a normal glove, except it's got these five long-you look a bit like Edward Scissor hands, except your Edward Rakehands, and you can just go around raking stuff up with your bed.

You have to be on your hands and knees.

You would have to be on your hands and knees.

It's not going to be nice.

I mean, because it's the middle of Autumn.

Yeah.

It's going to be dumped.

Edward Rakehands, by the way, would have been really useful in that scene where Edward Scissorhands cuts all the hedges.

He could have been on the side cleaning up.

There's not Edward Bimbaghans comes along.

Guys, why are we all called Edward?

We're not related.

We've got different surnames.

We've all got the surnames.

Hands.

Wait, is it a double barrel surname?

Yeah, so one of them married Mrs.

Scissor and one of them married Mrs.

Break.

I've never noticed before the moment where we come up with the title of an episode.

I think no such thing as Edward Binbag Hans.

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okay it is time to move on to our final fact of the show and that is chasinski Yes, my fact is that early humans had spiky penises.

That is insane.

How early?

I actually couldn't believe just a couple of weeks ago 630 this month

no this was a study a study on human genes that was done in 2011 and it found that about 700,000 years ago so before our common ancestor split into modern humans and Neanderthals then we have the gene that carries penis spines and then that gene seems to have been deleted when we evolved into what modern humans today but lots of other like almost all other primates still have penis spines and

Yeah, they do, except for spider monkeys, I think.

All primates have penis spines.

And what do the spines feel like?

As in

if I if I if I gripped a chimp's penis, would I would I be arrested?

Yeah.

Would I cut my hands?

Would the palms of my hands be sliced?

The ones on primates, I think, are more bumpy.

Some animals have really spiky spines, like cats, I think, do, but I think they're more like lumps, slightly blunt spikes.

You've never seen the film Edwards has a penis, have you?

So, just to go into quickly the reason that we might well, that men might have had spiky penises in the past.

We're not totally sure about it, but we think it might be because

what it can do is it can help clear out rival sperm from a female vagina.

So, if you get the spikes in, then as it's sort of retracting, they scrape the edge of a vagina and they'll bring out any sperm that's been left in there by someone else, and they can break through a little sperm sac and break it open to make this permanent some animals isn't it i think um i think dragonflies have like spade shaped penises that they do that with it must be really hard to study the evolution of human penises um because the lack of bone means that how can you how can you you just there's nothing so ironic all boner no bone all boner no bone

sounds like you've said that a few times

i've got to change my um strapline on a lot of dating sites

We might have had a bone.

I must stop saying we in reference to our penises.

Men might have had a bone, we don't know, but other primates do have a penile bone, I think, don't they?

And it has a lot of advantages having a bone there because it means you can push it out much quicker than having to wait for the blood to engorge it.

It's just flip right out and it can stay out for longer.

And

I think Richard Dawkins is

Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene wrote that the advantage of humans not having this is that it having to get blood flowing in there shows that you've got like a healthy blood flow, shows is kind of a sign of good health.

So women are more attracted to it.

So that might be why men have evolved to have

penises without the bone, because it's harder to get it blown up.

I've heard, so in place of the bone, there is a new thing that they're testing out, which is a metal rod.

So some men could now have a metal rod inside their penis.

And the idea is for it's done.

Do you you remember where it's done, Andy?

In hospitals, mostly.

If it's big offered to you in a bar, you should be very careful.

So, the idea is that this is for people suffering from erectile dysfunction.

And if they've gone through various courses, they're going to then say on health services or whatever they will say, you can have this.

And the idea is that it's a little metal rod inside.

But when you want an erection, you can press a button, like a remote control, and it preheats this metal bar to a heat point where it expands within you.

You are never going to to get on a flight, are you?

I mean, that's just not, it's just not going to happen.

Every single time, you're going to set it off, they're going to get that paddle thing, you're going to go up and down your body,

get to the rod.

Yeah.

What, and you think you just go, never mind, I'm going home.

Doesn't matter.

I don't think that would happen, yeah.

The other thing is, you can get a bit of cartilage put in there if you have erectile problems, and then you have to just kind of maneuver the penis into position.

So it's kind of permanently erect from that point.

That's in Mary Roach's book, Bonk, which is about science and sex.

And it's an amazing book.

Oh, it's an incredible book, yeah.

So, this is partly about how

males of various species manage to get rid of competition because the spines are often used to

scrape other sperm out of the vagina.

And so, I was looking at other ways that you get rid of the competition, and one is that in mice, sperm club together as a group to beat rival sperm.

It's exactly like my West Science Saurants.

Yeah.

The jets of the sperms.

It's exactly like in a cycling race, which James will know more about, where they move faster if they move as a group, so they can tell if they're the sperm that belong to the same person and all the sperm that belong to that person get together, and all the sperm that belong to another person get together.

This is in these mice inside this female mouse.

And so they, as a group, they move much faster than they do individually.

What's that called?

It's like the

peloton effect.

It's a peloton.

It's the peloton of sperm.

And then when they get near the finish line, suddenly they all start to get away with it.

Someone breaks away.

Yeah.

And then the Mark Cavendish sperm wins.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So they're just programmed.

It will be smell or...

No, what is it?

What is it?

How do they know this?

How can they tell them that they have to know they're just a cell?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, cells can be programmed to do things.

So I imagine it must be that.

It's inside the DNA of the cell

that has instructions of what it should do.

It

makes the tails wag.

Yeah.

And also, if they have their specific rendition of Keep Cool from West Side Story, then they can tell and then follow.

Which is the best song to sing for a sperm because you do need to keep lower than the ambient temperature of the body.

Yeah, it's weird that they weren't the lyrics in the original West Side Story, actually.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would 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 accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James,

Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M.

Jaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group Twitter account, which is at qipodcast, or go to no such thingasthafish.com that has all of our previous episodes.

Also, you can go to no such thingasthenews.com, which has all of the episodes from our recent TV series in which we dissect the most interesting news from the last seven days.

All right, that's it, guys.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.