108: No Such Thing As Samurai Olaf

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you from Orin Moore in Glasgow, Scotland.

My name is Dan Shriver and please welcome to the stage is Anna Jaczinski, Andy 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, Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact this week is that for just one penny, you can rent a bee for a month.

What are we doing here?

So,

what would you do with one bee?

Well, you make friends, you

take it on expeditions.

So

we've as we've mentioned before on this podcast, a lot of bees in America live on trucks.

And the reason that they do

around the country all the time to because they're rented out to pollinate crops, and they have this whole, like, basically a tour schedule where they move from area to area, pollinating a new crop every every few weeks.

And there's a massive crop, the Californian almond crop, almond, and that needs one and a half million beehives, which is a total of at least 30 billion bees, which is amazing.

They all arrive around the same time.

And so they arrive, they pollinate the crop, and then they go.

And an American beekeeper, whose name is Randy Oliver,

has calculated the cost of it, and he worked out that the cost is one penny, one US penny in fact, so a bit less than an English penny, uh per bee per month.

Bargain.

One English penny would get you one bee for two months.

Yeah.

I think it's about one point six.

Six weeks, yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Not worth it.

It won't work for the holiday, I'm thinking.

Yeah.

So you must you must get more than one, presumably.

You must do it in

there's no like number of bees and then the minimum option is one.

So, what I'm asking is, what is the minimum number of bees that I can hire?

Don't know.

Okay.

I've got a tenor in my pocket.

It's a Scottish tenor.

That would get you.

They won't accept that, James.

Trust me.

And wait, if it's one penny,

let's just say it's one penny.

So it's.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

It's a thousand pounds.

No, I for a hive.

I think you might I think the minimum is probably at least one hive.

Okay.

Um do you know how how bees collect pollen?

I didn't know this, it's so cool.

So um they go and bees will go out and they'll either be collecting pollen or they'll be collecting nectar.

They never do both at once.

You don't wanna mix those two.

Um and if they're collecting pollen they get onto a flower and it they get covered in pollen because they've got you know ha they're hairy, they're furry and so pollen sticks all over them.

But that's okay because they've got combs on their front four four legs.

So they use the combs on their front two legs to comb the pollen out of their antennae.

tenae and they use the combs on their middle legs to comb the pollen out of their fur on their body and then they've got these two kind of buckets on their back legs which I think they're called pollen baskets and they're like literally I mean they just look like little baskets on the back of their legs and they crush the pollen from once they've combed it out of their hair into these two little baskets and then they carry it home in their pollen baskets.

Isn't that cool?

That's very cool.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

The one really amazing thing about bees is that they have a positive charge.

They're electric.

Bees are electric.

If you're putting them into a remote controller,

do you get double B and triple B batteries?

So what happens?

So the bee flies through the air and it kind of

hits particles in the air and that gives it a positive charge.

A bit like if you get a balloon and you rub it against yourself, and that gives the balloon a charge.

It's a bit like static.

But the flowers have a negative charge, and that means that when a bee goes into a flower, the pollen will actually jump, just jump from the flower to the bee.

Using electricity.

This I've read today:

bees don't pee or poo in space.

Why would you go to space?

I don't go to space to poo either.

Well,

yeah, but if you were in space, you would at some point say.

Oh, I see.

So when we send bees up there,

so they hold three yeah yeah so a bunch of bees were sent to space and in space they they actually started so a lot of a lot of little insects have been sent to space particularly flying insects to see how they can cope with with flying and there's I watched some amazing footage today by the way of

pigeons inside one of those vomit rockets that go down

they let them loose so if you don't know the vomit rocket it's where they film zero gravity without leaving the Earth's atmosphere so you can do

actual astronauts use it to practice being in zero G.

Exactly.

So basically the plane is, what is it, it's falling at the surface.

So it goes up in a parabola and it kind of makes it feel like you're weightless.

So you fly around and yeah, so on.

And

the.

You do.

So they brought pigeons on board and the pigeons just didn't know what was going on because they couldn't, they were just flying and bumping into walls.

At one point, a pigeon is flying upside down and the others are like, what the?

It's really confusing.

That's where pigeons will get their alien abduction stories from.

So

they brought a bunch of bees into space and they brought house flies.

And house flies, actually, they say for house flies, it's a no-fly zone.

They just don't bother.

They don't even try.

They start trying.

They can't fly.

So either they just try and cling to the wall or they just stay still and just float everywhere they go.

So house flies don't fly in space.

Bees kind of, after about seven days, worked out what to do.

And they managed to, they even built a honeycomb.

They even managed to make residents.

And

the main thing they noticed, though, is that they just didn't go to the toilet they were holding until they got back to Earth.

Well, I think it's because they were put in an enclosed hive, a space hive, weren't they?

And bees do not defecate in their own hives.

They don't shit what they eat.

And so they literally thought, well, if I can't get out of this thing, then I'm not going to poo in it.

They're too polite.

So they held it in for a week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because if they held it in thinking, I'll do it when I get back, that's quite optimistic because they're just bees.

They don't know that they're actually going to come back, do they?

Wow.

Yeah, so interesting, eh?

Moths, when they went into space, actually learned to, I think they were the smartest flying creature.

They learned that they could kind of float in space.

So when you try to flap, it doesn't really work because you get so disoriented.

But the moths in zero gravity very quickly realized that they could change the method of flying and turn more into seagulls.

And then they just sort of floated around on the air.

Right?

Yeah.

Cool.

That's very cool.

Well done moths, very clever.

Do you know why

honeybees die when they sting you?

So most the vast majority of bees don't die when they sting you

but most honeybees do die when they sting you and it's because all of their insides are falling out.

So

I know it's really sad.

What do you mean?

So when they put their sting into you I think human skin is a bit too hard so they can't properly retract their sort of barbed stinger as it comes out.

So instead what it does is rather than leaving behind just its sting as it tries to pull away,

it leaves behind inside you its digestive tract and its abdomen and everything.

So, and then that is not really a bee anymore, it's just a lump of fluff.

So, that's over for them.

So, you've found mirth even in a horrible, horrible

fact.

But they evolved to mostly, they mostly sting other insects or other bees.

So, that's what the sting is really for, and they have no problem stinging them without, you know, without that happening to them.

It's only when they sting something with really tough skin and to a bee we have really tough skin yeah yeah we need to move on soon to the next fact can I just talk about other things you can rent yeah yeah yeah

James

you were very lucky to get off with a caution I don't think

guinea pigs

you can rent guinea pigs

yeah in Switzerland you can rent guinea pigs

but only Switzerland as far as I can find and that's because according to Swiss law it's illegal to have one guinea pig on its own you you need to have a second guinea pig because they're really kind of sociable creatures and if you have one they get lonely and so the swiss made a law against that

and so what happens is one of your guinea pigs dies and you're like okay now i've only got one guinea pig i'm gonna have to get another one but what would happen is you get a young one

and then the old one would die and then you'd have to get another young one and you'd just be in some horrible cycle of just always getting more and more guinea pigs.

So

some people have seen a gap in the market and thought, you know what we can do?

We can rent one until the second one dies.

And that's a thing.

I must say, the Swiss parliament really does have time on its hands

in Japan.

You can rent an attractive man to wipe away your tears.

Is there a phone number or a website?

I ordered one for you.

He's backstage.

Yeah, isn't this totally bizarre?

It's definitely true.

It's a Tokyo-based company.

It's called Ikamiso Danshi.

And that means, apparently, roughly translates as handsome weeping boys.

And it's if they're, you know, it's for women specifically.

And apparently, women are prone to going to the workplace or whatever and bursting into tears.

And so we need to hire attractive weeping boys to come turn up to the office, wipe away your tears, and comfort you um okay interestingly I have been to Tokyo and I have seen the clubs they have which are kind of just handsome young men clubs they're they're for women they're aimed at women and they

they're aimed at women I didn't go in but it's just sort of just sort of like handsome young men hanging around in there looking cool and a bit emo and the bills are very unreasonable as well

50,000 yen for a Coke

but that sort of fits into that trend yeah

it does yeah I'm sorry that sounds traumatic for you.

It's a very good thing.

Great thing you've got little Olaf waiting next door.

That was a really good Japanese name I just didn't remember.

Samurai Olaf.

We should move on to our next packs.

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

My fact this week is that Iceland imports ice.

ice.

Yeah, it actually does.

In shops now, you can get ice in Iceland.

It's in particularly this one shop which is called Hagkup, and it's a sort of grocery store.

And they import ice.

You buy them in blocks of four.

And it doesn't make any sense at all because the water in Iceland is rated a total 100% for freshness.

So they've got great water that you can turn into ice.

But they bring it in from Norway.

So they now import ice from Norway.

That's really good.

Yeah.

I found this out by via the Twitter account of a guy called Jon Nar,

who was the mayor of Reykjavik.

And he was actually a comedian who hated what was going on in the country.

And he thought, this is just bullshit.

I'm going to run as mayor of Reykjavik.

So he said, I'm going to set up a party.

They said, what are you going to call it?

And he said...

the best party will be the best party.

So they set up the best party.

We've spoken about this on the podcast before.

And he made all the promises that anyone wanted him to make.

So he was like, what do you want?

I'll give you anything.

And they said, we want free towels.

He went, You'll have free towels.

When I'm mayor, everyone will have free towels.

Is that the first thing that the people demanded?

Think they wanted to test the grounds first and see what he was going to go for.

He did also say afterwards, By the way, here's my main promise: whatever you ask for and I agree to, I will break once I become mayor.

So when he became mayor, he said, You're getting no free towels.

I didn't know that Britain exports ice to China.

Hooi, yeah, and to Sweden.

British exports of ice to China have tripled in the last three years.

Wow.

Probably from quite a low base.

But still.

We have a company.

There's a company in Yorkshire called the Ice Company.

So not.

Very good name.

Yeah, not.

I mean, a descriptive name, if nothing else.

And they make 500 tons of ice a day.

They're in South Kirkby in Yorkshire.

And this is the cool thing.

So they have these machines which make ice.

Massive machines.

And they make

300 pound blocks of really crystal clear, you know, beautiful looking ice.

and it's made in these huge freezing compartments, right?

And the water gets frozen in cylinders, and then you know, huge blades chop it up, and then the cubes of ice are blow-dried so they don't stick to each other.

Really?

Yeah, so somewhere there's like someone whose job is to be an ice hairdryer.

Isn't that weird?

That is weird.

Well, clear ice is very sought after, and I think this might be why this Norwegian ice has been imported because I think it's for it's Mr.

Iceman, isn't it?

Yes, which again is a very good name.

And it, so I went to the Mr.

Iceman website, and it's the Mr.

Iceman ice that's now being sold in Iceland.

And they advertise the fact that they've got the hardest ice in the world.

So you can, if you're a special occasion, you drop one of these blocks of ice in your whiskey and it takes twice as long to melt as an ordinary block of ice.

So that's what everyone wants.

It says for those that appreciate a whiskey cold but not diluted, they will cherish the ice block, which is actually quite a good idea.

Do you know the queen likes ice?

But she doesn't.

Does she?

That's a great fact.

But she doesn't like the noise that ice makes in the glass.

Does she have special flunkies to, whenever the ice is getting close to the edge of the glass, to just dip their finger in and let it rebound off?

I don't think the queen would like fingers in her drink.

She drinks chin and dubonnet or Dubonnet.

It's her favourite drink.

And she hates the noise that the ice makes.

And so her favourite flunky, Prince Philip, invented a machine.

He invented a machine that makes tiny ice balls that don't grate against each other.

And so now she can have her drink and it doesn't make any noise.

Prince Philip invented a machine.

Yeah.

I mean, they say it's tough at the top, but I had no idea

just how tough it was.

Well, they make, sorry, they make tiny ice balls.

Tiny little ice balls.

Those are popular.

I've heard about them in fancy bars and things.

They have sort of hand-carved ice balls, which are great.

Wow.

And some unusual imports.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so Germany imports Lederhosen.

Wow.

Really?

There's fewer than a hundred businesses making Lederhausen left in Germany and they get most of them from China now.

That's one thing.

Australia imports dingo urine.

Imports?

Yeah.

Where are the dingoes outside Australia?

I think the thing is with dingo urine, it's quite important that you have to get it from a captive dingo.

You can't just go into the wild and just grab a dingo.

And like a lot of zoos around the world have dingoes in them, and so they get the urine from these places and then they import them into Australia and they use them to deter other animals.

And make fosters.

It's not true.

I don't think it's even made in Australia.

And I'm drinking it now.

I love it.

So I feel really bad about that comment for a number of reasons.

And it's illegal to bring dirty mattresses into Canada.

What?

What?

You're not allowed to import a dirty mattress into Canada.

You have to have it fumigated and you need a letter from the fumigator proving that you've done it.

I wouldn't want someone bringing a dirty mattress into my house.

No.

And what is a country but a big house?

Doesn't Canada mean large village in like an old

Native American language?

I don't know.

It does.

Okay.

When you say doesn't this, you mean this is a thing.

France imports all its frog flags, doesn't it?

Oh, does it?

Yeah.

From Southeast Asia?

Yeah, I think mainly from the Philippines, Indonesia.

Oh, no, mainly from Indonesia and some from Japan.

And yeah, I think

frog farming is now illegal in France.

Or, yeah, I think you can't really farm frogs in France, but they still consume them.

And so they get them all from Southeast Asia.

And they're becoming massively endangered frogs in Southeast Asia.

Lots, because the French eat about an incredible number of tons of frog flags a year.

Wow.

Yeah, so it's very bad.

It is indeed.

Corpses, the corpse trade is picking up, I think.

It's a problem in some countries like Turkey that

people don't want to donate their bodies after they've died, and so there's a cadaver shortage.

Is it for like dissection and it's for dissection, yeah, so for medical purposes and for like crash test dummies, so if they're testing aeroplanes or things like that, they use human body.

They do that, they don't yeah, they don't tell you that when it's the donate your body to science.

They sit you in cars.

Andy, this is true.

They sit you.

Who is they?

They sit you in cars and they just slam the cars into walls.

And they see, because with a crash test dummy, a real crash test dummy, you can't tell what things will break in an actual crash.

So it's saving people.

Or blown up by a landmine.

That's another potential option.

Is it?

They test landmines on, which I would have thought is very obvious.

If a landmine blows stuff up, it blows stuff up.

But no, they test.

But then the important thing with that is you need to know if there's a body part this distance away where was the original landmine.

So it's all that kind of thing.

This is all very important science, Andy.

They actually, someone invented, just on landmines, someone has invented, this is quite a while ago,

seeds that you scatter out into fields, and when the plants grow, they touch the landmine metal, and so what would otherwise be, let's say, a yellow flower then goes red.

So for all these countries that still have unblasted landmines, you can now see them.

It's quite a beautiful solution, they say, to how you can come away with dying.

Yeah, it's yeah, you've got to be a little bit more than a hundred.

Unless you don't know that they've done that and you want to pick a nice bunch of flowers

and these.

These yellow ones are a bit boring, aren't they?

Why don't you go and get a bunch of the red, Danny?

And that's Valentine's Day ruined.

We need to move on to the next fact.

Okay, let's move on.

Should we go for it?

Yeah, yeah.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the most dangerous invasive species in Britain is a poo-eating mussel from Transylvania.

It's true.

It's true.

This is a really bad, evil mussel that's come in from Transylvania

and they are blocking up our toilets.

I would have thought they'd be helping relieve the blocked toilets.

Yes, that's a good point, but they have to live there and they are really, really good at reproducing.

And one female is capable of producing one million babies in a year.

Oh, yeah, what's she called?

So how are they getting here?

On ships.

Yeah, on ships, bilges, and things like that.

So when a ship is going from one place to another, they actually collect water from one area to kind of keep the ballast.

And then when they get to the other place, they'll often release it.

And then you'll end up with species moving from one place to another.

It's like the bees.

It's exactly like the bees.

Okay.

yeah.

They're the bees of the ocean.

Yeah, yeah.

Basically, it's our fault.

It's not their fault.

They were happy in Transylvania.

We brought them over and they did what they did.

Okay, yeah.

Although, it's not just humans that can bring invasive species, because I went to a Glasgow museum today, and they said that there's, what was it?

It was a plant called spearwart, and that's been brought to this area, and it's causing a real problem, and it was brought on the feet of geese.

So when they flew over from, I think, from Africa, they carried this little plant over and now it's become an invasive species.

So it's not always us.

Oh, thanks.

Wow.

Geese.

Those guys.

So mussels get a bad reputation, don't they?

If you look up mussels, there's pretty much no one's got a good word to say about them.

They're invasive species everywhere.

And they're a problem in the Great Lakes in America, I think.

So these are they quagger mussels?

Yeah, quaggers.

Quaggers and zebra mussels.

I think.

In America, they have zebra ones, and here we have quaggers, but they're both named after sort of horse-like creatures.

Oh, yeah, because a quagger is like an extinct type of zebra.

Right, isn't it?

What's up with that?

Quagga mussels, one of the things they do to the native species of mussels, they literally sit on them and kill them by doing that.

So there's a speech- I know, they physically push them into the sediment on river bases and things like that, and sort of the native species are crushed.

And one of the species which is at risk, one of the native native species of mussel, is called pseudonodonta complanata, and its common name is the depressed river mussel.

What a grimly prophetic name!

But yeah, they ruin

ecosystems, don't they?

So in Great Lakes, they eat all the algae, I think, which then stops feeding organisms, which then feed other organisms, then it wipes out everything.

And so you're just left with a lake full of mussels, which is a disaster.

But I think they shouldn't get such a bad rep because they are natural water filters.

You could just drop a mussel in some dirty water and then drink it a little bit later.

You couldn't do that, but

they do sieve water.

So

when they're looking for a meal, then they take the water in and they filter it through their tissues.

And they absorb some of the stuff that they want from the water and then they release the rest of it.

And what they absorb are a lot of the horrible chemicals in the ocean.

So they'll absorb herbicides, they'll absorb flame retardants, they'll absorb a lot of the poisons that we put into the oceans

and they will release purified water.

So they're using that to remove contaminants in quite a lot of lakes.

Well, of course, that's one of the reasons why they make us so sick if you have a bad one, because they're kind of filtering dirty water and leaving nice water, but they keep all the nasty things that make people sick.

And then if you get a bad one, yeah, that's why you get sick.

Yeah.

So this quagger, one of the reasons it's quite bad, is not only does that eat human excrement, but there are other animals that eat its excrement.

And one of them is a killer shrimp that they call the pink peril.

And

whenever it comes into any

lake, it kills all the other shrimps there.

And so these two guys always kind of co-invade lakes or rivers.

So whenever there's a muscle there, there's always the killer pink shrimp there as well.

And that's why it's like doubly bad.

That's mortifying, isn't it?

You're not even the guy who eats the poo.

You're the guy who eats the poo of the guy who eats the poo.

Wow.

You know, there's actually animals now that disguise themselves as poo so that they don't get eaten.

Is that right?

Yeah, so they would, if the muscle was around, they'd be in big trouble.

But most animals don't eat them.

So

there's one that's called the moth caterpillar.

So the moth caterpillar does have sort of little white bits on it and little brown bits.

And it will disguise itself in a sitting position to look like bird droppings.

So it's just quite safe.

Anytime a bird sees it, it thinks, oh, that's poo, I'm not going to risk it this time.

So you've got the moth caterpillar, there's the orb-weeping spider, there's a giant swallow-tailed butterfly, and then this one's really on the nose, bird-dropping spiders.

And they all do that.

They all disguise themselves.

It's an evolutionary thing.

And yet, then they give themselves that giveaway name.

It's sort of like, what was the point in getting to all that trouble?

They should have called themselves just some bird droppings, nothing to see here.

So NASA have actually asked the community of scientists around the world and said there will be a prize for this if you can convert poo into an eating product.

Because when we go for these long-haul missions to Mars, you are going to need everything that you can get to be reused as potential source for something.

And they think poo might be what we can use for food.

Right, and what is the judging panel of this competition?

Heston Blumenthal.

Actually, you know, Heston Blumenthal has now contributed to space food.

Has he?

Yeah, so Tim Peake, the British astronaut who's gone up in space, he worked with Heston Blumenthal and his people, and they've created a bacon sandwich that can be made and eaten and a cup of tea that can be made and drunk.

And they're made of two.

Well, they didn't tell Tim that, but yeah.

But yeah, so that's quite cool.

So Heston's already getting into space.

Great.

Speaking of defecation and Transylvania, which is where

the spuriti muscle comes from, there's the Salina Turda salt mine, which is this huge salt mine.

And it was a salt mine until 1932, so it's massive.

I think it's in the capital, the biggest city in Transylvania.

And it sounds like the coolest holiday ever now.

Have you seen it?

Really?

So they converted it, so it's this massive expanse of mine

under the main city there.

And they've turned it into basically a theme park.

It's this underground theme park.

They did this in 1992, so it's got this massive 180-seat amphitheater, it's got basketball courts, it's got like ping-pong tables, it's got mini-golf, it's got bowling.

You get carried around

this big underground theme park in the old machinery that was used for mining once.

They've got a huge underground lake, and you can go on the lake in little boats.

They've got this ferris wheel that takes you up around it, and you can look at the stalactites and the stalact mites as you go around on it.

And they've transformed this disused salt mine that they didn't know what to do with for 50 years into the best theme park in the world.

Sounds amazing.

Yeah, we should go there.

And that's in Turda.

That's in Turda.

Yeah.

The Edict of Turda is quite a famous thing, which is, I think, it was a kind of thing where it meant that in Transylvania, everyone was allowed to have any religion they wanted, and it was one of the first places in the world that had this.

And I have this theory that that's why kind of people think of Transylvania as kind of this weird kind of gothic place because the Catholic Church saw that it was a place where anyone could have any religion they wanted and they kind of didn't like it.

Ah, yeah.

I think it might be because they had a leader called Vlad the Impala who impaled hundreds of thousands of people on spikes.

Look, there are good sides to put in.

There are good plants of both sides in this argument.

Let's be real.

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There's nothing more satisfying than finding the perfect green paint for your living room, except maybe popping open that can of Valspar Ultra and rolling that first smooth stroke on the wall.

And there's nothing more satisfying than admiring your freshly painted wall.

Except maybe peeling off the painter's tape to see those crisp edges.

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Let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Chacinski.

Yeah, my fact is that until about 4,000 years ago, humans didn't notice the color blue.

Or most humans didn't notice the color blue.

Okay.

Just escaped their notice.

So I'd not heard of this before.

And

so since reading into it, it's really fascinating.

It's amazing.

So the idea effectively is that

someone looked through all the old literature that we have, any bit of writing, ancient Iceland, Homer's Odyssey, all that sort of stuff.

And any time that there should have been a reference to blue, they used a different colour.

And so the idea is that they actually think that maybe, because there was no word describing it, we just didn't notice the sky.

We just weren't looking at the big blue thing in the sky.

and as a result of not naming it, it was just blended into different colours.

Yeah, it is extremely controversial that yeah, so this is a this is a very controversial, or it's a controversial idea, but I think what corroborates it really nicely is that so this guy who went through all these ancient texts, and it is from many different cultures, so yeah, Greece, China, Japan, uh, Hebrew languages, none of them had the word for the colour blue.

Um, they started off all having black and white, they were the first words to colour words to appear, and then red was the next one, and then yellows and greens came in, and then blue was last.

And the idea that maybe people weren't really noticing blue or sort of couldn't distinguish it from others does make a bit of sense when you look at this research that was done by a guy called Jules Davidoff, and he did this research in Namibia with the Himba tribe.

And the Himba tribe does not have a word for blue at all.

And you can look this up, it's really, really cool to do.

What he did was he showed members of the Himba tribe a series of, I think it was 12 dots, and 11 of them were bright green and one of them was bright blue and he said which one is the blue one and they couldn't tell they just didn't know it all looked the same to them and so they they really couldn't distinguish it but then that tribe has many many more words for green than we have and they showed them a 12 green circles and said which one is the different shade of green and if you look at the green circles you cannot tell I can't tell which one was the lighter shade of green and everyone who they tested immediately spotted the lighter shade of green but the idea is that because they have more words to describe it and to distinguish between them, that we sort of learn,

we automatically learn to distinguish that.

I think it's a really, really interesting idea.

Yeah, it's amazing.

There's another kind of fact, which isn't really a fact, which no one could actually see the color blue.

Or maybe they were colorblind or something back in the day.

And the idea is Homer wrote about the sea and he said it was the wine dark sea.

And people are like, why is he saying wine dark instead of blue?

Wine dark.

Yeah.

Because when you see the sea in the evening at sunset, it does it can look the colour of wine.

Also, we don't know what colour.

Maybe all their wine was bright blue.

Yeah.

It's just no one's mentioned.

Well, there is a theory that they in those days they used to add water to the wine because the wine was a lot kind of stronger, so they'd add water to it, and the water might have had a high alkaline content, which made it look a bit more blue.

And they made their wine look a bit more blue.

That seems like a little bit like clutching at straws to me.

Yeah, I don't think we'll ever resolve this argument one way or the other.

It is amazing to think of it though, it's very, very cool.

I went onto a website called XKCD.

Like, you guys must know this.

It's a webcom.

And Randall Munro is in tonight.

And so it's a webcomic by Randall Munro, and he kind of explains things.

And he did a really good kind of study where he looked at colours and he had men and women looking at all different colours and saw how they described them to see if there was any difference.

And they found that actually men and women was pretty much the same, apart from women tend to add more things like light green and lime green, whereas men would just say something's green.

Just green.

It's just green.

But

what he did was, so that was a general thing, but what he did was...

Classic lads.

Let's all go down the pub and not qualify colours.

Sorry, James.

So what he did, what he did was, that was kind of a general thing, but he looked at all the different things that people had said and tried to find which were the most male comments and which were the most female comments.

So these are the colours that women said much more often than men.

So dusty teal, blush pink,

dusty lavender, butter yellow, and dusky rose.

So they were things that women said that men really didn't say.

And the things that men said that women really didn't say for colours were penis.

I mean, it's not, that is not one colour for a star,

It's just green bait.

You've got to see a doctor.

Who's beautiful grass?

As green as my penis.

Yeah, so penis,

dunno,

beige, spelt with with an A.

And WTF.

Whoa.

Wow.

Yeah, apparently women can't see those colours.

True.

True facts.

Speaking of penises, I found.

And the colour blue.

Scientists have worked out how now to,

they can flash a blue light at your eyes and give you an erection

it's it's a really new thing that's happening at the moment

at the moment

at the moment they've only been able to give mice erections

But they're working on it for humans.

And the idea is that it stimulates a thing inside your eye that leads directly to a part of your penis, which I wrote down, it's called the...

I don't think that's the important part of this fact.

It's called Corpus Cavernusum.

It's a region that gets filled up with blood to facilitate an erection.

So it kind of you see this light and it kind of just opens it up and it can you can go crazy.

And

I actually don't understand the science of it, but I was really hardened to read the main sign of it.

Oh my god!

That was cartoned, wasn't it?

Cartoned.

Cartoned.

Go on, you're around to realize.

Yeah.

So the guy, the scientist, is working on it.

He calls it a rectiliopogenetic stimulator.

And when he was asked about it, so he said it's quite simple.

Once you get past the gene therapy part of it, shine a blue light, cause dick to get hard.

And

that's basically the

science.

It's amazing.

It's to do with an algae as well.

It's apparently a bit of an algae that they've taken out.

And I don't know if, like, you know, if I'm not sure.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this about the new alternative to Viagra, which is playing sounds to your penis.

Yeah, it's like Viagra doesn't always work, and sometimes it has side effects, but this is the thing.

They get a machine, they put it on the men's parts, and they play very, very high clicks.

Like, there's

do you like dolphins a bit much?

Is this a very, very coded way of telling us about your awakening when you saw Flipper?

But it does work.

It does work.

That's incredible.

It kind of excites the blood vessels to kind of open.

Wow.

Wow.

This is real science, people.

I mean, I've got a fact about eyes and colour perception, but I'm not sure we can go back.

I'd be really happy if we went back.

Okay, yeah, let's go back to eyes.

Okay.

Tarantulas have evolved to be blue, or for parts of them to be blue, separately on eight different occasions in nature, and we don't know why.

Why do they keep forgetting how to be blue and having to re-evolve it?

When they branched off into separate, I think it's separate genuses and separate species, or maybe it's separate species within the same genus, they have independently in the once they've branched off,

evolved into blue.

We have no idea.

And they don't have good colour vision, so it's not like they know.

That's the really weird thing.

And it's not driven driven by sexual selection because they can't see when each other are blue they have no idea um they can't tell so we have no idea maybe it hides them from their prey or maybe it you know has some other effect but yeah wow how weird um i i was reading that you can now get your eyes turned blue if you have brown eyes uh for five thousand dollars the idea is that actually right behind every brown eye is a blue eye because it's all to do with colour so you can actually burn away the brown and sitting behind it is the natural blue yeah so people are doing this now they They say that babies all have blue eyes.

I don't know if it's true, but they do say so, don't they?

Babies have very pale blue eyes for the first few days and then they sort themselves out

and get their acts together.

That's really cool.

If I hadn't recently spent all my money renting these, I would definitely live by my eyes.

Let's wrap up.

Shall we wrap up?

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At egg shaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You can email a podcast at qi.com.

Yeah.

All right.

Or you can go to no such thingasafish.com.

That is our website.

And we have all of our previous episodes up there.

Thank you at home for listening to this episode.

Thank you guys so much for being here.

We'll be back again next week.

Goodbye.

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