92: No Such Thing As A Frozen Chicken Haunting

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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 the Up the Creek Comedy Club in Greenwich.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to the stage.

It's the three regulars, Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

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 Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that there is only a one in 800,000 chance that nobody will cough during this podcast recording.

How are those odds looking now?

Yeah, so there was a recent study done.

I saw this on the Improbable website, and it was by Professor Andreas Wagoner from the University of Hanover, and it was called Why Do People Not Cough in Concerts?

The Economics of Concerts Etiquette.

And he basically found out the probability that a certain number of people would cough.

And I kind of extrapolated his data into the number of people who are here tonight and got it completely wrong.

I did hear genuine coughs.

There was one.

No, we've put the idea in their minds now.

Yeah.

I have an unbearable urge to cough.

I'm not very suggestible, but.

This could really have spoiled the entire podcast.

So I read a different report that suggested that

people actively try to cough more when they go to classical concerts.

Yeah.

What?

Yeah.

They find themselves just wanting to...

Well, I knew it.

They're so annoying.

Why are they doing that all the time?

I don't know.

I mean, they're.

Hang on, you haven't looked into what their motivation is.

I was kind of hoping one of you guys had it.

It was at the top of the Google search.

I figured you guys would read it.

Well, luckily enough, I did look into that.

Oh, yeah.

There's a few different thoughts.

One is that you might be showing displeasure to the performance.

And you're thinking, it's a bit like, I'm not happy.

I'm just going to cough.

You're a great bar, cello.

Yeah.

And the other thing is, maybe you are actively suppressing the idea that you're going to cough through most of it and then suddenly you think, okay, this is a loud bit, I can finally cough, and you would do it then.

Okay, people always do in the loud parts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a guy called Robert R.

Provine who writes amazing studies on sneezing and yawning and on coughing.

And he does all these studies on sort of bits of the bits of human experience that don't get much scientific attention because they're not seen as important.

And so he has studied lots and lots of people about coughing.

And he did an experiment.

He asked people to cough.

So on average, you can cough within 1.7 seconds if you're asked to.

Whereas if you're asked to sneeze on demand, most people can't do it.

And if they can, the average time is 8.1 seconds to summon up a sneeze, which I think is amazing that anyone can do that.

In eight seconds, it would take me ages to work up a sneeze.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I used to have a friend that could vomit on command.

It's true.

It's true.

Some people have this.

And he would only need a tiny sip of something, and then he'd go

and just yak up onto the street.

That's amazing.

It was extraordinary.

What does he do these days?

Australia's got talent.

Do you know that, so talking of sneezing and coughing, a cough leaves your mouth at 50 miles an hour?

Which is quite fast.

And I think it's, yeah, 3,000 droplets are expelled when you cough.

So one cough, 3,000 droplets are expelled.

When you sneeze, it leaves your mouth at more than 200 miles an hour, and more than 40,000 droplets are expelled from your mouth in one sneeze.

Wow.

How cool is that?

Yeah, that's a huge house.

Wait, how many miles an hour?

More than 200 miles an hour for a sneeze, 50 for a cough, so it's way ahead.

If you sneeze in a car that is going at 80 miles an hour.

I suppose technically that sneeze is going at 280 miles an hour.

I feel like I need to explain relativity to you.

No, I mean.

Now is not the time.

So people who are extremely bothered by coughing might have a thing called mesophonia,

which is basically, it's a kind of thing where you're really bothered by any kind of noise, but coughing is one of them.

Chewing food is another one.

And

we've got a few mesophones into that.

Mesophones?

I think it's someone that sounds like a cough.

There's a ten-level scale of mesophonia, and you can go online and see which one you are.

Level 5 is when you cover your ears if someone's coughing or kind of chewing or whatever.

Level 9 is consciously suppressing the desire to do harm to others.

And level 10 is actual violence.

Wow.

Level 7 I found really interesting.

It said in level 7 there was a few different things, and one of them was there may be unwanted sexual arousal.

I did read a wiki page page about that called Coughing Fetish, where, yeah, it's an actual thing.

It's an actual thing.

And we are a growing group of people who demand your respect.

No, it's so, but actually, it's a bit misleading because coughing fetish.

Which is not sexy.

It leads to, it leads to, it redirects to a page called smoking fetish, and it's the fetish of watching people smoke.

Well, speaking of getting turned on, you know, when.

I think you have a new member of your group now

if I can introduce myself

I'm actually okay and I can promise I will never cough again in case it stands nearby

but you know when someone has a cold and like let's say you're going out with someone who has a cold and they're like well that's disgusting you've got a cold I'm not gonna come anywhere near you saying I'm gonna kiss you actually

there is almost 0% chance you're gonna get infected from a cold by kissing someone someone.

Like, the only way you can get infected is if nasal mucus dribbles down into your mouth during that.

Well, exactly, you're not kissing that guy anyway.

So you can't, that is not an excuse.

Okay, it's not an excuse.

But it's also not a reason for someone to kiss you just because you've got a cold.

Fish cough.

Yeah.

I've not got much on this.

That's the shortest fact ever, is it's just two words.

Nine letters.

Yeah.

They sort of have particles that clog up their gills, and so it's a half cough, half sneeze.

It's not exactly a cough.

There's an internet factoid that giraffes don't cough.

Yeah, I don't think that's true, isn't it?

It isn't.

I found a medical study of a giraffe that was coughing.

I can't believe that.

Why did a giraffe know it was about to cough before a human knew they were about to cough because it's got further to go?

Yeah, well, most people can cough within like 1.2 seconds.

It's like three and a half minutes for a giraffe.

But no, there was a giraffe with severe respiratory disease who couldn't stop coughing and ended up dying.

But

death visits us all, ladies and gentlemen.

So

it would have died of something else.

James, I've lost them.

Dolphins don't cough, do they?

Really?

No.

Do you have any more on that fact?

Back to you, Andy.

Mice cough,

which is the same length as fish cough.

So I've got a joint shortest fact.

But scientists have tested it by spraying them with little mists of

capsaicin or capsaicin, which is the molecule which makes chili peppers spicy.

So they made a mist out of it and they sprayed a little bit of it

at the mice and then they had tiny microphones to listen.

Yeah, because normally you can't hear mice coughing because it's such a small sound, so they needed extra sensitive microphones.

But what have they built a mouse-sized version of this in my hand?

The mice aren't holding the microphones, so

there's a tiny mouse podcast somewhere.

Humans cough.

We're going to have to move on to our next facts.

Yeah, no, okay, good.

Thank you.

Oh my God.

So drinking cough syrup before a pie eating championship can shave 1.2 seconds off the time it takes you to eat a pie.

Why?

It kind of like numbs your throat and lubricates as well, both of those things.

Yeah, and so there was a ban on what they called outside gravy

in the World Pie Eating Championships.

Outside gravy, that's disgusting.

Yeah, exactly.

But it was, it was the World Pie Eating Championships is held in Wigan, and they thought that people were coming in with this gravy that was mixed with cough syrup.

In 2009, Barry Rigby was the champion of the pie-eating, and this was the first year they brought in the new rule.

And just that they asked him what is the trick of being a great pie-eater?

And he said, I'm not giving too much away, but the basic rule is bite, swallow, bite, swallow.

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Okay,

time for fact number two and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the Coliseum has recently banned centurions.

Yeah, so basically obviously it's a massive tourist attraction now, the area.

And like if you went somewhere like Hollywood, they'll have Spider-Man and Superman dressed up there.

That's the same thing with the Coliseum.

You get people dressed up as centurions, and it's sort of hassling the tourists.

They're charging too much.

They're just getting in the way.

They're like a pest there now, basically.

That they've said you guys are banned.

And so it's the big holy year next year.

And so they want to clean it up before the holy year happens.

And so centurions are no longer allowed at the Coliseum.

The quote from the mayor is amazing, because he said that they were inappropriate, insistent, and sometimes aggressive.

Considering considering they're dressed as men who, you know, conquered Europe.

Well, Centurions, I mean, I think this is very well known, but I just want to make it clear how many people they tended to rule over.

Okay, so that's quite weird.

Yeah, that they ruled over 80 people.

There would be eight soldiers, and then there'd be 10 blocks of eight, and that would be a centuria.

And centurions ruled over them.

But I like that two centurions, do you know what they were called?

By centurions?

No, it was actually called a man-nipple.

No.

What?

It's called aurmaniple.

It's by nipple.

But let's not mispronounce for comic effect.

Man-nipple.

Yeah, a maniple.

A man-nipple is two centuries of Roman soldiers, and it means literally a handful.

It's from the same origin as manipulation, which is a handful.

So they tried, because they keep, for centurions, getting into fights.

And in 2013, this is just a story of the kind of scrapes they got into.

One of them attacked a tourist and the tourist fell over and broke a finger.

And the tourist, it was called Jose Esna, said that he had offered the Centurion more cash, because that was the thing.

They pose for a photo with you, and then they say, give us some money.

They say, give us five Euros or ten euros or whatever.

And he said he had offered the Centurion more cash.

But, quotes, when I offered extra dollars, he said, in Italy, we blow our nose with dollars and called me a son of a bitch, a mafioso, and a cuckold.

But it's a hard job being um being a living statue isn't it uh there was a guy i read an interview with a guy called paul admides and he's a living statue and he said that he's been spat on prodded pushed over sniffed at by dogs um perched on by pigeons wow but he said that um occasionally a dog would urinate on him But he said he liked that because it was a sign that he was doing well.

Wow.

But imagine going home after work and your wife goes, Oh, how was your day?

And you're like, It was great.

I got pissed on by six dogs.

There were the first arrests related to living statues in the UK in 2011, and it happened when the invisible king was convicted of assaulting the silver wizard.

And the king accused the wizard of stealing his spot, which was by the London Eye, Prime Turf.

But the twist is, they were flatmates.

Wow.

Imagine that flat

when they're watching TV.

Are they working?

Are they not working?

Just, I was looking at street performers on living statues, and there's a street performer in Paris in 2013, a street performer in Paris called Stephen Cohen.

And with his performance, he wanted to evoke his situation, which was being torn between two countries.

So his native country was South Africa, and then it was France, where he currently lived.

And so what he did was he went to the Eiffel Tower and he was dressed like a bird, and he was wearing a garter and tights and these long red gloves and no underwear or trousers, and had tied a rooster to his penis and was being led around the Eiffel Tower by his penis by a rooster.

And that was his art.

And he was arrested in decent exposure.

Yeah, sure.

I'm cool with that.

He missed a chance to say it was being pulled around by his cock.

I looked through an online database of street performers oh yeah and i found just i love these guys they're called whispering trees um an absolute surefire shocker brilliant either side of an entrance watch the queue jump so they just dress as trees stand really still and then whisper at you as you go by

oh wow i also found big rory

okay and this is the exact entry on big rory in this database big rory the scots giant with power presence and bagpipes dangerous but safe

it's funny it's a job where you have to be slightly shit to do well.

It's true, no one pays statues money.

Exactly.

Maybe Nelson on top of Nelson's column is a living statue.

He's been there for 200 years, not earned a penny.

They have a World Statue Championships in the Netherlands every year.

And it was won by a Briton in 2009, which is really exciting.

A guy called Chris Clarkson of Southport.

He does a lot of statue work, but before that, he was an actor and he'd worked in A Touch of Frost and in Hollyoaks, where presumably he was fired for having a bit too much expression.

They asked him how to be a good statue, and he said to stand in front of the television for an hour and a half without moving, and then you'll get a feeling of what it's like.

Because apparently, it just really hurts.

Like, standing still for long periods really, really hurts.

Yeah.

Especially if you're watching Holly Oaks.

An almost linking fact back to Roman legions and Roman soldiers, but also sort of on the street performances.

Did you know that Bath is haunted by a naked Roman soldier?

No.

Yeah,

I didn't know this either, but

apparently the apparition is said to be quite convincing, and at one point a police officer in Bath mistook it for a genuine streaker and chased it down the street, only to see it disappear into thin air.

So look out for that.

It's a naked Roman soldier.

And the question this article asked, which I think you're going to ask me now.

if he's naked how do you know he's a Roman soldier

that is the question

is he shouting Veiny Veyde V chi

sometimes you just know

that's so good I didn't read I've been reading a book about haunted bits of Britain by Derek Akora and that's not in there There's amazing places.

Can I tell you my favorite place in there?

I wrote it down.

It's

Yoville Railway Railway Station's Buffet.

It's haunted

by a sausage roll.

So just back to the Coliseum very quickly.

They had what was probably, because obviously it was a huge arena and they had seating.

There was a seating plan as well.

And they had probably the most early version, so far as I can read, of ticketing.

And the ticketing was done on pottery.

So you were given shards of pottery and they'd have chiseled into it your seat,

the row that you were in.

Because how many people could they sit in there?

That was.

It was.

About 50,000?

Yeah, that's a lot of pottery.

That's.

I mean, that's a good idea.

That's all you know when they find ancient Roman pottery is always in little bits and pieces because it was all broken up.

It's equivalent of one directions back in town.

Oh, God.

Smash up these.

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

Yeah, my fact this week is that.

From 1978 to 1991, tens of thousands of chicken heads were dropped from helicopters over Switzerland.

Okay, so yeah, okay, why?

Tell us the story.

So, this was because there'd been a rabies epidemic in Europe from about the 1930s, I think, and foxes were infected with rabies and it was spreading.

I think it spread about 20 miles a year, so it was gradually encroaching.

And they didn't know how to get rid of it until they came up with this idea in Switzerland.

A Swiss scientist came up with this idea of putting vaccines, rabies' vaccines, into chicken heads that were left over from slaughterhouses and then dropping them from helicopters over Switzerland.

And then foxes eat the chicken heads and they're immune from rabies.

And I just think that's ingenious.

Yeah, it's amazing.

It works.

So lots of European countries took this on.

So I think Germany in the late 1980s said, okay, it's a bit weird and barbaric that you're doing this whole chicken head thing.

So they manufactured just little fish pellets and dropped them instead with the vaccine in.

And it turned out that worked as well.

Yeah, it's not as cool, though.

Imagine her being in a helicopter with a sack of chicken heads.

You'd feel like the king of the world.

But the worst thing is, oh, the king of the world is flying over us.

I wonder what he's going to distribute.

But they did, they, before they worked out the chicken head thing, they did try other options of how to vaccinate foxes.

And one of the things, it was called the VAT trap, and it was basically the equivalent of a bear trap.

So anything that stood on it would trigger a giant needle that would just go quang into them and inject them.

And they had to stop because too many hikers kept walking along.

Suddenly getting walloped by a needle.

But did you see that they actually didn't stop because of the hikers?

Because they were concerned, the people who manufactured it, that that would be a problem.

And, you know, people are getting vaccinated against rabies they don't have when they're on a walk.

And they set these traps on a desert, this is in the US, they did this.

They set these traps on a beach, which was a deserted beach, and they thought this is a good place to test out our vaccine.

And it turned out that the US Navy was planning to use that deserted beach a few days later for a mock invasion as a training exercise for all of its soldiers.

And so

the people who'd set them offered to remove them, and officials argued that the hazards would serve as an additional measure of the invader's prowess.

So the rabies vaccine was invented by Louis Pasteur.

Yeah.

A few other people as well, but he's like the headline guy really.

One of the things that he did in the lab is he would get some saliva from a rabid dog and then he would use that for his experiments.

But unlike everyone else who kind of used kind of gloves and I don't know, helmets or glasses or whatever people use, he just went straight in there and just went up to the rabbit dog and just got the saliva out of there, right?

Which is pretty brave, considering that if you got bitten, the protocol was to be shot immediately.

Whoa.

If you got bit, you just got shot.

That's fierce protocol.

That is hardcore.

I read that he sucked the saliva from the mouth of a rabbit dog, which was

sort of secured on a lab table, and he's supposedly using a pipette held in his mouth,

which seems needlessly

bravado-ish.

It kind of feels like he's the bear grills of his day doing unnecessary feats of apparent courage.

I have a fact about airdrops

and animal airdrops.

So

wasps pick up ants when they're competing over food and drop them away from the food.

This is true.

Researchers observed this in the wild and then they tested it on

real situations.

So they put out some tuna, they let some ants go and start eating the tuna, and then

they release some wasps.

And sometimes the ants will attack the wasp, and even though they're much smaller, they have, you know, they can spray formic acid and stuff.

And so sometimes the wasps just pick up the ants, fly them away from the tuna, drop them, and then go back to the tuna.

Imagine if you're flying around and just dropping ants anywhere you want to, you'd feel like king of the world.

I regret sharing my fantasy with you.

It's possible that the ants could enjoy that, though, right?

Because it's like my meal was interrupted, but it was fun paragliding.

Yeah, and ants are actually small enough.

There's a certain size of animal that once you get small enough, you probably wouldn't die because your maximum velocity you can reach is not high enough to squish you.

I think even mice you can drop from a really high height, and

they're not heavy enough to hurt them properly.

Horses, on the other hand.

I have a chicken fact, if we could go to chickens.

Pond Square in Highgate, in London, is haunted by a half-frozen chicken.

Oh, I know whose chicken that is.

Yes, this is the way.

Okay, so for a very long time, there's been a half-frozen chicken that's been haunting this pond.

And

everyone has been sort of going, oh, there's a half-frozen chicken.

And it turns out that the half-frozen chicken belonged to a man called Francis Bacon, who, if you remember, died when he was experimenting on.

Wait, hang on, which bit don't you believe when you're shaking your head?

First of all, he supposedly died of a chill after stuffing a chicken with snow, didn't he?

But I don't think that's true, first of all.

And then the rest of it, obviously, I don't think that's true either.

Why would the chicken haunt Highgate, though?

That's what

Francis Bacon might haunt Highgate, but the chicken was already dead, I think.

I know, it's a really odd situation

so chicken heads can help pro-athletes actually uh there's and this is real there's a guy called

ouch

wow it's a terrible burn on everything we've heard so far

no um chicken heads can help pro-athletes there's a guy called hans wilhelm muller wolfart

He was the doctor from Bayern Munich until quite recently when he got fired.

But he used to inject an extract of chicken heads into the kind of tendons of athletes to help them.

And there's a little bit of evidence that it might work.

He treated Michael Owen, Stephen Gerard, Usain Boltz, Paula Radcliffe, Bono.

The five great athletes of our time.

But he got fired quite recently, and he is quite controversial.

He once prescribed goat's blood injections into a striker from a football team,

but because he's called Hans, he's known as healing Hans.

Yeah, but he is quite famous actually.

Do you guys know about chucking?

No.

Okay, I'm glad.

Apparently, this is a social media phenomenon where you chook, and that is it's kind of like planking, but instead of like lying flat and impersonating a plank in front of the camera, you pretend to be a frozen chicken carcass in public.

Do you have to haunt Highgate?

You can actually do it anywhere.

So all you have to do is

take all of your clothes off and then crouch down and then have a photo taken of yourself and then a naked person crouched down in a fetal position sort of on their knees looks like a chicken, a chicken carcass.

How does someone sat there naked look like a chicken any more than a centurion?

Good point.

No, so okay, so if you were just very quickly, if you were going sort of profile and you were leaning on your knees and you were leaning over, a human in that position looks remarkably like a frozen chicken so many mistakes on Christmas Day embarrassing

um can I this fact uh has the element of uh talking about these uh these were dropped from helicopters and I started looking into helicopters slightly do you know that there's there's a hell of the world's biggest helicopter can carry it's big enough that it can carry a plane wow is now no way

do you know when the earliest helicopter was no uh da vinci supposedly had one did he he drew one He designed one, yes.

But it wasn't as early as the helicopter that was invented in 400 BC by the Chinese.

What?

Which, because officially, so this was, it was called the bamboo copter, apparently, which stresses me out.

I think I might have mentioned on the podcast before that one of my favorite etymologies is helicopter because

the etymology is so unusually split up.

So it's helicos, which is a spiral, and a potere, which you wouldn't expect to be a word on its own, which is like the wing.

So by saying bamboo copter, they've stomped right in the middle of that word helicos.

You should never say anything copter, should you?

It should be either pter

or helico.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

I feel your pain, Anna.

Yeah, I've written a strongly worded letter to ancient Chinese emperors.

You know, a very popular escape from prison is via helicopter.

I mean, popular.

Defined popular.

It seems to be.

So people actually do it more often than you would think.

France holds the record for most prison escapes via helicopter.

And that's 11.

So actually not as much as

I was saying earlier.

It's epidemic proportions.

But there's a guy with the world record for most helicopter escapes from prison, which is three.

He escaped in 2001, 2003, 2007.

And at no point did someone go, we should watch out for this guy every time he goes into the yard.

I say let's put a roof on David's cell.

I say we should.

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Okay, time for our final fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that in 2015, a 10-year study concluded that punching glass is very dangerous.

Wasn't the only thing they found out, but it was pretty much the headline.

So, it was a study by a group of Australian doctors, and they concluded in about July this year.

They measured everyone who came into a particular hospital from 2003 to 2012, collected lots of data, and they said that it is really, really dangerous to punch glass.

And they found out other things.

They found out that the typical patient who punches glass is a 26-year-old single male who is unemployed and intoxicated.

Of the um 137 people that they found who punched glass, 113 were men, 122 were single,

95 were unemployed, and 91 were drunk.

Wow.

And

they have one conclusion as well, which is to how to deal with this thing.

Preventing young intoxicated males from aiming punches at glass is a difficult task.

And perhaps the only rational method, although costly, is to replace replace all glass within arm's reach with safety glass.

No more glass for you.

That's amazing.

I think it might be cheaper to replace all drunk men with sober men.

This was in Australia, but there was another study in Sunderland.

And there were only 67 patients in this one, but it was in Sunderland.

And so...

England's Australian.

Well, they found that all of the people had consumed alcohol.

But it's so it's danger.

Why is it dangerous?

Well, Anna,

because you can mess your hand up real bad.

I mean,

like the glass breaks and then a glass gets into your cutscene.

I just wondered if there are any more complex conclusions in that your hand, so it was just that people got injured a lot.

Yeah.

But people say that, um, because I punch I put my hand through a window once, um, but I wasn't even even drunk.

You were drunk in 26 and male at the time.

It actually wasn't any of those things.

But I remembered the fact that I was about 15 and I remembered that people had said that the time people most get injured is when they retract their arm, when they've broken glass, because that's when it like slices up against you.

And so I held my hand suspended out of the window and I was in my family home and I was like, Daddy,

what do I do now?

But I think that is true.

Well, I held my arm there through the hole in the glass until my dad came upstairs and went, you can't pull your hand out of the glass now.

Right.

Yeah, and it was absolutely amazing that you would have that presence of mind to think, I remember reading a paper about this guy.

And thus was a QI researcher born.

I was researching great bits of glass just to see.

Just to see what was considered to be...

Thus was a great QI researcher not born.

Yeah, so I was looking into great bits of glass, and then I came across a whole sort of, did you mean great bits of glass to stand on?

And so I started reading into great bits of glass to stand on.

Now, one of the best bits of glass to stand on,

and it's not a type of glass, but it's an achievement if you ever get to stand on this.

There's actually at the bottom of the International Space Station.

So I know in a gravity-less place, there can't really be a bottom, but it's the bit that's facing Earth.

They actually have a glass floor that that you can stand on.

So, yeah, so you push yourself up to it, and there's photos of astronauts looking down, so they can see all of Earth below their feet, which is really nice.

I'd not heard that before as an international.

And it reminded me that in the Grand Canyon, you can actually go on a thing called the Skywalk now,

which is really amazing.

So, it's this incredible bit that hangs over the Grand Canyon.

It's complete glass, and you just look down as you're looking over.

When they opened it, they wanted some spectacular people to walk on it.

And they found, they asked Buzz Aldrin, would you be one of the two first people to do it?

And there was another astronaut there, a guy who's the only Native American astronaut, part Native American astronaut.

Oh, don't tell me that Buzz was the second person.

They were meant to meet up at the middle, and Buzz stopped to do a salute, and the guy got there first.

So he's the second,

once again, the second man to make it to something.

On punching.

Yeah, yeah.

So, recent research has just been done into the human fist, and there is a suggestion, and one scientist strongly believes on the basis of this research, that the human fist was evolved for punching.

So we think that humans are superior to you know all other beings because we evolve with our dexterous hands for writing or for claw or whatever.

We actually evolve to beat each other up and it turns out we're much more well adapted.

Our fists, the fact that they fit our fingers fit so well into the palm of our hands, that really is ideal for punch-ups.

So the idea is

an opposable thumb you could use to grab something, but you can also use it to kind of buttress your fist to kind of properly hit someone, right?

Hold it down.

And

nature's being defensive as well as aggressive because apparently males have evolved to be punched.

Before you go any further, I have not.

Your face says otherwise.

Whoa, some woes over here.

Lots of applause over there.

Do you know that the world record most punches, quickest punches, this is ridiculous by the way, but the most punches in 15 seconds is 200.

No way!

Yeah, isn't that amazing?

It's a guy called Bhaskar Joshi.

He's a martial arts expert from India and he managed to do 200 in 15 seconds.

What was he hitting?

I think he was hitting like...

200 guys.

Yeah, he was hitting a punch bag, I think.

But do you know there's a robot that they've trained to punch humans?

Why?

Why would you do that?

We've all seen Terminator 2.

We know there is.

This is a Fraunhofer IFF Institute in Germany.

And they've invented a robot that punches people.

And the idea is that you can test how hard it has to hit a human before it hurts.

Wow.

These guys are idiots.

And they're going to be the first against the wall when the robot turns.

they have like an in an ultrasound scanner that can tell whether you're bruising or not before you actually bruise and the idea according to them is that it's going to stop in the future from humans being injured by robots what so they're we're prepping for robot warfare that's amazing you know you know they also uh when you donate your body to science and you you can read up now on how many different ways they sort of take you apart and use different bits for different things.

One of the things is that they'll take your arm now and just have it punching a punching bag constantly to see why we punch.

Wow, that's amazing.

There's another one where you can become like a crash test dummy, can't you?

Yeah.

Because a normal crash test dummy is quite hard to get a real, you can't make it really like a human, but if you'll put a human in there and then see how they react to being in a crash, then that really, really does help science.

I mean, that's so cool.

It's like the most, if you've never done anything badass in your actual life, I think saying, writing on your donor card at the bottom, please preference for crash test dummy

is the way to go.

I would like my head to be thrown out of a helicopter.

Okay, that's it.

That's 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 we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

So I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At egg-shaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Jaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yeah, or you can go to no such thingasafish.com.

That's our website where we have all of our previous episodes.

And we will be back again next week.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for being here, guys.

Goodbye.

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