90: No Such Thing As The Brilliant Billion

I earned my degree online at Arizona State University.

I chose to get my degree at ASU because I knew that I'd get a quality education, they were recognized for excellence, and that I would be prepared for the workforce upon graduating.

To be associated with ASU,

both as a student and alum, it makes me extremely proud.

And having experienced the program, I know now that I'm set up for success.

Learn more at ASUonline.asu.edu.

Your night in just got legendary.

Legends.com is the only free-to-play social casino and sports book where you can spin the reels, drop parlays, chase the spread, and hit up live blackjack without leaving your couch.

Slots, sports, original games, Legends has it all.

Win real prizes and redeem instantly straight to your bank.

Legends is a free-to-play social casino.

Void the prohibited.

It must be 80 pay responses.

Visit Legends.com for full details.

Get in the game now and score a 50% bonus on your first purchase only at LegendsWithaZ.com.

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.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the Great Wall of China is held together by sticky rice.

Right.

This is not true.

It's true.

It's true.

How is that possible?

Well, it's the mortar that holds the bricks together.

It must be extremely overcooked, because I don't think that's good sticky rice if it's like cement.

Well, what they found is that

they've got this kind of mortar which is half organic and half inorganic.

And the organic compounds in it is something called amylopectin, which is like a starchy stuff that you would get if you cook potatoes or rice or whatever.

And they're pretty certain that they got that through cooking sticky rice and then extracting this starch and then just mixing it with lime and making the mortar.

Wow, that's really cool.

I've always thought food would make great cement because have you ever left a sort of the remnants of a Weetabix bowl?

Weetabix?

Why are we not using Weetabix to hold buildings together?

You're right.

You leave it five minutes.

You cannot wash that up.

It's done.

Might as well.

I I throw away the bowls.

That is why we are out of crockery in the office.

It's very cool.

So, how much of the Great Wall was used?

So, the Great Wall started being built 2,200 years ago, and this mortar came in 1,500 years ago.

And so, it's not all of the wall, but the main bit which was built by the Ming dynasty, the bit that you kind of see in the photos, that has sticky rice in it.

That's all the fancy towers and really good bits of it.

Yeah, yeah.

Not the like earthen mounds.

yeah yeah which aren't even really the great wall of china are they they're they're i heard them described as the uh the qi wall which is spelt the qi wall which is quite nice um but it was built in 500 bc and it's mostly just earth but it was really quite effective because if you're an infantry army trying to cross that you can cross it but a it'll take loads of time and b you'll probably have to leave some supplies behind and it's just a pain yeah the thing is that is great and it's a wall and it's in china so i think we should call that the great wall of China as well.

Yeah, and that was by the Emperor who kind of created China, modern-day China, I guess, who was an incredible character.

Emperor Qi.

Emperor Qi.

And he was the terracotta warriors guy.

He was...

It's amazing when you look at what he did in one lifetime.

I mean, he killed a lot of people in the process, but it's...

Apparently I shouldn't hold that against him.

He had an army of 1.5 million men.

Wow.

Imagine if the grand old Duke of York had an army of 1.5 million men.

The hill would be full.

It would be very, very hard.

There's no room to go back down.

Do you know that they've now

tried to combat the thing of everyone going on the wall and graffitiing it?

And so they've actually created a section that you can legally graffiti now on the Great Wall of China.

Yeah, there's a graffiti corner.

That seems a crazy idea.

I saw that.

I can't quite believe it.

It kind of makes sense.

But it does take the fun out of graffiti, though.

Yeah, when it's allowed.

Hey, guys, welcome to the cool graffiti area where you can draw what you like on the wall.

So, you know, last week I think I mentioned that they've just realized there are eight times as many trees as we thought there were on Earth, which, if it was edited out, that's a fact for this week's podcast, there are eight times as many trees as we thought there were.

We've just miscounted.

So, in the same way, they recently measured the Great Wall of China, and it's like three times longer than we thought it was.

We're all the trees behind it.

It's

hiding.

But how did we get that wrong?

So, we thought it was 9,000 kilometers, and then it turns out they've just announced it's 21,000.

So cool.

That's halfway round the Earth.

That's half the circumference of the Earth.

Wow.

If it's stretched out.

And it's all sorts of different bits folded in on itself and so on.

But yeah, it's lots of different walls, isn't it?

It's not actually one proper wall.

Well, depending on whether you go with James's, it's all definitely the Great Wall of China theory.

Every single wall in China, which I consider to be great.

Apparently, I've been to the Great Wall of China.

Have you?

Yeah.

So have I.

Have you?

Yeah.

I was reading.

Well, actually, I wasn't reading.

I saw this in a Carl Pilkington Idiot Abroad documentary episode where he visited there and he was reading a little pamphlet in it where it said basically that section most people go to has been renovated so much that it's basically a whole new wall.

It's all new bricks.

So since 1983, that's what people are visiting, a sort of 1983 version of the Great Wall of China.

Which is probably safer because so many people are visiting it.

I read somewhere saying it's really ironic that considering it was designed to keep people out, it's now one of China's biggest tourist attractions.

It It attracts millions of people to it every year.

Yeah.

Was it definitely to keep people out?

I remember once reading that it was a place to collect tax or something.

Yeah, not sure.

Do you know what you're thinking of?

What?

The Great Hedge of India.

Am I?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's India.

There's a huge hedge that runs along, and it was a borderline to collect tax on.

And so you'd get to the hedge, and there might be someone patrolling the hedge, and they would collect tax or something like that.

They call the tax the hedge fund.

Ooh, nice.

Oh,

do you guys know who the first person to be filmed on the Great Wall of China was?

Justin Bieber.

No.

Chairman Mao.

No.

For a movie.

Sorry, I shouldn't say that.

Who's closer?

James Sam, Justin Bieber on me.

Yes.

Stephen Seagal.

So close in name.

Stephen Seagull.

No, so

Steve Coogan.

What?

Steve Coogan was the first ever person to be filmed.

He made a movie called Around the World in 80 Days.

It was the Jules Verne movie, and he's the first person to be filmed in it for a movie.

They got access to it for the first time ever.

It had never been featured in a film before.

Like, it had never been probably.

Well, if it had been featured, it was just purely a shot as opposed to someone walking and doing dialogue.

Or it would have been a set or something like that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So, on the Great Wall of China, you know the whole thing about whether you can see it from space or not.

So,

in 2003, China sent its first astronaut, or as they call them, Tycho Naut, because Tycho is Chinese for space.

They sent the first astronaut up, Yang Liue, and he said, guys, I can't see it.

And everyone panicked.

And it was a really big problem.

And eventually they decided you could see it, but actually, you can only see it from a really low orbit when the weather's good and if you've got a powerful telephoto lens.

They should paint it pink.

Yeah, they should do something different.

Because it's quite, they do really care about it.

Every single Chinese astronaut that has been up has been given the role of looking for the Great Wall of China and has failed to find it.

So the photos that they did get, the astronaut who took the photos where you could see it if you looked really closely and sort of blew it up quite to a big photo.

He said he just didn't know if it was in the photo at the time when he took it.

So it was by coincidence that he managed to get it.

And in 2006,

someone went on television in China associated with their space program.

And this is what he said.

He said, we need to carry out more tests and improve astronaut training.

So that's like still their main focus.

It's like, no, we don't want to ride it off just yet.

But do you know when it dates back to?

It dates back to before.

astronauts.

Well the earliest I found is Ripley of Believe It or Not Fame.

In 1932 he said that it's the mightiest work of man.

It was the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the moon, which it definitely isn't.

But there was a writer in 1754 called William Stukely who said, and this was about Hadrian's wall, he said, it's a mighty wall of four score miles in length, which makes a considerable figure on the terrestrial globe and may be discerned at the moon.

Wow.

That was about Hadrian's wall.

I know.

Which you can barely see from like standing on tiptoes.

I wonder if Helen Sharman had a look down to see if she could see Hadrian's wall.

And if not, I think we need to send some more Brits up to see if we can see it or not.

We need more training.

Tim Peake's going up.

We could give him a special mission to do it.

That's what I really liked, by the way.

The first mention that you could see it from the moon was the Ripley's Believe It or Not book.

And I didn't realize that Ripley's Believe It or Not was an actual question.

And that's what it feels like.

Okay, so not.

I don't believe it.

It feels like it's an actual.

god is that what the whole like 50 of that book was saying is false maybe we've been all reading it wrong yeah damn it so i was looking at sticky rice because i'm i thought it's surely more interesting than the great wall of china so um every year in japan they eat these sticky rice cakes and the health department's had to advise people that before they eat the cakes they need to cut them into small pieces chew them slowly and learn how to perform basic first aid before indulging because so many people keep choking on them wow i think maybe it's the same substance that they used to build the great wall because it's people just there's an epidemic epidemic.

Maybe it's drying up and lodging in their throat like a concrete ball.

It's doing that.

Yeah, I can't swallow it down.

Did you know that an Italian bride recently was rushed to hospital because people were showering her with rice as she was exiting the church and she got a bit of rice stuck in her ear and had to be hurried to the ER?

She was okay.

There's like a common myth that if you throw rice on the ground, then pigeons will exit it and explode, but it's not true.

Ah.

Have we ever tested it?

No I don't really want to do that experiment just on the off chance that Snopes is wrong on this one.

We paused the podcast right now and came back 20 minutes later.

Oh my god there it is.

Flooding guts everywhere.

Chapalga Square is a mess.

Shall we move on soon to our next fact?

Yeah, I have one more thing on the Great Wall.

Yeah.

Just going along the Steve Coogan line, the first man, we think, to walk the complete Great Wall of China was an American.

It was an American adventurer called William Edgar Geil.

And he was a really incredible guy.

And he trekked across Africa and he travelled along the Yangtze River.

He did all these amazing expeditions.

And no one's heard of him these days.

It was late 19th century.

And

when he died, he left $3,000 to commission a biography of himself.

He wrote, My life has been unusual, and the story of it is likely to benefit young people.

He's very, very confident.

And

he wrote the first ever ever book in the West about the Great Wall of China, and he said he wanted it to be so good that any historians in future writing about it would find little to write about unless he pirated our notes.

Just one more thing about rice.

Have you guys heard of Dakigokochi?

And I don't know if that's how you pronounce it.

Almost certainly not.

But in Japan, this was a tradition.

In 2008, it suddenly became a craze where you get a rice-filled bag and you draw a baby's face on it.

If you've got a friend who's had a baby and you present that to them as a gift, and so you try to draw the baby that they've had, like an image of it on a bag of rice and that's your baby warming present that's weird isn't it what purpose is that serving is it like in those um sitcoms where they give a child like a bag of flour to look after as if it was a baby i had that at my school yeah i went to a really backward school it strikes me sometimes when i think yeah we had to care for a flower baby in year seven yeah so do you think maybe it's the same kind of thing if you look after the rice and don't accidentally boil it

it means you're okay for looking after babies or if you must accidentally boil one of these two things that you've just got, make sure it's the rice.

That's very confusing, though, because you think, oh, that's lovely.

I'll have that rice for my supper.

Oh, no!

Or it's like, well, I need some mortar to put up this brick wall.

Oh, no!

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

My fact is that the world's largest single-celled organism can get up to 12 inches long.

That's great.

That's incredible.

Yeah, it's amazing.

What is it?

It's an algae or an alga.

It's called Calerpa taxifulla, and it's a single cell, and yet it gets up to a foot long, and it has all these different things in it.

So it looks like a plant.

It has these fronds, which look like leaves, and then it's got little root-like bits as well, which hold it in place.

But it is one cell.

Wow.

It's so cool.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Single-celled organisms, I've realized, are much more complicated, can be much more complicated and interesting than you would imagine.

Like, there's one that's recently been discovered that has kind of what they think are eyes, isn't there?

Which take up about a third of its body, and it is just one cell.

Are you talking about guano weeds?

I sure am.

Or what are they called?

Ocellic.

They're called oceloids.

Oceloids.

I like things, little black dots inside the single-celled organism, and it seems like they appropriate bacteria to be used as their eye.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, so the cornea, what you would count as a cornea, is actually a little bacterium, and the retina, which what you would think is similar to a human retina, is actually another bacterium.

That's amazing.

I know.

But then have they become a multicellular organism?

That's a good point.

But this was discovered, wasn't it, more than 100 years ago by this guy who saw it under the microscope and said, look, this thing has eyes.

And no one believed him.

And so it was one of those things that we just assumed it didn't have eyes for another 120 years.

Do you think he went, believe it or not,

this thing has eyes?

Okay, Frank, we don't believe it.

I saw a fish today with four eyes.

Did you?

What?

Yeah, it's called the four-eye fish, and it has four eyes.

Is this the beginning of a joke?

No.

Where were you this morning?

I went to an aquarium.

Yeah, I went to the Hornyman Museum,

which has got an aquarium in it.

And yeah, they have one of their things, there's a four-eye fish.

So I think the point is they have kind of two eyes like a normal fish, but then the top of one eye is got a certain lens, and the bottom has a certain lens, so they can see outside the water as well as inside the water.

Is that right?

This is insane.

So cool.

The joke you were thinking of was, I saw a fish with no eyes.

A fish.

Yes, that's what I thought you were screwing up there.

Yeah, but you weren't.

It was just an interesting fact.

What do you call a fish with four eyes?

A fish.

Actually, sorry, there's another amazing single-celled organism which does a thing that's kind of similar to that.

And this is called the xenophyophreeze, which I think was the biggest known single-celled organism before yours came along.

Zeno504 means bearer of foreign objects, and that's because it makes it sort of constructs its own body out of stuff that's lying around.

So it kind of picks up bits of like dirt and dust and material off the ground and bacteria.

Like a Mr.

Potato Head.

It's exactly like a Mr.

Potato Head.

Yes.

I just remember, sorry, I just was talking about Mr.

Potato Head, just a little fact about that.

When Mr.

Potato Head came out, it was during rationing in America, and no one wanted to advertise it.

None of the advertisers would advertise it because they thought it would encourage children to play with their food.

And so until the rationing stopped, they couldn't really

advertise it anyway.

Or it could encourage children to eat plastic, which is inadvisable.

It had a face on it.

I thought it was a baby.

Sorry, Dan.

No, I was just going to say: so there's a DIY living thing that builds itself as it goes.

Well, it kind of builds itself extensions.

It kind of builds a house for itself.

But in the deep sea, there are these xenophyophores.

There are up to 2,000 every hundred square meters on the seabed.

Wow.

They're the kings down there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're the kings, really, one-celled organisms of the world.

They way outnumber multicellular organisms, don't they?

There are many more of them than there are of us, yeah.

So we're animals, and we, and at the very top level of

taxonomy is domain.

I think everyone else learned this in year nine biology, and I snoozed that lesson.

But I don't know, there are three domains, and every living thing that you know of fits into one.

So animals, plants, fungi, everything you think of as an animal fits into one.

And then there are two whole different domains for just these bacteria, basically.

Yeah.

You know, all of that.

And everyone else was learning that at school.

Anna was sweeping up flour from the flower.

Just on the idea of, so single-cell organisms, when I think of that, I just think of the earliest of life.

That's how we all came about, right?

So I was looking into early life and how we came about generally.

And I read about a thing that has been observed in deep space, 750

light years away from Earth.

It's a proto-star.

It's like a sun-like star shooting out these huge bullets of water.

And they actually think that that's how water is getting seeded around the universe from these kind of stars.

These huge, like huge amounts of water.

And so they say that if we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount of shooting out equals 100 million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second

yeah and their velocities are reaching 200,000 kilometers per hour so 80 fast 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun and they've been observing this these huge batches of water coming out of these stars and because I did read a long time ago there was a theory that maybe the way that Earth got water was from one of these a huge just whatever bullet of water coming towards us or ice i guess but um well they think do they think maybe comets because comets often have loads of ice on them they think an enormous comet might have provided a lot of I can't imagine that much water coming just from comets though.

It's controversial I think.

Yeah.

Well this this is just a this is quite a new report that's come out where they've observed a protostar shooting out a super soaker fifty nine million somewhere in the universe.

That's so amazing.

Yeah, I know, I couldn't believe it.

But you you think it's uh not fully okay.

I haven't read that after all, but um

some people think that water came from space, some people think it managed to be made on Earth.

It might might well be true, for all I know.

Speaking of early life forms, do you guys know about the boring billion?

No.

The boring billion is a period of time that scientists use to describe between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago when life just stopped evolving completely, and the whole of Earth, the only life on Earth, was one huge layer of slime.

That is so good.

For a billion years.

For a boring billion.

Was it like slime mold kind of amoeba kind of stuff?

It was.

It was like a,

what's it called?

A bacterial sheet.

Am I actually just like...

Like a mat kind of thing.

Yeah, it was like a microbial mat.

You still get microbial mats today.

There's a huge patch of them the size of

the size of grease, I think.

Yeah,

there's one layer of microbial mats on the bottom of the ocean.

It's just off Venezuela, and it's the size of grease.

And it can be up to seven centimetres thick, as in bottom to top.

And it's just this incredible web of strands and filaments and microbes living in these they look like little cowpats on the ocean floor and there's an area the size of Greece undersea which is these things as excited as Andy is getting about this I think he would have loved it in the boring billions

you should have been living in that time

I would have called it the brilliant billion

I randomly was flicking through the other day a book by Michael Palin on his trip to Brazil and the book's called Brazil and he was talking to a guy in the Amazon about deforestation and so on, and when they're actually just chopping down stuff.

And this guy said that the term that they all refer to when they talk about a size of area that they're deforesting in the Amazon, they call it one Belgium or six Belgiums.

Oh, do they?

Yeah, they use Belgium as the.

We would say whales, I think.

Like the size of whales is chopped down every two minutes or something.

Right.

Yeah, so they seem to like they'll say to each other, so they kind of use it as an unofficial

unit of measurement.

Yeah.

Something about bacteria.

Oh, yeah.

So the largest bacterium is called Theomargarita namibiensis.

That's actually quite a pretty name.

It sounds like a parent's actually named a child, doesn't it?

It is.

I tried to look up if there was anyone called Theo Margarita in the world.

And there was one guy.

He's a football agent, or he's signed up to be a football agent, but there's not really much about him.

He didn't seem that interesting.

But it's a shame.

But yeah, this is the biggest bacteria in the world.

It's big enough to be seen with the naked eye.

And its volume is 3 million times more than the average bacterium.

And I thought that if you had the average human and it was someone who was three million times bigger than that, it would be about ten times as large as the world's biggest tree.

It would be a human that size.

Wow.

Yeah, you don't want to be bullied by that guy.

These things are so cool.

So

I think it's the thickness of seven pages.

in a book.

If you hold those together, that's the width.

That's how long they get.

So you can see them.

Another thing about them is that these bacteria, the world's largest bacteria, is the same size as the world's smallest snail.

Oh, do they hang out?

But that's called Acmella nana, and it was only described this month, November 2015.

Imagine if you're that snail and you're like, oh, I feel like I'm just coming down with a bit of a bug.

That's actually the same size as me.

Cool.

And those two are both slightly larger than the very smallest plant in the world, which is a duckweed, and it gets just 0.6 millimetres.

That's an individual plant.

Oh, wow.

Tiny.

So I like to imagine all three of them.

And then I'm having a little crease of them.

This is just one thing I like about, because you mentioned it, giving things their scientific names.

The binomial naming system.

It just struck me the other day when I read it in a book that it's one of the only, maybe the only universal bit of language.

So wherever you go in the world, you're not going to be able to communicate with anyone who speaks a language you you don't, unless you need to describe a certain type of plant or a mole or something.

And then you just say, you know, puffiness, puffiness, and they're going to know exactly what you mean if they're a zoologist.

I wonder about computer code, it's a bit similar to that, maybe.

Yeah.

The other thing is, apparently, there's one word which is understood by everyone on earth, and that's huh?

There was a paper earlier this year saying that this word is everyone knows what that means.

Huh?

Do you have to make that ridiculous face with it that you just made

that I wish everyone could see?

Huh?

I started researching single-celled organisms and then quickly stopped because I didn't understand anything about it.

So I looked at the rest of the fact, which is that a single-cell organism can be up to 12 inches long.

When you're going to name stuff that's 12 inches long, Dan, I don't know if we want to put out this podcast.

Are you about to name other stuff that's 12 inches long?

Yeah.

Oh, God.

So I started looking into things that are 12 inches long.

One of the things is that two years ago, Subway got sued

because customers were complaining that their 12-inch foot-long sandwiches weren't in fact 12-inch foot-longs.

So you could bring in your single-celled organism to measure it against you.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And someone actually, there was a big class action lawsuit and they were representing customers who'd purchased the six-inch foot-long sandwiches anytime between January the 1st, 2003 and October the 2nd, 2015.

So if anyone felt like they were duped and had a bit of proof, they could come forward and say, actually, six years ago, I was pretty sure that was a bit shorter than a foot long.

It's like 11.9 inches.

Yeah, exactly.

And they had to pay up.

So Subway actually paid up for the settlements of $525,000 American.

And now they have to measure all of their bread.

But they could have just claimed that, oh, sorry, when we said foot long, we just meant as long as Michael's foot.

Michael's the guy on the opposite.

Michael Foot.

Michael Foot was much bigger than he was five or six feet, actually.

Can I give a really interesting theory, I think, about single-celled organisms that I read today?

It might be quite random.

I only read it in this one study.

Was it in Ripley's Believe It or not?

It sure was.

As it in the second half of the book.

But so it's quite a mystery why animals happened, why multi-celled organisms happened.

What was it that made single cells go to multi-cells?

There are various theories.

I like this theory, which is that it's because we're able to eat ourselves.

So, in so cells, organisms need food to survive, right?

So, they eat other cells, other things that are made of cells.

So, when cells were all clustered together, if they got hungry, they could just eat the cell next to them that they were attached to.

So, that meant they never got hungry.

But the cells that were single-celled organisms couldn't fight.

If they got hungry and there wasn't another single cell nearby, then they just starved to death.

And so, suddenly, it evolved that it's better to be, you know, multi-celled organisms happened because you could just eat the other bits of yourself.

So, you can digest yourself easily without having to go out looking for food.

And that's why they came into being.

In Sark, the island of Sark, there is a jail with a single cell.

You can fit two prisoners in it at a push.

And they have to be amoeba.

Do you want to know a cool thing about what I think is the oldest animal on Earth?

So, any guesses?

A tortoise.

Okay.

A.

It was something ocean-based, right?

So, well,

like coral.

Bruce Forsythe.

I think.

No, Dan's right on this one.

So, sponges are technically animals, which never fails to surprise me.

They are

in the animal kingdom, and they look just like sponges.

But there are these giant barrel sponges, which can be up to two and a half meters tall and that much across as well.

Single animals.

And some of those they think could be up to 2,400 years old.

Yeah.

Which outstrips anything else?

Do you know that you couldn't kill a sponge with your bare hands?

I disagree.

Because if you kind of try and rip it apart or pull it or anything like that, it will just regrow.

So how can they be killed?

Probably.

Let's say with fire.

I thought we were actually bringing them close to extinction because back in the day, before we used toilet paper, people would use sponges.

So we were sort of bottom-wiping them to death, basically.

Yeah.

As a species.

As in bacteria would then get into the ecosystem, is that right?

Dunno.

Oh.

Hang on, so we that implies that we didn't take it off to wipe our asses, we just sat on a huge lot of sponge on the ocean.

You took it out and put it back.

Put it back in, okay, reattached it.

In the old days, you had to swim to the bottom of the sea to wipe your bum.

It was terrible for the people living next to the Marianas trench, wasn't it?

They called it the Marianus Trench.

I've got quite a cool thing on amoeba, actually.

Just that.

So

there's an amoeba called the Chaos Amoeba, which I think is quite quite cool.

Or it's a Chaos is a genus of amoeba, and it was named by Linnaeus, and I think it was the first amoeba to be seen and named.

And then this reminded me, so Linnaeus obviously was responsible for seeing a lot of these little species and naming them for the first time.

And I was reading in a book the other day by Colin Tudge, who's amazing, and you should all read his books, that Linnaeus, when he went on botanical expeditions, would have a musical band leading the way and would make everyone dress in really wacky costumes.

Yeah.

Did everyone know that?

And whenever they found a new species, he would like ring a bell or something like that, or play a tooter horn or something.

See, I know you think the boring billion sounds fun, but I think that sounds like a more fun day out.

We're all working out where in history we're going to go with our type machines, aren't we?

Andy's been gone a while.

I said, How long have you been some slime?

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

My fact this week is that if you're bitten by the boom slang snake, you bleed from every orifice.

Frightening.

James finds it funny.

I find the word orifice funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty terrifying.

Even your gums.

Yeah, I mean,

every part of your body you could bleed from.

Yeah, your gums, your eyes, your nose,

your, you know, the bits down there.

Mariana strength.

Your Mariana strength, exactly.

Your Marianas.

Well, okay, I'll never call it anything else

again.

Anyway, so this is really horrible.

We shouldn't be laughing.

No, but it's fine.

This is the boom slang snake, which is quite a cool name, is not particularly dangerous because it very, very rarely attacks people.

I think it's only killed seven people on record.

But when it does kill you, it has a venom which is called a hematoxin, which destroys your blood cells.

And the first recorded incident was an expert on snakes who got bitten by it when he was in his lab and he thought nothing of it because it's just a tiny little bruise.

And he actually, because he was a snake expert, he noted down the symptoms as they went along and spent the day going, oh, my bruise is looking a little bit purple.

I'll get a little tiny bit sore now.

And then he was dead within 24 hours because suddenly, about six to eight hours later, you start bleeding

everywhere.

Yes, I think he was.

Yeah.

And I think, was it thought to be harmless at the time, the boom slang?

So he said,

if he'd been bitten by a snake then thought to be dangerous, he obviously would have been really worried.

But he just thought, oh, it's just a boom slang.

I love, so the boom slang, so it's killed seven people with its bite i reckon it's only seven because it must be such an ordeal for it to actually bite someone properly because its fangs are located at the back of its mouth yeah so for some ridiculous reason evolution put it back there so in order to bite it has to open its mouth 170 degrees like this huge

and then make the bite but that's that's just such an odd placement that's amazing and they're called they're called back-fanged snakes aren't they and there are loads of species of snake which yeah i don't really understand it either supposedly when they bite you boom slangs they have to, it looks as though they're chewing on their prey.

Right.

Supposedly, when they bite their prey, it looks as though they're chewing on them, but actually, all they're doing is working the venom into their prey.

But because they have to open their mouths so wide to get their fangs actually in there, then they need to, it looks like they're chomping on you.

Have you guys heard of the Japanese tiger keelback?

No,

it is the most badass snake.

This snake is incredible.

So, it can bite you and kill you with a poison, with a toxin.

However, it's a non-venomous snake.

And what it does is it bites poison frogs.

It takes from it the venom and the toxin from the toad, and then it lets it drip back to its back fangs as well.

And it keeps it in these little, I think, pouches.

And then it bites something and it uses the poison that it's carried over to kill its enemy.

That's insane, right?

That's amazing.

Yeah.

That's because it takes a lot of energy to make your own venom, doesn't it?

And so it's actually really clever.

It's much less energy to just go and nick it off someone else and like work out with your test tubes inside your body how to actually concoct one.

Do they tell each other though?

Like, do the snakes go, it's cool, there's no venom, but that toad will give you it.

You just have to put it to your back.

Like, how do they pass that knowledge on?

Is it like with beavers?

They just know how to build dams when they're born.

Are they keelbacks?

Did you say?

Yeah.

So, um, female keelbacks, um, when they have babies and the babies don't have any venom yet, they'll find um a toad and then collect the venom from the toad and then give it to the children so that they have some

venom when they're first born.

So, that might might be observational.

It could be, yeah.

Yeah.

Do you guys know how many people would you guess?

I think I told Addie this the other day, so don't answer it.

How many people would you two guess per year are killed by snakes?

Around the world?

Around the world, yeah.

I would say about 100.

How many people do you reckon, Dan?

Oh God, I don't know.

Maybe something ridiculously low, like seven, because we have so much.

It's 200,000.

What?

Really?

200,000 people a year.

They're the most dangerous animal aside from mosquitoes.

And there's a massive health emergency because it's a really unfashionable thing for pharmaceutical companies to be investing in because everywhere where snakes are dangerous is in like rural, developing, the poorest areas.

And so lots of pharmaceutical companies are stopping producing certain antivenom, which is killing a lot of people.

But 200,000 people a year, that's more than you would have expected, right?

That's crazy.

It's insane.

Yeah, there was a guy recently who survived a brown snake attack, which is, I think, Australia's most dangerous snake.

He was doing a charity walk and he came across a snake that he thought was dead and it leapt up and it bit him.

But he survived the attack because this entire walk, which was right across, a huge walk in Australia, he was wearing a stormtrooper outfit from Star Wars and so it hit the plate on

his shin.

And he made all the news in Australia.

I'm not surprised.

Yeah.

And

every single news channel that interviewed him asked him if he was a massive Star Wars nerd and he went, no.

He doesn't even like Star Wars.

It's like, what is is Star Wars?

I was just wearing my anti-snake suit.

Wow, amazing.

I read a list yesterday of the 1,295 venomous snakes.

There's a list of them online.

I'm not sure it's all of them, but I think it might be pretty close.

Do you want to hear some of the names?

Yeah, yes, please.

Okay, the Moorish snake.

Moorish with two O's?

Or like, okay, not as in once you've had one, you just can't stop.

The tiger cat snake, which I really like because it's it's like three animals in one.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a bit like there's a hawk moth caterpillar, I think.

I think maybe it must get really upset because it's called the hawk moth caterpillar.

And then when it turns into a moth, I reckon it thinks that must be the things I turn into as I keep going on.

It spends the rest of its life waiting to become a hawk.

Anyway, it's incredible if you Google it because it can disguise itself as a snake in order to repel birds.

And so it's like its underside has this pair of false eyes on it, and it sort of causes itself to become a bit engorged where the snake's head would be and if you look at pictures it looks exactly like the head of a snake except that it's obviously caterpillar-sized so I don't know what kind of a frightening snake is three inches long but it works.

That's great.

They've apparently found out that snakes are actually 70 million years older than we first thought they were.

These snakes sometimes were massive.

One of them, this is what they ate, dinosaurs.

It was a dinosaur-eating snake.

That's amazing.

Although you did get small dinosaurs back in the day.

I know, but just the word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You just imagine it kind of locking its jaws around like a diplodocus.

Exactly, yeah.

It says it ate small mammals, lizards, and even dinosaurs.

I read quite a cool news story from 1996 about a snake, and I'm going to say now I wouldn't recommend this because actually, if a snake bite, you're not supposed to create a tawny K because people often think that's the right thing to do, but actually, sometimes that can trap the venom in the wrong place and then make it more harmful than it otherwise would have been.

However, it does sometimes work.

In 1996 in Texas, a man was bitten by a poisonous coral snake.

He killed the reptile by biting off its head and then peeled off its skin and used it as a tourniquet to wrap around the injury.

That's amazing.

That's pretty hardcore, isn't it?

That is super hardcore.

You know they can hear through so I don't know if this is all species of snake, but they can hear through their jawbone.

So their jawbone's on the ground, but what's really interesting is that their jawbone is split into two.

So they can work out the direction.

Because if the left jawbone is going, boo, there's a little guy over there, yeah, they can suddenly be going, oh, okay, left jawbone.

All right, let's make a move.

It also has two ways of smelling, and one is the classic way, you know, classic snake smell way.

The other is through its tongue tasting the air.

And that's how it smells as well.

So when you see a snake and it's kind of sticking out its tongue, just like Hannah's doing now, it's trying to kind of see if it can taste any predators or prey.

Okay.

Speaking of being able to hear, do you know the death adder?

No.

Okay, the Death Adder,

it kills a lot of people.

A lot of people are killed by it, but it's not called the Death Adder because of that.

It used to be called the Death Adder, and then it just kind of got switched around.

And it's because when early people went to Australia, they saw it and it never ran away from humans.

And so they assumed that it just couldn't hear the humans.

And so they thought it was deaf.

Does this make sense?

I like the fact that the deaf adder became the death adder due to a mishearing, basically.

Have you seen footage of flying snakes?

Oh, yeah, they're amazing.

They're phenomenal.

They go a long way, don't they?

They go a long way.

Where do they get flying to?

So if they're off on a tree and they want to get to the ground, but they kind of want to cover some distance while they're in the air.

They always fly from somewhere higher to somewhere lower.

Yes,

never the other way.

Very good point.

So it's not, I guess it's more a parachuting.

mechanism that they do because they flatten their body into a sort of spiral almost like when you see in the olympics the ribbons that they do when that ribbon display It's like that.

I mean birds are still laughing in their faces.

Yeah, but give it a few million years and you won't be laughing when there are flying snakes with wings.

You'll be harking back to that time of the boring billions.

Longing for some slime.

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

My fact this week is that Albert Einstein has a social media team.

Okay.

Yeah.

So he has, this is a genuinely devoted team who are paid specifically to keep up his Twitter presence, his Facebook output, his tumbling.

I did know his Twitter presence had fallen a bit by the wayside over the past 70 years since he died.

How does it feel to be less technologically a debt than somebody who's been dead for 50 years?

Yeah, fair point.

So you will see on Twitter that people set up accounts for dead historical characters.

Someone even has done one for God, and they run it as if they are God.

Yeah, but that's got a verified account.

Exactly.

So that's the difference.

Albert Einstein has a little blue tick next to his Twitter account because it's a verified account.

He on Facebook has a little tick as well.

He's got 17 million followers on Facebook.

17 million.

So this is Corbis who looks after his output and they have the license to his image.

And as a result of the money that they get from it, he is the fifth most profitable dead person, basically.

He makes he's the so I think only people like maybe Kirk Cobain and a few others Elvis Elvis and maybe John Lennon

yes and the fourth is Charles Schultz who drew peanuts really because his books are still so popular and still so love but I I was very skeptical about this because I thought this sounds terrible using Einstein's image after his death for profit it turns out that actually on his death he left the rights to his image to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem which he co-founded so he said you can have the rights to my image after I die and use it to to make money for the university.

So they licensed out to Corbis the right to use this image.

And Corbis take a cut of the money, basically, but most of it goes back to the Hebrew University.

So it is actually an odd way of fulfilling your will or, you know, having a charitable legacy.

They actually really care about it.

The guy who runs the team at Corbis says that every day he thinks about what Einstein stands for and what he doesn't stand for, and then he sends out a tweet or he sends out a Facebook message reflecting what he thinks Einstein might have said about a situation.

Also, he corrects people who misattribute quotes to Einstein.

So Einstein will write back to them.

In one case, he wrote to one of the Kardashians saying, Einstein never said that.

So he's also doing damage limitation on the spread of misinformation.

And I just love the quote.

There was a guy at Corbus, not the guy who actually runs Einstein's account, but one of the managers there, Kevin Connolly, who said, it's not rocket science running Einstein's social media presence.

Yeah, they also point out that no one on the Corbus team has any scientific expertise.

Yeah.

So that, yeah.

Einstein still gets five to ten requests for an autograph every day.

What?

It's true.

Like people ask on Twitter for his autograph.

I'm afraid I don't have much more detail than that.

But I suspect they go disappointed most of the time.

Einstein, those pictures of him from the 30s look old.

These guys are in, and they're in black and white, so you can tell they're a long time ago.

How ancient do they think this guy is?

Yeah.

So, Einstein's a bit slightly disturbing person, right?

Because he seems to have no flaws.

Well, he has one flaw.

He has one flaw, but in every other way, he's so great.

So, all these quotes that he said that are all so wise and brilliant, he's this great pacifist, he's a genius.

If you read, you know, the I think New Scientist or Scientific American a couple of months ago did the top 10 greatest scientists of all time, and you can feel they all want to be a bit left-field, but in the end, they all say Einstein's the one.

And yet, he had this weird relationship with his wife.

So, his list of ways that his wife had to behave around him if the marriage was to function is so weird.

So, yeah, they were on the brink of a divorce, and then they decided to hold the marriage together for the kids.

And in part of the deal was Einstein wrote this letter to her.

And it's featured in the Letters of Notebook.

If anyone has that, you can see it.

What does it say?

So, the conditions of him of them remaining together, it was a contract that he wrote up that she had to sign, and she had to say that she would make sure that his clothes and laundry were kept in good order, that he'd get his three meals regularly in his room, bedroom and study kept neat, stuff like that.

But then you will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons.

You will stop talking to me if I request it.

That's an insane one.

You will stop talking to me if I request it.

I mean, it just doesn't sound like me.

I'd be pleased.

I mean, this doesn't sound like a guy who'd be great on social media if he actually was allowed.

yeah, he just blocks her.

Basically,

this is what he promises her in return.

In return, I assure you, of proper comportment on my part, such as I would exercise to any woman as a stranger.

Oh,

ouch.

And she signed it.

What an ass.

What an ass.

And then they divorced a couple of years later, I think.

Oh, did they?

Yeah.

All right.

Couldn't keep it up.

Kept on yabbering on, didn't she?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

You know what the weirdest thing about that list is?

It feels really awkward having to say bad stuff about Einstein?

But it's true, this is who he was.

But you really kind of, I feel almost dirty saying this out loud, but it's kind of, it's just true.

Yeah.

It's odd.

Well, that's because of the expert work being done by the folks at Corbett

who very rarely tweet, you will not talk to me if I request it.

So Einstein was also an inventor because he worked in the patents office, didn't he?

But he did a few inventions.

My favorite one is a blouse with two sets of buttons sewn parallel to each other so that that it would fit both a slim person and a fat person.

It's such a good idea.

It means that you can use the slim buttons and if you put on a load of weight, then you can use the fat buttons.

Did he release that into the market or did he just invent it?

He invented it and patented it, but no one ever made it.

I don't think I've got shirt cuffs where you can do it.

In case you put a lot of weight on your wrists,

you know, like cake goes straight to my wrists.

Anyway, yeah, he had some other he painted a hearing aid, I think, and a refrigerator,

which didn't take off at the time,

literally or metaphorically, and wasn't really bought.

But now they're thinking about reintroducing it because it's very environmentally friendly.

So it was very ahead of his time.

It's not the reason he did it, though.

He did it because fridges at the time were lethal.

So they all used gases like ammonia.

to actually do the cooling of the food or other gases like methyl chloride.

And several people died as a result of these gases leaking out into their homes, basically.

So Einstein was one of several scientists who worked on fixing that.

And in 1925, he co-developed with a former student a fridge and he patented it, but then they invented a non-poisonous refrigerant, which just worked better.

Do you know Yoda was based on Einstein?

No.

No.

The guy who designed Yoda said he based it on a combination of himself and Einstein.

It was Stuart Freeborn.

So hang on.

If one element of Yoda is taken from Stuart?

Yeah.

Yes.

From Einstein, it means that Stuart must must be two foot tall and breathing.

When Einstein became really famous and he had lectures, people really wanted to go to the lectures even though they didn't understand any of it.

And so he would start a lecture and then stop after five minutes and say, I will now pause so that those with no further interest in the subject can leave.

And pretty much everyone would go and there'd just be like two or three people left.

Wow.

In Oxford, I visited it quite a few times.

I didn't understand what I was looking at.

But you can see the chalkboard that Einstein, when he came to England to explain E equals MC squared, you can see the chalkboard where all the workings out are on there.

It's quite nice.

It's a weird bit of history to look at.

Although, weirdly,

nowhere on the chalkboard does it say E equals M C Square.

So I just have to assume that they're telling the truth.

You were definitely one of the people in the lectures, weren't you?

Who as soon as you sat down, I was like, God, five minutes.

I've got to wait until he excuses me.

I'm definitely not here for the science.

It's just that thing Dana was saying before about taxonomy being everywhere in the world.

I guess mathematics as well is another one.

Yeah.

So any mathematician can talk to each other about maths by just using the symbols.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know how Einstein's brain was chopped up?

Yeah.

There's now an app that you can get, and I think it's for doctors,

where they've got high-res images of the brain.

You can download it and you can go close into it and you can just...

And I don't know what purpose it has because they're not quite sure how it fully fits together.

I would say the main purpose is to get £2.49 on people.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But I mean, that's quite cool, just the idea that even his brain is now sort of an app.

An app.

Yeah.

Also, interestingly, so just going back to the sort of naughtier side of Einstein,

there's an idea that his granddaughter, who was raised by Hans, which was his son,

was in fact an illegitimate love child of Einstein's.

Her name was Evelyn.

And she was actually given a bit of Einstein's brain.

And the idea was that she was actually going to do a DNA checkup to see if she was related because she got no money at all.

Like the will, when it went to the Hebrew University, his likeness and all that stuff, they didn't give her a cut of anything.

And the most exciting thing about her, though, is that for a period of about 13 years, she was married to Grover Krantz, who all the Bigfoot enthusiasts out there will know is the first scientist to believe in and try to prove the existence of Bigfoot.

Right.

Yeah, so she was associated with two great men.

The constant debate, who has given more to science, Einstein or Groverkrant.

Can we do a quick thing on social media?

Social media, particularly after death.

Because there are companies now which offer to keep tweeting the kind of things that you would have tweeted after you die.

So they'll take a sample of all your previous tweets.

And their slogan is, when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting.

I've read I was reading a story about these firms and there was one businesswoman who had registered her interest in having that and she said um it would be interesting to have a quotes kind of ironic legacy.

But then she said but I'm not sure who'd be interested in reading a computer generated me.

In the cold light of day, it is a very conceited thing to do.

Which is very I think self-aware.

Yeah.

And there's another one called Eterne Me, I think, which you sort of can train your avatar.

So it recommends that if you sign up to it, the best way to have as realistic tweeting as possible after you die is to properly train up your avatar and feed it with your whole personality.

So give it all your pictures, all your tweets.

And then it creates this thing that looks like you and that can, you know, speak to people as you would have.

Wow.

It's so mad.

Oh, brave new world.

Yeah.

There's a guy called Joe Veeks of Vikes, and he is a writer for the music and pop culture website Death and Taxes.

And he has.

Wait, sorry, did he say Death and Taxes?

Sorry, go on.

And he's kind of gone on to HootSuite, which is an app which will send tweets in the future.

So you can do it for a tweet next week.

If you're not going to be in the country, it'll just send it.

But anyway, he has got some messages to be sent out in 2086, and he wants to be the last person to ever tweet.

And he reckons that just Twitter, with it being an internet company or whatever, or just any company really, probably still won't be going in those times.

But he will still have one last tweet.

Oh, wow.

But if Twitter doesn't exist, how will it go out?

Yeah.

You could still post on MySpace even though no one's going on there anymore.

That's true.

Wait, what do you mean?

Hashtag get Andy off MySpace.

There are some things, Twitter accounts, that make me really happy I'm not on Twitter.

So one of them is the one of them is at Schreibaland.

At Schreibaland is right there on a par with the Big Ben Twitter feed.

Which is fantastic.

What are you talking about?

Big Ben clock is so good.

It's great.

At one o'clock it tweets bong.

At two o'clock, it tweets bong bong.

And it's been doing that for years, every hour.

Okay, so that's Andy's favourite twitter.

Yeah, but it does do that.

And one that I do like, though, is,

have you guys seen Kim Kierkegaard?

Kim what?

Kim Kierkegaard.

No, no.

It's a combination of Kim Kardashian and Kierkegaard.

Great.

And it says, it's the philosophy of Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian.

And it includes things like, filling in the eyebrows with a pencil or powder helps helps eliminate the imperfection that pertains to everything human.

It's really fun.

That's great.

It's so clever.

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, you can get us all on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

And you can also go to no such thingasafish.com where you can listen to all of our previous episodes.

Thank you so much for listening.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.