70: No Such Thing As A Rat Multiborg

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, sitting here with Anna Chasinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order. Here we go.
Starting with you, Andrew Hutter-Murray.

My fact is that babies practice their first words before saying them out loud, which is very sweet. I love that.
Wait, how do we know?

Well,

this is from a study at the University of Washington where scientists scanned babies' brains and observed what happened when they were being spoken to.

And bits of their brains light up, different parts of the brain light up. And some of the bits are associated just with listening and taking in information.

And other bits are associated with actually planning the motor movements that you need to say words. So even when they are listening, they are trying to figure out how to make that sound, basically.

So that's what it is. It's just that they're figuring out how to make sounds.
But don't they all finally reach the same word? Isn't it all mama? No. Is it not?

I thought that was the first word. George Orwell's first word was supposedly beastly.

Yeah.

Very good. That says more about his mother than about him.
Yeah, true. Considering you're at Animal Farm, though.
Yeah, that's true.

Dada is the most common. 15% of babies apparently

have dada. Followed by daddy 13%,

mama 10%, dad 10%,

mummy 8%, mum 7%,

cat 2%, dog 1%.

I found a survey from 2014 where more than one in eight parents claimed their child's first word was tablet as in a tablet computer.

Although this was a technology firm who make device protection cases who sponsored the research. And it also found that babies break tablets a lot.

So they sponsored the research, and by coincidence, that's the word that comes out of the mouse.

Babies, I think, might be a lot cleverer than we give them credit for.

There was a study done where they tested whether hundred-hour-old babies, so a bunch of babies who are only a few days old, could count,

and they'd show them a series of images with a certain number of shapes on them.

So they'd show them like a bunch of circles, and one picture would have three circles in it, one picture would have four circles, one would have five circles, etc.

And then at the same time, they would play them recordings with a certain number of like bleeps on them.

And when they played a recording of let's say three bleeps, then the babies would look towards the picture with three circles on it, and it was like they were connecting the

you know, they were counting the number of bleeps and then associating it with the vision. Isn't that incredible? Like four days old.
They can count up to twenty-seven iPads though.

I read a thing about swearing in children, and it took children from one to twelve, and it just measured a host of different swear words. So how frequently they use them.

And so for one and two-year-olds, the most frequent swear word that they use is poopy. Is this pre-curfew? Because if so, I don't think we're allowed to say that.

That falls off very rapidly by the age of seven or eight.

Jerk is big around for three and four-year-olds, then tails off, it has a huge dip in the graph. Do you know that newborn babies recognise the theme song from their mum's favourite soap opera?

Do they? They tested this, an old study in 1988.

Yeah, they tested it. They also tested them on made-up words.
Oh, yeah.

So they made up a word like, I don't know, titu or something, and they played it to them more than 25,000 times while the mother was pregnant. Oh, my God.

And after birth, unsurprisingly, the baby recognised the word and its variations, and other babies didn't recognise it. Have you heard about

the way babies grip? Newborn babies, the strength of their grip. They can grip strongly enough to support their own weight.
Wow.

And they think that this is a hangover from I was just going to say, from being a chimp and having to pull yourself up the hairs or something. So, does that mean if you put your finger

in a baby's hand and they grab hold of it, you could lift it up? Yeah. Do you know how I know that with such confidence?

In 1891, back in the good old days, a researcher dangled 60 newborns from a walking stick to see how long they could last.

Wow. And the longest lasted two minutes, 35,

and the shortest lasted ten seconds. Oh, wow.
Two minutes thirty-five. Yeah.

How long was this stick that he could get sixteen infants dangling?

That is

incredible. Sixty.
Sixty.

Sixty. There must be one at a time.
I think it was one. Sadly, I think it was one at a time.

Another thing babies can do, which I think is quite exciting, is they have they seem to have an innate awareness of organs and how bodies work.

So there was a study done where there were like moving toys given to a bunch of toddlers, and then they split the dolls in half and they showed them to the babies, and they made it so the dolls were completely hollow on the inside.

And the babies were really confused.

So when they split a doll in half and there was nothing on the inside, the babies would like show obvious signs of bewilderment and look inside properly as if to say, Where the hell are his organs?

It's alive. I don't think that shows detailed knowledge of human anatomy.
I wouldn't trust them to do an operation.

I'd still go for Dr. A, the animal doctor, or Dr.
B, the baby in the coat. Yeah.

Do you know that

babies can't taste salt until they're four months old? They can also taste with their cheeks, which we can't do. Isn't that cool? As in if they could just hold the thing to their cheeks.

Oh, that is delicious. It needs more basil.

More salt. I mean, I don't know, actually.

It has to be the inside of their cheeks, sadly. But even so, quite cool.

Taste buds all over their cheeks. They've got taste buds on their cheeks.
That's very cool. That would be really fun.
It's a weird idea being able to taste with your cheeks. We could once do it.

So I was reading a story in the British Newspaper Archive in the Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough in 1887. And a man has written this letter into the newspaper.
This man got on a train in 1887.

A man in his early twenties got on the train carriage with him and was holding a baby, even though the man looked very young to be engaged in such a manner.

So, you know, early 20s, bit young to have a baby. The baby started crying and the man pinched the baby quite hard and it started crying a lot more.

And so a couple of women nearby said, Oh, if you do, if you keep doing that, you shouldn't do that to a baby. If you keep doing that, we're going to cool security.

And the young man said, I'll do what I like. And taking the baby by its long robe, began to swing it around and around so that its head came into contact with the door frame after each revolution.

And the shrieking became terrific.

And then bang, the train stops, the man gets out, leaving on the seat a broken Yankee rubber baby, which is a prank doll they used to have in the 1880s that apparently young men would take onto trains in order to terrify the living shit out of everyone else.

Wow. I think you mean the living poopy.

There's no way it sounded like it was going to be a really traumatic story. It's still awful.
And then it was just a doll, though, Andy. Still awful, though.
It's still traumatic.

I haven't recovered from the awfulness,

which I guess is the whole point of the prank. Yeah.
What a good prank that it's still affecting people, even

though it's like 130 years later. Yeah, I'm upset.
You're a

bastard on the train. This man should be so happy.
My God, he must be happy in his grave right now. Isn't that crazy?

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Chasinski. My fact is that the first pair of Nike trainers were made in a waffle iron.
Who's gonna quibble with my pronunciation of Nike? Nobody. Nobody.

No, ma'am. Nobody.
And

I reckon you're asking for a reason, right? You I mean technically, I guess we should say Nike, because that's how you pronounce it in ancient Greek. Well, that's how you pronounce the ancient Greek.

I always say Nike. You definitely shouldn't say Nike.
No, we have got some very exciting news. Two people wrote to the founder, the co-founder of Nike to ask, and he wrote back to them.
It's Nike.

They wrote to Philip Knight. He's the chairman, and I believe he's the co-founder.
He should change his name.

Philip Knight? To Nike. To Nike.

Or we should change it to Nike.

But they sent him, and they wrote the phonetic pronunciation of both. He just all he did was just circle and send it back to them and he circled nigh hyphen key as in a key, opening a door.

So it's Nike. It was named Nike was named by the first ever Nike employee who was called Jeff Johnson.

But it means victory in Greek, which you would pronounce in ancient Greek Nike.

So I mean maybe they're wrong about the pronunciation of their own brand. But Nike was the goddess, or Nike was the goddess of victory.

But I read that the thing she did was to fly around the battlefield, battlefield, lifting people up and bestowing honours on them and things like that. So she wouldn't ever have needed shoes.

No way.

Sorry, waffle lion. Yeah, sorry.
So we should go back to the first row of Nike trainers were made by Bill Bowerman, who was the Nike co-founder.

And he'd worked for this company making shoes for a few years. But in 1971, they released the first line of completely Nike trainers with the Nike label on them.

And the way he designed them was so they had a special way of gripping the ground.

He wanted to design like a better pair of running shoes, revolutionized running shoes that could work on a whole bunch of surfaces and design them with better grip, but not with like spikes like football spikes which would dig into the ground.

And he was discussing this conundrum, like how to develop trainers with good grip with his wife over breakfast.

And she got some waffles out of the oven and she was brainstorming at the time and saying, why don't you try attaching some bits of my jewelry or something to the bottom of shoes and seeing if that works or something like that.

He was like, yeah, you know that waffle you're holding? What if we turn that upside down and put it on the bottom of a trainer? And then he disappeared,

went back to his lab, got two cans of like this liquid plastic that you use to make trainers, came back, seized the waffle iron off his wife, poured the liquid plastic into the waffle iron, and there was born the first soul of Nike trainers, which is that waffle soul.

So

I think this resurfaced recently because they found the waffle iron. Yeah, they did.

And I read that when they found this old waffle iron, which had just been in a rubbish tip at the back of the founder's garden for ages and ages. Do you know why it was in a rubbish tip? No.

It was because he so it wasn't even in a rubbish tip, it was buried because Bill Bauman, in the place that he lived in America, it was like up a hill or something, and it was too far for like rubbish truck drivers to come.

And so he'd just bury it all in the garden. And his granddaughter or daughter, I can't, I think it was a daughter, wasn't it? Was just like found this a few years ago.

It was like, there's this huge pile of stuff buried in our garden, just rubbish. He didn't live on a hill at first.
He just kept on burying all of his household waste, and eventually he did.

But when they discovered this thing, I read this line:

It truly is the headwaters of our innovation. Nike historian Scott Ream said.
From a historian's standpoint, it's like finding the Titanic.

Which it's not.

And also, historians do kind of like the Titanic as well, don't they? Yeah, it's quite the same thing.

It's not like the history equivalent of finding the Titanic, because the Titanic is the history equivalent of finding the.

But Nike has a Nike has a historian. Yeah, that makes sense.

It must be a really easy job up until the mid-20th century.

1875, still nothing.

I don't know, like 400 BC, goddess of victory. 1912, Titanic sinks.
Don't really give a shit about that.

From a historian's point of view, this would be like finding the first ever Nike shoe.

The waffle iron that was used to make this first pair of trainers had been in use in the the Barriman family since 1936. This was quite impressive.

They must have been pissed off when he broke it, right?

Yeah, it's so casual, just ruining it. Just in number second, did he? He broke it.
It was not usable after that.

Yeah, I think it tasted of like hot plastic.

Do you know where waffles come from?

They're actually derived from religious wafers. Oh, yeah.
Used for communion as well as just to make food.

But you used to have wafer irons, which in French were called moule à blis, and they had biblical scenes on them.

That was the first waffle design, and communion wafers normally had a picture of Jesus and his crucifixion on them, because they were for holy use.

Interesting thing about um communion wafers is Catholics at least do this.

Um you would go up and they would put the uh wafer directly into your mouth and the reason that they did that is to stop people from stealing them because people used to get them in their hands, pretend to put them in their mouths and then take them home and they would do like um magic incantations with them or sprinkle them on the crops to make them grow better or if someone's got to be able to do it.

Or pour golden syrup and bacon over them and enjoy a Canadian breakfast.

Well, speaking of untrustworthiness, which I guess that speaks to, waferers, which are people who sold waffles or wafers in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, were apparently notoriously untrustworthy.

So they were described in the literature at the time as designing persons, thieves, etcetera, who took up wafering as a cloak for dishonest practices, and they appear in various literature uh in the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, like Chaucer, as typically bad people, and they had to be abolished in 1826, the practice of being a waferer

because they were so untrustworthy. Also, I like this quote, I can't remember where I read this in some history magazine, but it was Charles IX who enacted the first ever waffle legislation in 1560.

So, as well as being untrustworthy, I think they were quite violent waferers, or oubliers, as they were, as you said, they were called in France, and they kept on getting into fights with each other when they were selling too close to one another.

So, the first waffle legislation was to say exactly how much space there had to be between two wafer sellers, because otherwise, they couldn't be trusted not to beat the crap out of each other.

That's why they had a picture of the crucifixion on them. It was Jesus saying, you have to be this far apart, guys.

No fighting.

You were saying about how waffle guys were untrustworthy. Well, these days they are quite trustworthy.
The Waffle House in America

are famous for staying open no matter what. If there's a disaster, they'll stay open.
And they pride themselves on you always be able to go there and get a waffle if there's a problem.

And that means that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, if ever they see that a waffle house is closed, they know that that's the kind of place they need to go and give aid to because that must be the worst.

If the waffle house closed, then it must be pretty worse. No way, then that's the impulse.

That's amazing.

So they always, so when disaster strikes, they still when disaster strikes, if there's loads of different counties that are obviously all kind of in trouble, if the waffle house is closed in one of them, they'll go

it's quite a good tip, though, actually, if you own a waffle house in a disaster struck area to close it and that's going to bring help.

Or if you're the mayor of a disaster struck area, blow up the waffle house.

Also a good tip.

There are 60,000 Nikes which fell off a ship and they are followed by meteorologists and oceanographers to see the currents of the oceans

in the same way that those rubber ducks were at that time. Yeah, so they say things like, we've been running some experiments.

No,

I would have thought they would say that all the time.

I'm sure they didn't. I would love it if you went into that office and you said that, and it was the first time they heard that.

And you were the hero of the office. You met Andy, it's amazing.
Hi, I'm here for my training. Are there any trainers about?

I don't want to waffle. Oh, no, it's too far.

It's too far. They won't get that one.

In the corner, the Nike historian's pissing himself.

These shoes that fell off the ship, they're still wearable. If you find them on a beach, you can still wear them.

Which means that people collect them and they have impromptu swap meets where people who have two lefts swap one for a right, or if they have two different sizes, they try and swap them.

That's amazing. That is really incredible.

There's a charity called Because International which has developed a shoe that grows with your foot so that because it's a major problem in in developing countries, is that people can't afford shoes, and so they're barefoot all the time they grow out of their shoes.

And it can grow up to seven sizes, I think. So it grows by sort of curving outwards as your foot grows.
So as a kid, you can have it when you're, you know,

four and still have it when you're 12. Isn't that so cool? That is cool.
So there's a theory that shoes emerged 40,000 years ago, which is way earlier than our original estimate.

We thought that we'd had them for maybe five or ten thousand years. Okay.

But there's a scientist from Washington University called Eric Trinkos, and he found the time in in history where toe bones began to get smaller.

Because for most of our history, we've had really, really big toe bones because we were doing lots of walking and climbing and carrying things around.

But then 40,000 years ago, we kept our big leg bones. They stayed the same size, but our toe bones started small.
So we all used to have like big clown feet.

Yes!

Let's say that.

And he was trying to work out what would remove stress on toes, but not on legs. And he says, that's shoes.
Yeah. But they couldn't just make bigger shoes

to fit our toe bones in. I'm not sure how much our toes shrank.

In my imagination, they've shrunk quite a lot.

It's a conundrum. What are we going to do? Our feet won't fit into these tiny shoes we keep making.
I guess we'll just have to wait for our feet to evolve into smaller feet.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact is: rats dream of places they want to visit.

Well, like the Taj Mahal or...

Yeah.

Maybe if they if they'd basically, whenever a rat gets shown something while they're conscious, they found this in mazes, and they'd see somewhere that they couldn't go to.

Then when they went for a nap, rats have naps,

the scientists found that they were dreaming about what it'd be like to actually get into that place and then get the thing that they think might be in there.

So they start dreaming about all these unattained places that they'd like to visit. Because either they've seen a bit of cheese in it or, yeah.

And we know that by because they look at inside their brains which neurons are firing when they go around the maze when they're awake, don't they?

And then when they fall asleep, you look at the same neurons are firing, so they're obviously reliving, going around the maze.

And it's really sad that we've decided that means the only place a rat wants to visit above and beyond anything else is the bit of food in the maze that we planted there in the experiment they did yesterday.

The interesting thing here is that we can tell what rats are dreaming about. It's extraordinary, isn't it?

From what I've read, and I do find it very hard to break through scientific jargon sometimes, but it sounds like, as Anna was saying, they look at these neurons that are firing off and they can see that they're making similar connections.

I think there was a tiny thing about their actual physical movements of their body as well, kind of suggesting, I'm going left, I'm going right, I think. But I might be wrong about that.

80% of dreams are about normal things, like doing the washing up or being at work. Yeah, that makes sense.

100% of mine.

But then again, 5.2% of men have kissed a monster in in their dreams. 3.4% have had foreplay with an animal.
And 1.7% have had sex with an object, plant or rock.

An object.

Because plants and rocks are objects.

Kissed a monster. Do you think a monster, as in like a mermaid or a...

Is a mermaid a monster?

I think it'd be classified as a monster, yes.

A monster truck would come under object.

What about some monster munch? Objects.

There's actually a term for people who study dreams in science, and it's onerology. And it's not what the interpretation is, it's why we dream.

And so it's not, you know, oh, your teeth fall out, you're stressed, that kind of stuff. There's a really good book by Richard Wiseman called Night School, which has a lot of stuff about dreaming.

It says the guy who came up with the term rapid eye movement, I think his name was Aserinski or Aserinki.

He nearly called it jerky eye movement. Oh, yeah.
Which is quite a nice thing.

But then it had negative connotations, the word jerk,'cause a lot of three and four year olds were using it to slag each other off.

Um yeah, but it could have been called that.

So humans get erections in dreams. Male male ones, that is.
Male humans. I think.

And it's during REM sleep, which is usually where dreams happen. A lot of other animals, rats as well, they get them, get erections during REM sleep.

But apparently the armadillo is the only animal to get erections in non-REM sleep. Wow.
Wow.

What? It's just a fact. That is so weird.
That's a great fact.

Is it embarrassing for a rat when it gets an erection, do you think? The rat. Yeah, because it's never wearing a jacket, so it can't cover it up.

I always wonder why you always came into work in a jacket, Andy.

It's summer here, and Candy has got this long trench coat on.

I've got another jacket under this one.

You know, rats feel regret after they make a poor choice in life. Do they? Yep.

They did an experiment where they gave them the chance to eat food now after waiting for a bit or just move on to the next thing. And if they chose to move on then the next food offering was worse.

And they paused and they looked at the good reward that they now couldn't have and then later on they changed their decision when they were run through it again. So

they think that that is them showing regret. And they didn't do it when they encountered bad food without having chosen accidentally the bad food.

We do seem to anthropomorphize rats a lot, or science does at the moment. Like, there are a lot of studies that come out saying, Yeah, rats feel regret.

There's one that claims rats feel empathy, which is also very plausible. So, this study got two rats to live together for two weeks or something, so they bonded, learned to be mates.

And then, researchers locked one of them in a cage, which could only be opened by the other rat from the outside.

And they found that the other rat would always open the cage even when there was no apparent benefit for the other rat.

So, even if opening the cage released the rat into a separate room, so so there wasn't even the social advantage of having that rat hang out with you now, the rat would still go and open the cage first thing.

I think they even put food in there, and the rat would open the cage before it went and ate the food because it wanted to free its mate.

Apparently, that's what we've decided. Oh, that's nice, isn't it? That's good.

They also

piss on food that they want to mark as edible.

Nothing wrong with that.

Have you seen the fridge recently in the office?

I think they're marking it as formally edible, really.

You ate some cake at my last birthday, didn't you?

Everyone complained, but it was edible cake.

Very moist, this cake.

Is it irony? It's urinal cake.

Is it irony that in the act of signposting something that's edible, you make it no longer edible? Like, is that like a cache 22, isn't it?

No one came to my following birthday.

So, on rats' brains,

we've managed to get rats to communicate with each other mentally across oceans. So, scientists again experimenting on rats willy-nilly to their heart's content.

But they've connected the brains of a pair of rats.

And so, one rat can be in the US, one rat can be in Britain, and they've connected their brains up so they can share sensory information with each other.

And they've trained the rats so that if they press a lever in a certain box that they're in, then they'll get some food. But they've trained them to communicate mentally with each other.

So they'll for it.

So let's say there's the rat in in the US has got a lever, but the rat in the UK has not got a lever, and the rat in the UK will send a sensory signal to the rat in the US saying, press that lever now, and we'll both get food.

And then the rat in the US presses the lever based on signals it's receiving in its brain from the rat in the UK, and then they both get the food reward. Isn't that insane?

And the scientists who did this, one of the scientists said, apropos of nothing, this was written up on in New Scientists or something, and the scientist in charge said, I don't think there's any risk of super smart rats from this.

I'm not worried about an imminent invasion of rat multiborgs. Neither was I until I was.
Neither were we!

What? Rat multiborgs?

He's coined the word. He's worried.

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Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that humans used milk as paint for 40,000 years before anyone thought to drink it.

It's amazing.

Yeah, so very basically,

the first use of milk-based paint is about 49,000 years ago,

and the first use of milk as a drink, as in the first time humans could even digest cow's milk, was around seven or eight thousand years ago. That is so weird.

I like the idea that 40,000 years from now, somebody will be doing a podcast saying, Did you know that humans used to use paint as paint for thousands of years before they worked out we could drink it?

That's true.

It's very optimistic for the medium of podcasts.

It's a young medium.

There is a woman who paints with milk at the moment. She's called Millie Brown.
She drinks coloured milk and then she regurgitates it onto canvas. Oh.

I read an article about her and it said, and I quote, she has mastered the art of regurgitation. Right.
The art of regurgitation.

All babies also are sort of novices in the art of regurgitation, but she has got it down.

There are a few artists who use bodily fluids for

painting.

So one is Rose Lynn Fisher, who made a series of landscapes using a hundred different varieties of tear. Varieties?

Yeah, so I think the way she sees it is you could have a really, really upset tear, or you could have a cutting onions tear, or 98 other types of tear.

That's where you fall down, isn't it? That's the only two examples she ever has to use before someone interrupts and goes, oh, we get the idea. And you think, Phew, because I did not have a third.

Oh, there are loads. Okay, we don't need to go through the various different ways in which you cry, Andy.

When Anna says hurtful things like that,

when no one eats his urine cake.

Here's something. Before World War II,

skimmed milk was just thrown away.

It was just discarded. Nobody drank skimmed milk.

It was discarded. It was fed to pigs.

Because you cream off the top stuff. And so much of it was just poured into rivers.

Wow.

It was only sold when marketers realized, because a lot of it's creamed off to make butter, the top bit, and loads of it was just chucked away.

And then marketers realized, A, that people were getting really annoyed at saying this stream is full of discarded milk. And secondly, they realized it could be marketed as a weight loss device.

Wow, that's really interesting.

Another thing that they did during the war with milk was make plastic out of it.

You can, the casein, casein, is a protein which you get in milk, and that can be somehow, by adding acid, can be turned into a very brittle but still usable plastic.

And apparently, they used it even for aeroplanes. I read it was to glue them together.
Oh, was it? Yeah. Okay.
Oh, my God, I don't trust that. Really? Are the wings are glued on with milk? Yeah.

Yeah, basically. Hang on, the wings are glued on at all.

I'm definitely not going to get a plane. You've made a model plane, haven't you?

Just think bigger.

Saint Cuthbert chopped his own leg off in remorse after speaking angrily to his parents

and it was then repaired with a cast made of milk.

The story of Saint Cuthbert. I just want to say this, there is a really fantastic book called Milk, a Local and Global History by Deborah Valenze, which is where I got lots of my stuff from.

Oh no, it's really good. If you like milk, it's an absolute riporing treat.

Do you know what animal exclusively drinks milk? Ooh. The only thing they ever drink.
Yeah. Dolphins.
Yes.

No. Yeah.

Because they don't drink when they're adults. They don't drink.
The only thing they drink is their mother's milk.

So all they've ever known is the sweet taste of milk. I was reading something about dolphins today.

It was: someone's done some research on dolphin vaginas

to see some of the things that I've seen. Some pervert

has hastily come up with a reason why they're in the lab with Squeaky.

Squeaky.

He certainly was after that experiment.

Anyway, part of that

article, one of the things they said is that if a female dolphin doesn't want to have sex, then one of the ways that she does it is by putting her vagina out of the water so that the male can't get out of it.

Presumably, some people have gone dolphin watching.

A load of females poking their vaginas out of the water. It's not exactly Jaws with the dosing thing, is it? It's not exactly flipper either.

I think it's the same person who did the famous work on duck vaginas, duck penises, how they don't kind of fit together. Yeah, right.
You got just sort of vagina scientists

amazing um dolphin milk is almost fifty percent fat and cow's milk is four percent by way of comparison so it is really really thick and it's isn't we've said a thing before it's like toothpaste it's so thick also it's really hard for baby dolphins to uh drink while they are in fluid themselves they can roll their tongues up so they're like straws and their tongues form this watertight seal which keeps the milk in and keeps salt water out so they don't drink any of the salt water so it has to be you know fluid transfer within another liquid.

It's very, very, very difficult. Right.

Another milk that used to be very popular is ass milk in the 18th century.

Donkey milk, you mean?

Yeah. Yeah.
Just checking. Well, you're laughing at.
That's rude.

Call it poopy milk, please.

Ass milk was so popular in the 18th century that there was even a Mrs. Dawkins of Bolsover Street who was the ass milk provider for the

I'm just wondering if I could change the job title

just to donkey milk actually

we've had the the name label printed outside

she was the ass milk salesperson to the Roll family

was it expensive or was it it was expensive it was used as like a cure-all for anything that was wrong with you you would take ass milk it was even used as a face wash and to shine shoes.

So it's used for everything. Yeah.

That's amazing. Okay.
Was it expensive because donkeys are fewer than cows? That is true and also they produce a lot less milk.

So in ancient Greek times, one remedy for women who had trouble conceiving was to pour milk into their vagina.

Yeah, did it work? Don't think so. No.

What was the logic behind that? Did they have logic in there? Was there no...

Did anyone ask for logic back then? And they just said that. Well, they supposedly invented logic, didn't they, the ancient Greeks? Okay, I don't think that's a good idea.

Well, it sounds like they had to, because eventually

questions started being asked.

Sorry, why are we putting the milk in my vagina?

What do you mean, why?

So you guys could try producing milk, and I would like one of you to do this. Okay.

So you, because you obviously have the glands which allow you to produce milk, but you just don't have enough prolactin. But apparently, if men massage their nipples, you can stimulate,

you can get a spike of prolactin, which means that you're able to produce milk from your nipples. How long do you have to massage for?

Just try it and tell me. Oh, okay.
I know, because I don't know. I've been unwittingly preparing for the experiment for years.

That's why I've got the holes in my raincoat.

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

If you want to gain contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, we can be found on Twitter. I'm on at Schreiberland.
James. At eggshaped.

andy at andrew hunter m anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account on twitter which is at qi podcast also no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes also links to the live shows that we're doing we'll be back again next week with another show we'll see you then goodbye

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