38: No Such Thing As A Super Mario Love Hotel

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Your ring, your way.

We ran it on QI a few years ago.

Yeah.

Which was there's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

Okay, hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this time from Brussels, Belgium.

My name is Anne Triver.

I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves.

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

And we also have a special guest this evening, the great Levin Skyra.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Okay, fact number one, starting with you, Levin.

Yes, my fact is that apparently ants' nests can get infested by ants.

Aren't all ants' nests infested by ants, just by definition?

All the time they go, where do they come from?

No, there's a very small species of ants, and they're called the thief ants.

They're smaller than a millimeter.

And they live inside the walls of the nests of bigger ants.

They just have small tunnels in the walls of ants' nests, and then they sit there and they wait.

And when there's food around and there's no soldier ants, they sneak out, they steal the food, and then they run back into the wall.

And the bigger ants cannot follow them because the tunnels are too small.

Wow, that's ingenious.

How big were they?

One millimeter.

Yeah, a bit less than one millimeter.

Yeah.

Wow.

Are the other ants like, I don't know if I'm going crazy, but I think we have an ant problem.

Yeah.

And they put poison around and tell the children, don't patch it.

None of them can move.

So hard to have a picnic in an ant's nest.

Yeah, so what?

Have they ever caught them?

The thief ants.

Yeah, no, I just mean is it like a conspiracy theory in that world?

It's like, swear to God, they're here.

Look where was that bit of crumb I brought back.

It's gone.

Well, I I think every now and then one of these soldier ants will will will actually catch one and and and eat it.

Apparently we you all may have one of these colonies of ants in your home, and you won't know they're there because they're so small.

And they can get into sealed packages of food, again, because they are so small.

Wow.

I read that the smallest species of ant can are so small they could live inside the brain case of the largest species of ant.

Wow, that's fine.

Like a colony of them could.

There's one kind of ant called the acorn ant, and they have an entire nest in one acorn.

Whoa.

So

there's this small animal, it's called an acorn weevil, a very cute little bug.

And it

eats the inside of acorns when they're still on the tree.

So it drills a little hole and then it's it sucks out the inside and then it falls down and so there's there's a hollow acorn on the ground with a small hole inside.

And that's where these acorn ants go in and they build an entire nest in one acorn.

They're actually,

they can be found around Belgium and England.

So when you walk around and you see an oak and you just pick up acorns, you look for the ones that are in the wet ground and you crack them open.

Like one in 100 will have a small nest of acorn ants in there.

Wow, that's so cool.

There's an ant, isn't there?

Is it Brunei ants that, when they're threatened, they're the ones, they're the worker ants who are put on the front line and they explode their own heads so that they spill a sticky brain goo to slow down whoever it is who's trying to attack them.

What they're like suicide ant bombers.

Yeah, they're kamikaze ants.

Wow.

Yeah.

James and I, we were talking about this on the train on the way.

Okay, it's my favourite kind of ants.

Okay, same.

Okay, this is great.

My favourite kind of ants are called doorhead ants.

And they're called doorhead ants because their heads are doors.

Yeah.

What do you mean?

Every door in your house, exactly.

An ant.

No, they have this amazing flat head.

It's like a flat circle of their head, and they use it to plug holes in trees, and the other ants live inside that tree.

What?

Wait, why do you need to plug a hole in it?

To stop other people from coming in.

That's how doors work, I'm sure.

Sorry.

That's amazing.

But it's so funny because it's just one of those cases of you're born and that's what you do.

Like, there's probably a doorhead ant sort of going, oh, I want to be a poet when I'm older, Dad.

I'm afraid, son.

And sorry, your father was a door.

your grandmother was a door.

Nothing else, not even a gate over the fence.

So, can I ask more about these tiny ants?

Do they have any other homes outside of just infesting other nests, or is it just a really charmed life?

Well, I think it's an easy life.

I think they're also found outside of other nests, but they're always looking for food, and it's just the easiest thing.

Some of them live next to an ant's nest, so not inside the walls, but next to it, and have just one small tunnel going to the other nest just to go back and forth every now and then to the shop.

Have you heard

there's an ant that has the

quickest slam of jaws of all the animal kingdoms?

Is that I think it's the trapdoor ants?

It's the trapdoor ant.

Yeah.

A lot of door ants, basically.

Door-based ants.

There's the swing door ant, there's the revolving door and that's good.

But what's really really exciting about them is that they, so they can slam really quickly.

I think I wrote it down, it was something like 230 kilometers an hour.

It's just really quick.

But what's really exciting is if they're being attacked, they can use it as

an escape mechanism by slamming their mouth into the ground and just launching themselves

completely away from their prey.

I think what they do is they kind of bite the floor, don't they?

And if the floor's hard enough, then it fires them off.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

Lobsters can swim backwards, but not forwards.

What?

Lobsters can walk.

Oh, right, you meant they're doing backstroke.

No, they can walk forwards, but if they're in real trouble, they have their whole.

They flip their tail under them

really, really fast, and that sort of jets water back forwards, and they are pushed back.

So that's their escape mechanism.

But they can never use it to swim forwards.

It's really tragic.

Wow.

So they only have one swim stroke.

Yeah.

That's the only thing they compete in.

And it's called escape, yeah.

Anyway, sorry, ants.

Apparently, in Panama, you can get ants to clean your house.

So if you go out, they're army ants in Panama, so they all act en masse, thousands and thousands of them in one ant army.

And if you leave your house at the right time, so you know when it's army ant season, um then they come and they eat everything.

So every crumb, every worm, every bit of dirt on your floor, they eat it.

So there are people in Panama who say, we just go out for the day, come back at the end of the day, they've gone, everything is clean.

They should have made the canal like that, shouldn't they?

Just put a line of ants down just to bite it and bite it.

That would have been quite cool.

We've got to start using them.

I think that's high risk.

Really?

Yeah, personally.

You've got to make sure all your food's in very, very safe places.

Yeah, you're in trouble if you forget the dog, of course.

Yeah, you really are.

You've got a skeleton.

There's a lemon ant that tastes of lemon that I didn't know about.

If you lick it, it tastes like lemon.

How can you lick an ant, a single ant?

Right, you lick a bunch of them.

You lick it.

Lick them on a lolly.

And they're really cool.

So they rely on these shrubs to survive as their homes.

And they're really good defenders of these shrubs.

So, if any other plants try to grow around them, then they kill them.

So, it's a really ideal kind of guard to have, which I quite like.

Loyal, very loyal.

Yeah.

Are they any use for us?

Not unless you're a shrub.

I haven't suspected that anymore.

If life gives you lemon ants.

Yeah.

I'm still stuck on this door edge, because I just love the idea that that's where he is all the time.

And the only interaction he has is with the ants coming in and out.

Hey, Mike, how's it going?

Yeah, pretty good.

Gary, having a good day, mate.

Yeah, catch you later.

Wait, so it's not is he a species of ant?

Yeah.

Are all the ants in the colony door ants, but only some of them are used as actual doors ants?

That's right.

Okay.

And yeah, only some of them are used by doors, as doors, sorry.

But some of them actually use their heads because they're kind of flat and around the top here.

They can use them to float down.

If they want to jump out of a tree, it means that they won't.

I mean, ants wouldn't die if they fell anyway, would they?

No.

But it helps them to glide in whichever way they want.

That's quite cool, isn't it?

They're also parachute ants.

That's just bad marketing.

When you're both a door and a parachute, don't call yourself a door.

Call yourself a parachute.

Parachute, yeah, much cooler.

You're right.

Branding.

They need work on branding.

Apparently, seagulls in the UK have started behaving quite badly this year, and it's because they've been eating red ants, and the formic acid in red ants makes them drunk.

And so seagulls have been crashing into buildings, and they've been a bit more vicious, stealing people's sandwiches, and they've been flying out in front of cars, and it's because they're all pissed.

Sounds British to me.

I was actually on drunk animals, which I know we mentioned, and we love.

There was a story this week about bohemian wax-winged birds in Yukon, in Canada, and they've been getting really drunk on fermented berries this year.

So, the national park in Canada, the Yukon Wildlife Sanctuary, has set up rehab centers for them.

So, if you see, they advertise every

drunk birds, you've got to take it to the rehab centre and say it's a drunk bird, and they put it in this little cage and and they let it sober up until it's responsible enough to be able to fly on its own again.

That's amazing.

You say they were eating berries?

Yeah.

Okay, so there is a species of nematode worm that, when it infects a certain type of ant, it makes that arse go bright red so it looks exactly like a berry.

And so the birds come down and eat it and then get infected themselves.

And then the nematode goes out of the feces and then it does a whole system.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

That is really amazing.

That's like the zombie ants, isn't it?

Which I think we've covered on.

I love zombie ants.

So zombie ants are the ones where there's a, what do you call it, not a mushroom, a fungus that spreads itself over the forest floor, doesn't it?

And then it gets into the head of these ants and possesses them to climb high up the trees.

And then they eat their brains from the inside out.

So they die high up this tree.

And then the fungus grows out of their brains and spreads itself all over the forest floor again, and the process starts all over again.

You have another zombie ant that it's caused by the foret fly.

So a forest fly, a very small fly, and it hovers over an ant, waits for the right moment, and then it dives down.

And in the dive, it puts an egg in the neck of the ant.

And the egg will hatch, and the small larvae will start eating the brain.

And this ant will

just start walking straight forward, not returning to the nest, just walking, walking, walking.

Then, when it's when it has been walking long enough,

the larva will release a chemical that makes the neck solve away.

So the head falls off.

Oh.

And then you have just an ant head lying there, and then the larva will live there and eat and then form a cocoon.

And then it flies out as a new forage fly and it returns to the nest and attacks a new ant.

Oh my god.

Wow.

Do they know about this?

Are they aware?

I just wonder, if you're like a quite balanced normal ant, you must be like going, what the hell is going on here?

This guy's just walked forward.

He's come back.

He's attacked us.

This other guy thinks there's tiny little ants stealing our food.

Mix tastes of lemons.

Frank's ass looks like a berry.

We're out of control here.

I just want to be a doll.

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Okay, we need to move on to fact number two, and that is Chasinski.

Yep, my fact this week is that in Cambodia, a teenage girl's parents might build her a love hut where her parents encourage her to sleep with as many boys as she wants until she finds the one that she likes.

This is in the Krung, it's K-R-E-U-N G, Krung Krayung tribe in Cambodia, which is in rural northern Cambodia.

And basically when a girl turns about thirteen, it's between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, her parents say, Okay, we understand that you want to be getting to know boys now, and it's often embarrassing for the boys to come and visit your house when your parents are there.

So their parents it's traditional for the parents to build her this love hut which is removed from the house, away enough away, and she sleeps there and boys come and visit her and different boys come every night and they so a a lot of the girls say sometimes they just stay up and talk, but I guess you would say that when your parents ask.

Sometimes.

And they just do that until they find one who is their soulmate.

And apparently, they say it takes, on average, ten boys for them to find their soulmate.

So that's the average.

I can see a bad Hollywood rom-com

forming in your mind, Anna.

Yeah, called Love Hut.

Sounds got a good name as well.

And you just know that Hugh Grant is going to be the ten boys.

Oh, there he is.

Movie's going to be finished.

Now he's Hugh Grant.

But also the fact that they that the parents build it themselves and you know when it's finished you have y you get a tour, you know.

And your father is all like, Yes, you know, I built this and it's uh very stable and don't sit on that bit, it creaks a bit.

Yeah, it's the exact opposite of what every other dad that I know would do.

Like

my dad would build that love hut for my sister and then stand outside and try to kick the ass of every every person who tried to come

with a shotgun.

In the meantime, she's inviting boys in the house.

Look at my dad, he's still out there, no problem.

I reckon he would build it with the biggest, heaviest door ever, wouldn't he?

Is there anything to stop them?

Oh my god, in the ant world, the door would be one ant that would never get to sleep.

Well, that's- Hey, Mike, have fun in there.

I hope she picks you.

Correct.

I'll keep it closed.

Oh, no.

Until the 18th century, most most people slept twice per night, and they took a two-hour break in between to smoke, have sex, or visit neighbours.

Or all three.

You just wake up and go, oh, well, what were the three options again?

I always forget.

Which order should we do them tonight, dear?

We haven't seen the neighbours for a while, have we?

They used to advise that the best time to

make love was after your first sleep in the era where it was two sleeps a night.

A scientist in the 17th century said the time it's going to be most productive and enjoyable after sleep number one.

So it's first sleep, second sleep.

It's because you were a bit refreshed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

It makes sense.

So it was when it got dark and no one had electricity and no one could afford candles, and so as soon as it got dark at eight in the evening, you just passed out and nothing else to do.

And then you wake up at midnight and go, well.

Should we shag?

Speaking of the darkness, do you know that people sleep 20 minutes longer on a night when there's a full moon compared to when there's not a a full moon?

No way.

Yeah, way.

How come?

It's exhausting being a werewolf, though.

Just speaking of love huts,

I

found out

before Nintendo made video games, they had a bunch of other products, one of which was that Nintendo used to run love hotels.

Probably

a love hotel.

It's effectively a brothel,

but done the Nintendo style.

There are different levels of the gas.

There's platforms, and you walk in.

Everyone's dressed.

Did someone order a plumber?

And they also,

to give you a kind of a sense of isolation and no contact with the people working in the actual hotel, they used to send the keys for rooms to you in the reception or in your room through pneumatic pipes.

Like Mario, like those, you know, the awesome green pipes.

It's for couples, isn't it?

It's for people who are in a hotel.

No, no, it was also for prostitution and so on.

I missed that level in Super Mario, actually.

The keys get fed up to me so I can serve as my prostitute.

Yeah, I don't remember that.

I was in Tokyo last year, and there's a district which

has a lot of these love hotels in.

And I walked around it because it's really, they're all built in weird,

fabulous styles, like medieval European castles, or one of them looks like a robot.

They're bizarre buildings.

And

I stress I didn't enter any of them.

The reason that they are popular is because the average Japanese flat is about two rooms.

I mean, there are no love huts, put it that way, and it's very difficult to have time as a couple by yourself.

And often, three generations of a family live in the same flat, and everyone's sort of right next to each other.

So that it's kind of evolved out of the property market, basically.

That's why it happens.

So the reason I like the love huts is because it's like a a real, it's an example, I guess, of gender roles being turned around a little bit.

And so, an anthropologist called Fiona McGregor went there and interviewed all generations, and they said the women are really independent and they know exactly what they want, and there's a lot of equality and relationships between them.

So, I like examples of that.

So, there's the Bari tribe of Venezuela and other South American tribes believe that children can have more than one father.

So, again, promiscuity in women is quite common.

And they'll say, you know, you'll say,

who's your child's father?

And she'll say, well, she was,

it started with this guy, and then this guy came along a couple of months later, and the sperm sloshed together, which is what they think, and the child is sort of a combination of a bunch of men.

So again, you know, promiscuity, fine.

You just wait till your dads get home.

You are in so much trouble.

They used to think that the child would be able to get things from whoever they suckled from, didn't they?

So they would think that a child, they would get a wet nurse who would be able to speak Greek in the hope that the child would suckle from that wet nurse and be able to speak Greek in the future.

Yeah.

How did that go?

I can't speak Greek.

You could walk up to a very beautiful Greek woman and go, So I'd like to learn Greek.

Guys, we need to move on.

Does anyone have anything more they want to throw into this one?

This is in 2000, it was only in 2006 that the official Spanish siesta was cut down from three hours to one hour.

Three hours until 2006 was the lunch break.

Yeah.

But you stay at work until 10 in the evening, so it was also tough.

Do you know they have world championships in siesta?

No.

No way.

How do you win?

They have them in

they look for very loud places like shopping malls and then they put beds there and they just have the athletes come up and they just have a countdown and then go nap.

And then the guy who has who falls asleep fast and has the longest nap, he's the winner, is the world champion in siesta.

Wow.

that's pretty fake that.

Yeah, I guess so.

You can measure if someone's asleep.

I think they've probably worked out.

It's not just the guy going,

okay, well we should move on.

Andy Murray.

My fact is that

the longest canyon in the world is 50% longer than the Grand Canyon, and we didn't know about it until August last year.

How did we miss it?

Yeah, how can that be the case?

Well, it is buried under under 1.9 miles of ice.

Okay.

To be fair.

But this is so cool.

It's in Greenland.

And

the Grand Canyon is maybe 280 miles long, and this one is 460 miles long.

And it could be even bigger.

But we didn't know about it because it's under this huge ice sheet, which is so heavy that it's turned Greenland into

a bowl-shaped country.

And for ages, scientists had no idea why.

If it's like a bowl with all this ice weighing down, surely there should be ice melting at the bottom and there should be lakes under the ice sheet, but there aren't.

And they couldn't find any with radar.

So when they found this canyon, which goes towards the sea, they think, oh, this must be how the water has been getting out and not causing the

lakes to form.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

And it last year and no human has ever seen it, because when it happened, this canyon formed, it was four million years ago and we didn't exist.

Wow.

Can we break the ice and have a look, get tourists there?

I mean if we do well if the if the ice goes then the seas will rise by seven meters and we're all completely stuffed.

Well but that's that's a good question.

What would happen if all the ice on Greenland would melt?

So ice that ice that is floating in in seawater, when it melts it doesn't make the sea level go up.

But all the ice that on that is on land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica will make the sea level go up.

But if you would only melt the ice that is on Greenland, then in Belgium and in England nothing would change.

And in Iceland, the sea level would go down by three meters

because

this ice sheet has so much gravity that it pulls the water towards Greenland.

And when you melt it, the water level around Greenland will go down, and in the rest of the world, it will go up.

Wow.

So, like, people like the Seychelles are screwed.

Or people like Tuvalu or Nauru or Maldives, yeah, they're all screwed, but we're fine.

Yeah, there's one problem when the ice on Greenland melts, it probably starts melting too on Antarctica, and that's a problem for us to be able to do it.

Yeah, yeah, that is a problem.

One thing I like about Greenland, because this is in Greenland, right?

Yeah.

Is that so?

Eric the Red was the guy who first founded,

made a European settlement on Greenland.

And the reason he did that was because he'd been expelled from Iceland in around 985 AD for murdering one of his neighbours.

And the reason he lived in Iceland in the first place was because his father had been banished from Norway for committing manslaughter.

So his family was constantly murdering people.

But his son, Leif Erickson, was actually the first European to land in North America, wasn't he?

Yeah, wasn't it?

And he sailed to North America about 500 years before Columbus did, landed on the North American continent, and then went back.

But the reason, so I think this is really funny, the reason he could find it was because there was another guy in Iceland at the time whose father had moved to Greenland and he wanted to find his father.

So he set sail for Greenland, not knowing where he was going.

And he came across, so he'd had a description of Greenland, knew what he was looking for, kept on seeing this kind of coastline, which was lots of forests and stuff, and then lots of verdant greenland.

And the other people on his boat kept saying, Can we get off here?

What is this?

And he was like, No, we're going to Greenland.

And he kept very detailed diaries of what it was.

And it was North America, but he wouldn't let them get off.

And he sailed up the whole coast of North America, eventually arrived in Greenland.

And Lee Ferrikson was like, You know that place you saw?

How did you find that?

But yeah, first guy to get to America.

The tallest trees on Greenland are two inches high.

Two inches?

That doesn't really constitute a tree.

It's a tree.

Yeah, it's a tree.

It doesn't have to be a tree, because I think it's more than two inches.

They say they have this similar in Iceland.

They have very small trees.

And there's a joke that they say: is it like, what do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland?

And the answer is stand up.

That's very good.

It's true.

They have birch trees that are about

one meter high.

But another another fact about Greenland there are no two towns in Greenland that are connected by road.

Oh.

You cannot drive to another town.

You have to go by boat or fly.

There's no roads between towns.

That is a pain.

Yeah, it is.

The other thing is about um Greenland is if you look on a map, any kind of globe or whatever, you'll always have uh Newark, which is the capital, will always be on that map, so will probably Gottharp, so a few other places.

Um Newark is the largest place, it's nineteen thousand people live there, which would be a village in the UK.

But it's still on every globe.

It's a tiny, tiny place, and it's still on every globe you could find.

And I find that quite interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you look at like the 11th most populous city in the world, it's somewhere in China, that's on no globes because it's right next to Hong Kong.

So why would you put it on?

And that's got like probably, I don't know, 50 million people living there,

not on any globes.

And then this place has got 10,000, 19,000, and it's on every globe.

Yeah.

It's quite cool.

There's a place, the most northerly point of Greenland is called Coffee Club Island.

And it was named by a guy in honour of his coffee club back in Denmark.

I think it was Danish.

He was called Large Cock.

I know he wasn't, was he?

No, he was called Lauger Koch.

But I'm going to call him Large Cock.

I'm sure everyone at school did as well.

And he found this place, he called it Coffee Club Island.

It's right in the northern tip.

It's the northernmost point of land on all of Earth.

It became quite famous.

and then someone else went to look at it a few days later and found that there was actually another bit of land just over there, and it had been underwater when he'd been there because the tide was so high.

Wow.

But the other place doesn't really have a name.

They call it.

They call it Starbucks.

That will get all the name.

Coffee Club Island.

Those are the days where you could just go and call things after your local

Reading Club Bay.

The place where, when they first went to Greenland, the only bay that was good for fishing that the two settlements fished in was called Disco Bay, which I quite like.

Oh, that's good.

This sounds like a fun place.

On canyons.

Was it named after anything?

That's what I'm saying.

No, no, well, it's in the language, so I guess.

Disco is Latin, but I can't remember what for.

It's not related to that.

It's, yeah, Viking talk of the 10th century.

I don't know if you're fluent there.

No.

Disco is short for Disco Tech,

and that was named after Bibliotheque, which is French for library, And it was named because it's a place where you have discs like records.

So a discotheque as a Bibliotheque is books, and disco-tech is discs.

So actually, a discotheque should be a place where everybody has to be quiet looking at vinyl, you know.

Have you seen the Beatles album?

Okay, speaking of Beatles, while we're on that, and canyons, as we were, there's a canyon in America, which I haven't written down the name of it, but there was a guy in America who was walking down there, he was called James Richards.

And when he was walking down the canyon, he tripped and he fell down quite a long way down the canyon, knocked himself unconscious.

And he says that he then woke up in a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up.

There was a man called Jonas there who told him all about what happened with the Beatles.

And when he returned to our world, he brought one of their tapes with him.

And he has a website where he has the music of the Beatles because they never broke up in this parallel world.

Wow.

Were they good after they didn't break up?

Did they sound like a lunatic in the desert?

Actually, one of the

Beatles started as the Quarrymen.

And one of the members, Pete Shotton,

went on to become John Lennon and Yoko Ono's personal assistant.

And years ago, there was an official biography by a guy called Hunter Davies who wrote about the Beatles in their time.

And he went and he revisited all these original characters from the Beatles.

Pete Shotton now lives on an island somewhere off England.

And

when he was asked by Hunter Davies, How you doing?

He said, I'm really good.

I'm actually back in contact with John.

And they went, Well, what do you mean?

And he said, I had an American medium come, and she got me back in contact with John, and we're writing songs again.

He, by the way, in the quarrymen, was the guy who played the washboard.

Not even an instrument.

That's literally a kitchen item.

Nobody does a washboard like Pete.

If he was from Birmingham.

Can I, just on the subject of canyons, because when I think of canyons, I think of Grand Canyon, and I immediately think of Evil Knievel.

And Evil Knievel is extraordinary because, as far as I can tell from reading his career, we all know Evil Knievel, right?

The guy who tried to jump the Grand Canyon.

He also was just one of the great stunt bike people of all time.

Most people came, it turns out, just to watch him fail every time.

And every single thing that he did, it was like, which bit do we want him to fall on?

So one of his first, so actually, he started doing stunts.

So, why did people want him to fail?

Surely.

Because he kept surviving.

So, it was just fun to watch a man go, I'm jumping over two mountain lions and a cargo of rattlesnakes.

And when he goes, he falls into the rattlesnakes and they all cheer.

And that genuinely happens.

Because they're like, this man can't die.

It's fine.

We enjoy it.

This is the weird fact about Evil Knivil.

He practiced crashing more than he did landing.

Well, that explains his problem.

He was

an interesting character.

I mean, he used to carry a cane around, and he carried inside the cane wild turkey, the alcohol, and he would drink it from his cane directly, and no one would see.

What's he doing fillating that cane?

I'm not an especially observant person, but if I saw someone walking with a cane and then drink from it, I think I would sit up.

Did he do that while he was riding?

He was getting drunk while he was doing that.

That's why he kept crashing.

He kept trying to get the lid off the cane.

There's an American

car guy from the Indy 500 or whatever called Dick Trickle.

I always remember his name.

I don't know why I remember his name.

He used to, he liked to smoke, and it was in the, it must have been in the 50s or something.

And he had a helmet, but he wanted to smoke while he was riding, and so he would drill a hole in his helmet so he could get the cigarette through there, and so he could smoke while he was driving.

And I always wanted to run on QI, why did Dick Trickle have a hole in his helmet?

But they never let me do it.

And we never will.

In the Grand Canyon, do you know what the most common cause of death is?

Falling.

Sort of.

Not having enough to drink on.

No, so I would have thought that.

It's plane crashes.

It's weirdly common.

And in fact, so the reason the Federal Aviation Administration in America was set up, so like I guess a safety overseer of air flights was because of the Grand Canyon.

And there were two commercial flights used to like detour to go over the Grand Canyon so people could have a quick look.

So there were two flights, I think, in 1956.

They collided.

But also, I think it's a bit of a risk with a canyon, the airflow goes downwards, and so they have to clear airspace sometimes around a canyon now.

So the biggest diamond mine in the world,

which is somewhere in Africa,

has airspace cleared around it because the downwards flow has pulled a bunch of helicopters into it.

I say a bunch too.

But

it's enough to say, actually, let's not do this anymore.

That's a planet eating helicopters.

Guys, we need to move on, by the way.

The scariest crater in the world is in Turkmenistan.

And

do you guys know about this?

The Darvaza crater, which is also called the Door to Hell.

Yeah, it's so terrifying.

So it's where the Soviets were doing experiments there.

They were drilling for gas in the 1970s, and there was a leak, and essentially, what happens was noxious gases leaked out, and it set fire, and it's been burning ever since.

So for 40 years, 45 years now, it's been constantly on fire.

And it's this huge crater.

And a guy descended into it last year, George Corunis, had to wear a Kevlar suit and sort of abseil down into it.

And he said that he didn't know why anyone else hadn't done it before, because once you're there, there are no restrictions.

If you can find the right place, you can drive out, up, get out of your car, walk over the edge, and jump right in if you want.

The choice is yours.

I'm so far the only person who's actually done that.

I would have thought no one had done it because it's constantly on fire.

Yeah, I think it is.

Can I really quickly tell you about the first ever expedition through the Grand Canyon

was by the American explorer Powell.

And he was an incredible explorer.

He had just one arm.

He lost his other one in the Civil War.

Never mentioned it.

But they took four boats.

And ten men went on this expedition.

Four of them died on the expedition.

They had to throw food overboard.

They lost boats.

It was a terrible thing.

On the first day, they threw away 200 kilos of bacon because they thought it was slowing them down.

And by the end, they were eating moldy flour because they had no food left.

But the boats were called, these were the four names of the boats: Maid of the Canyon, Emma Dean, Kitty Clyde's sister,

and no name.

Just evidently, that meeting, they just ran out of ideas after the first three.

2 I am.

Come on, let's go.

Come on, we've been here for four hours.

We must be able to think of one more.

Let's just go with no name.

Okay, let's move on.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in 2008, the University of Bath invented a 3D printer that could print a copy of itself.

Within three minutes, that copy had copied itself to make a third copy, and today nobody knows how many of these printers exist in the world.

That's so amazing.

But they're going to take it over, aren't they?

Oh, yeah, they're going to print us to death.

What a way to go.

This is one of the end-of-the-world scenarios.

It's called the Grey Goo.

And

it's not about 3D printers, but it's about nano robots.

So I think it was already mentioned by Feynman in the 60s.

They were thinking about nano robots that could reproduce themselves, because of course nanobots are so small you need like millions of them and well let's just build one that builds the others.

And then they had this idea like okay what if they break out of the laboratory and they just start collecting collecting stuff?

And so, one of the end-of-the-world scenarios is that there would be some research center turning into a grey goo of nano-robots, and it was just spread all over the world until we're a big ball of nano robots.

Well, if they feed off carbon, so they start eating all of us as well.

I read a quote by someone saying that mankind's last great invention will be the first self-replicating intelligent machine.

Basically, that's the end of us.

But the idea with the grey goo is actually they would have to get their energy from somewhere, so unless they could somehow be solar panel, probably will probably be okay.

Yeah, but we have invented the solar panel, James.

I don't want to worry you.

We've given them their tools.

They can get their energy chemically, you know, like we digest food.

Well, once we figured out how to build them that way, then we're doomed.

Let's just not figure it out.

There are some researchers, I'm not sure what they are, who have come up with this machine.

And they programmed it to get across a certain bit of land, which has got bumps or whatever.

They 3D printed it, they made it walk, and then when it got somewhere or broke or whatever, then they fed that back into the computer and let it re-kind of work itself out to try and make it a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better.

And that's kind of like a way of making evolution through computers, and that's happening right now, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Just so very quickly on the printer.

So they've built a printer that can replicate itself.

Sounds like it's really quick.

And they sold that.

And then someone else has replicated one.

Yeah, so the idea is that they've sold a thousand of these printers that can print other 3D printers, and they assume that if you've bought one, you're probably making some yourself, and then you've probably given them to someone else, etc., etc.

So they don't know how many of the extra ones have been made.

This was in 2008.

I was visiting,

we have a very big 3D printing company here in Belgium called Materialize, and they do amazing stuff.

And I was visiting them, and one of the great things they do is

when a surgeon has to operate on a broken bone, he does the operation completely in virtual reality.

So they take a scan of the bone and then he puts it in the computer and then he's just looking in the computer how to fit them back together, what the best points are to drill in the bones and put the titanium plate on it.

And then they 3D print a template that he can use when he does the operation.

So he can do the operation super quick.

Just opening it up, clicking the plastic parts on the bone, pushing them together and the holes where he has to drill are already there.

So he just goes click, click, puts it together, drill, drill, drill.

The screws inside, and he's finished.

And everything was prepared in the computer.

It's like an IKEA, IKEA broken bone operation.

It's like IKEA, that's

five hours later.

I think

we're missing one part.

Someone had a skull printed, didn't they, recently?

3D printed a skull.

But this is a weird thing that has been done with 3D printers.

In Japan, they're having their fetuses 3D printed.

So if you want to meet your baby before it comes out of you you ask for a 3D printout it's only about $800 for your fetus and it's 3D printed in a little see-through box wow

when will we be able to 3D print a person an actual living person

but they genuinely have 3D printed a Keanu Reeds no but I want a proper one like a real human yeah I want a working Keanu

Keanu Reeds there were two life-size mannequins of two guys who were looking for girlfriends and Match.com, an online dating site, did 3D printouts of those guys that looked exactly like them, didn't look anything like them, and they put them in a shop window.

The idea was that women would walk past and go, oh, I like the look of him, and then

do they remain single?

I don't know, but yeah, I guess so.

Anna, you were talking about Japan and the fetus thing.

There was a Japanese lady called Megumi Igarashi.

She was arrested quite recently for distributing data that allowed recipients to make 3D prints of her genitals.

And what she wanted to do was to model a kayak in the shape of her genitals.

What?

She's an artist.

She's an artist.

Okay, that's no excuse.

No, her art is all about her body and making it more kayak-like.

Which is weird, actually.

I just remembered the word kayak means men's boat.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and there is another word for women's boats.

So in the Olympics,

the kayak should only be a men's event, and they should have a different name for the women's event.

All the Eskimos are watching the Olympics.

Women in the kayak.

These men are very effeminate.

James's letter-writing campaign saying women should not be allowed to take part in the kayak event.

So what's the r resolution of the story?

Oh, she was let go.

Yeah, they arrested her and then they said, actually, we can't really arrest you for this.

So it was bad publicity for the government, so they let her go.

Why kayak?

Because it's kind of the right shape, I guess.

Well, here in Belgium, we have to.

I think you need to see a doctor around me.

Let's move on.

Oh, by the way, my favourite headline of the week, I read it in the Fortin Times.

You just mentioned arrest, made me think of it.

The headline was: Police say quadruple amputee is armed and on the run.

So initially, it was about 3D printed guitars.

Yeah, so no, actually, this fact is about 3D printers making themselves.

But originally, my fact was going to be that the band Claxons are doing a tour at the moment, and all their guitars are made from 3D printers, which I think is pretty cool.

That's really cool.

Why did they do that?

Just because it's cool?

Well, they are cool.

Hey, hey, hey, are they having a printed jam?

That's a very cool.

No, they said earlier this year that they were going to do it, but they didn't think it was possible.

And then some guys from the University of Sheffield, I think it was, came in and said, actually, we can do that.

And they've made these 3D printed guitars, and apparently they're really good.

There's a firm in America which will make a

which will 3D print, based on lots of photos of you and measurements, a model of your head, Which is for your loved ones to keep your ashes in after you die

It's really really creepy.

It's so strange it just it's

and it says hang on There's a line from the company on the website you will never again have to worry that you might forget what your loved one looked like

when you invest in one of these custom-made very lifelike cremation urns

because we're all looking at photos of our loved ones going but what do they look like?

Do you know NASA has started investing in 3D printers?

I'm not surprised.

Yeah, and but what's really interesting is it's not just for items, because I think they already do that, where they print out stuff that they can use on the International Space Station and so on.

They've started doing it for food.

So they've started printing pizzas.

But what's amazing is it actually looks like it's going to work, and they're going to start feeding astronauts with this pizza.

And it says that you can,

it takes seven minutes to print a pizza.

It takes takes less than that to make a pizza, though.

You're in space.

And then it goes like,

you're sorry, but the tomato cartridge ran out.

And you go, oh God, you put in a new cartridge.

I have to print a template now.

And then you go,

all new

sort of green-bluish pizza coming out.

Throw it away in a new one.

But someone's working on a digital cookbook now.

That's ingredients.

It's printing for it.

Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a thing.

That's our future.

Well, I have a bit of news for you.

When you buy pancakes in the supermarket, they are printed.

What?

Yeah.

All pancakes in the supermarket are printed.

What are you talking about?

Of course,

it's just in a factory.

There's this big line running around, entering the ovens, and the ink is coming out of extruders, and they just print it on the.

It would be easier for the companies now to make square pancakes, but nobody would buy them.

The only reason they are round is because we're used to round pancakes.

I would buy square square pancakes, Stephanie.

Yeah.

But they're printed.

They can even make them with your name, you know, a big, big, long pancake

that writes your name.

Wow.

Pancakes are printed, yeah.

So I think they need to stop using the word printed.

That's the problem, isn't it?

Because we don't trust printers.

We need to come up with a better word because they're printing organs now, or they think they're very close to printing organs.

So

they're having trouble with capillaries, I think, at the moment.

But we can print tissue and

functioning blood vessels.

But we know that printers screw screw up all the time.

So

we're not trusting each other.

What if you get the wrong printer as well and you print out your thesis on the pancake maker

and then the dog literally eats your homework for

that's gonna be a new thing.

We we need to wrap up guys.

Do you

yeah, if you wanna throw in?

Um I we were talking about uh having medical operations and guitars.

This is the this is where I went.

Does anyone watch True Detective?

Has anyone seen True Detective?

One of the guys in that, or he's also in CSI, recently played the guitar during brain surgery.

And so he's one of those.

And he did this Reddit AMA eventually.

So we just quickly described that.

So when you're having brain surgery done, they need to know that everything's working properly.

And so the way that some people do it, if you play guitar, is they'll be cutting your brain open in the back and you'll be playing guitar the whole time.

And if they make any mistakes, then you'll do something wrong with the guitar playing, so they'll know that there's a mistake.

Yeah, yeah.

And he was asked, so he did an AMA on Reddit, like an Ask Me Anything thing on Reddit.

And first of all, I found it really weird because maybe the first 50 questions were, what was it like to work with Matthew McConaughey?

How did you find you a detective?

Did you find you could identify with a character?

And I had to do a Command F for surgery, finally.

But yeah, he described it as the worst thing ever, apparently.

So if you ever thought brain surgery was going to be fun.

And he was asked to describe it further.

And he said, sorry, it's like nothing else I know to compare it to.

It's kind of like I'm in this club of brain surgery people, and we're the only ones that understand it.

I think that's quite a cool club.

Wow.

There's a,

I think it was a Dutch brain surgeon who told that he had a similar operation, like somebody staying conscious just to see if they didn't do anything wrong.

And they were working in the brain, and suddenly he said, Hey, touch that bit again.

And they said, What?

Yeah, he said, the song November Rain of Guns and Roses is right there.

What?

Yeah.

And so they said, touch it again.

And they touched it.

He said, yes, I'm hearing it now.

No.

Yeah, and this guy told this story, and then afterwards, his colleagues said, Why didn't you cut it out?

It's a horrible song.

Okay,

that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much, you guys, for coming here today.

If you want to get through to any of us to talk about the facts, if you're listening at home,

you can get us on our Twitter, which is at QIPodcast, or you can get us all individually.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Levin.

Levensker.

James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep.

And we're going to be back again next week with another episode.

We just want to say thanks to the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium.

This has been amazing.

Also, the Free University of Brussels, who've helped us set up this whole thing.

And to Nerdland, the new Levin Skyra TV show, which is going to be premiering in Belgium in February.

And yeah, we're going to be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Thanks so much.

See you later.

Goodbye.

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