21: No Such Thing As Testicle-Retracting Sumo Wrestlers

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certapro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certapro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

We ran it on QI a few years ago.

Yeah.

Um 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.

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'm sitting here with four other elves.

I've got Andy Murray, James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and on fact-checking duties, Alex Bell.

So once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Anna, fact number one.

My fact is that Made in Germany product labels were originally intended to put people off buying the product.

It was a law passed in England in 1887 which forced foreign companies to put labels saying where the product had been made on their items because British companies were worried about German knock-off products flooding their market and being cheap and tacky.

Typical inferior Germans.

Exactly.

Poor manufacturing base, terrible footballing skills.

Apparently it was mainly to save the Sheffield cutlery industry.

Obviously it's ironic because made in Germany it very, very quickly became a stamp of very high quality.

So True Fanta is German.

It became popular during the Nazi regime.

It wasn't invented specifically for it.

Oh, I thought Hitler commissioned it.

I thought he wanted a German soft drink.

That's what people think, but it became popular then, but it wasn't invented specifically

by Hitler.

That won't be surprising.

I find it very weird when countries decide that their products have to be patriotic.

Or like, you know, the classic thing during the war in Iraq when America and France fell out, that Freedom Fries became the thing.

And I love the story of Freedom Fries because it was one guy, it was a Republican chairman called Bob Ney, and he renamed the menus of three congressional cafeterias with Freedom Fries.

That's how it started.

And then it just spread from there.

Yeah, and he didn't need to tell anyone about it because he has control over the cafeterias.

So he just said, this is happening.

And so they changed it.

Isn't that amazing?

He has

fascistic imposition of freedom-based feud names.

I did read a reference to supposedly French kissing.

A couple of real zealots decided they were now going to do only freedom kissing.

That caught on either.

I had freedom toast as well for French toast.

He also changed that on the menu.

And that didn't get as much press.

I don't

read.

You can make the substitution for anything which is French.

New Freedom movie starring Gerard Depadieux.

Yeah.

Dawn Freedom, of course, famous English comedian.

Apparently, they um boycotted French's mustard, even though it's owned by a British company and it's named after an American guy called Mr French.

That's right, he actually came out and said, Please don't boycott us, it's just it's a surname of our family.

Have you guys heard of Star Spangled Ice Cream?

Yeah.

You heard this, this is brilliant.

So it's conservative Americans had an ice cream company and they gave their ice creams punning names.

So for instance, the mint ice cream was called Smaller Government.

So, can you guess what the chocolate ice cream was called during the bombardment of Afghanistan?

Well, it was called Chalk and Ore.

Even better, the vanilla ice cream was called I Hate the French Vanilla.

But gets right to the point.

Just back to the Freedom Fries thing very quickly.

It was really nice.

There was a counter.

So, when people were doing the Freedom Fries thing, there was a cafe in Santa Cruz which changed their their menu of fries to impeach George W.

Bush fries, which is really nice response to that.

Speaking of labels, there are these American handbags, Tom Bin handbags, and they have washing instructions in English and French that were made during the Bush era.

And the English ones are perfectly normal, and then when you read them in French, they say, do not bleach, do not dry and dry, do not iron.

We are sorry our president is an idiot.

We did not vote for him.

That's great.

That's lovely.

In the First World War, exactly the same thing happened with all German German-named products in the USA.

So sauerkraut was called Liberty Cabbage, and that was renamed as a result of a delegation petitioning the Federal Food Administration.

They said that sauerkraut consumption had decreased by 75% since 1914 over the course of the war.

And they said, Look, we've got 400 tons of it in New York alone on our hands.

Please rename it so that we can actually sell some of this stuff.

Isn't that cool?

Wow.

Yeah.

German measles became Liberty Measles.

Although that's sort of on the fringe of freedom kissing or whatever.

I was thinking about on Germany, because obviously made in Germany now is something that's associated with high quality.

And in fact, the obverse to my original fact, which is that made in Germany was imposed on the Germans by the English.

Now the EU regulations are saying that labelling should be more accurate.

So if actually most of the work on a product is done in Bangladesh and the most expensive part comes from India, then you're not allowed to say made in Germany because you're a German company.

And Germans are saying that's really unfair.

One of the reasons people buy buy our products is because it says made in Germany because they're really good.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying the German economy is great and maybe has something to do with the fact that their word for borrow is the same as their word for guilt.

So they obviously have really, really good borrowing rates.

Personal borrowing is very low.

Because it's shameful.

It's shameful.

Every time you borrow,

you have to say the word guilt.

That was a really roundabout way of borrowing it.

It was, wasn't it?

Good.

I think I wanted to inform people about the EU regulation at the same time as rounding it off.

No one can say you didn't do that.

I think I did.

So I was looking into Made in China as a label.

I was really surprised by stuff that they produce.

85% of all artificial Christmas trees are from China.

Oh, really?

Other things that are made in China, the US uniforms for the 2012 Olympics.

Really?

Yeah.

And also, in 2008, police in China said they discovered a factory making free Tibet flags.

Yeah, but

apparently the workers at the factory said they thought they were just making colourful flags.

They didn't know the significance of them.

So the Made in China label is exactly the same as Made in Germany, as in Japan forced it on the Chinese to say, to discourage people from buying Chinese products shortly afterwards.

No way.

I quite like funny labels on stuff, and I just remembered that the iPod Shuffle, when it first came out on its little safety label, said, Do not eat iPod Shuffle, which was useful.

My sister bought a pram for her first kid, Sophia, and uh it was this huge box and on the side of the box it has a picture of a baby saying baby not included.

I can't tell if it was a joke or if it was.

All right, we should wrap up on this one.

Alex, have you got anything to add?

Going back to soft drinks, Fanto was invented actually by Coca-Cola because they couldn't import their syrup into Nazi Germany, so they were trying to make up a drink using the leftovers that were available.

Let's be real.

Life happens.

Kids spill, pets shed.

And accidents are inevitable.

Find a sofa that can keep up at washable sofas.com.

Starting at just $699, our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out.

So you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry-free living.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life.

Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want.

Neat flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers.

It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.

Visit washablesofas.com today and save.

That's washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Okay, time for fact number two, and that is my fact, and my fact this week is in 1991, a professor at Iowa State University proposed that we could solve virtually every problem of human existence by blowing up the moon.

Not every problem.

This is what he said.

Not losing the remote.

I think that was included.

I think he went literally through.

Wow.

So what problems are we solving and how?

Well, the problems range from weather problems to famine to disease.

Now, it has been pointed out by most scientists alive that this is not the case.

It would not solve the problems.

In fact, NASA was saying that if we did blow up the moon, most likely part of the exploded moon would come back as a meteorite impacting on Earth and causing sufficient damage to

extinguish all life.

So, actually, slightly the reverse effect of what he said.

No, it kind of would solve all our problems to be gone.

We wouldn't have any problems anymore.

That's true.

He thought, and his name was Professor Alexander Abian.

His idea was that you would do it remotely from Earth.

So you would put explosives into the moon and just push a button.

When did you say you said that?

1991.

Oh, right.

It's quite recent then.

Reason enough to know better.

Yeah.

He's dead now, unfortunately.

And his children say that he was a very sane man.

So

this is not as if he was a lunatic.

He was a very much loved mathematics professor at his university.

There have been a lot of wacky suggestions about how to save the world over the years, haven't there?

Some of them you've got to admire, and apparently some of them could work.

So one idea is that we wrap Greenland up in a blanket.

Have you guys read this?

No, no.

So the problem is, so all the Greenland's ice is melting.

That's obviously a bit of an issue.

So in 2009, a bunch of geoengineers covered Greenland in this big white blanket, and it's meant to reflect the sun, so it means that the sun doesn't heat up and melt the ice.

And it was surprisingly successful, more successful than predicted, but it would cost about a trillion dollars to do it to the entirety of Greenland.

Pretty weird.

It's strange that putting a duvet on something would cool it down.

Yeah.

You would think it would just melt it.

But in a hot country, if you go on, if you've got the sun blazing in on you and you hide under a duva here thinking.

Well, Greenland is not a very hot country.

No.

That's a fair point.

So does the theory work or not?

Yeah, it did work, but it's just that it's way too expensive to be at all feasible.

Yeah.

My favourite fact about Greenland is that until quite recently, 10% of the whole population lived in the same apartment block.

What?

No.

One.

1%.

Was it 1%?

Okay.

Something like 400 people out of 40,000, I think.

Yeah, something like that.

Isn't that cool?

Yeah, that's very cool.

It's got block K, I think, or something like that.

Block P.

Block K.

I got that completely wrong, didn't I?

I knew there was a fact in there somewhere.

So, did we work out what kind of problems he was going to solve?

It was one of those things where he kind of just made the statement.

He didn't publish a paper on it or anything.

He just kind of loosely gave the territories.

And it was stuff like the weather pattern.

He didn't really go into it.

Tides.

Being cut off at high tide on a beach is always a nightmare.

That's always a nightmare.

That's going to stop.

Yeah.

Losing your remote.

That was a big part of his decision.

Would there be any tides left without the moon?

Yeah, because the sun

has tidal forces.

So there are solar tides as well.

Yeah, it just would mean that it would be high tide at midday every day.

Everywhere in the world where you were.

If it was midday, it'd be high tide.

Oh, that's so boring.

It's like decimalization, isn't it?

All those tide timetables that have to be reprinted as well.

The crazy pounds, shilling, and pence world of the moon.

Yeah.

Mollusks' reproductive organs grow and shrink according to the phases of the moon.

So if there was no moon, would they stay big or stay small?

It depends when you blew up the moon.

Yeah.

So there'd be a powerful lobby from the mollusk community to blow it up when they were big.

That's like the wind changing.

When the moon blows up, your face...

If you're stuck that way, your testicle will remain the same size forever.

I think we shouldn't be too judgmental though, should we?

Because I think he...

Abian, is that what he was called?

When he died, he said, those critics who dismissed my ideas are very close to those who dismiss Galileo.

And it was true, you know, when Galileo was thinking that.

So maybe 300 years when the moon's just in shattered pieces across the universe.

I don't think Galileo ever proposed blowing up the moon.

He wasn't smart enough.

Call me Captain Skeptical.

There was a plan to do a nuclear explosion on the moon, wasn't there, by America as a show of might to the Russians.

Wow.

Yeah.

It was like a PR exercise.

Oh, that is fascinating.

Sort of pointlessly exploding something.

Yeah.

I mean, it wouldn't have blown up the moon.

It would have just made a bit of a flash.

The idea was the Russians would look up and go, oh my god, they blew up a bit of the moon.

They must be a lot better than us.

Oh, they've got terrible aim.

Were they trying to hit us there?

Eastern Europe.

Come on, they can't hit a bandor.

I, of course, um,

shaking my head because I know Dad is going to say something about Yetis or vampires.

No, it's my favourite book of recent times that I purchased, which is called Who Built the Moon.

And it's a really lovely theory that the moon is artificial because back when the rocks were originally brought back from NASA's Apollo 11 mission, the geologists who were studying the rocks said this says made in China.

No,

they said that basically the moon is just, it's such a weird thing, the moon.

The way it sits, the position it sits in, the perfectness of the distance between the sun and the earth, and

just all the features that it allows for the tides and all that.

It's easier to prove it doesn't exist than to prove it does exist.

There are people called ecosexuals.

Do you know about these guys?

No.

What's an eco-sexual?

Hang on.

Is it people who like having sex with the planet?

Yes, in a way.

There are people who have married the moon.

Oh, wow.

There were also people who married the earth, and they interviewed these people, and they said there were 450 of us, and we're all married to the earth.

Has anyone had a divorce to to the Earth because they fell in love with the Moon and handed them off?

I don't think so.

Because actually, these people who married the Moon and married the Earth, they also married the Appalachian Mountains and some snow in Ottawa.

I'm tiring of these people.

And when they go to Spain later this summer, according to the news report, they plan to marry some hunks of coal in the city of Guijon.

Hunks of coal.

These people are alive now.

So they're all sluts, basically.

Putting themselves out there, left, right, and centre.

In the wedding ceremony, though, where you've got the person standing on one side of the altar and the entire earth on the other side of the altar.

Where do the guests sit?

Or a mountain range.

You might now kiss the snow.

The wedding ended tragically, early, when the groom melted.

So could we survive without the moon?

Is that

at all possible?

I don't think so.

I doubt it.

There would be earthquakes, wouldn't there, and volcanoes and one theory is that the Earth's rotational axis is as is if it just disappeared, that the Earth's rotational axis would go way off and provoke drastic climate change.

Oh, yeah, because doesn't the moon stop us from wobbling?

Like there's a natural wobble of planets, and because we have the moon, it steadies the earth, and without that, I think it would cause dramatic climate change.

Yeah.

Probably like what happened to Mars.

Oh, really?

I think so, like, as in, we would end up with no atmosphere.

We are so lucky to have the moon.

Yeah.

Yeah, thank you, Moon.

Your friend, Dan, is trying to destroy it.

No, he wants to help.

There's an amazing thing, and Alex, you'll probably have to help me find the proper fact about this, but there was a story about when Apollo 10 went around the backside of the moon.

So you know how you lose contact with the Earth because you can't get any signals.

It's like O2 on a regular day.

It's like this is a terrible signal.

So they have a few minutes behind the moon.

And the astronauts in Apollo 10, as they were going around the moon, they started hearing this amazing orchestra.

And they couldn't explain it.

And what's really interesting is it's only recently that they've declassified these papers.

And the conversation that they had was they were going, We can't tell everyone back on Earth that we're hearing this because they just won't believe us.

That will be our career over if we suddenly claim to hear this orchestra.

It took them years to work out what it was.

It turns out that it was a beam that was coming off from Saturn, I think it was.

Alec, you might have to help me on that one there.

I found a video about

the phenomenon, and it obviously happened, but I can't find anything about an explanation.

Eugene Zennon described it several times as an outer spacey style type music.

He probably just swallowed his iPod nano.

Patrick Moore was a keen, a keen musician.

Was he?

Oh, he was a Glockenspiel player.

Xylophonist.

Don't confuse Glockenspiels and Xylophones.

He played a really fun prank in 1976 on April the 1st, because obviously he did his radio programme, what was it called?

Sky at Night.

Sky at Night.

But on April the 1st, 1976, Patrick Moore told a radio audience that unusual planetary alignment would cause people on Earth to weigh a little bit less at 9.47 in the morning, and that if if everyone jumped in the air, they'd experience a strange sensation of weightlessness.

Lots of people did it, and they immediately called up the radio to say, Hey, it happened!

I felt it.

I was weightless for a second.

Yeah, people claim they actually levitated.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

It's such a good hoax.

I love it.

I like the fact that the first

person to play golf, probably the only person to play golf on the moon, Alan Shepard, missed it.

on his first attempt.

Kind of missing.

He missed his shot.

Yeah, he missed the shot.

To be fair, he was in a spacesuit, which I guess it's hard to hit a golf ball.

One thing I really, really like is that when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first landed on the moon, they just landed, NASA got in touch with them and ordered them to eat a meal and go to sleep.

Yeah.

Can you imagine having just landed on the moon and being told to go to bed?

Let's have a nap.

Yeah, let's have a nap.

Can we get to the moon?

This is what we do.

We don't deserve to be contacted by other species.

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

Okay, my fact this week is something I read on mentalfloss.com and it is that in New York City until 1925, drivers going east or west stopped at an amber light and drove on green, while drivers going north or south drove on an amber light and stopped on green.

So it was it like a traffic light that had no back?

Yeah, you could see it from all different directions.

But you'd have to know whether you're going east or west or north or south, which sounds...

But in New York, I suppose that's that's easier than London, which has no grid system for most of it.

Easier.

Less easy than just saying across the city, red means stone.

Why did they do that?

They must have had a reason for splitting it up like that.

I don't know.

I think it's because

they use the same lights for people going in each directions.

Wow.

So when it was on amber, these guys could go, and when it was on green, these guys could go.

But it was the same white.

Good thing there were no diagonals in New York as well.

What the hell do they do?

That's true.

Similar kind of thing.

In London, the circle line on the underground used to be owned by two different companies, i.e., the clockwise bit was owned by one and the anti-clockwise was owned by another.

And you had to get a separate ticket from a different office.

Sometimes the companies would try and sell you a ticket so you'd go around 30 stops their way rather than go back three stops with the other company.

That's genius.

Sounds like Journey Planner on TFL.

I can't have to take seven items of transport to get it.

Who was Alex?

Was it you yesterday who's saying that the most popular tube journey is Covent Garden to Leicester Square?

Oh, yeah.

It's the most popular one and the shortest is the most commonly travelled.

Unless you take the anti-clockwise route, in which case...

It's really what your money's worth, yeah.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, they wanted to change it so that green meant spop stop and red meant go, because obviously red was a much more positive colour in those days.

It's very strong.

What I love about the Cultural Revolution, that fact about how

they tried to kill all the sparrows because they were eating all the crops.

Do you remember that?

I think think that was the great leap forwards.

Was it?

Yes.

It wasn't a Mao, yeah.

There were like half a billion sparrows in China, and they had a scheme where everyone was encouraged to kill them all.

And so everyone killed all the sparrows, and then that's great because they're not eating the crops anymore.

But they didn't realise that actually the sparrows were eating all the insects that were eating the crops.

So they got rid of the sparrows, and then all the crops died because they were eaten by insects instead.

Fools.

People never anticipate introductions and culling.

People never seem to anticipate the natural knock-on effect.

No, exactly.

Even though it happens every time.

Yeah, I really like that guy who wanted to introduce to America every single bird mentioned in Shakespeare.

Oh, yeah.

And he introduced tons of them, and one of them is now the biggest pest in America.

And I can't know which one it is.

Is it called Skylin or something like that?

Yeah, something like that.

Skylin or something like that.

Yeah.

I have an amazing sparrow fact that I found yesterday.

I'm so glad this has come up.

I read this in a Carl Sagan book.

I was in foils and just flipped it open to a random page.

And it was that sparrow's testicles are a millimeter long and weigh one milligram.

So I tweeted that yesterday, and Kay Smoliker, who is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam's head curator, he got back to me saying that in April and May, the sparrow's testicles will grow to the size of a kidney bean.

Wow.

From a millimeter.

Oh, my days.

That's like a.

That's what's that, like a thousand times.

I've had a full moon.

I read yesterday that also on testicle news.

Oh, yeah.

That wasn't the website.

It's just

so.

I read that hippos can hide their testicles around their body.

What?

Like on their shoulder?

Yeah,

so yeah, no.

What they can do is they can retract them up to a foot inside their body.

And the reason that they do it is because when hippos used to fight each other, or when hippos do fight each other, they often go for the testicles.

And so it's evolved as kind of an evolutionary way of moving their testicles out of the way.

And it's a real problem if you're trying to castrate them.

Can't believe hippos have beaten you guys to it.

Surely, you wish that you'd evolved.

Oh, WWF wrestlers do it.

That's the.

Okay, right.

This goes back to Ian Fleming, because in one of his books, I think it's in You Only Live Twice, Bond's getting his instructions from M, and M says, be careful of sumo wrestlers in Japan because they can all withdraw their testicles into their body.

Why be careful?

Watch out for those testicle retractors.

You'll die of shock.

There we go.

Some non-testicles where you expect to see testicles bond.

Just prepare yourself.

But can they?

Are you

tricking?

So humans can't.

No one can.

No, but can't you?

I've not tried, but I thought the idea was that they sort of shoved them into themselves.

If I had a half hour with you, Andy.

And I had a lot of determination.

But the fact that I'm kind of we've slightly jumped past, which I love way more, is that hippos kick each other in the balls.

That's good vice.

Bite.

Bite.

Bite their balls.

Oh, wow.

Because if you think about it, it's a good way.

If you're fighting someone for sexual reasons, as in you're trying to get the lady hippo,

then a good way of going against the guy is to bite his testicles off because then he can't mate with the female.

Two birds, one stone.

So you sort of cripple him and also...

One bird, no stone.

I think we should maybe go back to traffic lights.

Yeah, sure.

I was reading about the history of signs and when the two people who standardized signposts in the UK, it's pretty thrilling reading.

um were Jock Kinnear and Margaret Calvert in the 1950s.

But one of the things there was uproar about when they were standardizing signposts was signs had usually been in capital letters and their proposal to put them in lower case apparently caused outrage in the sign making community.

I can't even remember.

Lower case.

They decided because it's easier to read from a distance, because capitals can look all sort of the same if you're at a distance.

Oh, that's cool.

And they were tasked to find the most boring font available to them so it wasn't distracting for driving.

What did they go with?

And it's called Motorist Font.

That does sound boring, to be fair.

I like the way that before they standardized it, they would have weird-like signs.

There was the sign for schools used to be a flaming torch of knowledge.

That's brilliant.

I want to live in a country where those are the symbols.

It's great, isn't it?

But imagine driving up the road and you see a flaming torch.

School is not the first place you think of.

Danger, fire, turn around.

I mean, actually, the sign for schools.

That school is libertied straight ahead.

The sign for schools now, the girl in that picture is, or Children Crossing, is based on that woman, Margaret, who standardised the schools, which I don't know how it's based on her, because it's the most generic girl picture ever.

Yeah, and the sign for farm animals is based on her family cow, which was called Patience.

So now we know that the cow on those farm signs is called Patience.

Wonderful.

Alex, have you got anything to add?

Yes, a couple of things very quickly.

It was Eugene

Schiefflin in 1890 who released A Load of Birds in Central Park.

They were all mentioned in Shakespeare.

He let bullfinches, chaffinches,

nightingales, and skylarks into the park, but it was the starlings that he released, which have now grown to about a population of about two billion.

One massive pest.

In British Columbia, it is the second largest producer of blueberries, and they just eat all the blueberries.

So that's a bit of a nightmare.

It was in You Only Live Twice that Bond was being taught how to be Japanese, and his teacher told him that simarises can retract their testicles, but it's, as far as I can tell, a complete myth.

Yeah.

There's nothing like it, like for artificially doing it or otherwise.

Again, half an hour with me and Andy in a room.

Time for a sofa upgrade.

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices, with sofas starting at $699.

Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

From wine country weekends to scenic drives through the Sierra foothills, fall is the perfect time to explore California.

And there's no better way to do it than in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

With 17 fuel-efficient options like the stylish all-hybrid Camry, the Adventure-Ready RAV4 hybrid, or the spacious Grand Highlander hybrid, Toyota has the perfect ride for any adventure.

Every new Toyota comes with Toyota Care, a two-year complementary scheduled maintenance plan, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and of course, Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Visit your local Toyota dealer and test drive one today so you can be prepared for wherever the road takes you this fall.

Toyota, let's go places.

See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is you, Andy Murray.

My fact is that there are companies which lasso

icebergs to stop them hitting oil rigs.

That's really good.

How cool is that?

That's very cool.

So when you say lasso, do they do the the cowboy thing if they just throw a rope at it?

They just throw a rope and they say yeehaw and then they brand it which doesn't work because it melts.

It melts.

It's not exactly like the cowboy thing, but basically a ship circumnavigates an iceberg with a rope.

See what I mean?

So it ties it on at one point, it goes around the circumference and then reattaches it and just tows it.

You don't have to tow it more than a few degrees off course to ensure that it doesn't hit an oil rig.

But it's really clever.

And half the battle is in knowing where icebergs are and checking how they're floating.

And so they so they observe the sky, or they observe the sea rather from the skies and check what's moving where.

If any icebergs do need to be moved, then they call it.

Then they call a cowboy.

They call a cowboy, yeah.

That's absolutely.

That started with the Titanic, didn't it?

It was the fact that the iceberg hitting the Titanic led to them going, we need to monitor these things now.

And they started putting in place the system that we now have to work out where they all are.

The International Ice Patrol, which I just really like as a name.

Fantastic organization.

Yeah, that's good.

But I like the fact that, yeah, after the Titanic, just a bunch of guys in boats were sent out to check where icebergs were, so I assume they just kept crashing into icebergs and going, oh, there's one here.

Got another one.

Got one.

You know, they have a photo, or two photos, that they think potentially was the iceberg that the Titanic crashed into.

It's got red paint along the side.

So there's two icebergs that definitely had paint.

And so the pictures were taken just for that reason because they thought, oh, wow, how curious.

They didn't know that the Titanic incident had happened, which sounds weird, but true.

The two boats, it was a German boat.

They had no idea.

I read an amazing article on Wired, which was a biography of the iceberg that hit the Titanic, as much as you could speculate.

They reckon it started in Greenland.

Basically, every year, there's about 15 to 30 icebergs that are carved from the glaciers, and they reckon only about 1% of those make it to the Atlantic.

And then they gradually melt, and so they eventually disappear.

So had the Titanic been going a few years later, it might not have been there at all.

I kind of like the idea of the iceberg then going on to live a normal life with an ecosexual husband.

Well, it would also have been 3,000 years old.

Because

when it fell as snow onto the Arctic, it will have been packed.

and then very slowly moved out from the zone.

That's an interesting life to have nothing happen for 3,000 years and then you run into the Titanic yeah yeah his mates must think he's super cool that's the thing they were saying it was probably born as an iceberg roughly at the same time as Tutankhamun right I mean that's so nice that that that was happening well and then it just found its way down to the Atlantic and eventually just

really really amazing I guess it could be like

say some sweat from Tutankham Khamoon went up into the atmosphere it turned into snow fell down waited there for 3,000 years and then hit the Titanic so what claim is that Tutankhamun sunk the Titanic?

That should be your fact on these.

That is that conspiracy theory.

Yeah, no, no, no, but that was the big thing, that there was stuff from it's a huge myth from back in the day that Tutankhamun's stuff from the Howard Carter finding was on the Titanic, and it was the curse that brought it down.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

You guys must know that.

That was one of the classic childhood

childhood.

Yeah, like that was a lot of children were told bedtime stories.

Dan was told conspiracy theories in his cradle.

Phrased in terror.

Thing is, Dan, little Dan, the the lizards are behind it all.

Sleep well.

It is weird to think that, yeah, you might have molecules of water that were in the Titanic iceberg in you now.

Do you guys know about the world's largest iceberg?

No.

It's about the size of Jamaica.

Wow.

About half the size of whales.

And it carved off in the year 2000.

And they think that there's probably still bits of it that haven't melted.

Wow.

Was that an Antarctic one?

Yeah, it was called Iceberg B15.

Catchy.

They don't have very creative names, icebergs, like hurricanes.

They just have B50, D12, D14.

D12?

Do they wrap a lot?

They do.

I was looking at oil rigs.

America's third largest oil field is LA, and it's completely concealed.

So if most oil fields you picture are like those big pylons, LA is full of secret oil rigs.

So LA started sort of hippifying around, I think, the 1930s.

And people who had built these huge oil rig buildings, they're disguised as normal buildings in LA, and they're all over Hollywood.

And there are just buildings all over LA which look like normal concrete buildings.

And inside they're sucking up, you know, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil.

They're transformers of the oil industry, aren't they?

Towing an iceberg.

We've done some computer models to see if it's feasible to tow an iceberg from the Arctic down to Africa to give people drinking water.

And they think that you could take an iceberg from Newfoundland to the northwest coast of Africa.

It would take five months and would retain more than 60% of the iceberg's mass.

If it was the cheapest way, it might have been tried.

I did try it.

Wow.

Yeah, in the second half of the 19th century, smaller icebergs were routinely taken up to Peru for refrigeration in the brewing business.

God.

Or from the South Pole?

Yes, from the African south.

So, where do they keep them?

Is there like an African harbour where they just have loads of icebergs sitting there?

Must look so bizarre.

It's not only icebergs that we're lassoing.

NASA is investing in a project to lasso an asteroid using a robotic space lasso.

It's lassoing an asteroid into lunar orbit to make sure it orbits the moon so that it hopes that by 2025 we're going to be able to use it.

Astronauts will be able to use it as a way station from which to extract consumables on the way to Mars.

That sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard.

We've already established that losing the moon would solve all our problems, and now we're saying, let's bring another moon in.

Yeah.

A moon for the moon.

Okay, that's it for this week's podcast.

Thanks everyone for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us, you can do so on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At eggshate.

Alex.

At Alex Bell underscore.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email me on podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our qi.com slash podcast page where she and Alex compile all of the extra stuff that we've been talking about from this episode.

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

So stay tuned.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Okay, everyone else has left apart from me and Anna.

We're the only ones left in the office because everyone else has gone to Edinburgh.

But if you want to see any of the guys in Edinburgh, you can see Andy.

He has two shows.

One is called Ostentatious, and the other is called Foliader, and they are improvised comedy shows.

And Dan will be doing his one-hour show, which is called Cockblocked from Outer Space, and he will also be producing the Museum of Curiosity Live.

So, if anyone is in Edinburgh, then go and catch those.

Time for a sofa upgrade?

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.

With sofas starting at $699, Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

From wine country weekends to scenic drives through the Sierra foothills, Fall is the perfect time to explore California.

And there's no better way to do it than in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

With 17 fuel-efficient options like the stylish all-hybrid Camry, the Adventure-Ready RAV4 hybrid, or the spacious Grand Highlander hybrid, Toyota has the perfect ride for any adventure.

Every new Toyota comes with Toyota Care, a two-year complementary scheduled maintenance plan, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and of course, Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Visit your local Toyota dealer and test drive one today so you can be prepared for wherever the road takes you this fall.

Toyota, let's go places.

See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.