The Infinite Monkey’s Guide to... Audience Favourites

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Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

After nine episodes of us being in charge controlling the horizontal and the vertical, not that you'd have actually noticed because, of course, we're an audio show.

We've handed this episode over to you.

So this is the Infinite Monkey's Guide to, well, whatever you want.

What does controlling the horizontal and the vertical mean?

I'm glad you asked that because I knew a lot of people wouldn't get that reference.

It's the opening of outer limits, the outer limits.

We control the horizontal, we control the vertical.

We are going to take you into the outer limits, which was like kind of the Twilight Zone.

Do you know what I remember that?

The vertical and the horizontal.

I'd be interested in the next series that we do, where we have, again, an audience favorites, audience question show, I would like people to write in, and I would like them to say that they understood and recognised that reference.

I'd love it to know how many people got that.

Now, you've sent in hundreds of suggestions of moments of the show that you found enlightening or perplexing over the last 14 years that we've been, I was going to say on air, but that's rather old-fashioned, isn't it?

Yeah, because we're not really on air now, are we?

But are we on air or are we through air?

Because it's on air itself, I suppose.

You're mainly through optical fibre now, aren't we?

Anyway, the wonderful thing about all your suggestions is that it definitely took us back to stories that we'd forgotten and ideas that excited us, new ideas and wonderful stories, I thought.

So I'm glad you all enjoyed it.

Well, the first thing we're actually going to hear about is from an episode not that long ago, maybe a couple of years back, which was about the chattiness of trees.

I loved it that you did that in a perfect 80s DJ voice.

Chattiness of trees.

You very much enjoyed it.

Well, rather, the chattiness of trees, really, it's the astounding discovery of communication via Michael Reisel.

Is it Michael Reisel?

Michael Riesel.

Michael Riesel.

There we go, networks, which is an incredible discovery.

And indeed, the person we had on the show first became fascinated in it when her dog fell into an outside toilet and they had to dig it out.

But that's not the discussion you're going to hear.

So, thank you to Hazel Pearson, to Martine Macaulay, Joanne McConnell, and quite a few other people who wanted to hear more of this discussion between well, someone from one of your favorite TV shows.

Oh, yeah, from Ted Lasso, Brendan Hunt, and professor of forest ecology, Suzanne Simard.

They communicate in resources: water, nutrients, and carbon.

So think of that like a language.

If you think of carbon, photosynthate is a bunch of like six carbon molecules hooked to six oxygen molecules hooked to I think eight hydrogen molecules and that's like a word right it's a it's a compound and then there's a whole bunch of other compounds a bunch of amino acids which are other words in the language so you can think of the language of carbon and then nitrogen there's there's a different amino acids like glutamate and alanine and

there's other ones too.

I just can't remember what they are right now.

And so that's the language of amino acids.

And then water is just water.

And things are dissolved in water.

That's another part of the language.

And then there's a whole other stream of words that's just about information.

So I'm just using these metaphors of words and language because basically they're communicating with the things that they need.

And some of the other information they communicate is about their relationship with each other.

For example, do you want to marry me, Coach Beard?

We've only just met.

And I'm not saying no.

It's very forward of me, it's true.

Or, you know, if you're my brother, or if you're my sister.

Well, sidebar, then,

when they communicate that with each other, do they say, I think you might be my brother because I've recently been on a genealogy website called ancestry.com.

I know

their leaves are all over the fingerprints.

No, that doesn't make sense.

Is this communication, though?

Are they just reacting to concentrations of various molecules and so on, as you said, water?

Or

can it be defined as real communication?

It's real communication because one that's talking to the other one, it's a back-and-forth conversation.

So it goes back and forth.

And then the tree or the plant that is sending the communication, there's a response of the receiver, and then the communicator or the donor, we call them, also changes its behavior according to the messages that are going back and forth.

So there's an actual receipt of information and then a conveyance back again and a change in behavior.

So yeah, it's not just a transmission of resources, it's actually this conversation going on that changes how they behave.

How they grow.

Only between single species, or is it a communication across species?

All across species.

And they communicate through these, as I said, these fungal networks.

So all of the plants in England and the UK and where I'm from in Canada,

almost all plants form these mycorrhizas.

And mycorrhiza is a symbiosis between the plant and the fungus.

They can't survive without joining in this togetherness.

And so when you're in the forest and you see all those herbs in the understory, they're all linked together in this network.

I have a good question about these messages.

So they send each other warnings.

Do they ever send each other just like compliments?

Hey, Larry.

Larry, the Elm Tree, you look great today, buddy.

What are you doing?

Kind of.

Like, if you were my sibling, for example, and I knew you were my sibling, because I can detect through these chemical messages that you're my sibling, what we're finding is that they'll send more carbon, more water, and my sibling sibling will create bigger networks, they'll take up more nutrients, and they'll be like, hey, I'm doing better.

More confidence, generally carrying themselves better as a tree.

That's great.

That's how it should be.

There's a bright golden haze on the matter.

There's a bright golden haze on the matter.

Right, Brian, question for you.

Have you licked any rocks lately?

Yes.

Which rocks did you lick?

A sandstone, a granite, an igneous rock.

And was that blindfolded as usual in that version of nine and a half weeks that you make with geologists?

Yes, it was.

What an ugly image that would be beautiful depending on your take on it.

It turns out that even I, I'm not a trained geologist, but I've picked up enough geology over the years on Monkey Cage that if I lick sand

and then I lick granite and then I lick a volcanic rock I can tell the difference.

I reckon I could as well.

Yeah.

Let's do that now then.

Ow!

Yeah, I don't like pumice.

Pumice is too harsh, but I do feel like I've got a lovely smooth tongue now.

Anyway, Brian was somewhat aghast originally to discover that geologists really do lick rocks to ascertain their properties, a skill he now has.

Yeah, we don't do that in particle physics.

It's very hard, isn't it, to taste a quark and go, oh,

there's an uppiness to this, isn't there?

But there's also a little bit of charm, a bit of uppiness, a bit of charm.

Yeah.

Although, I suppose technically everything you taste is licking a quark yeah it's just telling which quarks which i suppose yeah yeah it's very hard to tell between them so please uh after you've heard the next clip do not lick rocks until you've been properly trained the infinite monkey cage takes no responsibility for any rock licking accidents that you experience after hearing this clip which was requested by neptune which i don't think is the roman sea god as far as we know how do you know that well i don't know for sure i'm merely being marginally sceptical so here are paleontologist susie madement geologist chris jackson and comedian Ross Noble and that rock licking.

We talk about the story of geology, the story of a rock.

Let's say you go outside, pick up a rock.

How do you begin to characterise it?

How do you begin to tell its story?

How do we know how old it is, how it was formed?

So

how do you tell that story?

Well geology is a discipline in which you kind of use all of your senses.

So obviously looking really closely at a rock is really important but one of the things that we often teach our students and we try and encourage them to do quite a lot and they often don't believe us is to bite a little bit off it to chew the rock that tells us how

that doesn't work for any children watching I don't think you should do that no you definitely should you definitely should chew the rock

probably probably think a little bit about where the rock is before you before you chew it like if it's on the side of a road maybe don't chew it don't chew the rock sorry I just I just need to just for my research, is it a chew or a lick?

Can we just kneel that?

No, it's a chew, it's a chew.

I mean, if you've got a halite like salt rock, you can legitimately lick that and not draw strange stares from your friends.

So no, I just,

you're making geologists sound really strange.

So is that the first thing that you do?

You go through a rock formation,

you lick it.

You lick the rock formation.

It is one of the tools available to us to determine some aspect of the texture of the rock.

Yeah, it's all about the texture.

So sometimes, unless you've got like a little hand lens, so a little microscope to look at what the grain size of the rock is, it's very hard to tell.

And actually, if you just bite a little bit off, if it's a bit grainy, then you'd say it's a sandstone.

If it's got a little bit of texture to it, it's a silt stone.

And if it just turns into mush in your mouth, it's mudstone.

So they are legitimate.

Stop laughing.

These are all legitimate.

See, all I've got is.

Me and Miuzi have trained for years and years and years.

Sorry, I know you're trying to get back to the science, but this is

really going to help me out.

Do you reckon?

And it's just a new game show I'm working on.

If I was to blindfold you and line up a load of rocks, do you reckon you could identify the rock just with your tongue?

How long do we have?

How long are you going to leave us with the rocks for?

You know what?

We can fix it in the edit, and you're playing for a car.

I think some of them, Susie, do you think we could...

I mean, if it was halite, you'd nail that one straight away, right?

Totally, totally.

It tastes like you're licking a salty chip, right?

I think it depends what level of accuracy you want, really.

We could get you down to sandstone, you know, straight away, couldn't we?

Really?

Yeah.

And if you licked one of the garnet mica chests that Susie talked about at the start, and if your tongue passed over a nice bit of garnet, it would be nice and smooth.

Yeah, that would be nice and smooth across your tongue.

And then as you lick some of the micaceous minerals, they might come off.

I've genuinely not thought about this that much.

And you've won a holiday.

One thing that seems to have continued to amaze our audience throughout all our series is that despite all the evidence to the contrary, I am older than Robin.

Yeah, I think one of the reasons is because when we tour, you get up and then you have a morning nap.

And then you have lunch and then you have an afternoon nap.

And then after your afternoon nap, you quickly have an early evening nap and then you go to bed.

Yeah.

Whereas when we get anywhere, like, you know, whether it's Pittsburgh or Indianapolis, I immediately get off the tour bus and go, I've got to see everything immediately.

I've got to find every weird bookshop and I've got to find every single strange art museum.

And so, I think there's something about, you know, your docility has led to a fantastic mental agility.

Yeah, I love some of these emails here.

This one.

You have managed to make 26 series, and Brian Cox still looks exactly the same.

Another one here, that Robin Int is younger than Brian Cox.

Never heard a scientific explanation, though.

Yeah, there's something about my frame of reference, isn't there?

I'm sure.

Yeah, I think there is.

But anyway.

Yeah, Brian is older than Robin.

Other people have said Brian Cox is a real person.

And not just Robin Inks doing his Alan Bennett impression, tried to explain the event arising to mother the other day, etc., etc., etc.

Yeah, no, and talking of impressionists, there you go.

There's a segment.

Oh, that is.

Talking of impressionists.

In 2011, I was replaced by John Culeshaw.

We did a show in Manchester, and most of it was John.

It was great.

In fact, a lot of people don't know this.

Actually, 17 out of the 20 shows a year are voiced either by John or myself doing Brian's voice.

So if every now and again you listen to the show and you go, that doesn't sound very much like Brian Cox, it's because it's Brian Cox.

Let's see if you can tell the difference then.

So here is John doing an impression of me.

And this is back in series five.

What's the North Ever Done for Us?

So, Brian, can you explain neutrinos and what their superliminal travel may mean for causality?

Well, neutrinos are really wonderful and

they're really beautiful and amazing.

The amazing thing is that they're so small that they can't even be seen with the human eye or even by the eyes of things that are really small, like a bowl,

like a flea, or even an ant and the neutrinos are faster than light because when observed they appear to be weaving teeny tiny wonderful little rollerblades that mean

they can go through the universe like it was a disco and in the year 2000 there was a band called oxide and neutrino did bound for the reload but it wasn't very good and it was quite artistic when you hear your voice being done by impressionists what do you make of it i don't think it sounds like me until you play a recording of me

so it is exactly the same as when you're a kid and you first hear recording your voice and you're in utter shock.

And you go, yeah, it is.

I do sound.

I mean, it is true that my accent has got less pronounced over the years.

So if you go back now, if you listen to some of the older Monkey Cage recordings, then I do actually sound like your impression.

Well, you used to sound quite like John Monson as well.

Remember when we had John Monson on the show?

And people went, I can't tell which bit's John Monson and which bits Brian Cox.

No.

Anyway,

John went off and did a few more impressions for us.

Here's one.

Welcome to the Sitting Under Sky Night,

where we shall be talking about the fountains of Enceladus.

They shouldn't exist, but they do.

What I love about John is that he can do every single Doctor Who.

I love him doing John Pertwee, but here is his Tom Baker.

Well, yes.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

I have reversed the polarity of the neutron flow, so the monkey cage should be free of the force field now.

To introduce my son to science by using Star Wars, I used to do an impersonation of Richard Dawkins turning into C-3PO and vice versa.

Oh, for heaven's sake, Artu, how many times must I tell you, Yahweh is a fictional god?

Well, unsurprisingly, dinosaur revelations frequently came up in our inbox of requests in the 14 years we've been on air.

The Brontosaurus has been rejected as being an amalgam of multiple dinosaurs, but the debate remains, actually.

Yeah.

And I think it's safest to say, in a scientific sense, that it's synonym for an apastosaurus.

A pastosaurus.

Apastosaurus.

That restaurant's not gonna.

Oh, the restaurant went extinct.

It was too big.

A patosaurus.

So we've done the disclaimer now.

Well, Zoe wrote to us to tell us that she'd learned that a T-Rex is more distant in time from a stegosaur than from an iPad.

Here's actor Rufus Hound, a former employee of the Science Museum, and paleontologist Susie Maidman again, who are talking about the wonders of dinosaurs and indeed the fact that they've discovered a new species just before this particular show aired.

I say they've discovered, I should say that's not Rufus and Susie.

Rufus was not involved at all.

Also, another paleontologist, Steve Brissett, as well, on how this is actually a more regular occurrence than you might expect.

A couple of weeks ago, we announced that we'd found a new stegosaur from North Africa, and it's the oldest stegosaur in the world, and it's also the first one one from North Africa.

And by oldest, so what are the time scales?

How old is that one, and what's the span of time that stegosaurs were present on the Earth?

Well, stegosaurs weren't around for that long.

Now, you know, this is a really, really common misconception about dinosaurs that they were all kind of living together in the same ecosystems.

But dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems for 170 million years.

So that, you know, by the time that Steve's T-Rex was alive, Stegosaurus was already a fossil.

And in fact, T-Rex is closer to an iPad in time than it is to a Stegosaurus.

So we're talking about vast swathes of time.

I had not realized how many new, like you were talking about discovering a new species.

This is something that's very regular, isn't it?

Is it approximately one species a week on average?

It is.

And last week was Susie's week with the Stegosaur.

And this week, I don't know who it'll be, but it is.

It's about 50 new species a year.

Hang on, let me just look under this desk.

No, it's not my favourite.

So 50 new species a year.

50 new species.

Yeah, it's incredible.

And that's been going on for about a decade.

So that's not just a blip.

Oh, now this, this,

I have no surprise that people wanted to hear this particular clip.

This is, in particular, it was Elaine Hood who asked about this, but you remember the episode we did about the flies?

Yeah.

In praise of flies.

Oh, Erica McAllister was quite remarkable on that.

And I highly recommend looking at her books as well about flies.

In praise of flies, where Elaine basically said after she listened to this, I used to scoop the fly out of my rose wine and continue drinking, but not anymore.

The whole glass full is jettisoned.

I mentioned this to many friends, and they all now do the same.

I hope it doesn't come out that we all own shares in rose wine.

And that's why we put it there.

Here's entomologist Erica McAllister and comedian David Bediel talking about

those flies.

When you're sitting in the pub and you've got that fly flying around your glass of wine or your pint of nutty ale.

It'll be a Drosophila.

It'll be a Drosophila.

Drosophila Drosophila are known not only for their amazing genetics, but because they have mega sperm.

Okay, and the fly, it's...

I have to finish.

Oh, you will.

You will.

Their sperm is about a thousand times bigger than yours.

I haven't.

There's really no need for this.

Well, you keep making it personal.

So, Drosophila, the melanogaster, it's a three-millimetre-long fly.

Its sperm is about one millimetre.

It's amazing.

But it's not as good as the biggest sperm, which is in berfurca uh the drosophila berfurca whose sperm is 5.8 centimeters long

which is massive it's huge it's like but they only have a few and they don't have teenage years but the sperm is bigger than they are yeah it's it's like massively runded up

and they've kind of like got a pea shooter as a genitalia where they

out it comes

but one of the loves why

sperm competition so she's trying to kill it as much as as possible, and he has to, his sperm keeps evolving to be bigger and bigger and bigger as she makes it more and more complicated.

Plus, he's fighting,

that sperm is fighting other sperm that's already in there.

And they found that the longer the sperm, it's easier to push out other sperm.

So,

and now, yet again, David Attenborough has walked over to his radio and goes, She's done it again.

Oh, God, that's the end of the week for me.

Two knighthoods, but not very big sperm.

But, but, one of the last things that you do

one of the last things that flies do is they will uh so if there's a female and she's pregnant because some flies do carry larvae so she is pregnant if if she's in a last ditch situation is she just lets all the larvae go or the eggs go and some males just let all the sperm go as well so when it falls into your pint or your drink and it's dying one of the last thing it might be doing is ejaculating into your nutty owl which is just a nice thought

Please, can we end the programme now?

Please, Brian.

We can't end the programme now because

Julie Helen Turner wrote to us to say that she learned that laughter boosts the immune system and is essential for social bonding.

That was again a fascinating episode.

Finally, getting Frank Skinner on the show and psychologist Richard Wiseman and also cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott, who regular listeners will know has spent a great deal of her career tickling rats.

Hello, I'm Frank Skinner, I'm a comedian, and what makes me laugh is fireworks.

See, it made you laugh too.

I don't know what it is, I've been to many fireworks displays.

As soon as they start going off, I crack up completely.

I was once accidentally next to Brian Ferry at a fireworks display, and I laughed so much that he moved away.

Why you guys, my grandfather was arrested bizarrely for stealing fireworks?

Is that your contribution?

I was hoping you'd make a more professional contribution to this discussion.

It worked out well because the police let him off.

Before we move on, Richard, do you have any comments on that idea that people laugh at just strange things that are not funny in themselves?

Well, we have to separate humour and laughter, because they're slightly different things.

And so laughter is very much a social signal.

You do laugh on your own, it's just you laugh much more more when you're with other people.

You're 30 times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own.

And that's science.

Does that provide any insight as to the evolutionary origin of laughter?

The fact there's some kind of crowd-like behaviour to it.

It seems to.

So the first appearance of laughter is in interactions with babies, normally something like tickling.

So tickling works across wherever you find an animal that laughs, it will laugh at being tickled.

Now, that's already a social situation.

You can't just walk the streets tickling babies.

The babies are only going to let certain people tickle them.

Everyone really don't.

But also, you can't tickle yourself.

So it has to be somebody else involved.

So it's from the very, very outset.

Laughter is something that is completely being driven by social factors.

Thank you for listening to the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2.

All the episodes we took clip from in this series are available on BBC Sounds and in the Infinite Monkey Cage back catalogue.

We have a greater back catalogue now than either of your recording careers with Dare or D-Reem.

So I think think that's a good thing.

It's true.

And if you enjoyed our show, here's another podcast that you might enjoy.

Hello.

I'm Dr.

Michael Mosley and in my BBC Radio 4 podcast, Just One Thing, I'm investigating investigating some quick, simple and surprising ways to improve your health and life.

Which will you try?

Maybe a cup of tea

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So to benefit your brain and body in ways you might not expect, here's just one thing you can do right now: subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds.

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