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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tashinsky, and Andrew Hunter-Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is that Charles Darwin kept a pet bug so he could see how long it lasted on a meal of blood. Who's blood? So, I went to... Charles Darwin's house recently oh yeah which is called Down House and it's amazing it's really great because they preserved it almost exactly as it was wow when he was living there because it was his then it passed to his and his wife's children and then it became a museum so they've got
the chair he wrote the origin of species in they've got all of his little experiments in the garden and there was a board up which said that it was it seemed to imply that it was his blood actually i think it was he got the bug to drink someone else's blood and then just monitored the bug. Did he just drag people off the street?
Well, he was on the voyage of the Beagle at the time. Because the voyage took years. I mean, the voyage was really, really long. You need company on that kind of thing. A pet's a good idea. It's a really good idea. Do we know what this bug is, by the way? We do. It's called the Vinchuca now. At the time, he called it...
the Benchooker. And it's called the kissing bug or the assassin bug and it crawls all over your body and then drinks your blood. So he put it on the table and from the account he got some sailors on the boat to offer their fingers to the bug. And he said that it would immediately protrude its sucker, make a charge, and if allowed, draw blood. And then in 10 minutes, it went from being completely flat to being globular. And that...
This one feast kept it fat during four whole months. Wow. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty good. Is that the one that he got Shagas disease from? Yeah. Yeah. This is of all the bugs. that you could keep as a pet. This is the one whereby... Yeah, it's the worst. Mosquito might be worse. Mosquito's bad, but this is the one where it's got that longevity thing where if you get bitten by it and the sort of whatever saliva goes into your body...
20 years later you might have heart conditions so he had incredibly poor health for the last few decades of his life really terrible digestion and just sort of just awful health and we think it may be it's not completely sure what it was but there's a really strong theory that it was his pet. Shagas disease from his pet bug. And when I say Shagas disease, it's C-H-A-G-A-S, isn't it? I pronounce it Shagas. It's much more funny to pronounce it Shagas.
addict meeting, but you thought you were going to a Shaggers disease meeting. It's just cool to say at the pub, isn't it? Got Shagga's disease. I'll let you catch it. Off an insect. I'll be dead in a couple of years. Did he have a name for the pet? No, I don't think he named the pet. Again, this brings into question... Is it a pet? Did he take it for walks?
It seems very unlikely, doesn't it? But a cat is a pet and you don't take that for a walk normally. Did it sit on his lap while he watched telly? Did it just aloofly walk away from him all the time like my cat does? Pet, exactly. Did it show no emotional interest? Pet. It was a cat. Effectively, it turns out he had a cat. But wait, if he got Chagas disease from...
It does imply that he did experiment on it himself, right? It may have been one of its many rival colleague bugs which actually gave him the disease. But he may also have, he probably did let it feed. He did, but it was on that trip which he wrote in his voyage of the Beagle Diary that there was a knife.
where there was an attack of these kind of bugs where he was bitten. So I don't think it was necessarily his pet that went for him as opposed to a whole swarm in the middle of the night. It is a really cool house. He had his desk chair. like so many animals, evolved to meet his needs. As in it gave birth to other desk chairs, some of which died because they weren't adapted well enough to the environment. Or did he intelligently design it to change it? Oh my god, he actually did.
He disproved himself. It was a big comfy chair and he had a board across it so he could sit in basically a lovely big armchair but also right. I think we said it had wheels. It had wheels. It was the first office chair. He invented the office chair.
tampering with furniture because we've actually mentioned years ago that Erasmus Darwin his grandfather adjusted a table to accommodate his fat stomach didn't he kind of holding it yeah well they were part of the Wedgwood family so they liked interiors oh yeah What's that?
On that side of the family? No, it was his wife, wasn't it? I just remembered they were cousins, he and his wife. So actually... Yeah, yeah. So you said it lasted four months, right? And a lot of bloodsuckers, they've got a bad rep, but they do last a very long time, most of them. Very small amounts of blood. Well, the little blood suckers. So I think you can get lice that last like a year on one blood meal. Wow. And leeches. So we breed leeches. Actually, Wales has the world's biggest leech.
breeding farm for medical purposes like the vast majority of the world's leeches that are used in medicine and they don't put that in the tourist information no no why did they choose the dragon as their animal leech dragons don't even exist good point and leech is much easier to draw
Yes. Looks a bit like a poo, though, on the flag. Yeah, you don't want that to be... If you draw the serrated teeth and the slobbering fangs, I think it'll make clearer that it's a leech on the flag. What do you think? Because, like, if you put eyes on a poo, it's...
looks like a poo as emojis have showed us that's true i think if you've got the leech latched into a human vein that's a great idea that's a nice logo and maybe cut the back off it so that it just keeps sucking and the blood pours out of its Why is it a severed leech? Well, that's what they do with leeches, isn't it? When you have blood-sucking leeches, if you're a guy from the 16th century or something, a doctor, you put a leech on them and you cut the end off and they just keep...
Do you? I think so. Oh, wow. Because they don't know they're full. I'm going off memory, so I might be completely wrong. They're not full. They're empty. You're emptying them out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know when people pack suitcases to go on holiday, but you don't want them to go in Austin Powers, for instance. Cut a hole in the...
Take them out. Oh, I see. You don't cut a hole in the suitcase. No, no. They get pissed off about that. Wait, so could you bleed to death if you had an anus-less leech? No. No, I think your body would create enough blood. Okay, your body has a lot of blood. Yeah, it would take a long time and a lot of blood.
leeches okay yeah still quite amazing my cat i have to feed it every day how long did that bug say one year without a meal yeah you can go one year without a meal these leeches they get fed sheep's blood every six months on the farm Which is not, I guess there's probably just one sheep and every six months it gets a call and it's like, it's your day to day. That's all right if it's only twice a year. I think, did they put it in a...
Put a load of sheep's blood in a condom or something and then the leeches have to attach onto it. Yeah, maybe it's that. Get that on the flag. So I actually haven't realised how widespread they are in plastic surgery, for instance. So there was a survey of 50 plastic... plastic surgery units in the UK and 80% of them use leeches in the last five years. So it's common. What are they in that scenario? What are they using? They shove them inside your boobs to make them bigger. Just loads and loads.
You can see them wriggling at Poshpice. They are used for, because they thin blood. So when they latch onto you to suck your blood, they thin it out so they can suck as much of it as possible. So in surgery, it's very useful because...
often you get blood clots after surgery and also if you're reattaching limbs so if your nose has fallen off and you need to have it reattached it's quite common to use leeches to sort of connect the two bits to keep the blood flow going otherwise your blood would just clot and then you wouldn't be able to get the blood flow
As it's pooling in the area, they just remove it and it means that the new capillaries form neatly between the two. They're amazing. Let's do some other animals that eat blood. Okay, well check this out, right? So... Mosquitoes? Oh, yeah. They eat blood. We all know that. Famously. What I didn't know is that there are midges that eat mosquitoes. So they eat the blood from the mosquito.
So it's like they're having our blood via the mosquito. Then is there a smaller little louse that's latched onto the midge? Possibly, yeah. It's the opposite of a Russian doll. Because also it's on the outside. It's out flowing, yeah, flowing out. Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. I was hearing blood is actually incredibly... I thought of blood as being an ultimate food. Well, you are a vampire. Yeah, exactly. As in...
It's a superfood. It's like kale. It's like red kale. It's strong. You know, you drink the blood to gain the life. Andy, this is really creepy. I don't know how many people think of it that way. It's full of iron. It's full of... It turns out it's pretty much the worst food you can have. Yeah. It's so rubbish. So it doesn't have enough B vitamins for you to survive on. So...
Almost everything needs B vitamins, and it's got none. Quite a lot of cereals have B vitamins added, don't they? So you can put blood on your cornflakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, well, that's a good solution. You're right, for the natural world.
So red meat has a thousand times as much vitamin B12 as blood, just to put that in context. Also, it does have loads of iron, which can be toxic. So that's a problem as well. And leeches and ticks and lots of other blood-sucking creatures, they have to have special bacteria in their stomach.
which create B vitamins and leeches have to have particular tissue to tie up the iron which they're ingesting. They don't want to ingest this iron but they've got these special chemicals in them to protect themselves from it. So it's a terrible food. So there's 30,000 species I read that are bloodsuckers. Wow. And that sounds a lot.
except for andy's point is it's really not a lot when you when you consider how readily available blood is and also how many species there are how many species there are so that's actually quite a limited number which goes to your point that it's not the most practical of food okay so like everything loads of carnivals eat meat. There are way more than 30,000 of those. But yeah, bloodsuckers, you have to be really specially evolved to do it. Yeah, exactly. So it's not the ultimate food.
Well, you've exploded a myth there. Do not pick that box on HelloFresh the next time you're ordering it. Blood box. Stop the podcast! Stop the podcast! Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Monzo. Yes, that's right. So it's like any high street bank, but unlike many other banks, Monzo has pots.
You know this, Andy, because you're with Monzo, aren't you? I certainly am. And I'm looking at my Monzo now, and it's very intuitive. You can set up a pot. Let's say you want to have one of the bills, or let's say you're putting aside tax because you know you're going to need it come the end of January, whatever it is.
put it in a pot and you can name your pots different things you can have little characters for your pots you can date lock them you can put targets on them it's really powerful when it adds up so many pots have you got andy i've got lots of pots I've got three. Look, I'm a fan of personal admin. It makes it fun, all right?
Well, here's the thing as well, is that I'm someone who's terrible at that kind of stuff. So they've thought of this. As soon as money hits your account, whatever you have assigned to go percentage-wise from that cash that comes in, it immediately disappears into the pods and does all of the organizing.
For you. It's very simple. And if you search Monzo Potts, you can see what all the fuss is about. Well, yep, as Andy says and as Andy uses, do search Monzo Potts. And just to say, if you are thinking of setting up your Monzo current account, you must be 16 plus and a UK resident. T's and C's apply And on with the show On with the podcast Stop the podcast Stop the podcast
Hello, everybody. We are sponsored this week by the RSPCA. Yes, very specifically by an amazing program they're running called the Animal Futures The Big Conversation, where they are looking for 10,000 people around the UK to get involved in the... biggest ever discussion that's been about animal welfare.
Yes, you could be one of the special chosen 10,000 because you get to choose yourself. And who wouldn't choose themselves, especially when the idea is that you go online and you give your opinion about stuff, which we all want to do all the time. And these are your thoughts. and views on this really important subject of animal futures and how we use animals in technology, in farming, in the wild, and just generally. So if you have any thoughts on that, do get involved. That's right.
And this is only running until the 28th of February. So get in quick, get your ideas in there, because what they're trying to do is imagine potential scenarios for animals for the year 2050. It's really, really important research and you can... part of it. So simply head to the RSPCA website, find Animal Futures The Big Conversation and become one of the golden 10,000.
Yes, and it will aim to make industry and government change. So you're not just shouting into the void for once. Do it now. OK, on with the podcast. On with the show. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the child, who the book The Exorcist was based on, went on to become a NASA engineer whose inventions contributed to the Apollo moon missions. So cool. So are you saying that actually they levitated?
All the way to the moon. Yes. Saying, fuck you, fuck you. Propelled by vomit coming out from the astronauts. Yeah. So the author of The Exorcist, the novel, William Blatty, he based it on a true life story. And it was... in 1949 in St. Louis in Missouri and it was the story of a kid who we've known as Roland Doe and no one's known who he is. Then it gets revealed an engineer from NASA who's called Ronald Edwin Hunkler. He in fact was the boy.
And the other name was a pseudonym. And all along, people within NASA, you know, close friends knew this, but he never wanted to tell anyone because he found it an extraordinarily embarrassing thing. So he was someone who worked at NASA. who was part of the Apollo missions, as I just said. He also had a few patents with them. He made these ceramics that you put on the outside of rockets. Cool. Tea cups and stuff. No, it's like special ceramics.
And I think when there was a crash or a problem recently, they blamed it on the ceramic plates. People might remember that. So he messed it up? No, no, no. That was a different issue. But he invented this thing, which was like foamed ceramics. Right.
would like make a slurry of different materials and then you will wait for it to bubble up and then you put it into the oven and it would bake and it would be really heat resistant he invented those things so cool we should say that obviously the exorcist the film is reagan the girl so
So I don't know at what point it changed. Was it in the book that it was a girl as well? When did it change from a boy to a girl? I think in the book it was a girl. Yes, in the book it was a girl. And then he changed it. What was his name? Blatty? Yeah. He changed it because it was a way of... what had gone on. The original case sounds extremely spooky. You'd expect! Does it though? It does to me. This is absolutely terrifying. He was born in 1935, this boy.
don't open with that well the cases of things like hearing scratching noises from his bedroom walls and the family minister wrote to a parapsychology lab at Duke University when the boy was 14 years old so 1949 And said that his bed shook when he was in it. Oh, come on. No, stop. He could have had Shagas disease. He was 14. And that a picture of Christ on the wall shook when he was near. by as in the image itself was right spooky
He did live in an earthquake-prone place. I can't believe they're the things you're picking out as spooky. So many mad things happened. So the details from the story that we know are based on basically this diary by Father Raymond Bishop. So there were a few priests who rocked up to try and help out.
with the exorcism. Father Raymond Bishop was one of them. Very confusing. Not a bishop. A priest called Bishop. Oh, clever. But, I mean, name yourself for the job you want. Yeah, okay. Yeah, he's working his way out. My local priest in Bolton is called A Pastor. That's great. Should have started an Italian restaurant though. He replaced someone called Father McVicar. No. That is someone who was voted on in an internet poll, wasn't it? Make a face.
Anyway, Bishop McBishopface wrote this diary about all the stuff that happened, which is part of the reason why we're sometimes sceptical about the facts of the exorcist, because he didn't come on until a bit later. So he was using what he'd been told by the family in the...
other priests have been involved earlier on but some of the things he said are kind of amusing so um there was apparently once there was a question of the time of departure from the house and suddenly the word saturday appeared written on the boy's hip so i guess the devil like you know get leave on saturday um there was for instance his desk at school used to move independently of him it's very hard to fake that i just like it's not like wow independently of anyone that just moved
Okay, I'm with Anna now. Guys, can we just clarify, please, that obviously we know it's all lies. I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying some of the claims that were made about what happened, you couldn't say a boy had done it. What I didn't believe was the priest wrote down... So what are you saying did it then? It's just lies.
Oh, I see. Made up. Made yuppie shit. But he said he left school out of embarrassment that his desk was moving. Now, I think if I was a school child and my desk moved independently, you'd be the coolest kid in school. That's not embarrassing. children are very quick to find a point of difference aren't they if you're quite nerdy and then your desk started moving
That's not going to help you become cool. I can picture what would have happened if I had been possessed by a demon at school. It wouldn't have helped. Right. No, no. Good to know. This guy, Hunkler, the exorcism boy, then growing up, he always apparently went out on Halloween. Because he was worried that someone would find him.
on Halloween oh I see not because he was worried the demons would come back just because right yeah yeah he seemed to be very paranoid about being found out for being this boy it's really terrified it ruined his life a bit yeah it's because the book sold 13 million copies in America alone But using a fictional plotline with a girl, he was nicely hidden.
I guess someone would have known, right? They would have known where he lives. I think some of the people he worked with knew. Yeah. Like, people did know. Yeah, that's true. I reckon it was an open secret in the area. Yeah, definitely. In the newspaper reports around the time, this is from the Baltimore Evening Sun from 19... they said that it took 20 to 30 exorcisms to get rid of the demon and that at the end of each one the child would have a tantrum and voice scraps of latin
and that a boy once sat in a chair and it tipped over. That was evidence that he had a demon. But it did say that local families were sprinkling holy water around his house because they'd heard about this demon possession and everyone would go around and...
put holy water there. You've got to get really good coverage, though, because holy water doesn't come in big quantities. No. You can't put it in a hosepipe. Yeah. It's not like putting down vinegar to deter a fox, where you can just slosh it about. Couldn't you just get a big vat of water and get a priest to...
To bless it. Does it then all become holy? Why don't we just bless all the water then? As in if this works, which I'm not saying it does, why not just bless the... Like send a priest to the Pacific Ocean. Exactly. Bless that. And then we're laughing. Basically, you're going to have to do this. Go to Lourdes. Buy up all the holy water. Drink it all.
piss it out, get it back into the water cycle, and then some of it will be... It just stays holy. Yeah, it'll be like one or two bits of it will be in every glass of water you ever drink will have a little bit of holy water in it. Well, that's a good idea. That's exciting. Presumably that's true already. You know, the holy water's been part of the...
water cycle hasn't it how long does it drink it and piss it out but it's been it's been sprinkled on people it evaporates it goes up into the clouds it's in the it's in the seas all water is holy i think we've established there we go nice we're fine well that's why demon possessions have dropped off haven't they
Well, some local families, like I say, they sprinkled water around this house, but there was one family that didn't believe any of it, and they invited him to stay with them and said, okay, we'll see if you're really possessed. And they reported that his bed shook and bumped in the night.
and they became believers. According to the Baltimore Evening Sun. One of the other symptoms, according to the priests who were there, and this one you could fake, probably, if you're talented, is that apparently during possession several times... there was the passing of wind through his rectum well one thing i noticed because i looked at all of his patents one of his patents is for gaseous flow purging in thermal blanket cleaning
So his patents was about gaseous flow. And while he was possessed, he also had gaseous flow. And I read through every single patent he did. And that was the only link I could find. a teenage boy farting and shaking the bed through unknown mechanisms. I bet he needed some thermal blanket cleaning after the... In the film, there was a lot of...
Maybe the filming itself was haunted. Because, for example, the climactic exorcism scene when they were filming it, it had to be delayed because a pigeon flew into a lightbox. Wow. and the set burned down the set burned down yeah burned down well a pigeon the pigeon I imagine the lightbox is very hot we understand why but I feel like that's a big story well the thing is the director William Friedkin
claimed that a winged creature with talons had been responsible for this fight. He was freaking out. Oh, God. He was responsible for it. So I think he was sexing up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Spooky. There's officially three Exorcist movies. So the first one was based on the novel. And then the second one, Blatty, went off and they just made, they wrote a sequel and they put that out. Exorcist 3. So sorry, the famous one is the first one? Famous one.
first one yeah then there's the sequel and then there's exorcist 3 which blatty himself wrote and directed so he came back for the third one oh but the novelist right the novelist yeah but he worked in he worked in film general anyway but so he also wrote novels and he he wanted to make his novel which was called legion into a movie okay and i think when they were funding it something went around where they sort of said it's not going to happen what if we call it exorcist three so it was named
exorcist 3 so he was directing it directing the whole movie they'd done the whole production and then during the production someone noticed that hang on there's no exorcisms in this movie whatsoever what's going on and so the money people came and said what are you doing why is this
So he said, well, it's actually based on my novel Legion, which doesn't have any exorcisms in it. So they ended up making him re-film the entire last third of the movie at costs of $4 million just so they could introduce some random new father character who could perform an exorcism.
Exorcism in the movie. To me that seems reasonable if they're calling it Exorcism 3. It's either that or change the name. What was Legion about? Did it fit with the plot? I actually don't know. Was it like a Roman army? through vidi vidi what was that they're all speaking latin all the way through it's incredibly scary Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that plants remember droughts.
And they like it. They like it. They like it because it's useful to them. How's it useful for them? Because they can't go somewhere. They can't go, oh, let's move next to that river. They can't. They haven't worked out how to buy plane tickets to wet places.
yet what you can do is you can take action as a plant um so this is this is kind of an amazing discovery about plants because it kind of taps into something that we thought that they were not capable of doing at all which is more of an animal feature how it works is
Let's say you take a plant that has undergone a really bad drought and then you take a plant that didn't undergo a really bad drought and then you subject them both to a bad drought the following year. The plant that underwent the bad drought is going to have learned to deal with it and it can do clever things. and not open its pores as much so it doesn't lose as much water. You know, it can do clever things to conserve water to make it less shit. These technical words, they're just...
Shit, that's what they said in the paper. And it's very clever. So basically they make a molecule, which is called the GABA molecule, which acts like a memory. So they make more of this molecule when it's droughty. And that molecule is... is what tells it next time to do things like not open its pores so it doesn't lose water. And the unbelievable thing about this, which I think is maybe even more amazing, is that it's sort of deposited on their genes, this learning process. So it's epigenetics.
Oh, what's that again? It's basically the opposite of Darwinism. It's like you're not just getting your genes from your parents. You're learning something, and then that goes into your genes, and then you can pass it on. Wow. I feel a bit challenged, actually. It feels a bit pointed that Anna's...
brought up this anti-Darmanistic thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just Lamarckism almost. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks a lot, Anna. I'm publishing your favourite. The other amazing thing about it. Sorry, I just got one specifically on that. You just said this thing was called GABA? Mm-hmm. The molecule? Mm-hmm. GABA is also an acronym for a very dry place.
It's a cricket ground in Australia, the Gabba. Well, it's in Australia. So the G-A-B-A is a slang term, Aussie slang term, which stands for the Great Australian Bugger All. And it's the bit, it's the sort of ultra outbacky. really, really dry bit of Australia. There we go. We've completed the circle. It's one of the first facts I ever learned at QI.
is it uh gabba actually stands in this case for gamma amino butyric acid and but the really interesting thing about it is that it's the same molecule that's used in mammals and in other animals to signal messages between your body so through your nervous system you also use GABA and these plants are using the same thing that's amazing yeah so we all contain GABA We're all constrained. Some of us more than others.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of stuff over the last kind of 10 years, if you start reading about plant, that looks into the idea of plant consciousness being a thing. Not the same way that humans have it, but investigating whether we've underestimated that. And I think people didn't want to think about it for ages.
because of this thing that I'd never heard of, actually. But this guy called Trofim Lysenko, who's this Soviet guy. So basically, he thought that plants had memories and he turned out to be a real piece of shit. So people don't like to copy him. So there are some grains that are stimulated by cold weather to know to then grow in spring. But he realized that if he subjected those grains to just cold temperatures, he could trick them.
into thinking that it had been winter and then they'd remember that and then they'd grow in what they thought was spring a few months later so he said Plants have got memories. Great. Does that mean double harvests? That means double harvest. Exactly. So he was like, this is going to transform the Soviet Union. Oh, my God. I am going to make it go so well. And as many of us know, the Soviet Union did not go that well in a harvest sense.
He didn't sound like a piece of shit so far. Right. Sounds like a good guy so far. Trying to get some extra harvests in. No, I agree. Maybe his intentions were good at some point. So he came up with some really dodgy scientific conclusions which were completely incorrect and forced loads of farmers...
to plant specific grains at specific times. It didn't work. And it's really responsible for a lot of the famines of the 40s and 50s in the Soviet Union. And, you know, he's possibly responsible for millions of deaths. The whole plant consciousness is obviously a giant pseudoscience.
which has been around since the late 60s there was a book that was called The Secret Life of Plants which came out which was a number one bestseller globally and it had all of these big claims about what plants were able to do and so a guy called Cleve Baxter was the main guy behind it he was a cia polygraph guy who kind of made it was an extraordinary story and it kind of the reason people talk to plants these days kind of is rooted back to him these days as an amazing woman in australia
who's called Monica Gagliano, and she's leading a lot in bioacoustics, which is looking at plants and how sound might be something that they can pick up as well. Many scientists obviously hugely sceptical, but she works for a university in Sydney. And she's publishing reports that, let's say, for example, you played The Sound of Water and it was a recording of water. The roots would grow towards it. We should say Gagliano is not the kind of pseudoscience of the 70s book. She is a legit...
She's a legitimate scientist, but she makes huge claims. She wrote a book called Thus Spoke the Plant, which she says she co-wrote with plants, speaking to the plants. Not metaphorically, literally. Did she share the royalties?
Possibly, I bet she does in some way, give it to a guy that looks after plants. Because, yeah, she has done experiments which are very surprising. Like, she did that... thing where um if you drop certain plants then they will close up to try and protect themselves and so she created actually this really cool thing which you use to drop a plant which you know when you're at a fairground and you sit on one of those benches it carries you up a pole
a vertical pole then it drops you down again she made that for plants and she realized that if you drop them enough times they stop closing up um because they learn because they learn that it's not going to do them any harm and she says that it can then remember that lesson for a month you can modify plants to make them drought proof as in you can um
You can GM tweak them, basically. So this is something that was done in 2018. Scientists tweaked a single gene in tobacco plants, which means they lose, I think it was a quarter less water. And it's because they have these pores, right, which they normally... open up and close in response to daylight okay so that's what triggers it so when the pores are open they suck in carbon dioxide but they also lose water
So the carbon dioxide is necessary for photosynthesis, but losing water is obviously a bad thing if you're in a time of drought. So in the GM version of these plants, they open for a briefer spell. It just goes, and then it goes up again. Thank you. So the good thing is they can still get enough carbon dioxide in to do all the photosynthesis they need, but they lose a quarter less water. You will have a plant that is way more resistant to...
dry weather. Clever. It's so clever. Why do we need all this tobacco? That's a great point. I suppose they hope it can be done eventually with other... They're more useful plants. Yeah, yeah. We're not just all going to have to just literally be smoking 20 a day. If we smoke 20 a day, we will need... In 1933, yo-yos were banned in Syria because they thought they were causing droughts. Yeah, I read that. Was there a logic to that?
Yeah, so you have ulama who were like religious heads and they petitioned the Prime Minister of Syria and said that the yo-yo was responsible for the drought that they were having at the time because the up and down movement was counteract. their prayers and so they banned it and the next day it rained.
There we go. But anyway, there was an article in the New York Times at the time and they spoke about whether this could be true or not. And they said, well, London at the moment is full of yo-yos and it rains there all the time. That is strong. That was their evidence. counter evidence yeah um james do you have a view as a golf fan yes on what i think you know is coming the fact that in droughts golf courses are
Very often exempt in the UK, in Australia. And it's on health at the moment. This is a huge deal. In France, they're going and pouring concrete and stuff into golf holes on golf courses. Which is the most pointless thing because they change the golf hole every single day.
like on a golf course if you go onto a green the hole is in a certain place every day they fill it in and they put it in a different place I had no idea about that because it's part of the game because people play every day right and so it would be boring if it was always
Oh yeah, that's the thing that makes it boring. People are coming in, filling in these holes, which are literally about to be filled in anyway. They're doing their job for them. Maybe they're doing it to help them out. Well, that's very funny. And so is that. How far? like three centimetres to the left. It might be as little as that. It tends to be like another part of the green, like with a different slope. Do golfers claim, oh, I would have got it if...
If I've been here yesterday, I was playing actually to yesterday's hole. Yeah, actually, when you play golf, you can see where the old hole was because it never quite mends. And so often you'll hit a ball and you're nowhere near the actual hole, but you're right next to where it was a few days ago.
Can you get like a half point for that? No half points. It's not a points game, is it? Well, yeah. Shots. Shots, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah. Well, I think we've all learned something very interesting. But yeah, they are exempt and they're exempt on... According to Southern Water, because this is happening at the moment in the UK, there have been a few hosepipe bans in certain areas. Southern Water wrote on their website that on health and safety grounds, golf courses are exempt. I mean, no, I...
rather think if I'm not allowed to use a hosepipe on my garden, probably you shouldn't be allowed on golf courses. Probably you would use more on a golf course. But perhaps there are reasons like because it gets people doing healthy things. Maybe is there other exemptions on tennis courts, for instance. I've got data on this yeah
My local bowls club lawn is looking very green. I would imagine probably for all sporting and health events, they probably have an exception. I don't know. Yeah, I guess golf courses are just the big grassy ones, aren't they? So that's probably the ones that get all the attention.
is smaller you know although it's probably less healthy as well I mean bowls doesn't do much good for you I remember once reading that it was the most dangerous sport that you can do and that's because 90 year olds do it and if you look at the number of deaths huge fatality rate yeah
Well, I was looking, sorry, just on golf courses, if you did want to not water your golf course, I was looking at advice on restoring courses after drought on some golf website. And apparently it said, make sure that all dead grass plants are removed by scarifying or tickle harrowing the turf. Tickle harrowing. Tickle harrowing. That's quite a good word for something, isn't it? If you've had a harrowing experience, but not very harrowing. That was a bit tickle harrowing. Watching The Exorcist.
I'm sorry, I cannot get over that they change the golf hole every day. It's absolutely blown my mind. And I think listeners at home are in my position right now going, why are they talking about anything else? That is astonishing. Certainly anyone who plays golf or has ever played golf or ever watched golf on television. would know that.
Watching it on TV, you wouldn't notice the next day. I mean, they talk about it all the time. There's very little else to talk about. Are there any rogue hole places who put it right on the edge of the green? That's kind of the point. Oh, let's say, for instance, there's a green, right? It's got lots of...
slopes on it one of the slopes goes right down into some water right yeah if you put the hole right next to that slope then it really changes where you aim because you're not going to aim to the one the side of it where the water is right or you can put it
20 yards further so you have to use a different golf club to reach out the next time or you put it next to a bunker why not do it so that there is no flag so all you do is when you arrive and this is for professionals when you arrive you have the data of the previous months, whole positions. I mean, that...
Pretty much happens what you're talking about. So the week before a major championship, all the caddies will walk around and look at all the possible places where the hole could be, where it's been in previous years, where it's been on a Thursday, on a Friday, on a Saturday, on a Sunday, and they kind of...
know more or less where it's going to be and then on the morning they all get a little booklet that tells you exactly where the hole is on each of the yeah right the 18 holes so it'll be like 17 yards on and eight yards from the left or whatever and that's every morning they get that
Okay. I found a way of being less interested in golf than I was before. This is the most fascinating chat I think I've had in eight years of this podcast. Oh, God. Just one more question. One more question. So let's say... Masters is happening, and... and they go and they suss out where the holes have been previously is there a kind of thing where you go home and let's say greg norman and watch golf in a while greg norman is definitely haven't if you're talking about greg norman and the masters
Anyway, carry on. Is there a simulation thing where they can place the ball in a virtual reality kind of simulation so they can test with knowing what the wind speeds will be the next day and so on? Can they prepare? You have simulated golf and you can simulate...
wind for sure you can simulate pin positions whether anyone actually does that i doubt but it's not impossible dan i cannot believe you fought tooth and nail even though we're saying shut up that question that was so boring are you kidding me that was so boring Kill it. You and I will do our own special podcast afterwards where you ask me all the questions no one ever wants to know about golf. It's going to be a hit. Club fish. New show coming. Golf club fish. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.
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Yes, and it will aim to make industry and government change. So you're not just shouting into the void for once. Do it now. OK, on with the podcast. On with the show. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that when you play golf... Yes! Yes! Okay, my fact this week is that in 2017 there was a house party in Maryland that was so boozy the ambient air in the building tested positive on a breathalyzer.
I'm just excited that everyone from the U.S. is going to switch off because you just said Maryland. Maryland. It's just Maryland. That's just how U.S. But Maryland, I can see in a Bolton accent. In a Bolton accent, yeah. I was getting shit for the golf chat. Sorry. This feels like the non-meat of the fact given that the building tested positive on Fratalyzer. I mean, that was the funny thing. It's incredible. So yeah, this was a party. Like a frat party kind of thing. Advertised...
online as Tequila Tuesday. Loads of neighbors complained that it was so loud and so the police turned up and it turned out that as well as being beer cans and spilled alcohol and lots of possibly underage people drinking. They also did a breathalyzer on lots of people, but they did it inside the house and it registered .01. So it wouldn't be legally drunk, but it showed up on the breathalyzer. So it would be able to drive? The building would be allowed to drive.
But the reason that this is kind of interesting, I think, is that some breathalysers, they work by taking the ambient air. and then they compare your breath to what the air is and so like if you're outside if you've been driving and then they stop you they're testing against the air you know around the road that's one thing but if they're testing against air which is
already also drunk, then there could be a problem with your car. That's really funny. So if you could sort of hot box your car with alcohol air, make sure they test that. If you are drink driving right now, quickly pour vodka all over your car.
waft up the air conditioning, get it going, and you'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. We're not condoning drink driving in any way. Absolutely not. I think we are based on this research. Blimey. I really like the fact that the breathalyzer was first called the drunkometer. Yeah.
It's a much funnier and better name. Yeah. That was an early version of it. It was like 30 years in the 60s even. They were still calling it the droncometer. It was a standard phrase. Or sometimes the alcometer. It was about 30 years they called it that. I don't know why they changed it. Intoximeter. Intoximeter.
as well. It's harder to say. Saying it is a test, actually. If you can pronounce it, you'll find a drive. But the Drunk Cometor was a different thing than the breathalyzer we use today. I love that the breathalyzer itself was invented by a guy called Robert Frank Borkenstein. It's amazing. Frank Borkenstein is such a great name.
in canada it's sometimes called the balkenstein or it used to be like um the breathalyzer was known as a balkenstein of course balkenstein was the name of the doctor yeah you should call it balkenstein's monster that's right yeah he really changed things a lot balkenstein because it was 1954 he invented it and before him the drunkometer could tell the presence of alcohol but it couldn't tell the quantity of alcohol couldn't measure it precisely and so before him
A defense lawyer, if someone was on a charge of drink driving, a defense lawyer might say, oh, my client was working very long hours and his eyes are red because he's got allergies. And, you know, I've got friends of his racked up who will all swear blind that he only had two beers on the night. And so he's not. you know he wasn't drink driving and it was incredible just so hard to prove yeah yeah uh whereas balkenstein absolutely changed that he did he liked to drink himself though
If you look at any obituaries, they're not very euphemistic about it. Really? Was he implementing it as a competitive thing, like he would score highest on my breathalyzer? In The Guardian it says, he was a genial fellow who enjoyed serving drinks to his... friends and exhibited a catholic taste in wines and spirits but he was a really great guy he um he when he was a child he built a robot
um which worked like when he was at school um in world war ii they had bombs which had latches in which held them before they were released but they needed to be spot checked and he invented a new way of spot checking them which made it way way easier so it meant help the help the war effort in that way nice safety first again yeah theme developing
I read a thing. There was a judge in Kerry, Ireland. Two cases were thrown out where the drink driving claim was no longer useful because the judge said that the people who were accused of potentially... being drunk had inhaled their own urine while they were in the actual custody of the police so sorry what so this is a thing there's a thing which is kind of known as a loophole law and what it is is called section 49 It requires that if you are the police bringing...
people to the um to the station yeah there needs to be 20 minutes before you breathalyze them in that 20 minutes you have to have your eyes on them and they can't have drinks and they can't have anything that might influence what their breath is going to be as in you breathalyze them straight away
car haven't you because when you stop someone in a car you breathalyze them but you need them you need it at the station for it to be legit so what happened i think that's because the idea is that you can show a false positive on a breathalyzer if you've drunk really recently or if you've got like alcohol in your mouth right so it's just waiting long
enough that you're definitely to make sure that you're definitely positive yeah hey so what where do we get to inhaling your own urine so in these in these two specific cases a judge called uh judge o'connor he said that where he was told that during this 20 minute period where they won't be observed they both went to the bathroom and when they went to the bathroom they both were facing away from the police officers who were meant to be monitoring them and according to the judge
In that time, the urine could have released odours that would have been of an alcoholic nature, and that could influence their brand. Is that why we say someone's pissed? Possibly. What year was this? That is incredible. It wasn't long ago, but I haven't written down the year. That is bananas. Did it work? Do we know? Yeah, the two cases were thrown out of court for that specific reason. Why are we sharing tips?
mean that's incredible so what they should have done was after they came back from the toilet waited another 20 minutes but then they they used the breathalyzer test within that time frame bananas yeah or you say it was just the police weren't monitoring them so or if the police they were at the urinal but the policeman is sort of facing
them at the urinal and watching them for every second. I think if you're at a urinal and someone's facing you, there are problems. Something's gone wrong. They have to be sitting in the urinal, don't they? Can we talk about Barbara Castle? uh yes we can yeah very keen um so transport secretary who introduced breathalyzers to british policing in 1967 made you know um and part of the problem was that
At the time, the number of cars on the road had increased sixfold in the previous 20 years. So there were, you know, in the late 40s, there were 2 million cars on the road. Now there were 12 million. That's sixfold. That's sixfold. And my new podcast is going to be about simple sums. And we'll go up against your golf hole podcast and we'll just see whose is worse. It was just that last week Anna said something about doubling and she said from 6 million to 12 million. You went, that's doubling.
I've been hoist on my own referential petard I hate it anyway Barber Castle was great but she was incredibly unpopular at the time for introducing this partly because drinkers were saying I want to be able to have several drinks and then go home I want to drive home. So some pub customers stuck pins in a doll labelled Barbara Castle. That's from The Mirror in 67. But her main foe, maybe, when this thing was introduced, was... Have you guys heard of AJP Taylor?
No. He's a very famous 20th century historian, basically. Really, really famous at the time. And he wrote about her and about breathalyzers again and again. And there was a piece, Why Pick on the Private Motorist? And he said...
And he concluded at the end of this piece, it was a really, really rude piece about her and about the whole idea. He said, a car for 45 years I have consistently ignored all the various speed limits never once have I encountered the slightest risk as a result this is what she was up against I found the way breathalysers work really interesting in a way that's not at all funny. More interesting than where they put the hole on the green.
You do realise the more we call back to this, more I'm going to have to keep it in. This is my spin-off podcast.
um so uh they work based on color change which i think is so cool so basically when you breathe into a breathalyzer you've usually got or the police who's holding the breathalyzer they've got the control solution one side then they've got the solution that you're breathing into um and they're using a solution called potassium dichromite um which is orange in color but when you breathe into it the alcohol reacts with the dichromite and it produces
it's chromium uh chromium ions on their own and that is green so if you're breathing alcohol into it the orange turns to green which is kind of cool and then the way it works is it produces an electrical current based on the color change which i actually just didn't know could happen so because different colors produce different amounts of energy so if you've got a color that's a high frequency like blue like at the bottom of the rainbow it produces more energy than let's say red so that we
can connect it up to a system where that translates into an electrical current. So you connect some electrodes to the green solution and the orange solution, and they can sense the difference between the two and exactly how green it is. Wow.
And that's exactly how much alcohol you've got. And that's a standard breathalyzer? That's what they use, yeah. And then it translates into a figure on a screen. So you don't see any of this. No, of course. Sadly. Yeah. And you probably might be too drunk to understand it anyway. I haven't had anything to drink it. I was clinging on. In 2010...
In Eastern Cape in South Africa, there was a person who was arrested and breathalyzed, and they were 32 times over the legal alcohol limit. Wow. Which, as far as I can tell, is a record. He was caught driving a Mercedes-Benz. veto very erratically and inside the car there were also five children a woman and 15 sheep That's a big number. Was he part of a joke? Sorry, in the single car. Hang on, you can't get 15 sheep in a car.
Well, he did. If you're drunk enough, you can do anything. It probably wasn't a Mini, was it? It was a Mercedes-Benz Vita, which I actually don't know what that kind of car is. But it doesn't sound like it's a bus. So that's incredible. he'd allegedly stolen the sheep from nearby farms so um while drunk imagine waking up in the morning kind of forgetting what you did last night going out to the car there's just 15 sheep
2010 was a huge year for drink driving incidents like this. So also in 2010, a guy in Nebraska was pulled over. after swerving dangerously on the road and police saw he was driving very erratically and there was a bottle of vodka in the car
Empty beer cans all over the place. He was 19 years old. I mean, all the signs were there. He was arrested. You could say you're going to the recycling centre, can't you? Well, yeah. He was tested. He was definitely over the limit. But the extra bit of evidence against him was that at the time he was dressed as a breathalyzer test. You've been to a party.
And it had a dial at the front which said, you know, are you blood alcohol level? And it was from loser having fun to brain damage. The arrow was set to brain damage for him. And he had a tube which you blow into at his crotch level. With insert inside mouth written on it. And did the police use his breathalyzer? He's like, can you blow into this? He's like, only after you blow into this. What an absolute tool. Police are the...
He was joined at the detox centre by a French maid and a naughty border patrol agent. There's one way that people think you can beat the test, and that's by sucking on a penny. The idea is that the zinc or the copper in the penny reacts with your alcohol in your mouth and it kind of puts a different chemical into the breathalyser so it doesn't do all the chemical stuff it's supposed to do. Basically, old breathalysers, that would work.
These days, the way breathalysers are made, it doesn't work. And it hasn't worked for about, you know, 10, 20 years almost. It hasn't worked. You've got to hope you get an incredibly old police officer. Well, there was another thing in 1967. This was a... warning published in the Somerset County Gazette. A warning was given to motorists
And it was just as the breathalyzer was being introduced. A warning was given to motorists by Somerset police this week that they should treat with caution the suggestion that they could beat the breathalyzer by eating mashed potatoes. You load up on mashed potatoes.
potato and then you're fine it feels like yeah you can't they do get tricked by certain things so you never know that's why breathalyzer can never be admissible evidence it just gives you enough evidence to take them to the police station where you do a blood test like for instance uh there's if you have
a lot of acetone um in your in your breath that could be just because you haven't eaten for a long time you haven't eaten for a long time if you're diabetic you can have acetone levels a thousand times higher um than normal that can set off a breathalyzer yeah so you can make all of these excuses while you're on the way to the station I'm sort of picturing someone right now listening to our show
They've just been pulled over and they're desperately, while the policeman's walking towards their car, listening to all the advice we're giving right now, looking for pennies on the floor. Mashed potatoes in the back. Do you remember that fact that you guys didn't let me put in book of the year?
over who was probably on drugs more than alcohol and the police officers asked him for a urine sample on the spot so he went into the bush and he took ages to come back out and then when he came out he presented a semen sample and he had misheard Ha ha ha ha!
Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna.
you can email podcast.qi.com yep you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there as well as links to this final bit of the tour that we're about to go on for nerd immunity
It's only around the corner, so check the dates. It's early September. We'd love to see you there. Otherwise, you can also join our brand new membership club, Club Fish. It's where we are putting up all of these episodes without any of the ads that you hear along the way.
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