No Such Thing As An Emotional Support Wig

Live from the Royal Institution, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss boffins, blankets, baldness and Binks. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia Shopify: Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.co.uk http://shopify.co.uk

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things As Fish, a weekly podcast, this week, coming to you live from the Royal Institution in London.

• 0:25Dan Schreiber?

  My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  My fact this week is that the spacecraft that's about to orbit Mercury is wearing a hand-stitched blanket for warmth.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Aww.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Adorable.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I know.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  So nice.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Knitted by its mum?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  This is this really cool blanket, which is necessary because at its hottest, Mercury gets to about 400 degrees centigrade, and at its coldest, about minus 190. And so there's this space blanket, and I saw some pictures of it getting hand-stitched on, and they sort of drape the blanket over the vessel, and then they stitch it while it's on. You know, like if you're getting a dress fitting, or people in films when they get dress fittings, they wear the material and then they get it stitched on while they're standing there.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  What side does Sir's antennae dress?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  That was such a male laugh that came after that, wasn't it? Just about 10 people in the audience.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Anyway, it really is weaving, and because, like a lot of fabrics, it can get really static because it's wearing this blanket, then there are also threads of conducting metal that have been woven through the blanket to conduct the static electricity away. And in fact, blood was shed in the weaving process. Someone pricked their needle, pricked their finger with the needle, and stabbed themselves with a needle because they were up late stitching this blanket.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Does that mean some of the blood might have gone into the blanket, and that might now be in space?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Oh god, I think so. Do you think they're gonna clone us?

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Who?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  The Mercurians.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  And this isn't the first ever satellite to go to Mercury, is it? So there was one quite a long time ago called Mariner 10, and they used also a cloth, but it wasn't hand-stitched. It was called Beta cloth. It was like a super-strong, heat-resistant fabric. And that kind of cloth can be seen on EastEnders very regularly.

• 2:39Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Riddle me this.

• 2:41Dan Schreiber?

  Ah, it can be seen on East...

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Uh, the Old Vic pub.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the only thing you know about EastEnders.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  I guess they've got coasters.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, made of this cloth.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Is it in the opening credits, somewhere?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  It's in the credits.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Is it on the London Eye?

• 3:01Dan Schreiber?

  It's on the Millennium Dome.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 3:02Dan Schreiber?

  Is it when you stretch it, is it what they do the drum sound on?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  One of you has got it right, and it is, it's the Millennium Dome, the O2. It's what covers that dome.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Can I just say, when I said the London Eye, I meant the Millennium Dome.

• 3:17Dan Schreiber?

  And when I said the stretched John, that's what I meant as well.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  That's so cool.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  That's very cool. Wait, is it just the same material?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  It's the same material, yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  That's very cool.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Lots of buildings.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  I'm a bit confused, because you're saying it's for warmth, this blanket is. And you're saying it's for coolth, because it's very hot there. It's to protect it from the...

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Well, it's insulating, isn't it? So it's both, in fact.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  So it's just to protect the spacecraft from whatever...

• 3:41Speaker 01

  From warmth, from hot and cold.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Mad swings in temperature.

• 3:44Dan Schreiber?

  It's a very hot thing. We should say that this is part of a mission that was launched in 2018, and it still has not arrived at Mercury. It will be in September of this year, and it's called the Bepi Colombo mission. And this is from Giuseppe Bepi Colombo. He's a man who worked out the way that you could get to Mercury, which is not to go to Mercury, weirdly. The way to get to Mercury is to go away from Mercury, and you need to get pass-by to planets so that you can slow yourself down enough to then orbit Mercury. It's the weirdest thing.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  So it's like a slingshot?

• 4:16Dan Schreiber?

  It's a slingshot. If you've seen The Martian, the movie where they need to get the astronauts back to Mars, that's kind of what they do around the Earth. It's so weird. It's easier to get to Pluto than it is to get to Mercury because it's moving so fast around the Sun that you just need to get the timing exactly right.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  It's like going into the centre of town is harder than just heading out into the suburbs.

• 4:35Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  That's basically it.

• 4:37Dan Schreiber?

  No, you're right.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And you sometimes need to go around the one-way system, which is a pain in the ass.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  It's a bit like that.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  It's exactly like that. I've just thought of that, and I'm sticking to it.

• 4:45Dan Schreiber?

  That's very good.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  It's more like that it's just as hard to get up a mountain to ski down a mountain because you have to stop when you get to the bottom of the mountain. That's the problem. It's quite easy to get a spaceship to go towards Mercury, but it's pretty hard to stop it from going into the Sun afterwards.

• 5:00Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, okay. So the whole trip is basically trying to slow it down.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Well, they launched it in 2018, and the first planet they slingshotted around was Earth two years later, which feels so weirdly...

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Well, they've been there and back.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  I tell you, it feels like you've gone around the one-way system, that, you know, then, oh, hang on, oh, we've done this bit, you know.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Stop trying to make it work.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  They had gone there and back by that point, so it's actually been to Mercury, I think, three times now, but because it's not going at the right speed, it just has to go, oh, I'll just try again, sorry.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  It's like going to the London Eye but going round the Millennium Dome before you get to the...

• 5:34Speaker 02

  So the Bepi Colombo was the guy who kind of came up with the idea of going round Venus to get to Mercury, but the person who first came up with the idea of slingshotting was a guy called Yuri Konradzuk. He was a Russian guy, and what's really interesting about this guy is he was around at the start of the 20th century, and everything was going wrong in Russia at the time. And he was in Siberia, and he decided he wanted to build an enormous grain elevator, okay, in Siberia, but they didn't have very much stuff, so he managed to build it out of wood without a single nail. This grain elevator, right? And then, a bit later on, he got on the wrong side of the Soviets, and they decided to put him in jail, and they used his grain elevator as evidence against him,

• 6:18Speaker 02

  and said, "The fact that you haven't used any nails proves that you were trying to sabotage the entire system, and that you were gonna go in one day and just pull, like a game of Jenga, and just pull a little bit out and it was gonna collapse."

• 6:29Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Why do you need to elevate grain?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  I would have thought the main challenge is in transporting it, maybe keeping it nice and cool, or whatever you do with grain. I come from a long line of farmers.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Are we running out of time, Dan?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  You get up to the top of a building, and then you have a big slide that delivers it everywhere else.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Into the side, oh, well, like into a silo, isn't it? I'm guessing. I am guessing. Okay.

• 6:56Dan Schreiber?

  Do you guys know why we're going there with Bepi Colombo? There are a few reasons. Obviously, they're performing multiple experiments, but one of the reasons is because a lot of scientists say Mercury shouldn't be there. It shouldn't exist.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  So they're just checking that it is?

• 7:12Dan Schreiber?

  I think they're double-checking that it's actually there.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  How so? How should it not?

• 7:16Dan Schreiber?

  It's, if you were mapping out how the solar system functioned, it shouldn't, by the gravity, by the density of the planet, it should have been pulled in. It just doesn't make sense, and they're trying to work out... I absolutely love that there's someone that knows the science here, and he's nodding every time I get something right.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Are there any grain experts in the...

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Can I tell you, Dan, you love a sort of space disaster, or a potential space disaster, like Apollo 13.

• 7:40Dan Schreiber?

  I like it when they avert the disaster, yeah. You know what's talked about Apollo 13? The ending.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Okay, I just, I thought you might like this, because the Mariner 10 voyage, the first satellite sent off, I think it was 1974 it went, and it went wrong in all these interesting ways. So about a month after launch, it just switched, for no reason that anyone could tell, from main power to backup power. And that's a problem, because then you don't have a backup, because you're already using the backup, but there wasn't any way to get it back on main power. The other amazing thing was that the paint was flaking off a little bit, right? Doesn't sound like a huge problem, it's, you know, it's just the paint, but these tiny flecks of paint were going past the star tracker, and the way that Mariner 10 was navigating was with a star tracker, and it needed to keep its eye on the star Canopus.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  So every time it saw a little fleck of paint go past, bright and white, it thought, "Oh, great," and just started changing direction.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Nightmare, and they had to just correct it all the time, and it was constantly having to be redirected.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  It's like, do you remember when they had AI that was doing the camera work for a football game? And they would just follow the football, but then it accidentally saw the bald head of the linesman. It just followed him for the entire game.

• 8:58Dan Schreiber?

  That really happened?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 9:00Dan Schreiber?

  So funny. It's really hot there. That's the other thing, right? It is so unbelievably hot.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 9:07Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  As discussed, when it's not unbelievably cold.

• 9:09Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:10Dan Schreiber?

  When you're on the other side, and at one point, they thought that Mercury didn't spin around, so they thought the far side of Mercury was probably the coldest bit of the solar system because it was just purely, it gets so, so cold. But the front side, facing the Sun, pooey, that's really hot.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 9:25Dan Schreiber?

  And so getting these satellites there is proving to be, we've had to use amazing technology. So they have a solar array, right, which is how they're powering it. It's so hot when they get that close, they can't even point the solar panels towards the Sun. They have to gently, kind of like, suggest the Sun is over there because it's still gonna heat it up. Isn't that wild?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Flirting with the Sun.

• 9:46Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, exactly. It just needs to stay on such an angle, otherwise it would just burn out. It would just, it would get too much energy, and it's, yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  It is not, you know what it does with the solar power? It turns xenon gas into a charged stream of plasma, which is then fired out as the solar propulsion thruster. I didn't know we had solar propulsion thrusters.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And in fact, if we had just done that, rather than going with this slingshot system, it would have taken seven years to get there, would it, by this point? Whereas if we'd just been doing the thruster mechanism, it would have taken a couple of months. So could have done with some more plasma streams.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  But then it would have just sped into the Sun or sped into the...

• 10:25Speaker 01

  No, no, it just uses so much fuel. Oh, yeah, we should say that the slingshot mechanism is so useful because it uses hardly any fuel, because what you're doing is you're using the gravity of Venus and Earth and Mercury to get yourself there. So you just need to have a huge fuel tank.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  It's very hard to get fuel outside of Earth.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Hard, it's like a bloody electric charger, yeah. Something you have to be really careful about on Mercury is making plans. Because if you tell someone, "I'll see you in three days," what kind of day are you talking about? So in fact, quiz question, what's the definition of a day?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  One spin, the planet spins around one sun on its axis.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Is that what everybody thinks?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  You idiot.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Idiot.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  I'm ass.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  The definition of a day is the time it takes for the Sun to return to the same place in the sky.

• 11:13Dan Schreiber?

  In the sky, yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  So 24...

• 11:15Speaker 03

  It's always, it's always, it's always in the same place in the sky.

• 11:21Dan Schreiber?

  No, it's not.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  It's always in the same place.

• 11:23Dan Schreiber?

  No, it's not.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  The Sun?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  It's not in the same place.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  What about night?

• 11:25Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 11:29Dan Schreiber?

  It's always in the same place. We go round it. That's, don't go anti-Capernican on me, right? Okay, it's not in the same place in the sky, but it's-

• 11:37Speaker 01

  To your eyes.

• 11:38Dan Schreiber?

  To your eyes.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  That's the definition of a day is-

• 11:39Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yes, well, the day that you would talk about, so that's what takes 24 hours.

• 11:43Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  The time it takes for Earth to do a full axis is 23 hours and 56 minutes. And that's because, at the same time it's spinning on its own axis, the Earth is rotating round the Sun. So if you imagine it going round, it spins on its own axis, and by the time it's done a 360 degree spin, it's moved a bit round the Sun, so to point still directly towards the Sun, it needs to spin one degree more. Not a big deal on Earth. On Mercury, because it orbits the Sun at quite a similar speed to the speed it orbits on its axis, so it spins on its axis very, very slowly. The two different kinds of day are very different. So, a sidereal day, which I'm sure you all know, is the time it takes to spin on your own axis.

• 12:23Dan Schreiber?

  On your own axis.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. Sorry, Dan, I should let you take over from-

• 12:27Dan Schreiber?

  Give me a chance to at least jump in, yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  23 hours, 56 minutes on Earth, 59 days on Mercury. A solar day, 24 hours on Earth, 176 days on Mercury. So if you say, "I'll see you in three days", you could be out by like, I don't know, what's the maths, a year and a half? So I'm just saying that's something to worry about.

• 12:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  I think maybe we shouldn't go, after all.

• 12:57Dan Schreiber?

  Why don't we get to fact number two, and that is, Andy.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  My fact is, a female boffin is technically known as a boffin.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Technically?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Technically, according to the book, The Rise of the Boffin.

• 13:19Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  By Ron W. Clark. This is a book about the history of boffins and boffinology. And boffin had a very specific meaning for a long time. Boffins were kind of, they were, they were a cadre of mostly men, sort of male research scientists during the Second World War, who were working on weird and wonderful experiments, and that's, that's where the word came into kind of modern use. But this book, I just picked it up, there's a copy in the, in the basement, because we were lucky to get a kind of backstage tour of the Royal Institution, and on, there it is, page one, it says, "A female boffin, of course, is a boffin." One thing, because I think we'll probably talk about a few more kind of brilliant women from the RI's history, but the boffins from the Second World War, they were sent down to a place on the English Channel, right?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  And they were doing the first work on radar, so it's massively important for the war effort, you know, it was massively important for the Battle of Britain, for all sorts of areas, you know, having functioning radar is, was a huge advantage. The thing is, it was directly under a bombing route that the Luftwaffe frequently flew over during the Battle of Britain. But it didn't look like very much, it just looked like an army camp, right? It was bombed once, and this could have been absolutely catastrophic to the British war effort, but fortunately, later, after all the dust had settled on the, on the war, they asked the Luftwaffe, "Why didn't you bomb it more?", and they said, "Oh yeah, well, we, we assumed you wouldn't put anything important under a major flight route for the Luftwaffe." Like, you'd have to be unbelievably stupid to do that, so we assumed it was just a kind of piddling little army camp.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Ah, the double bluff that won the war.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  The double bluff, yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  And the word boffin, we should just say, comes from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, and there's a character called Nicodemus Boffin, who is like an uneducated dustman. He wins a load of money and decides to educate himself by reading lots of books and doing that kind of thing. We think that's where it comes from, although there had been a meaning of like an officer, like an old doddering officer-

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  In the war was a boffin, and that doesn't quite work with this, but I think certainly that's-

• 15:16Speaker 03

  It seems to be most- It's in loads of books, there's a family in The Hobbit called the Boffins.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems to be a really, I guess it's quite, it's a fun word, isn't it, really?

• 15:23Speaker 03

  It's a fun word.

• 15:23Dan Schreiber?

  But boffin is not caught on, presumably?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Not just this book.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Just this one book?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Like, page one?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  We're gonna make it, are we gonna make it happen?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Let's make boffins happen.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  This is sort of a home of boffins, the RI.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Would it have done so well if it weren't for the boffins of the very start of the 1800s? Maybe not, because I was very surprised to know that the audiences in this lecture theatre, which is where all the greatest scientific discoveries were basically distributed to the public, were more than half female, and it's because the RI employed socialites to make it cool to go to science lectures.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Guys, I got a question for you, so look at the audience here. What kind of, what word do you think was one of the most common to describe the audience at the Royal Institution?

• 16:10Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  This is something noted by Sir William Henry Bragg, who was a Nobel Prize winner.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Someone shouted nerd from the audience?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Nerd?

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Not nerd.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Odd?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  No, we're talking about the old audience.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, sorry.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Is it positive or negative?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  It's positive.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 16:29Dan Schreiber?

  Cool dudes.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Legend.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Cool dude is close enough, fashion, fashionable. And like Hannah said, it was a very fashionable place for people to come. And also, as well as like sending the socialites out, you would be able to get discount lecture rates if you gave your daughters or your best friends tickets, they would get cheaper tickets to get more women in.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Ah, oh, like one of those, sign someone else up and you'll get half price off and they'll get half price off things, and I keep meaning to forward that email to you guys about Airbnb.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  It's more like, use the offer code FISH.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Can I tell you one of my favourite boffins?

• 17:08Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  So this is Caroline Haslett, I think she was a member of the RI. She was also director of the Electrical Association for Women. And she was born in 1895, started off as a boiler engineer in Suffolk, was expelled from her boiler engineering school because of a dangerous love affair.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  And then, she had, but she had a crusade her whole life, which was to liberate women from drudgery in the home through the medium of electricity. And she had this thing called the House of Marvels in Bristol, which was a house which was all electric. And in 1935, this was insane, you know, people couldn't believe it.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  What, you mean like lots of things, things plugged into the mains? Not like you stepped to the house? I don't know, an electric house sounds like I step on the floor and I go, this is-

• 17:53Speaker 03

  It killed everyone on, yeah, yeah, on, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it had things like a drying cupboard and an electric clock, and these were very advanced in 1935. And her memorial, which I just think is so nice, there is a Caroline Haslett memorial pylon down in Sussex.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  That's nice.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  I didn't know you got those.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  I know.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Sounds like the kind of place you're gonna take your wife on holiday, Andy.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  If you could have any piece of infrastructure named after you, what would it be?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  That, that's difficult for you.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Ah, it's gotta be a solar farm.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Solar farm?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but a pylon's a nice one, you know. Oh, no, a big, one of those big new sand batteries they're building in Finland, they're very cool.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Oh, well, hmm.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  I kind of wish I had.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Can't have them all, you've opened a can of worms here. The Royal Society, though, and it does feel like sacrilege to mention it, in the Royal Institution, but it obviously has been held in very high esteem for a long time. Such high esteem that another boffin, I can't remember what we're calling, referring to them now, Dorothy Hodgkin, very famous, won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in crystalography when she'd made the discovery that led to her Nobel Prize, which was solving the structure of penicillin. Her tutor said, "You'll get the Nobel Prize for this", and she said, "I'd much rather be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society", and he said, "That's much harder."

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  But she was anyway, so that's all right. And also she had a colleague, John Cornforth, cool name, who, when she said, "I, I think the structure of penicillin might be this", he said, "If it turns out to be this, I will give up chemistry and grow mushrooms instead."

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And did he?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  He didn't, he went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975, so, bit of a dickhead, really? Didn't stick to his word.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Can I give you another boffin?

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Seeing as we're doing that, so Raissa Nitabou. She is the only woman for whom a body part is named.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Say her name again.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Raissa Nitabou.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  The knee?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it's a layer between the placenta and the uterus wall. But there are 432 people after whom parts of the body are named, and 424 are male physicians. Eight of them are gods and kings, and the only one that's named after a woman is this part of the placenta.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  And I think there are at least three times more human body parts named after worms than there are after women.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  So the vermilion border, for instance, around your mouth.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  I don't know that.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  It's like the bit between your lip and your, the rest of your skin.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  That's named after a worm.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  That's a very, very small, I can see why you'd name it after a worm.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing, the wormian bones, they are wriggly bits of bones that attach your skull plates together.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Named after Ole Von.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah?

• 20:51Dan Schreiber?

  People want this book.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  They know, they know where it's going, that. Into the book.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Half the audience so confused by that.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  And one other is, so these are things which sound like they should be named after a trait, but are actually named after a person with an apposite name. And the other one I found, when I went through all the body parts, is the Alcock Canal, which is where the nerves that serve your penis pass through, and that's named after Benjamin Alcock.

• 21:21Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 21:24Dan Schreiber?

  That's great. That's wonderful. The problem we're talking about in a fact like this, where we're talking about general female scientists, is there's just so many extraordinary people out there, and how do you narrow it down? So I decided I was gonna look specifically at people called Margaret, just to see what they've done for the world, and there are so many amazing Margaret.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Is that because my mum's in the audience?

• 21:45Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, exactly. But there are amazing ones. Margaret Gatti, she wrote a book about seaweed, and there was a whole seaweed craze that happened in the UK in the 1800s. And it was a way of liberating women who wanted to have a scientific passion but weren't allowed into these institutions. They could go down to the sea and they could identify all these different seaweeds. Margaret Gatti's book had 200 different seaweeds in there, right? And it was getting so popular that men were writing that their wives were travelling with larger muffs so that they could hide all their seaweed equipment in, because it was seen as uncouth to have that. So the muff, obviously the thing you put your hand.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 22:24Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Dan Schreiber?

  Well, it wasn't to me.

• 22:29Dan Schreiber?

  So I thought it's worth mentioning. Have you cleaned that muff recently? It absolutely reeks. Why is there a test tube in there?

• 22:38Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, another amazing woman, Margaret Alice Murray. She was the first woman in Britain to hold a full-time appointment in Egyptology. So this is an academic world, not strict science, but she was the first person to unwrap mummies in public as a woman.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Not meant to do that.

• 22:54Dan Schreiber?

  Sorry?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Not meant to do that. Meant to keep them wrapped. It's the whole idea. Well, see, this is why they didn't used to let women in. They'd just come in and they unwrap all the mummies. Oh, take these bandages off, come on.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Get some air on it, get some air on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:10Dan Schreiber?

  No woman was allowed to do it again until 1945. She also wrote a book about witchcraft, which led it up to wicca being quite a legit field. But it was very controversial because she bent a lot of the stuff. But she lived to 100, and she released her autobiography, aged 100, and it was called My First Hundred Years.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 23:31Dan Schreiber?

  Such a good title.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 23:33Dan Schreiber?

  Last one I'll mention quickly, Margaret Roberts. Very interesting lady. She was a chemist, and she's notable because she became the only prime minister of the UK to have a science degree. That was Margaret Thatcher. She started as Margaret Roberts, and it was very interesting.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  She's still the only one?

• 23:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:52Dan Schreiber?

  I believe so, yeah. I mean, the article was from 1998, but she, she.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Well, it's not like we've been going through them quite a lot recently.

• 24:02Dan Schreiber?

  What's really cool, though, is that for all the faults that you have with Margaret Thatcher, she was one of the people that led to the Montreal Protocol, which is when there was discussions about CFCs on an international level, she was a chemist who came to the table with knowledge that it was ruining our planet and convinced all the other leaders of the world that this was something that we needed to ban. So having a scientist in a prime minister role is probably a good thing.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Do you know who her supervisor was at university? Previously mentioned in the last 10 minutes. Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize winner.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Not Benjamin Alcock.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't that amazing? I did not know this. Dorothy Hodgkin was Margaret Thatcher's tutor at uni, and Thatcher, so she worked in Hodgkin's lab. So she was a big crystallographer person, hence the Nobel Prize. And she kept a photo of her up in 10 Downing Street when she worked there. And Dorothy Hodgkin was incredibly virulently anti-nuclear development and anti lots of other stuff that Margaret Thatcher stood for, and used to keep on coming to nag Margaret Thatcher about, you know, please, please stop investing in nuclear technology. And Margaret, I think, would just always say, no, but I have your picture up in my room, so.

• 25:12Dan Schreiber?

  Great. I've got a couple of very quick boffin quizzes for you.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Oh, great. Great.

• 25:15Dan Schreiber?

  These are headlines from the Sun about what those boffins have been up to. I've removed one word from each one.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:22Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  This is nothing like Have I Got News For You? Just for legal reasons.

• 25:27Dan Schreiber?

  What's that show? I don't know.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Okay, good.

• 25:31Dan Schreiber?

  Boffins create super what that can survive being run over by a car? Super rat, someone yelled out in the crowd. Super rat that can survive being run over by a car? No?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Superhuman.

• 25:40Dan Schreiber?

  No.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Supercolor fragilistic expialidocious.

• 25:44Dan Schreiber?

  There we go. Jelly.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Super jelly?

• 25:45Dan Schreiber?

  Super jelly. Okay. Fifty, 50 most beautiful what's confirmed by boffins. Is yours on the list?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Alcock canals.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Is that a body part?

• 25:59Dan Schreiber?

  No.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 26:00Dan Schreiber?

  It's baby names. Dave the 16-inch what killed by boffins?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  I'm not going there.

• 26:09Dan Schreiber?

  Earthworm. Dave the earthworm.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:11Dan Schreiber?

  Was basically Britain's Harambe.

• 26:17Dan Schreiber?

  He was tragically 16-inch-long earthworm. Can you imagine?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  It's a lot.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:22Dan Schreiber?

  Huge.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Is he now two 8-inch earthworms?

• 26:26Dan Schreiber?

  He's now one 16-inch earthworm in a jar at the Natural History Museum. Sadly, they studied him, and then they killed him and put him in a jar.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Oh, right, okay, that's.

• 26:33Dan Schreiber?

  That's. Well, I've got one more, but I'm too cross about a Dave the earthworm now.

• 26:43Dan Schreiber?

  It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that according to Ethiopian tradition, during the 14th century, it was illegal to be a short, bald, old man.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  So.

• 26:59Dan Schreiber?

  Someone just said, damn it.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  This is a legendary Ethiopian queen called Fura, and we don't know very much about her because it's all oral retelling of her story. She may not have even existed, but all the stories say that she reversed traditional gender roles, and she forced the men to do all the housework and all the childcare. And she really took against all the short, bald, old ones. And as someone who's kind of on the borderline of some of those categories, it's kind of interesting. But she, basically, it was that the older, bolder, shorter men were kind of talking to people and giving them ideas and telling them what to do, and she's like, well, I'm the queen and I should tell you what to do. That's kind of.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:43Dan Schreiber?

  And they were like traditionally figures of respect in the community like this. Yeah, yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  And then in all the stories, there is one short, old, bald man who manages to escape. And she asks people to do something ridiculous, and they go to him for advice, and then he tells them how to do things. It's like a lot of different stories like that.

• 28:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, because it was a lot, she led, she didn't say she was the queen of the people. She was the queen of the women. She was really saying, men, you have no place here. And so it was the men who were escaping to the cave going, please, short, bald man, tell us, tell us what we can do. And he kept feeding advice back to them of what they could do. And eventually it was his advice that saw to her end.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to give an example of the kind of thing. So she would ask them to do ridiculous things, like to build a house that was not on the ground and not in the sky, but somewhere in between. And then they would go to the old man saying, what the fuck is she on about? And then he'd say, okay, well, say that you'll do it if she puts down the first foundation. And then they went to her and said, we'll do it if you put down the first foundation. And then she'd get really annoyed, and she'd be like, you're talking to that old man again, haven't you?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you said.

• 28:52Dan Schreiber?

  Now, go and build me an elevator for grain.

• 28:58Dan Schreiber?

  But no nails, yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  But you were saying about how they got rid of her at the end.

• 29:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, so finally, she said, I want to go see all of my land, and I want to ride around it, and I want to, I want people to meet me and say how great I am. So they ran to the old man in the cave, and they said, hey, she's, she wants to go around, what do we do? And he said, here's our chance, it's finally arrived. Put her on a giraffe, and it will run so fast it will rip her limb to limb. And according to the facts, that's what happened. How, according to the facts? This is all very, it's very misty stuff, isn't it?

• 29:31Speaker 02

  According to the stories.

• 29:32Dan Schreiber?

  According to the stories. But why does riding on a giraffe take your limb from limb? Well, she was tied to the giraffe. Does that help? I don't think so. I don't think it makes sense at all, Andy, but her arm flew off, and then her waist flew off. Her waist flew off? Her genitals flew off. Oh, dear. And the remains fell off. And where all these pieces fell is a long ride, apparently, because all the towns are named after each bit of her body.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Really? So you can, can you still visit towns called, you know, Fura's Buttock?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a place called Sala, which means genitals. A place called Kura, which means like the remains after you got rid of all the other bits. And her waist, there's a place called Hallo, which means waist. I can't find any of them on Google Maps, but I do believe that they all exist.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  And isn't there a tradition? I don't know if it's still upheld, but the place where her last bit of body fell, her last big toe fell or whatever, people go to it, and women pour milk on it as a sign of respect and love, and men beat, beat it with sticks. So if you're going as a couple to this tour of sight, you've got very different aims when you get there.

• 30:39Dan Schreiber?

  The milk is an interesting thing. Why is there milk? What's the milk connection?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's always like a kind of a votive offering milk, isn't it? But I guess because it's such a precious resource. I think especially in certain, certain parts of Africa.

• 30:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, well, I, I wonder if it's to do with the fact that we have some items from the old, what are they called again? It's the Salima, Salima people?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Sadama.

• 31:00Dan Schreiber?

  Sorry, Sadama people. We have old items, so there's an item in the Met Museum, which is a pillow for keeping the people of that area in Ethiopia, their head off their pillows, because they used to use butter as their. Keeping your head off the pillow? Yeah, so basically, your hair had been done up in butter, which was a hair gel, basically, back in the day. The idea is that you would do your hair up, you would keep it on this wooden thing, and it would retain this amazing look that you'd done purely.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  You would keep your head on the wooden thing, you mean? So it was like a wooden frame, and you lie your neck on it?

• 31:32Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, exactly, yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Feels like you don't need the pillow at that point, doesn't it? Feels like if it's to keep your head off the pillow, at that point, you can just take the pillow away.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:40Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Can I borrow your pillow? It just doesn't look like you're using it.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  They have four types of marriage, the Sadama people. Or four types of sort of getting married. Three types are your kind of standard, traditional woman forced into a relationship she didn't want to be in against her will, the end. But number four, if you're lucky enough, is if a woman fancies a man, she stands on his doorstep, waits for the door to be opened and throws a stick into his house. And if a woman does that to you, as a man, you have to marry her.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Fanatical, saves lives, small talk, doesn't it?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  How often would number four happen over number one?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I think it depends on like family culture, on, you know, just what your, what your parents let you do.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:25Dan Schreiber?

  It's a bit humiliating for someone to basically play fetch with you as their way of...

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Come on, Andy, you've, you've been treated worse by various...

• 32:36Speaker 03

  I'm in marriage number four. Yeah, yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  There are some marriage taboos in the Sadama area. So men are not allowed to mention the names of their in-laws. And women are not allowed to not only not say the names of their in-laws, but also any word that has the first syllable as the name of their in-laws. So for instance, my surname is Harkin and my wife wouldn't be allowed to say Harkin, but she wouldn't also be allowed to say harmonica or hard-boiled egg.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Which would be very difficult in our life.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  That comes up a lot in our house.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Every morning at breakfast, you get the harmonica out while you're cooking. Yeah, that sucks.

• 33:11Dan Schreiber?

  Short, bald, old men? Who's the shortest, oldest, boldest man you can name?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Living?

• 33:17Dan Schreiber?

  I've got one, and I don't think you're going to get shorter or balder or older.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Living.

• 33:22Dan Schreiber?

  Not living.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  So in history, in all of history?

• 33:25Dan Schreiber?

  Well, yeah, yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Gandhi.

• 33:26Dan Schreiber?

  Short and bald and old, yes.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:28Dan Schreiber?

  But not him. Older and shorter and maybe balder.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Methuselah.

• 33:32Dan Schreiber?

  Older.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Older than Methuselah?

• 33:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yep.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  But Methuselah was like 600 years old or something, wasn't he?

• 33:38Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, no, sorry.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  What kind of old are we talking about?

• 33:39Dan Schreiber?

  Like older and longer ago.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Oh, I see.

• 33:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. No, nice. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Okay, so from someone from...

• 33:45Dan Schreiber?

  He's a friend of the podcast.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Oh, Utsi.

• 33:47Dan Schreiber?

  Utsi the Iceman.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  No way!

• 33:49Dan Schreiber?

  Utsi the Iceman, friend of the podcast, was balding. He had the male pattern baldness gene. He was 53, which I think at the time was old.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:59Dan Schreiber?

  He was getting on.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:00Dan Schreiber?

  And he was five foot three.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Was he?

• 34:02Dan Schreiber?

  Short, bald, old.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  He could have been tall for that era.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  You don't know. Yeah, I agree.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 34:11Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  It's pretty good, though. Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  That's good. Yeah, that's good.

• 34:14Dan Schreiber?

  The other thing, we got, I haven't told you this, this is fresh information, it's just come into the inbox today. Utsi the Iceman had a tramp stamp.

• 34:23Dan Schreiber?

  I'm afraid I didn't write down the name of the person who sent it in, but he had on his, on his back like one of those...

• 34:27Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 34:28Dan Schreiber?

  What's a tramp stamp?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:29Dan Schreiber?

  Now, you know.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  It's a...

• 34:33Dan Schreiber?

  It's a... You don't, you don't know, because, you know, you have so many, but it's the, it's the tattoo that goes on the lower back.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that one?

• 34:41Dan Schreiber?

  That one.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Okay. Male pattern baldness, it's quite weird, isn't it? That it, that you go bald in a pattern. And that we have no idea why it happens like that. And so obviously you lose it from the top and then you lose it from the front sides. And there have been various theories, but the latest scientific papers are concluding that the reason that you lose the hair from the top of your head first and then from the sides of your temples is basically gravity is pulling your hair off.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And...

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Really?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  The theory is that basically you've got a layer of fat under your scalp. And men lose this layer of fat as they get older, whereas women don't. And that's where your hair follicles are, sort of under this layer of fat. And so the idea is that this layer of fat is cushioning the force of gravity. So as men lose it, then gravity is pushing down hardest on the top of your head, because that's where it's directly hitting it, as opposed to when it starts to slope on the sides, the gravity is a bit less.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  So it pulls the hairs off. So that's why the hairs fall off the top. And then the reason they apparently, in scientific papers, fall off the front and starts to recede is from the weight of your face pulling...

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Stop.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Pulling the follicles.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  How heavy is your face?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Well, if you look at bald men, they've all got huge noses.

• 35:56Dan Schreiber?

  Well, that's interesting. That's interesting because I have a very big nose, but also in theory I should be bald. But luckily, as a child, I basically had no forehead. I had, I had like a two-point forehead. I had hair that grew all over here and my parents used to shave a forehead on to me. No, seriously.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Stop.

• 36:17Dan Schreiber?

  And it's receded now that I'm in my 40s to where it's like basically a normal forehead.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 36:23Dan Schreiber?

  But that tracks with your theory, big nose and heavy face.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Absolute cobblers. I just don't...

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Guys, this is the home of science.

• 36:33Dan Schreiber?

  What? I'm, I'm reporting data.

• 36:38Dan Schreiber?

  Dan sits down, "What, what today, sir? Just another forehead, please." Same again. As a child, if you...

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Short front.

• 36:45Dan Schreiber?

  You see photos of me as a child, I had a bowl haircut and I asked my parents why and they said, "Because you didn't have a forehead and it was weird." So I just had a fringe the whole way round, looking like I was Blackadder from series one.

• 36:59Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I was reading about, there's a lot of baddies in literature and let's say in movies that are bald, so...

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Lex Luthor.

• 37:07Dan Schreiber?

  Lex Luthor, Darth Vader when the mask comes off.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but...

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Describe Darth Vader in one word. If you get it right, we'll give you a billion...

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Describe the man who robbed you with a lightsaber.

• 37:24Dan Schreiber?

  I'm just pointing out when I...

• 37:25Speaker 02

  He was bald.

• 37:28Dan Schreiber?

  Just pointing out that when the mask came off, they would have gone, "Yeah, of course he's bald."

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Of course he is, because if you bowl the mask off and there's this luxurious hair, that's weirder.

• 37:39Dan Schreiber?

  When he was younger, he did have luxurious hair. I think then acid took it away, didn't it? Yeah, it's a fact, a lot like... Anyway, the point is, is that you do have, you do have villains who are seen with that. But that almost led to Patrick Stewart not getting the job of Picard in Star Trek. And he wrote about this in his autobiography recently. When he was on his way to the audition, he was in the UK and he was going to America. Just before he got on the plane, they said, "Can you bring a wig? We need you to wear a wig." And so his wife went home and he got on the plane and his wig got on the plane behind him. So it followed him to LA.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 38:14Dan Schreiber?

  To where he did the audition, because...

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Can I tune out for a second? Did Dan say the wig got on the plane behind him?

• 38:21Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Like an emotional support...

• 38:22Dan Schreiber?

  Well, they weren't going to hold the plane for it, so it got on, it got on its own.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, it got on the following plane.

• 38:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  You said it got on the plane behind him, like he gets on the plane.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Stop kicking my seat. Whoa!

• 38:41Dan Schreiber?

  The theory is, is that because in the future, that's, that far in the future, we would have cured baldness. So there would be no people who were bald. So they thought that's what Gene Roddenberry wanted. He does the audition, he goes home, and then a few days later he gets a phone call and they say, "We'd like to see you again, this time without the wig." And it turns out Gene Roddenberry said, "I don't think in the 24th century we're going to care about bald heads anyway."

• 39:04Speaker 02

  And then the wig got back on the plane and went home.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  I actually have a fact that marries Ethiopian female rulers and baldness.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Which I've only...

• 39:14Speaker 02

  So did I at the start of this section.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Shit, it's the same one. How embarrassing. No, this is about the most famous maybe Ethiopian female ruler, the Queen of Sheba. Some people claim that she's Yemeni, but are any of those people here? No.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Most people agree that she was an Ethiopian queen. King Solomon was told about her by his pet bird, actually, who flew around Africa and came back to Solomon and said, "There's this really fit woman, you should marry her." And so he found the Queen of Sheba and he thought, "Yes, I will marry her." But there are all these rumours that she's got really hairy legs. And so there are various versions of this story, some in the Torah, some in the Quran, I think, but this is one of them. He was like, "We're going to have to trick her because I need to know if she's got really gross hairy legs." And so in the palace he made for her, he built a floor made of glass with water underneath it, but that made it look like the whole floor was a pool. So when the Queen of Sheba's walking across it, she's going to have to hitch up her skirts.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  And she did indeed hitch up her skirts and he did indeed say, "Ha, you've got a disgusting hairy leg. What's going on there?" And she said, "My mum fancied a goat when she was pregnant with me, genuinely this was the explanation." And so that made her be born with a hairy leg. And he didn't marry her until he designed a special hair removal cream that could remove all the hair from her legs. And that is...

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Is that feminism?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  God, it's...

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Feel like...

• 40:52Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Gollum actor Andy Serkis' MTV Awards acceptance speech was so good, it won an award.

• 41:08Dan Schreiber?

  The acceptance speech won an award.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Crazy.

• 41:11Dan Schreiber?

  Isn't that astonishing? It's not when you see it, though. Is anyone here seeing the acceptance speech? Yeah, big 2003 MTV Award fans in the house? It basically was Andy Serkis sort of accepting it on behalf of Gollum because the category was best virtual performance. So it was a year in which Gollum was up against Scooby Doo, Kangaroo Jack, Dobby and Yoda.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  I wonder if they had speeches prepared.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  I love that fall shot of them all in the audience. Yoda's looking absolutely livid. He's short and bald and old. Anyway, sorry.

• 41:44Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was a speech and we've got a picture of it up here where Gollum is holding the award. He basically attacks Andy Serkis for trying to accept the award that should be his, but instead of it just being quite a fun sort of, "Oh, you took it from me," he goes into total profanity, the worst swearing you would ever hear, and it was so good, it won a Hugo Award, which is a science fiction ceremony that happens.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  Do you want to know one of the strangest award speech knock-on effects ever?

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, go on.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  So 1994, Tom Hanks won Best Actor at the Oscars for Philadelphia, right?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  And he was a very young man at the time, but he'd done a few films and this was his first, you know, really big, serious role, obviously all about, you know, the AIDS crisis. And in the speech, he paid tribute to his old high school teacher, Rawley Farnsworth, right? And he said he paid tribute to him as one of the, you know, sort of one of the great but unsung body of gay Americans, right? And the story at the time was that he had outed him accidentally on stage. Which thankfully is not true. He had phoned up three days before and asked for permission to mention him as, "So I was one of your pupils, I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Tom Hanks, I'm actually pretty famous now."

• 42:58Speaker 03

  But this speech, and the kind of version of events of the speech, led to another film by Kevin Kline called In and Out about someone inadvertently outed during an award's acceptance speech.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, really?

• 43:12Speaker 03

  So the acceptance speech prompted another film. A whole film was based on the speech.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Poor Tom Hanks then, really having to settle down and go, "But I definitely didn't do that."

• 43:21Speaker 03

  No, no, he definitely didn't.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  It's actually kind of cool, the way that Andy Serkis became Gollum. I suppose, if you're a Gollum fan, I mean, it was quite groundbreaking at the time, right? When we saw Gollum and it's like, he is Andy Serkis, but he's not. And Andy Serkis was meant to be just the voice, and he didn't really want to be just the voice of Gollum because he thought, "I'm a full-body actor here." So he rocked up anyway because his wife persuaded him to, and he was so good while he was auditioning for the voice, his whole body and his whole face morphed in the way that Gollum's does, and acted out the bit so well that Peter Jackson thought, "Okay, we've got to use the body and face of this guy as well for Gollum," which is a bit shit because they'd already designed the whole of Gollum for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Can I just say, sorry, I don't really, I don't know these films very well, and I don't know what Andy Serkis looks like. Does he look like this?

• 44:11Speaker 03

  It's uncanny, it's uncanny.

• 44:14Dan Schreiber?

  That's actually just a shot of Andy Serkis.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Oh, is it?

• 44:17Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  But yeah, they had to redesign the whole part around him, and one of the earliest uses of that kind of CGI where they put like points all over Andy Serkis's body and they...

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Motion capture.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Motion capture, indeed.

• 44:28Dan Schreiber?

  But that's an interesting difference, which I didn't properly appreciate. CGI is different to motion capture. Motion capture is, we are seeing Andy Serkis, he's in the scene, he's doing all these things. CGI is really a computer-generated reconstruction, maybe using a guide, but built from scratch.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah. One feels like a subcategory almost, but yeah. But what motion capture can't do is the face, or it can and it sometimes does, but in Lord of the Rings it didn't, but if you look at Andy Serkis's face, and to answer your question, James, yes, it does look quite a lot like Gollum's, but in the most flattering possible way.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  It kind of mimics Andy Serkis's face, and that's because the animators, when they were turning Andy Serkis's movements into Gollum, they used to call Andy Serkis over to their desks and say, "Okay, we're creating this scene now, can you act it out in front of us and we will follow your facial expressions precisely and make sure that we match them exactly to Gollum." Yeah. Which sounds quite, so fun, me and Andy Serkis just trotting along to the desk again, "Yes, I'll do it."

• 45:29Speaker 02

  I read that he based the voice on Gollum on the sounds his cats made while coughing up fur balls. Does that sound right?

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  I think his name, Gollum, according to J.R. Tolkien, the name comes from the horrible swelling and gurgling sound that Gollum made.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what does Tolkien know?

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Well, I thought it was named after, because it's like a Jewish monster or something called the Gollum.

• 45:54Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Oh, Gollum.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Gollum, that's right, I thought it was that, but he said that it came from this. Other people think that maybe it comes from like the word gold, basically, an old word for gold. I don't know. But I looked at Andy Serkis's filmography, because like I said, I'm not really massively familiar with him, and apparently he voiced an animated talking anus in 2019.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Remember that?

• 46:17Speaker 02

  You don't remember?

• 46:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  It won Best Picture.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  It was for an environmental charity, and it was to discourage people from flushing web wipes down the toilets, and it opens with a line, "Hello, I'm an asshole."

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Gollum, or Andy Serkis, rather, wasn't the absolute first example of motion capture, which I find very interesting. So there was an early pioneer in the field was Jar Jar Binks. Does anyone remember the character of Jar Jar Binks? Yeah. Now beloved, of course, we all celebrate Jar Jar Binks' Day every year.

• 46:55Dan Schreiber?

  Ahmed Best was the actor.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Ahmed Best, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  And he didn't win Best Actor.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Jar Jar was hated, but a lot of people...

• 47:06Speaker 01

  It's hated, I think, as we know, from the groan in the audience when you mention his name.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  As in, it was very sad, because he was a young actor who was very excited to get this role as Jar Jar Binks, and George Lucas told him, "Look, they hate it now, but 20 years from now, the kids who love Jar Jar are going to be adults and they're going to change the narrative," and that has not happened.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  The absolutely mad thing about Jar Jar Binks, because, I mean, it was, you know, pioneering stuff, and you can see production shots where Ahmed Best is wearing the suit, he's wearing the head, but he's got the sort of, like, the body suit on that's helping to map his movements. Other people going for Jar Jar Binks included Robin Williams. And Michael Jackson.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Would have been even less popular, maybe?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael Jackson eventually refused to do it because he wanted to do it as himself. He didn't want it to be, himself to be CGI'd. He was like, "I have the Jar Jar Binks, look, just let me act it." And Lucas said, "No one wants to see that on screen."

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 48:04Dan Schreiber?

  But the actor who played him, Ahmed Best, interesting fact, his twin brother went to prom with Lauryn Hill.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  We've slipped into the pages of Heat magazine, and I think we should slip out.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Sorry, who's Lauryn Hill?

• 48:20Dan Schreiber?

  The miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she was in The Fugees, she was one of the pioneering sounds of the 90s, I would say.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. The first CGI in movies was in Vertigo, 1958, Alfred Hitchcock. And it's the swirly bit at the start, so it's not any real film, it's in the credits. And he used something called a Karrison Predictor, and this was something they used in the war, where you could put a load of inputs in about the, how fast an aeroplane was going and what direction it was going, and it will be able to predict where the aeroplane would go, and then you'd be able to fire in that spot, so that when the plane got there, the bullet would get there at the same time. And he basically put a load of inputs into this and then hung it over his camera or whatever and made it make lots of different twists and turns, and that's what makes those spirals at the start of that film.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  That's so cool.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  One of the first films to really lean in, I suppose, to CGI was Tron, which I haven't seen, but it looks brilliant, 1982. So this really was the first pioneering use of like computer-generated imagery without any real world in it, but I always find with early CGI, the weird stuff is the stuff that's kind of lo-fi and done by hand. So all the characters in it are just a face, and then the rest of them is CGI'd, and they've got all these sort of glowing lines, like lines of circuitry all over their bodies, and every single frame of those lines was hand-painted on. So there was about half a million separate pieces of art done for that film with little bits of paint that hand-painted on the glowing lines of the circuitry. It was the opposite.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  And then it couldn't be nominated for an Oscar for Best Special Effects because it was cheating.

• 50:04Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  How's that really? You remember, it was 1982.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  You were one.

• 50:09Dan Schreiber?

  I hadn't been born for two years, but I remember the first thing I said when I came out of the womb, going, "That's bullshit, man."

• 50:15Speaker 02

  You came out of the womb, picked up your fringe, went, "This is bullshit."

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Someone CGI this bullshit on my head? A lot of films now, they, they want to say, we don't make it with CGI. That's a big thing. It's like, this was not made with CGI. And so I was looking at YouTube mini-series by someone called The Movie Rabbit Hole. And they found out that basically films are using CGI to delete evidence of CGI in their behind the scenes footage.

• 50:48Dan Schreiber?

  Love it.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Isn't that amazing? But like, for instance, one thing about not using CGI, Christopher Nolan, for Interstellar, there's this big bit where there's a big cornfield.

• 50:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he planted 500 acres of real cornfield in Alberta, Canada, in order that he didn't have to CGI this field.

• 51:07Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  What a faff.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Well.

• 51:09Dan Schreiber?

  The cornfields exist.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they.

• 51:13Dan Schreiber?

  You need one willing farmer.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  What, to lose all his corn?

• 51:17Dan Schreiber?

  Because he burns it down, Andy, in the movie. It all.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  He burns it down. Well.

• 51:20Dan Schreiber?

  You don't see Nolan in shot, but like, it's as part of the.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Sorry, I thought it was just walking through the corn, swishing it like in Gladiator, which actually would make it worth more, probably.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Well, he didn't actually burn it all down. It cost him $100,000 to make this entire cornfield. And he managed to make a profit of $162,000 by selling a lot of the corn afterwards.

• 51:41Dan Schreiber?

  That's amazing.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  It's pretty good.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Because I was just wondering if Gladiator bread went for more at the time. And if not, they should have.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Where Russell Crowe swished along it. Yeah, of course.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  You'd pay more for one that's been fingered by Russell Crowe, wouldn't you?

• 51:56Speaker 02

  I don't think I would.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Do you not think?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  You'd ask for a discount.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  I feel like I would erect a scarecrow just to scare Russell Crowe.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 52:05Dan Schreiber?

  We're gonna have to wrap up, guys. Does anyone want to say anything before we go?

• 52:10Speaker 02

  I was reading an article in The Economist about actors losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence. It is happening, but mostly in the animal world. And that's because people don't really want to use animals in movies because it might be cruel and you can do it with AI and CGI instead. And there's a guy called Steve Martin, interestingly, who was, he's like one of the main guys who used to give all the animals for Hollywood to use. And he said, there's not been a single chimp in any big American movie since The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. And he has a bear called Tag the Bear who can't get any work at all. And has had to start wrestling with Logan Paul

• 52:53Speaker 02

  and taking on humans in hot dog eating contests.

• 52:56Dan Schreiber?

  What? Really?

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Has had to.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Well.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Has had to. I feel like Steve Martin's like, it's the only work he can get.

• 53:05Dan Schreiber?

  But that's where we're getting with actors, right? Where CGI is now taking over a lot of actors. I think we're gonna get to a point where they'll replace old movies with problematic actors with a new actor so that you can watch the movie again.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Really?

• 53:17Dan Schreiber?

  I think that feels like we're headed. I can see a world where Michael Jackson's taken out all his video clips and Jar Jar Binks is put in, in his place. And that's just our reality going forward.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  It's always gonna be Jar Jar. Everybody Alan films, Jar Jar Binks.

• 53:34Dan Schreiber?

  It would be a much happier world, that's it.

• 53:40Dan Schreiber?

  That is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for being here in this amazing room, the Royal Institution with us. We've loved being here. And if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, we're all on Instagram, we're on Twitter, we're on various different places. You can find us there or email podcast at qi.com because Andy goes through it all and he picks out your best facts for our new show, Little Fish. Anyone heard Little Fish? It's a cool show, eh? And then there's drop us a line. Any drop us a line listeners and viewers? Please send them all there. We love getting them. But otherwise, we'll be back again next week with another episode. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here. We'll see you again. Goodbye.