No Such Thing As Chekhov's Volcano

Greg Foot joins James, Anna and Andy to discuss vision, vacuums, volcanoes and Volvos. Head to nosuchthingasafish.com/Risummer http://nosuchthingasafish.com/Risummer for tickets to our July shows at the Royal Institution! 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 Get NordVPN two-year plan + four months extra ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fish It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee. Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, where we were joined by the absolutely brilliant science communicator Greg Futt. Now, I have known Greg for many, many years. He is really, I would say, one of the UK's premier fact checkers. If you listen to BBC Radio 4, you might know him from the show Sliced Bread, where he looks at different products and claims and sees whether the science backs them up or not. But he has a brand new podcast. It's very exciting. It's called The Baby Fact Check. And it is something that I really wish I had about three years ago when I had a very young baby, because Greg is a new father himself. Congratulations to him and his partner.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  And they have realised that there is so much information out there, so many claims from companies, from the internet. And Greg has decided to use his many, many skills to work out which of these claims are true and which of them are false. It's such a great idea and he has done it absolutely brilliantly. So if you want to listen to that, then go to The Baby Fact Check, wherever you get your podcasts. And in fact, at The Baby Fact Check is the place to go on Instagram to learn more. And if you want to know more about Greg in general, then go to Greg Futt, that's G R E G F W O T dot com. And everything will be on there. On with the podcast.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  No, not on with the podcast. Hi, James.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Hi, Andy.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  We have more news, one more exciting announcement. We are doing a little run of live shows this summer. We're going to the Royal Institution.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Venerable.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Home of science and now us temporarily. We're going to be in the lecture theatre. It's amazing. Oh, it's an amazing thing. We did a show last year there and it was so much fun. It's such an amazing, historic, wonderful venue. It's where the Royal Institution Christmas lectures are. And we are going to be there on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 25th of July. They're all at 7.30pm. The one on the 21st is going to be livestreamed and available on catch up for two weeks. So please come on down, come and see us. Ruin the home of science and its reputation with our stupid jokes. If you want to get tickets, you can go to nosuchthingasafish.com/risummer.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Come and see the show.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Come and see us. Can I do on with the podcast now?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  On with the podcast.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, coming to you from the QI offices in Hobon. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here with James Harkin, Anna Turgensky and Greg Foot. Hello. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. So, in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Greg.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Tests have shown that a Volvo 240 used to be the best car with the right vibrations to calm down a crying baby.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I was told this by one of the UK's leading infant crying academics, by the way.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Wow. Leading infant crying academics?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  He goes to all the annual crying conferences, he was telling me.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  I was going to say whale of a time, but that feels too soon for a band party.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  You've come to the right place, James, by that. That is amazing. I think remembering back where I was three or four years ago when my baby was very young, if I heard this, I'd be straight onto autocar and buy myself a Volvo 240.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Except you said "used to". Have babies changed or have Volvos changed?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Well, I was picturing the Volvos, that big old boxy car, isn't it, from late 70s, early 90s. I think cars have got quieter. I think they probably dampen the vibrations a little bit more as well, so, yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  So James needs to go second hand.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Do babies have a bigger carbon footprint than the rest of us? Because they're driving around in these massive old Volvos.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Babies do have a big carbon footprint, don't they? Like, and household pets as well. They say that those are two big changes you can make in your life that's going to massively increase your carbon footprint.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Feed the dog to the baby and then you...

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I'm glad you went that way round.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  So, this is really... So I didn't know about Volvos in particular, but I knew that vaguely vibrations help babies stop crying. And Honda announced in 2022, the big, you know, Japanese car giant, they've developed, they had developed a car specifically to stop babies crying.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it was a small plush toy car.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Which recreates the sound of the womb.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that's what it comes down to. I was reading some science papers about it. Firstly, they call this rhythmic vestibular stimulation. Which I think is what got us into this problem in the first place. But it's all about the motion and the sound supposedly being similar to what's in the womb. Maybe there's kind of the sound acting as white noise as well and to kind of calm the baby down.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  White noise is really interesting. I read about the first ever white noise machine. I don't know if you guys found this.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Is it just static on a wireless?

• 5:06Speaker 00

  It's older. It's older. Do you want to guess?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Oh, ancient Egyptians.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Oh, for God's sake.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Pre like Sumerian.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  God damn it. It's definitely earlier than you might think. It's from 1667. And the first person to ever use a white noise machine was Pope Clement the Ninth. And he suffered from bad insomnia. And so he commissioned an architect called Gian Lorenzo Bernini to come up with some way of helping him sleep. And it was well known at the time that like flowing water could help you sleep. And so Bernini came up with this machine, which had a rotating wheel connected to some paper. And it would just make this white noise and it worked.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  And the Pope slept like a baby.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Well, they do look like babies, don't they, most Popes? So maybe that's why.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Being the Pope used to be the absolute sweetest gig in the whole world, didn't it?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  If the if the modern Pope commissioned an architect to build him a machine to help him sleep, everyone would say you've lost touch with the people. But back then you could.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  I I mean, he does live in a, no, it was gold palace.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  That's true. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Which is decorated by the greatest artists of all time.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he didn't commission.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  It's a hand me down. It's a hand me down.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  He got it invented.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  So I've also been chatting to various sleep experts recently and one I spoke to about white noise. And they said, look, white noise can help mask noises in the house, like dogs barking, doorbells going, that sort of thing. Bit of advice, if you are going to use white noise around your baby, don't make it too loud, don't put it too close to the baby's cot. But then I had this really interesting chat with Professor Helen Ball, who's the director of the Durham University Sleep Lab. And she was saying, should we really be encouraging babies to sleep more deeply? And for longer, because actually you need them to stay aroused. And you don't want to blunt that arousal with something like white noise.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  On the other hand.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  If the baby's asleep, you can sleep.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  That is exactly it.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  This is a huge problem I have with all parenting advice is it's very, it's very baby focused.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Especially with babies waking up, you know, so many people online are like, oh, teaching a baby to sleep through the night is actually quite unnatural. It's quite normal and don't worry, it's healthy for your baby to be waking up every hour. I don't give a shit. It's not healthy for me.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  And actually for the whole family, it's less healthy if the parents aren't fresh, right?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  I mean, there's definitely a catch there. So what baby needs and what you need.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Well, I've shown you what side I'm on.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Well, you know, there was some advice for babies that would have worked for you as well, Anna, because it does seem like in the medieval times, a lot of babies would drink wine. And in quite decent quantities as well. So there was a physician called Bartholomew Scherrenmuller, who was asked, what should you do if you can't get your baby to stop drinking wine?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  And he said, if you cannot get the child off wine, referring to red wine, then give it white wine. Well diluted and that will wean it off the red wine.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And doesn't stain their teeth as well.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  They don't have teeth.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So was it, so it was diluted, but I mean, still probably not best practice.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Well, I think so.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Not now, no.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  I mean, why? Colic drops, they used to be alcoholic.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  What was that?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Colic drops used to be alcoholic.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  So colic is basically just a catch all term for uncontrollable crying.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Lots of crying.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  And you used to get these drops that would help them and they would have alcohol, but also opium sometimes, I think.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  In the olden days. There was something called Mrs Winslow's soothing syrup, which was basically morphine.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  But in the Ebus Papyrus, which is one of the oldest papyrus's from ancient Egypt that we have about medicine and stuff, they do say that you should prevent the excessive crying of children by giving them opium.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  All of this would have been extremely effective, you can't deny it. I'm definitely not saying we should do it, but it would have worked.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  It's a bad idea, but it would have worked.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Who do you think is better at distinct, this is going to be a biased sample, but distinguishing their own babies cries from other babies, mothers and fathers?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  I'm going to assume mothers.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Evolutionarily.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  I think it is, it is quite notable when you hear even like as older children, when they're all playing, a load of them, and your child cries, you can kind of notice it, can't you?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Well, there you go, and you're not a mother, are you?

• 9:32Speaker 00

  No.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Well, there you go. So that's two theories exploded, and James's last point, so it's not mothers particularly, it's just that mothers have always historically in studies been better at distinguish their babies crying, and much better, because they've always spent more time with their babies. But if you do controlled studies, then it's just about how much time you spend with a kid, and so that's changing a lot. And actually, it doesn't even have to be your child. They ran a study where non-parents were trained to identify a specific baby's cry, you know, hear it a few times, and then had to pick it out of a bunch of other cries that weren't that baby, and they were as good as the parents at doing it.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Talking baby cries, have you heard that whole thing about how you can tell from the cry what is up with the baby? Like, this is called the Dunston baby language, and the idea is that there was particular cries for hunger, I'm sleepy, I'm gassy, lower gas or upper gas, different cry. And it was a big thing, I came across this.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Gosh.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Because of social media, it was a clip from Oprah many years ago, and this lady was on there explaining these cries. And I watched it, and I was like, that's totally it, my baby's doing that, I've totally got it. And I became this like baby cry detective for the next week, trying to figure it out. And then I spoke to the experts, and the expert was like, no.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Oh, great, thanks so much, it just doesn't work, unless the parents have contextual information, it's not a thing.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that is, the truth is that babies cry, and you just basically try everything that's worked in the past, you try all those things until one of them works again.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And to save possible parents a lot of time. There is almost no reliable evidence on the best way to raise children at that age because the studies have not been done. So there are good studies that say, don't neglect or abuse your children. They have a bad time. But there aren't good studies that say if you hold and stroke your child for eight hours a day as opposed to 10 hours a day, they will grow up to be, you know, really independent.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Because it's just so hard to get any evidence with that level of detail.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  With enough of a sample size.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Exactly, and across enough time.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  There's a million variables and.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Not particularly ethical either. Just leave that one crying, but look after that one and let's see what happens.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  How babies keep crying is insane because babies can cry for hours and hours, right? And if, if, if one, if any one of us were to scream for several hours, we would be in pain.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Oh my God, how do they do it? Have you got the answer?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Have they got circular breathing? Should we get them on the bagpipes?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  All babies are either Scottish or Australian and they're really good. But yeah, no one could, you know, you'd get, what is it called? Nodules? I mean, you'd really, you would do yourself serious injury.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Like for instance, a lot of like metal singers, they do it for a little while and then they have terrible, they have to have operations.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  But basically their vocal cords, babies vocal cords are physically just very different to adult vocal cords. They don't have stiffening ligaments and they're full of hyaluronic acid. So what that means, the effect is that they're way more elastic and they absorb way more shock, which allows the baby to cry for hour after hour after hour. And it's part of the, it's not the whole reason, it's part of the reason they can't speak.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Oh. It's all too floppy.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  It's all too floppy. Yeah, it's not the only reason they can't speak. They don't know anything yet.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  I've known a lot of people who speak very well who don't know anything.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And Dan will be back next week. No, no, no, it's not fair. It's not fair. Yeah, anyway, that's why they can scream for a long time.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I'm so happy I know that because I always felt quite sorry for certain babies if they're left for prolonged periods crying because I think that must be really hurting them at this point. But no, I know they don't care. They're fine.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  One of the favourite facts that I came across recently in the Baby Fact Check podcast that I've been making is that there's this really interesting bit of research looking at Italian babies and American babies. Now, Italian babies were found to say fewer words than American babies of the same age.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  However, when researchers actually looked into this, they saw that Italian babies used gestures.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Great stuff.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Way more than American babies. They say for words like eat and telephone and big and hot and good. And when they added up the number of spoken words and gestures from the Italian babies, it was the same number of spoken words from American babies.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  No way!

• 13:37Speaker 02

  How awesome is that?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Italian and American babies are a different thing as well.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  They don't like, don't mess.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I'm leaving here!

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Don't mess with them.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  If you're trying to sort of reduce the amount that your baby cries in the early days, don't bother, because they've done, one of the few reliable studies they have done is looked at all societies, including hunter-gatherer societies, to see which babies cry more or less. And it's basically exactly the same in terms of frequency that a baby under three months will cry. I think three months, maybe under two months. So they cry for less long often in hunter-gatherer societies, largely, I think, because hunter-gatherers tend to pick them up, whereas often in our Western societies, we leave them there.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  There is a cry curve that is universal. On average, I think babies increase their crying around week five to six until week eight, when it starts to reduce. And researchers looked at 8,600 babies and their cry levels, and they found that there were babies, even at the peak, that only cried 30 to 40 minutes in 24 hours.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Super babies.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Whereas others cried for seven hours out of every 24 hours.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Big spectrum!

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's, is it just literally good luck or bad luck most of the time? Like, it seems to me like the number of people I know who have more than one child and one of them has been a perfect angel and the other one has cried non-stop.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  It's just, it seems to be.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  There's nothing you can do.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  I did read, like, you said that pretty much all societies are the same, but I did read one study that said that Danish babies cry less than other European babies.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  This is later on, so yes, you're absolutely right. Right, this was just in the early days and then when the babies get older than six weeks or so, then there is a big variation, isn't there? Yes, the Danes don't seem to cry.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And we don't really know why the Danish children don't cry as much. Some people think that it's like because Danish parents hold their children more, maybe it's genetics. Some people think it's because they have such good healthcare and long parental leave that the parents aren't stressed and it means that the parental stress isn't sort of impacting on the child.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I've heard breastfeeding.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Have you?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  I've heard breastfeeding.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Andy, we're in the middle of something.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry. Were you saying a fact?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  You've got super hearing, but you can hear it from the other side of London, can't you?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I must go.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  A woman is breastfeeding but not being observed by a Wes trader.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Stop the podcast.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Stop the podcast.

• 16:01Speaker 03

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• 16:04Speaker 01

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• 16:14Speaker 03

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• 16:21Speaker 01

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• 16:27Speaker 03

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• 16:31Speaker 01

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• 16:34Speaker 03

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• 16:43Speaker 01

  All right, time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is, in 1654, a public competition was held between a team of 30 horses and a vacuum.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  And the winner was?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  The vacuum. Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Was the competition who can suck up the most bits of dust from the carpet?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Henry.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  So this is an amazing thing. So when I said vacuum, I'm being trickster-y. It was a vacuum, not in the sense of a vacuum cleaner. It was just in the sense of a void in space. Like a vacuum with nothing in it, you know?

• 17:17Speaker 03

  That's all right. You didn't say the word cleaner?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Nope, true.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  We'll accept it.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, Anna. So this is a thing that's called the Magdeburg Hemispheres. Die Magdeburger Halbkugeln. Magdeburg, city in Germany. I don't understand what a hemisphere is. It's a hemisphere, but it's...

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Half a sphere.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Half a sphere. It's the brainchild of this guy called Otto von Goerger, who was crazy, and I maybe will come on to him. But he was interested in the idea of the concept of a vacuum, because people didn't really know what a vacuum was. And you know, it all comes back to barometers.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  As it always does with you, Andy.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  So you've got a glass tube full of mercury, right? And when the pressure drops, because the weather's about to get turned bad, the mercury drops in the tube, right?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  But what goes in that gap?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  What is at the top? It can't be air, because there's no way for air to get through the mercury. What is in there? And various people thought it was something called ether, or there were all sorts of theories. And von Goerger thought he'd experiment to find out. And in 1654, he created one of the first ever vacuums. He made these two iron hemispheres, sealed them neatly together, didn't attach them at all, apart from pumping the air out. And once he'd done that really effectively and, you know, closed the valve, nothing could pull these hemispheres apart. And he did this big public demonstration in front of the emperor, I think, where two teams of 15 horses were attached to each one of these hemispheres, and they tried their absolute hardest. This was entertainment.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Have you ever come across these things, Greg? I don't have any horses, but Andy, I did bring you a present.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Look at this!

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Oh my god!

• 18:52Speaker 02

  I brought you some mini Magdeburg spheres.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I'm so excited.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  I have a lot of science props at home, and I thought I must have some of these. So here you go. There's one half, pass to you. And now the seal that you can see inside, actually known as a mating rim.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Right. And I've lubed up your mating rim and my mating rim. Put them together.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Shall we leave?

• 19:13Speaker 02

  No, please stay. So hang on. Okay. Let's close them together.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Let me just attach this. This is the fiddly bit.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  I've got a rudimentary, not vacuum pump, but a way to remove some of the air. So just put that on the end. Here we go.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so Greg's kind of pulling on a trigger of like, it's like a gun-shaped rubber thing, and he is presumably removing all the air from between these.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Close the valve.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so now we've pulled out quite a lot of the air that's inside the spheres.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  I'm so excited.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  You bring your best 15 horsepower. I'll bring my best 15 horses. Okay, you ready?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Three, two, one, pull!

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  It's not gonna happen, don't even twist it!

• 19:54Speaker 01

  No!

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  But then, once I open this and the air comes out.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Although if Andy had just asked his wife to do it, it would have been fine.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Very good on the jars. That is stunning.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  That's so cool.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  That is so cool, Greg. I love it.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Isn't it great?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Look at that, Magdeburg emispheres.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  I guess we should say what causes them to stick is basically that the air pressure on the outside is pushing in so hard, and because there's nothing on the inside, there's nothing to push out.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  And so that's why it's so...

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. You're essentially pushing against atmosphere, aren't you?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was controversial, well, not controversial, but you know, no one thought he was right about this, until he demonstrated it.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Well, they thought that vacuums couldn't exist for most of history.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  One of the ancients said, "Nature abhors a vacuum", and the idea was if one ever came in nature, somehow something would fill it.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does make sense, but it's not true. As we have seen right now, we can make them. But yeah, this guy, this guy, how do you say his name, Andy?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Otto von Gherka?

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Von Gherka. He did this in Magdeburg, and Magdeburg had very, very recently been the victim of the worst atrocity in the Thirty Years' War, where the population went down from 20,000 to 4,000 due to an enormous massacre.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  God.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  And this public competition was almost like, "Look, we're back, guys."

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Like having the Olympics or something.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  A little bit like that, yeah. It was like, you know, "We've had a terrible time, but von Gherka was now the mayor, or kind of the mayor, and he was saying, 'Well, look, we can put on these big events of horses pulling things apart.'"

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Isn't that weird?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  I was reading about, this was 15 horses versus 15 horses. Someone tried it with 16, or someone tried it with 17 over the coming years.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Really?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Didn't help.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  I wonder how many horses would be able to pull that apart. There must be a limit, right?

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I mean.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  I was looking at the maths and apparently if, if he could achieve a full vacuum inside the hemispheres, it would have been held together with a force of around 20,000 Newtons, which is the equivalent to lifting, people say a car or a small elephant.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  It depends on the type of elephant, if we want to be pedantic, which I know you lot very much love to be.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And the car. It's a small plush car made by Honda, maybe not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Cozy coop.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  There's a monument to him or to the spheres in Magdeburg now.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  It's beautiful. It's just, it's, it's one of the sets of hemispheres and one horse at either end and they're, they're straining away and that, you know, it's not coming apart.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And this guy, Von Gercke, he was like, I'm really surprised that his name doesn't come up more. Like, it seems like he was absolutely massively important in loads and loads of physics, but just never got anything named after him.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  It's a hard word to spell. It's after university?

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Oh, there's a university named after him.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cool.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  But it's not like Pascal after whom the pressure is named after or.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  He, he did write this up in his book, which was only published in English in 1994. Bloody publishers, you know. Great news, we've got a translation deal. What? You've been dead for 350 years.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Guys, what do you think would happen if you got into a vacuum?

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Die.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Well.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Explode?

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Not necessarily. Well, not immediately. You would die very soon, but not as quickly as you might think. In the 1960s, when it was more okay to do this kind of thing, they put various animals in vacuums to see what happened. Um, cause they, you know, it was the age of space travel. They were thinking, what will happen to humans if they end up accidentally? Um, and so in 1965, they put dogs in a vacuum and they found that dogs in a vacuum for 90 seconds always survived, always. Now, they had a bad time. They would immediately fall unconscious. The gas evacuating from their whole bodies, because once you're in a vacuum, the gas wants to leave your body, caused simultaneous defecation, projectile vomiting and urination, and they swelled up to resemble a massive balloon. But good news, once they're pressurized, they're fine after 10 minutes.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  They'd be, they were blind for a little bit longer. But that's, and they did the same with chimps in 1964, and they found that chimps could last 3.5 minutes.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  No way.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And then within 72 minutes after recompression, they're fine. Again, they swelled up like a huge balloon, and then they were okay. So that's good to know. If you do fall into a vacuum, you've got maybe three to 3.5 minutes. Well, we think we're closer to chimps, so maybe three and a half minutes.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Okay. The first vacuum you were talking about was made like with barometers.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  They're just bringing it back to barometers.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  It was by a guy called Torricelli, and Torricelli was also the first person to explain that wind is caused by changes in air temperature. So he's quite good. People before that thought that wind was caused by dampness coming from the earth and causing stuff to blow around. But he also invented something called Torricelli's trumpet, right? So this is, it's a cone, and the cone gets thinner as it goes along, and it gets thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner, but it goes on for infinity. So it's infinitely long.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Did someone build this?

• 24:54Speaker 00

  It cannot be built. It's a theoretical cone. But the really interesting thing about it is-

• 25:00Speaker 01

  He's in the back row of the orchestra. He's also in the front row of the orchestra. He's also 200 miles away.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  The really interesting thing about it is that the surface area of the cone is infinite, because it goes on forever.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  But you can show by maths that the volume is finite. You can work out what the actual volume is. And so that means that if you fill it with paint, you can have a finite amount of paint which covers an infinite amount of area.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  What?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  No way. No, no, no. Hang on. How's it-

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Topological paradigm.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  It's going on forever. How can the volume be finite? Because the thing is going on-

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Does it eventually get tighter than an atom of paint?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  It's basically just a trick of infinities.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  And it's a mathematical thing. It's theoretical. It can't exist.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  And it's because, basically, you work out the surface area by adding a load of things together until you get to infinity, and you work out the volume by adding a load of things before you get to infinity. And they're slightly different things, and one of them ends up equaling infinity, and the other one ends up equaling a finite number.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  It's a good prank as well for someone on their first day. Can you just go out and get some paint? No, we've got stripy paint. I need enough paint to paint the inside of- what was this trumpet?

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Torricelli.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Torricelli's trumpet. Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Just get down to being cute.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  On vacuums.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  So, one place which has one of the biggest vacuums, I think in the whole world, is CERN. So, Large Hadron Collider, particle accelerator, very, very big and exciting physics happening. And what they have to do, they have to have these enormous vacuum systems to clear the tubes, so that the particles there, I'm simplifying, but it's, I'm at my maximum level, but I'm also, I know I'm simplifying drastically, so the particles don't smash into the wrong things. They're trying to smash particles together. So, it's about, apparently it's about this, they say, there's the nave of a cathedral in volume, that they have to completely empty out, because it's a massive great ring, you

• 27:04Speaker 01

  know, it's, but the volume is thousands and thousands of cubic meters they need to empty out.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  You get different sized cathedrals, of course. This wasn't like a small plushy cathedral.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  It wasn't. No, what a good point.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  More like St Paul's.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like I say, a medium cathedral, alright, just forget the cathedral thing, alright? They have to empty.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  And just the nave, not the chancel.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  It could probably be the whole of a tiny cathedral.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  They have to suck out a volume of air, okay?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, Greg.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Am I concentrating on the wrong thing here, Andy?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  So, basically, so they pump in this extremely cold gas, it takes two weeks of pumping to get the gases that are inside the ring to condense and then adhere to the walls of the pipe by adsorption, so not absorption, adsorption, the sort of chemical attachment. And even after this huge amount of work they've done, the air inside the space they're trying to clear still contains about 3 million molecules per cubic centimeter.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  So, even after all that work, and that's just because there are more molecules everywhere than you think.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  You just can't get your head around those.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  You can't get your head around it, no.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  This is where you have to say, Avogadro.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Was.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Remember that from chemistry?

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Avogadro's constant.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Avogadro's constant.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Something times 10 to the 23.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, you always.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Have to add it to your equations to get the number of molecules in things.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  It's how you calculate how big a cathedral has to be.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And basically, it's the equivalent of being several hundred miles above the earth. Because the, you know, the atmosphere, there is so much, so much less up there, so many fewer molecules. But it's still not completely empty.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Well, this is, because what would you guys say is the definition of a vacuum?

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Well, completely empty, I would say.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Completely empty?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Is there never a real vacuum?

• 28:55Speaker 03

  No, well, basically never. And almost everything that we call a vacuum isn't even close. You know, when you're like vacuum packed, or vacuum sealed, or all of that stuff. Vacuum cleaner. All of that stuff is like, you just have to, basically, the definition of a vacuum is actually, the air pressure on one side is lower than atmospheric air pressure. That's it. It doesn't mean empty.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  So it just, usually if you've taken out about 70 to 90% of the air, then that creates the vacuum. And so nothing, it's all got air in it, hasn't it?

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Very nice. Vacuum cleaner doesn't suck, it blows. So there's a fan inside that blows air out of the machine.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  And as you've just said, that lowers the air pressure inside. So there's a pressure differential between the inside and the outside. The surrounding air then rushes in and it brings any little bits of dust and crud and whatever, and toast on your kitchen floor into the vacuum cleaner.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Clever. That's why you shouldn't use them backwards, because it just.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Spies it all back out again.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Dost out, yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  That's really cool.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  That is really interesting. So what am I saying when I go into A and E and I have it attached to my chair?

• 29:57Speaker 00

  And it blew my penis into it.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is James.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that volcanoes sometimes clean up after themselves. Good house guests.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Are we talking lava going back up?

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Amazingly, they suck, they don't blow.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  No, so this is something that they found out from the Hunga Tonga Hunga Harper submarine volcano, which erupted in 2022 and basically blew up a lot of Tonga. It was an enormous volcano. It's one of the biggest we've had for many, many, many years. And scientists managed to do some studies about it. And recently they found that it fired out all of this methane, okay? Which would be very bad for global warming because it's a greenhouse gas. But at the same time as firing it out, it fired out some other stuff which destroyed methane as well.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  So good.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  So it fires out seawater mixed with ash. And that can mix with sunlight to produce reactive chlorine atoms. I'm going on very much the edge of my understanding here. And that helps to accelerate the decomposition of methane, which means the methane loses its hydrogen atoms, gets chlorine instead, turns into formaldehyde, which then turns into CO2 and water. Now, the problem is that it does this on a huge scale, but not nearly as huge as the scale it does of blowing the stuff off. So it releases overall about the annual emissions of methane of about 2 million cows.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  What this eruption did?

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it kind of cleans up around 300th of that per day. And it does it for about 10 days and then it stops. So there's still plenty of methane being sent up by them. But it does do some cleaning. And the interesting thing, as far as the researchers are concerned, is it's possible, now that we've seen this happens in nature, it could be a way of us scrubbing methane out of the sky.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, wow.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  By using something similar.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Because methane is one of the really bad greenhouse gases, isn't it? But it's shorter lived.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  So as soon as, you know, if you act on methane quickly, that's a really good way of dealing with a chunk of the problem.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. If you manage to shove a load of chlorine up there as well, which does also feel like it might have its own issues.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Lost the hole in the ozone layer, CFC, isn't that chlorofluorocarbons? So that, I presume it's at a different height or at a different size.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Chemistry is by far the weakest of all of my sciences.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's not pretend we all know the difference between chlorine and chlorofluorocarbons and the effect they would have. But someone should do something about it. Someone should start firing volcanoes at the atmosphere is what you're saying.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  I just like the idea of them cleaning up after themselves.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Well, sort of to the extent that if you ask a teenage boy to clean up after himself, you know, he does a little bit of a token.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  He does one tenth of the work.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  They did find a lot of the methane underneath the bed.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  I was thinking, does that mean you put a little volcano in a field full of cows?

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a good idea. Or a load of cows into a volcano.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  That would be lovely. It's barbecue night.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  But the reason that I brought volcanoes is because I saw a video of you, Greg, that you went to see some volcanoes in Japan. Is that right?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did. This was, this was a few years back now. So I was travelling the world, meeting scientists whose work was investigating the science of risk. And there was a scientist who was looking at the risk of volcanic ash affecting jet engines for aeroplanes. And he was doing a lot of work out in Japan. So I went to see the Sakurajima volcano, which is the, the most active volcano in Japan. And we got there and we thought, oh, okay, we've got, we've got three days to try to get this on camera. That's fine. Loads of time for me to chat to the scientist and we'll get a lot of, you know, GVs, loads of shots of it. Within an hour of getting there, the thing erupted.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  And then it basically didn't stop. Every like two hours, it would erupt again.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  So I can say I've had sushi under an active volcano. We were just sat there going, oh, it's going again.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  And what did it look like? Could you, was it just lots of black smoke?

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Actually, a lot, a lot of white smoke.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Also, that is a new pope.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Or actually slightly blue smoke. This was quite interesting because of the sulphur dioxide that's coming out. Again, chemistry. And I could hear it burping on the way as we were kind of driving up towards this volcano. So these like, these whooshes, which was it venting? It was like building up the pressure and like burping out a bit of the pressure again. So it was a phenomenal experience. You'd see these absolutely massive lumps be thrown out from this volcano. And I remember, Dr Chimarelli was his name. It was like, oh yeah, that one, that one's as big as a bus. What? You can't get your head around that. Yeah, it's incredible.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Burping sulphur and methane. Sounds like sort of being around an alcoholic.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  I've been to see, I've seen two erupting volcanoes and didn't have nearly as good an experience as you did. I went to one in Reunion, where it was kind of a really tiny eruption that was happening on the side of a mountain. And you could just see a little bit of red and a little bit of smoke. It wasn't like a big one that you see in a cartoon or something. And then I went to IFI Atli York in Iceland.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Well pronounced.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Do you remember when that happened?

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  So I was there then, and I took a bus up to the fields where it was happening. And I got loads of videos of just grey ash. Literally, you can't see anything at all. It's just complete ash.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  I didn't know you were there for that.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  No, I'd forgotten that as well.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Did you see any lightning?

• 35:46Speaker 00

  No, but I have heard about this.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the electrification of the ash can produce thunder and lightning in the cloud that comes out of a volcano. And that is one of the theories for how life started on the planet, lightning in a volcano.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  That is cool.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  It's a Frankenstein moment, isn't it?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  That is amazing. Yeah, this one in Tonga that happened in 2022, apparently there were over 200,000 flashes of lightning, which was about 2,600 flashes per minute at its peak.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  It's like basically the most lightning that we've ever seen in one place at one time.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Oh my god. Do you guys know about Robert Landsberg?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  I don't think we've talked about him before. He was a photographer and he lived quite near Mount St Helens in Washington State. And he in 1980-

• 36:32Speaker 03

  It looked like it was having a little eruption, as they do sometimes, a little belch. And so he went to take some photos and video of it. And he'd been a lot before and done that. And when he got there, well, we don't, we don't have his first account, hand account for reasons you'll realise. But when he got there.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Yes, why they're all that? Checkles volcano.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  He clearly realised at some point that it was going to be a huge eruption. As it was, and that he was probably too close to get away. But what he did was, what we know he did, was he took the photos. And then he put the shutter back over the lens. He rewound the whole film into its protective canister. He put it back in his bag and then he lay on top of his bag to protect the photos that he'd had. So his body was found a few days later.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Would that work?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  It did work. We've got the photos. To be honest, they're only okay. But.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Did they come back with a little sticker on them saying, maybe stay further away from the volcano in the future?

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Isn't that what a sacrifice?

• 37:39Speaker 00

  What was his name?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  He was called Robert Landsberg.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Dedication to the job.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  It just feels like, I don't think you sink in lava, do you? Because your body is lighter than it.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it was more the ash.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Oh, it was the ash. I see.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Or like the extreme heat sort of pulverised him, but saved his.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  It wasn't like a big sort of lava flow came and it went over the top of you.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  No, no. So we only just found out what the largest volcano on earth is. I think it was.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  Where is it?

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Five years ago.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Chimborazo?

• 38:08Speaker 03

  It's, no, it's a shield volcano. So these are the really, like, gently sloping massive ones. They're not as exciting. They're not the cartoon volcanoes. Called shield volcanoes because they look like a shield if it's lying down. Because they slightly come off the ground and then they've got a little nipple in the middle, which is where the bit is, where the lava comes out. Anyway, scientists were doing a survey, surveying the ocean floor in 2020. We thought it was Mona Loura and they found a volcano that is twice as big as Mona Loura.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Is that an underwater one?

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Underwater one, yeah. Cheating a bit, I know.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  That's right. Mona Loura is. The one in Hawaii, which is if you go from the bottom of the ocean to the top of it is taller than Everest.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  But it perks up above the ocean, but it starts underneath, is that right?

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, nice.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  But anyway, I can't even claim that. It's Puhahonu, if anyone asks, which means turtle surfacing for breath.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  And it's big.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  How many cathedrals? Abagadro.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  People are still, it's amazing, people are still finding volcanoes, but not always under the water or on earth. There was someone called Linda A. Marabito, who was the first person to find volcanic activity in space on Io, a moon of Jupiter. She was working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and she saw some images and thought that could only come from a volcano. And then since then, people have found all sorts of volcanoes on various different moons. Rosalie Lopez found 71 volcanoes on Io. And what I like about her is she was an astronomer, but during the last three weeks of her course, Mount Etna exploded near where she was working and she thought, you know what, I should also go into volcanoes.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And she completely changed the direction of her studying and went into space volcanoes instead. And then became one of the best people who have found some of the most volcanoes in space out of anyone.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Are they bigger? It feels like the ones on Io must be bigger.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they're a long way away, Andy.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  No, no, I know, I know.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Quite hard to see them.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  I'm not saying she's had, I'm not saying she's taken the easy way out at all. I wasn't even close to that.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  No, I know you weren't. But yeah, like I think the largest one we know of is on Mars, isn't it?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sure you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  And again, it's like very, very wide. It's like from the bottom to the top, it's like the size of France or something. It's like very, very, if you walked up it, you'd barely even notice you were walking up a hill. But by the time you got to the top of it, you were higher than anywhere else that we know about.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Katia Morris-Craft, do you read about them in the course of your research? They are fantastic. A French pair of volcanologists who really lived the life, you know, they had a honeymoon at. Stromboli, volcano.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Um, they were often the first people to get to a volcano and they shot a lot of footage.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  When was this?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Seventies and eighties.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  So lots of the classic footage that I remember seeing as a child, you need to have a video about volcanoes. And it was exciting. That was, you know, I'm sure lots of it was shot by them because they just, they took so much amazing footage and they did it, you know, they rushed as soon as they heard a volcano was going off, they'd rush there. And tragically, they died as well. They, they rushed to Mount Unzen in Japan and they were killed by it.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Isn't that tragically when they would genuinely say they died doing what they loved?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  They did. In fact, Morris said he wanted to die at the edge of a volcano. I mean.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Like, would it be tragic if like a microphone fell on your head and you died doing what you loved?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Uh, if people laughed, then I'm doing what I love. Well, if actually if there's an awkward silence, then we move on. That's my true gift.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Stop the podcast.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Stop the podcast.

• 41:52Speaker 03

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• 42:25Speaker 03

  Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. On with the show.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Okay, it's time for the final fact of the show now, and that is Anna.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  My fact this week is that Paul McCartney does iYoga.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  So you've done quite difficult chemistry and physics so far and you're keeping us, keeping us highbrow, Anna?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I'm keeping us, I'm keeping us rooted in what the people want to hear about. And that's iYoga because it's becoming a bit of a thing. Paul McCartney was introduced to it on a trip to India in the late 2000s, I think. And he was asked how, what his iYoga entails. So he said, you keep your head still and then you look up as far as you can for two to three seconds, then as far down as you can, then diagonally. So you make a Union Jack, as he described it with your eyes. And next, you cross your eyes for two to three seconds.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  We're already doing it.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Then you look great, by the way, guys. And then you finish by focusing on a distant object. And the idea is that you're exercising your eye muscles.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  How distant, like a volcano on the moon of Io?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  If you can get there, then you're doing very well.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  And what is the idea that this makes his eyes healthier or helps his just general vibe? Or what?

• 43:38Speaker 03

  He, I would say, to give him credit, flippantly comments that he still doesn't need glasses, and that's probably why, but that it makes your eyes healthier because you're exercising the muscles. I mean, there's no evidence to support that at all. The only thing that there's evidence for is that if you do sometimes take a break from looking at the screen and focus on something distant, that's good for, you know, stop you getting headaches. But a lot of people do this eye yoga. And yeah, it's a thing. And it comes from Buddhist practices, candle gazing, it used to be, where you're just supposed to stare at a candle without blinking until your eyes water and that purifies your body.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Oh, you can have a blind spot every time you blink for the rest of the time.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, do take a break from the candle every 20 minutes. If you're doing a lot of focus candle work, just don't try and just look at something else. Ideally, look at a phone briefly. I was trying to come up with Beatles related. When I saw her standing there.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  That's great. I and saw.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Because you're stopping your eyes being sore.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  But then I would say, like, we sent each other these facts about a week ago. It's quite easy to go onto Wikipedia and look at a list of all Beatles songs. And that was the best you came up with?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I did, I missed, I missed that crucial step. I just thought, oh, that's what it'll do. It made it to my notes. And I haven't bothered to, I should have gone back for a second, bite of the cherry. Yeah, yeah. Well, the inbox is podcasting. No, I know you're actually, please don't write in with all Beatles songs with the word "I" in them, because we don't, it's like, I don't have the bandwidth, I'm sorry, I wish I did. Yeah, no, eye yoga, it's just looking at stuff, it's just looking at stuff, isn't it? But it's like the eye test as well, because I wear contact lenses, like, so when you have an eye test, you have to look in every direction.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Oh, do you?

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Do you?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're trying to see the inside of the back of your eye, and so just to get a good view of everything, to make sure it's all hunky-dory.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  I don't think someone's hearing in Paul McCartney's eye, though, every time he's doing it, going, "Retina looks good, mate, you're all right."

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Same time tomorrow.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Although he did say he likes people looking at him when he does his actual yoga, so he's a yoga practitioner, and he says, he says he regularly practices yoga with a group of friends who are called the Yoga Boys, which includes Alec Baldwin. Very cool, well done. But he finishes his yoga workout every morning with a five-minute headstand, and he says he basically sort of likes it to show off, because he says, "If I'm in the gym, the big guys have got their weights and they're looking really beefy and cool, and they're suddenly really impressed by his five-minute headstand, they come up to him afterwards and presumably say, 'You fucking Paul McCartney.'"

• 46:05Speaker 02

  You don't like Paul McCartney, but upside down.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Like, a lot of these yoga poses are relatively new, right? They're from the 19th and 20th century. Almost all of them, in fact.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they, yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Because like, the old historical yoga practices, they would basically meditate. They weren't do a downward dog.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Or this kind of stuff. And all this kind of stuff came in the late 19th, early 20th century, and it's a mixture between old Indian practices and Western, especially Scandinavian, exercise routines that people did.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Stretching is good.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, not to say, there's nothing wrong with being modern.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. But did you read about Bernard, who invented modern yoga?

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Bernard?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bernard. Google Pierre Bernard from Des Moines. There had been a few monks who'd come over to the West, right, and done a bit of yogic practice, but it wasn't the developed, it wasn't lots of the exercises we know today. And Pierre Bernard, he founded this thing called the Pantric Order of America and started teaching yoga in 1905. And he claimed he'd learned it from a guru who was either Indian, Persian, Syrian, French or Bengali. Okay. It was not legit. Lots, I know, that is a curve ball. It is a curve ball.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  The others are all quite, he's somewhere in the east.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  The thing is, lots of his followers were massive white supremacists. This is an ironic thing, who claimed that an Aryan, i.e. white race, had created yoga.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  No way.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Before moving to India in the first place. None of this is true, but yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Don't tell the yogis that. It's white supremacists who got it popular.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think some of his followers were, not all of them by any means, but lots of those things, as James says, downward dog and sun salutations and 1930s things that are even after him.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  There were like some kind of things that you did that were poses, but they were mostly just sit comfortably while you're doing your meditation. But they did have different names and they were mostly based on animals. So there is a 13th century kind of yogic manuscript that says you might sit like a curlew or a camel.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  I can't, I feel like I don't see curlews sit. I picture them standing.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you sit like a curlew stance, maybe. These manuscripts, there's some old ones that say that there are 8.4 million asanas and the asana is their pose. But each of the poses represents one of the species of animals on earth. Okay. Now, 8.4 million asanas. In 2011, a marine ecologist, Camilo Mora and his team estimated that there are approximately 8.7 million species on earth. And this is, if you go on Google and search how many species are on earth, that's the figure that normally comes up. So in the 13th century, we had 8.4 million and now we think 8.7 million.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  That's pretty good.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  It's a rounding error, isn't it, basically?

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  So you should be able to come up with any species and there'll be a pose for it.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  But a lot of these will be minuscule wasps sometimes. How different are the poses gonna be?

• 49:07Speaker 00

  The parasitic wasp pose, you have to get inside the caterpillar.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Are you into this stuff, Greg?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Into yoga?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  No.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  But you're into fitness and wellness and stuff, right? Into fitness for sure.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, wellness is a very loaded word, isn't it? Someone says wellness to me and by the time it's reached my ears, I'm hearing bollocks.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Fitness.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I also have a podcast called Sliced Bread and that's all about looking at products that are making claims, big, bold claims to make you happier, healthier or greener and looking for the facts behind them and analysing those marketing claims to find out if they are marketing BS or the best thing since sliced bread. And we do a lot of wellness related products as part of that. So.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Do wellness people often not meet the mark, would you say? Or is it not fair to say?

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Quite often it's, there's something in it, but then it's massively exaggerated.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  I see.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Or applied in a dose or in a manner that you're just not going to get in say a supplement or something like that.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Are there some brilliant products that you've tested that have come up short?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Or long? We've looked at something like 150 different wonder products now. I think some of the favourites in terms of most played, air fryers back in 2022, we were looking at whether cooking with an air fryer will save you money. Petrol, that was one of the favourites, premium versus regular. Face creams was a big.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Are you going to tell us?

• 50:31Speaker 02

  No, I mean, this is all a hook, isn't it?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  All right.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  You need to go and have a listen. Dishwashers versus hand washing, oh, which one's better for the environment, which one uses more or less water?

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Also, not just wellness, just what's the best?

• 50:42Speaker 02

  We look at a whole bunch of different products, yeah. We recently did infrared saunas. I found that one quite interesting.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  I was tempted, thanks to social media, of whether I wanted to buy an infrared sauna.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  And is that you can find the criminals in the sauna?

• 50:56Speaker 02

  You can see if anyone's ejaculated in the sauna.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Didn't come up in the research, so to speak.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  And is the infrared, sorry, just quickly, the infrared sauna, what actually is that?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  So it runs at a lower temperature than the traditional kind of dry.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  It's just a room.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Finish. It's a room with infrared panels. And the expert said it essentially heats you from the inside out.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Like a microwave.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  That's it. Kind of like a microwave, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Well, after one and a half minutes, you have to come out and jump around and then go back.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I looked up different kinds of yoga.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  There are various sort of silly kinds of yoga, you know, there's, there's broga, yoga for bros.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Toga, toga with your toes, yuck.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Doge, you bring a dog.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  What? Does a dog do downward dog?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think the dog's just allowed to be there.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Does it do downward human?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  There's a yogi and there's a doge, you know, all of that. Goat yoga, face yoga, horse yoga, you're on a horse. But basically I opened a bunch of tabs about this, you know, often I will open a load of tabs and then I'll, I'll read through them at my leisure. But that sometimes backfires because on a reasonably busy train this morning, I just opened a tab and found how to get better, stronger erections using yoga.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  I was reasonably observed at the time. Have a click faster than you've ever clicked anything in your life.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  And?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  And it's, it's simple.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Paul McCartney does it.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to find Beatles puns about, no, no, I won't, I won't. A hard day's night?

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Come on, get back in a hard day's night. Dan is turning in his holiday grave.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  I don't like the Beatles, what can I say? Hard day's night.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  A very hard day's night. Yeah, yeah, there we go.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Do you know you have a sphincter in your eye?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  To spite yourself?

• 52:56Speaker 02

  So I was looking into Paul McCartney's eye yoga and, and whether any of this actually stands up to scrutiny or not. And, and essentially there are these various pairs of external eye muscles that some people say when you're doing this eye yoga, you're, you're, you're working on them. But eye doctors are saying it's not going to do anything for your sight. Perhaps focusing close on your nose, which I believe is one of the moves, that's it.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is going cross-eyed.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  That's working on it. Apparently that could potentially do something for your internal muscles. And one of those internal muscles is the iris sphincter. His partner in crime is the iris dilator. Open and close your iris. So maybe this eye yoga can can teach some of these internal muscles to relax your lens easier and focus up close easier.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  But there are better things to do that, like focusing on a pen that's really close to your eyes.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  I mean, it does, it does, it's not the maddest thing because they are muscles, the eyes. So Paul McCartney, I think it was said that the guy who taught him how to do this said, well, you don't have muscles in your ears, so you can't exercise your ears and improve your hearing, but you can exercise your eyes.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Andy is moving his ears right now.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  You are moving your ears. That's more the, it's not the eardrum, is it?

• 54:00Speaker 00

  You're also moving your forehead.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can only move my whole head when I do it.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  The rest of his face is locked in concentration.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. But what you can do, which is quite cool, is if you put your hands on the back of your skull at the bottom, either side of your spine, and then you close your eyes. And if you look up and down with your eyeballs, it took me a while to find the right spot in the back of your skull, but if you just look up and down with your eyeballs, you can feel the muscles.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  That's weird.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Moving, which is quite cool.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  They're not the muscles that are moving your eyes.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  They are, they're connected to the muscles that move your eyes. So they go all the way back to the back of your neck. Isn't that cool?

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Um, that's amazing.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  I was trying to think of the smallest, what's the smallest muscle in the human body? Because if something is a muscle, surely.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  You have muscles that kind of make your hairs erect.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and those you can't consciously control, of course. As in, I wonder what the smallest muscle is that you can actually train. So I think eye yoga, you know, you're exercising those muscles, even if you're not improving your sight, because that's something slightly different. The smallest muscle is the stapidius, which stabilizes the stirrup bone in your middle ear and is one millimeter long.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, but when you went to that bodybuilding exhibition, you said, okay, you guys look good, but look what I could do with my stapidius. And you went duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Mine is two millimeters long. That's actually much more impressive.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to hear any more about the things that we've said, we can all be found on our social media accounts. I'm on Instagram at AndrewHunterM. James?

• 55:34Speaker 00

  My Instagram is NoSuchThing as James Harkin.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Anna?

• 55:37Speaker 03

  You can email [email protected] or get us on Instagram at NoSuchThing.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Greg?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Instagram at GregFoot.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  And you have a couple of podcasts. You mentioned sliced bread, but there's another one?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yes. So the new one is called The Baby Fact Check. It is a new parenting podcast where trusted experts fact-check all the baby advice that is filling your social media feeds.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  That's at TheBabyFactCheck on Instagram for clips, or you can watch it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Terrific. If you want to email us, as Anna says, it's [email protected]. If you want to email us facts that we'll use in Little Fish, our Monday show, we love receiving them. If you want to email us with corrections, clarifications, Beatles puns and more.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  Poor Andy.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Stories about how fish has affected your life, all of that stuff, then we wrap all of that stuff up and it goes in Drop Us A Line, which is our fortnightly bonus show. That is part of Club Fish, which is our members' club. You can find it on patreon.com/clubfish and there's all sorts of bonus stuff there. There is extra material that James puts together. There is Drop Us A Line. And at the upper tiers, there are things like merch and getting your own fact dedicated to you. Patreon.com/clubfish. It's really fun. But for now, that's it from us. We'll be back next week with another one. Thanks to the Fishbusters team of Liang Li, Ethan Riparalia and everyone else in Team Fish and we'll see you next time. Goodbye.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Norwegian words.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Norwegian words.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  So good.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good.