No Such Thing As Space Eggs

Lieven Scheire joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss Cray, cranes, and the crazy crazy world of silica gel. 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one of more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolir should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolir is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolir.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolir.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  This is an advertisement for Zolir paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things Are Fish, where we were joined by our very, very good friend, Leven Skera. Now, regular listeners of No Such Things Are Fish will be well aware of Leven. He has been on our show many, many times. He is always absolutely brilliant, and we always love it when he comes over from Belgium and tells us all his amazing facts about science. Now, if you would like to learn more about a particular kind of science, AI, then do I have good news for you, because Leven is coming over in March to do a live tour across the UK, north, south, east, west. He's coming along, and he will be telling you all about AI. Would you believe it's more complicated than just getting a program on your computer and

• 1:47Speaker 02

  asking it questions and it getting the questions wrong? There is more to it, and we're better to learn about it than with Leven Skera, the man sometimes called the Stephen Fry of Belgium. I know that quite a lot of companies are snapping up tickets because they want their employees to learn all about AI, and Leven is such a good science communicator. Definitely, it is a place to go. Want to learn about that subject and have a laugh along the way. If you want to know more about that, then go to leevenskira.com. Probably you can't spell that if you're British. So he has also bought the domain leaving Shire. Like what a hobbit might do, perhaps leaving Shire.com.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  If you type that into your address bar, you will get his website and you'll be able to get tickets. If you want to learn more about No Such Things A Fish, then a good place to go at the moment is patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish, where you can join any one of our three tiers, the lowest of which £4 a month will get you dual drop as a line. Where have you ever listened to the show and thought, those guys have got something wrong? Well, if you have, then other people have thought that as well, and they have sent us emails. And Andy goes through them and picks out the very best and he quizzes us about them. It's not just things we got wrong, it's also people with extra material because there are so many experts listening to our show.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  So it's a really good place if you've enjoyed the previous episodes to learn a little bit more about those subjects. Patreon's also got a free tier. There's a little bit on there, I think, if you sign up to No Such Things A Fish on the free tier. But it's also a place where we will announce new things as and when they happen. And I could tell you a lot is cooking up at No Such Things A Fish HQ. So if you want to learn more, go to patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish. Anyway, really hope you enjoy this week's show with Leevan Skira on with the podcast.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin and Leevan Skira. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is James.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that when the father of supercomputing Seymour Cray got stuck on a problem, he would go into tunnels he built under his house and speak to elves.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  My kind of guy.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Um, yeah. So this is a guy called Seymour Cray. He built some of the first supercomputers. And according to one of his colleagues, who's John Rollwagon, Cray said that when he got stuck in a problem, he'd go under there and the elves come with the solutions to his problems.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Why it's certainly true is that he was brilliant at sort of getting a computer problem, going away just thinking about it and then getting the answer.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's an interesting story because it's sort of, um, he had such weird myths about him that he really talked to elves. Was he messing with his friend? There was a story that he built his own boat. And at the end of every year, he would burn the boat. And then he would build a new boat the next year because he loved building things and he loved creating a new thing on the blank page.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  I heard that he burned a boat just because he'd built a new one.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  And he didn't want to pay the tax on two boats?

• 5:27Speaker 04

  Unclear, unclear.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Well, a lot of, a lot of people think that he did do that once and then it became the myth that he did it once a year, but he did like his thinking time.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Have you come across this guy, Levan?

• 5:39Speaker 05

  No, I haven't. Some supercomputers have a great history. You know that, um, the US Air Force once built a supercomputer out of PlayStation 3s.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  The Condor console.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Really?

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. They bought $2 million of PlayStation 3s.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  They took out the computer chip.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  What were they trying to play?

• 5:57Speaker 05

  Analyzing satellite images.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Cool. And the thing, I've not, I've not played that game. It sounds good.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  It sounds right up your street in fairness, Andy.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Fun flight simulator's been knocked on the head. You need 1,760 PS3s to, to build a supercomputer? And the reason they did it was that it saved them $8 million.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  But, but they weren't using the PlayStation itself. They were extracting a chip from it, did you say?

• 6:21Speaker 05

  I think they used most of the hardware and you could run Linux on it back in the day. So you're in the Russian military and your secrets are cracked by 1,700 PS3s.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  But so what, what is a supercomputer then? Because that's a collection of Playstations. Does that count as a supercomputer?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  There's no like official definition of them.

• 6:40Speaker 05

  But it's, it's a term that I think was coined to make the difference with the mainstream computing. Power of that time and that changes constantly. Now, the the PS3 supercomputer was in the top 50 of computing power at that time, 2010. So it did did qualify as a supercomputer.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  And this guy Seymour Cray, his computers were super because he basically was one of the first people to use transistors. So a transistor is like an electrical switch, you know, a computer goes with zeros and ones, your transistor will tell you if it's a zero or a one because it switches one way or the other. Before that, they used vacuum tubes, so like light bulbs almost. And whether the light bulb was on or whether it was off, that would be your zero or one, and that's how they'd work out all the logical things they had to work out. So he could suddenly make things much, much smaller.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  The fastest supercomputer right now.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  What can it do in the space of a second?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  So the fastest supercomputer I think at the moment is called El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And let's say, Dan, you were to do a coin flip against everyone in Japan.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  As you do.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  As I've been trying to do for many decades.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Then you'll get a yes from a commissioner one day. It's a really fun idea.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And then once you've done, then Leven does the same against everyone in Japan. And then Andy does, then I do, and then everyone in the world does a coin flip against every single person in Japan. This El Capitan would be able to manage all those results in a single second.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Which is not a long TV show. I can see why AI is ruining the arts.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  Japan against the world. It's peta flop time. But I like this word peta flop. So flop is a floating, a floating point operation, so an addition or a multiplication. And then peta comes after terra, I think. Mega, giga.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  X is after peta.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  X is even bigger.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  So we've got a new supercomputer in the UK. It opened up last summer. It's in Bristol. It's called Isambard AI. And it's going to be used, the Guardian reported various things it's going to be used for. Improving skin cancer detection rates.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Really good. Predicting crowd movements and maybe if there's going to be an accident on a construction site, you know, it can sort of.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  What if like a brick starts falling, it can work out where it's going to land?

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Exactly. I mean, or maybe even more useful than that. And also how to spot sick dairy cows in Somerset.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  And there are a lot of dairy cows in Somerset, and if they get, if they're getting early signs of mastitis, that's a real pain for them.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  You know what? I went on to Google News last week.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  And I searched for supercomputer, and these headlines were all on the first page. Supercomputer tips Morocco to win 2025 African Cup of Nations trophy. Supercomputer reveals who's had the easiest ties in the FA Cup. Supercomputer predicts Man United finish as Michael Carrick takes over. Supercomputer delivers Leeds United versus Fulham prediction. And supercomputer predicts where FA Cup journey will end for Mansfield Town.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Hmm, I can see who's funding the research for this. I'm so glad we're using cities worth of water and electricity to come up with this vital stuff about Mansfield Town or Leeds United. What is going on?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Isn't that so weird? But what I think is happening is a normal computer is doing these calculations in a journalist's office somewhere, and they're just thinking, let's call it a supercomputer. I assume that's what's happening, right?

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not a protected term, is it?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  You can put super in front of everything. I feel like Seymour Cray was the first properly called a supercomputer, I think. I just one last fact on him. So Dan, you said he had this intense focus.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  He would spend days in complete seclusion, maybe in the tunnels under his house. There are stories also that he was very afraid about nuclear war. So he dug, he was digging sort of bomb shelter or having bomb shelters dug under his home. I don't know how true that is. But apparently he would often, on family car journeys, demand complete silence so he could think for the entire duration of the journey. Oh, that's my man. I mean, the dream. The absolute dream.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  But wait a minute, surely the kids are watching Frozen in the back. Have they watched that on mute?

• 10:45Speaker 04

  They're not allowed to watch anything.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  What?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  The whole family have to stay silent because dad is driving and thinking. They're watching a great man think. What more entertainment can you have? Let It Go is nothing compared with watching Seymour Cray have an idea. Pay to watch Seymour Cray think from the back of a car.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  I don't care how the wheels on the fucking bus are going. I need to work out how many pizza flops are in this computer.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Or you will not have the iPad by 2010 to watch your shows on.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  And then when everybody else is science, you still have the elves babbling in your ear.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  Shut up, elf.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Can I tell you a man thing about where supercomputers are gonna go next?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, please.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  You have a guess?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  League two football results.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  Where it's gonna go next?

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  Space? Quantum computing? Oh, computers in space.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  It's gonna go up there.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  Is it?

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Because it's cold.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. China are trying to get a, well, lots of people are trying to get a supercomputer in space. Everyone wants it to be in orbit. You know, Bezos and all sorts of people. And basically, the theory is, on the ground, all the computing power uses lots of energy and lots of water for the cooling and things like this. Up there, it's solar, well, we have solar power down here, but solar up there and cooling requirements are not nearly as big.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  Well, solar power is 24 hours if you choose the right orbit, so you don't have nights. Cooling is a strange thing because it is very cold, but also there is very little material, so you're kind of in a vacuum.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  It's like you can't sweat.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the ISS has this, this big grey things that some people think there are solar panels, but they're actually, the only way to cool the ISS is by radiation, like radiate the power off. And these things are to radiate the power in. So you need some sort of cooling in, in space too.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  But it's, it's, it's a different way than, than liquid cooling that we do here.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Could we cook something with radiation in space and then that comes back to earth?

• 12:41Speaker 05

  I guess so, yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  I've just had an idea, that's all. I'm just gonna write to Bezos after this.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Buy Andrew space sausage.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  I'm thinking space sausage.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  What, when SpaceX is straight there?

• 12:53Speaker 05

  SpaceX, oh my god.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  I don't wanna deal with masks.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  Space sausage.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  You send the satellite up surrounded by a thick layer of meat, right?

• 13:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  It's like a Scotch egg. Like a giant Scotch egg in space, and as it cooks, it drops off and comes back to earth. When it's cooked.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  How does it not burn on re-entry?

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Oh, we can, we can solve this down the line. I'm asking for a hundred million dollars, all right?

• 13:19Speaker 04

  That is.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Just quickly on Seymour Cray.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  He was born and eventually set up his offices in a place called Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  I tried to see if it had any other impact on the world, Chippewa Falls as well. So two I could find, a lady called Judith Ann Hensk, who was a singer in America, was the original singer of a song that's had a bit of an influence on the world because the song was called High Flying Bird.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Oh, and Noel Gallagher's band is named after it.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Noel Gallagher's band is named after that. So.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Really?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah, huge influence on the world there.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  That's one.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  The second one is.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  It couldn't be better. I don't think, I had to stop that. I don't think you're gonna cap.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Get ready.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Come on.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  It is the hometown of Jack Dawson, who sadly died on the Titanic in the movie Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio's character is called Jack Dawson.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Okay, okay.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  So there's a scene in the movie where Kate Winslet is standing on the front and she's about to jump off and he talks her out of it. And he talks about the time when he was standing on a frozen lake in Chippewa Falls, his hometown, and how it cracked and how cold it was when he went under and so on. And so that's the other main thing that they're known for, except the lake wasn't there until after the sinking of the Titanic. So it's a goof.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  There's a new lake?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's sort of a manmade lake in Chippewa Falls and it wasn't made until 1917.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Gosh.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Now, James Cameron did the whole thing where he changed the literal sky to put the stars in the right place when he redid the Titanic movie because he got that wrong.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  Neil deGrasse Tyson complained about it.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Neil deGrasse Tyson was watching the movie and at one point said, "The sky is wrong."

• 15:01Speaker 04

  I think Neil deGrasse Tyson needs to get his priorities right with the complaining.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Well, Cameron changed it. He redid it for the, for the anniversary release and he hasn't changed this? He's gonna have to go back now and do it all over again.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Wow. Do you think you have the same authority as Neil deGrasse Tyson when it comes to James Cameron's ear?

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Hundy P.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Hundy P.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. He'll probably just hand back all the money.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  They're probably saying, you know what, I'm gonna stop making Avatar 9 and I'm just gonna focus all time on time travelling this lake back in time. That'll be his solution.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Avatar, by the way, which is 100% scientifically accurate on my theory, right?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I haven't seen what the modern computers look like, the supercomputers, but aesthetically, they were really beautiful, the original Cray supercomputers. So Seymour Cray's Cray 1 was a sort of tall cylinder in the middle.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  And then it had sort of like leather seating around the bottom that you could genuinely sit on. And it was because the cooling system that it needed was underneath and it just was a thing that was part of the design.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Was it heated seats then?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, superheated seats though.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it keeps getting referenced as love seats and there's a few suggestions that people would sleep on it, not for...

• 16:11Speaker 04

  It wasn't 60s.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there's no...

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Is that a big cylindrical supercomputer in your pants?

• 16:18Speaker 04

  I'm afraid it's an Exoflop.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  This is an advertisement for Zolair, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Lieben.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  My fact is that a crane is called a crane because it looks like a crane. Any questions?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yes. Which crane is which?

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Aha, the crane, the machine, is named after the crane, the bird.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  And what does this have to do with Seymour Cray?

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Nothing yet. I'll ask the elves.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Medieval cranes looked like the birds. Have you seen a medieval crane on paintings?

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Only through the process of researching this, yeah. I hadn't though before, no.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a medieval crane would be a wooden building in a way. And it had these, these two, what do you call them, where the hamster would run around them?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Treadmills.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, treadmills. So it had two big treadmills at the side, and people would walk in the treadmills to make the rope move. And then from these two large treadmills, there was kind of a wooden building diagonally going up like 10, 15 metres. And then from the top, there would be a small piece going diagonally down again, where the rope would come out. And they would use this in harbors to take loads out of it. And these old medieval cranes, they look a lot like a crane, the bird, standing in a field. And so that's why they were called cranes.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  So cool. They're very beautiful. I had not seen one of these before, these tread wheel cranes. And they're mad. I think there's a place where they're trying to build a castle authentically in France, and they're using

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Really?

• 18:57Speaker 04

  one or two of these actual things.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  And Tom Scott, who's been on this show, has made a video where he goes and operates this crane.

• 19:04Speaker 05

  Really?

• 19:04Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  And they were used for like quite famous things, like Cologne Cathedral.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  So much.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Salisbury Cathedral.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  And it turns out that if you have enough people and enough time as well, because it moves slowly, but you can basically lift many, many, many tonnes in weight just by someone walking around.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  If you have the right gears.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  If you have the right gears, then you can certainly do it.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Could you like ratchet it and then use it as a catapult or something?

• 19:30Speaker 04

  A trebuchet.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know if, because then you need a lot of torque on there, and maybe the wood wouldn't.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Okay, because I was thinking for Andy's meat in space business.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Yes, that's how we're going to back down. That's a good idea.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Or is that how you're lobbing it up?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  That's how I was lobbing it up.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry, okay.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  You've got to get the sausage up there, mate.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  That's true. Is that a slang expression? I'm not familiar with it.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  It's a very, very normal expression here in the UK.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  Get your sausage off, mate.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  There was a Roman one called a polyspaston, which could lift 3,000 kilos per person walking in this thing. I mean, the gearing is amazing. And then they were used in ancient Rome, and then they weren't used for many centuries, and then in medieval times they came back. But they were still being installed in London in the 1850s.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  I think there's one down in Guildford, actually.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  It's not in operation today. I think it's a historical one, but.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  There are a few that can still be found in the cellars of cathedrals, because they they used to move up with the floors. So if you've built the first floor, you would disassemble the entire crane and build it again on the first floor. So you could work your way up there. And then when they were at the top and the church was finished, they would just store it in the cellar. Like, they wouldn't build it up again, but all the material would be would be there.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  That's very cool.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Do you know what the world's biggest crane is right now?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Right now?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  The bird or the machine?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  We're talking machines still, I think.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So is this guessable?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  Oh, is it?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  What would you call it? What would you call it?

• 20:57Speaker 05

  Mammoth.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Mammoth, no?

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Oh, I see.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Mastodon.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  These are great names. It's called Big Carl. And it's named after Carl Sarans, who works, he's a director of Sarans Engineering, which is a Flemish family business.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Which.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  What's it called?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Sarans. S-A-R-E-N-S.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  I see Sarans cranes all the time at my street.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Big Carl. They're a family business. They started moving trees with horses and cats.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  As you do.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  And now they're into the world's biggest cranes.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  And I was reading a trade magazine with an interview with Carl, and they said, what's going on with the crane industry? And he said, the whole industry is picking up.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Brilliant.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Which I don't think he deliberately did as a joke.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Doesn't translate in Dutch, actually.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  It does not.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Not, isn't it? Through the roof.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  In these medieval cranes, so you had these big treadmills and they used people to walk in there, sometimes children. Actually in Ghent, there's still a crane children's street.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, so they weren't like really small kids, but they were like teenagers and that were used. And they used animals, dogs, for example. There's, there's still pictures of dogs standing in these treadmills, kind of sealed off of the world with, with a small wooden wall, left and right. And so in the morning, you would put your dog in a treadmill and it would just walk. And in the evening, you opened the door and it could come out of it.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  You've got to make sure to put the dog in the right way around. Otherwise, you get home at the end of the day, it's disassembled half a cathedral. Not again, Fifi. These, these ones that we used, have you, you've heard of a capstan, maybe? That's the thing, you see them on board a ship for lifting various things. It's where you've got a pole vertically and there are four spars coming out of it on the ground and you have people pushing them around in a circle. Oh, yeah. And that lifts something upwards. That was a big thing. In the, they were used a lot in the 15th, 16th century, especially to raise obelisks, because Rome basically got a lot of obelisks from its territories in Egypt. So they were all in. Stol.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Stol, yeah. Why am I worried about medieval Romans coming at me? Yeah, yeah, they were, they were all sort of nicked. But basically, to, to raise these, they would use capstans with hundreds of men and horses involved, pushing them around to lift them up. And I just love this detail. This comes, by the way, from Low Tech Magazine, which is an amazing, it's about the past and forgotten tech and how it can actually be very useful today. The website is solar powered. It runs off the author's home solar power system. Anyway, to raise this obelisk in the Vatican in 1586, it used 800 men, 140 horses, and the best detail, spectators were ordered not to speak or make a noise on pain of death. Oh, God. Because hundreds of people were watching this very delicate operation.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  It's like watching snooker.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  It's like watching snooker. And it was apparently enforced. Seymour Crane was there. Will you shut up? Oh, yeah. I want a Seymour Crane.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  My god. So what's the reason? Because like often you can't make noise because there's someone drumming to make sure everyone goes in the right beat.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  It might have, it might well have been that. I don't know whether it was that or just like a mistake from distraction could have been fatal, you know, but yeah, sounds exciting. One last thing on crane cranes. In 2005.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Both of these things are crane cranes.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Which, good point.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Which one are we talking about?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Mechanical cranes.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Mechanical cranes.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. This is just a crazy story. It happened in London, South London, 2005. Fifteen year old girl was found on a crane at night, 130 feet above the ground. Riddle me this.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Well, sleepwalk is the obvious one.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  She was asleep. She'd sleepwalked up there. And a passerby had seen someone up there, called the authorities. And then a fireman went up, crawled out, found her there asleep, didn't know how to wake her up because thought if I wake her up, she might, you know, she might, she might panic. There's a chance.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Where was she asleep? I seem to, I have a vague memory of this story that she was on the wait on the other side. Like, it's not even like she was in the cabin bit.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, she was quite, quite, not, quite, quite not that.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Quite not?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Quite not.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  So it seems like he called, he got her phone out of her pocket and called her parents from the phone and said, can you ring back? So that I can, so that that'll wake her up.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  How did he get, how did he get her login to her phone? Did he lift up her head and hold the camera in front of it?

• 25:35Speaker 04

  It's 2006. It was a simpler time. It was a simpler time.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  But you still had codes on phones, did you?

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Maybe. Well, anyway, it was all fine in the end.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  How do you, how do you navigate that opening sentence with the parents?

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yes. Hi, I'm on a crane. A crane crane?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Um, cranberries are named after cranes.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Really?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Cranberries, yeah. The organic crane.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Lovely.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Because the plant stamens look a bit like the beaks of cranes. Geraniums are named after cranes.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  From the Greek geranus, meaning crane, because their seeds look like the crane bills.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  The, the, the Dutch word for geraniums is stork beak, stork bill.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Ah, so they're quite similar birds. And pedigree, the word pedigree also comes from the word for crane, the geranus. And that's because the foot of a crane has bits that stick out. And when you draw like a family tree, you have the bits that stick out.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Pedigranos, foot of a crane. Wow.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  That's really nice.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Oh, I love these etymology things that suddenly remove the blanket for someone.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  Abracadabra.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  Yes, I love it.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  The, the crane is called a crane because of the noise. So they, they, they have, they're, they're migratory birds. Did I, did I use the right amount of syllables? Yes, migratory birds. And so they, they, they fly over Belgium and Holland in huge groups, sometimes thousands of them. And they're quite high up. They have these long necks and then you can hear

• 27:05Speaker 05

  they make this crane, crane. And so then if you want to finish the etymology, the machine is named after the bird and the bird is named after the sound it makes. And in Belgium, we also say crane to, um, uh, uh, tap, water tap, faucet.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Do you?

• 27:20Speaker 05

  Because they, they also have, well, they used to have this, um, vertical piece and then a horizontal piece, like a pump.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  Um, cranes.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Britain's tallest bird?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  What are we talking?

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Oh, nine, 10, 12 feet. They're big. They're big.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Are they?

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Well, if you put them on a hill, yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're four feet or something.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're four feet.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  One meter twenty something. Yeah, that is four feet, yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. They, um, but they're making a comeback across the UK, which is very nice because, um, they were hunted and eaten to extinction in the UK. Also drying out wetlands. A lot of that went on in the Middle Ages and that really damages their habitats.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  People ate cranes? I've never heard of that, people eating cranes.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Apparently they are, I'm afraid to say they're absolutely delicious.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Or they certainly were in the 14th century when presumably food was a bit less nice. But no, um. In 1465, there was a new Archbishop of York and 204 cranes were roasted to celebrate the fact at the feast.

• 28:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  So they're, and by 1600, miraculously, they were extinct. And but they're back, they're back. And it's partly because a random pair got blown off course, as you were saying, Lee, and they.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  You know, the migratory. In 1979, they got blown off course, they ended up in the Norfolk Broads. And now there are maybe a couple of hundred and lots more breeding pairs, which is obviously the main thing. And there's a place in Suffolk where they are breeding, an RSPB site, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. And to help them breed, the staff have cut runways for them in the grasses, in the reeds, just to help them take off and land safely.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  With the lights and everything and the control tower.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  And the guy with the ping pong bats. We've got five cranes coming in from Chief of House at North Oxford. Look out, you're gonna bump into a crane. What kind of crane? Crane, crane.

• 29:03Speaker 05

  A small fact about the lighthearted topic of eating birds into extinction.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  I, this week.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  I personally.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  I personally ate the stork into extinction. No, I held with my hands the very last great ork that ever walked on this earth.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Really?

• 29:30Speaker 05

  It was strangled in 1844 on Elde, an island in Iceland. And so great orks got really rare because, well, they can't fly, so people used to eat them. And back then, like 19th century, if an animal became really rare, it became super expensive because all the collectioners wanted one.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing. I read an article about this where it's like, it would become well-known that there was an animal that they were about to go extinct.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  And what people thought was not, shall we save them? They were like, this is our last chance to catch one.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  And so these Icelandic sailors could make a nice buck out of, you had to strangle them because always you damaged the meat and the skin. So. They know, they know that the last great orc was killed on that island. The intestines were kept at Copenhagen and for a long time they didn't know where the skin ended up. Then they did genetic testing on the intestines and on all the sixty seven great orcs that are in museums and it's in Brussels. So they found out this is the very last great orc that ever lived and it's, it's now up there. It's in a, a place called the, well, the, it's, it's our national institute for, for, for natural science.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  They have a huge collection of, um, taxidermy. They have, um, one million mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles. And then they have, I think thirty million, if you count all the insects with it. And they have this separate room for extinct species that is extra secured because they are very valuable. Um, I met, um, one of the conservators there. And almost weekly, he makes the sad walk with a new species to the extinction room. This is, I, I want to film this one day, this, this weekly walk of getting the phone call like, yeah, you know, that bird over there on that island, well, extinct now, put it in the, put it in the special room.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  And then you, then you have to take an animal to the extinction room. Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  That's so sad.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  It is.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  You got anything funny to end this section on?

• 31:34Speaker 05

  No.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is a single gram of silica gel has an area of eight hundred square meters. Okay.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Strap in everyone.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  This is so much fun. You're about to go on the ride of your life, guys. There's a fantastic website called Scope of Work. Uh, it's really good. It's amazing essays about all sorts of stuff. You know the silica gel, the little packets do not eat, right?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  They often come in one gram packets.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And they're, they're to dry things out, right?

• 32:11Speaker 04

  They're to dry things out.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  They'll be in your shoes when you buy them or.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Exactly, or a bit of furniture or whatever. And that stuff in there is silica gel. And the reason it's amazing at drying things out is that when you zoom in on it, it's not like glass, which is silicon, uh, silicon dioxide. It's much less dense than glass. Silica gel is full of these tiny, tiny, tiny pores. So they're two point five nanometers across, which is the width of one strand of DNA. But these little balls of silica gel are so riddled with these voids, these holes everywhere, that one gram of it has an internal area of 800 square metres. So that's four tennis courts.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Like, they're absolutely amazing at taking on their own weight in water vapour, because it all condenses in their tiny capillaries. So that's why they're so effective. And when you're a, you know, shoemaker, for example, and you're just trying to say, they will say, silica gel sellers, how big do you want to keep dry? How big an area? How big a volume? And how dry do you want it to be? What's the maximum moisture you want inside the shoebox?

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  And they can just gear it exactly, because they know how much silica gel can absorb.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  It is pretty amazing. I mean, we all know these packs. We've all got them in various items that we've bought. The say do not eat on it. Turns out that's not because, as everyone assumes, that they're toxic. They're not toxic.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  They're delicious. They're like, they're the grains.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  I remember when the Archbishop of Durham came on a few years ago, they had 200,000 silica gel packets, didn't they?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so don't eat them, but it's largely for the packet, isn't it? It's to say, don't eat, you might, it's a choking hazard.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  It's very funny. We have to say, don't eat them, because obviously we're not recommending people eat silica gel, but it doesn't seem like actual silica.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  I don't think it would be any good for you, because it would absorb all the wa- sorry, it would adsorb all the water, because it doesn't absorb. Absorb is like a sponge you get, the water goes inside of it. Absorb means that it sticks to the outside of it.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  It's really weird.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  But the outside is on the inside.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Precisely.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Of the silica.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Because it's like a weird net thing. But anyway, so yeah, if, I think if you did eat a few of them, and you had swallowing problems already, I don't think it would be that good.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely don't eat them.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  People won't find an ancient Egyptian mummy if they, if you accidentally swallow a tiny bit of it. It's not like it dries you into a husk.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  An amazing assassination method.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Like the end of Indiana Jones.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  That's how they achieve that effect, all of that, yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  All of these celluses have got a bit of silica gel in them, apart from one.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  But they, we should say the only potential reason you shouldn't eat them is that some of the beads might have a little moisture indicator, like which is to indicate when they change colour, like cobalt chloride, which could be dangerous if you ate enough of it.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, just don't eat them.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Don't eat them. It says don't eat them. Take advice from the packet, not from us. But you'll be fine. But don't.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  But one thing you could do, which I don't, I see that, I get scared, it's toxic, chuck it in the bin. Actually, collecting them is quite useful because they can be used, not to eat, not to eat, no.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, but we've covered some pretty nerdy collectors, surely. Surely there are collectors of this stuff.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  It's not for the sake, it's not like a stamp collection. It is for if you drop your phone in the toilet or the bath, instead of putting it in rice, put it in a box full of these little packs and it's gonna probably act better than the rice. So they have their, they have their uses. Apparently they're great for defogging windshields as well. If you just chuck your 100 silica packs you've saved.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  No, I've heard musty smells of books. It adsorbs all of the musty smell. Rust in toolboxes, if you've got like a slightly damp garage or something, just pop a bit of that in. Allegedly, if you have a big enough packet, you can deodorise your laundry.

• 36:04Speaker 05

  But why don't we collect them and use them to lower the sea levels again?

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. The thing with these numbers is that people have no idea of how small atoms are. Atoms are, they're, they're, well, it's just crazy, we can't get our head around it. I used to have an example in my show on genetics. I talked about Julius Caesar, who bled to death, let's say he lost one litre of blood, you take one glass of water, like I have in front of me, what is the chance that I have a molecule in here, an H2O molecule, that literally exited a wound of Caesar as he bled to death? It's about 2,000 in each glass of water.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  But you definitely have that in there?

• 36:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  That belongs in a museum, man.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, the thing is that there are a lot more H2O molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in, on Earth.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  But so how much of history is sitting in that glass right now then?

• 36:59Speaker 05

  Everything.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  From the beginning of the planet, basically? Dinosaurs, dinosaur piss.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  Oh, a lot of dinosaur piss. That's what I always, that's what I always tell the homeopaths, like diluted dinosaur piss.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, but maybe it turns out that actually dinosaur piss is the secret panacea medicine. And they've been right all this time.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Who knows?

• 37:17Speaker 04

  I didn't know I'd been drinking Hitler piss this entire time.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  There's some Dalai Lama piss in there too, and some Mahatma Gandhi piss, so it kind of evens out.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Okay, good.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Here's something you can do with silica gel. You can make opals out of it.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  So.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  The cars or the stones?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  The stones or the fruits?

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  No, the stones. Basically, opal is made of silica, but it's dehydrated and it's compressed by nature. But you can make opals in the lab by getting a load of silica gel, putting it in water, leaving it for weeks and weeks and months and months until it all sinks down and stacks itself perfectly. And then you remove all of the water and it's in a perfect lattice. And that's how you make lab made opals.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  That's very cool.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  It's the same material, basically.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  And in a different crystal structure.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Precisely, yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  When you start zooming in enough like this, everything gets a bit weird, I find. Like, this stuff, silica gel, was first created in the early 20th century by a researcher at Johns Hopkins University called Walter Patrick. And he created it out of a material called water glass, which as far as I can tell is water soluble glass.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:30Speaker 05

  That's not very useful in construction.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Quite hard to have a glass.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  That just feels like sandy water, doesn't it?

• 38:36Speaker 04

  I think if you pour the, if you pour, if you have a glass of this stuff and you pour some water in, it dissolves, which is a good prank, if nothing else. But I just, I find it so bizarre that this exists. And there's an amazing 1930 paper, The Story of Silica Gel, which I read too much of. It's by the main silica gel making company, basically. And it begins, I just like, people really knew how to write science in the old days.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Also, it wasn't very dry.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Walked right into that. Stuck on that rake.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  You set it up yourself.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  I know, I know.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  I left the rake out. The story of silica, just listen to the way this begins, alright? Someday, the true history of mankind will be written. A history that will treat not the struggle of man against man, but of the epic struggle of man against the forces of nature. One great force of nature is oxidation. The intimate union of oxygen and carbon producing combustion. Combustion produces heat and primitive man soup. This is about silica gel.

• 39:38Speaker 05

  It's great.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Wonderful. It's so good.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  It's Lord of the Rings style science.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  It really is though, isn't it? Yeah. One of us uses way more silica gel than the others. Can you guess?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Is it me because there's a K-pop band called Silicon Gem?

• 39:50Speaker 04

  That's not the reason, but it is you.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Oh, I think I know why.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Go on.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  I think just through my research.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  I think it's James because of his cat.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Oh, that's how I dry her. She's been out in the rain.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  In there with his shoes now.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  Don't eat it.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  It's cat litter.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Is that right?

• 40:13Speaker 04

  A fair bit of it, yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  More absorbs.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Something we've been using, so World War One, after the invention by Walter Patrick, it was used in gas masks.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, salt shakers used to use it in the cap. You would put little bits of it so that the salt wouldn't dry out.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Clump up.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it doesn't clump up because people would put bits of rice in there, right?

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Rice.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  But you would actually put little silica inside the top of salt cap.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  I'm gonna put some in my coffee tin when I get home.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Do not eat.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  How many times do we have to tell you?

• 40:42Speaker 04

  But am I allowed to drink it?

• 40:44Speaker 05

  You sounded like a health and safety dalek there. Do not eat.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  I just imagined that you put it in your coffee and you pour the water in your coffee and all the water's gone.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  I put three kettles in here.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  You can do that with the powder from diapers. It's a typical magic trick that you do in science shows. You take like three cups, like non-transparent cups, like paper cups. And in one of them, you put the powder that is inside a diaper.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  Like a baby diaper. You put it like one or two centimeters at the bottom. And then you pour water in all three of them. And if you take the one that had the powder, you can turn it around over your head and nothing will come out. Because it, I don't know if it absorbs or adsorbs, but it also sticks to the side. So it's a.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  And I think it turns a little bit white or something. And I've seen people use that as fake snow, that stuff.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Really? Don't eat the yellow snow, though.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  That's not his pee.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  That's brilliant. I had one more thing about these one-atom layers.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  Like graphene. So graphene is stuff that is made of one layer of atoms, carbon atoms, all in hexagonal shapes. It's the stuff that your pencil is made of. So you're writing with graphene. And the cheapest way that they made one-layered graph, it's very difficult to make something of one atom thick. The cheapest way was with sticky tape. You just put sticky tape on a pencil and you rip it off. And then you put sticky tape on the sticky tape and you rip it off again. And you keep going until there's just one layer left. It's kind of a low-tech way to make graphene.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Silly question, how do you get it off the sticky tape?

• 42:29Speaker 05

  I do not know. I think you study it on the sticky tape.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, okay. So it's not for production?

• 42:35Speaker 05

  No.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  And then you put electricity on it and stuff. Yeah, it was science.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  We've met Andre Geim.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Who discovered it, I think. But he won a Nobel Prize for it, definitely. And he also won an Ig Nobel Prize for Levitating Frogs.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. That's right. He was at his university and there was a giant magnet and he was walking past it one day. And I think on a whim, he chucked a ham sandwich in. And just to see if it would float, and it did. So then he.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  This is how these people cut, like putting a sausage in space, putting a ham sandwich in a magnet. You know, these ideas, they seemed stupid at the time.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  We do the impossible. And then thirty years from now, we get the call from the Nobel Commission. It's like, yeah, thought that would happen eventually, yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  It was the Ig Nobel Prize he won for that one, not the Nobel Prize.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  For the frog, yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  The guy who does the Ig Nobel Prize, it sounds incredibly serious when he rings you up.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  He's the opposite of the Swedish chef.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  My favourite Ig Nobel Prize is also, has to do with surface, was mathematics. I think it was 2002, Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics for an Indian researcher who calculated the entire surface if you were to fold an Indian elephant open.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so what is the surface, what is the surface of an Indian elephant if you were to fold it open?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  What do you mean by that?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, fold it open, like, you don't mean cut in half and then fold?

• 43:59Speaker 05

  I think, I think fold all the surface area, so.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Oh, because it's very wrinkled.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it was really useful research because for, especially vets, when they had to dose medication for elephants, they had to measure the height of the elephant and it was very dangerous because they're moody creatures and people get killed by them. And he could calculate it from a footprint. So he could just let an elephant walk over some mud and then measure the area of the footprint and then he could say the entire surface area of the elephant is this, so the dosage of the medication is this and you don't have to get near it and get, get killed.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  You know what they say about elephants with big feet? They're just big in general.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  That's what they say, that's another saying here. Along with lobster sausage up there.

• 45:31Speaker 01

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• 45:52Speaker 03

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first female scientist to be celebrated with a marble bust at the Royal Society was never able to visit it because women weren't allowed in the building.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  This is-

• 46:10Speaker 02

  It's kind of a nice story at the start, because she got a bust.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  And then it kind of tells off quite a lot at the end, that.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was a fact that was told to me directly by a particle accelerator physicist from Australia called Dr. Susie Shihy. S-H-W-H-Y, if anyone wants to look her up, she's really awesome. And she was saying it's really fascinating. This incredible scientist who was born 1780, called Mary Somerville, was known as the queen of sciences in her time. She was such an influence that all the members of the society wanted to commemorate her with a bust in her own lifetime. And they did so, but because the rules of the society did not allow women into the building, she was never literally allowed to go and see it.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, they could have flexed the rules, but they didn't.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's outrageous in hindsight. It's absolutely outrageous.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  She could have seen it, I think, because in 1834, when she was still alive, there was a ship that was named after her called the Mary Somerville Ship, and the figurehead of that ship was copied from that bust.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  And not only for the ship, a lot of the leading scientists of the Royal Society loved it so much that they asked for a casting of it for their own homes, so she could have gone to their houses as well.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Again, these are just bad reasons not to let her in. I'm just livid about it.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  We're not saying that this is a good conversation, but she likely would have seen it in people's homes, in the front of a ship. So it's pretty cool. It got a lot of outing.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  But her history at the Royal Society was amazing. She, I think, was she the first woman to have a paper read out authored by her at the Royal Society? But- She wasn't allowed in. Her husband had to read it out on her behalf.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  You know, I think he had to get things out of the library from her. And she's amazing. She wrote so many extraordinary scientific works. She was an amazing mathematician. I mean, she just achieved so much in 19th century science. She pre-discovered a planet. So in 1840, I love this so much. In 1842, she she wrote she wrote a work saying, you know, there are some, get ready, disturbances in the movements of Uranus. All right.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  No giggling in the back.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Thank you. Yeah. And she then she basically said, it looks like there might be something else that is causing these disturbances in the movements of Uranus. And she inspired an astronomer called John Couch Adams. Lo and behold, four years later, Neptune is discovered.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Right where she said it would be. It's very cool.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  It is very cool. She and she tutored Ada Lovelace.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Really?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So she was she was really sort of a pivotal figure for science back then. But she was a woman, therefore it was hard.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  And what was the reason that she got to science? Because of course, back then you had to have the time and the money.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  So she, when she was a child, she got into Euclid, like a lot of scientists did. So Euclid is an old Greek book where he approves lots of geometry, but it's really easy to follow. You can just pick it up from the first pages, like this is what a dot is, this is what a line is. And then the final pages, this is an incredibly complicated bit of geometry. So it's really interesting for younger people to go through. So she was interested in it. And then she married her cousin and her cousin died, but he was very rich. So she became a woman of wealth, so she could do whatever she wants. She was quite young at this age. In actual fact, she then married another cousin of hers.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  She had a type.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  She had a type.

• 49:30Speaker 05

  But rich cousins.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  But she was, yeah, she was wealthy and she was interested in the sciences and so.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  And her parents originally didn't want her to learn too much. And I think for the first seven or eight years of her life, she wasn't taught to read, she wasn't taught anything. And eventually her parents thought, we'd better teach her, you know, the basics of reading and accounting. Then she was getting too good, she was reading too much Euclid and they freaked out a bit because they thought too much education had driven her sister insane. So.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Her sister?

• 49:56Speaker 04

  Her sister, yeah, yeah, she had an older sister, I think. And her first husband, who you mentioned, James, who was cousin number one, Samuel Greig, was a bit of a hindrance to her. He didn't agree with women being educated, basically. Happily, he died after three years, leaving her everything. So, as you say, she then got to marry cousin number two, who was a brilliant support all the way through her career, you know, and and, you know, hung back so she could shine, as it were.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  It sounds like education was the screen time of the children back then. Just half an hour of education a day, it will drive you insane.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  They used to take her candles away at night.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  Really?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, the parents would come in and going, we're taking your candles, you're reading too much.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  But this is a thing you would like, James, especially. I think she got into it because there was an algebra puzzle in a friend's fashion magazine and that's what brought her to Euclid. She thought, that seems interesting. She begged her brother's tutor to buy her the elements of geometry.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  I would like this because I like fashion magazines.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  That's it. Never, if you see James in public, he's never without a Grazia.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Puzzles, I love puzzles.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  An era where fashion magazines printed algebra puzzles is a great era.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  So the Royal Society, they didn't allow women to be members and into the building until 1945. And it was founded around 1660. There was a moment where a woman did make it in, Margaret Cavendish, who was also one of the early great female scientists of that period. She went in in May of 1667 and it caused such an uproar and scandal that no one was back until 1945, basically.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  She sort of got in a row with them or there was some disagreement? I think she pointed out some mistakes in the experiments, probably. She was really interested in science.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  She was very extravagant for her age. She wore men's clothes, which was seen very strange at the time. John Evelyn, who was there, said, "Her headgear was so pretty, I never saw anything so witty, though I was half afeared, God bless us, when I did see her, she looked like a cavalier, but that she had no beard." And Samuel Peeps, who was there, said the Duchess have been good, comely woman, but her dress is so antic and her department so unordinary that I do not like her at all. So I think she was just a bit like, she wasn't what you would expect to be in the Royal Society at the time. And that was it. But there was actually someone who was a fellow before 1945,

• 52:21Speaker 02

  a woman, and that was Queen Victoria, who was, she was an honorary Royal Fellow because it's the Royal Society and she was royalty. So she was allowed to be a member, but like, it was a member by name, really.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Didn't go in.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  So this, the idea of women not being part of these science institutions, not just the UK, like this was, this was global. There's one great example, which is that in France, in 1911, the Academy rejected Marie Curie to be a member of it. 1911 is the year that she won her second Nobel Prize in Sciences.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  If you get three, if you get three, we'll let you in. But two, I think you're still an amateur if you only have two Nobel Prizes.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  It's so weird that you have these people who are supposed to be very logical doing experiments, but still the, just the, having a woman there who has won two Nobel Prizes still going, well, no, I don't, I don't think it's appropriate for you to enter here. How do you, how do you get your head? Well, humans are very creative in rationalizing these things.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  There was a, to come back to the UK, the Royal Society, their earliest published report by a woman in their journal was attributed to Governor Beltra's lady. That's who's written this. And there was Hertha Ayrton, she was a brilliant scientist and she, she improved electric lighting dramatically, I think in the early 20th century. And a group of scholars proposed, we really should let in a woman into the society. And then they said, oh, sorry, you're married. Sorry, if you've been single, different matter. And Hertha Ayrton, she was told at the age of 52, I'm sorry, you're just too old to contribute to the Royal Society, while the society's president at the time was in his 80s. I mean, yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Obviously massive double standards, but yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Maria Mitchell's another interesting one. So she was a, an astronomy person in the 19th century. And she was friends with Mary Somerville. She came to, over to Europe to meet her. She couldn't get into the Royal Society. They wouldn't let her in there. But um, when she met George Airy FRS, the British Astronomer Royal, he said to her, in England, there is no astronomical public and we do not need to make science popular.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  So she went on around Europe and visited lots of people. And then she went to the Vatican where they had an amazing astronomy place. And she wanted to go and look at their telescopes. And she was told that because she was a woman, she wasn't allowed there after dark. So she could go and look at the telescopes during the daytime.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Oh no.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  But as soon as it went dark, women were not allowed in.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Isn't that amazing?

• 55:05Speaker 03

  We've mentioned that there was the Mary Somerville ship. And that was, again, in her lifetime, that ship was out there. So she would have seen the bus.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  It sank with all hands aboard in her lifetime.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  About 20 years and then.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. There's only one other fact, as far as I can tell, that also had a ship named after it that we've done on today's show. Little quiz question.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Uh, we've done cranes.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  HMS Silica Jell.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  It's incredible to see it plow its way across the seabed.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Always in dry dock.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Is the correct answer.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  There was a ship that was named after silica. And it too also sank. Uh, so it's now at the bottom of the ocean somewhere.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Slowly getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  I wonder how much higher the ocean would be if that didn't.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  That's great. She's on the Scottish tenor now, Mary Somerville, which is nice.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Oh, that's nice.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Because she grew up in Scotland as of 2017. And if you look at it under UV light, there's a little Easter egg hidden in there. It's a, it's a lunar diagram, which is from one of her books called The Mechanism of the Heavens. So that's very cool. She was very, also, the other thing she did, she was a real science communicator, like.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  She did do brilliant mathematical work and science in herself, but she also. Wrote these incredible books which explained and drew together science to lots of people. And there's this, you see it in lots of places, said that she was called the first person ever called a scientist. Because there was a review of one of her books by William Huell, who coined the word scientist in review. He didn't actually call her a scientist. He just said, it's crazy that we have chemists and biologists and we have blarists and everything. But where's the word? Why don't we call them a scientist? And scientists at the time hated the idea of the word scientist. Yeah. Because they were getting very snotty about the idea of professional scientists coming in and ruining a traditionally amateurs game for rich blokes.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  Well, as a physicist, you don't want to be in the same room with a chemist, of course. There shouldn't be one word or an engineer.

• 57:00Speaker 04

  Can I tell you a thing about her husband, her second husband? Yes. So I've got here, you can see, this is Reflections by Mary Somerville. This is a first edition of her memoir. Wow. Which was printed a couple of years after she died. Look, there's the bust. You can see the Royal Society bust. Yes. And it begins with a little intro from her daughter saying, this is genuinely how it begins, right? "The life of a woman entirely devoted to her family duties and to scientific pursuits affords little scope for a biography." Okay, why have I just bought this? "There are in it neither stirring events nor brilliant deeds." Okay? "And my mother was strongly averse to gossip and to revelations of private life or intimate correspondence.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  So nothing of the kind will be found in the following pages." Why have I bought this book?

• 57:49Speaker 05

  It's the silicon gel of literature, is what it is.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  And she's underselling it, right? Because in the first two pages, there's a shipwreck and the two sea battles and the American Revolution. Her father was involved in all of that. Oh, wow. And then, get this, get this about, so her second husband, also her cousin, right? Okay, just, I'm just gonna read this. "My mother was dangerously ill when she, when Mary herself was born. But my aunt was about to wean her second daughter Janet. So my aunt nursed me till a wet nurse could be found. So I was born in the house of my future husband and nursed by his mother."

• 58:26Speaker 04

  They'd both, they'd both been suckled at the same.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  About the same age, I bet.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  They were about the same age.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  One on each teat?

• 58:33Speaker 04

  It might have been. No wonder the daughter's like, nothing to read here, just maybe put it down. Just put it down. Five pages in, you're getting some double suckling stories.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on Instagram on @shriverland. James?

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Um, this morning, Leven added me on LinkedIn.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  I did?

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Why not add me on LinkedIn as well?

• 59:08Speaker 04

  I got a request as well.

• 59:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can tell you why, because I'm touring with this AI show and it's so popular amongst companies that I now have to go to LinkedIn to promote this stuff. Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Wow, very.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  It's the boomer TikTok and that's where I'm at.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Okay. Is there anywhere else to find you online, Leven?

• 59:24Speaker 05

  Yes, on my website, levenshere.com, but because you cannot spell this, I've also registered leavingshire.com.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Andy?

• 59:34Speaker 04

  I'm on Instagram at AndrewHunterM.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Yep, and you can get to us as a group online as well. But if you want to send us anything, [email protected], that is our email address. All the emails go to Andy. He reads them through, he collects the best of them and he brings it to our bonus episode, which is the mailbag episode called "Drop Us A Line." We do it every two weeks. We absolutely love it. So if you've got a great story about something you've heard us say, send it there. Or if you have a great fact, also send it there because Andy collects those and we bring it to Little Fish, which is our new Monday show. Hopefully you've heard it by now, where instead of our facts, we do all of your facts. So if you want to listen to Jewel, go to patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish. You can join up there. We've got lots of fun tiers. If you want to just listen to our other shows, or you want to check out anything

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  else about us, want to go to nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. And if you want to see an incredible night of science, go to Leven Skir's AI tour, which is happening in the next couple of months. Leven, when do you start?

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  It's March. I start, I think, the 10th of March. I will start in Leeds and then I go all over the country. It's not in a geographical, logical order, so I'm going to drive up and down all the time.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:00:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Okay, great.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  So it's the last, the last three weeks of March and I'll end in London on March 28th.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  That's right, Leicester Square Theatre.

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  That's it.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Very exciting. All right. Well, that is it for us. Thank you as well to our production team, Liang Li, Ethan Ruparelia, and all of the other fishbusters who are working behind the scenes. And we're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

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• 1:02:18Speaker 01

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