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Transcript 11,060 words · 12 speakers
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1:11 Speaker 02 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the brilliant Maddie Moat. Now, if you have children of a certain age, then you will know exactly who Maddie is. She is often seen on the BBC doing various kids' shows, especially ones related to science communication. But if you want to know more about her, having heard her today on this show, and I'm absolutely certain you will, then the best thing to do is to go to her YouTube channel. So Maddie's YouTube channel is all about curiosity. It's all about animals, it's about plants, it's about travel, it's about technology. She is really right up our street. She loves everything about knowledge and her videos are absolutely fantastic.
1:55 Speaker 02 And if you want to find them... Then go to youtube.com/maddiemote, that's M-A-D-D-I-E-M-O-A-T-E, or just search for Maddie's name on the internet. If you'd like to learn more about us and what we're up to at the moment and in the future, then the best place probably at the moment is to go to Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish, you can sign up there. You don't have to pay anything if you sign up. It is a place to get little free bits of pieces here and there and learn about what's going on. And then, of course, on top of that, we do have our various tiers. If you want to support the podcast financially and in return for doing so, you will get all sorts of amazing things from ad-free episodes on our lowest tier,
2:37 Speaker 02 all the way up to live internet quizzes and merch at our very top tier. Anyway, there's loads to see there, so just go to patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish to find out more. But in the meantime, really hope you enjoy this show with the fantastic Maddie Moat. On with the podcast.
3:11 Speaker 03 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing Is A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin and Maddie Moat. And once again, we have gathered round 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 Maddie.
3:36 Speaker 04 Okay, so I thought I could pose this fact as a question, sort of a bit of a guessing game. So the fact is, in 1988, one particular company had to recall 30 million flutes. That is obviously a lot of instruments. Yeah. So the question is, who is this company? Flute makers. Flute makers. Obviously.
4:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. Flute makers. And they didn't put all the holes in.
4:04 Speaker 04 They didn't, okay.
4:05 Speaker 03 Oh, good call. It's a holeless flute, it's just a stick, really, that they sent out.
4:10 Speaker 05 I was thinking too many holes.
4:11 Speaker 03 Can you have too many holes in a flute?
4:14 Speaker 05 Definitely.
4:16 Speaker 05 Can you?
4:16 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
4:17 Speaker 04 I think so. I think it becomes a different instrument.
4:19 Speaker 03 It's only a better flute up to a point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so.
4:23 Speaker 02 You put your hands over the holes, don't you?
4:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
4:26 Speaker 04 You'd run out of fingers.
4:27 Speaker 03 Oh, but if you had a spare set of hands, like a pantomime flute, you know, there's someone running the lower bit of the flute.
4:33 Speaker 04 A double flute. Are they not flutes that go in both directions?
4:37 Speaker 03 Like Darth Maul's lightsaber.
4:41 Speaker 03 I feel we've stepped away from the question here.
4:43 Speaker 04 To help you out, these flutes were actually branded cool flutes. So I don't know if that has anything to do with how many...
4:49 Speaker 02 For kids?
4:49 Speaker 04 For kids, yeah. Yeah, well, for younger people. And actually, it wasn't just flutes that were recalled, but also binoculars that were little cardboard boxes with plastic lenses. They were recalled at the same time.
5:00 Speaker 03 Okay, McDolls.
5:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think you're on the right track.
5:02 Speaker 03 Okay, Burger King.
5:06 Speaker 04 So I could talk. Oh, go on now.
5:07 Speaker 03 You used to get toys and cereal.
5:08 Speaker 04 Absolutely. So there you go. Bingo. So these cool flutes, they were actually found in boxes of Corn Pops. And they were recalled by Kellogg's, Kellogg's cereal. So it turns out these cool flutes, they were made up of two little tubes that sort of went into a mouthpiece. And these tubes, they could fall out and they were a choking hazard. So they had to recall thirty million of them.
5:31 Speaker 02 You know what they could have done with those flutes? More holes.
5:34 Speaker 04 So the reason I was looking at this in the first place is because I've been, I guess, fairly interested in just this whole world of collectible toys recently, because it feels like we're getting a bit of a resurgence. The idea of blind boxes, toy collectibles is coming back.
5:47 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
5:47 Speaker 04 And I was thinking, it was so, you know, what was my equivalent when I was younger? And that for me was cereal box toys. But then I sort of decided, looking at the history of cereal box toys, and the toys were kind of fascinating. Like, do you remember ever, do you remember any particular toys?
6:02 Speaker 02 I think maybe my earliest ever memory is getting some Ghostbusters stickers from our cereal.
6:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:10 Speaker 02 When the film came out. So that was like early eighties, right?
6:13 Speaker 03 Yeah. I don't think I was allowed to get the kind of cereals which came with toys in them.
6:18 Speaker 02 No, they didn't have them in Old Bran, did they?
6:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:22 Speaker 05 They just give you a little leaflet about your mortgage.
6:26 Speaker 05 That's the fun for you to read.
6:29 Speaker 04 What about you, Dan? Do you remember getting any?
6:31 Speaker 03 I remember the whole enjoyment and excitement of getting them. And right now, I'm drawing a blank on the exact toys. But I do remember, like, quite often, they were within the pack itself. You had to open up the plastic and you had to go through the fruit loops. And a lot of families had a policy that you had to wait till it fell out during a pour, as opposed to just getting right in and grabbing it.
6:51 Speaker 04 Totally. It was whoever poured it into their bowl. That was the unwritten rule.
6:55 Speaker 02 Andy, you're an only child, aren't you? So you wouldn't have had this issue. But obviously, if you've got three or four kids, and you've only got one toy in a pack.
7:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, but I think that's fair enough, the pouring out thing. Like, you're not allowed to plunge your hand into the Christmas pudding to pull out the sixth.
7:10 Speaker 02 That's not allowed.
7:13 Speaker 02 They're getting more insights into Andy's childhood. Like, one really interesting thing is the people who made them had to make them a certain weight. And that is because of something called the Brazil Nut Effect. That if you get lots of things that are different sizes and different weights, and you jiggle them around, eventually, the bigger things will end up at the top, and the smaller things will end up at the bottom. And this is something that's, you see this in all sorts of places, even like in avalanches, like the big bits of snow will be at the top and the small bits at the bottom. But they had this specific size and weight of these toys so that they knew that if they were jiggled around in transport, the toy would always be kind of in the middle.
7:50 Speaker 03 Oh.
7:51 Speaker 04 Oh, I didn't know that.
7:53 Speaker 03 Yes. What was yours? You haven't given us yours.
7:56 Speaker 04 Well, so I remember a colour changing spoon that I got in Cocoa Pops.
8:00 Speaker 03 Did you?
8:01 Speaker 04 Yeah. So when it would go into the cold milk, it would change colour.
8:04 Speaker 03 Oh, my god.
8:05 Speaker 04 But actually, one of those, looking at the various toys that have been over the years, it very much started out as China cereal bowls that you would have to send off by collecting tokens on the back of boxes. Then Kellogg's sort of saw that they were doing this with Quaker Oats, and Kellogg's were like, we can get on the back of this. So they started making these farmyard storybooks with various flaps that you could make funny animals out of. And then that sort of like started the spiral of, okay, well, what else, what toys can we put inside the packet?
8:33 Speaker 05 Hmm.
8:34 Speaker 04 And actually, this was sort of, I guess it became extremely popular after the Second World War, so we're sort of looking at the atomic age. So a lot of early cereal box toys are
8:44 Speaker 05 Radioactive?
8:45 Speaker 04 Literally, yes.
8:46 Speaker 05 No.
8:47 Speaker 04 No.
8:47 Speaker 05 What?
8:48 Speaker 04 Yes, genuinely.
8:49 Speaker 05 Oh, my God.
8:50 Speaker 04 But genuinely radioactive toys were placed inside cereal boxes.
8:54 Speaker 05 Well, then you know where it is in the packet because you can see the glow.
8:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. When I was a kid, there was adverts, if you went Ready Breck, you would always have a glow around your whole body. I didn't realise it was a radioactive glow.
9:06 Speaker 04 I remember if you had too much Sunny Delight, you sort of glowed orange, but that was a completely different thing.
9:11 Speaker 02 We're all showing our age here.
9:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, totally. But this toy, it was called the Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring, genuinely. And you would get this inside Kix cereal, which you could get for 15 cents, this is in the US.
9:22 Speaker 05 Wow.
9:23 Speaker 04 It was a gold adjustable ring. There was a little removable cap at the back, a little red cap that you could take off, and that's where you could hide secret messages.
9:31 Speaker 05 Okay.
9:31 Speaker 04 But then it contained something called, now I think I'm saying this right, but a spintharoscope, I don't know if anyone's heard of that before.
9:39 Speaker 05 No.
9:39 Speaker 04 It's basically a little device that would contain a small amount of radioactive material, so in this case, it's something called polonium 210.
9:46 Speaker 05 I've heard of polonium.
9:47 Speaker 04 There we go, polonium.
9:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, normally like polonium's been deployed on the streets of London, not free polonium, and you'll say, what?
9:54 Speaker 04 So this was, you know, radioactive material discovered by Marie Curie, tiny, small amounts of it were placed inside this ring, and then you would look into the atomic bomb through a little sort of lens that contained zinc sulphide.
10:06 Speaker 02 Right.
10:06 Speaker 04 And as the polonium was decaying, obviously you've got alpha particles that are shedding, they're hitting the zinc sulphide screen, creating little flashes. So the idea is your child could look inside the ring and actually see the scintillations of this radioactive material.
10:21 Speaker 05 Yet it's the flute we recall.
10:22 Speaker 04 Exactly. And because it had choking pieces, yet this ring could be sort of taken apart with small caps and things, and apparently that's fine.
10:30 Speaker 05 That's extraordinary.
10:31 Speaker 02 Um, I read this about this on Snopes, the website, and they said that there wasn't enough in it to do you any harm.
10:37 Speaker 05 Can I tell you guys my favourite cereal promotion ever?
10:41 Speaker 04 Please do.
10:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, we all have one.
10:43 Speaker 05 It's done by, it's done by Quaker Oats.
10:46 Speaker 02 Okay.
10:46 Speaker 05 It's 1954.
10:49 Speaker 05 They bought 19 acres of land in Yukon, in the Yukon Territory, Gold Rush Country in Canada. And they divided up these 19 acres into 21 million square inches.
11:03 Speaker 02 Right.
11:04 Speaker 05 And they printed 21 million property deeds, each one for one square inch. And if you sent in a box top, you would be sent a square inch of the Yukon.
11:13 Speaker 02 Wow.
11:14 Speaker 03 What?
11:14 Speaker 02 How interesting. When was this, Sandy?
11:16 Speaker 05 1954.
11:17 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:18 Speaker 05 It was not legally binding.
11:19 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
11:20 Speaker 04 What does that mean? Could you go along and like dig in that tiny little patch?
11:25 Speaker 02 It's gold!
11:25 Speaker 04 With like a teaspoon. That you got in a cereal box.
11:29 Speaker 05 One, one boy who got one sent in four toothpicks and some string and he said, can you fence my inch off, please?
11:35 Speaker 04 Oh, no!
11:37 Speaker 02 That's amazing. So sweet. Um, people do collect these toys still, don't they? I went on to eBay to see what kind of things I could buy from cereal packets.
11:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, I did too.
11:48 Speaker 02 Okay, what have we found? Maddie, what have you found?
11:49 Speaker 04 Um, well, actually it was the ring, the atomic bomb ring I found with the box was going for $645.
11:57 Speaker 02 The box makes a difference, doesn't it?
11:58 Speaker 04 Huge difference.
11:59 Speaker 02 And it's not like, you know, if you buy like a Marvel superhero figurine or something, it has to be inside the box.
12:06 Speaker 05 Right.
12:06 Speaker 02 You just have the box next to it flattened with the toy next to it.
12:10 Speaker 05 Oh, is that still, but that's still okay?
12:11 Speaker 02 So you just have to be inside the box or anything.
12:12 Speaker 05 Oh, God.
12:13 Speaker 02 Uh, I found one which was, um, some Cause Monsters from Frankenberry cereal in America. And they were 1,700 pounds.
12:22 Speaker 05 Seventy.
12:23 Speaker 04 Wow! I didn't see anything that valued it.
12:25 Speaker 02 It feels like a lot.
12:26 Speaker 05 Frankenberry.
12:27 Speaker 02 Frankenberry, do you know Frankenberry? Have you come across them? That was in the 90s, I think, in America they had them and they were a bit like, what are those cereals that have little marshmallows in? That have like got leprechauns on them?
12:37 Speaker 04 Lucky Chums.
12:37 Speaker 02 Lucky Chums, yeah, yeah. So it was like that, but it was monsters and the, um, marshmallows were like pink and purple and stuff. And the kids were eating it and this dye would go straight. Through them and come out of the toilet and it looked like, you know, I've had this when my daughter eats beetroot. And I'm like to my wife, Belina, Belina, we need to go to the toilet. No, she had beetroot yesterday, but like it would come out and they had a thing called Frankenberry stool. That was in like medical papers saying that this is.
13:05 Speaker 05 Right.
13:06 Speaker 02 Looked like people had blood in their poo.
13:08 Speaker 05 Was this one of the cereals that was basically 95% of sugar?
13:12 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:13 Speaker 05 With some, with some like.
13:14 Speaker 02 I don't want to say, cause I think they might still be extant, but yeah, I think there was a lot of sugar in them.
13:19 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:19 Speaker 02 But the interesting thing about that is so cereals Kellogg's, like the Kellogg's brothers, they had a sanitarium in um, north of America somewhere. Battle Creek. Battle Creek, that's it. And there were two brothers and one of the brothers decided we're going to start putting sugar in it. In order to attract younger people to eat it and not just be a health food. And they really fell out over that and they properly fell out.
13:42 Speaker 04 But ultimately it was the fact that these were sugary cereals, which is why we stopped getting cereal box toys. It was, there was meant, there were many factors, but one of them was the fact that these were slightly less nutritious foods. I think there was, there was a pledge, it was a voluntary pledge, which included the likes of General Mills and Kellogg's. They got together and they said, Hey, you know what? It's not right for us to push less nutritious foods at children, which is why they started taking toys away. Although at first they removed toys for children, but that's when they started putting in things like pedometers. And sort of reflective bike stickers. So they didn't quite, they didn't sort of remove them.
14:21 Speaker 02 Tell me more.
14:24 Speaker 04 But yeah, so that was kind of their attempt to be like, okay, we're not putting toys in them, but we can put sports related gifts in.
14:32 Speaker 05 Can I tell you, you guys something about a friend of the podcast?
14:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:35 Speaker 05 So Henry Perkey, you guys might remember.
14:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:39 Speaker 05 Inventor of shredded wheat.
14:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:40 Speaker 05 And father of the man who then invented round shredded wheat.
14:44 Speaker 04 Okay.
14:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. Very much a nepo cereal, isn't it?
14:47 Speaker 05 Absolutely.
14:48 Speaker 04 I thought it was knitted by grannies. Can't believe it.
14:52 Speaker 05 Myth busted. But his initial intention was not making shredded wheat to sell them to people. He wanted everyone to buy shredded wheat making machines. This was his big thing.
15:03 Speaker 02 Okay.
15:03 Speaker 05 He created a machine which shredded wheat. And then people just said, can we have some more of the shredded wheat, please? And he said, don't you want the machine that makes it? So there could have been a world we all had on our counter.
15:14 Speaker 02 Like a SodaStream.
15:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly.
15:16 Speaker 03 Or an air fryer. I have a slightly random question for you, Maddie. So when I first moved to Australia when I was 12, I became starstruck when I met the voice of the Australian Cocoa Pop Monkey.
15:27 Speaker 04 I know the British one.
15:29 Speaker 03 Wow, this is what I was gonna ask. You must know all of these people because of what you do. The world of voices for these iconic characters.
15:37 Speaker 04 This is so bizarre that you've asked me this because genuinely, one of my best friends is the voice of the Cocoa Pops Monkey.
15:42 Speaker 03 No.
15:43 Speaker 04 No, I'm not even kidding.
15:44 Speaker 02 Oh, my gosh.
15:45 Speaker 04 Genuinely, yeah.
15:46 Speaker 02 Wang.
15:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, he does really well from it. But, you know, the Cocoa Pops Monkey doesn't talk so much anymore. So as far as I'm aware, you know, every couple of years, they'll say, hey, can you come to the recording booth? And he'll just have to record a giggle.
16:00 Speaker 02 I was gonna say, I don't think I would recognise his voice anymore.
16:03 Speaker 05 Tony the Tiger is the one I would think of.
16:04 Speaker 02 I would recognise, if he was in the room next door, if I was in a restaurant and Tony the Tiger was at the next table.
16:10 Speaker 05 You'd have to be moved.
16:11 Speaker 02 No, I would recognise it was him, you know what I mean?
16:14 Speaker 05 Guy who thinks everything's great. My soup is not great.
16:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, as far as I know, in his many years of being the voice of the Cocoa Pops Monkey, Coco, I don't think the monkey talks much. Chocolatey goodness, something about, turn to the milk, chocolatey. Was that it?
16:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:35 Speaker 04 I think that was, that was kind of the catchphrase.
16:37 Speaker 05 That was a bit, that was a song where they briefly and ill-fatedly changed their name to Choco Crispies and then realised too late it didn't scan when they, I'd rather have a bowl of Choco Crispies.
16:48 Speaker 05 Thanks, everybody.
16:51 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
17:06 Speaker 07 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
17:17 Speaker 06 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
17:22 Speaker 08 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
17:28 Speaker 06 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
17:49 Speaker 03 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that after years of publicly arguing that the Milky Way is the only galaxy in the universe, one of Harvard University's head astronomers realized that actually he was wrong, and then went on to map 76,000 galaxies.
18:08 Speaker 04 So awkward.
18:11 Speaker 04 Who was he?
18:11 Speaker 03 His name was Harlow Shapley. He lived 1885 to 1972, American astronomer, and he served as the head of the Harvard College Observatory. Now, what's amazing is, up until the 1920s, most astronomers believed that our galaxy was the single galaxy in the universe. And that was it. If we were expanding, it would have been into that. You know, that was the idea of the time. So suddenly, a few scientists started coming up, saying, actually, I think it might be a bit bigger, one of whom was Edwin Hubble. And Shapley really thought that this was junk science. He took part in a debate with a man called Curtis, where they both presented their findings to say whether or not it was the case. And he stuck with it. And so it wasn't until Hubble eventually showed him proof,
18:56 Speaker 03 by sending him a letter of something that he'd discovered, that he then said, this has completely destroyed my universe, and accepted it. Which is the wonderful thing about science. It's not opinion. If the facts are in front of you, you can go on to map 76,000 galaxies. So it's quite nice.
19:11 Speaker 04 That is such a good quote as well. This is the letter that destroyed my universe, quite literally, and in many, many ways. I love that.
19:18 Speaker 02 Yeah. It's really cool. This debate they had is known as the great debate between Shapley and Curtis. And basically Curtis thought that there was extra galaxies. And Shapley thought that there was only one galaxy, but that we weren't in the middle of it. We were kind of on the side of it. And Curtis thought that we were in the middle of our galaxy. And it turned out they were both wrong or both right at the same time, which again is quite good about science. It's like, you might be right, you might be wrong, or more likely you might be kind of right in some ways and wrong in some ways.
19:48 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. Because we're not in the middle of our galaxy, we're on an arm, right? We're on an outer tentacle.
19:55 Speaker 03 Of the giant great octopus.
19:57 Speaker 05 Thank you.
19:58 Speaker 04 The centre of our galaxy is within the Sagittarius constellation. And actually, it's the part of the Sagittarius constellation, I think it's the five brightest stars that make up the shape of a teapot. So actually, the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is sort of just above the spout of a teapot.
20:15 Speaker 05 I know. A little teapot.
20:17 Speaker 03 Giant British flag at the centre.
20:22 Speaker 04 So it was Edwin Hubble that basically proved Shapley that he was wrong. But this isn't the first time that Edwin Hubble has proved somebody wrong.
20:29 Speaker 05 Oh, really?
20:29 Speaker 04 In fact, he also proved Einstein wrong at one point as well. Back then, Albert Einstein was looking at his calculations of space and going, this doesn't really quite make sense. Because if gravity is such a big, important thing, then surely everything should be coming towards each other. Surely the galaxy should be shrinking. So to make sense of the maths, he introduced this thing called a constant, a cosmological constant, which is just from now on, space is static. I say it's still because that's what makes sense.
20:58 Speaker 02 Wow.
20:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
20:58 Speaker 04 And then Hubble came along and was like, oh, really sorry, but actually, look at this, here's my proof. We now know about looking at the way light moves and looking at redshift. I can tell you that the universe is in fact expanding. So I'm sorry, you're wrong. And Einstein said, yeah, that was probably my greatest blunder.
21:15 Speaker 05 Hubble knocks him down, doesn't he?
21:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:18 Speaker 05 Hubble didn't have a funeral. His wife wouldn't tell anyone what had happened to him. I just find this mysterious.
21:26 Speaker 03 But we know how he died, right? Like, it wasn't a mysterious death.
21:29 Speaker 05 I don't, but I know that he died.
21:31 Speaker 03 I think, yeah, I think probably he died normally and then she just didn't tell us the location.
21:37 Speaker 02 What Dan's saying is we're not saying there's anything nefarious going on with his wife.
21:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm not saying there isn't, though.
21:41 Speaker 02 Are you?
21:42 Speaker 05 Oh, well, I'm just not saying.
21:43 Speaker 03 Reopening this cold case.
21:44 Speaker 05 I'm saying we don't know. And that's, that's actually the scientific method to just say we don't know and then hope someone else does the work.
21:52 Speaker 05 No, he didn't have a funeral and his wife refused to say either where he was buried or whether his ashes have been scattered or where or anything like that. It was just an intensely private thing.
21:59 Speaker 02 He was making lots of enemies of scientists by proving them wrong every day.
22:03 Speaker 05 Exactly.
22:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:04 Speaker 05 Exactly.
22:04 Speaker 04 There's nowhere to visit, but I guess he does have a fairly big telescope, you know, sort of like an observatory up there now that we can all remember him by.
22:11 Speaker 05 That's true.
22:12 Speaker 03 Yes, you're right.
22:13 Speaker 05 He didn't start out as a scientist. He started out, thanks to family pressure, studying law.
22:17 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
22:18 Speaker 05 Because his family told him, look, there's no future in this science thing. And then he spent a year teaching high school physics, which I love. Imagine if Mr. Hubble was your physics teacher. That's pretty cool. And basketball as well. He was very nifty on the basketball court.
22:32 Speaker 03 And not just nifty, he was a major basketball player for his college. And a lot of people said he could have become a professional in a couple of different sports. So he had that little decision to make.
22:42 Speaker 04 Those guys, good at everything.
22:46 Speaker 03 Shapley also had an interesting beginning because he was an incredibly clever kid. He advanced in his school years, you know, those kids that you hear that graduate, you know, their high school when they're like nine. He was that kind of kid. And he didn't know what he wanted to study. And he decided, I'm going to just study and do in life what I see first on the list, the alphabetical list of subjects for college.
23:09 Speaker 02 So he became an acrobat.
23:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, but only because aardvark studies were full.
23:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, he said, he said he rejected archaeology because he couldn't pronounce it properly. So he picked astronomy. It's probably a nice mythology he's created for himself, but that's, that's his claim.
23:26 Speaker 02 In the 40s, he rescued lots of his colleagues from the Nazis. So lots of scientists in Germany, especially Jewish ones, were being pictimized. And he got them out of there and brought them over to America and sort of signed, said, oh, they're going to be really important for our universities. So I'm going to get them out here. And they reckon he saved at least a thousand families from the Nazis.
23:50 Speaker 05 That was Shapley.
23:51 Speaker 02 That was Shapley. And he said that the stars will not be of much good to us if we do not preserve the minds with which to comprehend them. And then after that, he was accused of being a communist. And that's because in those days, you could be accused of being a premature anti fascist. If you, if you like, you were allowed to not like.
24:14 Speaker 05 This never happens, I swear.
24:17 Speaker 02 So the idea is like, you, if you didn't like the fascists in 1945, that was fine. But if you didn't like them in the 30s, that was dodgy in America.
24:26 Speaker 05 Cause they were still, the idea was that Hitler was the one who saved Germany from communism.
24:30 Speaker 02 Generally speaking, in America, people were not massively anti the Nazis until the war.
24:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:35 Speaker 02 And so if you could be seen to be anti them before the war, people thought you were a communist.
24:40 Speaker 04 Oh.
24:41 Speaker 02 Isn't that amazing?
24:42 Speaker 03 So you had a narrow window to say, you know what? I'm not sure about these guys.
24:47 Speaker 02 The more I hear about this.
24:50 Speaker 02 Well, yeah, he, he appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee, the McCarthy Committee. But yeah, really interesting guy.
24:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's fascinating. So the, the star that was spotted by Hubble is arguably the second most important star in the universe.
25:08 Speaker 02 So is this the one that proved that we were right?
25:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's called V1 and it's located in the Andromeda Nebula. It's 2.2 million light years away and it has one one hundredth of the brightness of the faintest. Star that is visible to our naked eye.
25:23 Speaker 04 Right.
25:24 Speaker 03 And I've read that it's often used as a marker for when you're judging other galaxies now. Because you need a marker point to go where is further and where is not.
25:34 Speaker 04 So because it's a little bit dimmer, they can go, that is definitely really far away. Way, way further away than anything that could be within our galaxy.
25:41 Speaker 03 Exactly, yeah. It's pretty amazing.
25:43 Speaker 02 Kind of just about see the Andromeda galaxy with a naked eye if you're really, really, really lucky. It just looks like a smudge if it's really dark.
25:50 Speaker 03 Right.
25:51 Speaker 02 They thought it was a star for a long time and then it was only, of course, when they got these really good telescopes. You could tell that it was a group of stars.
25:56 Speaker 03 That's quite a close galaxy, I presume?
25:58 Speaker 02 Closest, I think, is it?
26:00 Speaker 04 Not sure.
26:00 Speaker 02 Maybe. It's one of our closest. I think one day the Andromeda is going to crash into ours. You don't need to worry about it because it'll be like in millions and millions and millions of years.
26:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I've also read that if two galaxies are going to crash into each other, the size of galaxies would mean that you would just pass through each other and not notice.
26:16 Speaker 04 What?
26:16 Speaker 03 Oh, that's cool. Yeah, the space in between each place in a galaxy is so great.
26:22 Speaker 04 Surely there'd be some collisions with all just the stuff floating about.
26:26 Speaker 02 I think is that the gravity would pull them kind of together and they would join the mass of the stars.
26:32 Speaker 03 There'll be some dents in the fender, I'm sure, at the end of the process. Yes.
26:37 Speaker 02 Fifty billion of the stars in our galaxy now, they arrived here eight billion years ago when our galaxy collided with another galaxy called the Sausage Galaxy.
26:49 Speaker 03 Amazing. Amazing.
26:51 Speaker 04 I don't even know whether to believe you.
26:53 Speaker 02 It's true. It's true. Sometimes, some sparse spots sometimes call it the Gaia and Seladus Galaxy.
27:01 Speaker 02 Definitely in some places called the Sausage Galaxy and it collided with ours and we've got a lot of stars from it.
27:06 Speaker 03 Sausage and teapot is basically what we're talking about.
27:08 Speaker 05 It's an English breakfast. Is this one giant?
27:13 Speaker 03 Full English that we're living in.
27:15 Speaker 04 But on the sausage front, I do think some astronauts have reported just generally space to smell a little bit like barbecue. Oh, really? Yeah, because when they've come back in after a spacewalk, they've noticed the scent of barbecue on their, on their space suits. Wow. But also in terms of what does space smell like? If we actually look at the Milky Way, so our galaxy, there is an area within the Milky Way, got this giant cloud of gas and dust, you've got this star forming region, and they discovered there it was packed full of this chemical known as ethyl formate, which is responsible for giving both raspberries and rum their flavour. Oh. So not only do we have the tea pots and sausages, we also have rum and raspberry as well.
27:57 Speaker 03 And milk.
27:57 Speaker 04 And, yeah.
27:58 Speaker 03 Milk for the tea, the Milky Way.
27:59 Speaker 04 Of course.
28:00 Speaker 03 Yeah. How exciting. See, we should acknowledge as well, a quick shout out to Henrietta Swan-Levitt.
28:08 Speaker 04 Yes.
28:08 Speaker 03 Who was known as the human computer and at one point also worked at Harvard University's observatory, many, many years before Shapley got there. She's the person who worked out a thing about the rate of pulses coming out of a star, which was then used by Hubble.
28:25 Speaker 04 Oh, I see. So she kind of like came up with the standard of this is how you can work out how far away a star is by measuring the luminosity of its pulses.
28:34 Speaker 02 Now you measure luminosity in crabs, I think, which is the crab nebula has a certain
28:41 Speaker 04 glowing crab?
28:41 Speaker 02 That's a certain luminosity. And it's like, is it brighter or less bright than the crab nebula? So if something's seven crabs, it's seven times brighter than the crab nebula.
28:50 Speaker 03 Is this just a big, like, bar and grill restaurant? Out of space?
28:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:56 Speaker 03 I don't mind it.
28:57 Speaker 04 We should start a themed restaurant because the menu is looking really, really good. I guess, I don't know, but with these, these, the pulsars with these stars and a pulsing with the, the Cephalid stars that we're able to measure distance with, I'm assuming that they're very, very unlikely to have life around them because the light they're emitting is so, and so unreliable.
29:15 Speaker 03 I've got a room at the moment with a bulb which is dodgy and you can't be in that room.
29:20 Speaker 05 It's on one of the old dimmer switches and we've put a new dimmer bulb in and it's just an absolute nightmare to be in. I hate it. Yeah. So that makes sense. That makes sense to me.
29:28 Speaker 04 It's just frustrating. But oh, that's really hot. Oh, that's cold.
29:31 Speaker 02 Thank you, Professor. What I really like about this thing about Shapley and Hubble is they suddenly increased the size of the universe that we knew, right? So we start with Ptolemy, all the way back in ancient times, and he thought that the entire universe was 20,000 times the Earth's radius.
29:51 Speaker 05 20,000, okay.
29:51 Speaker 02 And he worked that out by saying, okay, well, the Earth is here in the middle. Everything goes around us. And then there's Mercury and Venus and the Sun and Mars and Jupiter. And then there's something else and something else. And eventually you get to the stars. And he had this nice little sort of nesting tables where everything goes and he worked that out. And then Newton comes along and says, okay, well, the stars don't seem to move much according to each other, so they don't have parallax, which is, parallax is like if you, if you put your thumb in front of your face and then close one eye and close the other, it seems to move. But if you do it with something far away, it moves much less. So he worked out with the stars, they're not doing that, so they must be really far away. So that got
30:32 Speaker 02 the universe much, much bigger. And then a guy called Friedrich Bessel, he managed to work out the parallax, that there was slight parallax and worked out that the, now the universe is light years in size. And then we got this great debate. We worked out that there's more than one galaxy. And then they found background radiation, which meant that suddenly the universe is, we don't know how big it is, but the observable universe is as far as light could get to us from when the universe started.
31:01 Speaker 05 Yes. And I've heard about some-
31:03 Speaker 02 I just love how it kind of expands slightly.
31:05 Speaker 05 Yeah. How much further can it go?
31:06 Speaker 02 At some stage it'll get bigger still. We just don't know how it's gonna get bigger.
31:09 Speaker 05 We don't know how, yeah. So cool. Well, this is the thing, you know, the new James Webb Space Telescope? Yeah. Very, very, very big telescope.
31:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:16 Speaker 05 Launched into orbit for better views and things like that. And it has found six enormous ancient galaxies, which would be nicknamed the Universe Breakers. And I love this. And they shouldn't exist, right?
31:28 Speaker 04 Wow.
31:29 Speaker 05 There should only be, from the point of where they are, you know, we know how long the light has taken to travel to us, we know the rough age they are, they should not have had time to form, because they date to 500 million years after the Big Bang. There should only be tiny baby galaxies there, but they're very well developed.
31:45 Speaker 02 And please tell me they look like a hash brown.
31:50 Speaker 04 We need it on the menu.
31:57 Speaker 05 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is, the first ever geothermal power station powered five light bulbs.
32:07 Speaker 04 Wow.
32:08 Speaker 05 Amazing. Some sources say four, but I prefer that, I'm backing it, I think it powered five. That's the source I found, yeah.
32:16 Speaker 02 The fifth one, it was a light bulb, but it kept going on and off, and it was really annoying.
32:20 Speaker 05 I just have to turn it off after a while, work in the dark. This was in 1904, and we're in Tuscany.
32:26 Speaker 02 Lovely.
32:27 Speaker 05 Lovely. I love it when Andy paints a picture. Absolutely. Well, just here, the, those Tuscan local animals and flora and fauna.
32:35 Speaker 02 Glass of Montepulciano.
32:37 Speaker 05 Beautiful.
32:37 Speaker 02 Overlooking the Tower of Pisa.
32:39 Speaker 05 Probably. There we are.
32:42 Speaker 02 Lots of tourists kind of pretending to hold it up.
32:46 Speaker 05 And this is in an area called the Devil's Valley.
32:49 Speaker 04 Oh, so not the Tower of Pisa.
32:54 Speaker 05 But I suppose it's appropriate that it was the Devil's Valley, because we're going underground.
32:58 Speaker 04 Okay.
32:59 Speaker 05 Into the warm. And this was where a guy called Prince Piero Ginnori Conti lit up the first ever geothermal power station. So that is taking heat from underground, bringing it above ground, and there are various different ways you can harness the power. One of them is by directly using steam from underground to turn a turbine, which then spins up and generates electricity. There are lots of different methods of doing it, which I'm sure we'll get into, but this first little experiment did four or five light bulbs. It was just so tiny. Yeah. But it's the cradle of geothermal, which is now being talked of as a, a big solution to lots of power shortages and a, a much, much cleaner way of powering the world. Than fossils. So there's a lot of renewed excitement about it.
33:41 Speaker 03 And it's still going, isn't it? Over a hundred years later, that exact spot, they have a huge factory that is producing, yeah.
33:47 Speaker 02 That Devil's Valley was the landscape that inspired Dante to make hell in Divine Comedy.
33:53 Speaker 04 Really?
33:53 Speaker 02 So when he writes about hell, he's talking about that place.
33:56 Speaker 03 Oh my goodness.
33:57 Speaker 05 That's cool.
33:58 Speaker 04 Okay, so not the picture I've seen or painted for us at all.
34:01 Speaker 05 Not from.
34:02 Speaker 04 The opposite.
34:04 Speaker 02 But yeah, really amazing, this guy. Was he a prince? I read he was a prince of Tre Vignano.
34:09 Speaker 03 I think he was. I couldn't get to the bottom of that either. It's sort of in some places it didn't mention it, and then other places suddenly prince was attached to his name.
34:15 Speaker 05 I think he was. I think he was an aristocrat. He was, I'm afraid, second mention for the fascists in this show. He was mates with Mussolini.
34:24 Speaker 02 Before or after it all went wrong?
34:27 Speaker 05 He was friends when it was fashionable in Italy to be friends with Mussolini. I don't know what happened after the war.
34:32 Speaker 04 Okay.
34:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:33 Speaker 02 Well, I know what happened to Mussolini after the war. But he was processing boric acid.
34:39 Speaker 05 Yes.
34:40 Speaker 02 Which sounds great. Boric acid.
34:42 Speaker 04 From this particular area.
34:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. And then he realised that he could make electricity from it and then started this geothermal company afterwards, didn't he?
34:52 Speaker 05 Right.
34:53 Speaker 04 I'm surprised this first happened in Tuscany, actually, because when I think of areas of geothermal activity, I immediately think of Iceland. That's kind of where I immediately go.
35:02 Speaker 05 I think Italy is like a relatively big user of geothermal, despite like it's a tiny, tiny percentage of its power.
35:09 Speaker 02 They do have a few volcanoes there, don't they?
35:12 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
35:13 Speaker 02 I suppose.
35:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, basically, that's the thing. Traditional geothermal relies on very specific conditions, which is it's tectonic things, lots of heat close to the surface, so you don't need to drill down for miles and miles and miles. So Iceland is brilliant for it because it's got exactly that. Kenya's very good for it. Iceland has installed underfloor heating outdoors.
35:33 Speaker 03 Nice.
35:34 Speaker 05 Outdoors.
35:34 Speaker 04 Under the roads.
35:35 Speaker 05 Under the roads and pavements.
35:36 Speaker 04 To stop everything freezing over.
35:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
35:38 Speaker 04 It costs so much warm water, just so close to the surface.
35:41 Speaker 02 They just have, it's stunning.
35:43 Speaker 05 That's very clever.
35:44 Speaker 07 It's very clever.
35:45 Speaker 04 They also have the, they grow more bananas in glass houses in Iceland than they do anywhere else.
35:51 Speaker 07 Really?
35:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, I know they don't, so they aren't growing bananas commercially to sell because they don't actually have enough light to sort of over the turnover of bananas to be good enough. But they do have a lot of geothermally heated greenhouses. So I think they can get enough heat going. I think the greenhouses have to be around 20 degrees permanently to get the bananas to grow, but then to also be using the geothermal energy to provide enough light that the bananas would also need. It's just not commercially viable.
36:20 Speaker 05 There are like dark bananas that you can harvest.
36:23 Speaker 04 Dark bananas.
36:24 Speaker 05 In the, in the like eight month night, whatever.
36:27 Speaker 04 They'll put, they'll, you know, they'll put a bit of light on, but I just don't think it's enough because they need so much light, but also tomatoes, various tropical fruits, algae. They've grown a lot of algae now using geothermal energy in Iceland.
36:39 Speaker 05 Lovely.
36:40 Speaker 04 Scrape it off to get your spirulina superfood.
36:44 Speaker 05 Andy, in case you haven't picked it up already, I've got a reputation as the guy on the show who likes the boring stuff.
36:51 Speaker 02 It's slightly unfair because we all like the boring stuff.
36:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, but I really get excited, don't I?
36:56 Speaker 02 Underfloor heating, invented by the Romans. They had like, uh, your house or your villa would be maybe a few meters above the ground or a meter above the ground. And then people would set fires or, or boil water underneath and that would get you warm. But they put geothermal underfloor heating in Bath, in the city of Bath in the UK. Because down there, there's quite a lot of hot springs and stuff. They could actually have, there's a few villas in Bath where you would get the geothermal stuff.
37:26 Speaker 05 It's amazing. Isn't it incredible that ancient Rome 2000 years ago has underfloor heating and yet I don't? Do you know what I mean? Like, where's the, where's the justice?
37:35 Speaker 02 You can afford it, Andy.
37:36 Speaker 05 You can do it.
37:37 Speaker 02 It's such a pain in the bum to put in, you know?
37:39 Speaker 05 Yes. Like, why didn't they put it into my home whenever they were building it? Like, what's going on? Why is that?
37:44 Speaker 02 I think in the UK, we don't necessarily need it that much because we don't really get very hot or very cold days.
37:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
37:51 Speaker 03 I had it in my home in southeast London, uh, when I lived there in our bathroom. But as the, as the builder was putting the final tile down, he accidentally shredded one of the wires and it was, it was too expensive to do anything about it.
38:04 Speaker 02 What do you mean?
38:04 Speaker 03 So we have.
38:05 Speaker 02 He dropped it in one of those shredded wheat machines.
38:09 Speaker 03 Basically, he said that he did something to one of the wires and so it never worked.
38:13 Speaker 05 You're joking.
38:13 Speaker 03 No, but it was there.
38:14 Speaker 04 So it's all there.
38:15 Speaker 03 It's all there, just it never worked. So we technically had it and we would always think about it.
38:21 Speaker 05 That must have been a big consolation as you walked in onto the freezing cold floor in the winter morning.
38:26 Speaker 03 We would tell people who visited, when we got under the floor heating, it doesn't work, but we have it.
38:31 Speaker 05 Did you still pay him?
38:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was.
38:34 Speaker 02 He's done the work.
38:35 Speaker 03 He's done the work.
38:36 Speaker 04 Scary tradesman.
38:37 Speaker 03 It's fault wires break.
38:40 Speaker 05 Wow.
38:41 Speaker 04 It does make me think though, you know, like if, if someone in the past had made a slightly different decision, would we be using geothermal energy more across the world? Because obviously there are some places where it makes sense to use it because it's easier to access. But I guess if you, if you drill down deep enough, eventually you are going to tap into geothermal energy. So why is it we're not using it more? Because it does make an awful lot of sense.
39:04 Speaker 05 It's just a pain to get down. It's just a pain to drill. It's, it's an initial pain. That's the problem.
39:08 Speaker 02 It's very expensive to set up.
39:10 Speaker 05 Exactly.
39:10 Speaker 02 And if you do it the old way where you're looking for quite a hot magma field.
39:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:15 Speaker 02 Because like you say, if you go deep enough anywhere, you're going to get hot.
39:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:19 Speaker 02 What they want to do is find somewhere that's not that deep.
39:21 Speaker 04 Sure.
39:22 Speaker 02 And dig down. And those places are really hard to find. It's not like, you know, it's obvious because these trees grow there. So it's going to be there. You just, you basically have to keep digging until you find the right place.
39:33 Speaker 05 Right.
39:34 Speaker 02 And like this recently, they've used AI in Nevada to find these zones where you can dig into. And they don't really know how the AIs found it. They basically put in all the information of all the different zones around the world where you can get this easy geothermal energy. And the AI models have just found the signal out of the noise. It's just like, they've worked out where it is, even though they're not quite sure how they did it, but it does work.
39:59 Speaker 05 Wow.
40:00 Speaker 02 It's one good use of it.
40:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:02 Speaker 02 And now they got enough energy from the geothermal to pay for one AI question on ChatGPT.
40:09 Speaker 03 As we said, it's tricky to do everywhere because digging down is expensive and it's, it's more economical if there's lots of heat close to the surface, which is only true in a few places.
40:19 Speaker 05 So there are lots of things being tried to get around this now. One of them is just most heat you need, unless it's like industrial heat for a factory, is actually pretty low. And so that's these ball holes, the ground source heat pump thing, like China's going gangbusters on that. And there are other kind of wacky versions of geothermal. There's enhanced, there's advanced, and there's supercritical hot rock.
40:40 Speaker 02 Okay, I'm gonna choose the last one.
40:43 Speaker 04 That's a cool kind of rock music.
40:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, that should be a genre.
40:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, shouldn't it?
40:48 Speaker 05 So here's an idea that's being experimented with. You drill a couple of holes, you drill down a mile or two, right? Two separate shafts.
40:58 Speaker 02 Right.
40:59 Speaker 05 You then drill sideways between the shafts, okay? So you've joined them up, you've made a sort of.
41:03 Speaker 02 Like a U shape.
41:04 Speaker 05 Like a U shape, yeah, exactly. Then you pump water down hole one and you're pumping it towards hole number two.
41:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:14 Speaker 05 And you're sort of cracking the rocks along the way. And the water is taking all the heat out of these rather hot rocks.
41:20 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:20 Speaker 05 And then the water is pumped out of a second well and it's at 200 degrees Celsius. How can it be at 200 degrees? Water boils at 100 degrees.
41:30 Speaker 02 Must be high pressure.
41:31 Speaker 05 It's high pressure, it's really high pressure. And you get this thing, you get superheated, sort of supercritical steam, which can drive a turbine extremely well. Or you just use that heat to actually heat up other water, which then drives the turbine. Like, there are different methods of doing it. It's very, very cool.
41:49 Speaker 02 It's actually quite similar to fracking, isn't it?
41:51 Speaker 05 It is, it's basically fracking.
41:52 Speaker 02 Basically fracking. So they use the technology that fracking did to get oil out. But instead of doing that, they put water in and heated it up.
41:59 Speaker 05 Exactly.
42:00 Speaker 02 Which is another reason why a lot of people aren't that happy about it, because fracking can cause earthquakes.
42:05 Speaker 05 Yes.
42:05 Speaker 04 Right.
42:06 Speaker 02 So, yeah.
42:06 Speaker 04 But is it a better way to use fracking technology, potentially?
42:09 Speaker 02 Undoubtedly, yeah, because you're getting.
42:11 Speaker 05 It's a lot greener, yeah, yeah.
42:12 Speaker 02 It's much greener. Another way you can do it is instead of using water, you might be able to use hydrogen. This is something called the Johnson thermoelectric energy converter. And the best thing about it is it's solid state, so you put it into the water and it's just one object. You put it in and then it gets electricity out of it. And it was invented by a guy called Lonnie Johnson, who also invented the super soaker.
42:39 Speaker 02 Isn't that amazing?
42:40 Speaker 03 I thought I recognised that name from somewhere.
42:42 Speaker 02 Yeah. It's very, very, at the moment, they're not using it. But it might be used in the future. And it's, this guy is, wants to use it in LA where they have a lot of like old oil wells. So they've already got the holes down there. So you can just put stuff down there. At the moment, the temperature in those oil wells is too low and you can't really get much geothermal out. But because this is so efficient, you might be able to use it.
43:06 Speaker 03 That's interesting.
43:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. But anyway, he invented the super sucker.
43:09 Speaker 03 That's, I love that. The difference in those two inventions is like the equivalent of like Einstein doing E equals mc squared. It's like, what's he going to do for his next equation? Uh, Viva six afraid of seven. Seven, eight, nine. Like that's, that's that similarity. That's amazing.
43:29 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
43:43 Speaker 07 People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
43:54 Speaker 06 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.
43:59 Speaker 08 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
44:05 Speaker 06 So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.
44:27 Speaker 03 Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.
44:31 Speaker 02 Okay, my fact this week is that in Peru, you can be sued by a bee.
44:40 Speaker 05 And he's got 20 million witnesses.
44:46 Speaker 04 Any size of bee?
44:48 Speaker 02 Not really, no. It's, it has to be a stingless bee.
44:51 Speaker 04 Okay.
44:52 Speaker 02 It has to be in one of two parts of Peru, the town of Cepito or the Loretto department. But they're both in the Amazon. And it turns out that these areas have stingless bees that are very, very important to indigenous communities. And they've been hurt by, you know, pollution, climate change, habitat loss, all that kind of stuff. And so these two areas of Peru have given them rights. And while the bee can't fill out the paperwork, a human can act on their behalf. And so if like, let's say a tree felling company comes into the Amazon, cuts down the load of habitat of these bees.
45:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:31 Speaker 02 Then a environmental company can go over and sue them.
45:36 Speaker 05 Right.
45:37 Speaker 02 On behalf of the bees.
45:38 Speaker 03 Can I, can I sue a bee?
45:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, if they have rights.
45:42 Speaker 04 In just those two places.
45:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:44 Speaker 04 But they can't sting you, they're stingless. So I think the best they could do is give you a little nibble.
45:48 Speaker 03 They can bite. Those bees can bite.
45:50 Speaker 02 Why are you gonna sue them?
45:52 Speaker 03 I'm just trying to work out what this new right has given them. Is there a flip side consequence?
45:57 Speaker 05 Doing it for the payout.
45:58 Speaker 03 Sorry to cut through Dan, but.
46:01 Speaker 02 Classic hive chaser.
46:05 Speaker 04 But also, can you sue a single bee? Or does it have to be the colony?
46:09 Speaker 05 Ooh.
46:10 Speaker 04 I wonder if you can, if you can take up a personal grievance with AB.
46:15 Speaker 05 I think Rowan Atkinson's just made a very successful series about this, hasn't he?
46:18 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
46:19 Speaker 05 Man versus bee. They don't cover series two of Man versus bee, which is just the, the legal battle afterwards.
46:24 Speaker 04 Set in the Amazon.
46:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. They do sound cool, these bees.
46:28 Speaker 02 Oh, they're amazing.
46:29 Speaker 05 They've, there's one big lie about stingless bees.
46:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:32 Speaker 05 They do have stings.
46:33 Speaker 02 What?
46:34 Speaker 04 Yes, they do.
46:35 Speaker 05 I didn't know this. I mean, I didn't know the stingless bee was a thing until this week, so.
46:39 Speaker 02 Imagine a roller coaster that you've been on. Oh my God, there's a thing called stingless bee. Oh my God, they have stings.
46:45 Speaker 05 I know, I did. I thought, oh, they're harmless, but they're not what. So the stings are called degenerate stings because they're so small and ineffective that they don't count. I know. But they do, as you said, Dan, they bite like the devil. They'll do suicidal biting, which is a biological term.
47:02 Speaker 02 What?
47:03 Speaker 05 Which is where they bite and bite and bite and bite and bite.
47:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:05 Speaker 05 You.
47:06 Speaker 04 Just you.
47:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:10 Speaker 04 Going after the bees, they're coming for you, Dan.
47:16 Speaker 05 And basically, they will keep biting. And if you try and pull them away.
47:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:20 Speaker 05 They will suffer fatal damage to their body rather than stop biting.
47:24 Speaker 02 Okay.
47:24 Speaker 04 They'll rip their heads off.
47:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly.
47:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, so they will just clamp down their jaws with so much vigour that they just will not let go.
47:33 Speaker 02 Like a dangerous dog.
47:35 Speaker 04 Like a dangerous dog.
47:36 Speaker 02 You know, they always say that the dogs will clamp onto you and they won't let go unless you put your finger up the butt.
47:41 Speaker 05 That is true.
47:43 Speaker 02 And I don't suppose you could do that with a bee?
47:46 Speaker 04 There's a useless sting in the world.
47:51 Speaker 04 But those suicidal tendencies, we see that in bees with stings as well. It's just when you, so the bees that we have in the, here in Europe, in UK, Apis mellifera, they will sting you, but sadly, when they sting you, their sting will, the barbs will get stuck in your skin and this essentially rips out their abdomen.
48:07 Speaker 02 Right.
48:08 Speaker 04 So I guess we're seeing the same behaviour in the stingless bee. It's just that they are physically choosing to not let go when they could.
48:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:16 Speaker 04 So that instinct to protect is so intense that, yeah.
48:19 Speaker 05 You, you're a beekeeper, aren't you?
48:20 Speaker 04 I am, yeah.
48:21 Speaker 05 How many, how many have you got?
48:23 Speaker 04 Seventy thousand.
48:26 Speaker 04 And their names are?
48:28 Speaker 05 Seventy thousand?
48:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd say, I'd say, yeah.
48:31 Speaker 02 How many hives is that?
48:32 Speaker 04 Two, so less at the moment because it's January. So the hives, they significantly decrease in numbers over the winter. But yeah, I would say in the height of the summer, around seventy, eighty thousand.
48:42 Speaker 05 So cool.
48:43 Speaker 04 Fucking gals.
48:44 Speaker 02 Have you been stunned?
48:45 Speaker 04 Many times, many times, yeah, yeah, yeah. So certainly do have stings.
48:50 Speaker 03 Where's the, where's, where's the most painful spot?
48:52 Speaker 04 Oh, um, painful, the most annoying was on my forehead. I sort of looked like a Star Trek character. For quite some time. That took a long time to go down. I do have to be careful though, because every time I get stung, I think I'm reacting a little bit more every single time. So I do need to be cautious.
49:08 Speaker 03 That's very cool. And do you, um, do you use the honey for yourself? Do you, do you sell it in local shops and farm?
49:14 Speaker 04 No, no, I would, I would say only just about get enough honey to sort of maybe get me through a few months. For me, extracting the honey is, it's, it's something that has been developed over hundreds and well, thousands of years. The bees, they will store their honey in honeycomb. We encourage them to store that honey in frames that can be easily removed from the hive. But stingless bees, you can also harvest their honey. It's just much harder. Because stingless bees don't make honeycomb. Instead, they store their honey in little sort of tiny honey pots that are about the size of grapes. And they're all, yeah, so they're all sort of.
49:55 Speaker 03 Like a little Winnie the Pooh.
49:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, they're all clustered together.
49:58 Speaker 03 What's it made of? What's the pots?
50:00 Speaker 04 So it's, it's similar to a sort of a sticky substance that European bees make, which is called propolis. Uh, which is a combination of wax, but you also get various tree saps and resins as well in the mix. So it kind of makes a bee polyfiller.
50:16 Speaker 03 Right.
50:16 Speaker 04 Material. And, but if you want to harvest the honey, to not destroy the hive, you would have to go in with a pipette or a syringe. And individually sort of go into these little honey pots and take, and take the honey out. So you can harvest it. It's a lot more time consuming.
50:30 Speaker 02 And I think that people buy it and it's very, very expensive, right?
50:34 Speaker 04 Yeah. I would assume so because it's so labour intensive.
50:37 Speaker 03 Stingless bee honey?
50:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, and it's been used like for medicine by, you know, indigenous people for hundreds of years, I'm sure.
50:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:44 Speaker 02 Um, they use it for, what do they use it for? They use it for, if you've got like a cough, if you've got some phlegm on your, on your chest, they use it for that, like we would with honey, I suppose. Also for infertility, rheumatism, anemia and arthritis. And they make alcohol out of it.
51:01 Speaker 05 Right.
51:02 Speaker 02 And if you want to go and harvest it according to locals. If on a full moon night, you grab a queen bee, squeeze her abdomen and smear the liquid that comes out of it. Her onto your eyelids, then you'll be able to temporarily see every bee's nest in the forest in the dark.
51:19 Speaker 05 Great.
51:21 Speaker 02 It's a good tip if you're ever in the Amazon.
51:25 Speaker 05 That's pretty cool.
51:25 Speaker 02 I'm not sure it's entirely true.
51:27 Speaker 05 I'm sure, I'm sure it's, I love it though, it sounds legit. And your, your bees are all gals, did you say?
51:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, I mean, yeah.
51:33 Speaker 05 Cause you've got a queen and then.
51:35 Speaker 04 All the girls.
51:36 Speaker 05 Are they the drones, workers?
51:37 Speaker 04 Worker bees, yeah, so all the worker bees are female and then she'll keep a couple of lads around. But really their only purpose is to go off and mate with a queen from another hive. So to be honest, the boys don't do anything. They are really very useless.
51:52 Speaker 05 Have you met the boys?
51:53 Speaker 04 You can see them, they're sort of, they're much larger, they're quite clumsy, they're kind of just dodder about, not really doing anything, getting in the way.
51:59 Speaker 05 The bees, Maddie, the bees.
52:05 Speaker 04 Um, so yeah, there are, there aren't many. And actually the, the girls will kick them out come September.
52:10 Speaker 05 That's awesome.
52:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, get them out, they're not useful anymore.
52:13 Speaker 05 Where do they go?
52:13 Speaker 04 Uh, they, they die. They're on the floor.
52:16 Speaker 05 Oh dear.
52:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, so it's actually, it's the, it's the cleaner bees or the undertaker bees. In fact, they, they get called. It's their responsibility to take out the dead. So quite often, sort of as you're approaching the winter months, you'll just see just a graveyard of bees in front of the hives. Where they've all been taken out, just to make sure things are clean for the winter.
52:33 Speaker 05 Yeah. Wow.
52:34 Speaker 04 Hmm.
52:35 Speaker 05 I've got a case of a goat suing a pig here.
52:37 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
52:38 Speaker 05 Okay, yep.
52:38 Speaker 04 Go on.
52:39 Speaker 05 Twenty fourteen. The pig is Pepper Pig.
52:43 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
52:44 Speaker 05 And the goat is Gabriella Capra.
52:46 Speaker 02 Oh, yes. Oh, Capra.
52:48 Speaker 05 Whose name in Italian means Gabriella Goat. And it's a character from Pepper Pig called Gabriella Goat. And then the Italian Pepper Pig, she's Gabriella Capra. And she said, uh, she needed a hundred thousand euros to compensate her because she was annoyed.
53:00 Speaker 02 Cause they used her name.
53:01 Speaker 05 Cause they used her name.
53:03 Speaker 02 Oh, right.
53:03 Speaker 05 It doesn't look like she got it. The case goes very, very quiet after a blizzard of publicity.
53:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:08 Speaker 05 Um, but in twenty twenty two, the owners of Pepper Pig themselves sued a Vietnamese firm, which had made a very, very, very similar looking and feeling franchise called Wolfu. So that's three little pigs suing a wolf.
53:22 Speaker 04 Oh.
53:23 Speaker 05 That's good, isn't it?
53:24 Speaker 03 Yeah. I was a family of four in Peppa Pig, but yeah, that's.
53:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't think the younger kid was part of the lawsuit.
53:30 Speaker 03 I was trying to. But Peppa is?
53:34 Speaker 03 Oh my God, you try and do something. You try and do something.
53:39 Speaker 04 I started looking at just generally the rights of other animals. And I couldn't find many examples where animals had been given the equivalent to human rights. There certainly are some that exist, but I was able to find quite a few examples where animals are being protected from humans doing stupid things. In Alaska, to protect these hibernating bears, the US have enacted a law saying it's completely illegal to wake a bear for a photo, but it is okay to hunt them.
54:10 Speaker 02 That feels like it's protecting the photographer.
54:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.
54:16 Speaker 03 You can't be allowed to shoot a hibernating bear.
54:18 Speaker 04 You would hope so. You would hope that a hibernating bear is protected.
54:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, if you're out there, if you're out there right now, listening, so you take aim.
54:25 Speaker 04 Don't do it.
54:26 Speaker 03 From two feet away, grow up, mate.
54:29 Speaker 03 But they said it's okay to take a photo, a selfie with a completely awake bear.
54:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, fine.
54:34 Speaker 03 All right. Actively encouraged.
54:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, but also in Alaska, not just thinking about the bears here, we're also protecting moose. And you are not allowed to push one out of an aeroplane, just in case you ever, you ever consider it. Yeah, not allowed.
54:48 Speaker 03 Some police are at it again, eh?
54:56 Speaker 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 we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at Shriberland on Instagram. James?
55:07 Speaker 02 My Instagram is nosuchingsjamesharkin.
55:09 Speaker 03 Andy? I'm at AndrewHunterM. Yep, and Maddie?
55:12 Speaker 04 You can find me at Maddymote on Instagram and YouTube.
55:15 Speaker 03 Yes, get to the YouTube channel. It's incredible. If you've got kids in your life, honestly, it's the it's the place to go. So yeah, you can get to us, by the way, as a group on podcast at qi.com. That's our email. All those emails go to Andy. We read out the best on drop us a line, AKA Jewel. And that is part of Club Fish, which is our Patreon secret members club. So if you want to check that out, go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. Lots of fun things going on there. Otherwise, just come back next week because we're going to have another episode for you. Thank you as ever to the fish team, Liang Li and Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the larger fishbusters in the office here. And we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.
56:10 Speaker 09 She's been thinking about the 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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57:09 Speaker 11 ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com PARENTS to learn more.
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