Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As The Official Podcast Of Wyoming About this episode Mary Roach joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss blood banks, breast boosting and beneficial bryophytes.
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
Transcript 10,761 words · 7 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 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.comPARENTS to learn more.
0:31 Speaker 01 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things as a Fish, where we were joined by one of our idols. It is American author Mary Roach. I think Mary really is one of us. She loves going around looking for facts and then putting them in her amazing books. Her books include things like Stiff, which is all about what happens to us after we die, Bonk, which is about, well, you can imagine, about sex, Gulp, which is about swallowing and eating, Grunt, which is about humans at war, Fuzz, which is about humans and animals in legal conflicts with each other, and The Incredible Packing for Mars, which is all about space.
1:13 Speaker 01 Honestly, her books are so, so good. She tells such a good story, and she finds all the incredible, fascinating facts about all these subjects. And she has a new book out. Her new book is called Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, and it is all about how we can replace different parts of our body, thanks to the wonders of technology. It's full of facts. I know you'll love it. If you want to know more about Mary, then go to maryroach.net, and all the details of how to buy her books are there, and I highly recommend you do it. I am literally looking at my bookcase right now in my house, and I can see four of her books on there. It's no exaggeration to say we love her stuff. Anyway, one more tiny little bit of news for you.
1:58 Speaker 01 As you will know by now, we have been going on Patreon quite recently, and you can go on there and sign up for a whole load of different tiers and get loads of good stuff. But you can also sign up for free, and you will be able to get A little bit of free stuff and one of those things that is available for everyone now is a newsletter. So we have decided for a limited time, perhaps depending on how the workload goes, to put out a newsletter all about the things that are happening behind the scenes on No Such Thing as a Fish. There's little silly quizzes in there. There's facts about things in the news. There's all sorts of stuff. We're giving it a try. We don't know whether it will work or not. Let us know if you've read it and if you like it.
2:38 Speaker 01 And the way to find that and all of our Patreon stuff is to go to patreon.com/clubfish. Anyway, I know you're all desperate to hear what Mary Roach has to say on this week's podcast. So with no further ado, on with the podcast.
3:09 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations around the world. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Mary Roach. 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 Mary.
3:37 Speaker 03 Here we go. At the early blood banks, we're talking around 1915 or so, the staff sat hidden behind a wall with holes cut every few feet. Donors would come in, sit down, stick their arm through a hole and thereby be spared the sight of needles and blood.
3:57 Speaker 02 Wow.
3:58 Speaker 03 Do you guys in the UK have the have the term glory hole?
4:03 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh, you know what? My brain did not. Go there.
4:07 Speaker 02 That was quick.
4:08 Speaker 03 See, my brain went there.
4:09 Speaker 04 I don't know, Mary. I'm just gonna put that on the record.
4:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, we do. We do have them in the UK. We don't have them in NHS facilities necessarily, but.
4:19 Speaker 03 Yeah. Anyway, blood bank glory holes. That's what came to mind. But anyway, that that's my fact.
4:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:25 Speaker 04 Were people very scared of needles in a way they're not now? Because I think I think unless you have a specific fear of needles now, most people are more all right with it.
4:34 Speaker 03 Well, it's because it was new. This, you know, it was like in the teens. When they discovered anticoagulants so they could actually store blood and have a blood bank. Before then, there really wasn't a need to have large numbers of the public donating blood. So and there was some resistance. It was new, kind of weird, like, ooh, where's it gonna go? And how you and it's red and it's me. I don't know.
4:59 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't know if you guys have it, but I really don't like needles at all. There is something about, like, I will do it. Like, obviously, when you have your injections and stuff like that, I will do it. But I have to look away when I do it. I can't look at it going in. And it's not that I don't like the pain or I don't like, it's just there's something about it being so thin going into my skin that it really gives me the heebie jeebies.
5:24 Speaker 04 Interesting.
5:25 Speaker 03 You'd rather something big, wide going in.
5:28 Speaker 01 I feel like it. I feel like it. We're not still on glory holes, are we? No, no.
5:34 Speaker 02 But James, are you then saying that sticking your arm through a hole where you can't even see what's going on and feeling the pain is less terrifying?
5:41 Speaker 01 It is that because I will, when I had my COVID jabs, for instance, I would look away and say, I don't like needles very much. So just, you know, tell me when it's done, kind of thing.
5:52 Speaker 03 But see, I'm I'm with you, Dan. I think it would be far more terrifying just to have your arm over there and not know who's there, what are they doing? How big is the needle? What does my blood look like? Blah. Like, the the unknown would be the scary part for me.
6:05 Speaker 01 Interesting.
6:06 Speaker 04 Well, I have a good theory about why this might be. So one of the earliest blood banks that could store blood, it was a bit after the one you're talking about, Mary. This is in 1937. It's also. In America and there was a scientist called Bernard Fantus and he and his colleagues opened a blood bank, which could keep blood viable for about 10 days. So that was really useful because obviously unless you have someone who needs a transfusion and a donor in the same place, that's not very helpful. So Fantus was from where originally Budapest? And where was Vlad the Impaler, inspiration for Dracula, also from and imprisoned for a long time? Budapest. So.
6:45 Speaker 01 Was he?
6:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:46 Speaker 01 Was he not Romanian Vlad the Impaler?
6:48 Speaker 04 He travelled around a bit. He was definitely in Budapest for a long. He spent a lot of time in prison in Budapest. All right?
6:53 Speaker 01 I've been to his house and I'm sure it's in Romania.
6:55 Speaker 04 Yes, he probably had multiple properties. He was a very successful.
6:59 Speaker 01 He was very, you know, as far as impalers goes, he was one of the best.
7:04 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
7:06 Speaker 01 But the thing is, the interesting thing is when he impaled people, he did it through a huge hole.
7:12 Speaker 04 It's just nicer that way, isn't it? Yeah.
7:14 Speaker 01 Fantus, he had the idea because he'd seen something similar happening in Russia. And he, he got the money when he saved a woman's life. And the husband of this woman said, I'll do anything, whatever you want, I'll let you have it. And he said, okay, I need a ton of money for a blood bank. And the guy went, how much? And apparently it was a little bit too much. And so this guy had to go and get some other donors, but it was from that moment that this started. Is that right, Mary?
7:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, Moscow around that time, they had this clinic and I'm not going to attempt to pronounce it because it's Russian-y.
7:48 Speaker 03 But it was a cadaver blood clinic. So all of the accidents, all the, you know, emergency, trauma, et cetera, deaths, sudden deaths, et cetera. They were all brought to this one central location in Moscow and they would kind of put the cadaver on a tilt table and drain the blood. And weirdly, and this was carried on by Jack Kevorkian in the US and some other people in the US saying like, why are we wasting this? This is, this is perfectly good blood. And it did, the weird thing is if somebody had died suddenly, the blood wouldn't coagulate in the same way. It was actually more useful blood. And I didn't include this in my book. I'm like, really? Do we know that? Did anybody look into that whole violent death means the blood keeps longer?
8:31 Speaker 03 But anyway, there are all these papers on it and cadavers were drained.
8:36 Speaker 01 And there was a lot of people dying suddenly in the 1920s in Russia as well.
8:42 Speaker 02 Over in America, there was another interesting frontline character, which was Charles Drew. Amazing character. Drew Drew Drew a lot of blood himself over his lifetime because he he came up with large scale blood banks in World War Two. But he was also African American. And this really limited him from quite a lot of access to to medical places in the States.
9:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. And what I read about Drew, and I don't know, this may be apocryphal. But what I read was that at the end of his life, he actually needed blood. But at that time, if you were black, you couldn't get white blood. It was like there was this, you know, segregation in in blood transfusion.
9:25 Speaker 02 Fortunately, that that wasn't the case. Specifically with him. It was the case that that is how blood transfusions were working in America at the time.
9:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:36 Speaker 02 But he that he was really mangled up in a car crash. And unfortunately, nothing would have saved him. A few people have written that even actually a blood transfusion might have killed him quicker as a result of the injuries he sustained. But he retired.
9:49 Speaker 03 But it made a nice story.
9:50 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly.
9:53 Speaker 02 But he.
9:53 Speaker 03 Which I was perpetuating for.
9:56 Speaker 02 That's my job on this show, Mary. You stay away from dubious facts. He was a director of the American Red Cross and he retired because of this exact racial segregation.
10:05 Speaker 01 I think he resigned, didn't he?
10:06 Speaker 02 Sorry, he resigned. Yeah. And they changed that in 1950.
10:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, he he died in 1950. And that's also the year that they lost that policy.
10:18 Speaker 01 Oh, OK.
10:19 Speaker 04 Yeah. Dan, speaking of your theories.
10:24 Speaker 02 Yep.
10:24 Speaker 04 Do you remember?
10:25 Speaker 02 Yes, Budapest taught to me.
10:28 Speaker 04 OK. Do you remember telling us what happens with carbonated water in transit?
10:35 Speaker 02 Um, it's not my personal theory, but I have been perpetuating it. Absolutely. Uh, Mary, there is a, um, there's an idea that sparkling water, um, when it's being transferred in large container ships across from country to country, that the bubbles are removed from the water so as to not lose the fizz in transit. And then at the other port, when it's reached its destination, the same bubbles are replaced into the water itself.
11:01 Speaker 03 Wait, where do they, they store this, they store the bubbles?
11:04 Speaker 04 Well, the bubbles have, the bubbles have to go on a, they, they fly, obviously, because they're a lot lighter to transport.
11:10 Speaker 02 Yes. Yeah.
11:12 Speaker 01 Is there a reason you bring this up, Andy?
11:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, aid to bring down, which, which is, is reason enough in itself. But I didn't realize there is sort of a slight analogy in what happens when you donate blood. So I, I just had no idea what happened when you donate blood. I haven't done it before. I think I might do it off the back of this. It sounds like it's a very, very worthwhile thing to do. But when you donate it, um, it's immediately split up into separate components. So they put it in a centrifuge and spin it. And you know, in a centrifuge, it spins incredibly fast and different components spin out to different sort of areas in the centrifuge. And so it's, what is it? It's red blood cells, plasma and platelets, I think are the three things that are useful. So one donation of your blood can end up in three separate people.
11:59 Speaker 04 So it's a bit like the taking the bubbles out thing. I just thought that was quite interesting.
12:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's kind of nothing like it.
12:06 Speaker 04 Well, that's analogy. Some see it, some don't, Mary, you know.
12:12 Speaker 03 But nice segue, anyway.
12:14 Speaker 02 Um, we should move on in a second. Um, I want to give a quick shout out to one of the great blood donors of our age, someone who has donated 23 gallons of blood since the 1960s. So on average, a person's body contains about 1.5 gallons. So she's done, she's done amazing work. Her son's continued her work. But yeah, Lilian Bloodworth, big shout out to her.
12:36 Speaker 02 She was born to do it. Actually, do you know what's interesting? There are two people on this call who would have been quite useless blood donors. Had they been in America or Australia.
12:49 Speaker 02 Who would that be?
12:50 Speaker 01 Well, I noticed like you and I are wearing glasses. So that's one thing that if we were playing Guess Who, that's how we would split it into 50 50.
12:58 Speaker 03 You know what? I couldn't give blood for from like the 80s through about three years ago because I spent time in the UK.
13:09 Speaker 02 Here we go.
13:10 Speaker 03 When mad cow was a thing. And so the blood bank people are like, we're still very, very concerned about you. That you may have eaten a hamburger.
13:21 Speaker 02 It's exactly that, Mary. It was, it was really for people who lived here. I didn't know it extended to even if you visited, but if you had lived in the UK between 1980 and 1996, you could not give blood in places like America or Australia because you might have mad cow disease sitting in your blood somehow and it would get into the country. Yeah, it was until 2022, you couldn't give blood.
13:44 Speaker 04 I've got one last thing on shoving your arm in a hole.
13:47 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, please.
13:49 Speaker 04 And how it can be life-saving. Okay, so this is an American story, Mary, and you might have come across it because you've written a book about animals and the law. So in 2015, there was a hunter in Montana called Chase Delwo. Amazing name. He was out hunting with a bow and arrow. So being quite sporting, I would say, hoping to hunt some elk. And he suddenly noticed he was one meter from a bear and like a really big bear. It bit his head, it had tossed him in the air and it then bit his leg and it was coming at him again. What did he do?
14:26 Speaker 01 He put his hand in the only hole he could see.
14:30 Speaker 04 That's right. He did.
14:31 Speaker 01 Is it really? Oh, no, I did.
14:33 Speaker 04 He shoved his, he said, I remember, this is an amazing quote, he said, I remembered an article that my grandmother gave me a long time ago, which is amazing presence of mind in the situation. But the article said, the like, big animals often have really bad gag reflexes. And he said, so I shoved my right arm down his throat and it worked.
14:51 Speaker 03 Oh, that hole.
14:51 Speaker 04 That hole. Come on, guys. Grow up.
15:00 Speaker 04 He didn't do the Sooty Show live on air. Yeah, he shoved his arm down the bear, not up it, and it worked.
15:11 Speaker 05 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.
15:26 Speaker 00 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.
15:37 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
15:42 Speaker 06 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
15:48 Speaker 05 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.
16:09 Speaker 02 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.
16:13 Speaker 01 Okay, my fact this week is that moss can solve crimes, but it's woefully underappreciated.
16:20 Speaker 04 Okay, cool. Hear me out.
16:22 Speaker 01 Moss cop.
16:23 Speaker 04 Moss cop. He's slow, but he's dedicated. He'll get you eventually.
16:30 Speaker 01 All you have to do is hide on the north side of a tree and he can't get you.
16:36 Speaker 01 So this is a story I saw in Nautilus Online Magazine about a study in forensic sciences research by Matt von Canrath et al. from the botanical collections at Field Museum in Chicago. And the first sentence is forensic botany, particularly bryophyte analysis, so that's analyzing moss, is potentially important but underutilized tool in criminal investigations. And then they go on to all the times that this has happened that they could find in history where moss has been used to solve crimes. Basically, they came up with about 10, but they reckon that we should be utilizing this more.
17:14 Speaker 04 Yes. Is it? Is for rural crimes, I guess.
17:17 Speaker 01 I've got moss, all of the, all of the walls, as I walk my daughter to nursery, there's moss on all of them, which is quite annoying because she's, she's really into moss right now.
17:27 Speaker 04 Is she?
17:27 Speaker 01 It takes us about, it takes about an hour and a half to get to nursery in the morning because she keeps looking at all the moss.
17:32 Speaker 04 I love it.
17:33 Speaker 01 I haven't done a paternity test, Andy, to check that she isn't yours.
17:36 Speaker 04 Don't do it.
17:39 Speaker 01 But yeah, you're right. So basically you find a body and how long the moss has taken to grow on it, that might tell you about when the person died. And also moss will be different if it grows in different areas. And so you can, let's say they found some moss on my trainers and I said I was nowhere near the crime and they say, well, what do you call this? So that can do it as well.
18:03 Speaker 03 Those forensic botany people, they don't get the love that they should. I was at a forensics conference about two weeks ago, you know, where all the, all the grad students and everybody have their posters up and it's row after row of posters and forensics conference posters are pretty out there. There's like the deaf by taxidermy elk head, that was one. The elk head fell, killed someone. Homicide by hot dog was another poster. Yeah, these are posters. These are published research papers. And, and so there's always a lot of activity around the ones with the really lurid photographs. And, but then you keep walking and they'll be like, the person who looks at pollen. And it's really important.
18:47 Speaker 03 He's just standing there waiting for somebody to chat.
18:50 Speaker 02 It's a shame because it is, it is incredibly important. There's an amazing forensic ecologist, she calls herself here, in the UK called Professor Patricia Wiltshire. She's also known as the snot lady. And she's known as the snot lady because she spends her time on crime scenes largely going into nasal cavities and getting the pollen grains out of it. So she's been doing this, yeah, for 40 years. She's been brought in to solve many crimes. If a car was thought to have been in an area, but they couldn't prove it, she'll be brought in to look for remnants of pollen on the wheels or inside of the car. In fact, her very first case, it was an interesting study where they needed to see if a car had gone through this field.
19:33 Speaker 02 And she did all the studying of all the areas pollen. So when she arrived on the scene, they said, let us show you where it happened. And she said, no, no, no, let me show you where I think it happened. And she found a particular grassy area, hedgy area, and she went, it would have happened there based on what I found. They said, that's exactly where it happened. And then
19:50 Speaker 04 Because there are huge tire tracks. There are huge tire tracks going through the field.
19:55 Speaker 02 Big hole in the hedge shaped like a car.
19:59 Speaker 01 And there's some chalk outlines of people's bodies right next to it.
20:04 Speaker 04 That's incredible. That's incredible.
20:06 Speaker 03 Somebody at this conference told me that the FBI here in the States has a classified pollen map. So they've got a map of like what pollen is where specifically for forensics, forensic botany.
20:20 Speaker 01 One other thing about moss and why that's so important is because in an area, they might all have the same kind of grass. Let's say you, the murder happens on a golf course. Your golf course might have the same kind of grass all the way around it. But moss can find little micro niches to kind of go. And the moss that's on the second hole might be different than the moss on the third hole and the moss on the fourth hole. It might be slightly different. And also you get like even smaller animals that live inside like mossy areas. So that's an extra bit of data that you can get from it.
20:53 Speaker 03 This is a really low rent golf course. If you've got moss, I mean, you've ever seen the grass on a golf, see Mar-a-Lago, there's no moss growing on it.
21:02 Speaker 04 Can I just say, the fourth hole is an incredible name for a murder mystery set on a golf course.
21:07 Speaker 03 Or a blood bank.
21:08 Speaker 01 Yes.
21:11 Speaker 01 Or a quest from a bear. Go for the fourth hole.
21:18 Speaker 04 Speaking of cold cases, maybe the coldest case of all.
21:24 Speaker 04 That of Utsi the Iceman.
21:27 Speaker 02 Oh, yes.
21:28 Speaker 04 Has a moss link. So he is a friend of the podcast. I think we agree.
21:34 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
21:35 Speaker 04 Five thousand three hundred years old and dead. And he was found up in the in the Alps, I believe.
21:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
21:44 Speaker 04 Certainly up a mountain in Europe. And anyway, he has 75 species of moss around him. I don't mean sort of on him. He wasn't collecting it, but it does tell you, for example, where he was coming from. Because there are mosses from lower down in the valley. So we can retrace his steps based on the mosses that are in his gut or on his clothes or whatever it might be. So that's cool.
22:04 Speaker 02 That is cool.
22:05 Speaker 03 And speaking of his steps, there was one of those anthropologists that likes to kind of live the anthropology. This guy who is an expert in Paleolithic, if that's the right era footwear. And he actually made a pair of the, they were kind of Birkenstock like, the shoes.
22:24 Speaker 04 So embarrassing.
22:25 Speaker 03 He made some Utsi footwear. I don't remember exactly why, but anyway, he recreated Utsi's unattractive footwear.
22:32 Speaker 04 It's a shame they weren't Uggs, because that was probably what he would say a lot of the time. Anyway.
22:38 Speaker 03 That's where that came from.
22:40 Speaker 04 Yep.
22:40 Speaker 03 Name of, yep.
22:42 Speaker 04 The Swedish military.
22:43 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
22:44 Speaker 04 Has a, has a collection of air and it's really useful. Um, so they have bottles dating back to the 1960s or samples of air, right? And that was because they were trying to monitor fallout from nuclear weapons and see if that was affecting the environment. Because obviously it was a time of a lot of nuclear testing. Um, but these air samples have had a weird second life because they're incredibly useful for um, sampling other things about the world. One of the things is they contain moss spores. And these are microscopically small, but obviously if you take a sample of air, it's going to have all sorts of other junk in it that you weren't intending to collect. And they have studied all this microscopic material found there.
23:29 Speaker 04 And what they have realized is moss spores in Sweden specifically are being Released four weeks earlier than they were in 1990. So it's one of the indices for changing climate is because the autumns are warmer, so mosses develop their capsules more and they release them earlier the next year. So that's another way that you can study things using something you had no intention of studying at the time you started.
23:52 Speaker 01 That's really interesting. I've been to a water museum in Iceland. I dragged my wife on quite a long detour to go to this water museum. And it was just like a load of pipes with water in, but it's water from all different parts of Iceland. I think it was quite disappointing when we got there, but I think the idea is.
24:12 Speaker 03 Really?
24:12 Speaker 04 Doesn't sound it.
24:15 Speaker 01 I built it up all day as well on the whole drive, saying this is going to be great.
24:20 Speaker 03 My husband, I was doing a talk in Alaska in Skagway, and my husband's like, what am I gonna do? There's not really a lot going on here in Skagway. And I said, oh, but there's, if you take this boat, there's this island and there's a hammer museum. And you like to build things. It's a hammer museum. He's like, yes, yes, it's a hammer museum. And he comes back, I'm like, how was it? He goes, there's a lot of hammers.
24:46 Speaker 01 It was banging.
24:50 Speaker 01 And you also get like wood museums. They're not museums, they're like a wood library. And if you look at it, it's like, almost like whole, it's like a library, but all the books have been turned around because all you can see is like bits of wood. But actually, again, it's used by people to find out where things came from and it can solve crimes. Is that right?
25:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's a great forensics resource up at the National Wildlife Forensics Lab and it's up in Oregon and it's a hair library. Well, it's to see, you know, okay, if you have this that's been smuggled, is it from an endangered species? Is it a crime we can prosecute? So they have to be able to identify it. So they have. And you know, each animal have like the under hair and the coarse hair and the face. I mean, the no whiskers, there's a lot of different material.
25:35 Speaker 01 I was wondering if you'd had a hair transplant, whether you would be able to like commit a crime and get away with it. But then I realised that I've had a hair transplant and they just take your own hair and put it somewhere else.
25:47 Speaker 02 They arrest your arse instead of your head. It's brilliant.
25:51 Speaker 01 They didn't take the hair from my arse, Andy.
25:54 Speaker 03 But you can, you can take hair from any, you can take pubic hair and put it on your eyebrow. And this has all been done. You can take chest hair, put it up there. You can also take head hair for pubic baldness, which is a thing, but they warn you, you will have to trim it because it will, it will retain the characteristics of its homeland. Right. You take it from a head and you put it down there and it's going to grow to like six, seven, eight inches.
26:18 Speaker 01 Luckily, my hair is quite pubic ridden style anyway, so.
26:24 Speaker 03 That was the, that was the one downside that was reported in this paper. When you take chest hair or pubic hair and you transfer it to the head, because maybe you've run out of hair on the backs of the head, you can take the pubic hair, say, but it's, and this is a quote, "difficult to style."
26:42 Speaker 01 I've got a question for you, Mary. You might not, in fairness, I can't expect you to be able to answer this, but the lice that you get on your hair are different, a different species completely to the lice that you get on your pubic hair, I believe, as I understand it. So if you were to transplant pubic hair onto your head, which lice would live there?
27:04 Speaker 03 God, why didn't I think of that?
27:06 Speaker 02 Wow.
27:07 Speaker 03 Oh my God. Yeah, you're right. That's a great question. Do pubic lice survive?
27:12 Speaker 01 Because. It's got to be, it's, it's not an altitude thing. It's a hair thing, isn't it?
27:18 Speaker 02 It's a hair thing.
27:18 Speaker 01 Is it?
27:19 Speaker 03 I've heard lice prefer straight hair to curly hair, to kinky hair.
27:24 Speaker 02 But you're growing your curly hair up there now and you're mixing it in with the cut, you would have two species of lice hanging out.
27:29 Speaker 03 Yes, and they'd probably breed and then you'd have these weird hybrid lice that nobody could kill and it would be this epidemic.
27:35 Speaker 01 That is the start of a John Wyndham novel, waiting to be written, isn't it?
27:48 Speaker 02 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first recipient of breast implants had to have them removed after she chewed through the stitches.
28:01 Speaker 02 So, um, this is performed by a man called Dr. Biggs, Thomas Biggs, and it wasn't a human, it was a dog named Esmeralda.
28:12 Speaker 03 Whoa, because I have a different competing first breast implant
28:19 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
28:19 Speaker 03 story, which was on a dog, but this was Thomas Cronin in 1961.
28:24 Speaker 01 So actually, they were working together. Cronin was the main guy, but Biggs was, he sort of looked after the recovery of the dog.
28:30 Speaker 03 Oh, okay, okay, okay. All right, so it's the same story.
28:33 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly, so.
28:34 Speaker 01 But when Dan's doing the headline and he sees the word Biggs, understandably, that's the name you go for.
28:41 Speaker 02 Dr. Biggs was part of a team of doctors who had come up with this new idea for how they could have silicon implants done for breast enhancement. And so what they did was, uh, they, they put the, um, the implant under the skin of the dog Esmeralda, and she eventually chewed at these stitches, they had to be taken out. However, the other doctors thought this was a complete success. They said that the implants were as harmless as water, and so they started looking into finding humans.
29:11 Speaker 01 One interesting thing I found when I was reading about this, um, surgery, is that the, uh, implant that they put inside the dog was described as biscuit sized. And I think no wonder it's biting at the stitches and trying to get at it. Don't make it the shape of a dog biscuit, for God's sake.
29:30 Speaker 03 You know what? This implant that they came up with, a silastic natural fuel breast prosthesis, um, it was originally available in small, medium and large, and there were two sizes that they quickly discontinued, small, no, mini and petite. There was no market for mini and petite breast implants.
29:50 Speaker 01 I think that's still true of penis transplants today. The main One I think is called Panuma, which is a portmanteau of penis new man. And I read an article from 2023 in Texas Monthly Magazine that said that it comes in five sizes ranging from large to XXL. So you can't, nobody wants to buy a medium penis transplant.
30:13 Speaker 04 When you say transplant, James, do you mean someone who's lost theirs?
30:17 Speaker 01 Implant, if I said transplant.
30:19 Speaker 04 Oh, implant. Oh, okay. Okay.
30:20 Speaker 03 There's a similar story about the Apollo astronauts because the urine collection device was this condom ended, you know, it slipped on the penis and with a tube, then there'd be a bag kind of strapped to the leg or whatever. The urine, yes, the urine collection assembly, I think it was called. But anyway, originally the astronaut would request small, medium, large, and nobody would request small. And there was a lot of leakage. Then they changed it to medium, large, extra large. That's the story I hear. And there are actually, I think, four urine collection assembly devices up on the moon. They ditched them.
30:59 Speaker 01 Really?
30:59 Speaker 03 And two were, there's some small and some large. And I don't know whose was who.
31:04 Speaker 02 I didn't know about the leakage. That's so funny. What a way of being found out. It's just urine leaking out next year.
31:11 Speaker 01 I guess it was too big for the big.
31:15 Speaker 02 It's cold, it's cold here in space, isn't it? I'm just jumping back to this story very quickly, because this is the, this is the founding of modern breast surgery. So the inventors really were Frank Garraw and Thomas Cronin. And connecting to one of the previous facts, Frank Garraw was squeezing a plastic blood bag. And it was while he was doing that, he was like, he said, oh, this feels a bit like a woman's breast.
31:39 Speaker 01 What a pervert.
31:40 Speaker 03 Here's, yes, the quote, here's the quote, inspired by the look and feel of a bag of blood. So you can just picture the scene. They're in the OR and he's kind of bored. He's like, does that remind you of something?
31:53 Speaker 01 So this guy, was he already working, was he already thinking that this is a problem that needs to be solved? And he was going around feeling everything that he could to see what was most like a pair of breasts.
32:04 Speaker 04 He was banned from every grocery store in the area. That's an interesting fact that I won't tell you.
32:09 Speaker 03 He was a squeezer.
32:12 Speaker 03 I don't know that the answer. I had a sense of he's just, it was this moment of inspiration.
32:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:17 Speaker 03 That looks like a breast.
32:19 Speaker 04 Lightbulb moment. Yeah, yeah. So they found, they found this, um, they needed a human subject after Esmeralda had been a, a success as Esmeralda's operation. And they approached this woman called Timmy Jean Lindsay and she had not remotely considered her breasts. She wasn't in the market for a breast implant. She had gone into hospital because she had a tattoo of roses across her torso. It was, it was at her ex-boyfriend's suggestion. And she didn't really want it anymore because they'd broken up. She was trying to get the tattoo removed. She had had six children, but when they approached her and said, do you want a breast operation, you know, to enhance your breasts or whatever? She said, well, like, no, I mean, if anything, I'd love to get my ears pinned back.
33:03 Speaker 04 And they said, oh, we'll do that. We'll throw that in. That's no problem if you agree to this procedure. So that's what, that's what led to it. I mean, she, she really wasn't looking for that when she went in at all.
33:14 Speaker 03 Before there were bags of silicon. I mean, it's, it's great that it was put in a bag because the history of the stuff that's been injected into women's breasts. Here's a partial list. Ready? Goat's milk, pig collagen, beeswax, olive oil, paraffin, petroleum jelly, transformer fluid, various glues and polymers. And my favorite five inch slabs of your own buttocks.
33:39 Speaker 04 Oh. And then there was just silicon injected loose.
33:42 Speaker 03 Exactly, yeah.
33:43 Speaker 04 Came around after the Second World War and that is really dangerous because it can interact very badly with your body and lead to an awful range of conditions and things like gangrene.
33:52 Speaker 03 Including, including the condition of death. Yeah.
33:55 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. The worst condition. Yeah.
33:59 Speaker 02 We should say as well, you've just mentioned Second World War. This happened in the year 1962. And it was sort of off the back of the fifties and particularly the late fifties of how a lot of the actresses at the time, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell. There was a lot of cleavage going on. And so while he did have this moment of feeling the blood bag, I think it was in the consciousness of America. Of a lot of people want this stuff. How can we, how can we do this?
34:25 Speaker 04 Yeah. But it was, it was dependent on Hitler being defeated, the change of global breast perception. One thing leads directly, yes, directly.
34:34 Speaker 02 Was that another one of her conditions? I want my ears pinned back. I want Hitler defeated.
34:41 Speaker 04 Basically, in America in the war, there was, metal was not really allowed for civilian use, you know, in industrial terms. I mean, I think America made something like 200 cars during the entire Second World War for civilian, like it just, every bit of material needed went to the war effort. And after the war, suddenly, metal was available again, and underwire bras were invented, which obviously lift and support and shape. And this changed the perception of women's bodies and what shape they quote unquote ought to be in this kind of thing, or what a desirable body looked like. So it's all based on Hitler.
35:18 Speaker 01 Right.
35:19 Speaker 02 Wow. Hey, by the way, you know how this fact connects to the first fact about blood? It also connects to the second fact about forensics, because quite often, in very horrific murder scenes, they will have done a job to hide who the person is, fingerprints will have been removed and so on. And in that case, if they happen to have had breast implants, every modern breast implant has either a serial or the information has been logged that can be traced back via the doctor. So anytime a doctor puts one in now, either it's a serial that comes in the box, they know the patient that it's gone to.
35:52 Speaker 01 When you say serial that comes in the box, a serial number, right?
35:55 Speaker 02 No, it's the, so it's one of those toys that you get inside Cocoa Pops these days. That's how they deliver breast implants. You gotta shake it out, yeah. No, that's, so they've all got serial numbers. So quite a few people have been identified via the serial number in the breast implant to identify who they are.
36:14 Speaker 01 How interesting. I read a paper from 2017, it was a ballistic study, and they hypothesized in this study that in theory, if someone shot you in the breast and you had an implant, that the fluid would be able to sort of move it out of the way. And then, in 2020, it actually happened. As in, there's a 2020 study that says, based on the trajectory of a bullet when this lady was shot, as far as they can see, the only way that it failed to kill them is because it hit the implant, which moved it slightly out of the way, which took it away from her heart.
36:49 Speaker 04 Good lord.
36:50 Speaker 03 Wow. I have heard that they develop kind of a hard shell around breast implants after a long time. So maybe your body builds a kind of a shell, like it walls it off. Like this is not me, we'll just kind of wall here.
37:06 Speaker 04 Right.
37:07 Speaker 01 You said about them getting hard, which they do, Mary, but they're still not like solid usually most of the time. And that means that breast implants that women use are often not the right thing for men to use if you want a chest implant. So let's say you want to enhance your pectoral muscles, the normal breast implants won't do that. And there was a recent study, actually it's quite old now, it's from 2003, that found that the best thing to do is buttock implants. Because apparently the implants that you get in your bum, they're much more solid and the fake gluteus is much more similar to a fake pectoral than a silicon bag.
37:46 Speaker 03 Probably the first one they did was a buttock implant that they stuck it in there because the first buttock implant was a breast implant that they just stuck down there. Like, maybe this will work down here.
37:55 Speaker 04 What? Really?
37:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:57 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh, what's next?
38:01 Speaker 02 It's so interesting, because Mary, your new book, Replaceable You, this is literally, this is the concept of the book. It's, it's taking bits of you and replacing it with something else. And so this fact about the breast implants that's in there, quite a lot of stuff we've mentioned. Another thing, just jumping back to the hair transplant, in the seventies, the implants were artificial. The hair was artificial.
38:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, you could, you could, this was a kind of a budget option. It was kind of essentially like getting doll hair. Put into your balding areas and there was this kind of dermatological crochet hook. You just kind of hook it down into the skin and back up. And horrible, there were a lot of infections. I think there was a fatality from this. And of course, you know, your hair, if you start to go gray, now it doesn't match. Difficult to style again. And they had to be sort of spaced far apart. So you actually looked, it looked like doll hair.
38:58 Speaker 01 It feels like the best way to style it would be to get like a five year old girl to do it. You just see all these middle aged men with plaques and yeah.
39:08 Speaker 04 Just on the, briefly on the breast implant thing, there's an amazing book on this subject. It's by Florence Williams. It's called Breasts A Natural And Unnatural History. And she has a whole chapter about the, the history of implants and, and all of this. But I, the, the reason why humans have breasts at all is sort of bizarre. And I know there are lots of theories, but most animals don't, right? Most, and in fact, even I think most apes don't.
39:34 Speaker 01 What do you mean by breasts though? Because like all mammals have mammary glands at least.
39:40 Speaker 03 You mean like big bouncy ones? Is that what you're saying?
39:42 Speaker 04 Well, that's not exactly how I'd put it, but.
39:45 Speaker 02 Yes. Big jugs, is that what you're saying?
39:48 Speaker 04 Oh my God, I was, I was, oh God, okay. Well, I think the reason, I'm blushing. I hope you're all happy. Okay.
39:59 Speaker 01 I think honestly, this is an audio medium, but I think everyone at home could feel that blush.
40:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm feeling it now.
40:10 Speaker 04 There's one theory as to why, and this is what, this is in Florence Williams's book, is that women need more fat on them to not only reach puberty, but also to grow a baby and to lactate and to feed the baby. And human infants need huge amounts of fat to grow because we are a bipedal species, as of quite recently. And for a bipedal creature, the human woman, to give birth, the baby needs to be really small. The baby's head needs to be really small to be birthed successfully. So mothers then have to produce huge amounts of milk to grow them up because they need so long to develop after birth.
40:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, because basically babies are idiots, right? Like babies are born really, it takes them a long time to get to any kind of self reliance. Whereas like a giraffe's born and then about 20 minutes later, it's running around.
41:03 Speaker 04 Exactly.
41:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, basically lands on its feet as it's born and walks away.
41:08 Speaker 04 But the human baby has to be born relatively useless, which is why the mother needs to do all of that extra milk production, which needs a lot of fat.
41:17 Speaker 01 And why is this Hitler's fault? I can't remember.
41:20 Speaker 04 So much is it this one?
41:26 Speaker 05 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.
41:41 Speaker 00 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.
41:52 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
41:57 Speaker 06 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
42:03 Speaker 05 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.
42:25 Speaker 02 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.
42:29 Speaker 04 My fact is, there is only one American state with an official state smell.
42:36 Speaker 01 Wow.
42:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:38 Speaker 01 Is it Washington DC and it's the stench of corruption?
42:42 Speaker 04 Lovely, lovely. Ring that satire bell. It's, it's New Mexico.
42:53 Speaker 04 Which in 2023 officially signed into law, the state smell. And the smell, it sounds gorgeous. It's the smell of green chilies roasting in the fall. And apparently that New Mexico produces, I think it's 60% of the US chili pepper crop. And the chilies are all green to start and some of them turn red later on, which also prompted the New Mexico official state question, which is red or green? And I just went on a bit of a rabbit hole of reading about New Mexico's state symbols.
43:27 Speaker 04 And, and other state symbols.
43:28 Speaker 01 So the chili roasting, the smell of, feels to me like it'd be quite pungent. Like if I put chilies into my food and they're cooking, my eyes are watering, right?
43:39 Speaker 03 Yes. And you're choking, it's horrible. Yeah.
43:43 Speaker 04 Okay.
43:43 Speaker 03 You don't want to be smelling back.
43:44 Speaker 01 It's basically pepper spray, which is the...
43:46 Speaker 03 It is.
43:49 Speaker 03 It's a non-lethal weapon.
43:51 Speaker 04 Okay.
43:53 Speaker 01 We don't want to get completely cancelled in New Mexico.
43:55 Speaker 04 No, no, no.
43:56 Speaker 01 So then what about this question, Andy? So you said that the official question of New Mexico is red or green? What's that mean?
44:04 Speaker 04 I think it's people ask you, do you want red chili or green chili?
44:09 Speaker 01 If you're in a restaurant, right?
44:10 Speaker 04 On the rest of your food, I assume so, yeah, yeah.
44:12 Speaker 01 That's right. So do you know what the state answer is? The official state answer?
44:16 Speaker 04 No.
44:17 Speaker 01 Do you Dan? Have you got it?
44:18 Speaker 02 I do. It came out two years later, didn't it?
44:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. The official state answer to the official state question is red and green or Christmas.
44:29 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I forgot to Google the, the plot twist at the end of that state answer.
44:36 Speaker 01 Well, I could tell you, Christmas, basically in New Mexico, if someone says to you in a restaurant, red or green, and you say Christmas, then that means a bit of red and a bit of green, because that's like Christmas decorations.
44:48 Speaker 04 Really nice.
44:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, right.
44:49 Speaker 01 So it's like having ketchup and HP sauce together. It's like.
44:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
44:53 Speaker 04 That's great.
44:54 Speaker 02 New Mexico also has a state song, and a lot of the states have their own state song. And so there's two in New Mexico. There's an English language one and Spanish language one. The English language one is called Oh Fair New Mexico, and it was written by Elizabeth Garrett, the daughter of Pat Garrett, who killed Billy the Kid. Isn't that wild?
45:19 Speaker 04 I mean.
45:20 Speaker 02 What a connection. She died in 1947 in New Mexico in Roswell. 1947, ring any bells? Only the same year that supposedly an alien spacecraft crashed there. Coincidence?
45:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:35 Speaker 02 What are we saying?
45:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:36 Speaker 02 Of course, two years after the death of Hitler, thereby completely revolutionizing global breath perception.
45:43 Speaker 02 Mary, what state are you from?
45:44 Speaker 03 I'm from New Hampshire.
45:45 Speaker 02 Oh, okay.
45:46 Speaker 03 I don't know what the symbol is, but I can tell you the motto. I went down a state motto rabbit hole. But the motto in New Hampshire, which some people tape over, because it's a little inflammatory, our motto is live free or die.
46:00 Speaker 02 I've seen that.
46:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you can apparently be arrested for taping over the motto on your license plate on your car.
46:07 Speaker 02 But surely taping over it is living free. Surely that is doing what you want.
46:12 Speaker 03 What would they?
46:13 Speaker 02 Okay, so that's much more inflammatory than New Mexico's, where the state slogan is, everybody is somebody in New Mexico. Much less controversial.
46:21 Speaker 04 That's good.
46:22 Speaker 03 Okay, Colorado, right? The state motto of Colorado is nothing without providence. You'd think that would be Rhode Island, because Providence is the capital of Rhode Island. But Rhode Island, the state motto is simply hope. When I was studying chewing for a book called Gulp, and I was talking to this guy, he was talking about what we do when we chew and reduce this material, and then we form it into a bolus, which is the swallowable state. And I thought that should be the Rhode Island, because it's so small. Rhode Island, the swallowable state.
46:56 Speaker 04 That's really good.
46:57 Speaker 01 Do you know what the official reptile of New Mexico is? Did you come across this, guys?
47:02 Speaker 04 No.
47:03 Speaker 01 It is.
47:03 Speaker 03 Gila monster?
47:04 Speaker 01 No, good guess. It is the Leaping Lesbian Lizard. So, in fact,
47:13 Speaker 01 most people, most people would call it the New Mexico Whitetail Lizard. Or you might even know it as Cnemidophorus neomexicanus.
47:24 Speaker 04 Oh, yes.
47:25 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, right, that one.
47:27 Speaker 01 But it's become a bit of an idol for the LGBTQ community. Because all members of the species are female and they reproduce asexually through
47:37 Speaker 04 No way.
47:38 Speaker 01 And so they've been known online as the Leaping Lesbian Lizard. They inspired a Pokémon called Selazal. And they're the name of an ultimate frisbee team in some college somewhere. But they're also the official reptile of New Mexico.
47:55 Speaker 04 It's really random what states get what, well, it's not random, but I mean, it turns out there's no restrictions on it. So California has a state slug.
48:06 Speaker 03 The banana slug.
48:07 Speaker 04 The banana slug.
48:08 Speaker 03 I know it.
48:08 Speaker 04 Recently signed into
48:09 Speaker 03 It's the team mascot for Santa Cruz.
48:13 Speaker 01 Are they the ones that chew off each other's genitals during mating?
48:18 Speaker 03 I don't know.
48:19 Speaker 04 I think they are, but that's nothing to do with the slug, James.
48:24 Speaker 03 The students of Santa Cruz.
48:28 Speaker 04 But there's just, there's just no restriction on it. So 20 states have a state soil.
48:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:33 Speaker 03 Wow.
48:34 Speaker 04 Oregon has a state seashell, the Oregon Hairy Triton. An official Oregon steak has been proposed. I'm not sure if it's been adopted. That is of course T-bone. And basically there's just no restriction on what becomes a state symbol. So it's often, I would say, child driven. You know, like it's, well, at school, children might have a campaign. You know, we want the state muffin to be the blueberry muffin. But that can lead to disaster because often you'll end up with this being proposed in a state legislature. And a load of politicians saying, what is this shit about a state wasp? While a group of crestfallen nine-year-olds look on saying, well, it's a really great local wasp, but it's important, you know?
49:15 Speaker 02 They have the, um, they're state stars as well, as in out of space. So Delaware has one, which is called the Delaware Diamond. And it was given it despite the fact that it's not an official star, as in it's not recognized by an astronomical community with that name. It was a name that was given to it by, you know, you can just buy a star on the International Star Registry.
49:38 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
49:39 Speaker 02 I've got one. It's called Tribaland. Someone bought one and called it the Delaware Diamond, and that has become the state star.
49:46 Speaker 01 Do you know Virginia has a state Shakespeare festival?
49:50 Speaker 02 I was just saying, okay, sure.
49:52 Speaker 01 It's, it's the Virginia Shakespeare Festival.
49:55 Speaker 02 Wow.
49:58 Speaker 01 Apparently there's a few different ones. And the people who ran this particular one, which is the oldest one in Virginia, they wanted to get some more kudos over the other Shakespeare festivals. So they said to some politician, can you make us the official one? And they did.
50:12 Speaker 02 So yeah, sometimes it feels like it's being done as a sort of, exactly like that.
50:15 Speaker 03 It's a marketing ploy. These are like marketing ploys. Like all of the International Worcestershire Sauce Day and International, like anything you would find in the world. There's an International, eh, Day.
50:28 Speaker 04 It can be positive. I mean, if it, if it's raising awareness of, you know, let's say the banana slug was endangered in some areas, it's, it's a nice way for, it's education and local bodies can.
50:37 Speaker 01 Guys, guys, guys, guys, hear me out. The official podcast of Wyoming. Come on.
50:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
50:43 Speaker 01 Let's get the campaign started.
50:45 Speaker 04 That's a great idea.
50:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, why not?
50:47 Speaker 04 Well, we love Wyoming. I recently learned how to say it correctly, so.
50:54 Speaker 02 I forgot, we are used in Wyoming to scare off bears.
50:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:58 Speaker 02 So people, we've got messages, Mary, from people who, when they're doing hikes, they will play us out loud on speakers so that bears don't come because they hear chatter of various humans clustered together.
51:09 Speaker 04 I mean, as we now know, you can just shove your arm down their throats and that's, that's actually just as good as listening to the podcast, but. No, but sometimes they get rejected as well. So I think that I read a great list of Minnesota's rejected state icons.
51:25 Speaker 04 State fossil is not the giant beaver. For some reason, that did not clear the, the legal threshold, despite, despite a Minnesota paleontologist issuing this very moving speech where they said, Minnesota has a deep connection to beavers.
51:40 Speaker 02 What does this mean?
51:42 Speaker 03 Mary, what's going on? Can I leave you with the state motto of Michigan?
51:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:46 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
51:48 Speaker 03 If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.
51:53 Speaker 02 If you seek a pleasant peninsula.
51:55 Speaker 03 Pleasant peninsula, look about you.
51:58 Speaker 02 You're going yourself.
51:58 Speaker 03 And here's another very vague, Washington state, buy and buy. What does that mean?
52:04 Speaker 04 Buy now?
52:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
52:06 Speaker 03 It's not B U Y, that actually.
52:09 Speaker 02 Oh, right.
52:09 Speaker 03 It's B Y, buy and buy.
52:11 Speaker 04 Buy and buy.
52:12 Speaker 03 Buy and buy.
52:13 Speaker 02 Well, you bring up Michigan, they've got a state song as well, which is called My Michigan. And it's the official state song, however, they rarely get to perform it because the state failed to purchase the copyright from the song's authors. Therefore, they're not allowed to use it. But they've kept it as their song because the copyright will lapse at the end of 2028. So they're so close to now being able to use it in various different places. And then one other one is in California. There's an official state song, which is I Love You California. And it has been used in a video game called Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. There's a moment where you're constructing the Golden Gate Bridge, which doesn't need
52:57 Speaker 02 to be in San Francisco, but you just build it in the game and it needs to act as a bridge. And as they're building it, it plays this song and it also reads out lines from Percy Shelley's A Bridle Song, which has the golden gates of sleep on bar as the opening line. Now, what's a crazy thing about this, not super crazy, but a weird coincidence, is the music to this song, I Love You California, was written by a man called Frankenstein. They've paired up Shelley with Frankenstein.
53:26 Speaker 04 Brilliant.
53:27 Speaker 03 Hmm.
53:28 Speaker 02 Isn't that wild?
53:28 Speaker 04 That's, I feel like you're the first person to make this connection, Dan. That's quite.
53:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
53:32 Speaker 04 That's reckoned out.
53:33 Speaker 02 I don't feel like it got the goosebump raising.
53:37 Speaker 04 No, no, not a bit.
53:39 Speaker 02 It's getting in my head, which kind of makes sense for why no one spotted that before.
53:45 Speaker 03 I think I zoned out there for a minute.
53:50 Speaker 01 Andy, your fact was about there being only one American state with official smell. There are other states with official smell, like national states, so countries. There was a thing called the World Sensorium, which was a project where they asked countries around the world to name their national smell. Nearly a quarter of the world's population identified with the same smell. Some of these are like larger countries, that's why it's a quarter of the population. But there was 11 countries that officially cited a particular smell that no other country did. Can you guess what it is?
54:28 Speaker 04 It's Sauvage, isn't it? It's so, oh no, Dior Por Homme. Is that it?
54:34 Speaker 01 It's not that, no.
54:36 Speaker 03 Cinnamon, bacon cookies.
54:38 Speaker 01 Cinnamon's a good call in that it's a naturally occurring thing. It was jasmine.
54:45 Speaker 03 Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There may be a lot of agreement on nice smells, but there's a lot of disagreement on bad smells. What constitutes a bad smell? The US military was trying to create a non-lethal weapon, something that would just clear a room, and they wanted it to be like internationally useful. So this woman, Pam Dalton, at the Monell Chemical Census Center, went around the world with vials containing vomit smell, sewage smell, and something called US military latrine smell. And she presented these to different cultures and different countries. And she asked things like, would you consider this smell edible, wearable, pleasant? It was a whole list, and there were some, some people were like, yeah, vomit, that's wearable.
55:30 Speaker 03 I would, that's perfume. In the end, they, they did a mix because they, they realized, not only does it have to be off-putting, but something weird and unidentifiable because that'll freak people out.
55:44 Speaker 01 And what did they use that again for, Mary?
55:46 Speaker 03 It would be in a grenade or something. You'd throw it into a room, and it was so vile that everyone would leave the room.
55:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, like a non-lethal weapon.
55:52 Speaker 03 It was a non-lethal weapon.
55:54 Speaker 04 Do we know what they went with as a smell at the end?
55:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I smelled it, and it's pretty bad. It was heavy on the US Army latrine smell.
56:06 Speaker 03 You know, I spent time at this place, Hilltop Labs, where they they do testing of deodorant type things like cat litter or, you know, underarm deodorant, things that are supposed to fight bad smells. So you want to be careful with their refrigerator because they have some horrible things in there. And I said, what is the worst? You guys, what's the worst smell that there is?
56:29 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
56:29 Speaker 03 And they said incubated saliva.
56:33 Speaker 01 Oh.
56:33 Speaker 02 Oh.
56:34 Speaker 01 Interesting.
56:35 Speaker 03 Incubated saliva.
56:37 Speaker 04 Incubated.
56:37 Speaker 03 Rotten. Just leave it in some warm environment and let it fester.
56:41 Speaker 01 Right.
56:42 Speaker 03 That was, that's, that was their vote.
56:44 Speaker 01 Wow. So just going quickly back to this world sensorium. Do you know what the United Kingdom's official smell was?
56:51 Speaker 02 It's gonna be like a full English breakfast. The, the whole mixture of a full English.
56:56 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
56:57 Speaker 01 Good guess?
56:58 Speaker 04 Uh, I'll say a nice conker.
57:02 Speaker 01 No, it was incubated saliva. No, it wasn't. It was, um,
57:07 Speaker 01 it was the smell of sea wind rolling through a land of grass.
57:11 Speaker 02 Oh, nice.
57:12 Speaker 04 That does actually sound quite nice. Do you have France there, James?
57:16 Speaker 01 Um, I'm not on my list. I can tell you that coffee was quite a lot of places. And Georgia, Germany, Moldova and Uzbekistan chose the smell of grapes, which I don't think smell of anything.
57:27 Speaker 02 Hmm. No. Oh, no, I do. I get grapes.
57:30 Speaker 01 Really?
57:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, I get grape smell. Yeah. Smells great. Um, okay. Well, we need to wrap up.
57:38 Speaker 01 On that joke.
57:40 Speaker 03 That was a good one.
57:42 Speaker 02 Unless you want to wrap up on the Frankenstein bit earlier. I don't know. Giving your options here, man.
57:52 Speaker 02 Okay, that is 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've said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James?
58:04 Speaker 01 Uh, my Instagram is nositsingasjamesharkin.
58:07 Speaker 02 Andy.
58:08 Speaker 04 At Andrew Hunter M.
58:09 Speaker 02 And Mary, you're on Instagram as well.
58:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, @authormaryroach.
58:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, and for everyone listening, Mary's new book is out now, Replaceable You. Get it. But also, just like we're talking to the best there is here, you know, Fuzz was incredible. Grunt, all about the military. QI, you know, books like Packing from Mars and Bonk and all those stiff. We used all of it. All of QI is basically just shredding Mary's book into questions.
58:38 Speaker 01 For legal reasons, I want to say that we did lots of other work as well.
58:43 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. But no, do get yourself the Mary Roach Library because it's the best selection of nonfiction books that you can get.
58:52 Speaker 01 Phenomenal.
58:52 Speaker 02 So if you want to get through to us, by the way, [email protected] is our email. Send all your best facts because we pick those out and they go towards Little Fish, our Monday show. Or if you want to mention anything that you think should be brought up on our secret mailbag show called Drop Us A Line, which is part of Club Fish, which you'll find if you go to Patreon. And send that stuff there because Andy picks out the best ones and we use them for both of those shows. So otherwise, just come back here next week. Big thank you, as ever, to our production team, Liang Li and Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the rest of the Fishbusters. And that's it. In the words of the Washington state motto, "Bye and bye."
59:48 Speaker 01 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. 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 or 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.
1:00:29 Speaker 00 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 zolar.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolar. This is an advertisement for Zolar paid for by Genentech and Novartis. 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.comPARENTS to learn more.
Previous Little Fish: I am Dorkus, Queen of the Dorks Next Little Fish: Release The Naughty List Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated