Forensic Science And The Champawat Tiger

It begins with a discovery in a loft: a full man eating tiger skin, brought back from a village in northern India where Professor Hannah Fry's ex-mother in law grew up. That find sends Hannah and Michael Stevens into the strange world of man eating big cats: a tigress blamed for a staggering number of deaths, what can turn a tiger toward hunting humans in the first place, and how India now borrows techniques from forensic science…effectively putting a tiger on trial before deciding its fate. And it raises an uncomfortable question: when a critically endangered animal kills a person, how do you weigh human safety against saving a species? Plus the wonderfully simple trick that stops attacks in their tracks. Then it's over to your questions, taking in some of the universe's most beautiful coincidences, from the sky above us to the clockwork of distant moons, and a mysterious number that once haunted one of the great physicists. Come and join our sub-Reddit: /r/TheRestIsScience ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  And today on Field Notes, Hannah has brought something, or she's going to show me something. She sent me an email while I was asleep.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  I did, but don't open it yet. Don't open it yet.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I haven't opened it yet because the subject line said, "Michael, do not read until we record later." At 2:01 a.m. she sent that, so...

• 0:26Speaker 01

  We are in different countries, to be fair.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  This is sort of by the by, but I'm going to send it to you on WhatsApp because I think if you open the email, it will immediately be obvious for the surprises, okay?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  All right. The object that I'm bringing today is something that we found in my ex-mother-in-law's loft. Okay. Now, important piece of information is that she's called Mary. She's absolutely amazing. I adore her, still adore her, will continue to adore her forever. She was born and brought up in India, and she's lived in this house for a very long time. We're going through some boxes. On you go.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Okay, so here it is. I've got a video from you. I can already see like a cardboard box with like some rope coming out of it, or wires or something. Should I hit play?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Off you go.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Okay, play.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  That's what we found.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Okay, so the rope I saw coming out was just part of a handle. Now, there's a whole bunch of crinkly paper holding... Oh! It's a tiger head.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  It's a taxidermied tiger head.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Which we found in her loft.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Our bodies are incredible machines, worrying away, making more and more DNA to build the proteins that keep us alive.

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• 2:48Speaker 01

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• 3:29Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Okay, there's a story behind this, right? She's not just collecting large animal taxidermies in a sort of weird and horrible and creepy way. There's this full story behind this. Let me give you this one. Okay, so I've just sent you another link.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Okay. Okay, so I'm loading the second video, which is a great view. It's out of the box now. I was a little bit sad when I first saw this decapitated tiger.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Of course. It isn't decapitated, though, to be fair.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  But then, your second video does have you saying, just kind of, I don't know the context, but you say in the background of the video, "Okay, so once they start eating people, they don't stop."

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Was this a man-killer?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  This was a man-eater. Okay, so she grew up in this village in India, which is right next to Nepal, right? So the northern part of India.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  So up north, yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  It's this area called Uttarakhand in India, and there's lots of wild tigers all around there. And this particular tiger was a man-eater, had been attacking people in the village and killing them. This is like way back in the 1940s, 1950s, by the way. And her dad was this quite important person in the village. And what they would do, when a tiger started eating humans, they knew that it wouldn't stop. Like, humans are very easy prey.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  And they're delicious.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And they're delicious, thank you very much. Still hoping for that invitation to eat some genuine human flesh, I see.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Me too, yeah. Well, I thought you were speaking for yourself.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  No, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  All right, I'm still waiting. Yeah, you're right.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  But once they realize that they can very easily kill and eat humans, they don't tend to stop. And so when you get a man-eater, it's sort of quite important that the village goes out there and hunts down this particular tiger, and essentially takes it out of the question. So a group of men from the village, including her dad, went out and they found the tiger. Essentially, they create this platform in the jungle, and they dangle meat from it, and they wait for the correct tiger to come past. They sort of know the different tigers by sight, by their patterning and so on. So this was the tiger, ended up in her loft, in this like nice old lady's loft, like thousands of miles away from where

• 6:31Speaker 01

  it started. But what I wanted to talk to you about today was, in general, this idea of man-eating tigers, because this is something that still absolutely happens, and the different ways that they try and approach it and tackle it. It's like a kind of crazy idea that you could just be wandering around near your home, and then have an actual predator come and attack you.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  I know, I know. Actually, let me tell you, I encountered something like this when I was in Kenya. I went there many years ago to speak to YouTubers in Kenya, and a lion showed up. And it was very cool, you know, "Oh, look at the lion, snap some photos." And then I saw a guy walking out with a gun, like a big gun. And I said, "Well, you can't shoot a lion, right? Like, they're endangered, you know?" But they did. And it was explained to me that, first of all, lions, Panthera leo, is not endangered, it's vulnerable.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  But the lion is too dangerous to the community, especially the children. And so once they've come that close, more lives are saved, I guess the human lives are saved by getting rid of that lion.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  So where were you when this happened? Were you out in the national park, or were you sort of in much more of an urban environment?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  I don't know where I was. So it was the morning after the meetings, and a friend and I just asked a guy if he could take us out. And we just drove a little further out to a different village, and I don't even remember the name of it.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  But it was a village, it was like a sort of a human settlement, essentially.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  It was a human settlement. This was not on like a reserve park or anything. This was more like, "Oh, and here's a place." In fact, it was a place we stopped in because I hadn't had any caffeine yet that day. And they were selling Red Bull, so we stopped to get a Red Bull. And I remember just being really annoyed because they didn't have sugar-free Red Bull. And I didn't want all the sugar, so I was like, "Gosh dang it!" And I got this, and the caffeine only, and the sugar only made me more irritable. And then a lion showed up. The lion was hanging out around the bathrooms, so...

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Wow, that is dangerous.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  We drove near them, and we saw, the lion was just chilling, just like, "Yo, what up?" And I'm like, "Oh, so cute." And then that's when I saw the men coming out with the guns, like big automatic weapons. And I was like, "Oh, that lion came into the wrong place." Did they have to do it? And I was told that they had to.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, what I will say, in India now, I mean, tigers are extremely endangered, extremely protected.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  So when this happens, there's this whole set of circumstances that come into play. But just, I think, let me just talk very briefly about the types of danger that they actually can pose to humans. So there's one very famous story called the Champawat Tiger, which is, it's about a three-hour drive from where my mother-in-law grew up, right? So really close, okay? This Champawat tiger, it started off, this is like 1895, something like that, and she started killing some humans in this tiny little village in Nepal. And hunters went in to try and kill her as a result of this, but she managed

• 9:59Speaker 01

  to evade them, carried on hunting. Eventually, the Nepalese army come out to try and track her, but fail, and yet managed to push her over the border into India. And then when she was in India, she would just pick off victim after victim after victim. And often they would be young women and children who were going to the forest to sort of collect firewood, to feed livestock, whatever else it might be. Also, she just became bolder and bolder and bolder. She would make these kills during daylight, whereas like a lot of the tiger attacks happen at nighttime. And across the entire region, like, people were really genuinely paralyzed with fear. So they would hear her roaring, and then nobody would leave their huts for ages afterwards, because they were like, "I'm not, I'm not

• 10:44Speaker 01

  going to risk it." Anyway, they think in the end, she killed 436 people.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is phenomenal, phenomenal. In the end, there was one young, youngish girl, 16-year-old girl, who she killed. And that allowed them to, sort of by following the torn clothes and trail into the jungle, they managed to find her. And when they, I mean, I do think that if there's one animal who's responsible for 436 deaths of villages... You know, it's not great, but I do see the argument that actually the safety of the humans is really important.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, if you don't have any other options, like, I think it would be better if we had the resources to capture the tiger and relocate it or rehome it.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Which is what they try and do now, but this is like over a hundred years ago. But they found that when, you know, after she was dead, they found that actually she had some broken teeth. They think that maybe she had been like shot or clipped by a bullet when she was much younger. And the the theory was that that was the reason why she then became a man eater.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  That actually tigers generally don't try and hunt humans, but if they find it harder to sort of attack prey on their own right, then humans are easier to to attack. And so you go for the for the humans instead.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Fast forward to the modern day. And now, when there are attacks, and they still happen, incidentally, so in late 2010, early 2011, there were four people who were killed in around this same area, right? In in the same area where my mother in law grew up. And what they did is the tiger who they thought was responsible, they went off and found it, but they also managed to recover DNA samples from the attack sites, from the the the sort of the the remains of the people who had been attacked by the tiger. And as a result, they did this forensic analysis in the same way that you would do if there was a human murder.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  And they managed to prove after the fact that the tiger had been the guilty party, right? They did DNA evidence against the tiger. They proved he was the guilty party. I think it might have been a female tiger, actually, on that instance. The female tiger was the guilty party and she'd killed these humans and that was fine. Okay, so her sort of taking her out was okay.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  It was fine. So they they they they they had the trial after the execution and luckily it was okay.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  But now, now they do the trials before the execution.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  So now what they do, you know, if you accept that actually having a tiger that's hunting humans is a really bad thing and that that tiger needs to be removed from that situation in some way or another, then you need to be sure that you are getting the correct tiger. And so what they do is they take the DNA from the crime scene. And then they go around, they sort of try and stalk the different tigers that are in the neighborhood. And they managed to get DNA from the tigers, from like urine samples, from like brushing past leaves. They basically do a full forensic analysis, a full forensic like crime scene thing, then run what is effectively a trial, right? Work out who the guilty tiger is.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  And then they like start with this process of like, can we dump the tiger, put the tiger in a zoo? Can we relocate the tiger? Is there anything, anything we can do? Killing the tiger does still happen, but it's the absolute last resort now.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Well, that's all really good to hear. I love that. I love that we're giving these like human rights to the animal criminals. And this should be an episode of some like crime show. There should be like the animal detectives who are like, okay, I got a urine sample from a tiger. We're gonna bring it to the lab and we're gonna find out if they're the criminal, if they're the murderer.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Well, I want to know, so first of all, this taxidermy tiger head that your former mother in law has.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. It's the full tiger body. It's the full tiger body. If you watch the second video, it's the full body.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  It's the full tiger body?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Paws, everything. It's unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably beautiful.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness. So what a special story also to have from from her life. Why did she not have it on display?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Because I think it's not that nice, you know?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a little un-nice. It's a little macabre. It's a little like you need to explain the context.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you did. That's the point, right? I think if you if you've got the postie coming around your house, you know what I mean? Some plumbers come around to fix you to fix your sink and then it's like, oh.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Massive tiger on your wall. That's um, that's quite the thing.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  How did you acquire that?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  How did you? You'd have to sort of put a plaque next to it being like, it's okay, this is not game hunting. This is not sort of big cat hunting. This is not like a trophy kill. This is like, you know, in the service of human life. And I think actually, even in that situation, I think that some people still would not be happy about it. Incidentally, by the way, this this this particular tiger skin, it can now, it can stay in their family, right? It can stay in the family, be handed down, but she can't, you can't, you can't sell it.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  You can't trade it. I think carrying it across borders is extremely difficult. Quite rightly, all of the rules of these things of like tiger skins, of of of elephant tusks, all of that have completely clamped down in a really, really serious way. And since the 1970s, actually, you haven't just been allowed to go out and kill tigers. Only in a situation where you know that they're a man eater. Has it even been on the cards that they could be shot?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Wow. Well, yeah, I mean, it's such a, we don't always think about it. I know there are, there are, you know, bears and sharks. We we are prey on this planet still to a certain degree. And it's, I think it's good to be reminded of that, that we are just sharing this planet and sometimes things are gonna get a little dark.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  A little bit dark. One thing that I would say, that old assumption, based on the on the tiger that killed 436 people, that that she had this tooth broken and that was the reason why she was hunting for humans. With all of this DNA evidence that has been going on in India in the last 15 years or so, they have tried to work out essentially what percentage of tigers are problematic, by which I mean interacting with sort of human, humans themselves, or with livestock that the humans keep. And the old assumption was that, you know, there'd only be one or two tigers, if they were her, who would do something like that.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  But actually, now that they've done these DNA swabs on like livestock carcasses that have been sort of dragged into the jungle by these by these tigers, it's more like 40% of the tiger population. It's like, hey, you know, it's like a Big Mac, right? It's like, listen, look at this easy lunch that's just right there. Why would I, why would I not?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, I I was just thinking about that. Like, I was using the word criminal to describe these animals and yet I don't think that's a fair description.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  It's literal fast food, you know?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, they're just getting fast food. They're just getting a nice little snack, the same way they would with any other animal. They're they're not, their intentions are not, aha, I'm gonna get away with this. I'm gonna commit an act that will weigh on my conscience and I don't care because it won't, because I'm a psychopath. They're just eating meat as they do.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I mean, and the thing is, is that like, hold on a second, that livestock were gonna get eaten anyway, you know? It's just gonna be, it's like, hey, that's my food rather than that.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  That's right. You stole our food. Or you, hey, you ate food, but it's not the food we want you to eat. So penalty is death. Golly.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  No, so actually, there's you, you, you cannot kill a tiger if it if it attacks livestock. Livestock, a sort of, not quite fair game, but but there's, there's no, you know, tiger, in a battle between tiger and cow, the tiger wins every single time. There is something you can do about it, though, which is very humane. I I really like the simplicity of this as a solution. So in in the 1980s, people noticed that the way that tigers hunt, sort of like some folklore about this as well, but the way that tigers hunt is that if they they sort of stalk their victims, and then if they feel like they've been spotted, they'll give up and they'll they'll go find something else to eat.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  So what people did in the 1980s, when in in West Bengal, this is, because you have people who are out there in the jungle, in the forest, you know, collecting honey, fishermen, woodcutters, whatever it might be, they gave out these these sort of helmets that had faces on the back of the head.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And it turns out that the number of tiger attacks just really dramatically dropped because tigers thought that the people were looking the other way and so didn't bother killing them. Now tigers have got, they've got smart to it. So now they, but it doesn't work quite as well. However, on cows, this is, I'm gonna move across to lions now rather than cows. But in Botswana, there was, there was one study, this is really recently, right? This is like 2020, I think, that the paper was published. What they did is they got cows' rumps in Botswana and they painted eyes on them.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And then it basically dropped the number of lion attacks, lions eating the cows, to zero.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  No kidding?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  The lions just stopped eating the cattle, just stopped, just just didn't, didn't bother.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  It's like the old butterfly trick. Just put some big eyes.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Just put some big eyes in your eyes.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you know what? This is all making me think about, have you heard of Osama bin Laden?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  His name's come up.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  The elephant.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  There was an elephant named Osama bin Laden in the Indian state of Assam.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Wait, named after the man or just in coincidence with?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  It was named after the human because this elephant was a rogue elephant that killed 27 people. And was not afraid of fireworks, which is, I guess, how they normally get rid of rogue elephants.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  It's my favorite Wikipedia article. Well, it's in my top 20 because the article is titled Osama bin Laden, elephant, just to be clear, we're talking about the elephant. And this elephant, unfortunately, also got executed for its, not crimes, but behavior.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  How did it kill them? Trample people?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't even say. I I can't find any articles describing what it did.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  I like the idea that it was just slapping it around the face with its trunk instead. Okay, well, I'm gonna read the the Wikipedia page for Osama bin Laden and the elephant while you guys go for a break. And when we come back, we'll answer your questions.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  All right, see you then.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to Doing It Anyway, a brand new series from Goalhanger. I'm Catty Kay. I've spent years studying the science and art of confidence, writing books about how we can close the confidence gap between men and women, and talking to experts and younger women about how to pass it on. Confidence means taking risks, acknowledging your fears, and, well, doing it anyway. In this series, I'll be talking to psychologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to unpack how you can rethink challenges and grow your own confidence. We'll talk about how to spot the difference between confidence and competence, how to deal with office politics and stolen credit, and, yes, handling rejection, and ultimately,

• 22:49Speaker 01

  how you can become a better leader, teammate, and, yes, a better person. Doing It Anyway with Catty Kay, every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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• 24:10Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Welcome back. We are now going to dive into questions from you, our listeners. I want to start with this one from Logan Asorio, who asks, "Why is eating food so much more pleasurable than drinking water? I would expect our evolution to make drinking a far more dopaminergic activity, because we can't survive more than a few days without water, but we can go months without food."

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Did you make up that word, Logan? It's a great word.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Dopaminergic?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  It's a new one on me. I like it. I'm gonna use it from now on.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  I don't know, Logan. I mean, uh, speak for yourself. I love drinking water. But I think, I think it is a really interesting, uh, way to think here, because, yeah, we definitely have all kinds of foods that we love. But you would think that water, being even more important to, to have, would be more, like, even more pleasurable. I, what I think is that there might be a little bit of a supernormal stimulus thing going on here, where compared to our, like, the diets that we had as we evolved 100,000 years ago,

• 26:03Speaker 00

  water was really good. And water can be really good. We've all had that sip of water that was just, like, so perfect, because we needed water at that moment.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  And that, that pleasure we get from eating and drinking is, is a way for our body to say, yes, you need to be doing this. Um, but, but we have since manufactured foods to be so good, to take advantage of exactly what our bodies are trained to give us pleasure for, that we've been able to make foods that are, like, so much better than anything you would just find out there.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Such a good point. If you're, if you're eating gruel, you know, eating gruel and drinking water, then actually, they're quite similar in terms of the, the joy that they're gonna give you, right?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. I think, like, a, a seared antelope steak probably did really hit the spot when you were hungry. But now, we can base that antelope steak in butter with some herbs, and we can raise the, the, not just the antelopes, but we can raise cattle to have, like, all this fat marbling in them. And food has just become so much better. It's not a normal stimuli anymore. It's super normal. And Hannah, you and I have talked about this on the podcast and in real life before. But like, you know, the processing that we can do to food to make it just so good, um, it, water can't

• 27:34Speaker 00

  compete. Now, we have processed, supernormal liquids that are, like, more delicious than anything we would normally have found. For example, what am I drinking right now? I'm drinking a vanilla-flavored, no-sugar Coca-Cola. So, I'm getting, like, no nutrient value at all from this, not even food energy. I'm just getting these flavors. And I can drink 12 of these during a podcast, you know?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  You'd be quite burpy.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  You'd be quite burpy. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I still think that Logan is on to something here, where, like, I've, I've definitely eaten food and been like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And although I sometimes really enjoy a beverage, I've never had as strong of a pleasure from a beverage as a food.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Do you think so? I think I have, you know?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  You do?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. If it's like, it's mostly cold beer, or like, or like a really, really, really good glass of white wine, like crisp and dry and delicious in the right setting, where it's like, just give me more. I've definitely had that sensation. I mean, it doesn't last very long. And there's a point where you're like, actually, after about two of them, I'm like, okay, I'm done. But, um, but I definitely, yes, I, for me, I think that there's like a similar satiation, as it were. I'm not a foodie, though, right? I think if someone was a foodie.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  They might, they might privilege food. Yeah, I think, I think that everyone's a little bit different. But I still think that at a, at a fundamental level, I think you're right, Logan. And here's why it might make sense. And this is just me coming up with a hypothetical, you know, speculative answer. But I think that when it comes to beverages and hydration, there really is this upper limit to where you can't drink anymore, because it is actually dangerous for you. And we've talked about this all the way back in our first episode. We've talked about water poisoning. But if you find a food source that's gonna give you a lot of, of, of energy to live, there isn't so much of an upper bound, because your body can take the excess calories and convert

• 29:57Speaker 00

  them to fat, to store, that help you survive in case you don't find food later. And so, of course, under that thinking, I would get why food would be more pleasurable, because your body has, has evolved to say, yes, have more of this, have more, have more, have more, because we can store it for later. But when you drink a beverage, your body might say, ah, yes, the hydration we needed, but also don't keep going, because it will make you, uh, uncomfortable, and there's no benefit beyond a certain point at this moment. What we should have evolved to feel pleasure in is in storing potable water. Like, oh,

• 30:37Speaker 00

  yeah, pour that stream water into a canteen. Mmm, I love doing this. But we didn't.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  That would have been useful.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Maybe if we had sensory organs in the canteens, it could have happened. But I think that's probably what's going on. Your body is like, look, we need to encourage the food eating because it's always worth it. But the beverage, we're going to limit more. So you just don't get the same dopaminergic effect from beverages.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  I like the idea that you could even have the water storage pouches, you know, maybe on your hips, just like extra.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, if, if we had biological water storage pouches evolved into our bodies, then I think we would feel the same kind of like, oh, this is so good. I gotta order more and we would just like over drink all the time.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Okay, next question. This one's from Timothy. Timothy says, Dear Hannah and Michael, what are some of your favorite ratios? Knowing it's just one seems too difficult. Here's some of mine. Height of tallest mountain, height of tallest building, 10 to one. Distance of the earth to sun against the diameter of the sun, 100 to one. Isn't it amazing that Everest is only 10 times taller than the Burj Khalifa? And yes, it's a long way from the earth to the sun, but the sun itself is very large. Really like this question. I've got, I've got some of my own. I've got some of my own ratios. You feel free to jump in as well, Michael here. Obviously I, I think we should start with the earth, sun and moon, right? That the, the sun is 400 times wider than the moon. And by pure chances, it's 400 times further away.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  That seems, that can have some extraordinary ratio.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  It's, it's extraordinary. What a great coincidence.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's others though. Do you want to hear others?

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, please give me some more.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  In the 1930s, Paul Dirac was, was trying to work out the ratio between the electric force, right? Sort of subatomic particle level and the force of gravity. And he works out that the ratio was 10 to the 40. So that's a one followed by 40 zeros. And then he was like, oh, you can do something else now. So he worked out the age of the universe measured in atomic ticks. How many times a, a clock, the sort of size of an atom basically has been beating since the beginning? And ended up with 10 to the 40 again. And he was like, that can't be a coincidence. This is, I don't believe in coincidences in the physical world. So he was like, okay, surely there's something going on here.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Maybe gravity, maybe they started off as one to one and the gravity itself must be slowly weakening as the universe ages. It's just, it doesn't make sense that they'd be the same number. But there's a few other places where the same number pops up. So in Jupiter, this might be my favorite one, I think. In Jupiter, this Jupiter's got three moons, right? And in the time that Ganymede loops Jupiter once, Europa goes around exactly twice. Boop, boop. And Io goes around four times. Boop, boop, boop, boop. It's like, that's a weird coincidence, isn't it? Isn't that a weird coincidence that you've basically got this actual sort of clockwork moon system?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  That's just this absolute clean one to two to four, you know? I think that's a coincidence, weird coincidence. Anyway, there's lots of these and it makes me question the existence of God.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, right? One that I really like is that almost exactly halfway between the Planck scale and the size of the observable universe. So right in the middle between the smallest and the biggest things is a human cell.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  That's good. That's coincidence, isn't it?

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, a few tenths of a millimeter is right there in the middle. So what we are made out of is just right there in the middle. We are average.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Isn't that interesting?

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Just as much stuff is bigger, there's, there's just as many measurements bigger than us as smaller than us in this universe we find ourselves in.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Freaky, freaky and unexplained.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Freaky, thank you, God. Here's a question from the Rest is Science subreddit. This comes from Drunk Socks.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  I didn't even know we had a subreddit. I'm very excited about this news.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, all of you out there, I'd love to see you there. Bring, bring your questions, your comments. Tell me how unkept my beard now looks. I apologize for that. I'm just not around the kinds of equipment I need to, to tend it well, but I will be.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't think it looks, you know what? Until you pointed it out, it hadn't occurred to me.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  I feel, I just feel a bit rough, but look, here's, here's Drunk Socks's question. Hello, I am investigating what makes a good question? Because I'm developing an app to have good and interesting conversations based on what people are curious about. I've come to the conclusion that there are some archetypes of questions that open up something interesting. What good question have you been asked? And what's your favorite question this podcast has addressed? I would love to see your list of question archetypes, Drunk Socks, because I've never thought of questions in that way. I've never thought of what, is there a taxonomy of types of questions or ways a question can be constructed? But when it comes to a good question I've been asked, man, I think

• 36:00Speaker 00

  kids, of course, always ask the best ones because they're not afraid. And sometimes the way they, they phrase the question shows a connection or a lack of connection that we all, all the older ones of us have all just assumed. Once a kid asked me, hey, what's the opposite of a duck? And I was like, whoa, I love this because it really forces us to question what opposite means.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  And it's also got room for a lot of creativity because you could say, ah, the opposite of a duck is a jump. See, I'm interpreting duck as in like to duck down to crouch down. And you get to do some word play and then you start to, then you start to wonder about like, why words mean the things that they mean. And so, yeah, I don't know. I, I just, I keep going back to that question.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  I like that a lot. I mean, I guess, sorry, I'm just thinking about the duck question. It's just a really good one because the duck is comfortable on land, water and in the air, right?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Right, so the opposite would be a creature that's not comfortable anywhere. It'd be me.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  You are the opposite of a duck. I also think that it's about, I think that the really good questions are ones that actually the duck question fits into, which takes something that feels really familiar and then give you a route to seeing it in an entirely new light.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  I think those are the really good questions, like that start on common ground and take you somewhere completely original and unexpected. I think those are the really good questions.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. They, they, they don't always have clear answers, but a good question is more about directing and disrupting thinking. So I'm going to be at Open Sauce soon and I'm going to be on Hank Green's podcast.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Where you ask him questions before you arrive and then he tries to prepare and give you answers. I'm very excited, but I asked questions like, how big do dogs think the world is?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Like, you know, like a, a dog might, you know, live in, in North Carolina and then it, it moves with its family to Florida. Like, what does it think happened? Is it like, whoa, I'm far away? Or is it like, oh, hey, all the smells are different. I wonder what happened? I also asked if humanity suddenly forgot the concept of love. Would we ever? And if so, how long would it take for us to rediscover it?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a nice question.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Cause we still have, we still have all the related feelings of companionship and, and loyalty and all of that. But how long would it take for us to be like, hey, I think these all are fitting into a thing that should have its own name. Let's call it love. And I don't think that there's an answer to that in the same way that there is an answer to the question. What's the average height of a human?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  I think instead, good questions just make you stop and think very differently about stuff that you normally, well, that was normally left unquestioned.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds really good. I'd always be tempted with the Hank Green one. I'd always be tempted to ask him something quite sort of deep and human about himself too.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Well, I did, I also, now I don't know which ones he's going to choose. I had to give more than he's going to pick, but I also asked, when was the loneliest you ever felt?

• 39:42Speaker 00

  We'll see if he's brave enough and trusts me enough to tell me.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  That's interesting. When, when's that coming out?

• 39:49Speaker 00

  I have no idea.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Well, we'll watch out for it. We'll watch out for it. Those are all excellent questions and all the questions from you guys were excellent as well. I've just been on the subreddit for the rest of science. It's, it's really lovely in there. It's just loads of lovely people talking about things, just really enjoyable. Maybe we should do an AMA at some point.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  So where should people go to participate in our subreddit?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Just to our slash the rest of science.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Oh, we should definitely do an AMA.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Maybe we should do a rule where it's like, it has to have a certain number of posts or something and then we'll do it.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  I don't want to hold, I don't want to hold that hostage. I don't want to force people because then they'll all join, we'll do the AMA and then they'll all just leave. We gotta earn this the old fashioned way. So, uh, yeah, we, we do look at it. So leave questions there, r slash the rest is science. As always, you can email them to the rest is science at goalhanger.com. We love those questions. Keep them coming and thanks for watching.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed. We will see you next week for our normal episodes on, what day does it come out now? I'm not sure. Sometime on Sunday or Monday, depending on where you are in the world. And then another field notes episode. See you then.

• 41:08Speaker 04

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