Instant Genius - Is there really no such thing as a fish? – Andrew Hunter Murray and Dan Schreiber

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

We like to think our Science Focus Podcast is something really rather special (really, you should tell all your mates about it). But let’s face it, it pales in comparison to the hugely popular podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, which bagged Apple’s prestigious ‘Best New Podcast’ award in 2014. Numerous awards later, including the 2019 Heinz Oberhummer Award in science communication, they have amassed a whopping 700,000 subscribers for their irreverent podcast about the weird and wacky things they’ve discovered over the past week. We can’t resist the opportunity to get meta and do a science podcast about doing a science podcast, so we sent Online Editor Alexander McNamara to meet two of the show's stars, Andrew Hunter Murray and Dan Schreiber, where they chewed the ‘facts’ about Isaac Newton lecturing to empty theatres, meeting scientists who suggest putting fake eyes on a cow’s backside, and the logistics around building a statue out of sausages. We also put their fact-checking skills to the test with a little quiz pulled from the Q&A section of BBC Science Focus Magazine. Why don’t you play along as well and let us know how you get by tweeting us @sciencefocus. Please remember to rate and review our show wherever you download your podcasts from. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Do you believe in magic? – Gustav Kuhn What happens when maths goes horribly, horribly wrong? – Matt Parker What does it mean to be happy? – Helen Russell Inside the mind of a comedian – Robin Ince Finding the fun in science – Dara Ó Briain This is how to invent everything – Ryan North Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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what we're doing really is piggybacking on the work of incredible scientists and researchers all over the world who are devoting years of their lives to finding out extremely interesting things as rigorously as they can. Yeah. And then we're making gags about that. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

Hello, I'm Alice Lipscomb, Southwold, the production editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. I for one think the Science Focus podcast is something really rather special. Not really is, you should tell all your mates about it. But let's face it, it pales in comparison to the hugely popular podcast, no such thing as a fish, which bagged Apple's prestigious Best New Podcast Award in 2014. Numerous awards later, including the 2019 Heinz Oberhammer Award in Science Communication, they have a master whopping 700,000 subscribers for their irreverent podcast about the weird and wacky things they've discovered over the past week.

Well, we couldn't resist the opportunity to get a little meta and to do a science podcast about doing a science podcast. So, we sent online editor Alexander McNamara to choose the facts about Isaac Newton lecturing to empty theatres, meeting scientists who suggest putting fake eyes on a cow's backside and the logistics around building a statue out of sausages. But we also put their fact-checking skills to the test with a little quiz that we pulled together from the Q&A section of the BBC Science Focus magazine. Why don't you play along as well?

And let us know how you get on by tweeting at Science Focus. Okay, so I'm here with Dan Shriver and Andrew Hunter Murray from the famous and very wildly popular, no such thing, as a fish podcast. So you've just been awarded a high. Heinz-Oberhammer Award for Science Communication for your podcast. I was just wondering if you could kick things off by telling us, what actually is your podcast all about? Ooh, it's kind of about everything.

So we work for QI, the TV show, and we've worked there in various different configurations over the years. And we found that we had lots of extra facts left over at the end of a series, which we'd really wanted to get into the TV show, but we couldn't. And they were about everything. They were about science, but they were also about history, about art, about food, about medicine, about whatever it might be. And we just thought we have to find a way of talking about these.

So every week we get together with one fact each and we just talk about those facts. Yeah, but it's great because it's a genuine conversation that we have. We each send each other this headline fact that we want to talk about. But we all go away, research, don't tell each other what we found. So come to the table with all this research and let the conversation flow. And that's the wonderful thing because it sort of can disappear to any topic that comes up. We might be talking about Charles Dickens, but then we might end up in that conversation, start talking about the sausages of the time, you know, whatever it is that comes up.

And that's really exciting. It's a rabbit hole of conversation. So it can really be about anything. You're not sort of say, hey, let's focus on biology this week or let's focus on literature this week. It's just, I've found a cool fact. I'm just going to go for it. Yeah, that's actually the most exciting thing. It's probably what makes us stay sane is that we're able to chase the interest that we have

week. So if I happen to be reading a biography of George Eliot, the author, and you come across a sentence, that's fantastic, because I'm so interested in her that week, and now I can bring that to the table. If we prescribed what we were talking about, you might end up resenting the topics slightly. So fortunately... I think you've got to say what the George Elliott fact is. You can't just tease it like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we found this fact that she, for 50 years after her death, her family, spent their entire sort of public life when talking about her, denying that she had a massive hand. She had one hand that was supposedly ginormous, so heavy, she said, in an interview that it weighed her down to one angle of her body.

And they denied it. They said, this is not true. And she, this was a neighbor who lived next to her, who revealed this in an interview. And she said that she got it from churning all the butter when she worked on a farm. So this one hand that was doing the churning just got bigger and bigger. and the family wouldn't allow anyone to do authorised biographies or anything unless they also actively publicly denied that she had a massive hand. So when they were doing, when they did the biography, they actually had to say she doesn't have a big hand or just gloss over it. Yeah, they had to say she doesn't have a big hand, which is more suspicious than not mentioning it at all to me.

If you've ever seen the film Hellboy, like his hand, basically. Do you think that in this situation you find out that, you know, perhaps maybe she does or doesn't have a big hand, would you then sort of like follow that rabbit hole, don't you say down to say, is there such a thing as big hand syndrome or can you get a big hand? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are so many ways you can go with it. I think that time we ended up talking mostly about Elliot because she had such an interesting life. But what else do we talk about in that one? But that's just a very good example of when we have a headline sentence.

So the keywords in there are George, sorry, George Elliott, family denies big hand. You've got so many different possible roads to go down and research. What are things that other families have denied about famous people. What are other big hand things? What are other George Elliot facts? I found myself looking into the hands of Alex Honnold, who's the climber, who was in the documentary Free Solo recently. And he's got absolutely enormous sausage fingers useful for climbing mountains. And so I went down a bit of rabbit hole of things that people have said about his hands online. And they've said all sorts of crazy baroque stuff. But I never read that out on the podcast because the conversation just turned in a different direction. And you can just kind of see the

ship of your hopes sailing away into the distance. Yeah. I was reading just yesterday about free climbing, uh, climate. So the French Spider-Man, you know him. I read that he, when he climbed the, at the time, the biggest building in the world, it was in Taipei. Um, he, he did that in order to promote it, a month before he did a photo shoot where he climbed a traffic light, seven foot tall.

Um, he couldn't hack it. He fell off and he injured himself and was hospitalized. 40 stitches almost missed the climb of the actual big building. It was crazy. That's just by the... the way, that's how the conversation rolls on the podcast. You just, yeah, it's word association. It's like a weird version of mallet's mallet thingy. That's, um, so in your mind's, what is it that says when you see a fact, what makes a good fact that you're like, yeah, that's

going in? Ooh. It's hard to know, isn't it? I think it's something that presents something you already knew about in a new way or a new light. So we often get asked what our favorite facts are. And think one of my favorites is that geese sometimes fly upside down when they're coming into land. And it's because they're too high. They've mistimed their landing. They need to reduce height very quickly. So they flip their body upside down. They keep their head the right way up and they flip their body upside down.

And they quickly sort of flap themselves down to earth the way they would flap themselves up normally. So that is kind of presenting normal information in a new way. Yeah. And I guess also insight into big subjects or big characters, but just focusing on a beautiful tiny detail. I remember reading Isaac Newton, used to lecture to empty theaters, basically because his lectures were so boring.

No one turned up, but he did them anyway. Just love the idea. A few time traveled back to see Newton. That would be a wonderful moment to see just a man lecturing like a crazy guy to an empty room. Those are very good. Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, I think. When he was slightly in later life,

he got so big that rather than go on a diet, he came up with a new solution, which was just to cut a semicircle out of his dining table so he could fit into it more easily. That's right. Yeah, he just placed his tummy in the semi-circle. There are all these weird aspects about people who you think you know about, or people who seem very serious and eminent. They're just like us. And then it's weird. There's sometimes there's facts that are interesting, but you never use. And we sometimes disagree on that. I've had a fact which has not made it onto the show as a headline fact, which was that when Lee Harvey, Oswald was buried. It was such controversy about his body and, you know, they're worried about lynching and all that sort of stuff happening to him before he made it to the grave, that he was

buried as a cowboy called William Bobo. That was the sort of the pseudonym he was given. And the pallbearers found out, as they were about to bury him, who he was, and they refused to do it. So he ended up being carried to the grave by the paparazzi who had found out that that was happening and tried to get a scoop, because no one else was there to carry it. They had to put their cameras down and carry him to the grave. Now, weirdly, we've never done that as a headline fact because I think you sort of go, where would we go with that? It's an interesting fact, but does that lead to territories

that we want to get into, you know, the deaths of assassins? And it's not necessarily funny for us. It's one of those weird things where tragedy, comedy is tragedy plus time, as the saying goes. So in our first ever episode, we did have a fact about the assassination of an American president, James Garfield. And I think because that happened in the middle of the 19th century, that's an easier subject for levity.

Yes. And the fact in that case was that after he was shot, he spent the last month of his life eating everything through his anus. And he was fed eggs and beef stew and I think alcohol sometimes. Yeah. And this is... He had a menu, basically, that he could pick from. Yeah.

And the fact really becomes one about... medical incompetence in the 19th century, because if he'd been shot today in the same way he was shot back then, he would have been out of hospital in two days. But as it was, he was surrounded by doctors poking their fingers in the wound with unwashed hands, and his condition worsened and his condition worsened. Alexander Graham Bell came by with a prototype metal detector to try and identify where the bullets were in his body. Failed to do so. Well, you'd think that you would know where the bullets were in his body. No, do you know, because he's been shot. I mean, you can see where he's been shot. Yeah, I guess they just, yeah, they wanted an exact location.

The problem is they couldn't work out where it was. And what Alexander Graham Bell, I think, didn't realize at the time. They thought the machine was broken. In fact, he was laying on a bed that had metal springs. So it was just going off. And I think they concluded that he was a robot. Yeah. It seems like you've got this nugget of a fact, which is, you know,

the assassination of a president is a historical fact. And yet you've gone down medicine there. you've gone technology with the metal detector. It seems like you can go sorts of all directions. Now, you've just won this science communication award, which is brilliant. Congratulations on that. But do you see yourself as a science podcast, or do you think yourself you could also be quite easily win a history podcast award?

Or you could win a biology podcast award. I mean, we're up for any awards that people want to give us so that we should get that on the record. We deliberately design the podcast so that we're eligible for every category in every audio award. It really is in everything podcast. But there is a strong scientific vein. And even the historical facts are about how people understood the world around them in previous

centuries. And that's a huge part of what we do. So, yeah, it's weird. Because if you want to talk about it as a science podcast for us, it kind of does fit that to an extent. But as you say, if it's a historical podcast and let's say ignoring your point just now about bending it towards science, we could just say we're a history podcast. podcast as well. We do, yeah, it's such a beautiful mix of so many different territories.

That comes with, again, not having a prescriptive subject for each week, but having four very different personalities with very different interests. You know, I talk a lot about cryptozoology and things that don't exist. There's still interesting facts about the history of those things that make it a topic that's worth talking about. So that kind of, you know, to an extent, we talk about, we could be classified as any podcast, really. we are is just a chat podcast, I would say. But also, I think this is one of the guiding principles of QI as well, is that if you tell people things and make them laugh at the same time, they're more likely to remember it. And so QI, the TV show, very much sees itself as education by stealth.

And I would hope that if we've done anything with no such thing as a fish, it's the same thing, basically. It's to get people to remember facts. It's to get people to talk more about them, maybe look up the research that it's based on, find out more about that. Yeah. We were, we should say, we were genuinely shocked when we got offered this award because we don't think of ourselves as a science podcast. We know we do a lot of science in it, but not at such a skew towards the science that we think we'd be eligible for something like this award. So that was really cool to receive as a thing. I think we mentioned things like methodologies. So if there's a fascinating scientific finding, we'll go into exactly how it was discovered. And we might, if the sample size, was unusually large or small, we might mention that, or might throw in a caveat. So I think there's kind of under the radar,

scientific communication going on that you might not register as a casual listener. Yeah, you're right. And I guess as well, we have to break it down for each of us to, because none of us, except for James on the podcast, has a science background. He did physics, am I right?

Something there at university. So it's pointless us talking with the jargon that a scientist would understand of communicating with another scientist. We have to break it down to make it as interesting as possible for each other, for it to stay in the podcast, because that's the main thing. Is it interesting? You could do something that's technically a brilliant find in science,

but if you've said it in a slightly boring way, it's not making the cut. So that's the challenge for us, really. That point of making something both interesting and sort of scientific in a way, there's obviously the, when you find a fact, you go, that is amazing. I'm really interested in that. How do you then go about saying, how accurate is it? And how can I tell this story

so it's both accurate and wildly interesting? Yes. Well, the nice thing about it is that because there are four of us we'll all have looked into the same claims. And I think there's, we have small enough egos that if someone says, even in the middle of a podcast recording, obviously this is not a definitive study.

There have been other studies which have countered this one or come up with a different result. we can take that on the chin. So that's quite a relief that we're all in that frame of mind. Yeah, I think as well, we're, sometimes when the facts come up or the studies or whatever, you're lobbing that into the arena, as it were, for then to play with the idea. You slightly imagine if you were there, what would you have said at the time?

And so you get a lot of fun embellishment just by acting out your thought of, how did they get to that? What would the other things that they that's the really fun bit where you can go into fantasy land and then you just keep the actual facts Peppered through as you're telling the story And I hope that people realize that we're we are not Practicing scientists because I think it's important for I think it's important for the podcast that people know that we are people who are interested in things and we've got the time to research them But this is all stuff we found out this week so

sometimes we might make mistakes. We normally try and correct them if we do, either in the edit or with a grovelling apology in the following week. We've only had to do that a couple of times. But only because we've stopped apologising. Too lazy. But I think that's, it's important to get across that, you know, what we're doing really is piggybacking on the work of incredible scientists

and researchers all over the world who are devoting years of their lives to finding out extremely interesting things as rigorously as they can. And then we're making gags about that. Exactly. We think, yeah, exactly. We'll read a Mary Roach book or a Bill Bryson book or a Jimal Callilly and we'll say he's missed a gag there. I guess it must be quite good for the people who are doing these studies

and that sort of thing, for you to be able to them to say, hey, look, we've been covered. Our work is being noticed. And you're getting that out there to a wider audience, which I guess is part of the whole science communications that you are doing. Well, we hope so, yeah. I mean, we're flattered whenever any of the scientists of work we've covered, knows it's been on the show and gets in touch. That does happen sometimes. Yeah, we do our best to acknowledge any of the... Sometimes if it's a generic science reporting on a paper that we'll say who wrote the paper, we won't necessarily talk about the journalist or the paper or the magazine that we got it from. But if it comes directly from a book or if we're, like, for example, that George Elliott fact came from a fantastic.

book. I unfortunately can't remember it in my head right now, but we acknowledge it on the podcast. And that for us, because those are our heroes, really. Everyone who's doing scientific research or any kind of research, we're just here reading that stuff and regurgitating it and trying to convert it into something as you would in a pub if you were telling someone about a great book that you read. But yeah, so we have a huge amount of hero worship. And as Andy says, if they get in contact, we go crazy when we get messages from people. And these are like, you know, people who are, you know, they research camels and, you know, snot. And, you know, so we really like writing to people when we can who are doing the research.

If you can find out in terms of someone. So a couple of years ago, I got in touch with Neil Jordan, who was doing a study in Botswana about painting eyes on cows' backsides in order to deter lions from preying on them. So this would be a huge help to farmers in the region who lose a lot of cattle to lion predation. and to my delight he wrote back and he told me about the study and we were able to feature it and we followed up a little later and he was saying the full report is going to be out soon and that is those are the moments that we're really excited about is finding out about those wonderful studies happening around the world so you must have in your travels and pursuit of facts and knowledge you must have like met

or spoken to a few of these these people that are doing it and you know as you say with the eyes on the back of a cattle's backside. These sound like very out there studies, and the characters behind them must also be fairly interesting as well. Have you ever met any people that you've gone, you're great? I want to tell your facts and tell everyone about what you were studying. Yeah, well, I've been very lucky.

Before we started the podcast, I created with a guy called John Lloyd, who runs QI and Rich Turner, a radio show called Museum of Curiosity. It's a Radio 4 show, which I produced for seven series. And the idea behind that was exactly that, find these amazing characters, bring them on, and get their life story out and then do with the format of what the show is. So through that, met some extraordinary people.

There was an Australian lizard expert called Chris Clement, who happened to be in town for two days. We managed to get him on the show. And he studies lizards for a living. He's very much personality-wise, a bit like Steve Irwin. He's this infectious, you know, overenthusiastic Australian. And he was studying why certain lizards, when they run so fast, suddenly pop a wheelie. They go on their back two legs as they're running.

And he had them on treadmills trying to work out what it was. He wanted to see if it was to do with fear. So he would hide behind the treadmill and jump out of them and scream. And he was a fantastic character. The sort of most prestigious person that I've met in the science world is Andre Geim. We had him on the show. So for any listener, Andre Geim is the one who won a Nobel Prize in Science for the discovery of graphene, which it feels like is going to change the world in the way that discovery of plastic, or at least the way that plastic has taken over the world. This is something. It's the, what is it, the strongest metal in the, or it's the strongest substance in the world? I can't quite remember. It's incredibly strong for being so wildly thin. It was made, I know they did it by cellotaping a pencil.

Yes, that's right. What's amazing about that. We were talking. about this in the pub afterwards, he has this thing, which is a Friday night project. This is a bit where he thinks, I'm gonna step away from the science where we're legitimately doing following ideas that are very serious. And every Friday, we're just gonna sit a room and go, what, this stuff in a pencil, what is this? Or could you actually scale a wall like Spider-Man? Is that a thing? And inventions come off the back of it. And that was, I've never seen or been around a mind that has worked so quickly. It's very odd when you're talk to someone where you don't even see them try to work out an answer that just comes out.

He's the only person I've seen who can do it at the rate of thought. It was extraordinary to talk to him. Yeah, you've met some amazing scientists, I imagine. Well, we had Erica McAllister on the show, who is the fly curator at the Natural History Museum and is fabulous. And she has such a passion for flies that you find yourself liking flies after half an hour. in her company. You know, these things you've sort of vaguely disliked all your life. And that's the really nice thing is that so many scientists we realize are geeks like us. You know, they will be much more specialized in the work they're doing. They'll know an enormous amount more than us about each of the things they're doing.

But at the bottom of it is the same desire to find things out and pass them on. Yeah. They're just hyper-focused on one thing in particular. Yeah. Do you guys have like a specialist subject, as it were, something that you're particularly interested or you know you you can find a good fact out of that just by looking at it. I probably back in the day yes but since we've been doing this job you you become such a broad researcher that it sort of waters down I would have said about 10 years ago if you'd ask me

anything about American comedy I would have that would have been my expertise or certain like rock music I was you know always reading music biographies. And you still are. We all have these things we kind of tend towards. So Dan knows a lot about music and pop culture. You know, he's always reading a biography of Freddie Mercury or David Bowie or whoever it might be.

But we all try and counteract our natural leanings in the podcast. So you get this nice spread. So it's not always Dan's pop music fact. And he's Second World War military innovation fact. Which is, he's just revealed his specialist subject there. it is in fact, specifically that. It's really, it's quite niche, actually. If you want to get even niche,

it is specifically parachuting animals from the World War II period. Yes. Well, that sounds like something I need to know more about right now. Well, so the very first allied operatives to land on D-Day were German shepherds who were parachuted in with the Allied forces behind German lines in Normandy. And I think there were three German shepherds that were parachuted in.

But the parachuting animal world is enormous, you know. Dogs are still being parachuted into bits of Afghanistan. Emergency services use them now. Yeah. Every RAF bomber in the Second World War had a pigeon fitted as standard in case it was shot down because these were homing pigeons and they could return with a message saying where the plane had been shot down. Yeah. And he's also an expert on topical, so hot news, breaking news,

sausage news. He is, there's no one who knows about what's going on with sausages around the world. I'm sure there are loads of people who are real pros, but you try and keep your hand in, you know, where you can. Stay modest about your sausage knowledge. Yeah.

I mean, there's one thing I want to track, I don't know if this will, this is useful to you, but heck, the sausage manufacturer, they have claimed that they're building a sausage of the north to rival the angel of the north, which is an enormous sausage monument. Now they

announced they were doing it on the 1st of April and I'm you know I'm no fool I can appreciate a funny April of all story but they've since insisted that they are doing it so at some point I need to contact Heck HQ and just say look this sausage of the north when's it um so this is very

nice because Andy has another career working as a journalist for private eye so all those rejected sausage stories come back our way and he's got somewhere to vent I feel there must be some sort of logistics logistically, how are you going to build a sausage of the north? Is it just one big, large sausage or is it a... It's one, a normal one. It could, I mean, you could do a very large

Cumberland sausage and sort of put tilted on its end. You could do that. No, what they've proposed is one huge sausage from the design drawings that, uh, uh, you know, going around the internet. I say going around in a very, very loose way. But it would, would it need wings or arms spreading out? I mean, it's basically a person-shaped statue, isn't it? A sausage is basically the shape of a person with their arms by their side. So I think they're just going to have a sausage on its end. It won't need, oh, for the Angel of the North thing. Yeah, Angel of the North. I don't think it's going to have wings. That's a shame. Because you could have ginormous cocktail sticks to, that would have to be

as part of the construction. You could put pineapples on the end of the cocktail sticks. I think they are probably open to suggestions. So we'll put in a pitch after this is over. I'm just moving it away from sausages slightly. Now, obviously, the name of your podcast, Andy, Andy's left. Andy, come back. We'll talk about it later. Once the mics are off, we'll get back to talking about sausages, I promise. So obviously your podcast makes a bold claim in the name of it that there is no such thing as a fish. Now, we're a science publication.

Please explain this to us because we're baffled by it. Well, this dates back to a question that I think was in the H series of QI. And the idea behind it is that the word fish makes no sense from a scientific point of view. because the fish in the ocean that we would call fish or that you'd see on a menu are so distantly related from each other that really is a biological category, it doesn't make any sense. So humans are more closely related to salmon than salmon are to sturgeon. You might not think so, but from the way the tree of life branches,

that's the conclusion that scientists have drawn. So we have a book in the office, which is the Oxford Encyclopedia of underwater life? Yeah, and actually more than anything, because it's not trying to shatter any kind of, there's no such thing as a fish. It's actually very, it's a very good representative example of what we do on the podcast, which is here we have this book, which is like a thousand pages.

It's huge. It's the ultimate book of fish. And you read the introduction, which a lot of people might skip over, but there, three pages in, is the sentence, by the way, there is no such thing as a fish. And you're just saying, that's an extraordinary sentence to put in a big book of fish. And that's really what we do We try and find that one sentence that sticks out

And makes you go, what? And that one is such a good example. We used it as our show title. It reminds me one of our friends at BBC Wildlife They came and told us the other day They were talking, and then there was a seagull appeared at the window, and she said, There's no such thing as a seagull, which, right.

I then questioned and went on the internet and typed in seagull, and it said seagulls. but then it turns out there isn't. They're just goals of different varieties. Yeah, yeah. That's another mind-blower. It's really great to find these things out. Again, they slightly reframe the way you see the world,

and you might never look at a seagull again without thinking, I know what you are, and you're not a seagull. Yeah. It's a dangerous road to go down the, does that thing actually exist? Because it turns out, not much does. The world is an illusion. Yeah. This must happen a lot to you, though.

So you have an idea about something, and then all of a sudden it's turned upside down. I guess this is kind of what happens in the, thinking back to earlier, talking about like the scientists and just how they are. A lot of the work you must do is similar to the way how actual people in the world of science and indeed technology, they look at something and go, that's weird, that's crazy, let's try and mess around with it. And I sort of see that's what you're doing with knowledge, essentially. I mean, that's very flattering, you know. Dan, you answer this. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. We rarely think about it that deeply. Yeah, I don't know. This is good. You're shaking us to our foundation. Yeah. I'm not giving you an existential crisis here.

The podcast will be cancelled next week and it's all our fault. We don't exist. I mean, the work that we do is so inconsequential compared with the work of all the scientists who's work we can. that, you know, we just, I mean, we love doing it and we love, we are basically a large fan account, you know, for a proper science. And that's the feeling that we have at our life shows as well, because we travel around the country and sometimes around, we're going around Europe shortly, doing shows. And the experts that we get in our audience are fabulous.

You know, you get people who are experts on hagfish or on radiation or on whatever it might be. And if you're talking about a particular subject, you'll frequently find yourself corrected from the stalls. And that's actually quite fun. Yeah, it's the weirdest heckles for a comedy gig you can ever get. So what have we had? My favorite one, we were playing in the Soho Theater

and we did a fact on Utsi, the Iceman that was found. And Iceman, not Iceman. And I kept saying Utsi, Utsi, Utsi, and this lady in the crowd just suddenly went, oh! it's urtsy! And it was this total fury of just pronounce it right! What are you doing?

It was, you would never get that in any gig anywhere. That wasn't a corrective one. That was just more a... That was a little bit, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. So you get people who are, who really know their stuff coming to our shows.

And then sometimes we'll meet them afterwards. So we, a few weeks ago, we were in the West Country. And Anna's fact, centered around artificial insemination of cattle. And she had a very interesting account of how it happens, which was, you know, none of us could believe it. And it was very, very funny and it ended the show. And then afterwards, when we were just meeting the audience,

a man came up to us and he said, I just want you to know I teach courses in cattle artificial insemination. And you'd all be very welcome to come and do a four-day course with me any time because you got it right. So, you know, we might be doing that. if we're in Devon, anytime soon. A few weeks later, when the show went out, we received an email with a photograph of someone saying,

I happen to be listening to this week's episodes. Here's a photo of what I'm doing exactly right now as I was listening. And it was a photo of his arm, no longer out in the open. Inside a cow. Inside a cow as listening to our podcast. Pretty amazing. It must be quite humbling to know that you're there at the spark of life, essentially. Yes.

Yeah. Brilliant. So there was one thing that I wanted to do with you guys. And so obviously you get a lot of facts and you have to make sure, you know, check the veracity of them and make sure they're okay. What I thought I'd do is I would, I'd get the new magazines and just see if I could get a few things out there

and test you to see if you could say whether that is a true fact or that is a, oh, great. That's a non-fact, a non-fact. We call it a Dan fact. Brilliant. So these are, in the latest issue, the magazine, if you want to read up on about it.

But I thought I'd just test you. Okay, so is this true, or is this false? Echidnas are the only mammal not to have a stomach. Ooh. Great. Oh, there are so many mammals. I'm going to say false.

I'm going to say true. Okay, so I can let you know that it is false. There is actually two animals, two mammals, sorry, there's lots of animals. two mammals that don't have a stomach and the other one is a platypus. That's what I thought.

I knew the platypus. I thought because they're so unusual being the marsupials, aren't they? They're funny little things. Monotremes? Is that the word for them? I just call them the stomachless. Yeah, it calls you do. All right.

Akidna the stomachless. Okay, so I'll do that one yet. There's some more about them, as I say. So the next one is, and just so that you know, these are all from the Q&A section. in the magazine. So, um, the next fact, true or false, the longest known bout of constipation lasted 45 days. True. I, false. It's two nil. It's true. Hey. It was me. Um, it had to be surgically removed, uh, from the body and was the size of the football. Oh my, my God. Oh, so it hardened to the size of one, one entity. Wow.

Pretty cool. It must have been pretty uncomfortable. Yeah. Did you get to keep it? I don't know. There's not that much space in the magazine for that sort of information. I'll look into that and get back to you. So, the last one to test.

Kling film is better for wrapping sandwiches for the environment than aluminium foil. Oh, there are so many measures of good or bad for the environment. I'm going to say it's... I'm going to say that's false and that it's worse for the environment than tinfoil. environment than tin foil. Okay, I'm going to go for True just to give Andy a chance of racking up a point here. Unfortunately, you haven't. It is actually, um, uh, cling film is better for the environment than aluminium foil. You would have to use aluminium foil six times because of the production process, uh, of making the aluminium foil. You'd have to use it six times to

make it as environmentally friendly as cling film. Wow. Wow. That's a lot of reuse. I don't, I only average three or four, I'd say. My foil. So, man, I know, I'm going to buy some cling film today. Yeah, or a wax cloth. That tends to be the best thing for wrapping up your sandwiches. Nice. So, that's how we do it in the environmentally friendly West Country that we are. Yeah.

Brilliant. So I think that's pretty good. So thank you for that. Goodbye, guys. Goodbye. Thank you so much. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. That was Andrew Hunter Murray and Dan Schreiber, who, along with James Harkin and Anna.

Chesinski, hosts the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, which you can find wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please remember to rate and review our show wherever you download your podcasts from. And if there's any space left in your brain for more science facts, the July issue of BBC Science Focus is out now. It's packed full of features, news and interviews to help you make sense of the world around you. For example, this month, we cook up some alien atmospheres, we meet the human hibernators, and get all colourful in the technical world of dinosaurs. And as always, there's much, much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team.

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