No Such Thing As A Fish - 108: No Such Thing As Samurai Olaf

Episode Date: April 8, 2016

Live from Glasgow, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss killer shrimps, poo-based space food, and handsome Japanese tear-wipers for hire.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Orinmore in Glasgow, Scotland. My name is Dan Shriver, and please welcome to the stage is Anna Czazinski, Andy Murray, and James Harkins. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact this week is that, for just one penny, you can rent a bee for a month.

What are we doing here? So what would you do with one bee? Well, you make friends, you know, take it on expeditions, you know. So as we've mentioned before on this podcast, a lot of bees in America live on trucks, and the reason that they do is because they move around the country all the time, because they're rented out to pollinate crops, and they have this whole, like, basically a tall schedule where they move from area to area pollinating a new crop every few weeks. And there's a massive crop, the Californian almond crop, almond, and that needs one and

a half million bee hives, which is a total of at least 30 billion bees, which is amazing. They all arrive around the same time, and so they arrive, they pollinate the crop, and then they go. And an American beekeeper, whose name is Randy Oliver, has calculated the cost of it, and he worked out that the cost is one penny, one US penny, in fact, so a bit less than an English penny, per bee per month. So one English penny would get you one bee for two months. I think it's about 1.6.

Six weeks, yeah. Oh, okay. Not worth it. It won't work for the holiday, I'm thinking. So you must get more than one, presumably. You must do it in... There's no, like, number of bees, and then the minimum option is one, sadly. You know, what I'm asking is, what is the minimum number of bees that I can hire?

Don't know. Okay. You could probably... I've got tenor in my pocket. It is a Scottish tenor. That would get you... They won't accept that, James. Trust me.

Hang on, wait, if it's one penny, let's just say it's one penny, so that's... A thousand. Wait, wait, wait, wait. It's a thousand. I don't think that's enough for a hive. I think the minimum is probably at least one hive. Okay. Do you know how bees collect pollen?

I didn't know this. It's so cool. So they go and... Bees will go out and they'll either be collecting pollen or they'll be collecting nectar. They never do both at once. You don't want to mix those two. And if they're collecting pollen, they get into a flower and they get covered in pollen because they've got, you know, their hairy, their furry, and so pollen sticks all over them.

But that's okay because they've got combs on their front four legs. So they use the combs on their front two legs to comb the pollen out of their antennae, and they use the combs on their middle legs to comb the pollen out of their fur on their body. And then they've got these two kind of buckets on their back legs, which I think they're called pollen baskets. And they're like... I mean, they just look like little baskets on the back of their legs. Wow.

And they crush the pollen once they've combed it out of their hair into these two little baskets. And then they carry it home in their pollen baskets. Isn't that cool? That's very cool. Yeah. That's amazing. The one really amazing thing about bees is that they have a positive charge. They're electric.

Bees are electric. If you're putting them into a remote control or... Do you get double B and triple B batteries? So what happens? So the bee flies through the air and it kind of hits particles in the air, and that gives it a positive charge. A bit like if you get a balloon and you rub it against yourself, and that gives the balloon a charge.

It's a bit like static. But the flowers have a negative charge, and that means that when a bee goes into a flower, the pollen will actually just jump from the flower to the bee. Wow. Using electricity. I've read today. Bees don't pee or poo in space.

Why would you go to space? I don't go to space to poo either. Yeah, but if you were in space, you would at some point... Oh, I see. So when we send bees up there... Yes. They hold it in. Yeah, yeah.

So a bunch of bees were sent to space, and in space they actually started... So a lot of little insects have been sent to space, particularly flying insects, to see how they can cope with flying. And I watched some amazing footage today, by the way, of pigeons inside one of those vomit rockets that go down. Oh, God.

They let them loose. So if you don't know the vomit rocket, it's where they film zero gravity without leaving the Earth's atmosphere. So you can do weightlessness. And also actual astronauts use it to practice being in zero. Yeah, exactly. So basically the plane is...

What is it? It's falling at the... So it goes up in a parabola, and it kind of makes it feel like you're weightless. Okay. So you fly around and, yeah, so on. And the... You do.

So they brought pigeons on board, and the pigeons just didn't know what was going on, because they couldn't... They were just flying and bumping into walls. At one point, a pigeon is flying upside down, and the others are like, What the... It's really confusing.

That's where pigeons will get their alien abduction stories from. So they brought a bunch of bees into space, and they brought houseflies. And houseflies, actually, they say for houseflies, it's a no-fly zone. They just don't bother. They don't even try. They start trying.

They can't fly. So either they just try and cling to the wall, or they just stay still and just float everywhere they go. So houseflies don't fly in space. Right. Bees kind of, after about seven days, worked out what to do, and they managed to...

They even built a honeycomb. They even managed to make residents. And the main thing they noticed, though, is that they just didn't go to the toilet. They were holding until they got back to Earth. Well, I think it's because they were put in an enclosed hive, a space hive, weren't they? And bees do not defecate in their own hives.

They don't shit where they eat. And so they literally thought, well, if I can't get out of this thing, then I'm not going to poo in it. They're too polite. So they held it in for a week. Yeah. Because if they held it in thinking,

I'll do it when I get back, that's quite optimistic, because they're just bees. They don't know that they're actually going to come back to me. Wow. Yeah, so interesting, eh? Moths, when they went into space, actually, learned to...

I think they were the smartest flying creature. They learned that they could kind of float in space. So when you try to flap, it doesn't really work, because you get so disoriented. But the moths in zero gravity very quickly realized that they could change the method of flying and turn more into seagulls, and then they just sort of floated around on the air.

Right? Yeah. Cool. Well, the moths, very clever. Do you know why honeybees die when they sting you? So most of the vast majority of bees don't die when they sting you. But most honeybees do die when they sting you.

And it's because all of their insides are falling out. So... What? I know, it's really sad. What do you mean? So when they put their sting into you, I think human skin is a bit too hard, so they can't properly retract

their sort of barbed stinger as it comes out. So instead, what it does is, rather than leaving behind just its sting, as it tries to pull away, it leaves behind inside you its digestive tract and its abdomen and everything. So, and then that is not really a bee anymore, it's just a lump of fluff.

So that's over for them. You've found moth even in a horrible, horrible fact. But they evolved to mostly, they mostly sting other insects or other bees, or, yeah, so that's what the sting is really for. And they have no problem stinging them without, you know, without that happening to them. So when they sting something with really tough skin

and to a bee, we have really tough skin. Yeah. We need to move on soon to the next fact. Oh, can I just talk about other things you can rent? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. James. You were very lucky to get off with a caution, I don't think...

Guinea pigs. You can rent Guinea pigs. Yeah, in Switzerland you can rent Guinea pigs. Oh, yeah. But only Switzerland as far as I can find. And that's because, according to Swiss law, it's illegal to have one Guinea pig on its own. You need to have a second Guinea pig

because they're really kind of sociable creatures and if you have one, they get lonely. And so the Swiss made a law against it. Wow. And so what happens is, one of your Guinea pigs dies and you're like, OK, now I've only got one Guinea pig, I'm going to have to get another one. But what would happen is you'd get a young one

and then the old one would die and then you'd have to get another young one and you'd just be in some horrible cycle of just always getting more and more Guinea pigs. So some people have seen a gap in the market and thought, you know what we can do? We can rent one until the second one dies. And that's the thing.

I must say, the Swiss parliament really does have time on its hands, doesn't it? In Japan, you can rent an attractive man to wipe away your tears. Is there a phone number or a website? I ordered one for you. He's backstage. Yeah, isn't this totally bizarre?

It's definitely true. It's a Tokyo-based company. It's called Ikamisodanshi. And that means, apparently, roughly translated as handsome weeping boys. And it's for women specifically. And apparently women are prone to going to the workplace or whatever and bursting into tears.

And so we need to hire attractive weeping boys to come and turn up to the office, wipe away your tears and comfort you. Okay, interestingly, I have been to Tokyo and I have seen the clubs they have, which are kind of just handsome young men clubs. They're aimed at women. They're aimed at women and I didn't go in.

But it's just sort of like handsome young men hanging around in there looking cool and a bit emo. And the bills are very unreasonable as well. 50,000 yen for a coke. But that sort of fits into that trend. Yeah, that's amazing. It does, yeah. I'm sorry that sounds dramatic for you.

Good thing you've got a little Olaf waiting next door. It was a really good Japanese name I just said for once. Samurai Olaf. We should move on to our next fact. Okay, it's time for fact number two. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Iceland imports ice. Yeah, it actually does.

In shops now you can get ice in Iceland. It's in particularly this one shop, which is called Had Cup and it's a sort of grocery store and they import ice. You buy them in blocks of four and it doesn't make any sense at all because the water in Iceland is rated a total 100% for freshness. So they've got great water that you can turn into ice, but they bring it in from Norway.

So they now import ice from Norway. That's really good. Yeah, I found this out via the Twitter account of a guy called Jan Nar who was the mayor of Reykjavik and he was actually a comedian who hated what was going on in the country and he thought this is just bullshit. I'm going to run as mayor of Reykjavik. So he said I'm going to set up a party.

They said what are you going to call it? And he said the best party will be the best party. So they set up the best party. I've had this on the podcast before and he made all the promises that anyone wanted him to make. So he was like what do you want? I'll give you anything. And they said we want free towels. You'll have free towels. When I'm mayor everyone will have free towels.

Is that the first thing that the people demanded? I think they wanted to test the grounds first and see what he was going to go for. He did also say afterwards by the way here's my main promise whatever you ask for and I agree to I will break once I become mayor. So when he became mayor he said you're getting no free towels. I didn't know that Britain exports ice to China. Really? Yeah.

And to Sweden. British exports of ice to China have tripled in the last three years. Wow. Probably from quite a low base. But still. There's a company in Yorkshire called the Ice Company. Very good name. I mean a descriptive name if nothing else.

And they make 500 tons of ice a day. They're in South Kirkby in Yorkshire. And this is the cool thing. They have these machines which make ice. Massive machines and they make 300 pound blocks of really crystal clear you know beautiful looking ice. And it's made in these huge freezing compartments right. And the water gets frozen in cylinders and then you know huge blades chop it up.

And then the cubes of ice are blow dried so they don't stick to each other. Whoa. Really? Yeah. So somewhere there's like someone whose job is to be an ice hairdryer. Isn't that weird? That is weird. Well clear ice is very sought after.

And I think this might be why this Norwegian ice has been imported. Because I think it's Mr. Iceman isn't it? Yes. Which again is a very good name. And so I went to the Mr. Iceman website and it's the Mr. Iceman ice that's now being sold in Iceland. And they advertise the fact that they've got the hardest ice in the world. So you can if it's a special occasion you drop one of these blocks of ice in your whiskey

and it takes twice as long to melt as an ordinary block of ice. So that's what everyone wants. It says for those that appreciate a whiskey cold but not diluted they will cherish the ice block. Which is actually quite a good idea. Do you know the queen likes ice? But she doesn't. That's a great fact.

But she doesn't like the noise that ice makes in the glass. Does she have special flunkies to whenever the ice is getting close to the edge of the glass? Just dip their finger in and let it rebound off. I don't think the queen would like fingers in there. She drinks Chin and Dubonnet or Dubonnet. It's her favorite drink and she hates the noise that the ice makes. And so her favorite flunky Prince Philip invented a machine. He invented a machine that makes tiny ice bowls that don't grate against each other.

And so now she can have her drink and it doesn't make any noise. Prince Philip invented a machine. I mean they say it's tough at the top but I had no idea just how tough it was. Well they make tiny little ice bowls. Those are popular. I've heard about them in fancy bars and things. They have sort of hand carved ice bowls which you can buy. Some unusual imports.

So Germany imports Lada Hosen. Really? There's fewer than 100 businesses making Lada Hosen left in Germany and they get most of them from China now. That's one thing. Australia imports Dingo urine. Imports? Where are the Dingo from? I think the thing is with Dingo urine it's quite important

that you have to get it from a captive Dingo. You have to get it from the wild and just grab a Dingo. And like a lot of zoos around the world have Dingo's in them and so they get the urine from these places and then they import them into Australia and they use them to deter other animals. And make posters. It's not true. I don't think it's even made in Australia.

And I'm drinking it now. I love it. So I feel really bad about that comment for a number of reasons. And it's illegal to bring dirty mattresses into Canada. What? You're not allowed to import a dirty mattress into Canada. You have to have it fumigated and you need a letter from the fumigator proving that you've done it. I wouldn't want someone bringing a dirty mattress into my house.

And what is a country but a big house? Doesn't Canada mean large village in like an old Native American language? I don't know. It does. I believe it. When you say doesn't this, you mean this is a thing? France imports all its frogs, doesn't it? Hard to say.

Yes. From Southeast Asia? Yeah, I think mainly from the Philippines, mainly from Indonesia and some from Japan. And yeah, I think frog farming is now illegal in France or yeah, I think you can't really farm frogs in France but they still consume them and so they get them all from Southeast Asia.

And they're becoming massively endangered. In Southeast Asia, lots because the French eat an incredible number of tons of frogs legs a year. Wow. Yeah, so it's very bad. It is indeed. Corpses, the corp's trade is picking up, I think. It's a problem in some countries like Turkey

that people don't want to donate their bodies after they've died and so there's a cadaver shortage. Is it for like dissection and... It's for dissection, yeah, so for medical purposes and for like crash test dummies so if they're testing airplanes or things like that they use human corpses. Yeah, they don't tell you that

when it's the donate your body to science. They sit you in cars. Andy, this is true. They sit you... Who is they? They sit you in cars and they just slam the cars into walls and they see because with a crash test dummy,

a real crash test dummy, you can't tell what things will break in an actual crash. So it's saving people. Or blown up by a landmine. What? That's another potential option. Is it? They test landmines on...

Which I would have thought is very obvious if a landmine blows stuff up, it blows stuff up but no, they test stuff up. But then the important thing with that is you need to know if there's a body part this distance away where was the original landmine. So it's all that kind of thing. This is all very important science, Andy.

Someone invented, just on landmines, someone has invented, this is quite a while ago, seeds that you scatter out into fields and when the plants grow they touch the landmine metal and so what would otherwise be, let's say, a yellow flower, then goes red. So for all these countries that still have unblasted landmines, you can now see them.

It's quite a beautiful solution, they say, to how you can avoid dying. It's amazing. You've got these red ashes. Unless you don't know that they've done that and you want to pick a nice bunch of flowers at anything. The yellow ones are a bit boring, aren't they? Why don't you go and get a bunch of the red, Danny?

And that's Valentine's Day ruined. We need to move on to the next fact. Okay, let's move on. Should we go for it? Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that the most dangerous invasive species in Britain

is a poo-eating muscle from Transylvania. It's true. It's true, this is a really bad, evil muscle that's come in from Transylvania. And they are blocking up our toilets. I would have thought they'd be helping relieve the blocked toilets. Yes, that's a good point, but they have to live there and they are really, really good at reproducing.

And one female is capable of producing one million babies in a year. Oh yeah, what's she called? So how are they getting here? On ships. Yeah, on ships, bilges and things like that. So when a ship is going from one place to another they actually collect water from one area

to kind of keep the ballast. And then when they get to the other place they'll often release it and then you'll end up with species moving from one place to another. It's like the bees. It's exactly like the bees. Okay.

Yeah. The bees of the ocean. Yeah, basically it's our fault. It's not their fault. They were happy in Transylvania. We brought them over and they did what they did. Although it's not just humans that can bring invasive species

because I went to a Glasgow museum today and they said that there's... What was it? It was a plant called spearwort and that's been brought to this area and it's causing a real problem and it was brought on the feet of geese. So when they flew over from, I think, from Africa

they carried this little plant over and now it's become an invasive species. So it's not always us. Wow. Geese. So mussels get a bad reputation, don't they? If you look up mussels, there's pretty much no one's got a good word to say about them.

They're invasive species everywhere and they're a problem in the Great Lakes in America, I think. So are they quagga mussels? Yeah, quaggas. Quaggas and zebra mussels, I think. In America they have zebra ones and here we have quaggas

but they're both named after sort of horse-like creatures. Oh, yeah. Because a quagga is like an extinct type of zebra. Right, isn't it? What's up with that? Quagga mussels, one of the things they do to native species of mussels, they literally sit on them

and kill them by doing that. I know, they physically push them into the sediment on riverbases and things like that and sort of the native species are crushed and one of the species which is at risk, one of the native species of mussel is called pseudonodonticomplanata and its common name is the depressed river mussel.

What a grimly prophetic name. But yeah, they ruin ecosystems, don't they? So in Great Lakes they eat all the algae, I think, which then stops feeding organisms, which then feed other organisms, then it wipes out everything and so you just have the lake full of mussels, which is a disaster.

But I think they shouldn't get such a bad rep because they are natural water filters. You could just drop a mussel in some dirty water and then drink it a little bit later. You couldn't do that. They do sieve water, so when they are looking for a meal, then they take the water in

and they filter it through their tissues and they absorb some of the stuff that they want from the water and then they release the rest of it and what they absorb are a lot of the horrible chemicals in the ocean, so they'll absorb herbicides, they'll absorb like flame retardants, they'll absorb a lot of the poisons that we put into the oceans and they will release purified water,

so they're using that to remove contaminants in quite a lot of lakes. Well, of course, that's one of the reasons why they make us so sick if you have a bad one because they're kind of filtering dirty water and leaving nice water, but they keep all the nasty things that make people sick and then if you get a bad one, yeah,

that's why you get sick. So this quagga, one of the reasons it's quite bad is not only does that eat human excrement, but there are other animals that eat its excrement and one of them is a killer shrimp that they call the pink peril. Whenever it goes into any lake, it kills all the other shrimps there

and so these two guys always kind of co-invade lakes or rivers, so whenever there's a mussel there, there's always the killer pink shrimp there as well and that's why it's doubly bad. That's mortifying, isn't it? You're not even the guy who eats the poo. You're the guy who eats the poo of the guy who eats the poo.

You know there's actually animals now that disguise themselves as poo so that they don't get eaten. Is that right? Yeah, so if the mussel was around, they'd be in big trouble, but most animals don't eat them. So there's one that's called the moth caterpillar.

So the moth caterpillar does have sort of little white bits on it and little brown bit and it will disguise itself in a sitting position to look like bird droppings. So it's just quite safe. Anytime a bird sees it, it thinks, oh, that's poo, I'm not going to risk it this time. So you've got the moth caterpillar.

There's the orb-weeping spider. There's a giant swallowtail butterfly and then this one's really on the nose, bird-dropping spiders. And they all do that. They all disguise themselves. It's an evolutionary thing. And yet then they give themselves that giveaway name.

It's sort of like, what was the point in going to all that trouble? They should have called themselves just some bird droppings, nothing to see here. So NASA have actually asked the community of scientists around the world and said there will be a prize for this if you can convert poo into an eating product

because when we go for these long-haul missions to Mars, you are going to need everything that you can get to be reused as potential source for something and they think poo might be what we can use for food. Right. And what is the judging panel of this competition? Heston Blumenthal. Actually, you know, Heston Blumenthal

has now contributed to space food. Let's see. Yeah, so Tim Peake, the British astronaut who's gone up in space, he worked with Heston Blumenthal and his people and they've created a bacon sandwich that can be made and eaten and a cup of tea that can be made and drunk.

And they're made out of poo. Well, they didn't tell Tim that, but yeah. But yeah. So, yeah. So, that's quite cool. So, Heston's already getting into space. Great. Oh, well.

Speaking of defecation and Transylvania, which is where this poo eating muscle comes from, there's the Salina Turda salt mine, which is this huge salt mine and it was a salt mine until 1932, so it's massive. I think it's in the capital of the biggest city in Transylvania. And it sounds like the coolest holiday ever now.

Have you seen it? Really? No. So, they converted it. So, it's this massive expanse of mine under the main city there. And they've turned it into basically a theme park. It's an underground theme park.

It was in 1992. So, it's got this massive 180-seat amphitheatre. It's got basketball courts. It's got ping-pong tables. It's got mini golf. It's got bowling. You get carried around this big underground theme park in the old machinery that was used for mining once.

They've got a huge underground lake and you can go on the lake in little boats. They've got this ferris wheel that takes you up around it and you can look at the stalactites and the stalagmites as you go around on it. And they've transformed this disused salt mine that they didn't know what to do with for 50 years into the best theme park in the world.

Sounds amazing. Yeah. We should go there. And that's in Turda. That's in Turda. Yeah. The edict of Turda is quite a famous thing, which is I think it was a kind of thing

where it meant that in Transylvania, everyone was allowed to have any religion they wanted and it was one of the first places in the world that had this. And I have this theory that that's why kind of people think of Transylvania as kind of this weird kind of gothic place because the Catholic Church saw that it was a place where anyone could have any religion they wanted

and they kind of didn't like it. Oh. Yeah. I think it might be because they had a leader called Radhiyan Paila who impaled hundreds of thousands of people on spikes. They're a good point of that size in this argument. Let's move on to our final fact of the show and that is Chisanski.

Yeah. My fact is that until about 4,000 years ago, humans didn't notice the color blue. Or most humans didn't notice the color blue. Okay. Yeah. Just escape their notice. So I've not heard of this before.

And so since reading into it, it's really fascinating. It's amazing. So the idea effectively is that someone looked through all the old literature that we have, any bit of writing, ancient Iceland, Homer's Odyssey, all that sort of stuff, and any time that there should have been a reference to blue, they used a different color. And so the idea is that they actually think that maybe,

because there was no word describing it, we just didn't notice the sky. We just weren't looking at the big blue thing in the sky. And as a result of not naming it, it was just blended into different colors. Yeah. It is extremely controversial, that. Yeah.

So this is a very controversial, it's a controversial idea, but I think what corroborates it really nicely is that, so this guy who went through all these ancient texts, and it is from many different cultures, so yeah, Greece, China, Japan, Hebrew languages, none of them had the word for the color blue. They started off all having black and white. They were the first words, color words to appear,

and then red was the next one. Then yellows and greens came in, and then blue was last. And the idea that maybe people weren't really noticing blue, or sort of couldn't distinguish it from others, does make a bit of sense when you look at this research that was done by a guy called Jules Davidoff, and he did this research in Namibia with the Himba tribe. And the Himba tribe does not have a word for blue at all.

And you can look this up, it's really, really cool to do. What he did was he showed members of the Himba tribe a series of, I think it was 12 dots, and 11 of them were bright green, and one of them was bright blue. And he said, which one is the blue one? And they couldn't tell. They just didn't know it, all the same to them.

And so they really couldn't distinguish it. But then that tribe has many, many more words for green than we have. And they showed them a 12 green circles and said, which one is the different shade of green? And if you look at the green circles, you cannot tell. I can't tell which one was the lighter shade of green. And everyone who they tested immediately spotted the lighter shade of green.

But the idea is that because they have more words to describe it and to distinguish between them, that we automatically learn to distinguish that. I think it's a really, really interesting idea. That's amazing. There's another kind of fact, which isn't really a fact, which no one could actually see the color blue, or maybe they were colorblind or something back in the day.

And the idea is Homer wrote about the sea, and he said it was the wine-dark sea. And people are like, why is he saying wine-dark instead of blue? Wine-dark? Yeah. Because when you see the sea in the evening at sunset, it can look the color of wine. Also, we didn't know what color.

Maybe all the wine was bright blue. Yeah. It's just no one's mentioned it. Well, there is a theory that in those days, they used to add water to the wine, because the wine was a lot kind of stronger, so they'd add water to it. And the water might have had a high alkaline content,

which made it look a bit more blue. And it made the wine look a bit more blue. That seems like a little bit like clutching at straws to me. I don't think we'll ever resolve this argument one way or the other. It is amazing to think of it, though. It's very, very cool. I went onto a website called XKCD. Yeah.

You guys must know this. It's a web comic. And Randall Monroe is in tonight. So it's a web comic by Randall Monroe, and he kind of explains things. And he did a really good kind of study where he looked at colors, and he had men and women looking at all different colors and saw how they described them to see if there was any difference.

And they found that actually men and women was pretty much the same. Apart from women tend to add more things like light green and lime green, whereas men would just say something's green. Just green. It's just green. But what he did was... So that was a general thing, but what he did was... Classic lads.

Let's all go down the pub and not qualify colors. Sorry, James. So what he did was... That was kind of a general thing, but he looked at all the different things that people had said and tried to find which were the most male comments and which were the most female comments. So these are the colors that women said much more often than men.

So dusty teal, blush pink, dusty lavender, butter yellow, and dusky rose. So they were things that women said that men really didn't say. And the things that men said that women really didn't say for colors were... I mean, that is not one color for a star. It's just green, mate. You've got to see a doctor. It was beautiful grass. It was green in my opinion.

LAUGHTER Yeah, so penis, dono. Beige, spelt with an A. And WTF. Wow. Yeah, apparently women can't see those colors. True, true facts. Speaking of penises, I found...

And the color blue. Scientists have worked out how now to... They can flash a blue light at your eyes and give you an erection. It's a really new thing that's happening at the moment. At the moment... At the moment, they've only been able to give mice erections. But they're working on it for humans. And the idea is that it stimulates a thing inside your eye

that leads directly to a part of your penis, which, I wrote down, it's called the... I don't think that's the important part of this lecture. It's called corpus cavernosum. It's a region that gets filled up with blood to facilitate an erection. So it kind of, you see this light and it kind of just opens it up and it can go crazy. And I actually don't understand the science of it,

but I was really hardened to read the main science. That was heartened, wasn't it then? Heartened. Go on, you're arounds to realize. Yeah. So the guy, the scientist, is working on it. He calls it a rectiliopogenetic stimulator. And when he was asked about it,

so he said it's quite simple. Once you get past the gene therapy part of it, shine a blue light, cause dick to get hard. And that's basically the short of it. That's science. It's amazing. It's to do with an algae as well. It's apparently a bit of an algae that they've taken out.

And I don't know if, like, you know... I don't know if I've ever mentioned this about the new alternative to Viagra, which is playing sounds to your penis. What? Yeah, it's like Viagra doesn't always work and sometimes it has side effects, but this is the thing, they get a machine,

they put it on the men's parts, and they play very, very high clicks like this. It is real. James, do you like dolphins a bit much? Is this a very, very coded way of telling us about your awakening when you saw Flipper? But it does work. It does work.

That's incredible. It kind of excites the blood vessels to kind of open. Wow. Wow. This is real science, people. I mean, I've got a fact about eyes and colour perception, but I'm not sure we can go back. I'd be really happy if we went back.

OK, yeah, let's go back to eyes, yeah. OK, tarantulas have evolved to be blue or for parts of them to be blue, separately on eight different occasions in nature and we don't know why. Why do they keep forgetting how to be blue and not mean to re-evolve it? When they branched off into separate,

I think it's separate genuses and separate species, or maybe it's separate species within the same genus, they have independently, once they've branched off, evolved to be blue. And we have no idea. And they don't have good colour vision, so it's not like they know.

That's the really weird thing. And it's not driven by sexual selection because they can't see when each other are blue. They have no idea. They can't tell. So we have no idea. Maybe it hides them from the prey or maybe it has some other effect, but yeah.

Wow, how weird. I was reading that you can now get your eyes turned blue if you have brown eyes for $5,000. The idea is that actually right behind every brown eye is a blue eye because it's all to do with colour. So you can actually burn away the brown and sitting behind it is the natural blue. So people are doing this now.

They say that babies all have blue eyes. I don't know if it's true, but they do say that, don't they? All babies have very pale blue eyes for the first few days and then they sort themselves out. Get their acts together. That's really cool. If I hadn't recently spent all my money renting these, I would definitely go with my eyes.

Let's wrap up. Shall we wrap up? OK, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about things that we have said over the course of this podcast, you can find us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, James. At X-Shaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Anna. You can email a podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to no-slash-thing-as-a-fish.com.

That is our website. And we have all of our previous episodes up there. Thank you at home for listening to this episode. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be back again next week. Goodbye!