No Such Thing As A Fish - 151: No Such Thing As A Komodo Dragon Restaurant

Episode Date: February 10, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss garlic-flavoured chocolate bars, Komodo dragon puberty and and why you don't want to french kiss a frog.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski 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, Anna Chazinski. My fact this week is that a frog's tongue is ten times softer than a human's tongue. I thought we had soft tongues already.

Well, you've been very lucky in your love life. Does this mean that French kissing a frog would be unbelievably good? Or unbelievably bad? Yeah, because you don't want too much give there, do you? I don't know. It really depends on your personal taste, but it doesn't use it for kissing. When the princess kisses the frog in the story, does she French kiss it? And if so, does she notice that its tongue is unbelievably soft?

That was probably in the original draft after that she kissed. She went, what the fuck is that? Actually, I do remember that in one of the really early versions of that, like in the old French versions of that thing, I think she has sex with the frog to turn him into a prince. No. I think so. This is ten times softer than a human's tongue.

So ten times softer. That's pretty chilly. It's soft. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's soft. It's so that they can catch their prey effectively. So if we stuck our tongue out and bashed it into a fly, then we'd bash the fly away from us.

But a frog's tongue is soft enough that if it bashes its tongue into a fly, it sort of moulds into the various crevices of the cricket or whatever it is, and then it can retract and pull it back in. And it does this by having an extremely soft tongue. And it also does it by having this incredible saliva. So frog saliva is 50,000 times more viscous, so 50,000 times stickier than us. So that means if you do French kiss a frog, it's going to be hard to get away. Wow.

Yeah, that's true. So if a frog was licking stamps to put on, that would be really solidly stuck on, right? Yeah, so in the early days of the post office, then every letter came with a frog attached. They employed them at first. It's incredible, but the thing is it changes, doesn't it? So it starts off like incredibly thick honey, and then when it's on the tongue, and then when it hits the insect for a moment, it liquefies, covers the insect completely, like it gets around every angle of it, every nook, every cranny, so the insect is completely covered

in it, and then it hardens again, and then the frog pulls it back in. How is that? It evolves over time, I know, but I mean, it's incredible to think of that evolving. And I can't believe that we've never bothered to look into it before. It's such a common trope, the idea of a frog darting out its tongue and grabbing an insect, and we've only just bothered to work out how they do it. There's so many things that do that, right? Like chameleons.

Yeah. So there's a lot of animals they use. Yeah, so I wonder if they do the same thing. They do. They do it in a slightly different way. Do they? Yeah, they evolve separately. I think like salamanders, they have like a kind of a skeletal bit attached to the tongue,

which fires it out, and the frog just kind of drops its jaw really, really quickly, and that flicks it out like a flicky thing. Because when I was reading the paper, so that's quite a different description to what I read about how the tongue is used when it darts out in order to catch prey, and they said that effectively what it was doing was it's acting almost like a bungee cord, so it's gripping on to the prey and just sucking it back in a very kind of mild manner as opposed to like a whip, like as if you were coming back up on the bungee. It's kind of weird bungee jumps if you're done while you stand on the ground and you

wait for a bungee rope to pull down and grab you on the way back up. Even more exciting, you jump off the cliff without a bungee rope and then it comes down and grabs you and pulls you up. That'd be pretty exciting. That'd be amazing. Do you know how they found this out? The scientist who did this as a PhD student called Alexis Noel, and she said, I actually got 15 frogs and scraped their tongues for a couple of hours one night.

It was pretty disgusting, and she said it takes about half an hour to get a milliliter of frog saliva off their tongue. She says it's like the world's most precious material because it's so hard to get and you get so little of it once you've done that. But I don't think that necessarily makes it precious. Well, it depends on her time, doesn't it? If she charges like two million dollars an hour and it takes her that long, then it is really precious.

But if she's on minimum wage, it's probably not that precious. She's probably somewhere in between, isn't she? Well, she works under Dr David Who. He was the guy who came up with the idea that all animals or all mammals urinate for the same amount of time, around 21 seconds. We met David Who. Have we? Yeah.

He's won the Nignobell Prize. We met him at the ignoble show in London. Oh, yes, we did. We did. We spoke to him afterwards. He gave us his card. You're right. Is he a doctor?

Sorry, David. Is he a doctor? He's Doctor Who, yeah. Nice. Yeah. That's very cool. Yeah, that's very cool. It's a baseball mitt and then it stretches, catches you and then pulls back.

And a bungee cord. Yeah, there's a lot of metaphors going on here. Well, the other metaphor is on the softness of the tongue. They said it's like freshly chewed chewing gum about that same stickiness and kind of softness and also marshmallow fluff. You know, if you get like a tea cake and you get marshmallow on your hands, you just can't get it off like that. Oh my God, I wonder if marshmallow fluff works like this.

And actually, if you bashed it really hard, it would suddenly turn to liquid and you could get it off your finger. You could be able to catch all those flies you've been looking for. Do you know, when the frog gets its tongue back in its mouth as well, then it has a problem which is that my saliva is like honey and it's incredibly sticky and I've got this fly on my tongue and I can't get it off. So do you know what they have to do? They have to push their eyeballs down into their head onto their tongue to scrape the

fly off their tongue. Well, it's not to scrape it because what I think we might have mentioned the eyeballs thing before, but I think they've just realized why that works because that's the same thing. I think the eyeballs bash into it and it's the impact that turns it into this very, very liquid thing. So what it is, is it's a non-Newtonian fluid which we've talked about before. So it's like quicksand whereby whenever you agitate it, it changes its viscosity. But it's like the opposite of custard, so it's a non-Newtonian fluid, but it has the

opposite effect. Ketchup is the same as frog saliva. What? What do you mean? It's the same, it's a non-Newtonian fluid as well, but this way round, so that's why if you bash a glass ketchup bottle, then it will suddenly come flowing out because if you hit it hard enough, then the viscosity of the liquid suddenly changes. I was looking into tongues, generally, and we don't know how bats drink.

We're still looking into how bats drink, and one of the things that they notice is that they use their tongue as a sort of conveyor belt to bring the liquid up. What does that mean? It means that the tongue sort of, is it on rollers? Yeah. I see. How does that work? I don't know, Dan.

I think you don't know how bat tongues work. I think you've slightly misunderstood the story. No, it says scientists, they use their tongues as a kind of conveyor belt to slurp up nectar. I think the key bit there is kind of. Okay. Because the amazing thing about it being conveyor belt would be if it wound all the way around on its rotor and came back out, which is hard to believe they do. Have you heard the myth about dog mouths?

Is it that they're cleaner than human mouths? Yes. I had not heard this myth until I was researching this fact, but there is a myth that dog mouths are cleaner than human mouths, and that it's fine as a result to friend-kiss them, and it's okay. I think what happens is, now you've read into this, so you might know, but I think there might be fewer bacteria, but the point is that they're all bacteria that you don't already have in your mouth.

Yes. And probably you don't really want in your mouth. Yeah. So there was an article on ABC News where they spoke to a vet and said, it may be safer because lots of the bacteria are species-specific, so you can't catch the same strep from a dog that you could from a person. However, I did read also articles like, I almost died after a dog saliva infection, so I think it's not recommended.

Well, especially a rabid dog. That can... Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you get rabid dog saliva and you've got any kind of cuts in your mouth, then you'll catch rabies from that, and they used to try to weaponize this. So I think, Leon, has he called? He's a Roman writer.

He wrote that if a rabid dog saliva could get into contact with someone, then they would get rabies. Leonardo da Vinci thought that this might be a good idea to use in war, and there was a Polish general called Kazimierz Semenowicz who thought that he would get the slobber from rabid dogs, put them in clay balls and fire them into like towns that are sieged. Is there hope that people will find the clay bottles on the ground and think, what is this? I must put it in my mouth, or is it that they can fire into people's mouths? Like, it just seems like such an inefficient distribution method.

They were firing into towns of toddlers who just picked them all up and tried to eat them. Yeah, right. They should put it in like an Easter egg or something. Yeah, exactly. Something really crafty like that. And then leave a load of Easter eggs outside, saying, sorry about the siege going on a bit, isn't it? Have some Easter eggs.

But our official advice is don't snog your dog, right? I think, yeah. That's mine, even if it might be safe, even if you've got a very clean dog. Even if it's safe, it's weird. Yeah. I have one more thing, which is that Gray Whales, this is so cool. They use their tongues really cleverly to control their heat loss. So they've always got mouths full of extremely cold ocean water, right?

So they might lose a massive amount of heat that way, and that would, they might die as a result of if they had a really warm tongue. So what happens is, the arteries that take blood to their tongue, right, are really close to the veins carrying blood away from the tongue. And as the arteries get close to the tongue, they transfer all the heat over from the artery going to the tongue to the vein heading back from the tongue, right? So the blood on its way to the tongue cools down, and the blood on its way back to the heart warms up.

And it sounds kind of like a conveyor belt. It does look like a conveyor belt, actually. So when it gets to the, when it gets to the end of the tongue, or when it gets to the tongue, it's incredibly cold already, this blood. So the whale doesn't lose massive amounts of heat because its tongue is constantly in contact with really cold water. Isn't that crafty? Yeah.

I don't know if it's this whale, but there is some kind of whale that can thermoregulate in that way, but by, it has erectile tissue in its tongue. And so it can kind of engorge it with blood in the way that an erection would. And so they would kind of, if they need to cool down, they get a massive kind of erection in the mouth, in the tongue, and that will cool them down. What are you laughing at, Andy? Just remembering a joke, someone told me. Do you want to just know how you can tell if you're an extrovert or an introvert by

your saliva? Yeah, sure. If you are constantly leaving it in other people's mouths, you're an extrovert. So there's a study that was done, I think, in the 60s, but I think it's been replicated that showed the introverts salivate more. So when you put drops of lemon on the tongue of people who are introverted by character, they produce more saliva, and it kind of makes sense because people who are introverts tend to react more strongly to certain kind of stimulation.

So they shy away things more. Well, it kind of makes sense if you're constantly slobbering, but you don't want to spend a lot of time with people. Every time you open your mouth, you spit in someone's face, you start to stop speaking. Well, so apparently this works. If you're not sure if you're an introvert or an extrovert, there's not the easiest way to tell, but you get a cotton bud. You tie a little bit of thread to the exact middle so that when you hold it by the thread,

it hangs horizontally, and then you put one end of the tip in your mouth for 20 seconds and take it out, and then you put lemon juice on your tongue, and then you put the other end of the tip on your mouth for another 20 seconds, so you're seeing how much you're salivating in response to the lemon juice, and then you hold it by the thread, and if it's hanging horizontally still, it means you haven't salivated much, which means you're an extrovert, and if it tilts, it means you've salivated quite a lot, so the end, one end is heavier now. It's a lot to do to tell you something that presumably you kind of already know.

If you've got the time to do this, you're an introvert. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that during the Second World War, Britain invented chocolate bars infused with garlic to give to pilots who were shot down and needed to make their breath authentically French. So it's the idea that you land in France, and you meet someone, and they say, are you French, and you just breathe on them, and they go, oh, you must be French then. They don't ask you to speak French.

They don't ask you why you're wearing an RAF uniform. So this gets written about quite a lot. I've tried to find concrete evidence of pilots actually being given these bars and using them, and I haven't found much. I do know that it was invented as a thing, because it's written about a load of times. There was a guy called Charles Fraser Smith, who was kind of one of the original inspirations of Q in the James Bond films. So that's this guy, and he did invent these things, as well as loads of other incredible

stuff. But I can't find out whether it was put into operation in the field. Why didn't he just give them garlic? It's not as though, well, it's not as though garlic goes especially well with chocolate anyway. And, B, RAF pilots in World War II would be undergoing a lot of physical trauma and challenges every day. I wouldn't have thought they're going to have a problem with just eating a couple of cloves

of garlic. That's not going to be the final straw, what they say. This guy was James Bond's Q, right? Yeah. So Q never just, there was always a double thing to the invention. It's a pen that doubles as a, so you wouldn't be like, it's just garlic. You'd be like, and, and it doubles as a chocolate bar. That's Q.

It's not garlic, but doubles as a chocolate bar. Well, it's a chocolate bar, garlic flavoured. Yeah. I'm just saying, but isn't it, a lot of people that go on missions, isn't chocolate a thing of sustenance? So maybe he was trying to double up the sustenance with the, so again, Q's mind is working there, is doubling up. Yeah.

I'm very good. Taking back my criticism, it was a great idea. This was in the news, because there was a very recent story, MI6 announced that their current Q is a woman, which surprised a lot of people because they thought it was still Desmond Llewellyn from the James Bond films. Well, it is, but he doubles up as a woman. Weird that they tell us who these people are. What's the point?

Yeah. I think it's bizarre that you know who the head of MI5 and MI6 is. Yeah. I do as well. Really odd. Probably aren't the real ones. Yeah. They can't be, right?

Like Stella Remington couldn't have been the head, head. I think she was. I mentioned she was, but on what James is saying, I think that you can't, there must be someone who is actually the secret head. There's going to be someone who if you ask them, they will just not be able to say anything I don't know. What if Stella Remington listens to this podcast and she's sitting at home feeling bad now? She's fine.

She probably is. She's the fake head of MI5. I don't think we can say people are fake. That's all. All I'm saying is if I was in charge, I would make Stella Remington the fake one and then have a real one. Yes. But she'd know at some point that she was the fake one after.

Well, yeah. She's in on it. Oh, she's in on it. She doesn't think she's running the show in secretly. No, she's in on it. She's an actor called Maureen. Maureen Lippmann. Yeah.

People are going to recognise her there. They'll say, I saw that Stella Remington in a... Like the BT Adverts. Yeah. She should be looking after the country's safety, not clocking off and doing BT Adverts. And then there'd be a scandal. I love the BT Adverts. That's a reference from the early 80s.

That's the last thing I can remember being. She's going to be feeling sad at home because you haven't been keeping up with her career. So I don't think that you need to be secret unless you're in the field. Isn't that the thing? I would assume. Well, Stella Remington was the first person that they openly acknowledged as the head. So that was a transparency thing that came in with one of the governments who decided transparency was a thing.

So they did keep them secret. Oh, OK. Yeah. That's not always been known. That was the thing that I think we've mentioned on a previous podcast and I don't know. I think we almost mentioned it as an urban myth, the idea of the spy who was pregnant and they discovered that she was a spy when she was delivering the baby because the pain was so great, she started swearing in her own language which I was writing.

Is that a myth? I don't know. I don't know. I thought you meant that the baby came out and started speaking Russian. That's 50 a month. It's a great myth. Or I mean, if it's true, it's even better. So is it might be true?

Apparently that I've heard it and I've never personally questioned it, but it does have the whiff of myth, doesn't it? Do you guys know about Operation Lena? No. No. So this was a German operation. This was in 1940 and it was when 12 German spies were sent to Britain as to a bit of a wrecky to plan Hitler's follow-up operation, which was going to be Operation Sea Lion,

which was going to be the invasion of Britain. And so they were trained up as to how to appear British, apparently trained up to blend right in. And they were caught straight away because of their own stupidity was what the British officials said. One of them went into a pub and ordered a pint of cider at 10 in the morning, and which is a weird thing to do in any situation. I can't think of anything more British.

No, you go to Gowick and Heathrow Airport, you'll see a lot of German spies there. German to my local weather spoons. So you would normally drink pints of cider at 10 in the morning, obviously, because it's Britain, but in wartime you weren't allowed to serve alcohol before midday, because I don't know, maybe they wanted people to be accomplishmentists in war. And so they immediately knew. And another couple was stopped because they were cycling through Scotland on the wrong side of the road, having to bother to research which side of the road you were supposed to

drive on. So police apprehended them and said you're on the wrong side of the road, that's a bit suspicious. Can we search your bags? In their bags, they found German sausages and some Nivea hand cream, which was German brand. Now, if they'd only been given sausage, which doubled up as a scone and gave them scone breath or a Cumberland sausage, they should have just bent their sausages into a spiral.

That's all you need to do. They said, what's the sausage? And they go, oh, no, my sausage has unraveled itself in my pocket. OK, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that a Komodo dragon can taste its meal two and a half miles before it gets to the restaurant. Stop saying restaurant.

You put that in the wording in the email and I thought Dan will change the wording for the actual thing. Well, no, if I mean, you know, it's not a restaurant, is it? But it's not an actual. No, I have no problem with the wording then. All it is is basically is that Komodo dragons have the ability to use their tongue to sample air and they can taste the meal, as it were, the carcass that might be laying two and a half miles away from that distance and know exactly where to go.

But it's not as if it can just sense where it is. It can actually taste and be like, oh, it tastes good and head on over, get excited by it. So it collects these particles, these scent particles inside what's known as the Jacobson's organ, which is just above its nose. And it's like a little analyzing station where it just like analyzes it and then gives them a result and says, tasty. And so they had that way. You can smell something as a human and not know exactly where it is.

Yes, they if they're getting a particle hitting the left side of their tongue, as opposed to the right, they will know to head over here. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. So if there's more particles on the left, yeah, because they've got a forked tongue. And so the right and left is interesting in fish, I think in sharks, people kind of think they might do that with sharks.

But one other way that they might do it is they get a little molecule of blood and they think, OK, there's something that's bleeding around here and they just follow the current because they know the blood must have come through a current. So if there's water coming towards them, they'll just follow the water in that direction and they'll find it. People are quite sure, I think. That's really cool. Yeah.

OK, I would have assumed that they're following actually the blood smell and they've they've located it, but actually they're using the science of how it arrived to them. But what you could do is if you are bitten, if you are bleeding in the water, you could get your blood and throw it down stream and hopefully trick the shark into thinking, I'm trying to work out where you'd have to throw your blood to save your skin. It would have to be in front of you, wouldn't it? Yeah. If you threw it down stream, wouldn't it flow right back to you?

Oh, yeah. If you throw it up stream, it will flow back down to where you are. And if you throw it downstream, you're just speeding up the process. There's no way you can throw it to save yourself. You could throw it to the side. Yeah. Five minutes later, a shark will arrive next to you and it will be foxed completely. Oh, well, nothing here.

Yeah, I'll just go, is this yours? Yeah, no. He went that way. So Komodo dragons are amazing. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, they're awesome. They're massive.

They're 10 feet long, up to 10 feet long. They're really heavy. Small when they're babies. Small when they're babies, of course. They live in trees when they're babies. So usually you would think, I need to escape a Komodo dragon by climbing a tree. They're already up there. Do you know why they climb up trees?

No. It's partly to avoid being eaten by their own parents. Is it? Komodo dragons are really savage things, yeah. And so they either climb a tree or if they have to be on the ground, they roll around in excrement, which is apparently unappealing. If your food is rolled in excrement, I've never found that. But the thing about if you climb up a tree

and there's baby Komodos there, they won't eat you, I don't think. Right. Because there's a really weird thing about Komodo dragons where the baby ones will eat little rodents and stuff like that. And the adult ones will go for much bigger prey. But the baby ones won't go for the bigger prey. And the adult ones won't go for the smaller prey. And it's when they reach 20 kilograms, approximately, not exactly,

but around 20 kilograms, all of a sudden they just switch. So just overnight, they just stop going for the little guys and go for the big guys. Wow. Oh no, do you think that's really killed a lot of friendships in the Komodo dragon world overnight? Yeah, you think when some people kind of, you know, reach puberty before the others. Yeah, exactly.

Did you guys all stop being friends with people when they reached puberty? Well, they just, I wasn't really interested in chasing rodents anymore. Check this out. Komodo dragons, they eat only about 12 times a year. They really eat huge amounts in one chunk. In fact, they can eat up to 80% of their body weight. And because they eat so much, one of the problems that they have is that the food can start rotting inside them before they digest it.

So they need to go, they do a thing where they go in the sun. So that some reason the sun rays help them to digest quicker. It must do some stuff to their skin. But they're also in a sort of rush when they're eating the carcasses. And they've been observed to have slammed themselves against trees, the carcass, in between so that they can thrust it down their throat quicker. So they'll often knock down trees as they're eating because they're slamming into it.

So what with food in their mouth? They're bashing the food against the tree down their throat. Because they only rot while it's in their mouth. I don't know if that's connected, but they certainly are impatient eaters. It's kind of like eating a yogurt, but just keeping it in your mouth for three days. Yes. And then it goes off. Yeah, exactly. It is like that.

But isn't that nuts that they're literally forcing it by slamming into a tree? I didn't know that we didn't really have any evidence that Komodo dragons existed until I think 1906. Yeah, it was the early 1900s. There were kind of stories about them, but then people always used to embellish stories. So people would say, I found this massive dragon and then everyone said it breeds fire and it flies.

And then we just didn't believe them. But yeah, I didn't know about them for a hundred years. And only so, yes, it was the early 1900s. And then they gave birth really to the idea of King Kong. Yeah, which I didn't know until I read this. So the producer of King Kong had read the story of W. W. Douglas Burden and W. Douglas Burden had gone over and he was the first person to properly film Komodo dragons,

bring back a few live Komodo dragons as well as samples of dead ones that they'd shot while they're out there. And he went out with his wife and he had basically the scenes that you see in King Kong where they go to Skull Island to begin with. Is the kind of same setup of what they had. Wait, did he tie his wife to a tree to draw Komodo dragon? No, but she almost got killed by Komodo dragon while she was out there. Yeah, she was she went out without her gun one day

and she was walking past a carcass that was laid out for a Komodo dragon that they were hoping to attract and one was coming. So suddenly she was between the carcass and the Komodo dragon and she laid down in the tall grass and really hoped that it hadn't seen her. But she also suspected that it had and smelt her. And so she accepted her death and just laid there because she knew it was that close and five feet away, the Komodo dragon as it was coming towards her was shot by one of the assistants of Burden.

So she survived. She didn't deserve to survive. Who just lies down and takes it? At least try and make a run for it. Well, she just knew there was no way. Well, there is a way. They're only slightly faster than the tree. Well, they've just discovered them.

They don't know what their abilities are. This is like a dinosaur. What kind of survival instinct is that? No, she just said I'm dead. She's where they go to have me. I'm completely idiot. That would work against some animals, though, wouldn't it? They're playing dead.

Yeah, I never. It's a big risk. Brown bears and black bears, there's a different one of them. I think brown bears, nothing works because they're faster. They can climb trees and they can just okay. And then with black bears, I think you're supposed to kind of take your clothes off

and slowly walk away from them so that they get confused about what your clothes are, so I'm just trying to make me have an embarrassing bear on you. Noted pervert, I'm through, I'm to worry. He was found naked and molten. Back on the way, they taste things. So they have this forked tongue and they stick it out and it gets like all the chemicals and the information from the air. And then they retract it into their mouth

and they rub it into pads on the bottom of their mouth. And then they have to close their mouth and the pads on the bottom of their mouth touch the top of their mouth. And that contains an organ that gives it to their brain. So every time they want to taste something, you get it on your tongue, put it on the bottom of your mouth, close your mouth, put it on the top of your mouth. It just seems like a real plaza. That is a hassle.

That does. But that does seem like a connoisseur as well. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. What a professional. It feels like someone's really tasting their food. So in your mythical Komodo Dragon restaurant. Yeah.

There'll be a lot of consideration going on. Yeah. I'm getting notes of carcass, but also excrement. Maybe that's why she laid still as well. She thought, I mean, how often do you change your mind about the restaurant you're going to as soon as you get up to it and see a better one next door? Yes.

She knew she was bad tasting. Yeah, exactly. Two and a half miles away, this Komodo Dragon made a booking. Yeah. It was on its way. Are we sure she wasn't lying still covering herself in feces? She probably was. So there is a thing.

Their metabolisms are really slow reptiles, as we know, because they're, as we say, cold-blooded. But their muscles can stay working for hours after death. So there was an Atlantic article all about the process of dissecting a Komodo Dragon, which is very hard. You go through loads and loads of knives because their skin is so tough. Really? Yeah.

And one of the students who was doing it, called Viv Allen, said that she'd been studying an alligator, which had been shot, had a massive hole in its head. And she stuck a knife into the alligator and it walked off the table. And they freaked out, obviously, because it was dead. But their metabolisms are so slow that their muscles can stay working for hours. And if you hit the right nerve center, you can trigger lots of muscular contractions. And she said, we freaked out.

It just wouldn't stop moving. We cut its head off just to make sure. And then one of the undergrads was sick in it. Oh, God. Wow. I know. Just quickly on reptiles surviving after they've been killed, a snake remains completely alive after you decapitate it,

not just muscles, not just muscles like spasming or anything. A snake's head is totally alive for about an hour. And after a full hour, it can see you and decide it's pissed off with you because you've cut its head from its body. And I don't know how it heads over to you, but crawl its way over to you on its head and bite you. That's amazing. No.

It's because they've got these ridiculously slow metabolisms. Oh, that's hilarious. That's amazing. So creepy. It must be weird if they actually say, like, chase a mouse and they catch it and they eat it, but it just walks you through. OK, it is time to move on to our final fact of the show. And that is James.

OK, my fact this week is that you can improve your darts game by training yourself to dream about darts. But it's not worth it because you have to dream about darts all the time. Well, you know, there are worse dreams. It's not a nightmare, at least. That's what depends on the game. The dartboard is chasing you as a nightmare. And it's trying to throw darts into your body and say,

see how you like it. I don't think that would improve your game. If that's the way you dream about it. Now, the way that this works, it was a study which they did on lucid dreamers. And these are people who can kind of decide what they're going to dream about. And it's the thing you can train yourself to do. You go to sleep and then you realise you're asleep and you can say, OK, now I'm going to chase dragons because I know I'm asleep.

Whereas most people just dream passively. Anyway, they got these people who could lucid dream to practice darts and they tested them afterwards. And the ones who did it were better at darts and the ones who didn't do it were worse at darts. Really? That's so cool. Although they did specify that if people, the third group that practice darts in their waking life were even better than the ones who practiced it

in their sleep. Sure. But I imagine if you practice in your waking life and practice while you're asleep, you're going to be even better. So it sounds like this is quite early research, like controversial as well. A lot of people aren't sure whether or not it does actually improve. It's just a small pool. Oh, it's a small study. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is that definitely does work.

I don't want to say definitely just in case, but it does appear to work is kind of in sport, just imagining that you're going to do something. And that really helps your your body to prepare for muscle memory and things like that. I can absolutely believe it. Haven't there been studies on people with their arms in cast who've been asked to visualize themselves doing exercises with that arm? And it's been their arm has become stronger than if they were than if they were not doing those visualizations.

Yeah, it absolutely. So that is. I mean, dreaming doesn't sound very far from that at all. I believe it. There was one thing about this study as well with the lucid dreamers about darts. Dreams being what they are. Sometimes they weren't exactly the same as a darts game. So one of the people was throwing a dartboard that was actually looked exactly like a tree stump, but that still helped them to get better.

Oh, sure. As it would in the real world, I guess. Yeah. It's like you find out the dartboard is your mum. That's different. No, but I think the idea is even if a dartboard turns into your mum and you turn out to be naked and you're flying over Australia, then you're still going to be better because you practice the darts bit. Imagine once you got to the competition, you needed those exact conditions. Um, Phil Taylor, the darts player, he dreams about darts.

So sometimes I'm playing darts in my sleep and I wake myself up. I hate it. Drives me crackers because if I have a cat in that, I'm dreaming about bloody darts. Yeah. So he is the best darts player of all time. Right. And he probably plays darts all the time in his in his normal life because otherwise, how would he get so good? Yeah. And he's probably just dreaming because you often dream about what you're doing.

Yeah, after them. Actually, he's deliberately doing its practice. Like if you play a computer game and when you close your eyes at night, you can see images from the computer game. The Tetris effect. Yeah, I used to get that all the time. I used to play a lot of computer games. Supposedly when, um, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip went on a tour of Australia

and they did something like 56 towns in 57 days. So it was a mega tour. Philip, at that point, was dreaming of just waving in his dreams. Yeah, I don't know if that's a proper fact. It's in the crown, but I assume they pulled that from a book somewhere. Wow. You love the crown so much. I can't believe it's taken you so long to crowbar it into this podcast.

What is the crown? Is it a film? It's a Netflix. It's written by Peter Morgan, who wrote the Queen. So he's he's very factual in his in his writing. And yet neither of those stories mentioned that they're all lizards. Weirdly. Have you ever seen the Queen try to catch a fly with a marshmallow like tongue? There goes the OBE.

I know, and I've sent all those emails to about the Honest Committee to my management. It's terrible. I'm Phil the power. So the nickname, the power, I went on to Wikipedia and saw a big list of all because they've all got sort of WWF nicknames that they bring to the sport. But what's really exciting is there's a lot of there's a lot of puns. So Antonio Alcinas, he's Spanish. So what do you reckon his is?

Antonio Alcinas, I don't know. El Datador. So that's all Datador Jamie Harvey. He's from Scotland. What's his pun tossing the dot? No, Scotland. The like Scotland the brave, some pun on this dart. Oh, yeah.

Mark Frost. Where's he from? Is he from Dartford? Because otherwise, I reckon we're going to struggle. Someone from Dartford could only be beaten by someone from Dartmore. So the the earliest form of darts, do you know why it was banned? Why? Didn't know that it was banned.

It's because people kept on dying. It's the earliest form of darts war. Yes. No, it was called puff and dart and it involved a blowpipe. OK. And you go, you know, you would blow the dart towards the board. And eventually I mean, people kept on swallowing them by mistake and they could be sucking instead of blowing. Yeah, they could be quite small.

And so eventually they thought, why don't we just get rid of the blowpipe element of the darts game? Did you read about that man last year or the year before last, who inhaled a dart and but he inhaled a rubber dart 44 years ago. And his parents took him to Ernie and said, we think our sons inhaled a dart and they said, there's not a dart in there. Go away. And then he he didn't know about this.

And he's always had sinus problems and he sneezed. This was in 2015. He sneezed. Please tell me he was standing right next to a dart box. And he took home five thousand pounds for prize money and the rubber dart. He sneezed and the rubber dart came out and it had been sitting in his nose for the last forty four years. Unbelievable. James, you know darts terminology because you're a fan of the sport.

Sure. Have you heard of the phrase, wankers fifty? I haven't. No, what is a wankers fifty? It's I don't know if this is common or rare. It doesn't seem common. It's where you're aiming for a bull's eye, which is fifty. But you hit single twenty, single eighteen and single twelve instead. So you do score fifty, but you use three darts. OK, have you heard of bag of dicks, which is B-A-G-A-D-I-X.

Oh, it's not an acronym. No. Oh, what would begin with X in the acronym? It's rhyming slang. It's not an acronym. It's rhyming slang for twenty six. Oh, because if you're aiming for the treble twenty, you miss it on one side and get one and on the other side, you get five. Exactly. We call that B and B, but I don't know why we call it that. B and B is two and six. And two and six is how much a bed and breakfast used to cost in the UK.

Two shillings and sixpence in predestinalization currency. So what's bag of dicks? Twenty six. Twenty six. No, but as in like, I don't know, should in that like most rhyming slang has a meaning to this thing. It's rhyme to, you know, a bag. Yeah, it's one of those. If you put some dicks in a bag.

OK, see, I don't know that it is that. It sounds more like a bingo call, doesn't it? Yeah, bag of dicks. Twenty six. This children do listen to this show. It's not that bad. Lots of people know what bingo is. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James at X-Shapes, Andy at Andrew Hunter M. And Chazinsky. You can email a podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group podcast account at QI podcast or go to our website.

No such thing as that. And if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there. We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.