No Such Thing As A Fish - 223: No Such Thing As A Worthless Doorstop

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

Live from Melbourne, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss death by meteorite, the Manhatt-ant and the downhill history of the slinky.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Melbourne. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Tysinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay my fact this week is that the only known modern death due to meteorite was a cow who was hit in the neck in Venezuela in 1972.

We didn't know about it for a decade because the farmer ate the cow and used the meteorite as a doorstop. It's amazing. So this is a thing that happened in Venezuela in a town that I don't know how to pronounce. It's T-R-U-J-I-L-L-O. Prujo. Was that a Zorro impression? Yeah.

It was good. So there was a sonic boom one night and then the next morning they found the dead cow and the rock and they kind of thought nothing more about it but then ten years later a doctor came along and he checked out this rock and realized that it was a meteorite and he said this is definitely a meteorite that's killed the cow and that's the only one. There's a lot of kind of possible people who've been killed or things that have been killed by meteorites but this is the only one with an actual certificate that says that's what it is.

Really? And did he just look at his doorstop after all those years and go, well that actually does look a bit like a meteorite. I mean how does it transpire that someone suddenly decides to take their doorstop to a science museum? I think it was that the doctor was visiting them rather than them taking just every single bit of rock from the house randomly to a museum. Is this one?

No. Is this one? No. You get lucky in the end. But then some people are a little bit skeptical about it actually because what they realized is because this is now a famous meteorite because it killed a cow it's now worth ten times more than it was originally. Now they're thinking maybe there's something dodgy going on here.

And then there's another twist so around the same area actually in Chile in the Atacama there was a large meteorite landed there and a load of people collected it and this was a really famous one and it landed in a dry riverbed called Vaca Muerta. How do you, sorry how do you pronounce that? Vaca Muerta. Sorry. Whatever Andy just said means dead cow in Spanish and so the theory is that maybe these people heard about this famous one and they went that gives me an idea I'm going to pretend

my cow got hit like that and then when anyone comes I'll have the rock but then I can say oh no I ate the cow. Right. I'll check that. But don't they, they do test these rocks right? Oh yeah you can tell if a meteorite is a meteorite. Yeah so they test is rock? I mean presumably they did.

Yeah so the meteorite is definitely a meteorite but the question is did it kill the cow or not? That's what some people are skeptical about. Right okay I see. Have you guys heard of the Nakla meteorite which fell on Egypt in 1911? Nope. So the story is that it vaporized a dog. Oh yes but that is very much the story of it as if there's no evidence because obviously

the dog was vaporized. Which is what makes people think it's not quite true. I read a really cool story that people used to think that Venus fly traps were aliens traveling on meteorites that landed on earth because back in the day Venus- What Dan what are you on about? No this is, I read this on the BBC's website back in the day what they used to, because Venus fly traps would be very unpredictable and where they came up and they would go to places where they would think a meteorite had landed and very often they would see out

of place Venus fly traps and it looks like an alien and so they thought it's an alien. It only looks like an alien because we've designed alien things after it, like movies and stuff like that. Yeah actually our aliens look like Venus fly traps, you're right, it's that way around isn't it? Yep. But they did, people used to attribute. Sorry Dan, but we're fine with vaporizing dog story over here.

Yeah that was a very sad story, it's a poor dog. People make money out of meteorites and like you were saying people would pay to come and see various cows and anything that's been touched by a meteorite or experienced a meteorite could then be sold so there was one that smashed through a car in New York in 1992, smashed through the boot of the car, the trunk of the car and the owner of the car had just bought it for $400 and she was able to sell it for 25 times that amount straight afterwards and she was also able to sell the original title to the car from when she bought it and a bulb from the rear tail light that had been blasted out by the meteorite.

Wow, that's so cool. So it just wasn't. I emailed the secretary of the American Meteorological Society, this is the people who look after meteorites and ask them what to do if I find the meteorite and they said the protocol for collecting meteorites ideally a fresh meteorite should be collected immediately without touching it and placed in a plastic sealed bag, how do you do that without touching it? It's the same procedure as for a dog poo, I imagine. And then you hang it up on a tree and wait for the authorities to come in.

And you don't have the dog anymore because it's been vaporized. Do you guys know there are about 20 full time meteorite hunters in the world? Very rare career to have and I think it was I think it was National Geographic. They interviewed one of them. He was a guy called Michael Farmer. He has been imprisoned for months in Oman because he went there. He knew a meteorite had landed. He went to try and find it and they locked him up saying you're not allowed to take rocks

out of Oman, but he's been nearly killed. But the one thing he said in this interview, which I really liked was he said, I've eaten a small piece of every moon rock and Mars rock that I have purchased or found. Not many people can say they have eaten a piece of the moon. And then he said, and I know for a fact that numerous scientists have done the same. Do you think that you don't check in to see if it tastes of cheese? But I think you wouldn't you would do that when you you give it a lick at least. Yes, I would want to see what it tasted like.

But I wouldn't eat a small bit of the moon. It feels somehow disrespectful. So who the goddess Salini? Yeah, actually, that's what you do, isn't it? With fossils and stuff, isn't it? If you're not sure if you've got fossilized dinosaur poo, for instance, you can lick it and it'll be slightly tacky to your tongue. Really? Come on.

It's a long time since he's been in a dinosaur game. If you find a plastic bag hanging up on a tree and you're not sure if it's a meteorite, do not do that. Well, that's like farmers eat their soil, didn't they? Sometimes some farmers test their taste, their soil to see if it's fertile. And then the other way is by sitting down with your bare bottom on the soil. Yes. What's that for? If it sits just for show.

It's like to check if it's warm enough. Yeah, so the soil is warm enough if you drop your trousers, sit on it and it does not sort of soar. Does anyone do that? No, so it's not a common practice these days, but. Although I keep a pair of underpants buried in my back garden. We all do that. Why do you do that?

This was official advice from someone or other, not to me, like to farmers. And the idea is you put your underpants in your back garden and then you go back a few months later and you check if they've been eaten away by all the microbes and stuff. And you'll always know because the microbes can't eat the elastic band around the side of it, but they can eat the cotton. And the purpose to see how. I mean, no, like if the bacteria have eaten them, then what?

Then you've got good soil and you can plant stuff. And if they haven't, then you have to put some fertilizer in. Also, you've got a free thong at that point. So I was reading, you know, in movies, how there's always it, like a sci-fi movie will start in Antarctica and a meteorite has landed. And and it always, Antarctica always seems to be associated with finding big meteorites. And I thought I was like, is that because of the poles

and it attracts as the meteorites coming in? And then I read this article, it turns out the reason they go there is because they're much easier to find because everything's white. So they just stick out. Is that amazing? I thought it was like some deep, amazing alien life kind of thing. No, it's just like, oh, there it is. Way easier. So much more simple than trekking through a forest full of rocks.

It's true. Also, not many humans there and other people to disturb it, right? Yeah, because they're black, aren't they meteorites? That's sort of lessons on how to spot them. And so another place where it's really common for meteorites to be found is Morocco. So for a country of its size, it's got like by multiple factors of 10 more meteorite findings than any other country of its size in the world. And this is just because this guy in 2006 decided to start teaching people

how to spot a meteorite and it's become a proper career for a lot of the nomadic people in Morocco. They go around finding meteorites. So a lot of them make money out of this and it's actually where the most important meteorite probably ever found was found. It was one that came from Mars. It was in 2011 and it's like this whole jumble of rocks are thrown together. And also it's kind of full of old Mars water.

So it's the first kind of evidence that we have of that. But the the cool story about this is that it was found by this guy who had lessons that they have in Morocco on how to spot a meteorite. And he saw it. I think it was on sale in a market. It's called the Black Beauty Stone now. But it was on sale in a market and he looked at it. He was tempted and then he said, no, no, I'm not going to buy it.

He drove away. He changed his mind. He drove back and then he bought it and he was driving. He was on his way back from the hospital from having a gallstone removed. So he had one stone removed and then he immediately got another stone. Yeah, you're saying this in the way that Dan says things sometimes. I thought it sounded like that. Is that what I sound like? I am so sorry.

Hey, we need to move on shortly. You guys got anything before we do? Can I give you a list of other things that have been used as door stops over the years? Yeah, sure. It is unbelievable how careless people are. So it's just like everything valuable you've ever heard of. In 2016, a Chinese vase being used as a door stop was suddenly sold for $160,000.

In 2014, a Chinese pot sold for $150,000. A Ming vase in 2012 sold for a million. The world's largest sapphire in 1947 was found in Queensland. It had been used as a door stop for nine years until the owner looked a bit closer. A Bronze Age dagger that was worth $50,000. In 1802, a lump of gold had been used as a door stop for three years and the jeweler who was visiting this house saw it and it sparked America's very first gold rush, so in North Carolina.

And finally, a can of tinned veal that was left in the Arctic by William Parry, the explorer, in 1825. It was rediscovered by another explorer in 1829 and used as a door stop for many, many years and finally opened in 1958. Yeah, it got that reaction I think from the people who opened it as well. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is that there is a unique species of ant that only lives in ten blocks of New York City.

They call it the Manhattan. So, this was sent in to me actually by a guy called Justin Hintz and it was that this biologist discovered this species of ant which lives between 63rd Street and 76th Street in New York which is in Broadway, in Broadway, Manhattan. And they were looking at it and they noticed that it was unlike any of the 13,000 other species of ants that have ever been catalogued. They thought it might have come from Europe but they can't trace it to any known ant

so they've got this one city dwelling that has evolved to be its own species and Manhattan. So, you look at an ant and then immediately access your mental catalogue of all the 13,000 other ants and just eliminate them all. Unless it has something extremely different. It had an extra leg. It was driving one of the yellow cabs, that's what that hasn't said. Get out of here! So, they eat so much junk food and the scientist who was studying this

said that the Pavement Ant eats so much, shifting their diets to more human foods, that it's actually changing the chemical makeup of their bodies to look more like humans. Which, sadly, is not as exciting a sentence as I thought it was. I think they mean internally as opposed to like, got a face. Ants have got faces, surely? Oh, but just imagine like my face on an ant. Yeah, and they don't get diabetes though, so that's a thing that separates them.

So, what other ants get diabetes do they? No, what? Compared to the humans who are eating all the fast food, I think was your point, right? Yeah, they're very good at digesting it. Fast food is actually sort of made for ants, it turns out. Exactly, not for us. The coming human ants don't get diabetes so they can keep eating. The scientist who did that, he was called Clint Penwick

and he was talking about the study, he was interviewed about it. And he said, when he was doing the study, nobody ever talked to me. I basically was walking around and then crouching down on the ground and huffing something off the sidewalk through this ridiculous looking device. And not a single New Yorker was like, hey, what are you doing? I guess I was not the weirdest person on the street. Now, that suggests to me that he was the weirdest person on the street. You don't tend to talk to the weirdest person on the street, mate.

That's not what everyone does. Well, New York has a few other species, doesn't it? They're so unique to it. They have a unique centipede, they have a sweet bee, they have a white-footed mouse with small ears. They also found in New York in 2014 the first new amphibian that's been found in the state for 150 years, so a frog, a leopard frog.

And so for more than a century, there's been two types of leopard frog living in New York and people have been arguing over it. Scientists have been arguing because there seemed to be so much variety in the different leopard frogs. There was this big debate that went on and apparently lots of discord and backlash from one scientist to another about theories as to how come there was so much variation with these two species. And a herbatologist in 1936 called Carl Cofield said,

actually, I think this two species might be three species and it caused such massive controversy and there was this bickering and all this strife that people refused to accept it in the scientific literature. His theory was absolutely rubbish. That was 1936 and then in 2014 we went, oh, yeah, he was right. There was another one. So quite sweetly, it's called the Rana Calfeldi after him. But presumably he's long dead.

Long dead, yeah, but he's somewhere, he's happy. Right. I think it's another New York discovered insect. So this is an insect that doesn't live in New York, but it was discovered by a New York scientist and it is a new type of beetle and they didn't know it existed, but they discovered it because it was attached to an ant and what it does is this beetle, when it wants to get to places,

it goes up to this ant and it bites onto its anus and it grips on and flips underneath. So the thorax, it's in between the thorax and the abdomen, abdomen, abdomen, abdomen, abdomen. Sure. Oh, sorry. Abdomen. Thank you.

So they were studying this ant and they were like, it's got two of those and they shouldn't and they shook it and the beetle fell off and that's what it did. This beetle has a unique way of transporting itself by biting the bum of the ant and getting... So does the ant just think it's got two bums? The ant doesn't seem to have an issue with it, yeah. I don't know.

So ants are pretty amazing. I really like this ant. I'd never heard of it. It's called the Azteca brevis and it's in Costa Rica and it catches prey that's more than 50 times as heavy and as large as it is and it does this by... So they all work together and they nest in a tree but they build this network of tunnels within the tree

with tiny little openings out through the tree bark that are just big enough to fit the little ants' heads and so it looks a little bit like holy cheese, like Swiss cheese or something and their heads poke out and then a big bit of prey will come along like a termite or something and will step on one of the holes one of its legs will fall into the hole

and the ant will bite the leg with its teeth so it's stuck and then this thing kind of struggles to get away and another leg falls into another hole and another ant bites its other leg and eventually all its legs end up in the holes with ants' teeth biting into it and then the other ants all emerge and tear it to pieces and have it for dinner.

But so it's sort of spread-eagled on this tree. Is there a happy ending at all to this story? If you're an ant. Oh sure. It's a hell of a nice story. That's really horrific. Just stuck there, sprawled out. It's like the scene in the zombie film

where all the hands come through the wall. I haven't seen that scene but it sounds like it is like that. I found an ant called Cericomirix amebulis and it's a farmer ant so it farms fungi it literally makes little scrapings and grows fungi to eat. But there's another species which is called megalomermic sematicus and it comes in

it comes into the first ants colony it doesn't do any work it lives in the colony it eats the fungus the first ant has made and it also eats the babies that the host is rearing and the hosts do nothing about it they don't take any defensive action. That is not much of a house guest, is it?

No. And then he stole their precious doorstop and fucked up. Yeah there was nothing in the fridge I hope you don't mind so I ate the baby but there's a reason that it's tolerated and the reason is that second ant contains a venom in its body

which helps to repel an even worse invader ant. What is that guy doing though? What is worse than eating the babies? I think maybe those guys just completely destroy I don't know they might destroy the nest or something but yeah so they have to put up with these really difficult guests because they know

that it's protecting them against something worse. I was reading an article in a Cosmos magazine about ants and I'll just read the start of that in a behaviour that finds a broad comparison with human tradition a genus known as turtle ants pass on possessions from older individuals directly to younger ones

in a mechanism that does not however find a human analogue they do so through their anuses. Wait wait wait what about that scene in pulp fiction with a guy who puts the watch up his anus? I haven't seen that film but Well someone must know what I'm talking about

There was definitely one guy up there who got it immediately Exactly, Christopher Walken puts a watch up his anus then gives it to his son so actually there isn't analogue in humans. So these turtle ants basically it's like a fecal transplant that the adults give to the babies

and basically if you don't get that fecal transplant from your parents then you would starve because you wouldn't have the right bacteria in your stomach so they do need it Oh wow So there's a story with a happy ending but a gross middle

There was going to be a really exciting game there was a kick-started game that reached funding and it was called Ant Simulator and it was a it sounded really cool so basically you would manage an ant colony like you would be the main ant like get over there

This is one of these New York ants So it looked really amazing and it had I think three people who were like the main people behind it and unfortunately it's not happening and the reason is because they captured it I think perfectly in the headline Ant Simulator cancelled after

team spends the money on booze and strippers two of them went off had a massive night and they had to make a video going I'm so sorry Ant Simulator can't happen anymore and we can't give you back your money either That is typical entomologist behaviour you know they're always doing that kind of thing

can't be trusted We're going to have to move on soon to our next fact They fake injury ants to get sympathy so they carry their injured home and ants have figured this out This is the Ronaldo ant isn't it

I've seen this It just grazes a leaf and it goes I am so impressed that you knew the name of any football player So the Ronaldo ant ants if they're injured they carry each other home and so some ants really over emphasize injuries so it was found ants

have been witness moving really really slowly or limping or falling over I don't know how an ant falls over but they do in the hope of being carried but then if no one helps they look around and they get back up and they walk on like nothing's happened Okay let's move on It is time for fact number three

and that is Czazinski My fact this week is that the slinky business almost went bankrupt because the slinkies inventor kept giving the proceeds away to religious cults It's amazing Yeah so this is it The slinky was invented by a guy called Richard James

who was an engineer it was invented in 1943 He worked on a navy shipyard and he was working on a bit of equipment and noticed some springs acting oddly walking and so he said to his wife I think I can make a toy out of this and it was huge and it sold out

and he got very rich and then he turned to religion Christianity to be specific and he started giving away all this money and his wife was like oh my god we were almost broke we were almost completely out of money because he just gave it all away to various cults and then

he ran away to Bolivia to join one of them in 1960 and did not speak to or see his family again all the slinky He did occasionally write letters to his wife Betty urging her to repent so that is something Yes

So the invention was an amazing invention and it caught on quite quickly with the initial batch he sold something like 490 minutes once all they had to do was bring it to the front of a store and just show people it going down a couple of steps and it just everyone was like gotta have it

and then there was a few years where it just he needed to get it manufactured and people wouldn't buy into it but he not only invented the slinky he invented the machine that makes the slinky in a quick sort of like mass product way so a slinky and I don't know if it's still to this day

the same length but the original slinkies that he made if it was the coil was laid out just straight as a coil 80 feet long each slinky he created a machine that coiled it up in 10 seconds and then it was good to go so he has a patent for an invention as well as the toy invention

that's cool the patent for the original slinky said that it could be used as both a child's amusement and for parlor games okay so I couldn't work out what parlor games there might be but I went on to the internet and apparently there was once a game that was sold called

slinkum and it was like a little ramp and it had boxes at the bottom like squares and you would put your slinky down the ramp on whichever square it stopped in that's the number of points you got and obviously they weren't that confident about how good a game it was because the rules

offers a bounty of $25 for anyone offering a suggestion of an improvement of the game that's amazing so good do you know what the quality control is in the slinky factory they test

whether or not they can walk into their own box if they can do that then they're a high quality slinky I think they put the boxes at the bottom of the stairs and their final challenge that is amazing if it's too tight or too loose, won't walk in

another weird thing is that so he invented this while he was working for the war effort the side project as Anna was saying found a toy when it fell off the thing so what he was doing just on that there was like a meter which would tell you the horsepower of the

ship that he was on and he needed the dampening system to stop it from bouncing around everywhere so he was using springs to do that and then this spring happened to be great at doing other things so he saw that and he made it as a toy no intention for use of war then years later the Vietnam war

happened and slinkies were actually used in the war because what they were fantastic at doing was if you were stuck in the middle of nowhere you would throw a slinky up into a tree and it could act as a sort of antenna for radio signals that you needed to be sending so it ended up becoming

an actual use for war no way, that's so cool way wow here's a use for a slinky you can use it to get rid of squirrels uh-huh you put a squirrel on one

and then send it down the stairs no you don't do that and then it goes into its box and you slam the lid shut now what you do is you put it on your bird feeder and then when the squirrel comes along he kind of grabs on to the slinky and the weight pulls the slinky down

and he's kind of pulled down in like a little elevator ride there are videos online aren't there they are unbelievable hours of fun so when you drop a slinky the bottom doesn't know that you let go of the top

at first this is true I don't think it even knows it's a slinky this is my Dan fact of the show and I'm playing it now check it out, go home go to the slinky cupboard and check it out so it looks like it's floating

the bottom looks like it's floating because of the tension spring you're holding the slinky not scrunched up right so you're holding the very tip of it so it's really dangling down a long way your squirrels just come off the bottom exactly, it's loose at the bottom

and when you let go of the as you say the top bands it takes time for the motion to tell the bottom of the slinky that the top and the tension have been released you're not a physicist are you Andy not by trade but I've read

I couldn't quite believe this I've read that this happens even to solid objects so if you drop a steel rod the top starts accelerating before the bottom does because the vibrations need to travel down it's basically the tension is pulling up at the same rate

as the gravity is pushing down so the tension, once you've released it with your hand it needs to travel down the slinky before the slinky nose at the bottom oh that tension has been released now it is amazing, you should watch it on YouTube the slinky, it just levitates the bottom just levitates

there's a very good video on the Veritasium YouTube channel wow do you make that channel and yeah, it's incredible it's magic it's magic, you just ruined all the science of it I think we should say about the slinky but the hero behind it wasn't the guy who made it

and then turned to a Bolivian cult and there was his wife Bessie who was the person who saved it so she became determined to make it work and she made this 450 mile weekly round trip to the factory and pumped all their remaining money into it

she gambled their entire mortgage on a toy show in 1963 in New York hoping that people would go for it she launched the advertising campaign she gave it a jingle and she suddenly built from her ruined marriage this great little toy and I think she

might have been her idea to do the dog because the dog really gave it a boost and a train as well so the dog is pictured toy story in your head and the slinky dog that's literally it and when the movie came out they weren't prepared for the fact that it was going to be massively popular

so they didn't have the quantities that they need for merchandise to come out at that point which seems impossible as a thought, doesn't it they did a range of things which were all slinkies in the middle and then other things at the front of the back so they did the dog, they did the train

there was also a caterpillar, a hippo a fire engine, a worm and several more but they all had the they were all the same thing you can buy at the moment you can buy sound effects slinky for $12.99 and as it goes down it makes a sound

splat, boing and thwap but I kind of think the sound is quite nice anyway isn't it what a slinky makes so for $153.99 by a 14 carat gold plated slinky just to keep your door open we're going to have to move on soon

to our next fact I was just looking at some other toys Mr Potato Head the original Mr Potato Head did not come with the Potato Head it was just the bits on his face so it's got and it was just like bits of moustache

in fact I think the original one came with hands, feet, ears, two mouths, two pesevies, four noses, three hats eyeglasses and a pipe and some felt for the moustache but the idea was you should use one of your own potatoes so you should put it in a real potato

I think I actually remember having one of those with an actual potato unless you're going to tell me it was in the 1920s I think you might be lying about how old you are James now I haven't written down the date here but I think it was in the early 70s when they decided that

I was alive in the late 70s so do you remember they decided that the pins needed to jab into a potato were too sharp and contravened health and safety so you could no longer stick it into a real potato so they had to come with a plastic potato really? do you know who invented paint by numbers?

I love that though it was Michelangelo not the turtle not the turtle he's a party dude he used to assign sections of his ceilings for his students to paint and the way that he would do it

is he put numbers there so they knew what to paint but the modern one started in 1952 and Macy started selling this and a few months later it became massive because an amateur painter won third prize at a San Francisco art competition by doing just the paint by numbers wow

and the press coverage just said that no one could tell the difference between real painting and this and then it became absolutely huge wow that's so, I can't believe Michelangelo did that that's really funny he ruined his own profession in a way because once you're painting by numbers anyone can do it

and that's why there are no artists around today is because we're all just doing paint by numbers um okay should we move on to our final fact of the show it's time for a final fact of the show and that is Andy my fact is that when zebras are running away from a lion

they fart loudly with every stride and who's to say Andy that you wouldn't do exactly the same thing in that situation sure I would but they're quite gassy animals and the motion propels the gasses out of their bodies when they start running

just push them forward quicker and you can hear them from quite a long way away so this is there's a new book out and it's called does it fart and it's by Nick Caruso and Danny Rabioti and it's an absolutely fantastic book

so they're scientists and they started collecting animals and writing little essays about whether or not those animals fart and it was a spreadsheet that turned into a book, which is my favourite kind of book and they just got information about all kinds of things so there are termites in there

there are dinosaurs, dinosaurs the ruling is not anymore there's a thing about termites the amazing thing about termites termites each produce one half of one millionth a gram of methane per day however, unfortunately there are so many termites

that they produce between, this is a wide range so steady on, but they produce between 5 and 19% of methane emissions globally between what and what 5 and 19 that's a lot guys

kill them, this is why the answer finds a kill them that's your answer to every problem well I've got a very hawkish approach to termites it does sound like an incredible book so a couple of other things is

sloths don't fart so most animals do fart because their digestion is so slow like all the rest of them they would take them so long to work through the farting process that the gases would build up inside them and would become poisonous and so instead they are reabsorbed

by the intestines into their bloodstreams and then those gases are taken up to their lungs and they breathe them out instead so I desperately want to know what a slow breath smells like the early morning used to be called sparrow fart

which was just the time of day you know sparrow fart, it's so early that the sparrows are farting, I suppose but think about that, sparrows don't fart do they not? is that true of all birds? or no birds fart? why do they not fart?

they've got very short intestines and they poo very frequently and the main reason is that they so the reason you fart is that you have a build up of gas which is due to gas forming bacteria in your gut I think we may have mentioned that before so humans and mammals do have those bacteria and birds don't so that's the reason they don't

I was checking if humans might fart if they're being chased by stuff and James has been to the zoo today and I went on to runnersworld.com and apparently this is a problem that lots of runners have that are farting a lot while they're running right?

and they say that the reason is all that people have told me people have told me that's true I felt as I was agreeing with that that it was too enthusiastic so anyway, apparently what it is is heavy breathing you're taking in a lot of gas

and it has to go somewhere and that's what happens and you need to poo as well runners diarrhea is a serious problem on running forums hey does anyone else feel like they're at a help group? sorry

I forgot everyone was here okay, I do have a question and I'm not a physicist but I do have this question if you're running and you break wind let's say you're running at 12 miles an hour and you break wind at 4 miles an hour

out the other way I presume that the wind that you break is still travelling at 8 miles an hour in your wake okay, I've got a lot to tell you about relativity that's correct we'll do it after the show alright, I think that works

one of the good farting animal is the pupfish so I think this is in the book as well but it eats algae but it has such high levels of gas in it that the pupfish's stomach inflates fully inflates and it floats to the top of the water and that's a really really bad place for it to be

because it exposes it to lots of predators so the moment the pupfish has a meal of algae it has to fart to save its own life so it pops straight up to the top and is desperately trying to expel wind constantly to sink back down again it's extremely stressful

it's a race to the bottom for then maybe some stuff on zebras here's an amazing thing about zebras when they're being chased by a lion not only do they do what you said but they only run about half the top speed when they're being chased by a lion so basically what happens is

if you're going at your top speed and you're running it's really easy for the lion or whatever to tell where you're going to be in like two strides time so what they do is they go at half of their speed and then when the lion gets anywhere near them they just go in a different direction and then they go really fast

and then they'll slow down to half their speed again and then wait until the lion gets to them and then speed off really quickly again that's smart that isn't it very clever did you read about this ridiculous story in episode 111 where some farmers brought

in the UK bought a Shetland pony you know a really small pony and then they were surprised when they woke up one morning and they went out into the field and there was their Shetland pony in there but also a tiny tiny zebra and it was because

they hadn't realised they'd bought a pregnant Shetland pony and they bought it from a wildlife sanctuary where it was sharing a field with a zebra what? and then she was getting fatter but it really was a bit of a shock when we got up one morning and we saw that full zebra was there

we realised then what had happened that's... I have a related fact to that which is that I think it's in Georgia there are dogs who are supposed to be guarding sheep and they keep on having sex with the wolves they're meant to be defending the sheep from well I guess

it would put the wolves off what they were supposed to be doing is the seduction method but they keep on... and they keep testing the dogs as well and finding out oh you're half wolf because your parents were a wolf and a dog that is amazing

but in the line of duty James Bond does it all the time he does okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would 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 Andy at AndrewHunterM James at JamesHarkin and Chazinsky

you can email podcast at qi.com or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or go to our Facebook page no such thing as a fish or our website no such thing as a fish.com we have all of our previous episodes up there

all of our future tour dates and a link to our books so please do go there thank you so much guys we'll be back again next week goodbye