No Such Thing As A Fish - 280: No Such Thing As A Permanently Latvian Bear

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

Live from Oslo, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss medically-induced drunkenness, how to avoid being eaten by wolves on holiday, and what happens if you go clubbing with millipedes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week I'm coming to you live from Oslo my name is Dan Shriver I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Andy my fact is that there was once an Olympic sport where you had to dive into a pool and then glide along for a minute it was scrapped because the main factor was how heavy you were

don't you think though like the main factor in the running race is how fast you are so why is it not fair to have a how heavy you are completely it's completely that's that's fair you can train to be heavy in the same way you can run fast really I guess so you could see the winner coming along before the game even starts right he's got gold well this was this was the thing called the plunge for distance was the official name of it so basically you dived in you weren't allowed to move you weren't allowed to swim at all you had to keep your head under the surface of the water and then you were timed and they saw

how far you would get in either 60 seconds or until you put your head up above the water and another thing is it's not a great spectator spot is it it got called competitive floating it's the least spectatory sport imaginable it happened once in st. Louis in 1904 yeah and there were lots of reviews at the time which were pretty negative people said the competitors merely throw themselves heavily in the water and float along like icebergs in the shipping lanes and this this was in st. Louis in 1904 yeah that's right okay so there was lots of great things that happened in that Olympics in the water polo the

Americans said that instead of having a fully inflated ball you could have it slightly unflated if that's a word but actually to score a goal you had to hold the ball underwater in the net rather than throwing it and the Germans thought that this was complete nonsense they called it soft water polo and refused to compete two of the winning American water polo team were dead six months later and they think it might have been because the matches took place in the lagoon that was used as a sump for the animal and vegetable waste from all the other exhibits and the Germans they brought their own diving board for the

diving competition it was made out of a special coconut matting and they insisted that all the scoring be on the acrobatics you did in the air and it didn't matter how you entered the water yeah that was a massive controversy wasn't it in the diving and this was what was called the fancy diving which is what used to be the name for the high dive basically and yeah I think the person who won was an American and the guy who'd made the trophy to present to the winner was German and he refused to hand over the trophy because he was so outraged because this is bullshit he just landed well the stuff in the air was useless

it was a very interesting Olympics it was only 12 countries competed in the 1904 Olympics and it largely was because no one wanted to go to St. Louis they just thought it's too far away it's inaccessible so but the Americans said okay well we'll just put more people in so 81% of the people who competed in the 1904 Olympics were Americans so there were 630 athletes in total 523 were Americans they won 239 medals still a record to this day of most medals won by a single nation in the Olympics I think the runner-up was Germany who got 13 right but this was this is a thing this is a controversy in fact even in

Norway so the USA the that's where we are if the listeners haven't realized so the USA fielded athletes who were immigrants from Europe who hadn't actually become US citizens yet so they really weren't they shouldn't have been competing for the USA and the Norwegians were still annoyed about this in 2012 there was still officially requesting that the results were changed 108 years after these Olympics we've got a right historical wrongs where we can you know James you were saying that I think you said the Germans brought their own dive board yes well actually it generally people did bring their own

dive boards to diving competitions so this was until the 1960s basically so the diving board that we know today which is the really springy one and you know when you see them dive and I always think it's gonna snap because it bends so much and that was invented by a guy called Raymond Rood and he sort of tried it out and I know it's good name he tried it out in a neighbor's garden for a few years and it worked and so he brought it to the Olympics in 1960 but before that divers would just bring their own boards and then they'd get there and they'd sometimes do some swaps and they'd try out each other's boards to

see which ones they liked and it was only when he brought his and everyone requested his to the extent that he had to like telegram back or whatever to send some more over because it was so in demand that people were like should we just use this one did they bring the ladders as well or is it just the I don't think you need a special ladder so much so I think to get up yeah no I agree you need a ladder yeah yeah unless you're also very good at the high jump well there might be one event that would be where you do the pole vault onto it and then dive off it do you know how they make those those aluminium boards it's

very cool so they're made of aircraft-grade aluminium which I didn't know and they take a massive cylinder of aluminium and they heat it to a very high temperature and then they squeeze it through a massive press with thousands of tons of pressure on it so it's like pushing it through a toothpaste tube basically just sort of very hot aluminium toothpaste well the first one was made of a plane wing in fact sorry the first one was made of an aeroplane wing I heard penguin I mean their wings are kind of flat aren't they they're almost like diving pods quite bouncy blubbery quality if you get them in the right

season and here are the Antarctica team sorry an aeroplane wing yeah yeah it was somehow less funny than a penguin that's a long diving board though hey I think you sort of cut it up okay you don't want to be tired by the time you've got to the end of the diving board ideally you want somewhere between a penguin wing and an aeroplane wing okay that's the official measurement and there was just another Olympic thing so in 1896 in the first Olympics there was the hurdling and there was a massive difference between the American team who could run and then jump over the hurdles and the

Greek team who would run up to the head or stop jump over and then start running again who won so amazing was that part of their rules because they kind of thought that was the best way to do it well no one had ever really done it before it's a first Olympics wow no wonder the Greek Empire fell in the end wouldn't be your instincts just on diving so in Norway the Norwegians like to dive and specifically one particular kind of diving called I think it's dirt thing is this a thing yeah it's insane so this is I think it the translation is death

diving or deathing basically and it's an annual thing and essentially it's a belly flop from 10 meters high and so you get on this diving board has anyone been to one of the competitions yeah quite a few people it sounds insane so I was watching a lot of videos of this today but basically these mad Norwegian people go up 10 meters high and then you have to throw yourself off and you basically do as many impressive things in the air as you can and then your judge largely on how quickly you scrunch up at the end and kind of avoid literally splitting your body open but it's really funny to watch because the commentary is

just these two guys who were just constantly going oh oh oh insane so there is it there's a dive which is theoretically possible there's a pair of mathematicians in the University of Australia they've come up with the dive because you know you have all these different twists and some thoughts and turns and all this stuff so they've calculated a dive that they insist is must be possible which is you have to do one and a half summer salts and five twists and that's in 1.5 seconds between starting before then think and so they say they've simulated it and they say it's possible and any

diver that has been asked has said no we can't do that and it is done by mathematicians rather by a mechanical scientist it feels like they've just found the perfect sphere with no air resistance and just I don't know but I so desperately want to see a queue of scrawny pasty mathematicians being forced onto a diving board to prove they're working and we're gonna have to move on in a second to our next fact oh just a couple more Olympic things yeah so at the first ever Winter Olympics in 1924 seven people who won medals were dead is that what the event where you had to go under the snow for as long as

possible no the medals went to people who had achieved great things in mountaineering and so the British expedition to Everest in 1922 one despite the fact that a lot of people had died just one more mad Olympic sport that doesn't exist anymore in 1908 in the Olympics this was in London in fact dueling was a demonstration sport there and it was really great so it used a real gun but it was it was wax pellets so theoretically they couldn't they weren't supposed to kill you they did travel at 87 meters a second so they're going quite fast and then they they splat you expand the splat like an

incredibly dangerous painful and yet they wore some protection so they protected like their extremities and they wore big head protection otherwise it would kill them and the winner so they also wore this big black cloak all over themselves and on the cloak in chalk they had drawn out where all the vital organs are and then they did the duel and the winner was the person who hit closest because it made a mark hit closest to the most important vital organ that's so good and I was reading the an old newspaper report of it and there was one pistol man who I'm gonna assume was a Brit who said he and now

apparently he announced his intention to forego the head protection preferring to rely on the gentlemanly honour code that it was bad form to aim for the head just on a similar thing in 1924 in the fencing competition the French judge and the Hungarian judge really fell out and decided to have their own duel that November after the games they met on the Yugoslav Italian border and dueled for over an hour until both men were seriously injured and nearby people had to stop the contest okay it is time for fact number two and that is Chazinsky my fact this week is that at Polar Park in Norway you're told not to wear wool

clothes in case the wolves confuse you with a sheep so this is something that's a danger apparently this is a Polar Park which has anyone been it sounds amazing okay so for those of you who haven't is this 300 acre wildlife park and one of their main attractions is this wolf population that they've got there and I was reading an article by someone who'd been and visited and she said she didn't meet the wolves so you get to meet them they're sort of tame and friendly you're told but at the same time the main wildlife keeper says you got to be quite careful so for instance they show lots of interest in anyone who

is sick limping or weak you're told when you meet them to kneel down not sit so you can make a very quick escape if suddenly they turn on you and you're told to remove all your wool clothing otherwise so I wrote to actually the main wildlife keeper who's a guy called Stig Schlesen to check up on this with him and I said is this true that you can't and he said yes people are told not to wear wool otherwise you might have naked people running around after meeting the wolves it's that sheepy smell they can't resist it there are a lot of things that they say you can't do if you're going there so you can't wear

fur you can't wear gloves hats earrings you can't be pregnant you can't be under 18 and if they knock you over you just have to lay there you can't move why because they might eat you I assume I assume if they've knocked you over they've got you right where they want you yeah so you just have to a wolf is a kind of animal that chases after its prey so if it knocks you over and you panic and you run away then it might chase after you yeah but how far into the process of it eating you if it does start to do that yeah could you deploy plan B whatever that is well it sucks when plan B is try to outrun a very fast animal with

neither of your legs left there was just one more weird thing that the wildlife keeper said to me in his email he said another thing that we ask people not to do when they meet the wolves is related to the fact that wolves have very strong senses and they have a very strong sense of smell so we don't encourage people to have sex before meeting our wolves what wait do you mean you don't mean ever though bring another virgin for the wolves he didn't specify okay so obviously wolves are a little controversial here

because some parts of Norway have a wolf taxi which is for children going to school in areas where there are wolves right okay but the rewilding is a big thing and the way that you can rewild the wolf is really cool so step one is to watch the wolves in shifts to know when they're going to mate this is your we need to what you need to have where are they what sorry are they in a zoo or something when you need zoo wolves to mate so you then calculate because I think they're pregnant for about 63 days there are there about yeah yeah and then you search for a wild pack which has recently had puppies and you track them

down you with it hopefully they've got collars on so you know where they are and then you need to carry the new puppies to the pack that you found in backpacks adorable and and you need to get you need to get to the wolf's den and you need to go in and then you need to take your new zoo puppies and roll them around in the urine and the feces of the existing wild puppies right and you also and you sort of mix them up so they smell completely alike and then you retreat yeah really leave the puppies behind and then you'd hope that they blend in yeah it's not weird imagine if you though were visiting the park and

you quickly needed a piece he went into a cave had a quick wazz and then they shoved their faces into that you're now mummy I don't think my urine helps anything so the rewilding of wolves and birds especially around Europe is quite big at the moment you have quite a lot in France you have quite a lot in Germany and Switzerland that weren't there even 20 years ago I was speaking to my friend from Latvia and I was asking him if they have them in Latvia and he said I said do you have any wolves there and he said oh yeah we've got loads of wolves now so do you have any bears and he said we have

one bear although sometimes he goes over to Lithuania so they have 0.5 bears bears are now extinct in Latvia oh no sorry great news there was so they do seem to be controversial here there's Norway is split apparently are we agreed on this over whether wolves are bad guys or good guys yeah okay so half of you are gonna leave after I've said this but in 2009 one man personally offered a reward of 50,000 Norwegian kroner for information leading to a person who'd illegally killed a wolf so someone's killed a wolf he says here's this reward and in response to that he was completely so he was vandalized there

was rubbish dumped in his driveway like huge piles of garbage all of his out buildings and his fences were vandalized and one night he was out of town and his wife woke up to a loud buzzing noise to find a group of people encircling the house marching around it waving chainsaws well that's because he didn't make his house out of straw or twigs right there were licenses given out in Norway to shoot 16 wild wolves the government decided on a cull and more than 11,000 hunters applied for them but we were very into shooting wolves for a long time weren't we back when we had them before we did the podcast it was out

on a shoot that we thought you know we should we should do a podcast do you know I'm just speaking sorry can you just what were you talking about there yeah so we were big into we were big into hunting wolves so they are always the archetypal bad guy the wolf rather than the bear which is much more likely to kill you and England had a serious wolf problem it would kill lots of people sheep and eventually everyone got so pissed off about it that in the 13th century in 1281 King Edward the first commissioned a guy called Peter the mighty hunter Corbett Andrew Hunter Murray would be so much better if you

had the mighty as well that's a good point I will consider it you've got to earn a middle name like that I think and he definitely did so he was told to exterminate all the wolves in England and he did it so apparently by 1290 what all the wolves were exterminated he'd earned his nickname England was rid of all the wolves that was what was reported there were no more deaths of you know livestock by wolves anymore and he was known from then on as the unimplied there are there are some monkeys which have started domesticating wolves we think so this is really exciting this is like dogs 2.0 basically there are

bits of Ethiopia where there are Ethiopian wolves which is a particular species and Galada monkeys and they're getting on really well and the wolves don't eat the baby monkeys when they're hanging around together and the Galadas don't object to the wolves so this is very similar to the way that humans domesticated wolves in the first place and they will just sit next to each other for a couple of hours at a time just ignoring each other so they seem to be deliberately hanging out together okay but hey so when when we're traveling from one city to another and you asked just sat there ignoring me I'm

I'm domesticating you no but yeah anyway the wolves see the wolves seem to find it easier to catch rodents when they're hanging around with the monkeys and we don't know why okay so it might be there's a food reward in it for them and so that will be the next big thing well big thing in what in evolution they're going to be the new humans and dogs is what you're saying I'm trying to picture this the new humans and dogs yeah it works well wolves do team up with other creatures for hunting so there was a great headline in the Washington Post which was wolves and

hyenas hunt together prove Middle East peace process is possible okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that this year doctors in Vietnam saved a man's life by pumping 15 cans of beer into his body imagine having to do that in no way you'd have to mortgage your house so this is a guy who very sadly was dying from alcohol poisoning he was yeah so not so funny now is it 48 years old and he fell unconscious they took him to the hospital and he had huge levels of methanol in him he had more than a thousand times what would be the recommended limit and so yeah so basically

what they had to do is they had to administer more cans of beer into him because the idea was that they needed to slow down the metabolizing process that his liver was doing yeah and by by slowing it down and by putting in total these 15 cans one an hour they managed to slow it enough that they could fix him so what it is is that the beer contains ethanol and your body always does the ethanol before it does the methanol so you put all this beer in it's dealing with the ethanol and it gives you a bit of time to get the methanol out but they did still need to suck the methanol out didn't they otherwise you just got rid

of all the ethanol you've pumped in and then the methanol comes back but how do you suck methanol out of someone does it does it gather somewhere in your body yeah it's through dialysis okay yeah so the kidney yes yeah cool it's sometimes it's just questions and answers but he survived so it's a good good ending sorry yeah great but don't try it on any old illness not sure we're recommending it are we no no oh well some people recommended it so okay yes we are but lots of medicines which used to be just pure alcohol basically so in the 19th century Lydia E. Pinkham's vegetable compound for female complaints it said

it was herbal and it was entirely alcohol basically and it was it was aimed at women the slogan was only a woman can understand another woman's ills right and women were encouraged to write to Lydia Pinkham who was the woman on the bottle you know for personal advice and Lydia Pinkham had a very large number of typists who just replied for her recommending that these women take higher doses of Mrs. Pinkham's vegetable compound they kept this going for 20 years after Lydia Pinkham died yeah eventually they thought she's been replying to these letters for a very long time yeah it is effective though

alcohol in a lot of ways I it's probably the most medicinally and not for easing social situations just in medicine but I think it's probably the most effective medicine that existed in humanity for many thousand years in terms of its sterilizing qualities right so amazing sterilizing if you got a wound purifying water so the death rates in the 19th century if people hadn't been able to drink beer instead of water tap water most places would have been much higher it's a relaxant and so and there have been all these studies as well and I might get into trouble for saying this but it's genuinely if you

look rigorously at the research so there's a guy who looked at hundreds of studies into the effects of moderate drinking and once you've controlled for all factors so once you've controlled for like social factors economic factors age weight stuff like that even once you've eradicated those your increased mortality if you are a heavy drinker or an abstainer is higher than if you're a moderate drinker so if you're an abstainer you have a 51% higher mortality rate or risk than if you're a moderate drinker and moderate is two glasses of wine a day

so and how many of you had so far tonight Anna? I've got very big glasses I think it's weird the recommended daily allowance is half of that just on the medical thing about how it was really important over history one really weird thing is that the ancient Nubians used to make beer and as part of their beer they made this thing called tetracycline it was just kind of an off product of it and this actually is one of our greatest antibiotics which was only invented in the modern day in the 1940s and so what loads of archaeologists have found is these bodies with this amazing modern antibiotic in it and

they're like where the hell is this come from they said it was the equivalent of seeing an Egyptian mummy wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses but it came from their beer yeah that's very cool yeah you used to get prescriptions for alcohol sometimes during the days of prohibition so if you were willing to pay six dollars for a prescription you would get a pint of alcohol in America when it was banned and one of the people who did this was Winston Churchill right so he was in America in 1931 he looked the wrong way when he was crossing the road and he was hit by a car and he had some complications and he had months of

medical problems he was really in pain and so he got a doctor to write him a prescription and the doctor wrote the post-accident convalescence of Winston Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times but not beer you couldn't prescribe beer there was this bizarre controversy so people were really anti beer for medicinal reasons and there was a guy called he was the attorney general in America called Mitchell Palmer and he was under a lot of pressure from brewers so he said fine give sick people beer if it

helps them which it often would to relax you and he said you could prescribe it at any time and he said commercial drug stores should be able to sell it from kind of soda fountains so there was almost a time where pharmacies across America had a beer fountain during prohibition and then all those bloody abolitionists got involved and said that he couldn't do it and he was kicked out and then prescribing their tool was banned wow but they do it today still in American hospitals it from an article that I read where someone was visiting a friend and the food came in which was just the classic lunch they get but on

the on the tray was a can of Budweiser and it's because certain patients if they're going let's say through withdrawal that's not helpful in their situation to be suddenly cut off from alcohol so this same patient was given it for breakfast as well so it'd be sort of you know eggs and Budweiser for breakfast and that goes on still it's it's not necessarily seen as a bad thing Mariah Carey had it not not a person who gets a lot of airtime in this podcast but she was actually investigated by the police by the LA Department of Children and Family Services because TMZ reported that she had been drinking beer

while she was breastfeeding she had newborn twins and she said the nurse told me to do it and the nurse had told her that Guinness can help breastfeeders so it loosens up your milk and stuff and actually I was talking to our boss about this the other day and she was always told that and she always did it used to be told in the past it was always said that you should drink Guinness yeah I think yeah or breastfeeding or not breastfeeding really that might have been when we're in Ireland a few weeks ago we're gonna have to move on soon one alcohol you might not want to drink when breastfeeding or otherwise is an

Icelandic alcohol made from a whale's testicle the guy who made it said we smoke the testicle by the old Icelandic way with dried sheep shit and this method gives the beer a really unique smoke flavor fancy some of that unique okay what about this there's a beer made from elephant dung and they use coffee beans that have passed through an elephant's digestive system to make the beer and instead of talking about an aftertaste they talk about an afterglow and there is a new whiskey that has been made flavored with the anal secretions of beavers and on the website it says the sac excretion exhibits

bright and fruit qualities and rich leathery notes along with a creamy vanilla aroma you don't want creamy any when anal secretions if you're having to consume them I don't think I've got one more prescription that was dished out just because this was about you know prescribing beer effectively Cambridge University have just published a load of their patient records from the 1590s to the 1630s and it's got thousands and thousands they've got 80,000 case notes but they're incredibly hard to read because obviously the writing is extremely you know it's just very different to our writing today but they

finally put up a batch online and the prescriptions include things like the broth of the testicles of a ball pig beaten to a powder and quite a lot of pigeons so what one thing that occurs frequently is pigeon slippers a doctor would frequently prescribe you put a pigeon on each foot and you just a dead pigeon and you just cut it open pop it on your feet walk around what is that supposed to help I can't remember what it was actually helping it doesn't help the pigeon very much but and some like they vary the prescription there's one prescription which says a pigeon on each foot one says a pigeon on the neck and to

each foot another one just says half a pigeon to each foot it's not like when you split a paracetamol in half it's like the headaches not that bad I'll just do the half pigeon today yeah they did used to I don't even know why I'm saying this but I think this is what it might be is they used to use I think the anus of a pigeon to suck stuff out of buboes for the plague because it has quite good suction yes I thought it was snake bites as well as I think okay plenty recommended take a pigeon shove it anus on your bite and it'll it will suck it out turns out it doesn't and then you just die looking like an idiot who held

the pigeon but it wasn't it was for everything the pigeon thing it wasn't just for playing it was everything Samuel peeps did it one point always wife did I think but it what I know is it was a last resort so if someone brought in the pigeon you knew that that you were on your way out I was reading a source which is like a daughter was at her father's bedside and he was really sick and he saw the nurse bring in the pigeon and he went I see the thing that has never worked thank you okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James okay my fact this week is that if you put a bunch of millipedes in a

nightclub all their genitals will glow in different colors by the way if you've not been to a nightclub with James it is fucking awesome if you go to a nightclub with a millipede it's like put your left foot in and your left foot in and your left foot in and your left foot in. What nightclub are you going to? The Under 8? That was the last time I was in a nightclub. What if you're happy if you know it or not? Let's get some row row your boat up there DJ. Will you give this back some respect please? Why does this happen? Okay so these are flat-backed millipedes in the genus Pseudo polydesmus specifically and they all look almost identical regardless of their species because they're just like two centimetre long little brown things but scientists have found out that if

you shine ultraviolet light on their genitals then it's like a disco. It's all these greens and blues and some of them are shinier than others and stuff like that and this is like a really good way of telling the different species because before we would you would have to probably kill one and get the DNA to see whatever it was a different species. Wow so if you're ever in a nightclub and you think what is that sort of middle-aged nerd in the corner doing with what looks like a bag of insects. I'm gonna stick with a mirror ball I think to decorate my discos rather than a rotating ceiling full of millipede dicks. Do we know why

this happens is it so you can tell species. Is it so they can tell each other apart? We actually don't know why which is it's yeah all we know is that it's still a mystery. But millipedes are basically blind yeah so they wouldn't be able to see they won't get to enjoy it. They won't get to enjoy it probably ever. They don't know how great they look. Really sad. Yeah very sad. Is it is males and females? I think it is just males. Okay. There has been this and now I think it's both and now I think it's just females that will edit so nicely. There has been this incredible explosion over the last 20 years of people discovering that basically all animals glow fluorescent.

It's so bizarre and it's weird that they never discovered it before. So for instance just this year or I think maybe last year a scientist accidentally discovered that flying squirrels in North American flying squirrels glow pink under UV light and that was just he was out in the forest it was a guy called John Martin a forestry professor and he was shining a UV light up to look for light and fungi and some frogs that glow under UV light and you notice that all the flying squirrels were glowing pink and again we don't know why. I think maybe it's to blend in with stuff like light shins so that predators can't see them.

Maybe it shows you're healthy for a mate but how have we not shot UV lights at stuff before? Well the thing is humans we can't see UV light so this has just been a complete mystery for us for so long. There is a way to be able to see UV light if you have your cataracts removed some people if you have cataract surgery some people can see ultraviolet light and Monet had this for instance. Right. So it is possible that Monet would have been able to see these genitals of the millipedes. I should add it is very fun to go to a nightclub with James but you do have to go and get your cataracts removed before you go. It's a

bit less fun that bit. So they think that after he had the lens out of his eye he painted slightly different paintings. Yeah his paintings were a little bit more towards the purple side of the spectrum for that reason. Very cool. Some scientists have started making animals fluorescent as well which is very exciting so at Imperial College in London they've started deliberately making mosquitoes with fluorescent testicles and it's just males again and there's a really good reason for this which is that so they were genetically modified so there's a glowing protein which only expresses itself in their testicles and the reason

this is useful is you can identify males and females very early so you can release sterile males into the world at large without accidentally releasing any female mosquitoes because female mosquitoes are the ones who spread malaria. That's why it's important. But when you said there's a really good reason for this it did just sound like your professor had walked into the lab. Why the hell are those mosquitoes balls glowing? There's a very good reason for this. Just on things glowing. There's a deep sea worm called Tomopteris and it's transparent which is very useful because it means it's much harder to see it if you're a predator

and it can also make part of its body glow on command and then release that part as a decoy. But then it's lost part of its body. They could only do it so many times. That's very true. Once you're getting down to like making your head glow you're in real real trouble. There's a chameleon which will if you put it under UV light will glow in the dark and like a little blue glow and it's actually the bones that are glowing and you can see them under the skin. This is amazing. Again we don't know why it happens but it's basically you know like if you go to a Halloween party as a skeleton and all you can see is

the glowing bones. These chameleons are like that. Maybe if a predator comes they go oh someone's already eaten that one. We're gonna have to wrap up very shortly. Do you know how animals that eat bananas tell if a banana's ripe? Best before dates. The colour I would say. Yeah so it's if it's blue. If a banana looked blue to most animals that eat it like insects and stuff then it is ripe. So if you shine a UV light on a banana then it glows blue if it's ripened and that's if the chlorophyll is degraded so when it's green and unripe that's all that chlorophyll as the chlorophyll degrades then it glows blue in UV. So

should you shine a UV light at the supermarket on bananas if you want to really know whether they're ripe or not. I think so but do you have to get them to turn the lights off as well if you do that. Right everybody right I'm picking my bananas. Turn all the lights off please. You've got to have a good relationship with the store manager. Is it true that here in Norway you have UV passports? Oh yeah. That's very cool. I think they might be the only passports you put UV light and it has a northern lights effect over it. Yeah did any of you not know that you can go home and see it. Yeah it is cool they're not the only ones

actually. Canada has it too a few more but I think maybe the first. Yeah let's go with that. Let's go with that. So there was a scientist called Sean Davis and he wanted to put bacteria into a rat and see how it passed through the body but he didn't really know how to do that because it's quite difficult to kind of get the stool samples and work out how many bacteria there are so he genetically engineered the bacteria to glow in the dark which meant that these rats whenever they had a poo it glowed in the dark. Who doesn't want that? It's not useful unless you keep your poo somewhere. And he's, oh where did I leave that poo? Anna's very

unhelpful if you're trying to hide a poo on a dark night. And this feeds directly into Anna's experience. And he's there, turn off the lights because I need to choose my bananas. Wait what are you doing in the corner? 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 Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Chasinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep or you can go to our group account which is

at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there. We have all of our upcoming tour dates and we also have bits of merchandise that we've released. That's it. Thank you so much Oslo. That's been amazing. Thank you very much. We'll see you again. Goodbye!