No Such Thing As A Fish - 38: No Such Thing As A Super Mario Love Hotel

Episode Date: December 6, 2014

Episode 38 - In the first international live episode at the Brussels Atomium, Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) Anna (#getannaontwitter) and special guest Lieven Scheire (@lievenscheire) discuss love huts, space pizzas, door-based ants, and rehab for drunk birds.

We run it on QI a few years ago, which was there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Okay, hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this time from Brussels, Belgium. My name is Anne Treiber. I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves. It's Andy Murray, Anna Chazinski and James Harkin. And we also have a special guest this evening, the great Leven Skyra. And once again, we've gathered around the microphone

with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Okay, fact number one, starting with you, Leven. Yes, my fact is that apparently ants nests can get infested by ants. On all ants nests infested by ants, just by definition. All the time they go, where do they come from? No, there's a very small species of ants and they're called the thief ants. They're smaller than a millimeter. And they live inside the walls of the nests of bigger ants. They just have small tunnels in the walls of ants nests. And then they sit there and they wait. And when there's food around and there's no soldier ants, they sneak out, they steal the food and then they run back into the wall. And the bigger ants

cannot follow them because the tunnels are too small. Wow, that's ingenious. How big would I? One millimeter? Yeah, a bit less than one millimeter. Yeah. Wow. Are the other ants like, I don't know if I'm going crazy, but I think we have an ant problem. Yeah, they put poison around and tell the children, don't touch it. None of them can move. Yeah. So hard to have a picnic in an ant nest. Yeah. So have they ever caught them? The thief ants. Yeah. No, I just mean, is it like a conspiracy theory in that world? It's like, swear to God, they're here. Look, where was that bit of crumb I brought back? It's gone. Well, I think every now and then one

of these soldier ants will actually catch one and eat it. Apparently, you all may have one of these colonies of ants in your home and you won't know they're there because they're so small. And they can get into sealed packages of food again because they are so small. Wow. I read that the smallest species of ants are so small they could live inside the brain case of the largest species of ants. Wow. Like a colony of them could. There's one kind of ant called the acorn ant and they have an entire nest in one acorn. So there's this small animal, it's called an acorn weevil, very cute little bug and it eats the inside of acorns when they're still on the tree. So it drills a little hole and then it sucks out the inside and then it falls down and so there's a hollow acorn

on the ground with a small hole inside. And that's where these acorn ants go in and they build an entire nest in one acorn. They're actually, they can be found around Belgium and England. So when you walk around and you see an oak and you just pick up acorns, you look for the ones that are in the wet ground and you crack them open. Like one in 100 will have a small nest of acorn ants in there. Wow. That's so cool. There's an ant, isn't there? Is it Brunei ants that when they're threatened, they're the ones, they're the worker ants that put on the front line and they explode their own heads so that they spill a sticky brain goo to slow down whoever it is who's trying to attack them. What, they're like suicide ant bombers? Yeah, yeah, kamikaze ants. Wow. Yeah.

There's a, James and I, we were talking about this on the train on the way to Brussels. It's my favorite kind of ants. Okay, say it. This is great. My favorite kind of ants are called doorhead ants and they're called doorhead ants because their heads are doors. Yeah. What do you, what do you mean? Every door in your house. No, they have this amazing flat head. It's like a flat circle of their head and they use it to plug holes in trees and the other ants live inside the, that tree. What? Wait, why do you need to plug a hole in it? To stop other people from coming in. That's, that's how doors work.

That's amazing. But it's so funny because it's just one of those cases of you're born and that's what you do. Like there's probably a doorhead ant sort of going, oh, I want to be a poet when I'm older dad or I'm afraid son. I'm sorry, your father was a door, your brother was a door. Nothing else, not even a gate. So can I ask more about these tiny ants? Are they, do they have any other homes outside of just infesting other nests or is it just a really charmed life? Well, I think it's, it's an easy life. I think they're also found outside of, of other nests, but they're always looking for food and it's just the easiest thing.

Some of them live next to an ant nest. So not inside the walls, but next to it and have just one small tunnel going to the other nest just to go back and forth every now and then to the shop. Have you heard, there's a, there's a ant that has the quickest slam of jaws of all the animal kingdom. Is that, I think it's the trap door. It's the trap door ant. Yeah. A lot of door and, a lot of door ants basically. Door based ants. Yeah. There's the swing door ant. There's the revolving door ant. That's a good, but they, what's really exciting about them is that they, so they can slam really quickly. I think I wrote it down. It was something like 230 kilometers an hour. That's, it's just really quick. But what's really exciting is if they're being attacked,

they can use it as an escape, an escape mechanism by slamming their mouth into the ground and just launching themselves completely away from their prey. I think what they do is they kind of bite the floor, don't they? And if the floor is hard enough, then it fires them off. Yeah. That's amazing. That's pretty cool. Lobsters can swim backwards, but not forwards. What? Lobsters can walk. Oh, right. I think you meant they're doing backstroke. No, they can walk forwards, but if they're in real trouble, they have their whole, they, they flip their tail under them and that, really, really fast. And that's sort of jets water back forwards and they are pushed back. So that's their escape mechanism, but they can never use it to swim forwards. It's really

tragic. Wow. So they only have one swim stroke. Yeah. That's the only thing they compete in. And it's called escape. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, Ants. Apparently in Panama, you can get ants to clean your house. So if you go out, they're army ants in Panama, so they all act on mass, thousands and thousands of them in one ant army. And if you leave your house at the right time, so you know when it's army ant season, then they come and they eat everything. So every crumb, every worm, every bit of dirt on your floor, they eat it. So there are people in Panama who say, we just go out for the day, come back at the end of the day, they've gone, everything is clean. They should have made the canal like that, shouldn't they? Just put a line of ants down just to bite it, bite it. That would

have been quite cool. We've got to start using them. I think that's high risk. Really? Yeah, personally. You've got to make sure all your food's in very, very safe places. Yeah, you're in trouble if you forget the dog, of course. Yeah, you've got a skeleton. There's a lemon ant that tastes of lemon that I didn't know about. If you lick it, it tastes like lemon. How can you lick an ant, a single ant? All right, you lick a bunch of them, you put them on a lolly. And they're really cool. So they rely on these shrubs to survive as their homes, and they're really good defenders of these shrubs. So if any other plants try to grow around them, then they kill them. So it's a really ideal kind of guard to have, which I quite like.

Loyal. Very loyal. Yeah. Are they any use for us? Not unless you're a shrub. I haven't suspected life gives you lemon ants. I'm still stuck on this door edge because I just love the idea that that's where he is all the time. And the only interaction he has is with the ants coming in and out. Hey Mike, how's it going? Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, are you having a good day, mate? Yeah, catch you later. Wait, so it's not, is he a species of ant? Yeah, yeah. Are all the ants in the colony door ants, but only some of them are used as actual doors? That's right. They're called cephalotes ants. And yeah, only some of them are used by doors as door, sorry. But some of them actually use their heads because they're kind of flattened around the top here. They can use

them to float down. If they want to jump out of a tree, it means that they won't. I mean, ants wouldn't die if they fell anyway, would they? But it helps them to glide in whichever way they want. That's quite cool, isn't it? They're also parachute ants. That's amazing. That's just bad marketing when you're both a door and a parachute. Don't call yourself a door. Call yourself a parachute. Yeah, much cooler. You're right. Branding. They need work on branding. Apparently, seagulls in the UK have started behaving quite badly this year. And it's because they've been eating red ants, and the formic acid in red ants makes them drunk. And so seagulls have been crashing into buildings, and they've been a bit more vicious stealing people's sandwiches,

and they've been flying out in front of cars, and it's because they're all pissed. Sounds British to me. I was actually on Drunk Animals, which I know we mentioned, and we love. There was a story this week about Bohemian waxwing birds in Yukon in Canada, and they've been getting really drunk on fermented berries this year. So the National Park in Canada, Yukon Wildlife Sanctuary, has set up rehab centres for them. So if you see, they advertise over it, if you see one of these drunk birds, you've got to take it to the rehab centre and say it's a drunk bird, and they put it in this little cage, and they let it sober up until it's responsible enough to be able to fly on its own again. That's amazing. You said they were eating berries. Yeah. Okay, so there is a species of

nematode worm that when it infects a certain type of ant, it makes that arse go bright red, so it looks exactly like a berry. And so the birds come down and eat it and then get infected themselves, and then the nematode goes out of the feces, and then it does the whole system. That's amazing, that is really amazing. That's like the zombie ants, isn't it? Which I think we've covered on, I love zombie ants. So zombie ants are the ones where there's, what do you call it, not a mushroom, a fungus that spreads itself over the forest floor, doesn't it? And then it gets into the head of these ants and possesses them to climb high up the trees, and then they eat their brains from the inside out, so they die high up this tree, and then the fungus grows out of their brains and

spreads itself all over the forest floor again, and the process starts all over again. You have another zombie ant that's caused by the forest fly, so the forest fly is a very small fly, and it hoovers over an ant, waits for the right moment, and then it dives down, and in the dive it puts an egg in the neck of the ant, and the egg will hatch, and the small larva will start eating the brain, and this ant will just start walking straight forward, not returning to the nest, just walking, walking, walking, and when it has been walking long enough, the larva will release a chemical that makes the neck solve away, so the head falls off, and then you have just an ant head lying there, and then the larva will live there and eat, and then form a cocoon,

and then it flies out as a new forest fly, and it returns to the nest and attacks a new ant. Oh my god. Wow. Do they know about this? Are they aware? I just wonder if you're like a quite balanced normal ant, you must be like going, what the hell is going on here? This guy's just walked forward, he's come back, he's attacked us, this other guy thinks there's tiny little ants stealing our food. Make tastes of lemons. Frank's ass looks like a berry. We're out of control here. I just want to be a doll. Okay, we need to move on to fact number two, and that is Cheszinski. Yeah, my fact this week is that in Cambodia, a teenage girl's parents might build her a love hut where her parents encourage her to sleep with as many boys as she wants until she finds the one that she

likes. This is in the Krung, it's K-R-E-U-N-G Krung Krung tribe in Cambodia, which is in rural northern Cambodia, and basically when a girl turns about 13, it's between the ages of 13 and 15, her parents say, okay, we understand that you want to be getting to know boys now, and it's often embarrassing for the boys to come and visit your house when your parents are there, so their parents are traditional for the parents to build her this love hut, which is removed from the house away enough away, and she sleeps there, and boys come and visit her, and different boys come every night, and they, so a lot of the girls say sometimes they just stay up and talk, but I guess you would say that when your parents ask. Sometimes, and they just do that until they find one who is their

soulmate, and apparently they say it takes on average 10 boys for them to find their soulmate, so that's the average. This is, I can see a bad Hollywood rom-com forming in your mind, Anna. Yeah, called love hut, so it's got a good name as well. And you just know that Hugh Grant is going to be the 10th boy, you know. Oh, there he is, movie's going to be finished now as you can. But also the fact that they, that the parents build it themselves, and you know, when it's finished, you have, you get a tour, you know, and your father is going like, yes, you know, I built this, and it's stable, and don't sit on that bit, it creaks a bit. Yeah, it's the exact opposite of what every other dad that I know would do. Like, my dad would build

that love hut for my sister, and then stand outside, and try to kick the ass of every person, yeah, with a shotgun. In the meantime, she's inviting boys in the house, you know, like, look at my dad, he's still out there, no problem. I reckon he would build it with like the biggest, heaviest door ever, wouldn't he? Just anything to stop them. Oh my God, in the ant world, the door would be one ant that would never get asleep. Hey Mike, have fun in there, hope she picks you. I'll keep her closed. Oh no. Until the 18th century, most people slept twice per night, and they took a two hour break in between to smoke, have sex, or visit neighbors. Or all three. Just a wake up, and oh, what are three options again?

I always forget. Which order should we do them tonight, dear? We haven't seen the neighbors for a while, haven't we? They used to advise that the best time to make love was after your first sleep, in the era where it was two sleeps a night. The scientists in the 17th century said the time it's going to be most productive and enjoyable after sleep number one. So it's first sleep, second sleep. It's because you're a bit refreshed. Yeah, yeah. It makes sense. It was when it got dark and no one had electricity and no one could afford candles, and so as soon as it got dark at eight in the evening, you just passed out, nothing else to do, and then you wake up at midnight and go, well...

Speaking of the darkness, do you know that people sleep 20 minutes longer on a night when there's a full moon compared to when there's not a full moon? No way. Yeah, way. How come? It's exhausting being a werewolf, though. Just speaking of lovehuts, I found out before Nintendo made video games, they had a bunch of other products, one of which was that Nintendo used to run love hotels. What's a love hotel? A love hotel is effectively a brothel, but done in Nintendo style. There are different levels. Yes. There's platforms. Everyone's dressed. Did someone order a plumber? And they also, like, to give you a kind of a sense of isolation and no contact with the people

working in the actual hotel, they used to send the keys for rooms to you in the reception or in your room through pneumatic pipes, like Mario, like those, you know, the awesome green pipes. It's for couples, isn't it? It's for people who are in it. No, it's also for prostitution and so on. I missed that level in Super Mario, actually. The keys get fed up to me so I can serve as my prostitute. Yeah, I don't remember that. I was in Tokyo last year and there's a district which is, it has a lot of these love hotels in and I walked around it because it's a really, they're all built in weird, fabulous styles like medieval European castles or one of them is, looks like a robot. They're bizarre buildings and I was just, I stress I didn't enter any of them. The reason

that they are popular is because the average Japanese flat is about two rooms. I mean, there are no love huts put it that way and it's very difficult to have time as a couple by yourself and often three generations of a family live in the same flat and it's everyone sort of right next to each other so that it's kind of evolved out of the property market basically is why it happens. So the reason I like the love huts is because it's like a real, it's an example I guess of gender roles being turned around a little bit and so a anthropologist called Fiona McGregor went there and interviewed all generations and they said the women are really independent and they know exactly what they want and there's a lot of equality and relationships between them. So I like examples

of that. So there's the Bari tribe of Venezuela and other South American tribes believe that children can have more than one father. So again promiscuity in women is quite common and they'll say, you know, you'll say who's your child's father and she'll say well she was, it started with this guy and then this guy came along a couple of months later and the sperm sloshed together which is what they think and the child is sort of a combination of a bunch of men. So again, you know promiscuity fine. You just wait till your dads get home. You are in so much trouble. They used to think that the child would be able to get things from whoever they suckled from, didn't they? So they would think that a child, they would get a wet nurse who would be able to

speak Greek in the hope that the child would suckle from that wet nurse and be able to speak Greek in the future. Yeah, how did that go? I can't speak Greek. You could walk up to a very beautiful Greek woman and go, so I'd like to learn Greek. Guys, we need to move on. Does anyone have anything more they want to throw into this one? It was only in 2006 that the official Spanish siesta was cut down from three hours to one hour. Three hours until 2006 was the lunch break. But you'd stay at work until 10 in the evening so it was also tough. Do you know they have world championships in siesta? No. How do you win? They have them in, they look for very loud places like shopping malls and then they put beds there and they just have the athletes come up and they

just have a countdown and then go nap and then the guy who has, who falls asleep fast and has the longest nap, he's the winner. He's the world champion in siesta. Wow. You can fake that. Yeah. I guess so. You can measure if someone's asleep. I think they've probably worked out, it's not just the guy going, okay, we should move on. Andy Murray. My fact is that the longest canyon in the world is 50% longer than the Grand Canyon and we didn't know about it until August last year. How do we miss it? Yeah, how can that be the case? It is buried under 1.9 miles of ice, so to be fair. But this is so cool. It's in Greenland and the Grand Canyon is maybe 280 miles long and this one is 460 miles long and it could be even bigger. But we didn't know about

it because it's under this huge ice sheet which is so heavy that it's turned Greenland into a bowl shaped country. For ages scientists had no idea why, if it's like a bowl with all this ice weighing down, surely there should be ice melting at the bottom and there should be lakes under the ice sheet, but there aren't and they couldn't find any with radar. So when they found this canyon, which goes towards the sea, they think, oh, this must be how the water has been getting out and not causing the lakes to form. Wow. That's amazing. And no human has ever seen it because when it happened, this canyon formed, it was 4 million years ago and we didn't exist. Wow. Can we break the ice and have a look, get tourists there? If the ice goes, then the seas will rise by 7 meters

and we're all completely stuffed. Well, but that's a good question. What would happen if all the ice on Greenland would melt? So ice that is floating in seawater when it melts, it doesn't make the sea level go up. But all the ice that is on land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica will make the sea level go up. But if you would only melt the ice that is on Greenland, then in Belgium and in England, nothing would change. And in Iceland, the sea level would go down by 3 meters because this ice sheet has so much gravity that it pulls the water towards Greenland. And when you melt it, the water level around Greenland will go down and then the rest of the world will go up. Wow. So like people like the Seychelles are screwed or like Tuvalu or

Nauru or Maldives, yeah, they're all screwed, but we're fine. Yeah, there's one problem when the ice on Greenland melts, it probably starts melting too on Antarctica and that's a problem for us too. Yeah, that is a problem. One thing I like about Greenland, because this is in Greenland, right, is that, so Eric the Red was the guy who first founded, made a European settlement on Greenland and the reason he did that was because he'd been expelled from Iceland in around 985 AD for murdering one of his neighbors. And the reason he lived in Iceland in the first place was because his father had been banished from Norway for committing manslaughter. So his family was constantly murdering people. But his son, Leif Ericsson, was actually the first European to

land in North America, wasn't he? Yeah. And he sailed in North America about 500 years before Columbus did, landed on the North American continent and then went back. But the reason, so I think this is really funny, the reason he could find it was because there was another guy in Iceland at the time whose father had moved to Greenland and he wanted to find his father. So he set sail for Greenland, not knowing where he was going. And he came across, so he'd had a description of Greenland, knew what he was looking for, kept on seeing this kind of coastland, which was lots of forests and stuff, and then lots of verdant Greenland. And the other people on his boat kept saying, can we get off here? What is this? And he was like, nope, we're going to Greenland.

And he kept very detailed diaries of what it was. And it was North America, but he wouldn't let them get off and he sailed up the whole coast of North America, eventually arrived in Greenland. And Leif Ericsson was like, you know that place you saw? How did you find that? But yeah, first guy to get to America. The tallest trees on Greenland are two inches high. Two inches? That doesn't really constitute a tree. It's a tree. Yeah, you need to have to be a tree because I think it's more than two inches. They say they have the similar in Iceland, they have very small trees. And there's a joke that they say, is it like, what do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland? And the answer is stand up. That's very good. So they have

birch trees that are about one meter, one meter high. But another fact about Greenland, there are no two towns in Greenland that are connected by road. You cannot drive to another town. You have to go by boat or fly. There's no roads between towns. That is a pain. Yeah, it is. The other thing is about Greenland is if you look on a map, any kind of globe or whatever, you'll always have Newark, which is the capital, will always be on that map. So we'll probably go tharp. So a few other places. Newark is the largest place. It's 19,000 people live there, which would be a village in the UK. But it's still on every globe. It's a tiny, tiny place, but it's still on every globe you would find. I find that quite interesting. And if you look at the 11th most populous city in the world,

is somewhere in China, that's on no globes, because it's right next to Hong Kong. So why would you put it on? And that's got probably, I don't know, 50 million people living there, not on any globes. And then this place has got 10,000, 19,000, and it's on every globe. It's quite cool that. There's a place, the most northerly point of Greenland is called Coffee Club Island. And it was named by a guy in honor of his coffee club back in Denmark. I think it was Danish. He was called Large Cock. What? I know he was. Was he? No, he was called Lauga Coch. But I'm going to call him Large Cock. I'm sure everyone at school did as well. And he found this place. He called it Coffee Club Island. It's right in the northern tip.

It's another most point of land on all of Earth. It became quite famous. And then someone else went to look at it a few days later and found that there was actually another bit of land just over there. And it had been underwater when he'd been there because the tide was so high. Wow. But the other place doesn't really have a name. They call it Starbucks. That will get all the way. Coffee Club Island. Well, you just, those are the days where you could just go and call things after your local reading club bay. The place where, when they first went to Greenland, the only bay that was good for fishing that the two settlements fished in was called Disco Bay, which I quite like. That's great. This sounds

like a fun place. Yeah. Oh, canyons. Was it named after anything? That's why I remember. No, no, well, it's in the language. So I guess. Disco is Latin, but I can't remember what for. It's not related to that. Okay. Yeah. Viking talk of the 10th century, if I don't have your fluent there. Disco is short for disco tech. And that was named after bibliotech, which is French for a library. And it was named because it's a place where you have discs like records. So a disco tech has a bibliotech is books and disco tech is discs. So actually, a discotheque should be a place where everybody has to be quiet looking at vinyl, you know. Yeah. Have you seen the Beatles album? Okay, speaking of Beatles, while we're on that,

and canyons as we were, there's a canyon in America, which I haven't written down the name of it, but there was a guy in America was rocking walking down there. He was called James Richards. And when he was walking down the canyon, he tripped and he fell down quite a long way down the canyon, knocked himself unconscious. And he says that he then woke up in a parallel universe, where the Beatles never broke up. There was a man called Jonas there who told him all about what happened with the Beatles. And when he returned to our world, he brought one of their tapes with him. And he has a website where he has the music of the Beatles, because they never broke up in this parallel world. Wow. Were they good after they didn't break up? Did they sound like

a lunatic in the desert? Actually, one of the Beatles started as the Quarry Men. And one of the members, Pete Shotten, he went on to become John Lennon and Yoko Ono's personal assistant. And years ago, there was an official biography by a guy called Hunter Davies who wrote about the Beatles in their time. And he went in, he revisited all these original characters from the Beatles. Pete Shotten now lives on an island somewhere off England. And when he was asked by Hunter Davies, how are you doing? He said, I'm really good. I'm actually back in contact with John. And they went, what do you mean? And he said, I had an American medium come and she got me back in contact with John and we're writing songs again. He, by the way, in the Quarry Men was the

guy who played the washboard, not even an instrument. That's literally a kitchen item. Nobody does a washboard like Pete if he was from Birmingham. Can I just on the subject of canyons? Because when I think of canyons, I think of Grand Canyon and I immediately think of Evil Can Evil. And Evil Can Evil is extraordinary because as far as I can tell from reading his career, we all know Evil Can Evil, right? The guy who tried to jump the Grand Canyon. He also was just one of the great stunt bike people of all time. Most people came, it turns out, just to watch him fail every time. And every single thing that he did, it was like, which bit do we want him to fall on? So one of his first, so actually, he started doing stunts

for Hunter. So why did people want him to fail? Because he kept surviving. So it was just fun to watch a man go, I'm jumping over two mountain lions and a cargo of rattlesnakes. And when he goes, he falls into the rattlesnakes and they all cheer. And that genuinely happens. Like this man can't die. It's fine. This is the weird fact about Evil Can Evil. He practiced crashing more than he did landing. Well, that explains his problem. He was an interesting character. I mean, he used to carry a cane around and he carried inside the cane wild turkey, the alcohol, and he would drink it from his cane directly and no one would see. And I thought no one would see. What's he doing deflating that cane? I'm not an especially observant person, but if I saw someone walking

with a cane and then drink from it, I think I would sit up. Did he do that while he was riding? He was getting drunk while he was doing it. That's why he kept crashing. You kept trying to get the lid off the cane. There's an American car guy from the Indy 500 or whatever called Dick Trickle. I always remember his name. I don't know why I remember his name. He liked to smoke and it must have been in the 50s or something. And he had a helmet, but he wanted to smoke while he was riding and so he would drill a hole in his helmet so he could get the cigarette through there and so he could smoke while he was driving. And I always wanted to run on QI. Why did Dick Trickle have a hole in his helmet? But they never let me do it. And we never will. In the Grand Canyon,

do you know what the most common cause of death is? Falling. Sort of. Not having enough to drink. So I would have thought that. It's plane crashes. It's weirdly common. And in fact, so the reason the Federal Aviation Administration in America was set up, so like I guess a safety overseer of air flights was because of the Grand Canyon and there were two commercial flights used to like detour to go over the Grand Canyon so people could have a quick look. So there were two flights I think in 1956. They collided. But also I think it's a bit of a risk with the canyon the airflow goes downwards and so they have to clear airspace sometimes around a canyon now. So the biggest diamond mine in the world which is somewhere in Africa has airspace cleared around

it because the downwards flow has pulled a bunch of helicopters into it. I say a bunch too. It's enough to say actually let's not do this anymore. That's a planet eating helicopters. Guys we need to move on by the way. I just mentioned the scariest crater in the world is in Turkmenistan and do you guys know about this? The Darvaza crater which is also called the daughter hell. Yeah it's so terrifying. So it's where the Soviets were doing experiments there in they were drilling for gas in the 1970s and there was a leak and essentially what happens was noxious gases leaked out and it set fire and it's been burning ever since. So for 40 years, 45 years now it's been constantly on fire and it's this huge crater and a guy descended into

it last year George Corunis had to wear a Kevlar suit and sort of abseiled down into it and he said that he didn't know why anyone else hadn't done it before because once you're there there are no restrictions. If you can find the right place you can drive out up get out of your car walk over the edge and jump right in if you want. The choice is yours. I'm so far the only person who's actually done that. I would have thought no one had done it because it's constantly on fire. Can I really quickly tell you about the the first ever expedition through the Grand Canyon was by the American explorer Powell and he was an incredible explorer he had just one arm he lost his other one in the Civil War never mentioned it but they took four boats and ten men went on

this expedition four of them died on the expedition they had to throw food overboard they lost boats they it was a terrible thing on the first day they threw away 200 kilos of bacon because they thought it was slowing them down and by the end they were eating moldy flour because they had no food left um but the boats were called these were the four names of the boats made of the canyon Emma Dean Kitty Clyde's sister and no name just evidently that meeting they just ran out of ideas after the first three come on let's go we've been here for four hours we must be able to think of one more let's just go with no name okay let's let's move on yes okay time for our final fact of the show and that is

James okay my fact this week is that in 2008 the University of Bath invented a 3d printer that could print a copy of itself within three minutes that copy had copied itself to make a third copy and today nobody knows how many of these printers exist in the world that's so amazing but they're gonna take it over aren't they oh yeah they're gonna print us to death what a way to go this is one of the one of the end of the world scenarios it's called the gray goo and it's not about it's not about 3d printers but it's about nano robots so um i think it was already mentioned by Feynman in the in the 60s they were thinking about nano robots that could reproduce themselves because of course nano bots are so small you need like millions of them and as well let's just

build one that builds the others and then they had this idea like okay what if they break out of the laboratory and they just start collecting stuff and so one of the end of the world scenarios is that there would be some research center turning into a gray goo of nano robots and it was just spread all over the world until we're a big ball of nano and if they feed off carbon so they start eating all of us as well um i read a quote by someone saying that mankind's last great invention will be the first self-replicating intelligent machine basically that's the end of us but the idea with the gray goo is actually they would have to get their energy from somewhere so unless they could somehow be solar panel probably will will probably be okay yeah but we have invented

the solar panel james i don't want to worry you we've given them their tools they can get their energy chemically you know like like read digest food one once they figured out well once we figured out how to build them that way then we're doomed let's just not figure it out there there is um there are some researchers i'm not sure where they are um who have come up with this um machine uh and they programmed it to get across a certain uh bit of land which has got bumps or whatever uh they 3d printed it uh they made it walk and then when it got somewhere or broke or whatever then they fed that back into the computer and let it re kind of work itself out to try and make it a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better and that's kind of like

a way of making evolution through computers and that's happening right now right absolutely um just so very quickly on the printer so they've built a printer that can replicate itself sounds like it's really quick and they sold that and then someone else's replicated one yeah so the idea is that they've they've sold a thousand of these printers that can print other 3d printers and they assume that if you've bought one you're probably making some yourself and then you're probably giving them to someone else etc etc so they don't know how many of the extra ones have been made this was in 2008 i was i was visiting uh uh that we have a very big 3d printing company here in here in belgium called materialize and they do amazing stuff and i was visiting them and

one of the great things they do is when when a surgeon has to operate on a broken bone he does the operation completely in virtual reality so they take a scan of the bone and then he puts it in the computer and then he's he's just looking in the computer how to fit them back together what the best points are to drill in the bones and put the titanium plate on it and then they 3d print a template that he can use when he does the operation so he can do the operation super quick just opening it up clicking the plastic parts on the bone pushing them together and the holes where he has to drill are already there so he just goes click click puts it together drill drill drill the screws inside and he's finished and everything was prepared in the computer it's

like an ikea ikea broken bone operation it's like ikea that's five hours later i think i'm missing i think we're missing one part someone had a skull printed didn't they recently um 3d printed a skull but this is a weird thing that's been done with 3d printers in japan they're having their fetuses 3d printed so if you want to meet your baby before it comes out of you you ask for a 3d print out it's only about 800 for your fetus and it's 3d printed in a little see-through books wow yep when will we be able to 3d print a person an actual living person kiana reads oh sorry no they genuinely have 3d printed a kiana reads no but i want a proper one yeah i want to work in kia the word to life-size mannequins of two guys who were looking for

girlfriends and match.com an online dating site did a 3d printouts of those guys that looked exactly like them didn't look anything like them and they put them in a shop window and the idea was that women would walk past and go oh i like the look of him and then and then are they do they remain single or i i don't know but yeah i guess so um anna you were talking about um japan and the fetus thing um there was a japanese lady called magumi igarashi she was arrested quite recently for distributing data that allowed recipients to make 3d prints of her genitals and what she wanted to do was to model a kayak in the shape of her genitals what yeah she's an artist she's an artist okay that's no excuse now her art is all about um her body and making it more kayak like

which is weird actually i just remembered the word kayak means men's boat oh yeah yeah and in there is another word for women's boats so in the olympics the um the kayak should only be a men's event and they should have a different name for the women's event and yeah all the eskimos are watching the olympic women in the kayak these men are very effeminate james's letter writing campaign saying women should not be allowed to take part in the kayak event so what's the resolution of the story oh um she was let go um yeah they they arrested her and then they said actually we can't really arrest you for this it was bad publicity for the government so they let her go right why kayak because it's kind of the right shape yeah well here in belgium

i think you need to see a doctor around me let's move on oh by the way my favorite headline of the week i read it in the 40 in times uh just that you just mentioned arrest made me think of it the headline was police say quadruple amputee is armed and on the run so initially it was about 3d printed guitars yes so yeah so no actually this fact is about 3d printers making themselves but originally my fact was going to be that the band klaxons are doing a tour at the moment and all the guitars are made from 3d printers which i think is pretty cool it's really cool why did they do that just because it's cool well they are cool hey hey hey are they having a printed jam that's okay um no they said earlier this year that they were going

to do it but they didn't think it was possible and then some guys from the university of sheffield i think it was came in and said actually we can do that and they've made these 3d printed guitars and apparently they're really good um there's a firm in america which will make a uh which will 3d print based on lots of photos of you and measurements a model of your head which is for your loved ones to keep your ashes in after you die it's really really creepy it's so strange and it says hang on there's a line from the company on the website you will never again have to worry that you might forget what your loved one looked like when you invest in one of these custom made very lifelike cremation urns because we're all looking at photos of our loved

ones going but what do they look like um do you know nasa has started investing in 3d printers i'm not surprised yeah and but what's really interesting is it's not just for items because i think they already do that where they they print out stuff that they can use on the international space station and so on um they've started doing it for food so they've started printing pizzas um but what's amazing is it actually it looks like it's going to work and they're going to start feeding astronauts with this pizza and it says that you can um uh it takes seven minutes to print a pizza wow it takes less than that to make a pizza though yeah but you're in space and then and then it goes like we're sorry but the tomato cartridge ran out and you

go i got you put in a new cartridge i have to print a template now and then you go all new sort of green bluish pizza throw it away a new one yeah but then someone's working on a digital cookbook now the three things yeah yeah it's going to be a thing it's that's our future well i have i have a bit of news for you when you buy pancakes in the supermarket they are printed what yeah all pancakes in the supermarket are printed what are you talking about of course there's it's just uh it's it's just uh in in the factory there's there's this big line running around entering the ovens and the the ink is coming out of extruders and they just print it on the it would be easier for the companies now to make square pancakes but nobody would buy them the only

reason they are round is because we're used to round pancakes but they're square pancakes definitely yeah yeah but they're printed they can even make them with your name you know big big long pancake with you that that writes your name wow pancakes are printed yeah so i think they need to stop using the word printed that's the problem isn't it because we don't trust printers we need to come up with a better word because they're printing organs now or they think they're uh they're very close to printing organs so they've uh print they're having trouble with capillaries i think at the moment um but we can print tissue and yeah functioning but functioning blood vessels but we know that printers screw up all the time so i'm not trusting it what if you get the wrong printer as well and

you print out your thesis on the pancake maker yeah and then the dog literally eats your homework for uh that's gonna be a new thing um we we need to wrap up guys do you yeah if you want to throw in um i we were talking about uh having medical operations and guitars this was there this is where i went does anyone watch true detective has anyone seen true detective one of the guys in that or he's also in csi recently played the guitar during brain surgery and so he's one of those and he did this reddit AMA about it should we just quickly describe that so uh when you're having brain surgery done they need to know that everything's working properly and so the way that some people do it if you play guitar is they'll be cutting your brain open the back and you'll be

playing the guitar the whole time and if they make any mistakes then you'll do something wrong with the guitar playing so they'll know that there's a mistake yeah yeah and he was not so he did an AMA on reddit like an ask me anything thing on reddit and first of all i found it really weird because maybe the first 50 questions were what was it like to work with Matthew McConaughey how did you find true detective did you find you could identify with a character and i had to do a command f for surgery finally um but yeah he described it as the worst thing ever apparently so if you ever thought brain surgery was going to be fun and he was asked to describe it further and he said sorry it's like nothing else i know to compare it to it's kind of like i'm in this club

of brain surgery people and we're the only ones that understand it i think that's quite a cool club wow there's a um i think it's it was a dutch brain surgeon who who told that he had a similar operation like somebody's staying conscious just to see if they didn't do anything wrong and they were working in the brain and suddenly he said hey touch that bit again and they said what yeah he said the song november rain of gaunton roses is right there what yeah and so he said touch it again and he touched it yes i'm hearing it now no yeah and this guy told the story and then afterwards his colleague said like why didn't you cut it out it's a horrible song yeah okay uh that's it that's all of our facts thanks so much you guys for coming here today uh if you want to get through

to any of us uh to talk about the facts if you're listening at home uh you can get us on our twitter which is at qi podcast or you can get us all individually i'm on at schreiberland liven liven scheru uh james at egg shapes andy at andrew hunter m and anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep and we're gonna be back again next week with another episode we just want to say thanks to the atomium in brussels belgium this has been amazing uh also the free university of brussels uh who've helped us set up this whole thing and to nerdland the new liven skyra tv show which is gonna be premiering in belgium on in february uh and yeah we're gonna be back again next week with another episode and no such thing as a fish thanks so much see you later goodbye