No Such Thing As A Fish - 447: No Such Thing As A Rabbit-Cabbage Hybrid

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Live from Inverness, Dan, James, Anna, and Andrew discuss clones, cardboard, car keys and deadly parrot fever. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everybody, just before we start the show, we wanted to really highly recommend to you a new book that's just about to come out on the market. It's called The Theory of Everything Else and it is by an author you may have heard of. Lee Child. He's so close. Richard Osman. You're a bit further away now actually, go back to the Lee Child direction.

It's Dan Schreiber's book, ladies and gentlemen. Yay! Dan has written a book, it's called The Theory of Everything Else and if you listen to fish, you already know what it's about. It's about all the craziest, strangest theories that people have believed about all sorts of things around the world. You want the Titanic, it's in there. You want aliens, they're in there.

You want Nicholas Wichelt, the BBC's royal correspondent, living on the banks of Loch Ness, trying to find Nessie for several months earlier in his career. That's in there. And who doesn't want that? It's what we've always wanted. Dan's been cooking up this book for as long as I've known him. Genuinely, it's been absolutely worth the wait. Every single page is a story that you absolutely won't believe.

So it's about these weird ideas, people with these bizarre beliefs, but who somehow end up changing the world. It's about how these beliefs end up to have been logical. It's basically about how we should never dismiss what seems like lunacy because sometimes it can turn out to be genius and it is the most incredible read. Yeah, and that is the motto actually for recording episodes of the podcast with Dan. So you already know what you're going to get. If you want to check it out, just find The Theory of Everything Else.

There is also a website attached which will have all the additional notes and videos and updates. That's theoryofeverythingelse.co.uk. Guys, this is Dan's first book. We'd love it to be a monster hit. So get yourself a copy right now. Yes, please do. I kind of want to just read your transcript of the whole thing because all the characters,

all the stories in it are incredible. So please go there, help out Dan and read the most interesting book of your year. The Theory of Everything Else, you can pre-order it now or it's out next week, October the 13th. Get to a bookshop and buy it. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

A weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Inverness. Yes! My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, 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. And with fact number one, and that is James.

OK, my fact this week is that you can catch chlamydia from dead parrots. Darling! What do you have to do with dead parrots? Oh, that's a great question. To catch chlamydia from them. Well, it's a bacterium, chlamydia. This is actually called Cytocosis and it's kind of known as parrot fever, but it's a type of chlamydia and the bacterium can come from the parrot to you through mouth to beak

contact. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Sexy stuff. Or the airborne inhalation of feather dust, feces or respiratory secretions. Less sexy stuff. Yes.

So it can come from mouth to beak. There was actually, I was looking in some old newspaper archives about this and I found a 1992 cutting from the Press and Journal that reported on a teacher from Inverness who caught chlamydia from a dead parrot that he apparently found in his garden. And... Don't know apparently. OK. Why are you suggesting?

He might have been giving it life because of life. Mouth to beak. Mouth to beak. Yeah, yeah. Well, the article said that he said that he didn't touch it with his hands. I don't know why you need to specify that. And also that he didn't want to be named. OK.

Is he in? Are you in? Everyone knows him in this room, I think. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So do we know if he recovered? Yeah, he did.

Oh, great. Although, to be honest, it can be quite serious. Yeah. Certainly when it first came about, Cytocosis, it became like a bit of a pandemic or an epidemic really in America and as few other places. But it was in various parts of the world. This was in the 1920s. It had a really high death rate.

If you were over 35 and you caught it, like, it was something like 25% of people died. Yeah, it was crazy. And it was a proper panic, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, like the freak town. Yeah, and the papers, to begin with, they said that it was found initially, sort of like the first case that was mentioned was in Argentina, and it was on a sailor who wasn't really a sailor. He was an actor, and it was his stage parrot that gave it to him.

So they traced it to that, but then it was all these cases in America where people were trying to work out why these people were suddenly dying. But that's a good contact to have, isn't it? As in if you're a stage... Yeah. Did you say he was a sailor? He was a sailor with a stage parrot on his shoulders. But he was a stage sailor.

You said he was a sailor, but then you said he wasn't an actual sailor, right? He was just a sailor on stage. I know. I delivered it in my head like it was like a cool Dan Brown plot twist, but then I realized... In actual fact, it wasn't on his shoulder. In this play, it was in a cage, but all of the people in the play had to go and stroke the parrot. So it wasn't on his shoulder. They kept going over and stroking it.

Eight of the cast got sick, and two of them died after this play. Bloody hell. And this was in 1930. And as a result, 90% of Argentina's parrots were killed. Rough. What? Really rough. And this was...

The rumor always was that the Argentinians brought it over. It was the classic, you know, like the Chinese disease. It was... As Donald Trump was referred to the Chinese disease, that wasn't me doing that. Yeah. He said that quite a long time ago now. So that just came across as you... You've got to be careful with these references, don't you?

Make sure they're up to date. So on the East Coast, there were all these rumors that had come from Argentina. And in fact, the outbreak began, they think, in December 1929. And it was a man in Maryland who bought a parrot as a present for his wife. And not only that, he stored it with his daughter and son-in-law before he gave it to his wife. You know, can I hide this parrot with you? Anyway, three of them got seriously ill.

Not the guy who bought the parrot, actually, just the other three. And this guy, Dr. Martin, went and visited them. And he said it had the weirdest case today. These three people are sick. And she asked him about it a bit, and he eventually said, yeah, weirdly, the only other person who was sick in the room was their pet parrot, who I think is about to die. And his wife said, do you know what, that's so weird,

because I was just reading the sort of gossip pages of my magazine. And apparently there's this parrot sickness in Argentina. And it was that conversation. She'd happened to read this obscure article, and I asked him when that sounds like nonsense, but whatever, we'll chase it up. And it was that parrot sickness that kicked it all off. What gossip magazine has got...

She says it wasn't no fair with Katie Price. He says it was Chlamydia from a dead parrot. Hello! Hello! Very good. They're always talking in. That was a hugely significant parrot fever outbreak, because the doctor who'd been working on it was a guy called Charles Armstrong. He fell really ill after treating the patients who'd got it,

the guy who bought it, Mr. Martin. He was almost going to die, the doctor, Charles Armstrong. Another doctor injected him with the blood of a patient who had survived parrot fever, not doing any of the tests about, you know, I think the blood type or anything like that was a very primitive procedure, but he lived, Charles Armstrong, the doctor, lived,

and that entire incident led to the founding of America's National Institute of Health. So it's a big result from one parrot fever outbreak. I should also say, actually, just going back to the original fact, which is that you can catch it from dead parrots. This came from a study at the University of Adelaide and the University of the Sunshine Coast, which sounds quite amazing,

by Annalise Chaber and Et al. And they've described of sometimes when people have been dissecting parrots and then got pneumonia a little bit later, and then they checked their bodies and found that they actually caught it from the parrots when they were dead already. So most of these people were talking about they were catching it from quite a sickly parrot,

but these people have been catching it from an actual dead parrot and the guy from Inverness as well. I remember every dead parrot I've ever kissed, I have to say. So I'd know, because it was known as Old Maid's pneumonia, because, you know, parrots were all the rage then. People used to go door-to-door selling parrots to sad women whose husbands had died. Again, this was the stereotype,

that's what Donald Trump would have called them, that's not what I'm calling them. And the rumor was that they'd all been snogging their parrots because they were so sad and lonely and widowed. What?! And so that's why it was called Old Maid's Pneumonia. It said they were all getting chlamydia from them. And it's not, you're just breathing in the air around the parrot, okay?

Well, 63% of the people who got the citicosis at the time of the big outbreak were women. They did own parrots much more often, but we don't know that they were sticking their tongues down their throats. This was devastating for parrots. The panic really hit and everyone took it seriously, so there were stories about how in the US Navy the admirals were ordering anyone who had a parrot on board

just to let them off. Why have you got a parrot on a serious Navy vessel? They're at sea. Who doesn't bring a parrot to sea? It's not a pirate ship. When do you think pirates get their parrots? Pirates have parrots, sailors don't have parrots. That should be how you can tell the difference between a pirate

and a normal, law-abiding sailor. Very good point. Yeah, you check the leg, you check the pieces of eight, and then you check the parrot. Can't Chlamydia kind of damage your eyes as well, can it? You check for... Eye patches. Eye patches.

Eye patches. Exactly. Okay. So what are you saying it was devastating for parrots because they could no longer accompany sailors on their journey? No, it was a sort of mass death of parrots who were just thrown out to sea was more the angle. I want to thank you the poor sailors

and their pirate credentials. Those poor parrots, which can fly, they'll be fine. They can't fly a hundred miles back to land. Do you know you can get Chlamydia from house flies? Really? Yeah. What do you have to do with them? Well...

Annoyingly, I don't know if you guys saw what you wanted to see, but I dropped my notes just before we came out here, and I can't, it's on the next page, and I can't find the reason for it. That is the worst excuse in eight years of podcasting we've had for why you can't back up one of your outlandish plays. No, it's of experience. You dropped your notes.

Oh, yeah, and then the dog ran off with the page. No, I swear to God, I've been trying to find it. It might be backstage. I've got a line that says, with guinea pig inclusion conjunctivitis as an animal model, jokes about wives, it seems, have always been fair game. That's the next page, so, yeah.

But apparently you can get Chlamydia from house flies. That's a rumour going round. Good to know. Careful what you do with those blue bottles. Do you want to hear another parrot thing? Oh, yeah. Okay, are you guys familiar with a guy called Noel Fitzpatrick? Noel Fitzpatrick.

He's on a show called Super Vet. Anyway, he has a book which is sort of memoirs of a career, a vetting career. And there was a time when he had to operate on a parrot, but the problem was he couldn't anesthetise it. You know, the anesthetic wasn't suitable. It might have died if you tried to put it under. So he had to just hold it on the X-ray machine.

I'm quoting him directly here. He kept looking up at me and asking, what are you doing? What are you doing? I kept trying to keep him quiet and maybe a few choice phrases escaped from my big Irish mouth in the process. We completed the radiographs, gave the medication, and as I was handing him back to the dear, sweet elderly lady who was his companion, he jumped on the lady's arm,

craved his neck and shouted merrily, shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up! I can't tell you how scared I am that that's going to be my daughter's first word. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the head of the AA keeps his car keys in the microwave. And I've just realised that I should specify which of the AA's. I mean, this fact is because he's constantly shit-faced.

It's a safety thing in both instances. And then he's just too pissed to open it. No, because the head of the AA wouldn't be drunk. But this is the head of the automobile association, it's a guy called Edmund King, and he's very safety conscious, virgin and paranoid, I would say. He did an interview recently with the Telegraph where he says he's got one of these car keys

that remotely unopts your car. A fob. A fob. A fob. And he keeps it in a faraday cage, so in this leather bag with a wire mesh lining and a rubber band, and a wire mesh lining and a red metal box,

so a cage that can't let through any electromagnetic field. And after he's got it in that faraday cage, he puts it inside a microwave, and he's put the microwave right at the back of the house, as far away from the car as possible. And so every time he wants to drive somewhere, it's a real hassle for him. He either he or his wife had their car next.

His wife. Yeah. I didn't realise, if you have one of the keyless keys, basically, you know what I mean. Yeah, a keyless fob, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're sort of something like 50 times likely to have your car stolen,

because it's easier to hack the thing. Do you not think you would wait until like lunchtime when he's making a baked potato or something in the microwave and just steal his car? Exactly, yeah. So it's an amplifier and transmitter thing. This is how they get your car. So most people, if they have this key fob,

they might leave it near the front door, just sitting on a console table or something like that. And two criminals will be involved. One will go next to the door, and they'll have an amplifier. And while the other stands next to the door with a transmitter, I can't remember what you're wearing. One person's next to the house door near the key.

One person's next to the car door. One person's next to the car door. They amplify the signal. It comes to the car door. They can open it and steal it. Yeah. But that happens a lot, as you were saying. Take a wheel into the house.

That's what I would advise. The steering wheel are one of the actual wheels. I take both. I pop the steering wheel into one of the main wheels. And in I go. Actually, his wife's key was in a Faraday cage when her car got stolen. So, which I don't really know how they've done it.

The problem with this is, it's not the criminals. It's not cars. It's not the microwaves. Okay. It's the keyless, bloody fobs. Why do they exist? It's the maddest system ever. My mom has it.

And it's like, what is the point in this? If you can't get up the energy or the wherewithal to insert some keys into your ignition. It's pretty cool, though. Whenever I walk past my car, it just opens, even if I don't want to go in it. It's cool. Can you turn that off? It does automatically.

Well, I can disable it. And he wants to make you aware that if you want to disable it, you can disable it. I was reading a website that said, you know, the advantages of it, why you should get a keyless fob. And the only bullet point is, it allows you to start your car without being in the vehicle. That's true. Also, it does the coolest, I don't drive, and I don't have this fob key, so I don't know.

I mean, it would be insane for you to start with the key and work your way up to having a car. I got the key. It's just for those parties where you chuck them in the bar. It's not actually a car that goes with that. I just got the key. She'll be incredibly disappointed. Getting onto your unicycle.

She's already drawn the short straw. So, when you have one of these fobs, if you're at a certain distance and you try to open it, the signal's too far for it to work, right? Okay. So, if you were standing at a distance, let's say just far away enough where it couldn't work, you can still stand at that same spot and make it work

by using one simple trick. And that is holding the key to your head. What? Who here knows that by round of cheers? Right. So, what does it do? So, the idea is that our head is full of fluids, right? We have a lot of water in our heads.

Some more than others. And water is a great conductor. So, when you hold it to your head, the signals that are being passed through are using that water to amplify the signal. Oh. And you can open it from that spot you're standing at. No, it's like wearing metal boots in a lightning storm

if you want to get struck. Yes. I think. Wait, say it again. It's like wearing something that conducts well in a lightning storm if you want to get hit by lightning, right? Like a giant spike on your head or something. Exactly.

Holding another. Officers from Sheffield's southeast neighbourhood policing team came up with a way of stopping people from doing this key fob trick. And their idea is to buy a second car that doesn't have keyless entry and use it to block in the other one. That's good.

Oh, that's wonderful. That's great. Very clever. Very clever. Okay, here's a quiz. Oh, great. Oh, great. Okay.

Answer the question as quickly as you can, right? Yes. Okay, as quickly as you can. Just complete the sentence. That's the quiz. Yeah. If you switch off all the lights along the street, the number of thefts from people's cars increases.

Right. It halves. This is so weird. If you turn off all the lights along the road. Because they can't find your car? Well, they know the cars are there. So there have been trials done into this. They're like turning off street lights after midnight.

And it turned out that the thefts, not thefts of cars, thefts from cars, right? So people breaking in, stealing the stuff. The thefts went from 12 per street per month to six per street per month. Well, the thing is that it's really hard to see in the dark. And if you,

if you're waggling around the torch after midnight, that's quite conspicuous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes thieves feel a bit self-conscious. What? And they will just, they just sort of gravitate away towards other nearby streets, which do have street lights.

Self-conscious. Embarrassed. They're embarrassed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then other nearby streets got more thefts during this trial period. So it is a, like you're just pushing the problem elsewhere.

Okay. Yeah. But that works. Yeah. That's weird. Great quiz. Thank you. Do you know there's another way of protecting your car?

The super rich do this in Singapore. So Andy, you said before, why not take a wheel inside? What they do in Singapore, and this is for people who live in high-rise buildings. They take the whole car inside. So there's, there's, and this is for the super rich,

because the super rich, they've got lots of perks and ways that they can hide their cars. When you're rich, you've got a few perks. Yeah. One of these perks is that there are now buildings in Singapore whereby

you go into an underground garage and you park your car there and it goes on a slab. The slab goes into an elevator, and it's a special elevator that goes up to the floor of your building. So you might be 40 floors up, goes up there,

and then you have a glass partition between your house, lounge room, and then this extra garage room that hangs up there in the sky with you. The car on the slab gets put on there, and you can just see your car in your lounge room.

And no one can get to it because it's 40 floors up. That's like Batman-style level. It really is. It's reverse Batman because he lives underground. In a cave. In a cave.

Upside-down Batman. But you could also remove your own kitchen and living room instead and knock down your front wall and make that a nice place to hide your car if you want to emulate these people. Just another way to keep your car safe. Did you guys read about the car,

Thief, a couple of weeks ago, who hit the news it was in Rochdale, for the clue. He saw the car and he did that really stupid thing at the petrol station and then driving off without paying for petrol. Just don't draw attention to yourself. So the police are looking for him.

He's still in a Mitsubishi SUV and they found the house where they thought he was. They searched the house and one of the police officers noticed a large teddy bear breathing and turned it upside down and he was inside the bear. And it's the weirdest thing

because the police, it was managed to police and they tweeted a picture of the bear because there was a picture of the bear. It's got a little hole in its bum. Not big enough for even a baby, I would have thought. I don't know how he was getting in there. It's extraordinary. Yeah, he must have really sort of wriggled in

among the stuffing. How long do you think you try and keep it up for once they say, there's someone in that bear, isn't there? You just pretend to be one of those talking bears. That's what the movie Ted was. There was actually a man in there. The first ever vehicle alarm immobiliser system

for a car was invented in 1921 because at the time that technology didn't exist. So it was just a freelance effort by an army captain who lived in Victoria in London and his motorbike kept being nicked and he was quite annoyed about it.

His initial innovation was he would take out almost all the fuel so that if it was nicked it could go about a mile and then he'd just search a mile radius and he got the car back, the motorbike back quite a good idea. That's quite a good idea. He thought he didn't want even that to happen again.

So he attached a grenade to the motorbike and connected the pin to a nearby railing meaning that if anyone ever drove off on the motorbike it would set off the grenade. Unfortunately for him the wind just blew the bike over one day. The explosion destroyed his bike and destroyed his car

and destroyed a lot of the flat downstairs from him. There's one really advanced thing is a new Toyota patent. Basically when you walk into your car or you walk into a car the car can tell what your phone is but like if it's in your pocket it can kind of detect your phone

and then it will release a fragrance of your choosing. So if you're like, well I really like the smell of freshly mowed lawn then whenever you get in the car it will know you're there and it will give you that. Wait, has this car got like

just a big bank of every cent possibly? At the moment it's a patent so they might not have all of them. But like presumably... But you can mix it. It's like printering, isn't it? You can just combine, you know, like mowed grass. Or you could just buy all of the scents that you want.

Oh yeah, just get a big thing of toner for steak or whatever. When your car did smell like a steak. But you might do, right? And so if Andy walks in the car it smells of steak if I walk in it smells of... What if we both get in the same car though and then it's like a freshly mowed steak?

That's going to be a weird crash. Like a cow in a field. Oh yeah, perfect. Everyone's favourite smell, cows in fields. Anyway, the idea of this and one of the things that is genuinely in this patent is if someone gets in the car with a different phone so they realise that it's someone who shouldn't be there

then it can give tear gas instead of perfume. That's incredible. When you borrow your husband's phone for the day. That's a horrible journey. Oh my God. So there's another thing with the key fobs. There's a Volvo whereby it can tell you, it's got a sensor that can tell you

if there's a heartbeat in the car. So it can alert you to intruders. No, that's horrible. Is there someone hiding in your car? Yeah, there's like a huge teddy bear that's just appeared to your left-hand side. I think possibly there's two reasons for it. One is that if you closed the car door

or you're in a rush and you've left your child in there or your dog or something and you know how you forget leaving your child in a car. Just check in the car. That's why I'm not allowed to drive. I've lost six kids. But it's been used for intruders as well. It can just sort of say there's a heartbeat in your car.

Quite clever. I've got another very weird law that was passed, car-based. It was in 1928, Ministry of Transport passed an order. It made it illegal to lock your car if it was parked in public. It made it illegal. Is that so? Because I know that in Manitoba or somewhere

that you're not supposed to lock your cars in case there's like a polar bear and someone can hide in the car. Bingo. Yeah, yeah. What it is is because there was so much traffic that was stopping people getting around because cars were taking off

and cities weren't adapted for them. So it would be easier for the police to just move your car on if it was getting in people's way. So it was illegal to lock your car in public. Oh. So it wasn't the bear thing? It was similar to the bear thing. Because you made it sound like James

had given the right arm. I know. I was counting my points. I said the word bingo at one point. It's not a slam dunk bingo. Other people might need to use your car or move it around. Anyway, great quiz, Andy.

I can't believe I didn't get the university challenge. OK. It is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that scientists have successfully made a human hamster hybrid. They call it a hamster. So talk to us about your interpretation of the word successfully.

Scientists have successfully made the hybrid. Yeah, good call. OK. So this is called the hamster test. And it is a scientific way of testing male infertility. So this came about because scientists, there's a lot of ethical questions and issues that you have when you're trying to test for infertility

by using a human sperm and a human egg. So we needed alternatives for that. And fortunately. And this is the test of sperm as fertile, right? Yes. It's testing of male sperm as fertile. And this goes for IVF and all that sort of stuff. And so using a female egg is not allowed.

There's a lot of ethical questions with that. And so what happens is that they need another way of doing it. And fortunately, our mammalian reproduction makeup means that there are a few animals that we can do that with. So one of the things that they do it with is hamster eggs. And when they use the hamster eggs, what they do is they inject the sperm into it. But sometimes the sperm penetrates the hamster egg.

And when it penetrates, a hybrid embryo is created. A single cell embryo is created. And that's what scientists call the hamster. So when you say it's like a hybrid of a human and a hamster, it's not like a tiny human that can keep stuff in its cheeks. Well, I actually wrote to a bunch of scientists to ask if maybe one day hamsters will rule the earth. And a lot of them got back to me and said no.

Well, actually there was one NHS doctor who's doing amazing, like really cutting edge stuff on trying to cure cancer. And he was like, give me five minutes. And he went off to find out and he thinks that there is a way that you could eventually manufacture it to accommodate the cell. Because the problem is that it just, it will die after a few days or it will split into two cells or something. That's not necessarily a problem.

You need it to split into two cells. We're not single celled, are we? No. The key is it needs to split. But they kill it before it splits because that's bad. That's the point. But the point is we sometimes kill it before seeing if it can split into two.

But the belief is it can split into two. So they quickly go, before it splits into three. That's my theory. But the reality is that it couldn't live. It just couldn't live. This doesn't happen whenever we have a sperm test, does it? They don't take, they don't go to the hamster lab. This is one way of doing it.

I think there are other ways of checking. Oh, thank God. And I think it's not necessarily because the ethical things of using a human egg entirely. It's largely because human eggs are few and far between. Because you can easily get a donor egg from a hamster because you don't as often ask their permission. Whereas it's quite hard.

But yeah, it is also ethically easier because it's a hamster. But also there's a lot of question about when life begins. And that is one of the issues. If what happens here, what happens with the hamster, which is also, that's slightly an ethical debate because I've been asking scientists, so is that for just a second while it's alive? Is that a hamster?

Is that a real thing? And they've all refused to answer because it's a dodgy question. But it's also exciting that we could one day have hamsters because we don't have... I'm not going to wait for the version of Jurassic Park. Well, did you see there was a script that was leaked where Jurassic Park 4 was meant to be human dinosaur hybrids? No, I didn't see that.

Well, you missed out because there was conceptual art and it looks awesome. It's like a man with dino legs running around and that's what it was meant to be. I think technically Andy might be a hamster. Oh, yeah? We always put him in that wheel in the dressing room. Oh, my God!

And the amount of shit you can get in your cheeks is insane. The reason being, if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word hamster, it does exist. There's one citation from 1670 and it's a person who expresses their approval by humming... Hmm. So if you ever do that, which you do do sometimes... I do do that, yeah.

You're a hamster. God, imagine if that's what a scientist created. How disappointed would we be? Wow. Andy. What I find really interesting about this process of creating the hamster is that the sperm need to be incubated for 20 hours before they're introduced formally to the egg.

Like a society ball. Yeah, they go to the dance, they got little dance cards. But yeah, they're incubated before they are introduced and this is because I didn't realise that inside a woman's body when a sperm is introduced the conventional way, they have to capacitate for about 10 hours, which is the opposite of incapacitate, really. It takes them about 10 hours to get ready to fertilise

so they don't zoom in and they're all set. They zoom in and then they... Well, it's a process called capacitation. Well, they just kind of hovered near the egg? I think so. They hang around near the egg and they sort of like put a suit on and they get themselves all beefed up and ready to fertilise before doing it.

Wow. Another part of it, which is quite interesting, is to get the eggs from the hamster in the first place and one way that they do that is that they treat the hamster with pregnant horse serum and you put some pregnant horse serum into the hamster and that will simultaneously make them produce about 40 eggs. Wow.

So it's like a human hamster hybrid but then there's also a bit of horse in there as well. Do you ever just think science doesn't do itself any favours? I feel a bit eckey about this. I mean, this is a kind of crossbred species. I mean, not one that's viable but it's been reading about hybrids and crosses between species. It's been going since 2500 BC,

the crossing of species with each other, specifically by humans. So this was a thing that was found in Syria. It was a burial complex and they found about 25 skeletons and they weren't horses. They were kind of nearly horses but they weren't quite. And they were a cross between a domestic donkey and a wild ass. Okay.

So quite similar, very similar species but not identical. And they were these mysterious creatures called cungas which we don't have anymore but they were highly prized. They were calmer than wild asses but they were faster than donkeys. So they were useful for battles and they were used as royal vehicles.

They used as dowries and marriages and cungas just were a thing. Yeah. Four and a half thousand years ago. And a huge thing, right? They're all over the paintings and artworks in Mesopotamia. Exactly. They were a big deal.

The other thing about it is they're hard to make because they're infertile. So you create them and then they're sterile. So if you want a second cunga, you need to go out into the woods again and chase down one of these very fast, very strong wild asses again and then somehow make it mate with a donkey.

I mean, that's difficult at the best of times. Have you heard of the American country singer? She's called Taylor Mu. And she, this is really interesting, she has a chunk of skin on her body which is a different color to the rest of her. It was way darker. She didn't know why for years.

She was told it was a birthmark by doctors, seemed like the obvious explanation. Anyway, she found out she is her own twin sister. So in the womb, she was going to be twins, but the egg which would have become her sister fused with her egg, while both of them were right at the tiny, tiny embryo stage. So that darker skin is from her sister's DNA.

She's got two sets of DNA in her body, basically. But she has two immune systems, two blood streams I wrote down. I'm not exactly clear on that. But she has a, I don't know, just move on past it. But she also has lots of allergies because her body thinks that her sister's DNA is foreign DNA inside her body.

But the weird thing is, remember I said her name at the start? Taylor Mu. Taylor Mu. A mule is a hybridized... How did she not know? The clue was there. She was tailored, yeah.

You can have human pig hybrids. These exist. The hope with these is that they'll be able to grow human, like, organs inside pigs, and then we'll be able to take them out of the pigs and put them into us. And you'll be able to have that kind of thing. Have they got a fun name?

What are they called? Well, see if you can guess. So, part human, part pig, anyone? Pooman. Pooman. A pooman, as in pee for pig and human. Pooman. Oh, yeah, any suggestions?

Hog. Like human hog. No, the answer is a frankenswine. Lovely. Very strong. Hey, do you want to have a quick guess of... If I name a thing, you name the things that went into it. Oh, yeah, let's do that.

A swoos. A swan. A swan and a goose. A swan and a goose, bingo. A naluga. A beluga whale and a narwhal. A narwhal and a beluga, exactly. So, Anna's got one point, James's got one point.

I've only got two. Sorry, Dan. Great quiz, Andy. Oh, wait, I've got one more. A rabbit. It's a rabbit and a cabbage. No, it's a radish and a cabbage. Sorry. The only animal that eats its own ears.

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that cardboard is so valuable on the black market that it is nicknamed beige gold. Strap in. We're going to do 15 minutes on cardboard. Yeah. 20 if you're unlucky.

Beige gold. Beige gold. So cardboard is incredibly valuable at the moment. Incredibly valuable. Incredibly valuable. More. Okay. Prices were £70 per tonne.

Give or take recently. Not very much. A tonne of cardboard is a lot. £70 is not very much. But when coronavirus started, the price shot up of cardboard. It doubled because there was so much more demand. Lots of people were stuck at home.

Lots of people were doing online shopping. And the price just absolutely rocketed. And as a result of the price being very high, demand being massive, there have been cardboard heists. There have been cardboard... There's a cardboard mafia who were in operation in Europe. There's a whole cardboard crime network

whose job is to steal cardboard. When you think you've cornered as the police, the cardboard mafia, and you get up close to them, does it turn out it's just a cut out of them? They'd made their getaway minutes ago. That would be great. I did some maths.

Oh, yeah. And for one kilogram of gold, if you wanted to have enough cardboard to be worth the same amount as one kilogram of gold, it would have to weigh about as much as the Statue of Liberty. Okay. Okay. Gold is more valuable.

Gold smuggling is still more valuable. If you want to set up a crime syndicate, drugs are still the way to go. But if you're a small-timer, cardboard is the way. So there was a thing in Madrid in 2018 to 2019. This is even pre-COVID. Half the cardboard that people were putting out for recycling

was stolen. But I would say, is that a problem? If you're putting out cardboard to be recycled as someone else is stealing it rather than the normal recycling people? Well, to me personally, the job's being done, right? Well, that's true. But it's in the hands of the gangs, then, I guess,

who are going to... They control the cardboard trade now, you know? I don't know. And they'll corner the market. I don't know what they'll do with it. Well, they're making money out of it, basically. They would travel around the city basically before the cardboard recycling truck.

And they would just go to every stop. They'd learn the routes. They had dozens of people involved. Because they do sound like do-gooders. They sound like they're a neighbourhood watch. I've made the sound wrong. They're hardcore criminals. If someone drives around collecting my rubbish...

I don't care who does it. I know you don't care, but it's a big problem. Right. They're getting bullied in prison, is all I'm saying. It's what you're in for, voluntary recycling. So why don't the garbage men... Start half an hour early. They start early enough already, don't they?

Plus, your answer is just the garbage men have to start earlier. That's not the way to deal with crime. It's for the victims to adapt. Do you have to have hard, tough, rough justice for these crooks? Yeah. Madrid, the city of Madrid, where this was happening, they would export it to Southeast Asia for pulping. So they're stealing other people's cardboard.

Right. I feel like there's not enough anger in the room about this. I just kind of feel like there might be other problems. I know. Madrid deliberately introduced dumpsters with tiny holes for cardboard so that the gangs couldn't climb in and get the cardboard out. They don't need to climb in. They got there half an hour before the actual fucking truck got there.

What are you talking about? I'm just saying. Okay. Wow. So did the price go up because there was a shortage, because we were all ordering loads of stuff with cardboard. That was part of it. And hoarding cardboard, basically.

And then Amazon bought a load of the available cardboard. So for a while at the start of COVID, people couldn't get eggs. That was because there were enough eggs going around, but there weren't the cardboard containers for the eggs. And you can't just drop eggs on people's doorstep like this. Eggs are the worst thing to buy loose. So that was why you couldn't get eggs, right? But I don't remember there being an egg shortage during the hospital.

There was. That was a huge egg shortage. I didn't remember that. How was it? I would say egg and loo roll were the two big ones. Really? Hell yeah. Even.

I was in the countryside and the farmhouse next to us used to put freshly laid chicken eggs out every morning. Six of them. And I used to go about 7 a.m. already gone. Have you tried going a bit earlier? What was he putting the eggs out for? Sorry, for you. You know, in the countryside, people always put eggs. If they've got chickens outside and say,

hey, drop a pound in and take four eggs or whatever. All gone. But speaking of eggs, Easter eggs used to be made of cardboard. What? In very disappointing times for children at Easter before they were made of chocolate. And they were actually really beautiful. So in the 19th century, they would have beautiful scenes kind of drawn on them.

This was shortly after the kind of invention of cardboard. And then they'd be covered in satin. And they'd still be in two halves and you get your sweets inside. But yeah, the egg itself, don't eat it. You know what the first thing you ever put in a cardboard box was? Oh, great. Good question there, isn't it? Can we work it out?

No. I would say not in a thousand years. Another card, a smaller cardboard box. Oh, great. I'd say no. OK. Something small. Was it?

Fly. Animals, yeah. Oh, I know. A moth. It was a moth. No. Yes, it was. Wow.

There's a new tactic here. Just on right. Very close. It was a silkworm. Oh, cool. They were invented apparently in Valriac in Provence. Silkworms? No, cardboard boxes.

Because there was a guy who was making silk and he was in bringing the silkworms over from China and his silkworms kept dying. And so he went to a local wigmaker and asked him if there was anything that he could do. And this wigmaker made these kind of cardboard boxes with holes in which he invented. And this is according to the Cardboard Box Museum in France.

It sounds amazing. Yeah. It does sound really interesting. Yeah, Valriac, it says it's the historical capital of French cardboard. It's quite a lot of qualifications. I don't think there are any other cardboard museums. So just on the invention of cardboard,

did you guys come across Malcolm Thornhill in your research? No. Okay, there's this fact all over the internet, right? And it's that cardboard was invented in 1817 when Sir Malcolm Thornhill started using thick sheets of paper to make boxes. And they weren't like modern cardboard. They were just single sheets of cardboard.

So they weren't corrugated and firm and great like modern cardboard boxes. And if that is true, that means that theoretically Jane Austen could have used a cardboard box because that was the year she died, 1817. That's huge. That's huge. The only problem is, it is definitely not true. It's all over the internet.

It's on Wikipedia. It's been taken off the internet and put into books as a result of which... What's your evidence that it's not true? There's no evidence of Malcolm Thornhill being real. Oh, he's just... There's just no... You search for Malcolm Thornhill in 19th century sources.

There's nothing. The problem is, now that it's been taken off Wikipedia, where it was with no evidence, there wasn't any results and put in a book, it's now been sourced on Wikipedia to the books, which say that Malcolm Thornhill invented it in 1817. It's a thing called cytogenesis on Wikipedia, which is where something is this awful circular loop.

And now there's no way of getting rid of it. You're excluding this very little known myth. That's my thing now. Don't go home tonight and tell each other Malcolm Thornhill invented cardboard in 1817. Yeah, yeah. If there's one thing you don't say to each other after the show tonight, don't say that. I don't say that even if it was true, to be honest.

As a conversation starts, we're over dinner. I got a good one-question quiz. Well, it's been a real quiz episode tonight, hasn't it? Yeah, so here we go. Yeah, so it's one quiz question. Fingers on buzzers. This is a kind of cardboard. What is it used for?

It's called a zarf. Scarves. Buzz. Oh, I didn't buzz. Putting scarves in. Putting scarves in? No. Yeah, no.

I'm going to say scarves for zebras. Zebra scarves. Zarf. Oh, we're going back into hybrids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's not that, is it? It's absolutely that.

That's amazing that you guys just jammed some crazy fucking idea. No, it's obviously not that. What is it? A zarf is, and everyone's used zarfs, but you just didn't know what it was called. You know, when you go to a coffee shop and you get a coffee and it's a bit too hot and they put a little sleeve of cardboard over it? That's a zarf. It's a scarf for a cup.

A zarf. That's brilliant. That's great. And where does that come from? Just made up by someone. Yeah, I mean, it's been, zarfs have been used apparently. So there's an amazing writer who is called, what's his name again? I've read so many of his books.

AJ Jacobs. Is it on the next page? It's on the next page. Whereas, I think his name's AJ Jacobs. He wrote the book where he read the entire Encyclopedia and he did this book where he went around thanking people who had anyway played a part in making a cup of coffee that you would drink. So he went around the world going, thank you for this.

And one of the people he went to thank were makers of zarfs, which was this item. But he says that they were used as far back as ancient China. What? They were different material. They weren't necessarily thick coffee. Malcolm Thornhill hadn't even been born yet. I think they would have been like a marble or something, but you would put it around a hot drink and it would be a holder.

You think they were making coffee holders out of marble? I don't know. It just wasn't cardboard. Thornhill didn't. That's amazing. That's pretty cool. How many Starbucks do you think you'd have to go into and ask if I have a zarf around my coffee?

One of them to know what the fuck you were talking about. Cardboard was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2005. Ah, the cardboard box. The cardboard box. Obviously, the idea being if you get a present, the cardboard box is often more interesting to a kid than the actual toy itself. I love how lateral they think when they induct the toys into the Hall of Fame. Last year's toys that went in, one of the things I'll get inducted as one of the great

toys was sand. They're running low on toys, aren't they? I think a stick was one of the first ones. Last year was sand, risk, and American Girl dolls. Is it so that when you give your kids presents at Christmas, you can say, well, I got you something from the Hall of Fame? It's award-winning. Do you want to hear one more cardboard crime?

Yeah, go on. Sure. You can use cardboard to smuggle a cocaine. Sure, okay. Now, I know what you're thinking. Sure you can. Just put the cocaine in the box. Or what's the point of smuggling cocaine when cardboard's so fucking expensive?

Okay. In 2020, the Spanish police also spain, like the Madrid cardboard smuggling ring. The Spanish police, they smashed a gang who had put cocaine into cardboard boxes to smuggle it. Now, they hadn't just put cocaine into the boxes, they put it into the box. The cardboard box was partly made of cocaine. That's clever. They had liquefied the cocaine and then kind of impregnated it into the cardboard boxes.

But then the problem was they put actual cocaine inside the cocaine cardboard box. That's really clever. And then once you get the box to the other end, you just extract it chemically, cocaine. Perfect. A fun toy for the kid, a fun toy for the pair. That's not sand. Guys, we're going to have to wrap up really soon. Do you remember the anti-sex beds speaking of cardboard?

I think I've got one by mistake. Sorry. I was just possessed by a comedian from the 17th for a second there. What was that? The ghost of Les Dawson has blessed me with his presence. We're honored to have him here. The anti-sex beds were the Tokyo Olympics, Les. You all right, Dan?

That's the weirdest thing I've seen how to do. He genuinely looks suggestive. You look... Sorry. And then it was a really good joke. Come on, Dan. We can do this. Tokyo Olympics, they had anti-sex beds and they weren't actually anti-sex beds.

They were just made of cardboard. And the idea of anti-sex was that it was so flimsy you couldn't have sex in them. The dream was that the reason they had them at the Olympics was to discourage the athletes from having sex because it damages your game. But they were fine for sex anyway, so it wouldn't have discouraged it. They were good for sex. So why is Andy not getting any? Why am I here?

There are so many reasons. OK, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about 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 Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are there. You can check them out. You can also check out our new club, Club Fish.

So do check it out. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here tonight. We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Thank you so much, Inverness. That was awesome. We will be back again for the rest of you. We'll catch you later. Goodbye!