No Such Thing As A Fish - 532: No Such Thing As 'Is It Mushroom?'

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

James, Anna, Andy and Dan discuss speeding pennies, presidents, peanuts and parasites. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, just before we start this show, I wanted to let you know that James and I are going to be doing a talk chat, a lecture at the Hay Festival in Hay on Wye next Wednesday, the 29th of May, and we are going to be chatting about our new release of the paperback, A Load of Old Balls, which is all the most interesting facts and things we learned about sports. It's for sports lovers, it's for sports haters, it's for sports sceptics. You've got Mary Queen of Scots football in there, you've got Michael Palin's Conquer tournament, you've got lacrosse games involving over a hundred thousand players. There's something for everyone. Do come and listen to us. Hey, it's such a fun festival anyway. So to get tickets for

that go to no such thing as a fish dot com slash live and while you're there obviously buy tickets for our tour if you haven't already which you should have. On with the show! I'll leave the bathroom to you. Did you take a bath? I'll leave the bathroom to you. I'll leave the bathroom to you. I'll leave the bathroom to you. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray James Harkin and Anna Tyshinsky and once again We have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here We go starting with fact number one. That is James Okay, my fact this week is that the coroner who did the autopsy of President McKinley

Injected part of him into a dog McKinley injected part of him into a dog. So he was autopsied by two doctors called Harvey Gaylord and Herman Matzinger. And Matzinger wanted to find out whether the bullet that killed McKinley had been poisoned or had some bacteria on it, like a biological weapon. And so the way he did it was he took samples from the wound and he injected parts of it into some rabbits and the dog and wanted to see how the rabbits and dogs reacted because if there was poison on the bullet,

maybe they would die and that would be evidence that he'd been poisoned as well as shot. And? And it turns out that the thing that killed him was the bullet that went right through his body. Yeah, the dog was fine, wasn't it? In the notes that were given, he sort of said he was acting fine. Doesn't mention the rabbit. No, it doesn't mention the rabbit. It said that he was acting well, the dog, but his body temperature was around 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that good or bad for a dog? It's bad for a dog. It should be a bit lower than that.

You can react badly to an injection. I certainly do at the time. I get a raised temperature. We should say this was 1901 as well. Just for anyone who's not up on their president's... President McKinley, around 20th-ish? 25th, I think. He was 25th president.

That's right. So why am I talking about this today if it was something that happened around 1900? Well, because we do doing a book last week. Who's last? This is a new feature. Well, in the news this year there's an auction site called the Rab Collection and they found the personal papers of this Dr. Herman Matzinger

and that gave us all of this information about him injecting the president into the dog which we didn't know until this year. That's very cool. He was actually, no wonder he liked animals, because he was a buffalo doctor. And when I say buffalo doctor, he was a doctor who lived in the city of Buffalo in New York.

Who's that, Matt Singer? That was Matt Singer, yeah. Right. I just thought I'd try and trick you guys there. Good trick. But he wasn't the first man to even look after McKinley when he came in. Okay. That was a different man called Dr. after McKinley when he came in. Okay.

That was a different man called Dr. Man. And Dr. Man, Dr. Matthew Man, and he wasn't even a proper surgeon. He was a gynecologist. He was a gynecological surgeon. Oh no. This man has no vagina. It's all going into openings, isn't it, when someone's been shot? That's true.

What a comforting thing to hear. Dr. Anna says, you lie on the operating table. Look, it's all just stuff going in places. Don't worry. It's all holes in the body. Let's inspect your chest vagina now. Oh, the exit vagina is a lot bigger. But the weird thing is, Thomas Edison gets involved at this point. Of course he does.

He sent to Buffalo a new x-ray machine, which is exactly like first ever episode of the podcast, President Garfield's shot. In that case it was Alexander Graham Bell sending a proto metal detector. Basically all new technologies were at some point just being tried on presidents who have been assassinated. Basically if, God forbid, the American president gets shot in the next couple of years, they'll probably send a chat bot. Yeah. That's amazing. So, so autopsies have come, have come a long way since the days of injecting stuff into animals. And I didn't know really about body farms.

That sounds grim. And yet it is. They were basically invented by this guy called Billy Bass. I remember that. No, no. Big Mouth Billy Bass is singing fish. Wait, so he did body farms and then he did novelty singing fish. Apparently so. Or it could be that they are different people. So this guy called Bill Bass was a forensic anthropologist in the sixties and seventies and he realized that we didn't know much about what happens to bodies when they decompose. And so he kind

of bought up some farmland and decided to collect loads and loads of dead bodies and it's still going today and there are now a few body farms around the world and they're extraordinary places. It does sound like an excuse, doesn't it? When the police come in, they say, why have you got hundreds of dead bodies buried in your field? Well, also because they're buried in really odd scenarios. Because he asked if they're stored in the boots of cars, for instance, in pools of water, buried under rubble and in concrete.

Officer, no, this is my body allotment. I want one day to have a whole farm, but I've only got one so far. Yeah, they're incredible. And we've learned so much about forensics from them. And yeah, they do things like you'll be walking through a field and you might not see any bodies, but you might see pipes sticking up out of the ground. And that's because there are bodies underground. And they're connected to pipes which are collecting gases.

And the gases will determine what bodies smell of. And that's so that we can develop machines in future that can detect them by smell. That is stunning. Oh that's classy. Leaving your body to science like that is a really good thing to do. Yeah. As in well I hope I have the gumption to do that. Yeah. I thought we established you won't have any body remaining after we got to it from last week's episode. It's a fun little call back if you haven't listened to last week's episode yet. Find out what's gonna happen to me with these three three get their hands on me. So the father of autopsy, what people call that, is a guy called Karl Rokitansky and he came up with the idea of like looking at the internal organs to diagnose disease

on the outside. He personally performed 30,000 autopsies and supervised another 70,000. Sorry, 30,000? Yeah. That's one a day day for ages. It's one day for 100 years. Yeah. He did more than one a day is the way he got through that. Clever. But that's weekends, that's evenings, that's your birthday. Maybe you do more on your birthday. I don't know. If you're the father of it. So I got a question. I think Andy's the best one to answer this. Okay. But Dan might be able to answer and Anna definitely won't. So it's guys stuff. He's called Carl Rokitansky. And where do you know that name from?

Carl Rokitansky. Rokitansky. What are you guys both into? It's something that I associate with both of you, which is shit movies. Oh, was he in... Is that Adam Sandler's real name. Actually, it's unfair to call this a shit movie. It's actually a classic, but it's the kind of movie

you two would like. Pacific Rim 2. He gave his name to Max Rokitansky, who is the main character in the film series Mad Max. Oh, wow. And that's cause George Miller who directed it, he was working as a doctor when he was getting funds for it. George Miller.

That's amazing. That is very cool. George Miller's career has been amazing. He's done Mad Max. He did Babe, Babe 2, Pig in the City, Happy Feet, and then more Mad Max. Yeah. It's weird.

And that fund, what was it called? The latest one? The one second to last. Fury Road. He's like in his seventies or eighties when he comes out to make that again. And the new one's out shortly. Yeah. Anyway.

So why does he name... So this is why I thought these two might know this answer. I have actually seen Mad Max, uncharacteristically. I thought it was very dystopian. I'd rather be locked on a body part. You know what? The plot was not lost on you. Oh dear.

James, I have a different father of autopsy. Oh yeah, go on. Mondino de Luzzi. Oh my god, this again. Who is the father of autopsy, Andrew? You've told him a lot. Most episodes. Mondino de Luzzi was the restorer of Anatomy.

He was Italian, if you couldn't tell. At the University of Bologna. And Anatomy was banned, except for once every five years you could do a dissection. Wow. Is this like what's that film where every ten years or something you can all kill each other? The Purge. Yeah, this was basically The purge. Yeah. This was basically the purge.

Oh my God, Anna, you are in your dystopian worlds today. I am. Yeah. Amazing. So, Deliusi, he became the first person to do a dissection, document it and publish his findings and it was the first documented public dissection in 1700 years. Which is amazing. Wow.

But weirdly, senior people like him, they would not do the actual dissection themselves. So there's a picture of this happening. And it was in the 14th century. Senior people like him, they wouldn't do the dissection. They would, he would sit on a big elevated chair above the action. Like a tennis umpire. Exactly like that. And he was reading aloud from a book, I presume a book of anatomy. New balls please. And he was commenting on, you know, he was reading Galen's anatomy to the audience and saying look now you're going to say there was just a sort of barber surgeon actually doing the procedure. And also, did we ever mention the ostensile? That was basically

someone with one of those pointers whose job was to just point out the bits that were being autopsied or examined or whatever. Separate to the guy on the chair. The guy on the chair is talking you through it. Because he can't reach, he'd need a very long ostensors. I mean, they can go very long though. That's true. The ostensors is just there going,

ta-da, there's the pancreas. Uh-huh. Wow. Yeah. They became really popular, didn't they? The sections in Italy especially. Around the time of the 16th century, they were so popular you could buy flap anatomies. And a flap anatomy was

like a book with flaps in it, you know, like a kid's book where you could lift up the flaps and say, oh, look, there's the gallbladder. Isn't that cool? Wow. I can't believe that technology is that old. I don't know. Well, I mean mean the technology is quite basic for a flap. It's literally just a piece of paper. But I don't know if there were any kids books that did that before then. I can't imagine that work.

So I think the original kids flap book was probably this. Have you heard of vampire autopsies? These are very weird. These are a real thing that used to happen. There was concern that if you were dug up and you were very well preserved, you might be a vampire. And there was this big superstition that tuberculosis was an inherited disease.

So the dead could drain the life of their descendants. Actually those people had TB, but the idea was that they were kind of being drained by the people who died. And there was a theory that the body of the dead Person had to be destroyed to protect the health of the living the last one of these happened in 1949 What I know so was it to kill them to stop them? Vampirizing other people in 1949. Yeah, right very weird. I should have done my spooky voice for that. Yeah

I read about a very interesting autopsy that happened in Yeah, I read about a very interesting autopsy that happened in 1533 and it was an autopsy that was done on two children Who were infant twins who were conjoined and the question was are these two children? Two children with two souls or one soul and the autopsy was to determine that to work out Is there one soul between two kids souls did they find they found two? Oh, did they yeah, they found two because there's a Greek idea that the soul resided in the heart and they found two hearts within the conjoined twins, therefore that was the answer that they were given. But that was like a very theological specific autopsy happening. I think the important part of that was that these children hadn't been

baptized, but they would baptize people after their death, wouldn't they? And so if they only have one soul, they'd only have to have one baptism. But if they had two souls, they'd have to have two baptisms. Surely less effort just to do the double baptism. You know, just let's do two, come from our bases. Yeah, but if you're baptized twice, then that undoes the effect of the first baptism. It actually does. Yeah, it's like being bonked on the head by something, losing your memory.

Oh, right. The second bonk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see. Another autopsy, which was quite quite amazing was a little bit later on in 2010 and this is the amazing stuff they can reveal now. So this was a robbery in Oregon and it was two men in masks who tried to rob a cafe or coffee kiosk at gunpoint and the guy who was managing the kiosk also whipped out a gun because it America, and he managed to shoot one of the people who was robbing him, but the other one got away.

Now, they did an autopsy on the one robber that he'd shot, and they looked in his belly, and there was a still intact French fry in his stomach. Now, we know about how much French fries degrade and how good they digest, so they knew that he must have eaten a French fry sort of within the last hour. Not only that, but someone doing the autopsy managed to identify it as a Wendy's French fry.

Stop that. I think I could tell the difference between a Burger King and a McDonald's one for sure. There you go. Someone tasted it. They drew straws. So it's a Wendy's fry? Wendy's fry. So they just looked at all the nearby Wendy's restaurants, because it couldn't have been more than an hour ago he ate it and they looked at the security footage and there was one you know within an hour and they did indeed find the pictures of the two people on CCTV and found the other guy.

Wow. I'm gonna hear how they know it was a Wendy's fry. I mean I believe it. I just I'm just curious. Yeah. We don't have Wendy's here so we don't have if you can let us know if Wendy's fries are particularly maybe they're S-shaped or something. Moral of the story is always chew your food. That's a really good point, why is the fry intact?

I mean, he's literally inhaled that fry, hasn't he? Oh my god, I'd be so easy to autopsy if I committed a crime. All my food enters my body and completely intact. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that England's worst ever pennies are worth 350 pounds each. So they may be some of the best. These are coins called the Tealby pennies, right? And this is a story of a man, well, why am I telling you this fact today?

Well, I'll tell you. Is this gonna be a new feature now? I'm gonna start finding it quite tedious, I think. Basically, there's a man called Tony House, which I love. He's a metal detectorist and he was out, detectoring away, and he found a stash of pennies, ancient ones, they're from the 12th century. He found one and then he found 600 more. That's a leap.

That's like if you see one ant in your house. Exactly. And they're worth about 350 quid each. And the thing about them is they're really, really low quality coins. They are badly made, they're hard to read, the image is just hopelessly stamped. They're from the reign of Henry II. They're named after Tealby in Lincolnshire, which is where 5000 of them were found in a huge cache in the 19th century. And they're just really ropey coins. So why are they worth so much just because they're old now? Rare maybe?

They're old, they're pretty rare. Probably, there are quite a lot of them. Well, I was on a numismatist website called NumSoc, which was really good. It says, this coinage is renowned for its ugly appearance, bad craftsmanship and careless execution. To collect tealby pennies in the first place brands you as a little strange. Right, to be strange in the numismatist world is truly strangeness. I kind of absolutely love numismatism, in fact, even though it's really hard to say. And I love coin research because a, it's so reliable, it's such a reliable history, there's

no spurious, oh, what was this used for? Because all the information that you need is on this coin. It's like, there's a date, there's a face, it's a physical thing and... You're saying we have no mystery coins that we don't know the stories behind. Oh yeah, I mean we will have some mystery coins don't worry Dan, there are the alien theories out there I'm sure for you. It's all my research. But people are also so obsessed. I was on a reddit thread which was started by someone who said, I ranked all the Roman emperors for their coinage based on its artistic value, variety, collectability and historical value. Feel free to ask me about the rankings. And everyone did.

That is really tragic if no one answers that. Oh, don't you worry. Anyone? Thousands. I can tell you that Claudius wasn't high enough. And Claudius, of course, was responsible for the return to realism instead of the vaguely Hellenistic idealism on previous coins so he should have had at least an A rank according to one person. One person just said I feel insulted you ranked Nero as high as Augustus and this is not as an emperor this is his coinage. You were saying about there being no

dubious coins and we should which we did backtrack on in fairness, but I have an interesting thing that I found, which is about rainbow cups. I don't know if you guys found this. Was it related to the moon cup? The fact that they're cup-shaped both. Okay. Only. So these are coins that are cup-shaped and you find them, especially in Germany, and

you'll find them in fields, but these are often found after it had been raining, but then it was sunny straight afterwards because not only are they kind of pushed forward by the muddiness, but also water gets into the cupness and it shines and they're really easy to find because the reflection of the light comes off and people associated them with rainbows. And according to Discover Magazine, which is usually a pretty good source, this is the reason that we have like a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow. People whenever there was a rainbow, they would find these cup shaped coins.

And apparently there were tribes of southern Germany that were Celtic tribes that moved up into Ireland. And that's why the the Irish associated with like leprechauns. I love that. That's amazing. Isn't that cool? Yeah, that's really cool. That's great. I've got a, I've got a favorite coin.

Yeah. The double eagle. This is an American coin and it was a $10 coin issued in 1933. Half a million of them were struck, but they weren't issued as legal tender because 1933 the Great Depression blah blah blah banking crisis gold coins outlawed as legal tender it is now illegal to own a double eagle one what yeah they're all technically US government property because they never put them out yeah can't have accidentally got one in your change and own it no I see I think there is one isn't there there's one. So there are two in the Smithsonian, which is kind of different,

but there's one which is not illegal to own. I can't work out exactly why that's the only one that's not illegal to own, but it was sold in 2021 at auction for nearly 15 million pounds. What happened was a few of them were stolen and found their way into private hands via a jeweler called Israel Svit, who was from Philadelphia. And when they came to light, they would just get confiscated because you weren't allowed to have them. But one of them got sold to King Farouk of Egypt. And he wrote to the treasury department said, I have this coin. Is it okay if I keep it? And they hadn't discovered the theft at that stage. So they didn't realize that they'd been stolen and so they replied to him saying yeah, you can keep it

And that's the one that's the one that if it ever comes up is the one that gets sold I think unique that is yeah, that's really cool. Just while we're on American coins in 2007 There was a coin that was minted which had an image of JFK on it and if you pressed a button on the coin it played a short excerpt of his Ich bin ein Berliner so it had little technology in it to do that. Now I don't believe that was legal tender. Do you know where that was minted? What country that was for? Germany. Sounds it right. Mongolia. Lovely. Do you guys know that the first book written about the history of the coin was called the Ass and Party Bus? The Ass and Party Bus? Is that right? Is that a Latin book? Yeah, yeah. It's actually the

Ass et Party Bus. So I have translated two of the words. Of ass and? Party bus means like parts of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And ass was like an old Roman coin. Oh, that's great. Published in 1514 by Huyam Boud. And to be honest, it's quite boring. You read the whole thing, presumably. Yeah, the first 10 pages are about the etymology of the word ass. And then it goes on about... I bet you read that so voraciously, desperately opening the comedy. Something will come out.

One thing. One actually amazing thing, speaking of Romans and coins, is that coins are the reason that we're still discovering Roman emperors. Which I... Sorry, I just... Are we still? I didn't know. Wow. We discovered our latest Roman Emperor in 2022.

No, no. It's true. Who were we missing? This is... It's not a biggie. It's not like in between Nero. Oh, yeah. The air to Augustus actually only came to light.

No, this is the great Sponsianus. And... Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like a legit one. Hi, I'm doing it. Would you like to sponsor my anus? This is from, well, we think it's from the disaster century, whatever it's called, the

crisis century in the Roman period, which was like the third century when it was all falling to pieces and there were sort of 1900 emperors. But the reason he's only just come to light is because there were these coins found in Transylvania in the 1700s, which were assumed to be fake and people looked at them and said they're for trees. Sorry, Canandi, can you say these coins were found in Transylvania please? These coins were found in Transylvania. Yeah that seems to add to it for me.

Yeah you're absolutely right. Yeah, they were found in Transylvania in the 1700s and they had a picture of this bloke and it said Spontianus under it. Spontianus! It just doesn't work when you do it now. Anyway, it was decided that they were fakes and it was only in 2022 that analysis of them actually concluded they were probably real and so we've literally just found out that there was a Roman emperor at some time between 248 and 253 AD. Okay, wow. Very much a sort of Liz Truss style, blink and you'll miss him. Yeah, I think you were in an in-and-out job. And just one coin so far, did you say?

I think there are a couple, I believe there are two coins. Did you hear about the Eid-Mahr Aureus? So there's another Roman coin. Is this the like after Caesar was killed? Yes. Oh, the Eids of Mars. This is an amazing coin. This is a coin that celebrates the assassination of Julius Caesar, minted by Brutus, and with it has the inscription Eid-Mar, which is Eids of Mars.

And it has their daggers on. Brutus and Cassius's daggers are depicted. It's crazy. It's like immediately after almost, right? Yeah. Like it's like merch. That's kind of what they did though. Wasn't it? It was like, get rid of the old emperor. How do you do it? Well, let's just mint a load of coins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, Julius Caesar was the first known autopsy that we have. Was that required? Well, they found out that he was stabbed 23 times. Right. I mean that... But was that poison on the dagger, which was the actual cause of death?

I can't deal with this many vaginas? But they wanted to find out which of the stabbings was the one that killed him. No. How did they... No offence to the Romans. How did they think they were going to be able to do that? Surely it would have been some combination of the 23 that did it. I could tell you because most of them were either in the face or the groin it was found. Oh dear, I didn't know that. Wow. And it was just one or two and I think one of them went through the side of his arm and into his

artery. So they decided that that was it. Wow. Anyway. Blimey. In the groin, that's, was that deliberate? Doesn't seem inadvertent, doesn't it? Going for the crotch. Coin villain. Henry VIII. Really? Yeah, but the numismatist's foe. So he wasted lots of money on wars with foreigners basically and he specifically he debased the currency. He issued new coins where he'd put copper in the silver coins to make the silver go a bit further basically and it caused mayhem.

People were hoarding their good coins from the before times, which were still worth every bit of silver in them and they left the bad ones in circulation. Foreign bankers refused to accept English money. They were asking for gold instead. It just was a disaster. And then a few years after he dies, Elizabeth I came to the throne, so 15 years later, she had to recall every single coin in the kingdom and melt them down and reissue proper coins. You have like a coin amnesty. Everyone come and hand your coins in at the forum.

They had those, you know, those machines where you pour all your coins in and it gives you a little slip. They had those. Not the ones with the tray going back and forward. Is that what they're doing? Are they collecting my coins? Well they are collecting your coins effectively. You know those things by the way, they were invented by, I can't remember who it was now,

but they were invented and the person who invented them thought that they would only last one year. There had been quite a few of these kind of amusements that had come and gone really quickly. And so they invented them. They didn't patent them. They made a load of them and then they became really successful. And now you could just make them without any patents. I didn't realize that.

Yeah. And the original one had the big hole in the middle, which your coins would go in so they would make money. Whereas now the holes are hidden. So when the coins are being pushed, there's holes on the side that you can't see. And that's where the coins kind of fall into. And that's the cut that the machine's made. What the hell? Also, I'm not aiming, I don't want to get into those holes.

No. So think about it. I want to get into the big hole in the middle. Every coin you put in, in theory, is going to come out again, right? So how do they make money? Well, the way they make money is they have hidden holes, which the coins fall down and go into the bank. Wait, why would every coin in theory be coming out again? I just thought they got more and more and more coins until the whole thing exploded. Until the whole thing was full of coins.

Yeah, exactly. And someone's going to go to those machines and they're just crammed. You've never seen one of them fall to the top. I think you fill them with coins to start off with, because you've never turned up to one of those and there's no coins in it. There's still a sign saying please. So they filled them with coins and then in theory everyone you put in is going to push another one out. I did not know there were side things. I just thought they built up and then at night people came by and siphoned and stacked them artfully so the next day none of them would fall in the hole.

That might happen as well. Those machines are great. I love them so much. I spend so much of my money on them. Yeah they are amazing. I love them as well. You know those penny collection machines actually? What do you mean? The one where you get all of your money that you've been keeping in a jar for the last 10 years. Oh, and you tip them in and you turn it into cash. Do you know what the most that anyone's ever got out of them since then?

Oh great. Oh god, how much? So I think I mentioned on the show once that I did it in Australia and I think I got three or four hundred dollars out of it. What? Oh yeah, that's right. You're pouring in coppers into a machine, three or four hundred dollars out of it. What? Oh yeah, that's right. You're pouring in coppers into a machine, you got four hundred dollars. It wasn't all coppers, there was some fifty cents. What Looney Tunes bank robbery had you just done to have four hundred dollars in small coins?

It was all of Bean's money they'd been collecting over the years. Well remembered, he just spills change everywhere, never picks it up and I was unemployed. So I thought I'm going to try and contribute to this little domestic economy. Who's beaten my record then? Yeah. What is it? 2000 I'm going to say. No, the record is $13,084.59. Wow. I'm going to bring behind that person. There was a man in Alabama and he had to have all of his coins delivered to the bank to

do this because obviously there were so many of them he couldn't carry them and it took seven hours to count them all and his collection weighed more than 4.5 tonnes. My goodness. Why did he stop? The fool. Yes, what a weird again. That's an inside out logic. I would have gone for why did he stop? It does feel like perhaps there was someone else in his house who asked him to do it. Yeah fair enough. Have you guys heard of Christopher Ironside? He was the designer behind the first decimal coins that we had in 1969 in the UK right and so

so he designed the 50p that was the first thing that he designed all of the coins. I'm so sorry I think it was 71. Maybe he designed them. No, there was some that came out early. 71 was decimalization, but there were a few earlier decimal coins. Right, that's confusing. That is confusing. I mean, the whole decimalization thing sounds confusing to be fair.

You would have loved the Daily Mail in 1971. Why aren't there 240 anymore? But so there was sort of an announcement that Britain was gonna be heading this way But the Royal Mint didn't say who was designing the coins But they had picked this guy Christopher Ironside and he had to do it in secrecy from 1962 all the way to 1968 Now you would think they gave him an office to go and do it in that he could do it in secrecy if it was such A big deal they didn't he had to do it in his house. He had his mother living in the house

He had a daughter living in the house. He had two young kids on the way. He had a small house. So he had nowhere to do it. And they're constantly at risk of discovering the big secret, which is that he's working that task at the same time. He's designing. All you need is a desk. Exactly. And he wanted me...

There's the voice of big mint over here. They could give him a room in the building, I would say. Exactly. I'm not saying they couldn't do that, but I'm just saying that the fact that he's working from home, like many of us does today. Yeah, yeah. But if I was working from home and I couldn't let my wife find out that I was working on a podcast, it might be tricky.

Would it? Yeah. Yeah. What's this microphone for? Well, she's at home because she's got two kids on the way. And she's finding drawings of 50p coins around the place. She's saying, what's this? Uh, uh, uh, uh, it's nothing. So I think she, I think she gets into it because she becomes the model for Britannica on the

back of the 50p coin. Her name was Jean and we were talking last week about Uma Thurman's grandmother. Well, we now know who was basically the model for Britannica, but he had to hide it from all his friends who would come over and so on. So he had a big cloth that he would put over his desk. What did he claim he was doing? Did he say he was a spy? It kind of felt like it. It just doesn't feel hard to hide drawing a picture of Britannica.

No, he was making the moulds. He was doing all the moulds. Do you know how big a coin is? Totally, but like, you know. I think this guy had a rough time. I do, I've got to say. I want to know why it took him six years to design. What, like five coins? Because he was constantly trying to hide his tiny moulds everywhere. I think it was because he reports into the office every quarter, no sorry, my mother-in-law came into the room just as I was making the moulds.

And I had to throw it out of the window into the garden. And then someone walked past the garden and I had to go and bury it in the garden. And then a fox dug it up, you see, that's the problem. So I will need another three years. I'm afraid to complete the moulds. They had to delay one of the coins because he found his daughter at the desk putting into the putty her knife or whatever and it completely ruined the coin. So they had to redesign the coin. His whole family, I imagine, is just going, darling, we don't care. It's something to

do with the coin. We couldn't care less. It's dinner time. Oh, that's so good. That's hilarious. Just very quickly before we go, crypto coins that exist include the Yeti coin, the Golf coin, the Mossland coin, the egregious fish token, and the AP wine coin. Get out! What? For me? They've minted a coin for me! It's a crypto coin, I'll explain later. Oh right, yes. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that, in theory, you can get a peanut allergy transplant. Oh, good.

Why would I want that? You wouldn't be asking for it. This would be an accidental transplant. So there's numerous papers out there. The one that I read was to do with a 31 year old woman. She had liver failure. So she had a liver transplant. And then after the operation, she was kissing her partner

and he had just eaten a peanut butter chocolate. And as a she rushed up and she said that's weird that's never happened before they went to the doctors and they worked out that she now had hypersensitivity to peanut hazelnut and pecan and They believe that that was new from post-transplant and then there are the multiple examples of people who have been Claiming to have had a peanut allergy post-transplant. That's very cool. Yeah. What a pain in the ass for those people. Peanut allergies? Did you say peanuts? It was definitely, it was either penis or peanuts.

Oh, peanuts. Sorry. No, no, I still want peanuts. There is a day of the year where in Canada, peanut allergy cases which trigger anaphylactic shock rise by 85%. Can you work out what that day of the year is? When they eat a lot of peanuts? Super Bowl? No, Canada. The World Series, baseball, the hockey. Hockey. It's not sport. When's a day when suddenly everyone eats a lot more

peanuts? Christmas. Christmas. It's the Canadian Peanut Christmas. When they all take flights and get them for free. That's right. When they go to the cinema, do they all go to the cinema one day of the year? Canadians only go to the cinema one day a year because it's quite sinful, so they try and limit it. It's National Peanut Day. Charles Schultz, was he Canadian?

Oh, these are such good guesses. Okay. Is it really obvious? It's not really obvious. Peanut-based confectionary gets eaten a lot more on one day of the year. Halloween, when they do triple-tree. Thank you, Halloween. It's not really obvious. Peanut-based confectionery gets eaten a lot more on one day of the year. Halloween, when they do triple treats. Halloween, thank you.

Halloween. It's Halloween. You get children going house to house, having a lot of confectionery. Maybe they didn't know they've got a peanut allergy, or maybe they're just excited and they have some unfamiliar confectionery, and they already knew about it.

But yeah, that's 85%. Easter is 60% rice. I guess chocolate containing peanuts. Yeah, it's amazing how much it's changed over the last 20 years or so, isn't it? It's bizarre. Like the number of people who are allergic to peanuts just 20 years ago is so much lower than it is. So much and no one really knows why. No 1995 to 2016 has been a fivefold increase in the UK and peanut allergies and more in other places. And yeah, as James says, we're not really sure why it's much more industrialized

countries could be to do with the fact that we are not getting as many parasites, they think. And I think the immune system uses a similar mechanism to fight parasites as it does to flare up in allergies. Yeah, we just don't know. But it's rocketing. It is definitely like the more that you live in a city, the more likely you are to have it. So seems like it's something to do with not being exposed to natural environments, possibly vitamin D, sunlight. Apparently people with a vitamin D deficiency are 11 times more

likely to have a peanut allergy. But that might not be that might be just that the two things are related to a third thing. We just don't know. Yeah. One way of stopping getting allergies is to desensitize yourself by having small amounts of it, right? This doesn't work in all cases, but it's a very common way of treating them. And for that reason, there's a new kind of toothpaste that's been invented, which has got little tiny, tiny, tiny bits of peanuts in it. Oh, that's brilliant.

And the idea is that you have this toothpaste and it desensitises your immune system to the allergens. Nut paste? Nut paste? Give your kids nut paste today. I think we can go back to the branding drawing board before we start printing the packets. Ironically, they all just get stuck in your teeth. So then you need to use an actual normal toothpaste to get rid of it, presumably. Yeah.

You can be of course allergic to peanuts. Penis. Penis, yeah. Post-orgasmic illness syndrome is where you get like flu-like symptoms, rashes, itching after sex. But it has been caused in a few cases by men being allergic to their own semen.

Their own? Their own semen. Their own? Their own semen. Oh no. There is a cure, thank God. What is the... Is it... We're back to nut paste, basically. We are, I'm afraid.

No. It's multiple subcutaneous injections of the semen in question. I think I'll just stay ill for life. Thank you very much. Yeah. So you get very, very tiny bits of the semen and you would inject it under the skin and your body would learn to. Not on your toothbrush.

Not on your toothbrush. Wow. Scientists get allergic to the thing they're researching quite frequently because you're exposed to it day after day. There was a great piece, I think it was the Atlantic, about a scientist called Brian Fry. He studies snake venom and has since become allergic not to venom, but to snakes in general. Really? Yeah. And if you, there's apparently the huge chance that if you work with something

all the time, you develop an allergy. 40% of vets, 45% of people who work with lab rodents get an allergy to them. There was a leech scientist called Danielle Decarle who uses herself as bait when she's trying to catch leeches out in the field. You know, she just walks through a swamp and gets them. She now, after a year or two, couldn't do it anymore. And her hands started sweating up massively if she was trying to feed leech in the lab on her blood. And she had to feed them pig blood instead.

That's weird though, isn't it? Because obviously you're supposed to sensitize yourself up until a certain point. Yeah. But maybe you can be overexposed. Like if I'm eating peanut butter on a daily basis and a lot, does that mean I eventually might then become sensitized? I read the article and it said 25 to 60 percent of people who work with insects become allergic to them. So people who work with bees might come out in hives. Right. Hey! Lovely. Now I think about it, people keep telling me that because I love milk and I drink milk a lot, that I will become allergic to milk by the amount of milk that I drink. I don't listen to those people.

Do you know who told me it was Ash Gardner? Oh, did he? Who did our theme tune for anybody who doesn't know, who stopped drinking milk because he thinks he became allergic from drinking so much as a kid. I think I'm right in saying that. There's an interesting thing where people who think they are allergic to things in double blind tests, quite a high percentage of people turn out not to be allergic to them after all. Right. Just on the quickly jumping back to allergy transplants and just the idea of things being

transplanted when you take in a body part from a donor. I read an article from a lady who said that her personality changed after a kidney transplant, where instead of reading celebrity trash and watching celebrity trash, she started reading Jane Austen. And that was purely off the back. From the kidney. She said she got a brainy kidney.

She said there's a pseudoscience theory, which is the idea that you inherit traits of a person that you might take something off. And there's so many exact... There's a guy called Dr. Hagen, who's an ER doctor who claims that he inherited a love of avocados and barbecues after he got a transplant. I don't know, maybe if your digestive system responds to certain food stuff seems more likely than liking trash magazines compared to Jane Austen. Yeah. To be fair to the adopter.

Yeah, fair enough. He got in contact with the family because it was like a murder trial that she'd been killed in. He went to the trial and the family took him in and they did prayers together and then he went back to their house and the sentence reads, he learned she loved avocados and barbecues. And that's such unusual things that people like that could only possibly have come from this ridiculous idea. He never used to cry during movies as well. As a surgeon, you're trained not to cry. And then after surgery, he kept crying and kept crying. And as well as learning that this lady loved avocados and barbecues, she was also an emotionally passionate woman.

But there's a doctor who believes that as a patient is about to go into surgery to receive the transplant, a few bit of details might come out about the person they're getting the transplant from. And they embed that in a really emotional moment before they're about to go down. And it goes into their psyche rather than it being a physical transplant. Imagine, by the way, the kidney that you're receiving comes from someone who loved avocado. Okay, go under. There is a lot that we obviously don't know at all. Like we've talked about fecal

transplants before and how you can actually transplant unexpected things in them. It is thought and then we're in very early days of fecal transplants. What changes with my personality if I get someone else's poo in me? Depends whose poo you get. Which one of our poo do you want? And then I'll tell you what you'll get. We'll save that for our therapy session after the show again. I think Andy mentioned on the show before that a mother who received a fecal transplant from her daughter suddenly became obese. And her daughter was obese. And because we really don't know... Okay, well that makes sense because it could be the microbes causing that, right?

That's right. There was someone else who received a fecal transplant who had had alopecia and not had any hair since they were six who suddenly grew hair again. And I suppose this is all like micro climate. There's a lot still to learn about it and who knows what little things it's affecting. I buy it. I buy it a lot. Okay, here's a way.

If you are a parent and you have a baby who has a dummy You can protect them against allergies. How do you do it? Never let them take the dummy out so no food could get into the mouth. That's right. That's right Can anyone think of a second method? I know the answers is because I've accidentally been doing it my all my three kids I've seen you doing it. Yeah. Oh, well that must be you sucking on the dummy as well. Yeah. Is it really? Yeah.

Dan still has a dummy. He doesn't like to admit it, but it's, no. Oh my God. Oh my God, Dan. For the listener, Dan has just got a dummy out of his pocket and popped it in. We assume it came out of his pocket. We can see where it came from.

It certainly came from below the table. That's incredibly, Dan, wow. That's really disturbing. It's weird how disturbing that is to see. Well, I didn't know I had it in my pocket until I was coming in this morning and I felt it and I was like, Oh, I've got Kit's dummy. What's he got of yours? Where's my research note?

That would explain so much. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the largest parasite in the world is a Christmas tree. Feels a bit political. Feels like you're saying Christmas is rubbish. Okay. Like it's feeding on ordinary families trying to make them spend their money on Christmas. Basically it's capitalism and capitalism is a parasite on the working- Good point. Christianity actually, organized religion of any form is a parasite on our society.

All right, put down your joints. Put down that old wacky-backy. Welcome to the Dadcast. This is a different kind of Christmas tree to what you might be thinking. It's the Australian Christmas tree and the Australian Christmas tree is different to our British Christmas trees. Upside down. It's not upside down. It's actually very beautiful. It's also known as the...

All the baubles are made of cork. They're not used as Christmas trees, we should add, in Australia. We use the classic Christmas tree in Australia. Yep. Yep. You Australians, I think, do use the classic Christmas tree. These are known as mungi or mojarr trees as well, but they get called the Australian Christmas tree because they flower in December. and they're endemic to Noongar County in Western Australia and they're really beautiful actually and they grow in very barren landscape and they're bright yellow flowers when they flower so

they're like you know fires all over the desert but they are also parasites and it's so amazing so their roots can steal from other plants that are up to 110 meters away by slithering under the ground to this other plant. And then the plant roots wraps around the other plant's root and then injects a spike into it and can just suck out all their nutrients. It's extraordinary. It's amazing.

It's so cool. It's actually- It's zombie stuff. It's tipped me over into believing in plant sentience now. No. Because this- You're always so skeptical about that Of it on the line, but this is just extraordinary what it does I the thing that tipped me over is that it's a beautiful looking tree

So even when they are cutting down areas where this tree grows They'll cut everything down but this hot tree that just looks so cool and then it feeds off the grass That's basically what it is. It's like that's a sexy tree. We're keeping that up. It's evolved to be, I assume, a good looking tree to the human eye. No. You assumed wrong, but it is amazing. It's striking what it does. It's pretty spooky stuff, if you don't mind me saying it. As in, it's so aggressive.

It's yet another bit of evidence of like, the Australian version of everything is much more lethal than the non-Australian version. So it'll attack power cables, it can slice through power cables because it's so powerful. This wraparound organ it has. Sometimes I read it steals juice from its own roots. Yes. That's embarrassing. That's a big one. So what it's trying to do is get the juice from the power cable because it thinks that's a route.

Yeah. Yes. Actually it's just... It's not just trying to contact its friends on the phone on the other side of Australia. Well, maybe it would be trying to contact aliens because there was one time there was a space tracking station in Western Australia which was connected by underground cables and it got into those as well. Wow.

Really? Yeah. And getting it from its own roots is an accident as well. It is an accident. Yeah. It just finds something else. So I'd never, I don't know if you guys had or the listener has, but I'd never heard of parasitic plants before, as in I didn't really recognize that this relies entirely on stealing

other juices from other places. I suppose the most famous one is mistletoe, of which this is a type of mistletoe, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, mistletoe famously just grows on other trees. Grows on other trees. Photosynthesis is not a thing for it, so it just relies entirely on it. But just the idea that this needs other living things to live is extraordinary.

It kind of, it explodes your 9 biology when you learn about how plants survive, when actually there are thousands of plants that aren't doing any of that shit. They're not bothering with all this complicated chemical equation with their leaves. They just jab into other plants. I think there are 4,000 species. Have you guys heard of Hydenora africana? No. According to one website I read, and I quote, no plant looks more like a labia than the Hydenora africana. This flower not only has teeth like traps to lure insects into leaving or picking up their pollen, but emits a feces-like

scent to attract dung beetles. Gosh. I just love that sentence. Nothing looks more like alabia and it has teeth that smells like feces. Yeah. That is a good riddle to ask. But yeah, this one sort of likes to attract dung beetles With its smell and a lot of those ones that are like really really smelly plants and they are also parasitic The daughter is amazing as well. Did you guys read about that one? Yeah, one's extraordinary stable and it's feet isn't it? Yeah, so this is a plant which is it's got no roots or leaves and It's sort of yellowy looking it sort of grows on other plants and it's sort of yellowy looking, it sort of grows on other plants and it's only got a lifespan of five to ten days without a host, right? So it needs to find a host in that time and it goes-

This is when the seed gets dispersed. Yeah, sorry, when the seed gets dispersed and it can sense where the closest best host is through the air, which is mad and then goes that way. Yeah, I can see why you're so sinister. Sentient! So sinister, Sedona. Sentient. No, it is, because we don't understand a lot of how they do this, so it is extraordinary.

It is amazing. And it's weird how pretty so many of them are. It's like if you came out in the morning with glisters. It's almost like they evolved just so that humans would like them. Thank you, James! I see. would like them. Thank you, James. Let's see. I love them. There's one which lives entirely inside the stems of plants, and this is a genus, Pylostiles, nicely described in 1948

by Australia's government botanist who is called Charles Gardner. Which is nice. And it's so pretty, so it just lives entirely inside a stem. You don't know it's there. It's just little threads. And then plops out for about a week of the year, again, like the one Dan described. And it's so pretty. And these white flowers come out all over the stem of a plant.

So you'd think, gosh, this plant's looking so pretty. And actually it's diseased. It's another plant. It's another plant. It's so weird. I love it. Did you guys hear about the Lodgepole Pine Dwarf Mistletoe? This is another...

So this is a kind of mistletoe. Most mistletoe seeds are dispersed... Oh, most kinds of mistletoe, they're dispersed by birds. Birds eat the berries and then they fly somewhere else and then they poo out the seeds and the seeds have a new environment to grow in. Not the Lodgepole Pine Dwarf Mistletoe. It spreads by explosions. It...

Basically, the seed... Each fruit has a single seed inside it which is covered in this very very sticky stuff. And then as the fruit matures the pressure builds and builds and builds inside it. And then eventually it just goes BWAH! I've seen these exploding cucumbers in Greece. Yeah. So they was growing almost like a weed and some steps but I noticed it and it almost like a weed and some steps, but I noticed it and it looks like a tiny little gherkin. And then if you prod it enough, it just explodes

and the seeds go everywhere. And they're really cool, but they don't go that far. But then it apologizes. Sorry, that's never happened before for me. Do you know why mistletoe seeds are sticky? Because they are when they're when they're dispersed. Partly because they have to grow from upper tree, which is kind of cool anyway, so to stick to the tree. But as you say, they're dispersed by birds pooing them out and then wiping them on trees. So what it requires is for the bird to poo, but this annoying sticky seed gets stuck to its anus. And so this bird's going, I've got this seed on my bum.

I just need to wipe it on something. And they wipe their bums on the tree branches. And that's what sticks into it. And also because they've wiped their bums on the trees and their bums had poo on them, then they have their own fertilizer. Lovely. So it's like the perfect, if you're a seed, you know, you'll be flown to the top of a tree. Yeah.

And you've been put exactly where you want with a load of fertilizer. It's a dream. So I just said when you said that I went clever, but I realized that's obviously humanizing it. Like what is it? What is that? If it's not clever, it's just what it is. It's just a random thing.

It's just over millions and millions of years, maybe even before humans existed, different things have been tried out. I don't think we invented sentience. I'm not playing with humans for all that long. Is ivy parasitic? No, that just crawls on stuff. If it just grows on something, it's not technically parasitic. It has to be stealing its resources like it's sad.

So it doesn't steal resources. It might not be particularly good for the thing that's growing on, but it's not parasitic. Yeah, it could weaken the tree and make it fall and so on. Do you know what it is which makes people really angry? It's orchids. Are parasitic? In fact, all orchids are parasitic. Another beauty. But another beaut! But this is something that is

vigorously denied by the American Orchid Society. It's so weird. So basically, there are a slightly different kind of parasite. They parasitise mycorrhizal fungi, which are those threads underground, those fungal threads underground. So all orchid seeds start off by parasitising the fungi because they're not born with the resources to grow properly. So they steal from this fungi at first.

Many of them do it for their whole lives. So the parasites, and yet on the FAQs page of the American Orchid Society, there's a question. Are orchids parasites? No, no, they're not. Go away. Stop asking questions. Absolutely not. Of the approximately 20,000 species of orchid, not one is parasitic. So how are they, how are they claiming that? Are they claiming that because it's hosted by the fungus that it's different to being hosted by a... I think that's the assumption. They don't address much like hearing a politician interviewed on the Today program. They're really very much just repeating this one point.

I don't think anyone wants to talk about parasites. No, people want to hear about the good work that I'm doing for the people of the underground. Exactly. I think I've been very down on sentient plants throughout this, but I do think fungi are evil. Oh yeah, that's a good point. There is a mushroom called Fusarium xyrophylum. This is amazing. So it will find a plant called the desirous plant and it will sterilize it so it can't make flowers. But it will then make its own flowers that look exactly like the normal ones, but they're made out of mushroom. Wow. Wow.

Isn't that amazing? Oh my God, like a tofu alternative. Exactly like that. It's a plant replacement food. So you might think you're getting a nice bunch from Interflora, but actually all those roses and lilies and whatever, they're all actually mushrooms. That reminds me of the show, Is It Cake? Yes, yes.

There should be a show called Is It Mushroom? It looks like a sofa. It's a mushroom. And then the final episode, it turns out the host is a mushroom. Yeah. It's a full month. You might think I'm the host, but in fact, I'm a parasite. That's very funny. I read, just related to that, this 2024 Bolton, where I'm from in Greater Manchester,

has been named the town of culture for Greater Manchester. But also this week, it was named as the moldiest town in the whole of the UK. And it just feels like they got the wrong meaning of the word culture. Okay, 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 all be found on our various social media accounts. I'm on at Tribeland on Instagram. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy? I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter M. And Anna, where can they get us all as a group? You can go to Twitter or on at no such thing or Instagram at no such thing as a fish, or you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or go to our website at no such thing as a fish or you can email podcast at qi.com Yep, or go to our website no such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there We have the doors to the secret club known as club fish. We put lots of bonus material up there It's a really fun place as a discord where all the listeners get to chat to each other

It's really worth checking out do that now and as you know, we are back on the road with our new tour, Thunder Nerds. We are going to be coming to a bunch of cities and towns around the UK, and then we're going down under to Australia and New Zealand. Get tickets now before it sells out, or otherwise just come back here next week. We'll be here with another episode, and we'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye.