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

Episode Date: December 6, 2014

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

We run it on QI a few years ago. Yeah. Which was, there's no such thing as a fish. I mean there's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there. First paragraph, No Such Thing is a Fish.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this time from Brussels, Belgium. My name is Anne Shriver. I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves. It's Andy Murray, Anna Chazinski and James Harkin. And we also have a... special guest this evening, the great Levin Skyra. And once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Okay, fact number one, starting with you, Levin. Yes, my fact is that apparently ants' nests can get

infested by ants. Aren't all ants nest infested by ants just by definition? All the time, they go, where do they come from? No, there's a very small species of ants, and they're called a thief ants. They're smaller than a millimeter. And they live inside the walls of the nests of bigger ants. They just have small tunnels in the walls of ants' nests, and then they sit there and they wait, and when there's food around and there's no soldier ants, they sneak out, they steal the food, and then they run back into the wall, and the bigger ants cannot follow them because the tunnels are too small.

Wow, that's ingenious. How big were they? One millimeter. Yeah, a bit less than one millimeter, yeah. Wow. Are the other ants like, I don't know if I'm going crazy, but I think we have an ant problem. Yeah, they put poison around and tell the children,

Don't touch it! None of them can move. So hard to have a picnic in an ants nest. Yeah, so have they ever caught them? The thief ants. Yeah, no, I just mean, is it like a conspiracy theory in that world? I swear to God, they're here. Look where was that bit of crumb I brought back?

It's gone. Well, I think every now and then one of these soldier ants will actually catch one and eat it. Apparently, you all may have one of these colonies of ants in your home, and you won't know they're there because they're so small. And they can get into sealed packages of food again because they are so small. Wow. I read that the smallest species of ant are so small they could live inside the brain case of the largest species of ants. Wow.

Like a colony of them could. There's one kind of ant called the acorn ant, and they have an entire nest in one acorn. Whoa. So there's this small animal. It's called an acorn weevil, a very cute little bug. And it eats the inside of acorns when they're still on the tree. So it drills a little hole, and then it sucks out the inside, and then it falls down, and so there's a hollow acorn on the ground with a small hole inside.

And that's where these acorn ants go in, and they're basically. build an entire nest in one acorn. They're actually, they can be found around Belgium and England. So when you walk around and you see an oak and you just pick up acorns, you look for the ones that are in the wet ground and you crack them open like one in 100. We'll have a small nest of acorn ants in there. Wow. That's so cool. There's an ant, isn't there? Is it Brunei ants that when they're threatened, they're the ones that are the worker ants who are put on the front line and they explode their own heads so that they spill a sticky brain goo

to slow down. Who ever this is trying to attack them? What, they're like suicide ant bombers? Yeah, Camacazi ants. Wow. Yeah. There's a, James and I, we were talking about this on the train

on the way of... Okay, it's my favourite kind of ants. Okay, say it. This is great. My favourite kind of ants are called doorhead ants. And they're called doorhead hunts because their heads are doors. Yeah.

What do you mean? Every door in your house, that's a hand. No, they're called. have this amazing flat head. It's like a flat circle of their head, and they use it to plug holes in trees, and the other ants live inside that tree. What? Wait, wait, why do you need to plug a hole in? To stop other people from coming in. That's how doors work, and sorry. That's amazing. But it's so funny because it's just one of those cases of you're born and that's what you do.

Like, there's probably a door head ant sort of going, oh, I want to be a poet when I'm older dad. I'm afraid, son. I'm sorry, your father was a door. Grathe. Nothing else, not even a gate. So can I ask more about these tiny ants? Do they have any other homes outside of just infesting other nests, or is it just a really charmed life? Well, I think it's an easy life. I think they're also found outside of other nests, but they're always looking for food, and it's just the easiest thing.

Some of them live next to an ant's nest, so not inside the walls, but next to it, and have just one small tunnel going to the other nest just to go back and forth every now and then to the shop. Yeah. Have you heard there's a ant that has the quickest slam of jaws of all the animal kingdom? Is that... I think it's the trap door. It's the trapdoor ant. Yeah. A lot of door ants basically. Door-based ants. There's the swing door ant, there's the revolving door ant. That's good.

But what's really exciting about them is that they, so they can slam really quickly. I think I wrote it down, it was something like 230 kilometers an hour. That's just really quick. But what's really exciting is if they're being attacked, they can use it as an escape mechanism by slamming their mouth into the ground and just launching themselves completely away from their prey. I think what they do is they kind of bite the floor, don't they? And if the floor's hard enough, then it fires them off.

Yeah, that's amazing. Cool. Lobsters can swim backwards but not forwards. What? Lobsters can walk. Oh, I mean they're doing backstroke. No, they can walk forwards, but if they're in real trouble, they have their whole, they flip their tail under them. And that really, really fast.

And that sort of jets water backwards, and they are pushed back. So that's their escape mechanism. But they can never use it to swim forwards. It's really tragic. Wow. So they only have one swim stroke. Yeah. It's not the only thing they compete in.

And it's called escape, yeah. Anyway, sorry, ants. Apparently, in Panama, you can get ants to clean your house. So if you go out, they're army ants in Panama, so they all act en masse, thousands and thousands of them in one ant army. And if you leave your house at the right time, so you know when it's army ant season, then they come and they eat everything. So every crumb, every worm, every bit of dirt on your floor, they eat it. So there are people in Panama who say, we just go out for the day, come back at the end of the day, they've gone. Everything is clean.

They should have made the canal like that, shouldn't they? Just put a line of ants down just to bite it. That would have been quite cool. We've got to start using them. I think that's high risk. Really? Yeah, personally. You've got to make sure all your food's in very, very safe places.

Yeah, you're in trouble if you forget the dog, of course. Yeah, you've got a skeleton. There's a lemon ant that tastes of lemon that I didn't know about. If you lick it, it tastes like lemon. How can you lick an ant, a single ant? How can you look a bunch of them? You put them on a lolly. And they're really cool, so they rely on these shrubs to survive.

as their homes, and they're really good defenders of these shrubs, so if any other plants try to grow around them, then they kill them. So it's a really ideal kind of guard to have, which I quite like. Loyal, very loyal. Yeah. Are they any use for us for lemon drinks? Not unless you're a shrub. I haven't suspected that about you. If life gives you lemon ants.

I'm still stuck on this door edge, because I just love the idea that that's where he is all the time. And the only interaction he has is with the ants coming in and out. Hey, Mike, how's it going? pretty good. Gary, have a good day, mate. Yeah, catch you later. Wait, so it's not...

Is he a species event? Yeah. Or is it... Are all the ants in the colony, door ants, but only some of them are used as actual doors? That's right. They're called cephalotes,

and ants. And yeah, only of some of them are used by doors, as door, sorry. But some of them actually use their heads because they're kind of flatten around the top here, they can use them to float down if they want to jump out of a tree. It means that they won't...

I mean, ants wouldn't die if they fell anyway, would they? No. But it helps them to glide in which. whichever way they want. That's quite cool, isn't it? They're also parachute ants. Yeah. That's amazing. That's just bad marketing. When you're both a door and a parachute, don't call yourself a door.

Call yourself a parachute. Parachute, yeah, much cooler. You're right. Branding. They need work on branding. Apparently, seagulls in the UK have started behaving quite badly this year, and it's because they've been eating red ants, and the formic acid in red ants makes them drunk. And so seagulls have been crashing into buildings, and they've been a bit more vicious, stealing people's sandwiches, and they've been flying out in front of, of cars and it's because they're all pissed. Sounds British to me.

I was actually on drunk animals, which I never mentioned and we love. There was a story this week about Bohemian waxwing birds in Yukon in Canada and they've been getting really drunk on fermented berries this year. So the National Park in Canada, Yukon

Wildlife Sanctuary, has set up rehab centers for them. So if you see, they advertise over it, if you see one of these drunk birds, you've got to take it to the rehab center and say it's a drunk bird and they put it in this little cage and they let it sober up until it's responsible enough to be able to fly on its own again. That's amazing. You say they were eating berries?

Yeah. Okay, so there is a species of nematode worm that when it infects a certain type of ant, it makes that ass go bright red so it looks exactly like a berry. And so the birds come down and eat it and then get infected themselves and then the nematode goes out of the feces and then it does a whole system. That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. That is really amazing.

That's like the zombie ants, isn't it? Which I think we've covered on. I love zombie ants. So zombie ants are the ones where there's a, what do you call it? Not a mushroom. A fungus that spreads itself over the forest floor, doesn't it? And then it gets into the head of these ants and possesses them to climb high up the trees. And then they eat their brains from the inside out.

So they die high up this tree. And then the fungus grows out of their brains and spreads itself all over the forest floor again. And the process starts all over again. You have another zombie ant that it's caused. by the forest fly. So the forest fly, a very small fly, and it hovers over an ant, waits for the right moment, and then it dives down, and in the dive, it puts an egg in the neck of the ant. Then the egg will hatch, and the small larva will start eating the brain, and this ant will just start walking straight forward, not returning to the nest, just walking, walking, walking, and when it's,

when it has been walking long enough, the larva will release a chemical that makes a chemical that makes the neck solve away. So the head falls off. And then you have just an ant head lying there, and then the larva will live there and eat, and then form a cocoon. And then it flies out as a new forest fly, and it returns to the nest and attacks a new ant.

Oh, my God. Do they know about this? Are they aware? I just wonder, if you're like a quite balanced normal ant, you must be like going, what the hell is going on here? This guy's just walked forward. He's come back. He's attacked us.

This other guy thinks there's tiny little ant stealing our food. Make tastes of lemons. Frank's ass looks like a berry. We're out of control here. I just want to be a doll. Okay, we need to move on to fact number two, and that is Chazinsky. Yeah, my fact this week is that in Cambodia, a teenage girl's parents might build her a love hut, where her parents encourage her to sleep with as many boys as she wants until she finds the one that she likes.

This is in the Krung, it's K-R-E-U-N-G, Krueng tribe in Cambodia, which is in rural northern Cambodia. And basically, when a girl turns about 13, it's between the ages of 13 and 15, her parents say, okay, we understand that you want to be getting to know boys now, and it's often embarrassing for the boys to come and visit your house when your parents are there. So their parents is traditional for the parents to build her, this love hut, which is removed from the house away enough away and she sleeps there and boys come and visit her and different boys come every night

and they so a lot of the girls say sometimes they just stay up and talk but I guess you would say that when your parents ask and sometimes and they just do that until they find one who is their soulmate and apparently they say it takes on average 10 boys

for them to find their soulmate so that's the average incidentally I can see a bad Hollywood rom-com forming in your mind called Love Hut he's got a good name as well and you just know that Hugh Grant

is going to be the 10 boy oh there he is movie's going to be finished now as Hugh Grant but also the fact that the parents build it themselves and you know

when it's finished you have you get a tour you know and your father is going to like yes you know I built this and it's a stable and don't sit on that bit

it creaks a bit so and yeah Yeah, it's the exact opposite of what every other dad that I know would do. My dad would build that love hut for my sister and then stand outside and try to kick the ass of every person who try to come in. Yeah, with a shotgun. In the meantime, she's inviting boys in the house, you know. Look at my dad, he's still out there, no problem. I reckon he would build it with like the biggest, heaviest door ever, wouldn't he?

Just anything to stop them. Oh my God, in the ant world, the door would be one. They would never get to sleep. Hey, Mike, have fun in there. I hope she picks you. All right. I'll keep it closed. Oh, no. Until the 18th century, most people slept twice per night, and they took a two-hour break in between to smoke, have sex, or visit neighbours.

Or all three. You just have a wake copy. Well, what are three options again? I always forget. Which order should we do them tonight, dear? We haven't seen the neighbours for a while, haven't we? They used to advise that the best time to make love was after your first sleep in the era where it was two sleeps a night. The scientists in the 17th century said the time it's going to be most productive and enjoyable after sleep number one.

So it's first sleep to second sleep. It's because you're a bit refreshed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It makes sense. So it was when it got dark and no one had electricity and no one could afford candles. And so as soon as it got dark at eight in the evening, you just passed out nothing else to do.

And then you wake up at midnight and go, well... Should we check? Speaking of the darkness, do you know that people sleep 20 minutes longer on a night when there's a full moon compared to when there's not a full moon? No way. Yeah, way. How come? It's exhausting being a werewolf, though. Just speaking of Love Hutts, I found out before Nintendo made video games, they had a bunch of other products, one of which was that Nintendo used to run love hotels.

What's a love hotel? A love hotel. It's effectively a brothel, but done the Nintendo style. There are different levels. There's platforms. Everyone's dressed. Did someone order a plumber? And they also, like, to give you a kind of a sense of isolation and no contact with the people working in the actual hotel, they used to send the keys for rooms to you in the reception or in your room through pneumatic pipes like Mario like those you know the awesome green pipes it's for couples isn't it it's for people who are in it no no it's

also for prostitution and so on I miss that level in super Mario actually the keys get fed up to me so I can serve as my prostitute yeah I don't remember that I was in Tokyo last year and there's a district which is it has a lot of these love hotels in and I walked around it because it's really they're all built in weird fabulous styles like medieval European castles or one of them is looks like a robot they're bizarre buildings and um the reason i was just i stress i didn't enter any of them um the reason that they are popular is because um the average japanese flat is about two rooms i mean there are no love huts put it that way and it's very difficult to have a time as a couple by yourself and often three generations of a family live in the same flat and it's everyone's sort of

right next to each other so that it's kind of evolved out of the property market basically is why it happens so the reason i like the love hearts is because it's like a real it's an example i guess of gender roles being turned around a little bit and but so um a anthropologist called Fiona McGregor went there and interviewed all generations and they said the women are really independent and they know exactly what they want and there's a lot of equality and relationships between them. So I like examples of that. So there's the Bari tribe of Venezuela and other South American tribes believe that children can have more than one father. So again, promiscuity in women is quite common. And they'll say, you know, you'll say who's your child's father. And she's,

well, she was, it started with this guy. And then this guy came along a couple of months later and the sperm sloshed together, which is what they think. And the child is sort of a combination of a bunch of men. So again, you know, promiscuity, fine. You just wait till your dad's get home. You are in so much trouble. They used to think that the child would be able to get things from whoever they suckled from, didn't they? So they would get a wet nurse

who would be able to speak Greek in the hope that the child would suckle from that wet nurse and be able to speak Greek in the future. Yeah. How did that go? I can't speak Greek. You could walk up to a very beautiful Greek woman. So I'd like to learn Greek.

Guys, we need to move on. Does anyone have anything more they want to throw into this one? It was only in 2006 that the official Spanish siesta was cut down from three hours to one hour. Three hours until 2006 was the lunch break. Yeah.

But you'd stay at work until 10 in the evening, so it was also tough. Do you know they have world championships in siesta? No. No way. How do you win? They have them in... they look for very loud places like shopping malls

and then they put beds there and they just have the athletes come up and they just have a countdown and then go nap and then the guy who has who falls asleep fast and has the longest nap he's the winner is the world champion in siesta wow you can fake that yeah I guess so you can measure you can measure someone's asleep I think they probably works out it's not just the guy going are you sure okay we should move on

Andy Murray. My fact is that the longest canyon in the world is 50% longer than the Grand Canyon, and we didn't know about it until August last year. How did we miss it? Yeah, how can that be the case? Well, it is buried under 1.9 miles of ice, so, to be fair. But this is so cool. It's in Greenland, and the Grand Canyon is maybe 280 miles long, and this one is 460 miles long. And it could be even bigger. But we didn't know about it because it's under this huge ice sheet, which is so heavy that it's turned Greenland into a bowl,

a bowl-shaped country. And for ages, scientists had no idea why, if it's like a bowl with all this ice weighing down, surely there should be ice melting at the bottom, and there should be lakes under the ice sheet, but there aren't. And they couldn't find any with radar. So when they found this canyon,

which goes towards the sea, they think, oh, this must be how the water has been getting out and not causing the lakes to form. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. And last year, and no human has ever seen it, because when it happened, this canyon formed,

it was four million years ago, and we didn't exist. Wow. Can we break the ice and have a look, get tourists there? I mean... If we do... Well, if the ice goes, then the seas will rise by seven meters and we're all completely stuffed. Well, but that's a good question.

What would happen if all the ice on Greenland would melt? So ice that is... ice that is floating in sea water when it melts it doesn't make the sea level go up but all the ice that on that is on land masses such as greenland and antarctica will make the sea level go up but if you would only melt the ice that is on greenland then in Belgium and in england nothing would change and in iceland the sea level would go down by three meters because this ice sheet has so much gravity that it pulls the water towards Greenland. And when you melt it, the water level around Greenland will go down and then the rest of the world will go up. Wow. So like people like

the Seychelles are screwed or like Tuvalu or Nauru or Maldives. Yeah, they're all screwed. But we're fine. Yeah, there's one problem when the ice on Greenland melts, it probably starts melting to on Antarctica and that's a problem for us to. Yeah. Yeah. That is a problem. One thing I like about Greenland is this in Greenland, right? Yeah. is that... So Eric the Red was the guy who first founded,

made a European settlement on Greenland. And the reason he did that was because he'd been expelled from Iceland in around 985 AD for murdering one of his neighbours. And the reason he lived in Iceland

in the first place was because his father had been banished from Norway for committing manslaughter. So his family was constantly murdering people. But his son, Leif Eriksson, was actually the first European

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

And he was like, nope, we're going to Greenland. And he kept very detailed diaries of what it was. And it was North America, but he wouldn't let them get off. And he sailed up the whole coast of North America, eventually arrived in Greenland. And Lee Verroxen was like, you know that place you saw?

How did you find that? But yeah, first guy to go to America. The tallest trees on Greenland are two inches high. Two inches! That doesn't really consterned. It's a tree. It's a tree. It's a tree.

You need to have to be a tree, because I think it's more than two inches. They say, they have this similar in Iceland. They have very small trees. And there's a joke that they say, is it like, what do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland? And the answer is stand up. That's very good. They have birch trees that are about one meter, one meter high. But another fact about Greenland, there are no two towns in Greenland that are connected by road.

Oh. You cannot drive to another town. You have to go by boats or fly. There's no roads between towns. That is a pain. Yeah, it is. The other thing is about Greenland is if you look on a map, any kind of globe or whatever, you'll always have Newark, which is the capital, will always be on that map.

So we'll probably Godthab. So a few other places. Newark is the largest place. It's 19,000 people live there, which would be a village in the UK. But it's still on every globe. It's a tiny, tiny place, but it's still on every globe you would find. I find that quite interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. And if you look at like the 11th most populous city in the world is somewhere in China, that's on no globes because it's right next to Hong Kong. So why would you put it on? Wow. And that's got like probably, I don't know, 50 million people living there, not on any globes. And then this place has got 10,000, 19,000, and it's on every globe. Yeah.

It's quite cool that. There's a place, the most northerly point of Greenland is called a coffee club island. And it was named by a guy in honor of his coffee club. back in Denmark, I think he was Danish. He was called Large Cock. What? I know he wasn't. Was he? No, he was called Lauga Coch. But I'm going to call him Large Cock.

I'm sure everyone at school did as well. And he found this place. He called it Coffee Club Island. It's right on the northern tip. It's the northernmost point of land on all of Earth. It became quite famous. And then someone else went to look at it a few days later and found that there was actually another bit of land just over there. and it had been underwater when he'd been there

because the tide was so high. But the other place doesn't really have a name. They call it... I should call it Starbucks. That will get all the track. Coffee Club Island. Those are the days where you could just go and call things after your local Reading Club Bay.

The place where when they first went to Greenland, the only bay that was good for fishing that the two settlements fished in was called Disco Bay, which I quite like. Oh, that's great. This sounds like a fun place. Was it named after anything? No, well, it's in the language, so I guess.

Disco is Latin, but I can't remember what for? It's not related to that. It's, yeah, Viking talk of the 10th century. I don't know if you're fluent there. No. Disco is short for discotheque, and that was named after bibliotech, which is French for a library, and it was named because it's a place where you have discs like records. So a discotheque is a bibliotech, a bibliotech,

as a bibliotech is books and discotheque as discs. So actually a discotheque should be a place where everybody has to be quiet looking at vinyl, you know. Have you seen the Beatles album? Okay, speaking of Beatles, while we're on that. And canyons, as we were. There's a canyon in America, which I haven't written down the name of it, but there was a guy in America who was walking down there

who was called James Richards. And when he was walking down the canyon, he tripped, and he fell down quite a long way down the canyon, knocked himself unconscious and he says that he then woke up in a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up. There was a man called Jonas there who told him all about what happened with the Beatles. And when he returned to our world, he brought one of their tapes with him. And he has a website where he has the music of the Beatles because they never broke up in this parallel world. Wow.

Were they good after they didn't break up? Did they sound like a lunatic in the desert? Actually, one of the, so the Beatles started as the Quarrymen. And one of the members, Pete Chotton, he went on to become John Lennon and Yoko Ono's personal assistant. And years ago, there was an official biography by a guy called Hunter Davies who wrote about the Beatles in their time. And he went in and he revisited all these original characters from the Beatles. Pete Chotton now lives on an island somewhere off England. And when he was asked by Hunter Davies, how you doing?

He said, I'm really good. I'm actually back in contact with John. And they went, what do you mean? And he said, I had an American medium come, and she got me back in contact with John, and we're writing songs again. He, by the way, and the quarry men was the guy who played the washboard. Not even an instrument.

That's literally a kitchen item. Nobody does a washboard like, Pete, if he was from Birmingham. Can I just on the subject of canyons? Because when I think are canyons, I think a Grand Canyon. I immediately think of Evil Caneval. And Evil Caneval is extraordinary, because as far as I can tell from reading his career,

we all know Evil Caneval, right, the guy who tried to jump the Grand Canyon. He also was just one of the great stunt bike people of all time. Most people came, it turns out, just to watch him fail every time. And every single thing that he did, it was like, which bit do we want him to fall on? So one of his first... So actually, he started doing stunts for Honda. So why did people want him to fail? shall we not?

Because he kept surviving. So it was just fun to watch a man go, I'm jumping over two mountain lions and a cargo of rattlesnakes. And when he goes, he falls into the rattlesnakes and they all cheer. And that genuinely happens.

Well, because they're like, this man can't die. It's fine. We're going to enjoy. This is the weird fact about Evil Knievel. He practiced crashing more than he did landing. Well, that explains his problem. He was an interesting character.

I mean, he used to carry a cane around. and he carried inside the cane wild turkey, the alcohol, and he would drink it from his cane directly, and no one would see. And I thought... No one would see. What's he doing, philating that cane? I'm not an especially observant person, but if I saw someone walking with a cane and then drink from it,

I think I would sit up. Did he do that while he was riding? He was getting drunk while he was doing it. That's why he kept crashing. He kept trying to get the lid off the cane. There's an American car guy from the end. 500 or whatever called Dick Trickle. I always remember his name. I don't know why I remember his name. He used to, he liked to smoke and it was in, uh, must have been in the 50s or something.

And he had a helmet, uh, but he wanted to smoke while he was, um, riding. And so he would drill a hole in his helmet so he could get the cigarette through there and so he could smoke while he was driving. And I always wanted to run on QI. Why did Dick Trickle have a hole in his helmet? But they never let me do it. And we never will. In the Grand Canyon, do you know one of the most common cause of death is? Falling? Sort of. Not having enough to drink.

No, so I would have thought that. It's plane crashes. It's weirdly common. And in fact, so the reason the Federal Aviation Administration in America was set up, so like, I guess a safety overseer of air flights was because of the Grand Canyon. And there were two commercial flights used to, like, detour, to go over the Grand Canyon. So people could have a quick look. So there were two flights, I think, in 1956, they collided.

But also, I think it's a bit of a risk with a canyon. The airflow goes downwards. And so they have to clear airspace sometimes around a canyon now. So the biggest diamond mine in the world, which is somewhere in Africa, has airspace cleared around it because the downwards flow has pulled a bunch of helicopters into it. I say a bunch, too. It's enough to say, actually, let's not do this anymore. That's a planet eating helicopters. Guys, we need to move on, by the way.

I just mentioned the scariest crater in the world is in Turkmenistan. And do you guys know about this? The Darvaza Crater, which is also called the Door to Hell. Yeah, it's so terrifying. So it's where the Soviets were doing experiments there in, they were drilling for gas in the 1970s, and there was a leak, and essentially what happens was, noxious gases leaked out, and it set fire,

and it's been burning ever since. So for 40 years, 45 years now, it's been constantly on fire. and it's this huge crater and a guy descended into it last year. George Corunis had to wear a Kevlar suit and sort of abseiled down into it and

he said that he didn't know why anyone else hadn't done it before because once you're there there are no restrictions if you can find the right place you can drive out up get out of your car walk over the edge and jump right in if you want the choice is yours I'm so far the only person who's actually done that. I would have thought no one had done it because it's constantly

on fire Can I really quickly tell you about the first ever expedition through the Grand Canyon was by the American explorer Powell? And he was an incredible explorer. He had just one arm. He lost his other one in the Civil War. Never mentioned it. But they took four boats, and ten men went on this expedition.

Four of them died on the expedition. They had to throw food overboard. They lost boats. It was a terrible thing. On the first day, they threw away 200 kilos of bacon. because they thought it was slowing them down. And by the end they were eating moldy flour because they had no food left.

But the boats were called, these were the four names of the boats, maid of the canyon, Emma Dean, Kitty Clyde's sister, and no name. Just evidently that meeting, they just ran out of ideas after the first three. Two I am. Come on, let's go home. Come on, we've been here for four hours. We must be able to think of one more. Let's just go with no name.

Okay, let's move on. Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 2008, the University of Bath invented a 3D printer that could print a copy of itself. Within three minutes, that copy had copied itself to make a third copy, and today nobody knows how many of these printers exist in the world. That's so amazing. But they're going to take it over, aren't they? Oh, yeah. They're going to prints us to that.

What a way to go. This is one of the end-of-the-world scenarios. It's called the Greygoo. And it's not about 3D printers, but it's about nanorobots. So I think it was already mentioned by Feynman in the 60s. They were thinking about nano-robots that could reproduce themselves, because of course, nanobots are so small you need like millions of them. And there's, well, let's just build one that builds the others.

And then they had this idea like, okay, What if they break out of the laboratory and they just start collecting stuff? And so one of the end-of-the-world scenarios is that there would be some research center turning into a grey goo of nanorobots and it was just spread all over the world until we're a big ball of nanobobos. And if they feed off carbon, so they start eating all of us as well. I read a quote by someone saying that mankind's last great invention will be the first self-replicating intelligent machine. Basically, that's the end of us. But the idea with the grey goo is actually they would have to get their energy from somewhere.

So unless they could somehow be solar panel probably will probably be okay. Yeah, but we have invented the solar panel, James. I don't want to worry you. We've given them their tools. They can get their energy chemically, you know, like we digest food. Once we figured out, well, once we figured out how to build them that way, then we're doomed. Let's just not figure it out. There are some researchers, I'm not sure where they are, who have come up with this machine.

And they programmed it to get across a certain bit of land, which has got bumps or whatever. They 3D printed it. They made it walk. And then when it got somewhere or broke or whatever, then they fed that back into the computer and let it re kind of work itself out to try and make it a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. And that's kind of like a way of making evolution through computers. And that's happening right now, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Just so very quickly on the printer. So they've built a printer that can replicate itself. It sounds like it's really quick, and they sold that, and then someone else's replicated one. Yeah, so the idea is that they've sold a thousand of these printers that can print other 3D printers, and they assume that if you've bought one, you're probably making some yourself, and then you're probably giving them to someone else, et cetera, et cetera, so they don't know how many of the extra ones have been made. This was in 2008.

I was visiting, we have a very big 3D printing company here in Belgium called Materialize, and they do amazing stuff, and I was visiting them. And one of the great things they do is when a surgeon has to operate on a broken bone, he does the operation completely in virtual reality. So they take a scan of the bone, and then he puts it in the computer, and then he's just looking in the computer how to fit them back together, what the best points are to drill in the bones and put the titanium plate on it. And then they 3D print a template that he can use when he does the operation.

So he can do the operation super quick, just opening it up, clicking the plastic parts on the bone, pushing them together, and the holes where he has to drill are already there. So he just goes, click, click, puts it together, drill, drill, drill. The screw's inside, and he's finished. And everything was prepared in the computer. It's like an IKEA broken bone operation. Don't say it's like IKEA.

Five hours later. I think we're missing one part. Someone had a skull printed, didn't they recently? 3D printed a skull. But this is a weird thing that's been done. done with 3D printers. In Japan, they're having their fetuses 3D printed. So if you want to meet your baby before it comes out of you, you ask for a 3D printout. It's only about $800 for your fetus and it's 3D printed in a little see-through books. Wow. Yep. When will we be able to

3D print a person? An actual living person. Oh, they have Keanu Reeves. Oh, sorry. No, they genuinely have 3D printed a Keanu Reeves. No, but I want a proper one. I like a real human. I want a working kiotr. I don't want a working kiont. There were two life-size mannequins of two guys who were looking for girlfriends. And match.com, an online dating site, did 3D printouts of those guys that looked exactly like them, didn't look anything like them. And they put them in a shop window.

And the idea was that women would walk past and go, oh, I like the look of him. And then do they remain single? I don't know. But yeah, I guess so. Anna, you were talking about Japan and the fetus thing. There was a Japanese lady called Magumi Igarashi. She was arrested quite recently for distributing data that allowed recipients to make 3D prints of her genitals. And what she wanted to do was to model a kayak in the shape of her genitals.

What? She's an artist. She's an artist. That's no excuse. Now, her art is all about her body and making it more... Kayak like. Which is weird, actually. I just remember, the word kayak means men's boat.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there is another word for women's boats. So in the Olympics, the kayak should only be a men's event, and they should have a different name for the women's event. And yet, all the Eskimos are watching the Olympics. Women in the kayak. These men are very effeminate.

James's letter writing. campaign saying women should not be allowed to take part in the kayak event. So what's the resolution of the story? Oh, she was let go. Yeah, they arrested her and then they said, actually, we can't really arrest you for this. It was bad publicity for the government, so they let her go. Why kayak? Because it's kind of the right shape, I guess.

Well, here in Belgium we have. I think you need to see a doctor around. Let's move on. Oh, by the way, my favorite headline of the week, I read it in the 14 times. You just mentioned arrest, made me think of it. The headline was, police say quadruple amputee is armed and on the run. So initially, it was about 3D printed guitars. Yeah, so, no, actually, this fact is about 3D printers making themselves.

But originally, my fact was going to be that the band Claxons are doing guitar at the moment and all their guitars are made from 3D printers, which I think is pretty cool. That's really cool. Why did they do that? Just because it's cool? Well, they are cool. Hey, hey, hey, are they having a printed jam?

That's a very... That's good. No, they said earlier this year that they were going to do it, but they didn't think it was possible. And then some guys from the University of Sheffield, I think it was, came in and said, actually, we can do that. And they've made these 3D printed guitars,

and apparently they're really good. There's a firm in America which will make a, which will 3D print based on lots of photos of you and measurements, a model of your head, which is for your loved ones to keep your ashes in after you die. It's really, really creepy. It's so strange. And it says, hang on, there's a line from the company on the website. You will never again have to worry that you might forget what your loved one looked like when you invest in one of these custom-made very life. like cremation urns. Because we're all looking at photos of our loved ones going,

but what do they look like? Do you know NASA has started investing in 3D printers? I'm not surprised. Yeah, but what's really interesting is it's not just for items, because I think they already do that, where they print out stuff that they can use on the International Space Station and so on. They've started doing it for food.

So they've started printing pizzas. but what's amazing is it actually it looks like it's going to work and they're going to start feeding astronauts with this pizza and it says that you can it takes seven minutes to print a pizza Wow

It takes less than that to make a pizza Yeah but you're in space And then it goes like We're sorry but the tomato cartridge ran out And you go Oh God you put in a new cartridge I have to print a template now And then you go

A whole new sort of green-blueish pizza throw it away, a new one. But someone's working on a digital cookbook now. So 3D printing food? Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a thing. That's our future. Well, I have a bit of news for you.

When you buy pancakes in the supermarket, they are printed. What? Yeah. All pancakes in the supermarket are printed. What are you doing about? Of course, it's just in a factory. There's this big line running around entering the ovens. and the ink is coming out of extruders,

and they just print it on the... It would be easier for the companies now to make square pancakes, but nobody would buy them. The only reason they are round is because we're used to round pancakes. I would buy square pancakes, definitely. Yeah. But they're printed.

They can even make them with your name, you know, big long pancake that writes your name. Wow. Pancakes are printed, yeah. So I think they need to stop using the word printed. That's the problem, isn't it? Because we don't trust printers. We need to come up with a better word,

So they're printing organs now, or they think they're very close to printing organs. So they've print, they're having trouble with capillaries, I think, at the moment. But we can print tissue and, yeah, functioning blood vessels. But we know that printers screw up all the time. Wow. So I'm not trusting it. What if you get the wrong printer as well and you print out your thesis on the pancake maker? And then the dog literally eats your homework for a...

That's going to be a new thing. We need to wrap up, guys. Oh, really? Yeah, if you want to throw in... We were talking about having medical operations and guitars. This is where I went. Does anyone watch True Detective? Has anyone seen True Detective?

One of the guys in that, or he's also in CSI, recently played the guitar during brain surgery, and so he's one of those. And he did this Reddit AMA about it. Should we just quickly describe that? So when you're having brain surgery done, they need to know that everything's working properly. And so the way that some people do it, if you play guitar, is they'll be cutting your brain open their back and you'll be playing the whole time.

And if they make any mistakes, then you'll do something wrong with the guitar playing so they'll know that there's a mistake. Yeah, yeah. And he was on, so he did an AMA on Reddit, like an Ask Me Anything thing on Reddit. And first of all, I found it really weird because maybe the first 50 questions were, what was it like to work with Matthew McConaughey? How did you find true detective? Did you find you could identify with a character? And I had to do a command F for surgery, finally. But yeah, he described it as the worst thing ever, apparently, so if you ever thought brain surgery was going to be fun.

And he was asked to describe it further, and he said, sorry, it's like nothing else I know to compare it to. It's kind of like I'm in this club of brain surgery people and we're the only ones that understand it. I think that's quite a cool club. Wow. There's a, I think it was a Dutch brain surgeon who told that he had a similar operation,

like somebody staying conscious just to see if they didn't do anything wrong. And they were working in the brain and suddenly he said, hey, touch that bit again. And they said, what? Yeah, he said, the song November rain of Guns and Roses is right there. What? Yeah. And so they said, touch it again.

And they touched it. So yes, I'm hearing it now. No. Yeah, and this guy told this story. And then afterwards his colleague said, like, why didn't you cut it out? That's a horrible song. Yeah. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much you guys for coming here today.

If you want to get through to any of us to talk about the facts, if you're listening at home, you can get us on our Twitter, which is at QI Podcast, or you can get us all individually. I'm on at Schreiberland, Levin. Levin Scherer. James? At Egg-shaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast.com. Yep. And we're going to be back again next week with another episode.

just want to say thanks to the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium. This has been amazing. Also, the Free University of Brussels, who've helped us set up this whole thing. And to Nerdland, the new Levin Skyra TV show, which is going to be premiering in Belgium in February. And yeah, we're going to be back again next week with another episode and no such thing as a fish. Thanks so much. See you later. Goodbye.