The Gargle - Quantum sperm | Asteroid box | Spiderworm

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Debutant Pierre Novellie and Tom Neenan join host Alice Fraser for episode 135 of The Gargle - the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.All of the news, none of the politics!💦 Quantum sperm☄️ Asteroid container💣 Billionaire Zeppelin 🕸 Spiderworm silk🛌 ReviewsStory 1: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-caught-sperm-defying-one-of-the-major-laws-of-physicsStory 2: https://gizmodo.com/nasa-struggling-open-asteroid-sample-container-1850951047Story 3: https://spectrum.ieee.org/lta-airship-faa-clearanceStory 4: https://www.freethink.com/hard-tech/spider-dna-silkworms-kevlarHOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLE- Keep The Gargle alive and well by joining Team Bugle with a one-off payment, or become a Team Bugler or Super Bugler to receive extra bonus treats!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateCONTENTS0:00 Start02:16 Front cover04:45 Satirical cartoon08:20 Story 1: Scientists caught sperm defying one of the major laws of physics13:36 Ads15:20 Story 2: NASA is struggling to open its asteroid sample container21:43 Reviews24:25 Story 3: Google founder's airship gets FAA clearance32:32 Story 4: Adding spider DNA to silkworms creates silk stronger than Kevlar37:54 Bye / Anything to plug? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

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Acast.com This is a podcast from The Bugle. Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her son Jack. One day Jack's mother told him to sell their only cow and on the way to market Jack met a mysterious man who wanted to buy his cow for five magic beans. Jack took the deal and returned home to his mother who threw the beans out the window and raised her son's financial illiteracy for which she likely had only herself to blame. The next morning they looked out the window and a huge beanstalk had grown from the magic beans that reached from the ground to the clouds. Jack and his mother then sold tickets to passing pilgrims and tourists to view their cool bean monument

and sold knock-off bean sculptures with little googly eyes for $12 a pop and lived happily ever after. Sometimes Jack's mother asked him how he had known the beans were really magic, and he'd look out the mirror and say, it was something in the man's eyes. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was the gargle. Welcome to The Gargle, the sonic, glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world, a podcast that has all of the news and none of the politics. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Tom Neiman. Hello.

Hello, and Pierre Noveli, welcome. Hi, hi, hi. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. She said in a wavering voice, are you in a hotel room? Are we allowed to say that? It's an audio medium, but I'm seeing it visually. Yes, I think we do have

a YouTube version of this show available for people who like to ignore the visuals while they're listening to their podcasts. But yes, I'm in a hotel room in Melbourne. I'm here for a couple of days

and without my toddler, which is exciting. Oh, wow. Also very sad. It's a mix. Could you ask the hotel to send a toddler up, maybe, if you miss the sort of chaos they could send you one, a complimentary toddler?

Well, yeah. Today, for dinner, I ate some ramen and felt very bereft by having nobody to feed the bits to. All the good bits. Before we all sit around the communal hotpot that is this week's Top Stories, let's have a look at the front cover of this week's magazine. The front cover this week is Sam Bankman-Fried posing provocatively with an extremely cross-examination, conclusively demonstrating on every front

exactly the kind of smug, compulsively glib, rationalist, tap-dancing word jugglery that led him to think he could out-tango regulators, customers and the physics of business to the tune of $32 billion. On the bright side, his name will go down in history for terrible man-made disasters with mr ponzi sir pyramid and the hindenburg pierre have you been following ftx and the subsequent trial i've been following it as much as i can ever comprehend uh cryptocurrency and how on earth any

of this could happen um i i file it away in the same part of my brain as the fact that at least until recently people were paying millions of dollars for a JPEG of a monkey. So I sort of go, I accept it. I don't deny it. I go, oh, okay. I accept this reality because I must. I can't really do much more than accept it I just go oh yes okay I sort of feel like a kind of very out of touch and powerless king when news like

this happens so a courtier comes in and says sire the people are giving away all their money for pictures of apes I just have to go ah well i see i have no insight or is it just that it's too good to be true every time like if people just can't resist if someone just shows up and says why i've got a way that money can never stop and instead of thinking like i hope this isn't at the very least impossibly risky,

if not a scam like the last hundred times. And then they just fall for it. It just seems to work over and over again. Well, yes, I think you have a few different schools of thought when you're presented with this kind of opportunity, which is you can either be like, ah, well, suckers would fall for this, but if I get in before them,

I can sell this off to suckers before the whole thing collapses. Or you think this can't possibly be as stupid as it sounds, so I must be missing something, and you steer clear of it, thereby preserving all your money. Or you just buy it hook, line, and sinker, at which point you're the one left holding the bag of dogecoin or whatever the f**k this week and the satirical cartoon this week is a video of joe rogan shattering an arrow on a prototype of elon musk's new cyber truck uh sorry

that's not a satirical cartoon that's just a video elon musk posted this week on increasingly waterlogged and disinformation-clogged social media platform X. It's hard to do satire in times like this. Have you seen the video of Joe Rogan firing an arrow at a truck? Is that real? Yes.

Oh, my God. I believe the caption was actually Joe Rohan. Yes. He spelt it wrong, and I thought that was, at first, a very clever Tolkien reference, and then I remembered the writers of Rohan aren't archers. and I thought that was at first a very clever Tolkien reference and then I remembered the riders of Rohan aren't archers that doesn't make any sense was it to prove that the truck is

arrow proof? yes it was to prove that the truck was arrow proof Elon Musk contended or declared on with little kind of evidence that this kind of arrow shot from this distance, from this kind of bow, would have gone through a normal car.

I do wonder, like... It didn't go through the cyber truck. Are we stupid? Are we dumb for not wanting an arrowproof car? Do they know that a sort of Mad Max thingy is coming? In like five years, people will be like, wow. I mean, thank God we have an arrowproof car. Those wasteland raiders are sure hungry for our bags of crystallized sugar.

Well, I feel this is sort of a post hoc way of trying to make the Cybertruck look cool, which he has sort of failed to do on the kind of design front. Do you think he's forgotten that people can't just buy things if they vaguely look cool? I mean, they can, but they don't have the funds.

They're not as whimsical with their funds. They don't just go, oh, a cool truck, I'll buy that. It has to work. It has to be a car and sort of fit into a bracket where it matches sort of affordability and practicality that sweet spot that nothing at tesla do sort of seems to exist in exactly yeah because they're just you know which everything should just be whatever volvo or something yeah but no one that's not cool that's not exciting i want a um a motorproof harrier jet that's what i want just combine the two types of warfare we'll be engaging in in the future yeah i mean it'll add an extra spice to car ads rather than a slick new Italian sports car moving smoothly over landscapes followed by drones.

It'll be a sort of a clunky looking cyber machine jumping through obstacles and fighting off archers. They seem to want to make futuristic technology that's still like the computers in Alien, where it's like green text code on a massive thick screen like it's old futurism it's old futuristic it doesn't make any sense

I mean retrofuturism is the future of futurism Pierre get on board do they just never watch what happens to the really rich people in those films because Paul Reiser in Aliens and all these people

it never ends well for them and that's them they're not Paul Ripley they are Paul Reiser in his weird suit it brings me back to my central contention

about Elon Musk which is that we read the same sci-fi as teenagers we just disagree on who the heroes are and now it's time for our top story. Our top story this week is physics defying sperm news.

And this is quantum sperm news. This is the original pre-boot of Back to the Future, I assume. The news that sperm has seemingly been detected defying some of the laws of physics. Tom Neenan, you've met sperm before. Can you unpack this story for us? Only fleetingly. This is basically something that happens a lot when I'm on the gargle, which is I end up covering a story where I think the real truth is that a scientist was caught masturbating

and quickly had to find a reason to excuse themselves. So, yes, basically, it's it's it's it's Kanata Ishimoto, which is a mathematical scientist in Kyoto University and his colleagues. A point to add that say, right, OK, I'm going to try and get this right. say, right, okay, I'm going to try and get this right this exact quote, okay so it's the asymmetric interactions with animals behind them and the fluids that surround them forming a loophole of equal and opposite

forces that actually allow sperm to skirt Newton's third law of thermodynamics let's get it on that's the quote so basically it's that sperm can apparently go through things that that physically they should not be able to go through that they are able to somehow uh penetrate uh

sort of um different membranes that seemingly it would be impossible to do thus proving tom jones wrong that leaving your hat on is a legitimate form of contraception and they've been trying to work out why that is and it's something to do with sort of this odd motion I'm doing it with my hands which is pointless but that allows them basically

by sort of what is it again? Animals behind them and the fluids that surround them forming a loophole of equal and opposite forces which then allows them to penetrate it so one sperm can't do it but when they're all acting in unison in this in this material that's when they're allowed to do it have i understood this correctly yeah so newton's third law is that that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and the way that sperm moves is what's called non-reciprocal which you don't want to bring into the bedroom as a principle but it doesn't seem to cause a kind of a backlash um in the material through

which they uh move in concert um pierre yeah they've got the um the weird wiggly uh tails that have like the article uses the word motility a lot. Basically, they move in a kind of flailing spiral that means that they don't get stuck in the gloop. You should get stuck in gloop if you're in gloop. That's one of Newton's laws was gloop. If you're in gloop, you should be stuck. That was one of his big first discoveries when some sperm fell on his head

and he realized that it shouldn't be able to move like that so these uh so they're called non-reciprocal interactions and they tend to show up in unruly systems that seem to defy these laws of physics so flocking birds can do it particles in fluid uh swimming sperm bros on a podcast, all of them can manage to kind of defy the normal consequences of their actions. I got the impression that there was a... He was talking about two things where like a murmuration of starlings

creates like air currents and stuff that keeps energy in the system, but also that the tail of the sperm specifically was moving in such a way that it didn't have any energy transfer lost to the sort of fluid around it. So it might be able to do it on its own, even. Oh, I assumed it was like a group activity. Something about how they can't even quite reproduce the weird kind of jointed and unjointed at the same time tail action of these little these little guys It's amazing that

they're such a feat of engineering given how basic they are, given that they sort of, you can't whittle human beings down to a more basic form of life and yet it's baffling scientists Of all the things that you can't reproduce you'd think sperm wouldn't be one of them.

If anything, we have surfeits of it. We're drowning in the stuff. I don't know about your Saturday night, Tom. Yeah, but Tom, I think you're right. I think this guy just had some sperm on his hand and someone dusted it. He was in a position to looking at his hand and sort of going, Ha! That was how he opened.

He opened by going, Ha! I'm glad you're here, actually. Actually, I've got a question for you. You see this? You see this? How do they do that? Are you f***ing a microscope Or are you just happy to see A non-rational interaction

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Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships houses divided corporate rivalry and a performance enhancing broom it was a year i'd like to forget broom gate available now a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Space news now. And this is the news that what astronauts really need is a big man with strong grip as far as i can tell uh apparently nasa is struggling to open a sample container uh with asteroid bits

in it um pierre novely you know how to open a jar can you unpack this story for us yeah so basically um nasa sent up a uh a craft to take samples from an asteroid and organized it very carefully they're very careful at nasa they i would say they're almost excessively careful and they managed to get it so that the canister full of delicious asteroid rocks we presume delicious uh landed back on earth so they could open it and eat them and enjoy some fresh rocks from space but wouldn't you know it the container has jammed shut i think it was something to do with re-entry i couldn't quite uh uh figure out from the article i don't think they wanted to admit how they'd f***ed it. I think they were going, ah, space waves, maybe, or something.

What does it say? After multiple attempts at removal, the team discovered two of the 35 fasteners on the TAGSAM head could not be removed with current tools approved for use. They have to be careful, because otherwise the space rocks get all

up and not science anymore if you let space rocks get dirty they're not science anymore you have to go get more yeah they seem to be very carefully trying not to assign blame to any specific thing uh yeah francis mccubbin who's a curator at NASA, says the only problem is a great problem, and that's that we found a lot more sample than we're anticipating before even getting into the unit. And I just, I feel like that's the kind of words of someone who's really f***ed it. Yeah, they've gone, if anything, it's the jar is too full of delicious space rocks. And that is a great problem for us to have here because of how much we love at the very least discovering a way to justify the budget we've spent on getting these tiny rocks

back to earth so that we can look at them um it must be tense the budget meetings for these guys because the the numbers involved aren't impressive. And especially Americans love big numbers. You know, in their sports, in their politics. The missions, we exceeded the mission's goal of collecting 60 grams of debris from the asteroid. That's not an exciting amount of debris. What? Is there any exciting amount of debris? A thousand tons. A thousand amount of debris uh a thousand tons a thousand tons of

debris wow that's so much well done guys it feels like a bit of the problem that uh gene roddenberry set up with star trek which is that um part of the reason it was very difficult for the writers was that none of the central star trek cast could ever do anything that was like against the principles of Star Trek so it was kind of an extremely difficult problem to solve because they all had to be acting honorably at all times um and this idea that you can't get dirt on your dirt and you have to use a specifically approved tool so that you know you haven't got any dirt on your dirt uh so that you can properly examine the dirt, undirtied by dirt. It feels a little bit like you need to bring in

a kind of a Deep Space Nine scenario with external characters who can behave irrationally. Yeah, that's it. Have they considered the two go-tos for me, which are one, run it under the hot tap, and two, get your dad to do it? Because those are the two if you can't open something give your dad a call he'll sort it out is this not just proof that everyone who works

at nasa is a weak nerd yeah i think that actually what they should do is go it's now a time capsule yeah it's a time capsule now only to be opened when nasa scientists aren't sort of cucked nerds yeah the astronauts refused to do it they were straight they're in the pub they're being cool they're like the jocks of nasa whereas all the all the lab millhouses can't open this jar space dust it's embarrassing sending a book sending a bully that's what i say yeah those numbers up more debris or i'll i'll bully you that's the new strategy for nasa so the astronauts literally came back when we were on an asteroid we collected asteroid dirt we put it in here here you go your job is to open it yeah so they all sat there going, well, that is an insurmountable task you provided for us there.

They just said, hey, nerd, catch. And they threw it like an American football right at their chest. It was very embarrassing. Why are they looking at asteroids? Apart from science brackets general and progress brackets human. So that people can mine it for lithium so we can keep running our rechargeable batteries oh is it lithium again god was so horny for the billionaires you're all doing space missions because they seem cool and fun and not at all because they want to

own the moon yeah what happened to wanting to own the moon that was a good honest villain's ambition not just visiting it we've we've forgotten how to dream they want to mine the moon yeah i'm telling you hollow out the moon fill it with debris fill it with all crap from our planet all bobbleheads should i be concerned that um sort of a lot of the planet's future relies on sort of trend you know transferring to to batteries and things for electric cars. And so far, our plan for making more batteries is we hope that it randomly falls from the sky, that the material needed for it is just flying by us in space and we can pick it up. Because if it doesn't fly by us in space, we don't have enough.

And we have no plan for if we can't get any more. Our plan is space deliveroo. Fingers crossed. That was the dinosaurs' plan too. Second plan, get these spaceships nice and arrow-proof. Now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars tom what have you brought in for us this week um right well uh

yesterday was halloween uh in the uk and everywhere i think all hallows eve um and i don't usually get many visitors to my house but i i thought i'd go all out uh yesterday so i put the little jack-o'-lantern outside i got loads of sweets in and i prepared for visitors and i thought i would rate i didn't get many visitors but i'd rate the uh the visitors costumes that i got uh who came to my house so um number one ghost in hat a classic sheet with eye holes cut in it but accessorised with a wide brimmed sun hat added some much needed whimsy four stars vampire and toilet roll mummy who came as a pair

both passable, toilet roll mummy was sagging with moisture when it did reach my house three out of ten for those two girl of about ten who wore a Hogwarts uniform with werewolf ears and when I asked what she was replied, I don't know four stars who wore a Hogwarts uniform with werewolf ears. And when I asked what she was, replied, I don't know.

Four stars. Don't let anyone dim your spark. And finally, seven-year-old boy who was wearing a hoodie and jeans. And when I asked him what his costume was, no word of a lie, his dad stood behind him, said, he's me. And the dad was wearing the exact same outfit. Five stars, no notes.

That sounds wonderful. Pierre, what have you brought in for us? I would like to review getting an enormous reinforced mattress. That's what I've done. I had an old mattress. Every time I woke up, I woke up in a ditch. A ditch of my own mass's creation

my my i've got too much junk in my trunk i would wake up in a in a divot so i went on to a website that was genuinely called something like gorilla beds i ordered the kind of bed that they would make for a gorilla or a monster. And the address of the website, the email, was a Hotmail account. I got a reply from them far too quickly. But fair enough. I've got a mattress now that is largely bulletproof. And it has unf***ed my back.

Five out of five for the enormous gorilla beds. that is largely bulletproof and it has unf***ed my back. Five out of five for the enormous gorilla beds. Thank you to the presumably blacksmith who forged this insane bed. I mean, five out of five. Have you tried strapping it to your car and having Joe Rogan shoot an arrow at you? Speaking of billionaires, billionaire Zeppelin news now. Now that's the kind of billionaire I can get behind. Apparently, the new airship, which is funded by Sergey Brin

or Sergey Brin, has been approved for dominating our skies. Pierre Novelli, you've smoked a pipe and worn a top hat before. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. So basically, it's Zeppelin time again. We thought we were free from the terrifying raids of 1914 and 15 here in London. of 1914 and 15 here in London, but soon various Silicon Valley

lunatics will be piloting very slow, very dangerous craft. Bryn, he said he wants to develop these massive airships for humanitarian and cargo transport, which is a nice idea, but it's a very pre-helicopter way of

thinking about stuff i think we very much have helicopters that can do the same thing and much faster and also correct me if i'm wrong but we are running out of helium so i don't know if it's it's a good idea to transition to a series of enormous helium-filled balls that fly around instead of just helicopters. And I know that that's not maybe, I don't know. Is it greener? Is it really greener? I don't know if it is greener, Pierre, but I think it is definitely funnier if all of the people

who make any announcements about it have just first had a lung full of helium. That's true. Yeah, that's true. And they can say the word hello over and over again. Yeah, it's got electric motors and it's filled with helium and it's f***ing massive. And he's going to fly it around Silicon Valley and bits of Ohio apparently as well.

And he seems to want us to believe that this is for something and I do not. I think this is because he was bored and Zeppelins are cool and I'm glad. I think it represents a return to the proper

top hat and cape level villain style thinking. I think that's good for silicon valley i think we're all bored of the iron man version of of villainy that we've been uh uh enduring i think this would go back to sort of um tying a screaming lady to a railway line um a big zeppelin um jack the Ripper, foiling Sherlock Holmes, things like that.

I think we're going to get back to writing a letter in invisible ink with a big quill. Tell you what works really well as invisible ink and can also defy physics. No? A big inkwell of jizz that's what's good that's a cut from one of the Sherlock Holmes

mysteries this isn't just jizz Watson it's Dutch jizz from a left-handed red-headed he was facing north when he ejaculated. You can see here. There really is nothing to the story for us as humans,

but it is another way for this guy to escape angry mobs, so that is good. I think that's what he meant by humanitarian aid. There's something about the rich and Zeppelins that I find inherently funny. To the extent that while it was a tragic loss of life, the Hindenburg...

The thing about the Hindenburg is, it was a big bomb. And the big bomb that everyone ate dinner on. And one day the big bomb exploded. And they had the audacity to call it the humanity, when what they should have been saying was, oh, that thing that was definitely going to happen has happened.

The big bomb exploded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They should have shouted. Do you think... Yeah. There's an exhibit at the... There was an exhibit at one point at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, probably about 10 or 15 years ago, but it has stuck in my mind.

It was a homemade dune buggy in which a group of young men had crossed um i think the sahara desert and uh unfortunately in a tragic accident one uh load of the dune buggy young men had not made it across the sahara desert and they said it was a tragic accident and i thought that's not the phrase yeah like i feel like a tragic homemade dune buggy accident in the middle of the sahara desert is not i can't feel like tragical accident is wrong there yeah whatever happened to perished in the attempt that was the that's the victorian adventurous phrase it's no like oh he had a terrible accident on mount everest no no no it perished in the attempt they were doing a crazy brave thing and you know it went wrong and that's that's the phrase i was

looking for pierre thank you that's been bugging me for about 15 years. What do you think is the amount of money that your bank account reaches where you start sort of going, ah, and building Zeppelins and making all these plans to have dinner on a bomb? What's the amount of money where you start to live your life like someone in a cartoon lighting a stick of dynamite as if it's a cigar i think it's the second that it's the second it's a swimmable amount of money the second that you can you can dive into it and it's it's swimmable you know we're now on oh you mean you mean mcduck's number yeah that's the mathematical equation yeah mcduck's number

any amount of money is swimmable if you get enough inflation going. That would be tragic if, if Scrooge McDuck was living in, you know, sort of Weimar Germany. Naturally, he just, he just had a moderate income,

but he just cashed it all out in pennies. That would be really sad. Yeah. Not enough, not enough, not enough Zeppelins in Zimbabwe for that to be true. We need a whole lot more Zeppelins in Zim. Not to sound like even more of a nerd than the person who made quite a specific Star Trek writing reference earlier in this podcast,

but I quite like the addendum here that is corrected at the end here to say the this story was updated to correct engineering details on the pathfinder one which is what this vehicle is called uh 3 000 titanium hubs the vehicle has not the 96 originally reported and 10 000 carbon fiber tubes not the 288 originally reported. And I like this clarification because unless you are actually building a Zeppelin, it means nothing to you. Like those numbers could have been, this doesn't clarify,

this doesn't give me a better vision of the Zeppelin. I was not misled by the previous numbers. I had no idea. Yeah, it's hard to imagine some kind of like rogue Zeppelin engineer, like the old fisherman in Jaws going, What? There's nowhere near enough carbon fiber. Those maniacs.

And starting to like ring them up and warn them. We're going to kill them all. It's going to be that big dinner eating bomb again. Screaming down the phone. It's definitely that correction was the the nerd the yes the sort of head zeppelin henchman saying uh no actually it's actually like 8 000 it's so many yeah it's loads actually you're really making me look like an idiot here but the plan's also revealed that there's a little two meter gap when rebels need to detonate the zeppelin they need to go down a trench and then

that's his weak point and horrifying man-made chimera news or spider worms uh this is the news that adding spider dna to silkworms creates silk stronger than kevlar uh tom neenan you always look very well dressed can you unpack this story for us thank you certainly i hate this story i hate spiders um why do i hate spiders because they've got eight legs doesn't sound that scary but do bear in mind that's the equivalent of um two tigers or four criminals so that is um yeah so basically they it's this form of science uh called a but hang on biomimetics is that correct am i saying that correctly um where they sort of they take bits of crazy bits of animals and they try and use the this sort of science behind how that animal does that thing

to sort of help with synthetic uh creation so they've got like examples here are shark inspired swimming trunks so that's fun uh gecko inspired adhesives i guess with the little finger things and uh from what i understand they've also used um the tail of a tigger um for for like uh industrial kind of um uh levers and things. So that's quite handy. That's what's in Pierre's mattress. Yeah. Tigger tails. We had to have a lot of them hunted.

The problem is that you can't breed them in captivity. They won't do it. So you have to keep a wild but maintained population for culling purposes. Which is sort of, yeah, it's controlled. But that's, you know, it's quite humane in that

sense. You just sort of thin out the herd every now and again of the tiggers. Yeah, you try and get the tiggers that are going to be killing each other in battles for dominance anyway. To return to the actual So this is the fact so yes spider silk

lovely spider silk if you combine silkworm if you splice the genes of a silkworm with the genes of a spider is this correct then you create a silk which is both very strong and spooky that is the most important thing.

And also it can withstand, obviously, a hit from an arrow. And we should be doing this more, but apparently spiders are very difficult to farm because they're very charming on a farm and they befriend pigs and then they die. And that's a fact I read in a book. Is that right? Heartbreakingly sad.

Yeah, they spend all their time writing messages instead of doing their job. Exactly. Can't be farmed. Basically, spider silk has all of these incredible properties. Tensile strength is phenomenal, but it's very hard to farm spiders because spiders are as scared of other spiders uh as you are and will attempt to

kill them immediately so it's very hard so they've either got to breed a spider with a silkworm to make a peaceable fat spider or they've got to somehow infuse spider silk making genomes into silkworms in order to produce spider quality silk um from inferior silkworm bottoms. And it seems like they're actually succeeding. They're getting these tensile strength fibers out of these silkworms that have 1.299 MPAs of toughness. Again, they could be saying anything, any string of letters or numbers, and I'd be like, ooh. Essentially silkworms

making silk that is six times as tough as kevlar and 10 times as strong as nylon um and would definitely resist an arrow even one from joe rogan is this to scale so like because i don't want to brag i can if i see a silkworm a little bit of string from a silkworm i can break it like yeah i've i've walked through spider webs with my face and i didn't get knocked on my ass yeah there's got to be a limit to this yeah i didn't always think that where they always go like there's nothing stronger than spider silk and you think i think i could cut it with a knife i think we're all missing the third step here which is where that once they've horrifyingly bred the spiders and the silkworms together then they will

breed uh the new mutant silkworm with an elephant yeah now we're talking yeah that goddamn elephant shooting ropes not in that way sorry that's right they're gonna put it right in the balls do you know a better way we're gonna look i don't want to jack off an elephant but if you've got a better way of making bulletproof material i'd like to hear it this is the same guy from the jizz story better way of making bulletproof material. I'd like to hear it. This is the same guy from the jizz story. This is the worst reboot of the Peter Parker. To be fair, I am waiting for scientists

to somehow harness the limitless energy of whacking off. We know it defies physics and it's incredibly strong. It is basically Peter Parker is in the elephant jism. Let's make it happen. And that brings us to the end of the show.

I'm flipping through the ad section at the back of the magazine. Pierre, have you got anything to plug? Yes. I'm on tour at the moment. Go on my Instagram

to see the remaining tour dates. But the last big one is Leicester Square Theatre on the 23rd of November. That's the last outing for this show. It's straight fresh from the fringe 2022 in small letters after the phrase fresh from the fringe. So that's your last chance to see it. If you're in London, 23rd of November,

why can't I just enjoy things at Leicester Square Theatre it's an excellent venue and you can get dumplings before or afterwards because you're in Chinatown yeah Tom Neenan have you got anything to plug?

just follow me on on Instagram rather than X because X is rubbish now so follow me on Instagram at TPNeenan there's the Sky short I did which is still

available on sky or on now tv if you want to find it it's called silo it stars the brilliant sunil patel and kyle smith bino uh so um among others so so check that out if you so wish that's it yeah happy with that that's it and thank you to our roving reporters this week if you'd like to send in a story to us at hello garglers on x or blue sky where we are the gargle i'm alice fraser you can find me online at patreon.com slash alice fraser i do weekly writers meeting uh salons and various other updates to my life it's a one-stop shop full of my stand-up specials podcasts and blogs you can get the Dancy Lagarde reader at unbound.com. If you type in Alice Fraser at unbound.com,

this is an Alice Fraser and Bugle Productions podcast. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. Andy Zaltzman has no official title, but just sort of loiters about in the spiritual background of this show. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle,

including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.