The Gargle - Science special

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Science is the next theme in your mini-series of special episodes of The Gargle.James Colley and Tom Neenan join host Alice Fraser to get into the latest in science news, featuring:🦞 Self-cloning crayfish😧 Don't look back🔬 Fake papers🌏 Lost 'Atlantis'📝 Life hacksRemember to click Follow The Gargle in your podcast app to make sure you get every episode.If you enjoy the show leave a review, tell your friends, and share us on social media.To watch video versions of this and all other Bugle podcasts, head to the Bugle YouTube channel and hit subscribe.Would you like to help support The Gargle and other Bugle podcasts? I certainly would!You canMake a one-off donationJoin Team Bugle to get ad-free podcastsOr become a Super Bugler to also get exclusive podcasts and a limited edition episode of The Bugle on orange 12" vinyl. YES PLEASE!This week's stories:Story 1: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/invasive-marbled-crayfish-burlington-ontario-1.7081893?s=08Story 2: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/01/240118150638.htmStory 3: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00159-9Story 4: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/lost-atlantis-continent-off-australia-may-have-been-home-for-half-a-million-humans-70000-years-agoThis episode was presented and written by Alice Fraser, James Colley and Tom NeenanAnd produced by Ped Hunter, with executive production from Chris Skinner 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. The man before you has come from the future. His voice is grave, his eyes desperate. He comes from a time of endless suffering. Merciless armies have bathed the world in blood. His rebellion has no chance of winning the war. And so he has travelled to the past, to you,

to convince you not to invent the technology that will lead to the end of his world. To convince you not to invent stirrups. Without stirrups, the Mongol horde won't be unstoppable horse archers, they'll just be regular, stoppable, on-foot archers. He thanks you profusely before returning to the year 1225. You are far too late to solve his problem for him, but you offer him the best your age has. Hope that humanity will survive despite the rise of the Khans in the steppes. You give him the gift of the gargle. Welcome to the gargle. This is the Sonic Glossy Magazine, to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. All of the news, none of the politics.

And this is a science special edition with me, your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this edition, Tom Neenan and James Colley. Hello. I can't wait for the angry emails about the Mongols there. It's one of those things where you'd be surprised. Hordes of emails, you could say. They're not really an email-sending type, though, so I think you're okay. You would be surprised at how many people are pedantic about the Khans and the reasons for the technological rise of the Mongols. Before we straddle our sturdy step beasts and ride into the battle

that is this week's Top Stories, let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine. The front cover of this week's magazine at first glance is just a normal magazine cover, a beautiful woman in beautiful clothes. But wait, what's wrong with her hands and why does she have so many ears? Is this the new beauty standard you think, fingering a place on your face where some more ears could be?

And the headlines say, Celebrity face amalgamation, how to look your best without getting sued for copyright infringement. What not to eat? Which of these images is food, and celebrity nip slips you can make at home. The satirical cartoon this week is human astronauts arriving on an alien world addressing a gathering of the local aliens. The astronaut says, we come from another world to give you advanced technology.

It's called social media. It's sort of like the smallpox blankets of civilization. Dark. Yeah, that's what I'd do if I wanted to ruin someone and introduce social media. Do you know about the dark forest theory of alien interaction? The idea that the reason that you haven't interacted, like that humanity hasn't met with aliens the idea like this theory is that any sufficiently intelligent alien civilization that could

meet you would also understand that any other sufficiently intelligent alien civilization is a threat to their alien civilization so they decide to stay very very quiet about the fact that they're an advanced civilization while we are the only ones left traipsing through the galaxy going da da da da da here are our tv shows does that mean that at some point logan paul is going to discover um like some alien civilization in the dark forest by accident and then film it and then have to apologize for filming it, which is very on brand. Logan Paul has long since been replaced in the annals of Japanese tourism scandals by a guy called Johnny Somali,

who broke into a construction site in order to be obnoxious for his YouTube channel and then has recently been booted out of Japan after spending, I think, three or four months in jail, presumably regretting his desire to monetise being an arsehole. It would be pretty annoying for that to happen because this is the nation that saw a former PM assassinated and went, you know what, he's got a point, actually.

This assassin kind of crushed this assassination. It was ingenious. Well done. You know what? We're going to dissolve this guy's party. Good point, Assassin of Obay. Incredible. Have you ever struggled with your crayfish cloning themselves too much?

The top story for this week is how do you solve a problem like self-cloning crayfish in burlington ontario tom neenan uh you've seen you've seen the crayfish multiply can you unpack this story for us yes thank you um first of all props to the crayfish being able to clone themselves and they don't even have opposable thumbs like that is we it took us ages to clone one sheep whereas they have been cloning themselves it seems seems, for time immemorial. So well done. Basically, there's a problem.

And the problem is that crayfish can reproduce in this way. They then spread out and basically destroy the environment around them. Crayfish, if you will, are the white people of the crustacean world. And so they need to be stopped before, you know, they get ideas about their station. So basically basically they're finding a way of of like draining lakes and things like that stops these crayfish which reproduce it seems almost exclusively but via cloning uh although

i'm not sure how they check this because i can't tell the difference between one crayfish and another i know that's technically cray-ist. But anyway, the... So I'm not sure how they... I don't think it counts as craisism if it's accurate. Okay. They are indistinguishable from each other because they are genetically clones of one another. I'm sure they have their own personalities.

Yes, exactly. I hope so. So apparently this is how they've been doing it. And it's been exacerbated by the fact that people have been keeping crayfish as pets, which I think is, I can only assume that crayfish is a very low maintenance pet. Like that isn't one that's like, it's like really happy to see you when you get home and starts jumping up and everything or wants to share a bed with you or something. And I've never seen a crayfish roll over.

So I'm not sure they can be trained to do that. But yeah, crayfish are, so this is some kind of natural cloning i'm assuming i i'll be honest this is a science special i'm not so up on the science of how they do this if anyone wants to enlighten me on how to do it then i would be delighted to hear it oh well this is it's a little bit of a spoiler but um they're not actually cloning they're just all twins and um one of them goes in one end of the machine. The other one comes out the other end. It's a whole thing.

It doesn't really make as much sense as you want when you examine it. I don't think you're, you're racist though. This is like part of the problem. Like the, the scientists working on this said it took two years for them to ID successfully the first crayfish, which is in part because of a quirk of the crayfish species,

like this variant of their species, in which they never bring their wallets. Absolutely never bring a wallet wherever they're going. Makes them terrible to go out to dinner with. I would say if you're going out to dinner with a crayfish, put the crayfish in a tank, pull the lobster out, have dinner with a lobster now. Much nicer.

I think that's Jordanerson's whole shtick this like so you're right they started with pets it started as a german pet trade in the 90s which is amazing because you scratch the surface on any social problem and you find a german engineer mucking about we've had like so this happened a lot in australia with our own invasive species and you're right it also happened first with white people so it's interesting that these are kind of the precursors but they um they show up we have this invasive pest so um any australian listeners will know this anyone outside i don't care what you think uh but it's called the cane toad and um

so the cane toad uh is invasive pest uh probably the worst after the brother of the able toad and then they stack sorry and so we we came up with like a a quite like interesting scientific way to have to limit the spread of these things which is um you take a simple golf club and you give that to any teenager living on the border of new south wales and queensland and they stand on the new south wales side and they hit them back into the queensland side and some people would ask is this cruel but it's not technically cruel because the teenagers do enjoy it and i take a well and it's a crime that's being perpetrated against queensland so and if they're look if there are two people in a situation one enjoys it heaps and the other

not at all it kind of evens out to zero and i would love you to not apply that to any other situation but the one i just described i don't i saying it out loud now don't love that as a universal maxim but if one of them's a toad let's say okay see i'm irish so um you know my family originally from ireland so we the way we deal with pests is we get a fictional saint to drive them out uh which and i by the way i i've never investigated that what exactly the driving out of the snakes from Ireland actually constituted. I'd like to imagine it was a road trip and that Patrick was having to tolerate a load of like a mixtape of hisses or something

in order to get them over the border. But yeah, hey, whatever floats your boat, pest control wise, I guess. It's interesting that no other nation has the story of the saint that showed up with just a lot of snakes one day too many irish snakes showed up a ton of snakes yeah your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy do you need to kill someone but don't want to get out of bed are you less concerned with collateral damage than convenience? Then you need drone warfare. Drone warfare. What could go wrong?

And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by tools. Tools. Teeth for your hands. All technological progress is a straight line. The new is always better than the old. If you don't embrace all new technology, you're a Luddite. Don't be a Luddite. Buy the most transparent, disrupting, ever new source of hydration. Half a glass of water, now app enabled and on the blockchain. ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling

has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. 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 a cast.com and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com The blockchain is just what I call it when I freeze it into little ice cubes. Your next top story is the news that your memory of an event

is going to be way more traumatic than the lead-up to an event. James Colley, you understand this problem. As someone who's 39 weeks pregnant, I feel like I'm about to face this problem. But actually, I think with childbirth, your memory erases itself from hormones so that you make the same mistake again. So can you unpack this story for us?

Yeah, I also do imagine that the kid is going to end up being much more memorable than the event that they came from. I'm sure you'll have some moments of like, how did you show up here again? Oh, wait. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're never like, who's this person in my house? Why are you so small?

I found this fascinating. So I would like to dub this the Charlie Brown vindication principle because as he is lying in the ground, he remembers clearly being on the ground in pain. He remembers Lucy walking away with the football, but we cannot be certain he has a clear memory of all the events that led up to that moment. So therefore, if he falls into the trap again,

do you know what? That's not on us. This is a little bit of it. So part of this story is like that, based on like the analogy they use, it's like a true crime podcast. You're listening to a fact so shocking, it makes you pull the wheel and you crash.

And then you'll remember more about the crash than the lead up, which I would give a strong dirt rating because like, if I was in a horrific car crash because I was listening to a podcast, it shocked me itself. And you asked, how did that podcast start? You're asking the wrong question. We start with how are your bones is everyone alive well i think almost by definition if you're about to have an accident you're not paying attention

not to question the science here but it does feel like i do like though it does mean so our the part of the reasoning part this is our brain auto-edits traumatic moments. So our brains have their own little pet hunter at work being like, that didn't really work. Let's cut straight to the bit where you pissed yourself in a lecture theater. That's a random example that didn't happen. Your brain understands narrative construction. Cut to the action. Get into the middle.

Start in the middle of the scene. Don't give us all this lead up yeah exactly so does this mean so basically trauma can improve your memory is that right that is the worst like that's the application that a general he is in a war movie very very bad so basically if you're cramming for an exam or something, just have on like, I don't know, a top 10 worst gory moments from TikTok and just like make yourself watch it. Yeah, that's what you want to do. Break up immediately before a study session. Yeah. If this data carries through into more sort of persuasive results than this initial study,

it is going to mean that someone's not going to be able to say, I'm sorry, my grandmother died. That's why I need special consideration for this exam, because they'll be like, well, you should remember all of the facts. The more you loved her, the more you should learn. In fact, you really need a distinction on this. So grandma, time to run up and down the stairs. Yeah. Now it's time for our Life Hacks section. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review,

but because this is a special edition, we're asking our guest editors to bring in some life hacks for our listeners, ways to improve your life in the hackiest possible way. Tom Neenan, what have you brought in for us? Yes. Need money and need it quick. And all you have are some sheets of A4 paper and some old pens. Fear not. I've got a way of turning those old pens and those sheets of paper into cold, hard cash that you can spend immediately. Basically what you do, and I'm not sure if this works in australia but certainly in

the uk this is a culture that works brilliantly you find a high street with a lot of pubs on it you go into each pub uh with the paper and the pens and you say to people at tables um are you doing the quiz and they go i'll do the quiz um and then you collect money off them you give them a sheet of paper and a pen. You collect that from everyone in the pub, and then you leave the pub. You know what? No one's ever sad.

There's no, like, people do the quiz out of, you know, some sense of duty. When it doesn't happen, they're happy. You're happy you got the money. No one's any the worse off. You can make up to £400 a night using that technique. Oh, that's incredible. I know we're not giving reviews. it's not reviews but i give that a life hack a five star rating james what have you brought in what have you brought in for us as a life hack this is the kind of hack that um the mainstream doesn't want you to know about that

you won't learn at harvard business school and you won't learn it anywhere but the streets and here's what it is you can leave like when things are bad and they stink you can go like you know wheels were made for rolling mules were made to pack i've never seen a site that didn't look better looking back like if you're having a hard time just hightail it out there mr or mrs go what are they gonna do bring you back? Then go again. Consequences can only catch you if you have a fixed address. And let me be very clear. This is legal and financial advice from an expert, and I encourage you to apply this broadly to your own personal circumstances.

And if all goes wrong, you can try and call me on it. Good luck finding me, Bozo. I'm going to go. This is the original pitch for Jack Reacher James Cully just kept walking and now it's time for fake science news and this is the science news that a lot of science news is fake Tom Neenan yeah you are a very good painter and could probably forge a fake document. Can you unpack this story for us? Certainly. And I'll do it in a fitting style.

Whoa. Here's some information for you. Boy, oh boy. Turns out, get this. Whoa. That a lot of scientific journals, get this. What a shocking fact, are either not worth the paper they're printed on or contain a lot of padding. Oh boy, can you imagine? So much padding.

So that the content of these reports, whoo-wee, aren't actually... I'll stop that. Yeah, so apparently there's a crackdown on what they call poor quality or indeed fraudulent papers, which and these things called paper mills, which churn out loads of publications from from sort of institutions, I guess, in order to either inflate their sort of sense of or their standing academically. And and people there's a report that's being launched to kind of crack down on this and i can only hope that this report basically

is one of the worst written things that they get ai to write this report in like four days they publish it and it's really bad quality because that is the only way that it makes any sense um so yeah so i'm guessing that like a lot of these are just like, yeah, these are reports, documents, doctoral theses as well, that kind of thing be included in there, that just get churned out and they are absolute nonsense. And I, for one, can't wait to read every single one of them. It's so devastating because basically it's come from this very positive intention,

which was to measure how good academics are, which is sort of a thing that you can't really do because you don't know if someone's just going to stare out the window for 10 years smoking a pipe and then revolutionize their entire field. But the way that they decided to measure successful academia was by a number of papers put out in a number of places and then ranking those places as to whether they're good or not. So you could either write a very good paper and have accepted by a very good journal or you could churn out 1,000 pieces of dog shit and publish them in dog shit daily and thus boost the points for yourself and therefore for your university. And it's just led to, from every academic I've ever spoken to, just the absolute decline of academia across the board. I don't think anyone thinks this is a good thing. Nobody's having a good time,

except presumably the people who have started these fake journals that you have to pay to play in. James, have you published any fake papers recently? I've got to say, I did a physics degree and I turned in some bullshit. So if everyone could muddy the water on what actual science looks like, that would have really helped me out across this. It is very funny that after all of this crackdown on academia, the lack of funding, all of these new pushes and pressures we have, we've just gone to the idea that maybe, just maybe,

quantity is not better than quality. We should not have prioritised who could produce the most science. Perhaps the best science could be a better thing to focus on. The only problem I have with this is i don't trust this report because i'm not sure if this is one of the real journals or one of the fake journals i have never heard of no nature before and nature.com that's a fake link if i've ever seen one i'm not sure if this is happening at all i think this is a trap just to sell us, I suppose, nature. They're going to try and make you buy a tree.

I keep trying to talk producer Chris Skinner into giving me access to JSTOR, but apparently that's prohibitively expensive and only for institutions. Alice, you have to understand, there you did special ways you can apply for JSTOR, which is you message your uni student mates still and you trade that accreditation for, let's say, a Netflix, maybe a Disney Plus password. This is how academia was supposed to work. Just send them a photo of some property that you own and just seeing that will inspire them enough that they'll want to share it with you. At the moment

the only property I own is these four walls and they're made of curtains. And now it's time for our Lost Atlantis news! My favourite kind of news. If you ever listened to the last post and followed the story of New New Zealand, you will understand that I am obsessed with the idea of lost continents.

And there is a lost Atlantis continent off Australia that may have been home for half a million humans 70,000 years ago. And if you convert that into today's currency, that's at least 8 billion humans. So James Colley, you like putting your face underwater and seeing the marvels that there dwell. Can you unpack this story for us? It's a bit of a mixed case for me because my grandfather lost his continents and it was just really upsetting and disgusting for us all. But I've fallen for this before. They just want me to swim out there so they can steal my joggers. They're not getting my joggers.

But the idea is that there might have been a... This is something that we weirdly got taught about quite a bit, that there would be like some kind of land shelf, ice shelf between Indonesia and East Arnhem Land, which is in the northern territory kind of the top end of australia um that people could migrate over um there's like long histories in these cultures of of both sailing but also stories of walking and there's very interesting parts of um of this actual story which is like the idea that um part of the evidence for this is a major influx and increase in cave

paintings in east arnhem land after a certain point that would have happened during the migration uh that those cave paintings have different styles and it's particularly interesting because right now in this exact same area a mining operation multiple mining operations are destroying these cave paintings and melting the ice shelf so it's really like all right can we get as much information about this as we can real real quick because there are two elements that are very important to understand this story and i am not sure we're going to have them for long but the idea to me that atlantis is australian is the funniest thing in the world the addy cakes little lant. I'm just ducking over to Lost City of Lanty.

That would be fantastic. Firstly, wonderful news for the NRL, which needs to expand, has been looking towards Pacific nations. It would be wonderful to get another continent out there so we can get rugby league really to the stage it needs to be in this country, a truly national game.

I think it would be fantastic news for everyone who wants to take their little scooters back from their bali holiday that you could just ride that straight back i'm not just proposing that i like we dredge this we bring this back right yeah like that's the plan we don't just be like oh there was a city shame it's not there this is exactly what happened with seagull world in sydney everyone told me that there was Sega World, and you would go there, and Sonic the Hedgehog did a little musical, and then by the time I got to the city,

it wasn't there anymore, and everyone had already enjoyed it. Well, bring it back, is what I'm saying. I don't care if there's a lost new continent. Find me a new continent and put a Sega World on there. That's all I'm asking. Is that too much to ask? To clarify for the listener,

James Colley talking about NRL, which is Rugby League in Australia. There are various different codes of rugby that are played. You have Rugby League and Rugby Union and AFL. And generally there's considered to be a bit of a class division. Rugby League is considered a more working class man's sport. Rugby Union is considered a more sort of middle- to upper-class man's sport. And AFL is if you're in Melbourne.

That's the merchandise I have in arm's reach right now. There's the Blue Mountains Panther. This, interestingly, is a Panthers artwork that was made for Biggie Panthers. Look, it's somewhat of a passion project. This is a bobblehead of the Pope. That's unrelated. I'm sure the Pope would be a Panthers fan.

All I'm going to say is as someone who belongs to an island that recently kind of declared independence from a much bigger island with a lot more resources. It would be really handy if a bit of that like secret, you know, secret traversable land could be found in between, for instance, Dover and Calais, because I just can't help thinking if we were all technically part of the same landmass and maybe they relaxed a few of the, you know, sort of a few of the barriers to trade that would really help us out. So I don't know if there's a way of sharing this little bit of land that you have secretly

and maybe sort of raising it so it could be, so it is walkable. Then, yeah, we would really appreciate that right now, especially seeing as we're being battered by a storm as we speak, which will no doubt play merry havoc with our infrastructure. I mean, I'm looking forward to trying to raise this swath of land by boosting its self-esteem, just going and standing on the edge of Australia and shouting positive slogans. And that brings us to the end of this special edition of The Gargle. Do you have anything to plug, Tom Neenan? Follow me on Instagram at tpneenan.

And anything else you can buy the complete series of The Haunting, I think, on audiobook if you fancy doing that. I think that's by Penguin Books or Audible. Do it. It's so good. Oh, bless you. Yeah. So do that if you want to feel spooky in these long winter nights, then do that as well. Excellent. And James Colley, have you got anything to plug? I do. If you are in Australia right now, you can pick up this book, which is also being shown on audio format called The Next Big Thing.

It's a romantic comedy about the big things in Australia. I think you'll really enjoy it. It's also on Audible if you would like to listen to that. Read by someone called Miranda Tapsell, who I've heard is very good. So, yeah, check that out. Did you hear she was very good during your wedding vows to her? Oh, there, that's where it came up she is one of the all-time greats I

would call her a national treasure I would but she also has filmed something with Nicolas Cage and I worry about labelling her as a national

treasure in case he tries to take her you can find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser I'm currently if you're

listening to this on maternity leave so please uh throw some money my way i do i will be running my regular patreon events after a few weeks um and that's that includes two weekly writers meetings salons book clubs and various fun things as well as free access to all of my stand-up specials, podcasts and blogs. That's patreon.com slash alicefraser. Also, this is an Alice Fraser and Bugle podcast production. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. Your editor is Ped Hunter.

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.