Paul McCartney and eye yoga

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the absolutely brilliant science communicator Greg Foot. Now, I have known Greg for many, many years. He is really, I would say, one of the UK's premier fac t. checkers If you listen to BBC Radio 4, you might know him from the show Sliced Bread, where he looks at different products and claims and sees whether the science backs them up or not. But he has a brand new podcast. It's very exciting. It's called The Baby Fact Check. And it is something that I really wish I had about three years ago when I had a very young baby because, Greg is a new father himself, congratulations to him and his partner. And they have realized that there is so much information out there, so many claims from companies, from the internet, and Greg has decided to use his many, many skills to work out which of these claims are true and which of them are false. It's such a great idea, and he has done it absolutely brilliantly. So if you want to listen to that, then go to the baby fact check wherever you get your pod casts and in fact at the baby fact check is the place to go on Instagram to learn more. And if you want to know more about Greg in general, then go to Greg Foot, that's G-R-E-G-F-W-O-T .com and everything will be on there. On with the podcast. No, not on with the podcast. Hi James. Hi Andy. We have more news. One more exciting announcement. We are doing a little run of live shows. This summer we're going to the Royal Institution Venerable Home of Science and now us temporarily uh we're going to be in the lecture theatre it's amazing oh it's an amazing thing we did a show uh last year there and it was so much fun. It's such an amazing, historic, wonderful venue. It's where the Royal Institution Christmas lectures are and we are going to be there on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 25th of July. They're all at 7:30 p.m. Uh the one on the 21st is going to be live streamed and available on catch-up for two weeks. So please come on down, come and see us. Ruin the home of science and its reputation with our stupid jokes. Uh, if you want to get tickets, you can go to no such thingazafish.com slash RI Summer. Okay. Come and see the show. Come and see us. Can I do on with the podcast now? Yeah, yeah. On with the podcast Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here with James Harkin, Anna Tajzinski and Greg Foote. Hello. And once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. So, in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Greg. Tests have shown that a Volvo 240 used to be the best car with the right vibrations to calm down a crying baby. Wow. I was told this by one of the UK's leading infant crying academics, by the way. Oh wow. Yeah. Leading infant crying academics. He goes to all the annual crying conferences, he was telling me. You've come to the right place for jokes like that. Uh that is amazing. I think remembering back where I was three or four years ago when my baby was very young . If I heard this, I'd be straight onto auto car and fight myself at Volvo 240. Except you said used to. Have babies changed or have Volvos changed? Well I I was picturing the Volvo's that big old boxy car, isn't it, from late seventies, early nineties. I think cars have got quieter. I think they probably dampen their vibrations a little bit more as well. So um yeah. So James needs to go second hand. Do babies have a bigger carbon footprint than the rest of us because they're driving around in these massive old vault. Babies do have a big carbon footprint, don't they? Like and household pets as well. They say that those are two big changes you can make in your life that's going to massively increase your carbon footprint. Feed the dog to the baby and then you after so that's glad you went that way around. So um this is really so I d I didn't know about uh Volvos in particular, but I knew that vaguely vibrations help babies stop crying. And Honda announced in twenty twenty two, uh the big you know, Japanese car giant, they've developed they had developed a car specifically to stop babies crying. Mm. Yeah. But it was a small plush toy car. Which recreates the sound of the womb. Yeah, so I think that's what it comes down to. I was reading some science papers about it. Firstly, they call this rhythmic vestibular stimulation which I think is what got us into this problem in the first place. But it's all about the motion and the sound, supposedly being similar to what's in the womb. Maybe there's kind of the sound acting as white noise as well, um, to kind of calm the baby down. White noise is really interesting. Um I read about the first ever white noise machine. I don't know if you guys found this. No. Is it just static on a wireless? It's older. It's older. Do you want to guess? Oh ancient Egyptian. Pre uh like Sumerian linear. God damn it. It's definitely earlier than you might think. It's from 166 7 . And the first person to ever use a white noise machine was Pope Clement IX . And he suffered from bad insomnia. And so he commissioned an architect called Gian Lorenzo Bernini to come up with some way of helping him sleep and it was well known at the time that like flowing water could help you sleep and so uh Benini came up with this machine which had a rotating wheel, collected some paper, and it would just make this white noise and it worked. And the Pope slept like a baby. Well they do look like babies, don't they, most popes. So maybe that's why it works. Being the Pope used to be the absolute sweetest gig in the whole world, didn't it? Yeah. Just if the t if the modern Pope commissioned an architect to build a member sheet to help him sleep, everyone would say you've lost touch with the people. But back then you could I I I mean he does live in an Innoabrus Gold Palace. That's true, yeah, yeah, that's true. Which is decorated by the greatest artists of all time. Yeah, but he didn't commission. He got it on vintage. Yeah. So I've also been chatting to um various sleep experts recently and one I spoke to about white noise, and they said, Look, white noise can help mask noises in the house, like dogs barking, doorbells going, that sort of thing. Bit of advice: if you are going to use white noise around your baby, don't make it too loud, don't put it too close to the baby's cot. But then I had this really interesting chat with um Professor Helen Ball who's the director of the Durham University Sleep Lab. And she was saying should we really be encouraging babies to sleep more deeply and for longer? Because actually you need them to stay aro used and you don't want to blunt that arousal with something like white noise. On the other hand, if the baby's asleep, you can sleep. Yeah, yeah. That is exactly it. This is a huge problem I have with all parenting advice is it's very it's very baby focused. Um especially with babies waking up, you know, so many people online are like, oh teaching a baby to sleep through the night is actually quite unnatural. It's quite normal. And don't worry, it's healthy for your baby to be waking up every hour , is I don't give a shit. It's not healthy for me. And actually for the whole family, it's less healthy if the parents aren't fresh, right? Yeah. I mean there's definitely a trash there. So what baby needs and what you need. Yeah. Well, I've shown you what side I'm on. Well, you know, there were some advice for babies that would have worked for you as well, Anna, because it does seem like in the medieval times a lot of babies would drink wine. And in quite decent quantities as well. So there was a physician called Bartholomew Sheron Muller who was asked what should you do if you can't get your baby to stop drinking wine. Uh and well he said if you cannot get the child off wine, referring to red wine, uh then give it white wine. Uh well diluted and that will wean it off the red wine. And doesn't stain their teeth as well if They don't have teeth. Um so was it so it was diluted, but I mean still probably not best practice. Well I I think so, but now no, no. Colic drops, they used to be alcoholic. What was that? Colic drops used to be alcoholic. So colic is basically just a catch-old term for uncontrollable crying. Lots of crying. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and you used to get these drops that would help them and they would have alcohol, but s also opium sometimes, I think. Yeah, it doesn't fit in days. Um, there was something called Mrs. Winslow Soothing Syrup, which was basically morphine. Um but in the Ebus papyrus, which is one of the oldest papyruses from ancient Egypt that we have about medicine and stuff, they do say that you should um prevent the excessive crying of children by giving them opium. Wow. All of this would have been extremely effective. You can't deny it. And definitely not saying we should do it, but it would have worked. It's a bad idea. Yeah. But it would have worked. Who do you think is better at disting this is going to be a biased sample, but distinguishing their own babies' cries from other babies out of mothers and fathers. I'm gonna assume mothers. Evolutionarily. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is it is quite notable when you hear even like as older children, when they're all playing a load of them and your child cries, you can kind of notice it, can't you? Well, there you go, and you're not a mother, are you? No. Well there you go. So that's two um theories exploded in James's last point. Uh so it's not mothers particularly. It's just that mothers have always histor,ically in studies, been better at distinguishing their babies crying and much better because they've always spent more time with their babies. But if you do controlled studies, then it's just about how much time you spend with a kid. And so that's changing a lot. And actually, it doesn't even have to be your child . They ran a study where um non-parents were trained to identify a specific baby's cry, you know, hear it a few times, and then had to pick it out of a bunch of other cries that weren't that baby. And they were as good as the parents at doing it. Talking baby cries, have you heard that whole thing about how you can tell from the cry what is up with the baby? Like this is called the Dunstan baby language. And the idea is that there are particular cries for hunger, I'm sleep y, I'm gassy, lower gas or upper gas, different cry. And it was a big thing. I came across this because of social media. It was a clip from Oprah many years ago . And this lady was was on there explaining these cries. And I watched it and and I was like that's totally it my baby's doing that I've totally got it and I became this like baby cry detective for the next week trying to figure it out and then I spoke to the experts and the expert was like no oh great, thanks so much. Just doesn't work. Unless the parents have contextual information, it's not a thing. I th I mean I think that is the truth is that babies cry and you just basically try everything. Everything that's worked in the past, you try all those things until one of them works again. Yeah. And to save possible parents a lot of time, there is almost no reliable evidence on the best way to raise children at that age, because the studies have not been done. So there are good studies that say don't neglect to abuse your children, they have a bad time. But there aren't good studies that say if you um hold and stroke your child for eight hours a day as opposed to ten hours a day, they will grow up to be, you know, really independent. 'Cause it's just so hard to get any evidence with that level of detail enough of a sample size that it's across enough time. Um how babies keep crying is insane. Because babies can cry for hours and hours, right? And if if if one if any one of us were to scream for several hours, we would be in pain. Oh my god, how do they do it? Have you got that? Should we get them on the bagpipes? All babies are either Scottish or Australian. And they're really good. Um yeah, no one could you know you'd get um what is it called? Nodules. I mean you'd really you would serious injury. Like for instance a lot of um like metal singers. They do it for a little while and then they have terrible they have to have operations. But basically their vocal cords, babies' vocal cords, are physically just very different to adult vocal cords. They don't have stiffening ligaments and they're full of hyalururonic acid . So what that means the effect is that they're way more elastic and they absorb way more shock, which allows the baby to cry for hour after hour after hour. And it's part of the re it's not the whole reason, it's part of the reason they can't speak It's all too floppy. It's all too floppy, yeah, yeah. It's not the only reason they can't speak. They don't know anything yet. I've known a lot of people who speak very well who don't know anything. And Dan will be back next. No, no, no, it's not fair. It's not fair. Um yeah. Anyway, that's why they can screen for it for a long time. I'm so happy I know that because I always felt quite sorry for certain babies if they're left for prolonged periods crying because I think that must be really hurting them at this point, but no, I know they don't care. I'm afraid not . One of the favourite facts that I I came across recently in the baby fat check podcast that I've been making is that there's this really interesting bit of research looking at Italian bab ies and American babies. Now, Italian babies were found to say fewer words than American babies of the same age. Okay. However, when researchers actually looked into this, they saw that Italian babies use gestures way more than American babies. But they they say for words like eat and telephone and big and hot and good. And when they added up the number of spoken words and gestures from the Italian babies, it was the same number of spoken words from American babies. No way. How awesome is that. Italian American babies are a different thing as well. Don't mess with them. If you're trying to sort of reduce the amount that your baby cries in the early days, don't bother because they've done the one of the few reliable studies they have done is look to all societies, including hunter-gatherer societies, to see which babies cry more or less and it's basically exactly the same. In terms of frequency that a baby under three months will cry. I think three months, maybe under two months. So they cry for less long often in hunter gatherer societies, largely I think because hunter gatherers tend to pick them up, whereas often in our Western societies we leave them there. There is a cry curve that is univers al. Um on average I think babies increase their crying around week five to six until week eight when it starts to reduce. And researchers looked at 8, 600 babies and their cry levels. And they found that there were babies, even at the peak, that only cried 30 to 40 minutes in 24 hours. Super babies. Whereas others cried for seven hours out of every twenty-four hours. Spectrum. Yeah. And it's is is it just literally good luck or bad luck most of the time? Like it seems to me like you the number of people I know who have more than one child and one of them has been a perfect angel and then the other one has cried non-stop. Yeah. Is just it seems to be . I did read like you said that pretty much all societies are the same, but I did read one study that said that Danish babies cry less than other This is later on, so yes, you're you're absolutely right. This was just in the early days and then when the babies get older than six weeks or so then there is a big variation, isn't there? Yes, the Danes don't seem to cry. And we don't really know why the Danish children don't cry as much. Some people think that it's like cause Danish parents hold their children more, maybe it's genetics. Uh some people think it's because they have such good health care and long parental leave that the parents aren't stressed and it means that the parental stress isn't sort of impacting on the child. I've heard breastfeeding. Have you? I've heard breastfeeding. Andy, we're in the middle of something. sorry. You both superhero, but you can hear it from the other side of London, can't you? I must go. A woman is breastfeeding, but not being observed by a weird treasure. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Everyone, we'd like to let you know that this week we're sponsored by NordVPN. That is right. Now, VPN means virtual private network. It's a tool that creates an encrypted tunnel for your data. A secure tunnel. It protects your online identity, it hides your IP address and it allows you to enjoy increased security wherever you are in cyberspace. Absolutely. Wherever you are in actual space, you can be in your own secret tunnel in cyberspace. It does sound like the future. It sounds like the future, and in the future , I'm going on holiday. I will be in Montenegro next in a couple of weeks. While I'm there, I will download NordVPN so that I can get access to anything in the UK while I'm in Montenegro. So let's say the World Cup is on and I want to hear from the pundits on the British television, I'll be able to do it. Interesting. Well the good news, James, is everyone in your family will be able to do that too, because you can protect your whole household with one Nord VPN account, and that includes shared gadgets. If you would like to get involved with NordVPN, then you must go to NordVPN. That's N O R D VPN.com slash fish. And if you do that, you can get a two-year plan with four months extra. It's risk free with Nord's thirty day money back guarantee. That's right. NordVPN.com slash fish. Do it now. Stop the buggers. Stop the podcast. Hi everybody. Just to let you know we are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Andy, have you set up your website for the things that are not named after what you think they're going to be named after, but are actually named after a person with a strangely opposite name dot com yet. Well funny you ask, James, 'cause I've been having problems uh finding a designer willing to work on that. Yeah. I've had the ad out for ages and no one seems to think it's a good idea. Well, the way that you need to go is Squarespace because Squarespace is the place to go if you want to build a website. They have all sorts of amazing things. There are search engine optimization tools so that when people want to Google things that are named uh not after the the obvious seeming reason but for someone with the strangely opposite name, anyone Googling that phrase will be served my website first . Um I'll be able to sell things on that. There's just so much that Squarespace offers and they make it simple and easy. Absolutely. So if you would like to build your own website, then make sure you go to Squarespace and take advantage of this offer. If you go to Squarespace.com slash fish, you will get a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code FISH to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That's right. Did you know James the website was named after Sir Adrian Website, who created the first website in seventeen eighty two. Someone please help me. On with the podcast. Alright, time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is in 1654, a public competition was held between a team of 30 horses and a vacuum. Yeah. And the winner was The Vacuum. Was the competition who can suck up the most bits of dust from the carpet? Henry won. Um so this is an amazing thing. So when I said vacuum, I'm being trickstery. Uh it was a vacuum, not in the sense of a vacuum cleaner. It was just in the sense of a void in space. Like a vacuum with nothing in it, you know? That's all right. You didn't say the word cleaner. Nope. True. We'll accept it. Thank you, Anna. Um so this is a thing that's called the Magdeburg hemispheres. Die Magdeburger Halbkugel. Magdeburg City in Germany. I don't say what a hemisphere is. It's a hemisphere. But it's it's half a sphere. Half a sphere. Um it's the brain child of this guy called Otto von Geeriker who was crazy and I maybe we'll come on to him. Um but he was interested in the idea of the concept of a vacuum because people didn't really know what a vacuum was. And you know, um it all comes back to barometers. As it always does with you adding So you've got a glass tube full of mercury, right? And when the pressure drops because the weather's about to get turned bad, the mercury drops in the tube, right? But what goes in that gap? What is at the top? It can't be air because there's no way for air to get through the mercury. What is in there? And various people thought it was something called ether or there were all sorts of theories. And von Ger ke thought he'd experiment to find out. And in 1654, he created one of the first ever vacuums. He made these two iron hemispheres, sealed them neatly together, didn't attach them at all, apart from pumping the air out. And once he'd done that, really effec tively and you know closed the valve, nothing could pull these hemispheres apart. And he did this big public demonstration in front of the Emperor, I think, where two teams of 15 horses were attached to each one of these hemispheres and they tried their absolute hardest. This was entertainment. Have you ever come across these things, Greg? I don't have any horses, but Andy, I did bring you a present. Look at this! Oh my god! I brought you some mini Magdeburg spheres. I'm so excited. I have a lot of science props at home and I thought I must have some of these. So here you go, there's one half. Past to you. Okay. And now the seal that you can see inside. Yeah. Actually known as a mating rim . I've lubed up your mating rim and my mating rim. Let's put them together. Shall we leave? So please stay. So hang on. Okay. Let's place them together. Okay. Let me just attach this. This is the fiddly bit. Okay. I've got a rudimentary not vacuum pump, but a way to remove some of the air. So just put that on the end. Here we go. Okay, so Greg's kind of pulling on a trigger of like a it's like a gun-shaped rubber thing and he is presumably removing all the air between these. Close the valve. Okay. Okay, so now we've pulled out quite a lot of the air that's inside the spheres. I'm so excited. You bring your best 15 horsepower. I'll bring my best 15 horses. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Three, two, one, pool. Oh my god. It's not gonna happen. No. Wow. Oh my goodness. Once I open this and the air comes out, Oh my god. Love it. Although if Andy had just asked his wife to do it, it would have been fine. That is stunning. That's so cool. That is so cool, Greg. I love it. Look at that. Magdeburg hemispheres. You're welcome. Yeah. I guess we should say what causes them to stick is basically that the air pressure on the outside is pushing in so hard and 'cause there's nothing on the inside, there's nothing to push out. Right, exactly . Exactly. Yeah. You were simply pushing against atmosphere, aren't you? Yeah. It was controversial. Well, not controversial, but you know, no one thought he was right about this. And he until he died. Right. One of the ancients said nature appause a vacuum and the idea was if one ever came in nature, somehow something would fill it. Yeah. Right. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense, but it's not true. We can as we have seen right now, we can make them. But yeah, this guy this guy um von how do you say his name, Andy? Otto von Girke. Von Girke. He did this in Magdeburg and Magdeburg had very, very recently been the victim of the worst atrocity in the 30 Years' War, where the population went down from 20,000 to 4,000 due to an enormous massacre. And this public competition was almost like look, we're back guys. Like having the Olympics or something. A little bit like that. Yeah. It was like, you know, we've we've had a terrible time, but uh von Goerke was now the mayor, or kind of kind of the mayor, and he was saying, Well look, we can put on these big events of horses pulling things apart. Yeah. Isn't that weird? I was I was reading about this was fifteen horses versus fifteen horses. Someone tried it with sixteen. Someone tried it with seventeen over the coming years. Really? Didn't help. I wonder how many horses would be able to pull out part. It must be a limit, right? Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean I was looking at the maths. And apparently, if if he could achieve a full vacuum inside the hemispheres, it would have been held together with a force around twenty thousand newtons, which is the equivalent to lifting people say a car or small elephant. It depends on the type of elephant, if we want to be pedantic, which I know very much love to be. And the car? Cozy goop. Um there's a monument to him or to the spheres in Magdeburg now. Yeah. It's beautiful. It's just a it's a it's one of the sets of hemisphere's and a one horse at either end and they're they're straining away and they're you know it's not coming up. He was like I'm really surprised that his name doesn't come up more. Like it seems like he was absolutely massively important in loads and loads of physics, but just never got anything named after him. Yeah. It's a hard word to spell too. Is it a university? Oh, there's a university named after him. Oh, that's cool. But it's not like Pascal after whom the pressure is named after or He he did write this up in his book, which was only published in English in nineteen ninety four. Bloody publishers, you know. Great news, we've got a translation deal. What? You've been dead for three hundred and fifty years. Um guys, what do you think would happen if you got into a vacuum? Die. Yeah. Explode. Not necessarily. Well, not immediately. You would die very soon, but not as quickly as you might think. In the nineteen sixties, when it was more okay to do this kind of thing, they put various animals in vacuums to see what happened. Um, because they you know it was the age of space travel, they were thinking what will happen to humans if they end up accidentally. Um and so in 1965, they put dogs in a vacuum and they found that dogs in a vacuum for 90 seconds always survived. Always. Now they had a bad time. They would immediately fall unconscious, the gas evacuating from their whole bodies, because once you're in a vacuum, the gas wants to leave your body, cause simultaneous defecation, projectile vomiting, and urination, and they swelled up to resemble a massive balloon. But good news, once repressurized, they're fine after ten minutes. They'd be blind they were blind for a little bit longer. Jesus. But that's and they did the same with chimps in 1964. And they found that chimps could last 3.5 minutes. No way. And then within 72 minutes after recompression, they're fine. Again, they swelled up like a huge balloon, and then they were okay. So that's good to know if you do fall into a vacuum, you've got maybe ninety nine seconds. Well we think we're closer to chimps, so maybe three and a half minutes. Okay. The um first vacuum you were talking about was made like with barometers. I just bringing it back to barometers. It was by a guy called Torric elli, and Torricelli was also the first person to explain that wind is caused by changes in air temperature. Um so he's quite got it. People before that thought that wind was caused by dampness coming from the earth and causing stuff to blow around. But he also invented something called Torricelli's trumpet, right ? So this is it's a cone. Uh and the cone gets thinner as it goes along, and it gets thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner, but it goes on for infinity. So it's infinitely long. Did someone build this? It cannot be built. It's a theoretical cone. But the really interesting thing about it is also in the front row of the orchestra. The really interesting thing about it is that the um the surface area of the cone is infinite because it goes on forever. Okay. But you can show by maths that the volume is finite. You can work out what the actual volume is . And so that means that if you fill it with paint, you can have a finite amount of paint which covers an infinite amount of area. What? Away. No, no, no. Hang on. How's it the logical paradigm? It's going on forever. How can the volume be finite? Because the thing is going on . Yeah, does it eventually get tighter than an atom of paint? It's basically just a trick of um infinities. Okay. Okay. Okay. And it's a mathematical thing. It's theoretical, it can't exist. Right. That's amazing. And it's because basically you work out the the surface area by adding a load of things together until you get to infinity and you work out the volume by adding a load of things before you get to infinity and they're slightly different things and one of them ends up equaling infinity and the other one ends up equaling a finite number. It's a good prank as well for someone on their first day. Can you just go out and get some paint? No, we've got stripey paint. I need enough paint to paint the inside of what was this trumpet? Torricelli. Torricelli trumpet. Yeah. Just get down to being cute. Um on vacuums. Yeah. So one place which has one of the biggest vacuums I think in the whole world is CERN. Uh so large hadron collider, uh particle acceler ator, very, very big and exciting physics happening. And what they have to do, they have to have these enormous vacuum systems to clear the tubes so that the particles there's I'm simplifying, but it's put I'm at my maximum level, but I'm also I know I'm simplifying drastically so the particles don't smash into the wrong things. Yeah. Try to smash particles together. So it's about apparently it's about the s say that it's the the nave of a cathedral in volume that they have to completely empty out. Because it's a massive great ring, you know, it's but the volume is thousands and thousands of cubic metres. You get different size you get different size cathedrals, of course. This wasn't like a small plushy cathed ral. It wasn't. No. What a good point. Or at Saint Paul's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a like that's a medium cat all right. They have to have just the name, not the chancel. It could probably be the whole of a t tiny look, but they have to suck out a volume of air. Thank you, Greg. But basically, so they pump in this this extremely cold gas. It takes two weeks of pump pumping to get the gases that are inside the ring to condense and then adhere to the walls of the pipe by adsorption. So not absorption, adsorption, the sort of chemical attachment. And even after this huge amount of work they've done, the air inside the the the space they're trying to clear it still contains about three million molecules per cubic centimetre. Oh even after all that work and that's just because there are more molecules everywhere than you just can't get your head around them. You can't get your head around it 's in the way you have to say Avogadro. Oh yeah. Remember that from chemistry? Avogadro's. Avogadro's constant. Yeah. Something times ten to the twenty-three. Yeah. And it's you always have to add it to your equations to get the number of molecules and things. Oh right. Okay, thank you. Yeah, yeah. And basically it's the equivalent of being several hundred miles above the earth because the air you know, the the atmosphere th there is so much so much less up there, so many fewer molecules, but it's still not completely empty. Well this is because what would you guys say is the definition of a vacuum? Well, completely empty, I would say. Completely empty. So does it d is there never a real vacuum then? No, well basically never. And almost everything that we call a vacuum isn't even close. You know, when you're like vacuum-packed or um vacuum sealed or all of that stuff, vacuum cleaner. All of that stuff is like you just have to basically the definition of a vacuum is actually the air pressure on one side is lower than atmospheric air pressure. That's it. It doesn't mean empty. Oh, okay. So it just usually if you've taken out about seventy to ninety percent of the air, then that creates the vacuum. And so nothing it's all got air in it, hasn't it? Interesting. A vacuum cleaner doesn't suck, it blows. So there's a fan inside that blows air out of the machine. And as you've just said, that lowers the air pressure inside. So there's a pressure differential between the inside and the outs ide, the surrounding air then rushes in and it brings any little bits of dust and crud and whatever and toast on your kitchen floor into the vacuum cleaner. Clever. That's why you shouldn't backwards. 'Cause it just It fires it all backwards. Fires dust out. Yeah. That is really interesting. So what am I saying when I go into A and E and I have it attached to my penis in that it blew my penis into it? Okay, it's time for fact number three and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that volcanoes sometimes clean up after themselves. Good house guests. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking lava going back up Amazingly they suck, they don't blow. Um, no, so this is something that they found out from the Hunger Tonga Hunger Harper submarine volcano, which erupted in 2022 and basically blew up a lot of Tonga. It was an enormous volcano. It's one of the biggest we've had for many, many, many years. Uh, and scientists managed to do some studies about it and recently they found that it fired out all of this methane, okay, which would be very bad for global warming because it's a greenhouse gas. But at the same time as with firing it out, it fired out some other stuff which destroyed methane as well. Okay. So it fires out seaw ater uh mixed with ash and that can mix with sunlight to produce reactive chlorine atoms. I'm going on very much the edge of my understandings here. Uh and that helps to accelerate the decomposition of methane, which means the methane loses its hydrogen atoms, gets chlorine instead, turns into formaldehyde, which then turns into CO2 and water. Now the problem is that it does this on a huge scale, but not nearly as huge as the scale it does of blowing the stuff off. So it m releases overall about the annual emissions of methane of about two million cows. What this eruption did. Yeah. But it kind of cleans up around three hundredth of that per day, and it does it for about 10 days and then it stops. So there's still plenty of methane being sent up by them, but it does do some cleaning. And the interesting thing, as far as the researchers are concerned, is it's possible now that we've seen this happens in nature , it could be a way of us scrubbing methane out of the sky in the future. By using something similar. Because methane is one of the really bad greenhouse gases, isn't it? But it's shorter lived. Yeah. So it's seen as you know, if you act on methane quickly, that's a really good way of dealing with a chunk of the problem. Yeah, exactly. If you manage to shove a load of chlorine up there as well, which does also feel like it might have its own issues. Wasn't the hole in the ozone layer? CFC, isn't that chlorofluor ocarbon? So that I presume it's at a different height or at a different thing. Chemistry is still is by far the weakest of all of my sciences. Yeah, let's not pretend we all know the difference between chlorine and chlorofluorocarbons and the effect they would have. But someone should do something about someone should start firing volcanoes at the atmosphere is what you're saying. I just like the idea of them cleaning up after themselves. Sort of to the extent that if you ask a teenage boy to clean up after himself, you know, he does a little bit of work. He does one tenth of the work and then it stops. They did find a lot of the methane underneath the bed. Uh I was thinking, does that mean you put a little volcano in a field for the cows? Oh, that's a good idea. Or a load of cows into a volcano. But the reason that I brought up volcanoes is because I saw a video of you, Greg, that you went to see some volcanoes in Japan, is that right? Yeah, I did. This was this was a few years back now. So I was traveling the world meeting scientists whose work was investigating the science of risk. Um and there was a a scientist who was looking at um the risk of volcanic ash affecting uh jet engines for aeroplanes. And he was doing a lot of work out in Japan. So I went to see the Sakurajima Volcano, which is the the most active volcano in Japan. And we got there and we thought, Oh, okay, we've got we got've three days to try to get this on camera. That's fine. Loads of time for me to chat to the scientist and we'll get a lot of you know GVs, lovely lo loads of shots of it. Within an hour of getting there, the thing erupted. Wow. And then it basically didn't stop every like two hours it would erupt again.. Wow I so I can say I've had sushi under an active volcano where we just sat there going, oh, it's going again. Wow. And what did it look like? Could you was it just lots of black smoke? Um actually a lot a lot of white smoke. Yeah. Or actually slightly blue smoke. This was quite interesting, um, because of the sulfur darkside that's that's coming out. Again, chemistry. And I could hear it burping on the way as we were kind of driving up towards this volcano. So these like these who which was it venting. It was like building up the pressure and like burping out a bit of the pressure again. So it was a phenomenal experience. You'd see these absolute massive lumps be thrown out from this volcano. Uh and I remember um Dr. Cimarelli was his name. It was like, Oh yeah, that that one that one's as big as a bus. Like, what you can't get your head around that. Yeah, it's incredible. Burking sulfur and methane. Sounds like sort of being around an alcoholic mineral age . I've been to see I've seen two erupting volcanoes and didn't have nearly as good an experience as you did. I went to one in Reunion where it was kind of a really tiny eruption that was happening on the side of a mountain, and you could just see a little bit of red and a little bit of smoke. It wasn't like a big one that you see in a cartoon or something. And then I went to IF Atliokl in um Iceland. Well pronounced. Yeah. Remember when that happened? Yeah. Yeah. So I was there then and I took a bus up to the fields where it was happening and I got loads of videos of just grey ash. Literally, you can't see anything at all. It's just complete ash. I didn't . No, I've forgotten that as well. Did you see any lightning? No, but I have heard about this. Yeah, the electrification of the ash can produce thunder and lightning in the clown that comes out of a volcano. And that is one of the theories for um how life started on the planet. Lightning in a volcano. That is cool. It's a Frankenstein moment, isn't it? That's amazing. Yeah, this one in Tonga that happened in twenty twenty two. Uh apparently there were over two hundred thousand flashes of lightning, which was about two thousand six hundred flashes per minute at its peak.. W Wowow. It's like basic ally the most lightning that we've ever seen in one place at one time. Oh my god. Do you guys know about Robert Landsberg? Nope. I don't think we've talked about him before. He was a photographer and he lived quite near Mount St Helens in um Washington St ate. And he in nineteen eighty, uh, it looked like it was having a little eruption, as they do, something's a little belch. Um and so he went to take some photos and video of it. And he'd been a lot before and done that. And when he got there, well we don't we don't have his first count hand account for reasons you'll realize, but um when he got there spoiler alert. Jack als volcano Um He clearly realiz ed at some point that it was gonna be a huge eruption uh as it was and that he was probably too close to get away, but what he did was, what we know he did, was we took the photos, and then he put the shutter back over the lens, he rewound the whole film into its protective canister, he put it back in his bag, and then he lay on top of his bag to protect the photos that he'd had. So his body was found a few days later. Would that work? It did work. We've got the photos. To be honest, they're any okay. But did they come back with a little sticker on them saying maybe stay further away from the volcano ? Goodness name. What was his name? Uh he was called Robert Landsberg. Wow. Dedication to the job. It just feels like I don't think you sink in lava do you because your body is lighter than it. Yeah I think it was more the ash. Oh it was the ash I see. Ash or like the the extreme heat sort of pulverized him but saved his it wasn't like a big sort of lava flow came and it went over the top of the ice. We only just found out what the largest volcano on Earth is. Ooh, I think it was five years ago? It's no, it's a shield volcano, so these are the really um like gently sloping massive ones. They're not as excit they're not the cartoon volcanoes. Um called shield volcanoes because they look like a shield if it's lying down because they slightly come off the ground and then they've got a little nipple in the middle, which is where the uh bit is where the lava comes out. Anyway, um scientists were doing a survey, uh surveying the ocean floor in twenty twenty. We thought it was Mona Loa and they found a volcano that is twice as big. Oh they sound underwater one? Underwater one, yeah. Cheating a bit, I know. That's right. Lower is the one in Hawaii, which is if you go from the bottom of the ocean to the top of it is taller than Everest. Yes. Exactly. But it pokes up above the ocean, but it starts underneath. Is that right? Yeah. Okay, okay. Nice. But anyway, it can't even claim that. It's Puha Honu, if anyone asks. Uh which which means turtle surfacing for breath. Love that. And uh it's big. Yeah, this kind of how many cathedrals Abogadro People are still it's amazing, people are still finding volcanoes, but not always under the water or on earth. There was someone called Linda A. Marabito who was the first person to find volcanic activity in space on Io, a moon of Jupiter. She was working for the jet propulsion laboratory and she saw some images and thought that could only come from a volcano. Uh, and then since then, people have found all sorts of volcanoes on various different moons. Rosalie Lopez found 71 volcanoes on I o. Uh, and why like about her is she was an astronomer, but during the last three weeks of her course, Mount Etna exploded near where she was working, and she thought, you know what? I should also go into volcanoes. And she completely changed the direction of her studying and went into space volcanoes instead and then became one of the best people who have found some of the most volcanoes in space out of anyone. Are they bigger? It feels like the ones on Iron must be bigger than the way on these. No no no I know small I know it's quite hard to see them. I'm not saying she's had a I'm not saying she's taken the easy way out of the story. I wasn't even close to that. No, I know you weren't. Um yeah, like I think the largest one we know of is on Mars, isn't it? Oh, I'm sure you're right. And again, it's like very, very wide. It's like from the bottom to the top, it's like the size of France or something. It's like very, very if you walked up it you'd barely even notice you were walking up a hill. But by the time you got to the top of it, you were higher than anywhere else. Wow that we know about. Um Katia Morris Kraft? Do you read about them in the Ghost of your search? They are fantastic. They're French pair of Volc anologists who really lived their life. You know, they had a honeymoon at Stromboli , uh which volcano. Um they were often the first people to get to a volcano and they shot a lot When was this? Seventies and eighties. So lots of the classic footage that I remember seeing as a child you need to have a video about volcanoes and it was exciting. That was you know, I'm sure lots of it was shot by them 'cause they just they took so much amazing footage and they did it you know they rushed as soon as they heard a volcano was going off they'd rushed there and tragically they died as well. They they rushed to Mount uh Unzen in Japan and they were killed by it. Is that tragically when they would genuinely say they died doing what they loved? They did. In fact Morris said he wanted to die at the edge of a volcano. I mean like would it be tragic if like a microphone fell on your head and you died doing what you loved . Uh if people laugh, then I'm doing what I love. Well, if that actually if there's an awkward silence, then we move on. That's my true quick gift. Stop the podcast! Stop the podcast! Hi everyone, we'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Sal ie! Yes, Sal ie is an eSIM service app. Basically, if you travel and you would like data in more than 200 destinations, then you should get Sal ie. 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On with the show. On with the podcast . Okay, it's time for the final fact of the show now, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Paul McCartney does eye yoga So we've done quite difficult chemistry and physics so far. You're keeping us keeping us highbrow, Anna? Yeah, exactly. I'm keeping us I'm keeping us rooted in what the people want to hear about. And that's eye yoga, because it's becoming a bit of a thing. Paul McCartney was introduced to it on a trip to India in the late 2000s, I think. And he was asked how what his eye yoga entailed. So he said you keep your head still and then you look up as far as you can for two to three seconds, then as far down as you can, then diagonally. So you make a union jack as he described it with your eyes. Um and next you cross your eyes for two to three seconds. Um then you look great by the way, guys. And then you finish by focusing on a distant object and the idea is that you're exercising your eye muscles 'cause how distant like a volcano on the moon at the hell or if you can get there then you're doing very well at your eyes. And what is the idea that this m makes his eyes healthier or helps his just general vibe or what? He s I would say to give him credit flippantly comments that he does still doesn't need glasses and that's probably why. But that it makes your eyes healthier 'cause you're exercising the muscles. I mean, there's no evidence to support that at all. Um, the only thing that there's evidence for is that if you do um sometimes take a break from looking at a screen and focus on something distant, that's good for you know, stop you giv getting headaches. But a lot of people do this eye yoga and yeah, it's a thing. It comes and it comes from Buddhist practices, candle gazing, it used to be, where you're just supposed to stare at a candle without blinking until your eyes water and that purifies your body. Oh, you can have a blind spot every time you blink for the rest of the candle. Yeah, do take a break from the candle every 20 minutes if you're doing a lot of focused candle work. 20 minutes looking at something else. Ideally, look at a phone, briefly. I was trying to come up with um uh Beatles related when I saw her standing there. Oh that's great I am sore. Yeah, because you're stopping your eyes being sore, but then I would say like we sent each other these fights about a week ago. And it's quite easy to go on to Wikipedia and look at a list of all Beatles songs. And that was the best you came up with? Yeah. Okay. I didn't I missed I missed that crucial step . I just thought, oh that's what it'll do. It made its way into my notes. And I haven't bothered to I should have gone back for a second bite of the cherry here, yeah. Well the inbox is podcasting. No, I'm not even actually please don't write in with all Beatles songs with the word I in them 'cause we don't like I don't have the bandwidth. I'm r I'm sorry, I wish I did. Um Yeah, no eye yogurt it's just looking at stuff it's just looking at stuff, isn't it but it's it's like the eye test as well. 'Cause I've I I I wear contact lenses like so when you have an eye test you have to look in every direction. Oh do you? I do. Yeah, they're they're they're trying to see the inside of the back of your eye and so just to get a good view of everything to make sure it's all right. Going, Ret No, he's good, mate, you're all right, yeah, yeah. Same time tomorrow. Although he did say he likes people looking at him when he does his actual yoga, so he's a yoga practitioner, um, and he says he says you're regularly pra ctices yoga with a group of friends who are called the yoga boys, which includes Alec Baldwin. Very cool, well done. But he finishes his yoga morning with he finishes his yoga workout every morning with a five minute headstand and he says he basically sort of does it to show off because he says if I'm in the gym the big guys have got their weights and they're looking really beefy and cool and they're suddenly really impressed by his five minute headstand they come up to him afterwards and presumably say you're fucking Paul McCartney. You don't like Paul McCartney, but upside down. Like a lot of these yoga poses are relatively new, right? They're from the 19th and 20th century. Almost all of them, in fact. Yeah, I think they all yeah. Because like the old historical yoga practices, they were basically meditate. They weren't do a downward dog. No. Or this kind of stuff. And all this kind of stuff came in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, and it's a mixture between old Indian practices and Western, especially Scandinavian exercise routines that people did. Yeah. And stretching is good. Yeah, not to say there's nothing wrong with things . Absolutely not. But did you guys did you read about um Bernard, who invented modern yoga? Bernard. Yeah, Bernard. Guy called Pierre Bernard from Des Moines. Okay. There had been a few monks who'd come over to the West, right, and done and done a bit of yogic practice, but it wasn't the developed fit it wasn't l lots of the exercises we know today. Um and Pierre Bernard, he he founded this thing called the Tantric Order of America and started teaching yoga in nineteen oh five. And he claimed he'd learned it from a guru who was either Indian, Persian, Syrian, French, or Bengali. Okay. It was not legit. Lots of I know that is a curve pull. It is a curve pull. The others are all quite he's somewhere from the East. The thing is lots of his followers were massive white supremacists, this is an ironic thing, who claimed that an Aryan, i.e. white race, had created yoga before moving to India in the first place. None of this is true. But don't tell the yogis that it's white supremacists who got it popular. Yeah, well uh I think it's some of his followers were not all of them by any means, but lots of those things, as James says, downward doggins and salutations and nineteen thirties things. There are even after him, you know. There were like some kind of things that you did that were poses, but they were mostly just sit comfortably while you're doing your meditation. Uh but they did have different names and they were mostly based on animals. So there is a thirteenth century um kind of yogic manuscript um that says you might sit like a curlew or a camel. I can't I feel like I don't see curlews sit. I picture them standing. Yeah I think you sit like a curlew stands, maybe. These manuscripts, there's some old ones that say that there are eight point four million asanas, and the asana is their pose, but each of the poses represents one of the species of animals on Earth. Okay . Now, eight point four million asanas. In twenty eleven, a marine ecologist Camilo Mora and his team estimated that there are approximately eight point seven million species on Earth. And this is if you go on Google and search how many species are on Earth, that's the figure that normally comes up. So in the thirteenth century we had eight point four million and now we think eight point seven million. That's pretty good. It's a rounding error, isn't it, basically? Yeah. Well you should be able to come up with any species and there'll be a pose for it. Yeah. But a lot of these will be m minuscule wasps and things, right? The par posasitic waspe you have to get inside the catapult . Are you into this stuff Greg? Uh into yoga? Yeah. Uh no. Okay. But you're into fitness and wellness and stuff, right? Into fitness for sure. Yeah, well ness is a very loaded thing. Someone says wellness to me and by the time it's reached my ears I'm hearing bollocks. Yeah, so I I I also have a podcast called Slice Bread and that's all about looking at products that are making claims, big bold claims to make you happier, healthier or greener, and looking for the facts behind them and analysing those marketing claims to find out if they are marketing BS or the best thing since sliced bread. And we do a lot of wellness related products as part of that. So do the wellness people often not meet the mark, would you say? Or is it not fair to say quite often it's there's something in it, but then it's massively exaggerated or applied in a dose or in a manner that you're just not gonna get in, say, a supplement or or something like that. Okay. Are there some brilliant products that you've tested or that have come up short? Or long. We've looked at some like 150 different wonder products now. I think some of the favourites in terms of most played air fryers. Back in 2022, we were looking at whether cooking with an air fryer will save you money. Petrol, that was one of the favorites, premium versus regular. Dishwashers versus hand washing. Oh, which one's best Oh, so not just wellness, just what's what's the best? We look at a whole bunch of different products, yeah. We we recently the infrared saunas, I found that one quite interesting. Oh I was tempted thanks to social media of whether I wanted to buy an infrared sauna. Didn't come up in the research. So to speak . And is the infrared sorry, just quickly the infrared sauna, what actually is that? So it runs at a lower temperature than the traditional kind of dry finish. It's a room with infrar ed panels. And the expert said it essentially um heats you from the inside out like a microwave. It's a wave. Kind of like a microwave, yeah. But after one and a half minutes you have to come out and jump around and then go back and I looked up different kinds of yoga. Oh yeah. Yoga for bros. Yeah. Toga ., T togaoga, with your toes. Yuck. Um Doga, you bring a dog. Uh what? Does a dog do downward dog? I don't know. I think the dog's just allowed to be . What does it do downward human? There's a yogi and there's a dogie, you know, all of that. Um goat yoga, face yoga, horse yoga, you're on a horse. Uh but uh basically I opened a bunch of tabs about this, you know, and you often I will open a load of tabs and then I'll I'll read through them at my leisure. But that's sometimes backfires because on a reasonably busy train this morning I just opened a tab and found how to get better stronger erections using yoga. I was reasonably observed at the time. Yeah, yeah. And And this it's simple. Yeah. Oh I'm not trying to beatles pans about no way. A hard day's night. Come on, get back in a hard day's night. Dan is turning in his like the Beatles, what can I say? Hard day's night. A very hard day's night. Yeah, yeah, there we go. Do you know you have a sphincter in your eye? So I was looking into Paul McCartney's eye yoga and and whether any of this actually stands up to scrutiny or not. And essentially there are these various pairs of external eye muscles that some people say when you're doing this eye yoga you're you're you're working on them. But eye doctors are saying like it's not going to do anything for your sight. Perhaps focusing close on your nose, which I believe is one of the moves. That's it. Yeah, it is going crossword. That's working, Anna. Um apparently that could potentially do something for your internal muscles. And one of those internal muscles is the iris sphincter. Its partner in crime is the iris dilator. Opening close your iris. So maybe this eye yoga can can teach some of these internal muscles to relax your lens easier and focus up close easier. But there are better things to do that, like focusing on a pen that's really close to your eyes. But uh I mean it does it doesn't it's not the maddest thing 'cause they are muscles, the eyes. So Paul McCartney, I think it was said that the guy who taught him how to do this said, Well, you don't have muscles in your ears, so you can't exercise your ears and improve your hearing, but you can exercise your ears. You're also moving your forehead. Yeah, I can only move my whole head when I do it. The rest of his face is locked in concentration. Uh but what you can do, which is quite cool, is if you put your hands on the back of your skull at the bottom, either side of your spine, and then you close your eyes, and if you look up and down with your eyeballs it took me a while to find the right spot on the back of your skull. But if you just look up and down with your eyeballs you can feel the muscles that's weird. Moving which is quite cool. They're not the muscles that are moving your eyes. They are c they're connected to the muscles that move your eyes. So they go all the way back to the back of your neck. Isn't that cool? Um that's amazing. I was trying to think of the smallest what's the smallest muscle in the human body? Because if something is a muscle, surely You have muscles that kind of make your hairs erect Yeah, and those you can't consciously control, of course. As then I wonder what the smallest muscle is that you can actually train. So I think I, uh yoga, you know, you're exercising those muscles, even if you're not improving your sight, because that's something slightly different. Um the smallest muscle is the stapedious, which stabilizes the stirrup bone in your middle ear and it's one millimeter long. Yeah, but w when you went to that bodybuilding exhibition you said, Okay, you guys look good, but look what I can do with my stapedias. And you go d d d d Mine is two millimeters long. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to hear any more about the things that we've said, we can all be found on our social media accounts. I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter M James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Anna. You can email podcast at QI dot com or get us on Instagram at no such thing. Greg. Uh Instagram at GregFoot. And you have a couple of uh podcasts. You mentioned sliced bread, but there's another one. Yes. So the new one is called The Baby Fact Check. Uh it is a new parenting podcast where trusted experts fact check all the baby advice that is filling your social media feeds. Fantastic. That's at the baby fact check on Instagram for clips or you, can watch it on uh Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Terrific. Um, if you want to email us, as Anna says, it's podcast.qi.com. If you want to email us facts that we'll use in LittleFish, our Monday show, we love receiving them. If you want to email us with corrections, clarifications, Beatles Puns, and more stories stories about how fish has affected your life, all of that stuff, uh, then we re we wrap all of that stuff up and it goes in drop us a line, which is our fortnightly bonus show. That is part of Clubfish, which is our members' club. You can find it on Patreon.com slash clubfish and there's all sorts of bonus stuff there. There is extra material that James puts together. There is drop us a line and at the upper tiers there are things like merch and getting your own fact dedicated to you. Patreon.com slash clubfish. It's really fun. But for now, that's it from us. We'll be back next week with another one. Thanks to the Fishbusters team of Liang Lee, Ethan Riperalia, and everyone else in Team Fish. And we'll see you next time. Goodbye. Norwegian word . Norwegian words.