Flatworm memory and tapeworm traps

playa can sound like For others, it's This is our Paya, Corona. La Playa awaits. Relax responsibly, Corona Extra beer, imported by crrown Port Chico,llinois. Most of the time, La Paya sounds like this For some, Laplaya also sounds like this. is our playa Corona, La Paya Oaits. Relax responsibly, Corona extxtra beer imported by Crown I importp, Chicago, Illinois Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray James Harkin and Anna Tosinsky. and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one And lookucky, lookucky. It's Anna Tosinsky. My fact this week is that wild oats sow themselves. Yeah, so basically they're plants that look a bit like oats and they have seeds at the top of them that come in a little cluster that's called a pannacle but they don't panic. They very calmly have two spikes sticking out of them called ans and they look a bit like very long hairy legs And basically when the seeds come off, they go onto the ground and when they dry out, they twist one way and when they get moist, they twist another. So as the moisture goes up and down, they twist back and forth. And it reminded me a bit of one of those moves you used to do in a gym where you lie on your back and splay your legs out and roll around. You know I'm back in that gym anyway. We just sort of did the bleep test and stuff at my school Yeah, I'll teacher was sacked actually, but they sort of it makes them sort of crawl around and then they'll find a crevice, eventually, they'll fall into a crevice And once they've fallen into a crevice, this motion makes them drill down into it, so they literally bury themselves. It's the closest thing you'll see to something that's not sentient being absolutely sentient. It just looks like it's got your senses treesuff. I think it's alive guys. I think it is alive No, honestly it is alive. Well there we go. James agrees. What about you to Wild oats are they the ancestors of the oats that we eat? We think so, although there seems to be some disagreement, but I think they are yes, although the oats that we eat, the cultivated oats have lost these orns because they're bred out so the seeds can get much bigger. And wild oats are I think a weed. right. and they're quite annoying because they can plant themselves Yeah. So the idea of swing wild oats. is something that you would never need to do it because they do it themselves, but also you wouldn't wantce to do it because it gets in the way of all your normal plantans. So sewing wellild oats became a phrase that meant just doing something pointless and stupid. Yeah So go out and have fun in a promiscuous sexual way because you're not going marry these people, but go out and do that and then find the person you're going to marry Yeah, so it was not originally sexual as well. It was just people having fun and messing around and stuff. And actually an interesting thing that I found is that the word haaver I've only ever heard in the song I'm going to walk five hundred miles by proclaimers. You know, if I Hver, then I know I'm going to haver with you or whatever it is. Okay The word haaver means oats. And Havering means sort of messing around not doing anything properly and it's the same origin as this wild doat st. W God. so that means that we have a new sentence person to add to my list, Nigel Havers Oh yeah. That's a thrill. Anna, I've been updating the list. Ill have you it's been a long time. Anna there's a new list. Don't worry, we'll get on to the new list. okay. I think it ended up meaning something im moral really early though, because by the turn of the seventeenth century so from the late sixteenth century, wild oats Plural weirdly was a term for a dissolute immoral man So you'd say he's a bit of a wild oat? Yeah the earliest juice is by someone called Thomas Beacon from the sixteenth century. and he talks about certain light brains and wild oats. And he's talking about stupid people basically or idiots And he also coined the terms bucket full the turism. Omnis suufficient, seventeenthly unbearded and worist Honestly, I think Bcketfull is the big cist ofory of that list. I just love worsest. I think wor Wse is definitely the worstest of all So there are all kinds of wild oats, right? Yeah. They're all aen aen something Aenasat Avena Byzantine, Aennarigos U those last two are mostly just to feed animals. but there's a fourth kind. Aen abysinea which I read is only partly domesticated. Oh ' it disobedient. I don't really know what it means, but I just like it so much. Of course, according to some people they are still only animal feed. Or according to Samuel Johnson three hundred years ago, who famously said he described the oat, the normal oat as a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people Hm not one of his good ones. Well, I think it's one of his most famous ones. it. And he later wrote to Boswell, his friend, he wrote, I meant to vex them thing did it on purpose to mind the Scots up? Yeah ye yeah. so annoying. they were a big Scottish thing, weren't they? They thrived in the Scottish climate and all of that and they were grown in huge quantities. Brought over by the Romans, right? So they were they weren't there until the Romans got there. and then the climate was just so perfect because it was wet, sunny, was long day short. It had just perfectly suited it Yeah, that sort of became the thing of what Scottish people were brought up on. Yeah. And saved Britain during the war To a certain extent. ye Second World War. You know, obviously a big deal of cutting off food supplies and cutting off Atlantic food convoys and things like that and oats became a really big deal. They were Um, you know, they substituted a lot of the wheat that you then couldn't get I couldn't get back back then. White bread was illegal Yeah Did you have to eat oat bread? 'causeuse that's quite different to wheat bread as? I can't remember the or. The oats were used for there was a thing called the National looaf, which was just very I think very, very good for you bread, but obviously not very delicious. Although it sounds like a perform party good. It's a perform party merchandise. Oh. There's bros. which is a kind of porridge that you don't cook It's just cold water and oatmeal together. We should start We should start like a bros podcast.' porridge. It's a lot of chock seated porridge. Oh suchuch a bad timing, Anna. You. No, reallyally sad not to be involved in that It wouldn't make sense for me. Oat's had a Rnaaissance since the nineties, hasn't it It sort of appears everywhere in different things, now oat milk, particularly. That was invented in the nineties. I thought we had that for a very long time. Ricard Ost OSTE, which is almost a anagram of oats He's a Swedish scientist and as well as inventing it, he is a professor at Lund University where we will be going very soon to be doing our live shows. Is he still trading? Is He's still there so we could meet him. but he only spends twenty percent of his time there at the university. So hopefully we cross we land in that twenty percent. he's doing one day a week. I think is what you mean His official biography says he only spends twenty percent of his tele transation time. Wait a minute No because there's seven days in a week at point. you must I suppose one point four. Yeah point four days. So hopefully we're there on the one point four day. We'll see. Brilliant. Yeah. I didn't actually know how they're made oak milk. It's just because I've never thought about it. We always have some in the house But I thought it was just go they're dry. I mean, I suppose there is moisture in there if they. If you zoom in, there's those tiny oders hanging off even rain. But they mix it with water, off course they do they Yeah And they make it into a kind of suspension. So they make it's well porridge, right? Yeah. wateratery porridge. and then they take out the oes. Yeah, I suppose that's it yeah yeah. But that's how they do it. It sounds gross when you say it like that and I bet it wouldn't work if I did it, but I quite like it Yeah, it's really good.. I looked up for cereal bars. I got a bit distracted. yeah, o. Just on when things were invented, Danny was surprised that oat milk was a nineties invention. The first cereal bar, any guesses Okay twenty thousand BC Okay Later later I found some in a cave sound. I found the wrapper. So I will say, I don't know if it's surprising enough to justify a quiz. I think it wouldd be more surprising that it was very late because cereal bar could just be you dropp some honey on two bits of grainouldn't it Is it the eighties, Andy? is it eighteen eighty one That's be amazing. That is surprising. I'm amazed. It is late, isn't it? It is later than I thought. That's late. I'm astonished. It was called Serial Country and that means, of course that David Niven or Muddy Waters could both have enjoyed a cereal Oh. Oh God. there's too much to catch Anna up on on. It's actually the very new bit in fact. A two week old baby would be old enough to remember when they invented this new bit Okay. Speaking of cereal, they used to be called Cheery oats Oh But Quaker Oats owned the idea of having oats and cereals, so they had to remove the tea and call themselves Cheeris instead. Oh wow, really? Is that wh ready breick? Which I've never understood what that is, but it doesn't have oats in the title. Oh yeah Surely that's also porrid. it oats Yeah, it's porridge. D? Have the quake a lot trademarked oats As a food stuff. Lgely speaking, they have. Now, I think probably if your finger is made out of oats then It would be hard to argue that you can't call it oats, but obviously in one or two cases they have pushed it. Like Scot's porrid oats. Yeah my preferred brand.'s just that's called oats. that's allowed. It could be like that's in the UK, for instance, whereas Cery oat would have been in America where of course Quaker oats began. And also not made by Quakers. Not even blooming Quakers Yeah I can't believe that I think Qakers need to sue them. They just made up the name Quaker because it sounds really ironically honest and full of integrity. They didn't make up for that. sorry, they didn't invent the word Quaker. Apparently one of them read an encyclopedia article on Quakers And thought, Oh they sound great. I'm gonna to call my cereal after them. You wouldn't do it these days I think. No. J pick a religion. and Scientologist flakes. There was a company called Earlybird who got sued because they named one of their products, Hulen Oats, H A U LN.. And they got sued by Hul and Oats, the band Darl Hall. Yeah.. I do think I think that's fair enough because they've obviously taken their name. Yeah. Rolled oats and steel cut oats. Any prefs? If I was to see them both on the shelf, ye and I wanted to get some very special oats because Andy's coming aroundound to stay over.. And I know that he loves his oats and I want to get him something special. I would go for the rolled oats because I feel like it's more done by a cave manan with a big stone and rolled it over to make iting Yeah. Well, actually steel cut are the least processed They've just been sliced around a bit. The roll ones have been steamed a bit, I think and rolled into a flake. So if you want to go with cllassic The the hardest possible one to cook. you want steel cut oats, which which is what I use. Oats are very good for one medical condition and you have to get into a big bath full of votes to I know, because we had it recently. G. Chicken pox. Oh no. Oh, well there are two conditions. That can be cute buts I was talking about sunburn Really? It must be the same kind of soothing skin thing. Apparently you make a nice, cool buff. Yeah. Drop a load of oats in it And then you get in. So you basically are the porridge Interesting. It's been pretty goodool. You unlike the little blob of jam. You're the blob of jam, sure. That's it. You're not the oats. yeah. That's really interesting. Do you know that in Scotland they would make oatmeal poultices for minor boils So what we would do is you would get the oatmeal and you would put some butter in it and you would boil it up and then you would cool it and then you would put it against your boils. And if the boils were really difficult, then you would use urine instead of butter Oh, no, I's fine I think actually it's not that bad doctor. I think it's fine. I think I'll have the oats, please. They're also good apparently for curing your own warts. What you had to do was take eighty one stems of oats Bind them into nine bundles of nine and hide them under a stone. As the stems rotted, your wartz would disappear. peopleople just have a lot more warts and boils of the day. I feel like yeah, because we had cured them all by doing this oats thing yeah I just feel like there are many more boil cures that are older than Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Do we has anyone here ever had a boil? Yeah. Oh really. I think I had one on tour with all of us on the top of my butt, remember? Was that the one that you came round to my room and pod to my butt? Um ye, I've I've had wartts on my feet. Yeah, same child. As a kid. you get wartts, don't you? Yeah. Not sure I've ever had a wart Really? Okay, podcast at twoi. com if you want to give walks Most of the time, La Playa sounds like this For some, Lap Playa also sounds like this. is our Ba Corona, La Playa awaits. Relax responsibly, Corona extxtra beer imported by Crown I importort Chicago, Illinois Stop the podcast! Stop the podcast. Hi everyone, we'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Sai. Yes, Sale is the app that you can download which allows you to use the internet on your phone wherever you are on this earth. That's right. Quite often like when I've been abroad before, I thought, o, I'll just use my own plan that'll be fine. and I've come home and the bill has been a little bit on the extortionate side of expensive. So the last time I went abroad, which was to China, I decided I wasn't going to do it this time. I was going to go to Sali. I was going to get myself an ESM. and honestly, it was so easy. It was so reasonably priced. it was so convenient, it always worked wherever I went I highly recommend personally to use Saily if you're abroad. Yes, absolutely. All you need to do is download the app and then you buy a plan. There are multiple plans for over two hundred destinations in the world. They have some of the best rates online. and then you install the ESIM and off you go, Googling away, letting the holiday pass you buy as you sit in your hotel room looking out weir it' stuff online. and If you go to saaly d. com slash fish Or you download the Saly app and you use the offer code Fish, you can get an exclusive fifty percent discount on Saly data plans. On with the show. On with the podcast Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the world's first electric internet connected SUV car which was designed to help you easily locate parking spots and petrol stations was Chinese and called the Wong wayay. Very beautiful Beautiful. So I've just been to China and I got a car to pick us up from the airport and it was on an app And when we arrived there, I looked at the app and it said to look out for Wrong way I thought it was like a joke name that the driver had given himself or something. So I Googled it and it turns out that Rover car manufacturer I think went bust in the UK and then a Chinese company bought the technology, but not the name They made a new name that was kind of a transliterated version of Rover. It's Ro Airway. But if you pronounce it in pinion, then you say it wrong way. It sounds almost exactly the same as wrong way in English.ongon? Yeah further context on the name thing. My Chinese name, which I grew up with in Hong Kong is Xapo Sheer bore is Sreiber. sheer bor. So but it doesn't really work because it's Uncle Egg When you put those two words together. You Yeah, Mya's name is Uncle Egg. Thatute. Wow. Yeah. so that would always just caused embarrass. shave your head. I think you could could definitely pull off an uncle Egg. Yeah. be it becausecause eggs aren't hairy on the bottom, arent they? It could be like an egg coming out of the chicken. Oh, I could you could emerge you Yeah That is nice. Stick a little feather on your face and some bird poo on the other side. And what's really useful about Ping in is you would use the alphabet that we use in English. but Mandarin has four tones as well And so if you say a word, often if you just had P I and G ping You wouldn't know if it's ping, ping, ping, ping. So that's what it gives you on top of each word, it gives you the guidance of the arrow as it were. I think what's interesting with that is like because Chinese is like non alphabetic, they're always approximate, I think. Yeah, that's what I'd say. That's why you get sort of like A word which is uncoleg, but actually you can translate those two syllables to something which doesn't say uncoleg. it might say disisgusting pervert. I was gonna say excellent podcast, but Yeah, I mean Yeah yeah. Well, there are four tones out. And that's why satire in China is actually really good and really subtle Because you were able to make fun of political characters via the use of pinion and Chinese character because of the multiple meanings. And when the government arrested you, did they get to say, I don't like your tone, young manen. Yeah, that's good. Can I check your fact Jones? Yeah. You said this was the world's first electric internet connected SUV car. According to their website. So why are you using it to locate petrol stations Ah, well Where do you wash your car U Good point. I pay the local kidsver and then That's a good point actually. I do go to petrol stations to buy food. Flowers for your wife? Flowers for my wife. It's all the best stuff there, isn't it? Screen wash Ginstas pasties I also go there to wash my car and often there are charging points in petrol stations But That's a very good point. It was just me being fliiffant really, I'. No, I think we shouldn't be calling them petrol stations. you should call them wife fllower stations or something. We can't let petrol people having all. It might be an interesting reason that something that is going on in China with electric cars, which is replaceable batteries as opposed to charging your existing battery So you just drive over the marks and then the machine does the rest. And it's especially useful for big heavy trucks We're obviously putting in a load of electricity even at very fast rates would take a while, but a battery swap three minutes. That's how the first electric cars were. someomeone would come, take out your battery and put a new on it. And the reason was it was kind of based on old stage coaches and stuff where you would take your horses and you would swap your horses over It's always just the obvious thing to do. Whereas now we plug the horses in? But also like they're going to get rid of mobile phone integrated batteries, aren't they? That was in the news last week.. Yeah In the EU at least, I think they're going to make it. So whenever you buy a new phone, the battery has to be replaceable. You don't just have to get rid of it as soon as the battery So that's quite good. that's much better yeah They are the world leaders, aren't they? in electric cars now China. sixty five percent of electric cars are sold by China public because they had massive subsidies. So they have ended up with these electric car graveyards because electric car tech has come on so fast. So you know in the early twenty thousand ten s, I think there was huge investment in the subsidies, hundreds of companies start making them. And then the year later, everyone says, well, I don't want an electric car that can only drive twenty miles because there's a new one that can drive fifty. And so there are these giant car parks with thousands of cars in them. So they made last year thirty one million cars in China. How many do you think Britain made M I'll say one million. I'm back in Britain. Yeahah, well, you've slightly overestimated it. seven hundred thousand And Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey made more than us last year as well as the Czech Republic and the big big hitters like Germany, India and Japan. Right. But China's journey to this is so recent, isn't it? It's fascinating's Not entirely because of, but a hugeually influential person behind it was Ga Wang Gang. So he's China's Minister of Science and Tech. And was he got that job in two thousand seven. But he had been a teenager in the cultural revolution. Really horrible time for all concerned. went through that and then after it ended after Mao died, he went to university studied internal combustion engines, worked at Audi, and China bought a load of Audis for, you know, if you get a top government job, you got a really nice government car, which would have been a Western car like an Audi at the time And you noticed every time he went home, wow, you we're using more and more oil in China. and oh yeah, the pollution is getting worse and worse. Wonder if there's anything we could do to change that? and just pitched it to the then minister. And then last year they sold about eight million electric cars. plus five million hybrids they've just completely overtaken the rest of the world. Yeah China is also a world leader in car carriers or Rose. that's for a boat, isn't they? R Rll your boat. R Row your boat. Row stands for a roll on roll off. and they are car carrying boats, so they are more convenient than los which are lift on liftffs for boat carrying any kind of cargo that doesn't have wheels, because you drive cars on and off them, which you't row row ferries, don't you? Yes, exactly. Yeah. And China's about to build the world's biggest one, which is going to carry any guesses on how many cars? Oh Mbe a lot. ten thousand That's a good guess actually. A lot. twelve thousand eight hundred.ding. Pretty good. lot. C can ask one more question just on this.. China has just built a new snooker building where you can go and play Snooker How many snooker tables do you reckon there are in this build? No I heard this on TV this week because China is the other center of worldld snooker apart from Sheffield, right? Yeah It's like a Sheffield in China. Yeah yeah. I'm going to go big as an open end. I'm going to say a hundred thousand Okay, one probably fifty thousand checkers boards there's probably in existence. That I'm going br bring it back to reality and say a thousand Is exactly the right answer. It's hard room h yes. One thousand st tables same room. It doesn't sound as much now that I dropped my bomb on that. A guusta sorry. one thousand thousand. Well, it's just because twelve thousand eight hundred is far more than I thought could get.. I left a twenty p on one of these tables to show I was that Can I I fin that? Are you finished that?' finished on Roros. but also the Stevedors, which is cool because you rarely get to use that word. Stevedoreors being people who pack and unpack ships. dozens will work on their ship at once and they have a huge carparket for of the cars that need to get on the ship. Let's say, forty Stevedors jump in forty cars, zoom really, really fast because they've got to get thirteen thousand cars on their ship Drive up the ramp one after the other, pin them down, and then they will jump on a minibus, get back there, and then speed the other cars up. It's so cool. That's really cool. That' But I recently got the ferry from Dover to Calais and it was a very different experience. There were no steadors as far as I could se. When we came back into Dover, we got stuck for an hour because it had to reverse out and say sorry, the ship's not long enough to reach They do this trip every day. mean it' not long It's not long at all. We had to rep park it in a different parking spot. That's amazing. The whole scale of this stuff in China is just nuts, isn't it? we have just had the Beijing motor showow which has pretty much overtaken any other motor show in the world. You know it used to be Detroit or whatever. Okay. It's now Beijing In one of the halls at the Beijing Motor Show recently, one of the halls had more electric cars like models that are for sale in the whole USA. And there were seventeen halls at the Beijing Motor showhow. Everything's just huge in China. In China, this was my memory of it, and apparently it's still the case. Seatbelts are really hated by Chinese drivers and they often don't do it. but theyre get a lot of trouble if they get pulled over by the police So one way around it was this company started releasing t shirts that were white t shirts with a seatbelt pattern over the shirts. And that became a massive craze and police had to pull over more people than usual to see if it was the shirt or an actual seatbelt. And the problem is is most cars these days have the noise that goes off, the alarm if you've not got your seatbelt on So there was a big craze of sort of blingified seatbelt buckles without the strap on it that you put in to confuse the car into thinking that seates in. But you would get like Pokemon versions or you would get Snoopy or Winnie the Poo. Yeah. Be that is annoying when you have a bag and you put it on the passenger seat and then your car for the next five hours says t wor' the seatbt ye. You're a baby, same thing. It's k is to just do the seatbt up behind you Right Problem solved. My grandmother used to just hold it across her. she wouldn't plug it in. She would just pull it out and then hold it across her. 'causeuse she was a generation that were against it on principle, right? Well, there was like a theory wasn't there like if you're in a crash, you don't want to wear a seatbelt because you want to be flung away from the wreckage. a car just crash be as far away from it as possible In nineteen oh seven there was a peaking to Paris race, which was a big deal for cars in China at the time But the Chinese suspected that all the racers were spies because they were mostly Europeans who had come over And some of these cars, they had like the mud guards on the car, they were speescially arranged so you could take them off and you could use them as planks whenever you needed to drive over a swamp Oh cool.ool. And in Khazan in Russia because it had to go through Russia, two youths fled in terror when they saw the car because they'd never seen one before And initally Novgarod, one of the cars brightened the horse and the locals started throwing stones at the drivers because they were like, you comeome over here, frightening our horses. The winner was a guy called Prince Scipioni Borgesi And he was so far ahead of all the other cars. He was seventeen days ahead at one point that he attended four days for celebration in Moscow. halfway through the race. He still won by a week.. That was really funny The first sort of car was in China. Oh yeah Um yeah, made in China sixixteen eighties. C number one. No, hang on, come on. C number one, sixteen eighties car number two, eighteen nineties or something. But yeah, Car, this was made by a Flemish Jesuit missionary. So it was a nice merging of Eastter and West back then. a guy called Ferdinand Verbiist It was Qing Dynasty and he invented a car which was steam powered with coal powering it, which is pretty amazing. in sixteen eighty. Correct. Didn't even really have steam powered stuff then. Who would have been Andy Alive to experience this What a good question. Well, not Oliver or Richard Cromwell, sadly, of course. This erbiest guy, did he drive, run, travel? I see what you're doing because of the name. Yeah, He was the erbiest guy. Yeah' veryer good. The only problem with That's not the worstest joke you It was sixty five centimetres long and it was actually a toy for the emperor. But it still works. you squeeze into if you're desperate you can squze into a sixty five centimeter. How fast was it? How It was just a runar and it's good for parking. It didn't say how fast it went, but it could go for an hour before it needed more coal.ing. And he's interesting because he's the only westerner ever to have received an honorary name after death in China So if you've done something impressive in China, the emperor would give you a name after you died. Oh wow. And the emperor really liked him because he did other cool stuff And so he was called Chinmin, which means diligent and clever. V Very nice Can I tell you one of my other Chinese electric gu heroes? Yeah Wang Chan Fu. So he's the head of BYD Oh and they're the biggies.. There's one other, but they yeah. againain, they used to make batteries for mobile phones and then they got via that into bigger batteries and then thought, you know what? cars He once showed investors. He was at a meeting with you know, Warren Buffett. Yeah who was at Berkshire Hathaway, his huge investment firm BYD in their very early days were trying to get investment from Warren Buffet As an investor meeting, Wang Chan Fu once showed investors how clean and safe his batteries were by drinking from a glass of battery fluid in front of him.? He said, Look, this stuff is great. Wait but that doesn't? I don't need it to be drinkable I know, I know exactly at one point he was making actually. Is it not a highly acidic burum fluid I guess his stuff was not. Right. He didn't drop down dead as part of the PS. I sorry, I forgot a second droped downad a part of the PS. But he got the deal. Yeah, it was very impressive Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the reason a World War two bomb whistled as it fell from the sky is because it had a big whistle on it. Is this a specific bomb we're talking about or is it all the bombs? It wouldn't have been every single bomb, Absolutely. That's right. But these were German bombs. And the idea was it was an intimidation tactic. Like the Blitz ones. Yeah ones. Yeah, yeah. It would have been those because a lot of the memories of people during the Bitz talk about the whistling sound of the bomb as it came down And the Germans decided that they wanted to use this as a tactic. So they literally attached a whistle like device to the fins of the bomb so that as it came down, It created that sound. Whereas when we now go We think, o, that's just a sound of bom. but actually it's not a sound of a whistle. I actually think it's the sound of something falling. Like in my head, it's like, Wally coyote makes that sound? Yeah' falling. So I just thought it was actually I never really thought about it. and if I did think about it, I would know it was wrong. But I kind of just thought, o things that fall just go like that. Yeah. they want have come from the bombs, right? Yeah s goes It's getting deeper, yeah.. But as we know It's the Doppppler effect Yeah. If it's a police siren driving past you or something It will get higher as it approached you and then deeper as it went further away again. It's because movies have tricked us Yeah, yeah The whistle that you hear in the movies is the perspective of the pilot, not the person on the ground. I've started doing that since I read since I read this and was like, oh, yeah, of course. you know with kids when you feed them, you go an airplane. What I've started doing As it descends into his mouth. It's interesting, because it was used as a sort of intimidation tactic. I read an account by a guy called Harold Trlton, who in nineteen forty one, he was a young boy, and he remembers being in his kitchen and he hears the noise of the bomb coming down. And so they immediately jumped under the table because many tables had cages underneath them as a bomb protection device turns out it was the neighbor's kettle whistling and that's how sensitive everyone was at the time, specifically to that sound. There was loads of it around in the wall. Bombs. loads of bombs Yeah, no loads of noise being used To a certain extent, psychologically. So all of history. All history. Yeah. yeah, you're right. So the Stucker The Junkers eighty seven, JU eighty seven, they had little fan like whistling devices put on because they were dive bombing planes. So the idea is you dive down as close as possible to the target, release the bombbs when you're really close so they land accurately and then you fly off again But they were fitted with special devices which made them scream And it was a very terrifying sound to hear the scream of this Stucker plane, but it did slow them down a bit by about fifteen miles an hour, so they took them off eventually because it makes made even easier to shoot down. Well, do you remember the Night witches who we've mentioned before? the Soviet female pilots and they were in really old rickety planes because they gave them like the wooden planes But they couldn't go very high But they were very noisy because they were old And they used sound because it would just disrupt people's sleep. You were on edge all the time, or also you would have to use anti aircraft stuff in the middle of the night so no one could get any sleep. So it's kind of a psychological thing in that way that you distress. I think it's called harassing fire, it's known as sound you deliberately do something just to harass people and not necessarily to bomb them Well, the famous example in the Second Wor War that our grandparents used to talk about was the Doodlebugs, wasn't it? The Doodlebug was basically a German drone, essentially. So the V one. Yes, the V one. which it would be It fired and it was sort of like powered by a poooo poo sort of jet as it went through the air and it was programmed to stop at a certain point. and the famous thing about the Doodlebug, which everyone always remembers, is that when its engine was programmed to cut out, that was when it plummets out of the air. so you hear that poo poo poop and then a sudden silence. whichich actually a friend of mine in the village, Lorry is in his early nineties and he still remembers whenever you heard that silence You know You probably don't have time to save yourself at that point. you always be very happy to live next door to someone with a young child. neverever any silence. quiet Yeah. The V two, which was the successor Rcket, don't you don't have that psychological nightmare of hearing it and then cut out because it's going so fast that you don't hear it. You just hear a big bang Right. If you hear the big bang, you know you haven't been killed by it. H That's a good point. relief. I mean, they're both bad. They're both N not as bad as the Big Bang theory No If you hear that,. Oh no. You long for silence. Here's an interesting whistling bomb. In nineteen sixty five, the Attack Squadron twenty five, the American Squadron Tilot bombed, Vietnam So they wanted to mark the fact that they dropped six million pounds of ordnance on the country and they did it by taking an old toilet taking it up on the plane and then dropping it out And because of the holes in the toilet or something it just whistled all the way down That's to commemorate how much they've dropped on. It's just like soldiers, you know Soldiers being soldiers. Soldiers being soldiers. ye But actually previously in the Korean War, there was a kitchen sink bomb that was dropped on Korea because someone had said we've dropped everything on them except the kitchen sink. and so they deliberately just got a kitchen sink and dropped it down as well you've gota make your own fun, haven't you in war? I guess you s the humor changes a bit, doesn't it? Yeah. I like this real nonchalance in an article I read from Time Magazine in nineteen forty Be it's september nineteen forty this was written, so middle of the Battle of Britain. And it said, lastast week, while screaming bombs were falling on London, C Martin Wilbog, curator at Chicago's Museum of Natural History, calledght attention to the exhibit of Chinese whistling arrows and used the blitz as a way to segue into ancient Chinese whistling arrows. pre cur So these were arrows that were hollow on the inside. and so they whistled as they flew and they were to frighten people. and the Manchu emperor used them to scare people off the streets when he was walking through. so they couldn't harm people, the ones that he used How interesting. Genghis canan use those as well That was a biggie. Yeah. and that was more so used as an intimidation tactic prior to a siege. So if the noise and the confusion, it'd scare horses. If you had all these arrows and this noise coming, so it would cause chaos amongst the enemy and then you make your strike. That was kind of like one of the earliest things in war, wasn't it to scare the horses. That's why you would use They used scaring the opponents as well but scaring the horses was a really big deal. And then people started using elephants in warfare And noise is really good against elephants because elephants are like really weirdly skittish. How about loud noises? see? Yeah, they really are. Perhaps I too, I'm an elephant So they they don't show us that part of tricker out They have very sensitive hearing elephants. so Alexander the Great learned a good thing to do when battling against people who had elephants was to get a load of pigs and trumpets The pig squeal blow the trumpets and then the elephants would run away I know you know, if you're one of his cavalrymen and he's, do you want to pig or a trumpet to carry on your horse? when he's run out of trumpets, you've drawn the short straw haven't you? But if everyone's going hungry, you can't eat the trumpet. Good point. So it's makes blessing.. Yeah. It's actually just because elephants have got really biger is that they're hearing so U I think some of the hearing goes through their feet as well this now I think they just don't like vibrations Yeah, I think I don't know because they don't like bees either, do they? Like because of the buzzing of the bees. Yeah they hate be not the stings, the buzz. Yeah. And nice. Is that true? I thought No it's cartoons. ye. Yeah, but we're dealing with whistling bombs falling. you know. I did find tvtropes. com which adviseed me on the whistling bombs thing. Oh yeah. So please remember, if you should ever find yourself in an area often bombarded from the sky that not all projectiles make such a sound. If you are informed something deadly may lland nearby, you should duck or take cover even if you don't hear the whistle. I think if you're taking your advice If you're in a bombardment situation and you're reading your ontvtropes dot comot Well, look, I could. I tried to speak in the buffins at Budog I think these days it's like the buzz of a drone, isn't it? Yeahzz a drone.es Yes trouble. We do get to hear a close example of a whistling bomb in London these days. When would do you have heard that? On nights of celebration, on fire night fireworks. The whistling sound. It's a manufactured sound that's attached to it And so like all these things like the toilet has a hole in it has holes, it's not even by holes. It's a chemical mix. that's called whistle mix And whistle makes, Yeah Potassium benzoate is used. I gonna start a tribute active Little mix called this. We just play very high fitched. The dogs. That's insane. Yeah. And is it the fireworks? It's because they're going further away Because they're going away. They're doing the right thing. They're doing the right way around. They get the around. ons of physics. Thanks fireworks. My favorite bomb disposal person as we're on bombs. Yeah. Have you heard of Peter Gurney He was this massive hero of bomb disposal. And obviously, people who do bomb disposal are unbelievably brave. Yeah. particularly when you're dealing with Bombs that, for example, have been planted, whether it's a car bomb a second Wor War bomb, or a bomb that's been fired and they're not gone off. they're all kind of made in a factory, right? So you know roughly how to do them. peopleeople have known how to diffuse p. I just say And I actually think the people who diffuse those are quite brave as well. Okay, ye, I guess That's true. But the really brave people No, when like if it's like an IRA bomb or something, which has just been made by an enthusiastic cer. It's that TV show where that woman goes around diffusing bombs? Oh, I don't know., it's trigger pint. Fictional. Yeah, ye yeah. Oh. It's a real TV show So Peter Gurney did this. He diffused thousands of bombs over his careers. it was in Berlin and Egypt and Libya, but he just had to walk towards them, you know, knowing nothing about the structure and then seeing what was there because they have tricks on them at theidge So what would you use intuition? Well like how could you possibly use any logic? L un looggical thing? Lots of experience. or like if one part of it is removed, then that'll trigger another bit and you have to work that out. So he would often use medical scalpels, a ball of string, garden sacoturs and fish hooks And then this moment happened in nineteen ninety one in February, some shells were fired at ten Downing Street one and more in the middle of town. One landed in the garden of Ten Downing Street. hugely dangerous. he has to walk towards it. buildings around there are really tall, so he has no radio signal. Is this era? John Major. It would have been. So he has to straddle this bomb And he what he's armed with Twig And the spanner that he's borrowed from the Prime Mister's boiler. Okay? Why does't he bring his equipment? I guess I don't know why he didn't have it with him, but it was an immediate urgent thing. He didn't have time to go and get it It's just landed in It doesn't great. But that happens from all the time. another Prime Minister. have you got any secreies? No, but I've got this spanatter from my boiler. And my lucky twig. I mean so he was sitting asstride the bomb and this is from his obituary By the way he died last year agge ninety three. He survives this. He was conscious of an intense heat through his fire resistant trousers he's remembered to put his fire resistant trousers on. I don't know why he doesn't have his kit. But Prime Minister, do you have any clothing that I can use? I have these fire resistant trousers. But as he put it in his autobiography, braver men walk away, he suddenly realized that if he didn't do something quickly, he would never again sing anything other than soprano So he has to hop off the bomb, scoop up some snow from a nearby snowdrove because it's February, shove it down his trousers, and then get back on the bomb And he manages it, He diffuses it. Wow. Incredible. And like I say, he lived to the age of ninety three and he died last year. Bravo. Per he needed to be struggdling it rather than just next to it. Beuse that I mean he's an excuse for me in this is. That was also John Major's excuse with Idmita Curry Well, I've got one other old ancient whistling noise to intimidate. It's the Aztec death whistle. Have you heard of that? Yeah. ye. So in the nineteen nineties they were doing some excavations in New Mexico when they found this boy who was in a temple underground dead old. A long time ago, right? Long time. L time ago you're dead. So expected. that. N the surprising bit. o. So he was holding in one of his hands this object that no one had really seen before and it was called the Aztec Death whistle from then on. and you would blow into it and it would make a noise that sounded like a wind. Everyone thought maybe it was used for rituals when wind wasn't available. And they're not sure whether or not there's lots of theories but might have been used in the warfield to intimidate people. And so I happened to know someone who owns a modern Death whistle Azech Death whistle. And so I reached out to them to give us a sample. So this is a friend of the podcast. So here we go. Dith was all there for you by Reys Darby. Yeah So thank you Rese. But know Rese that could have been just him screaming I do have questions if that was just him. But I've read about those death whistles and I think we might have done it on QI or we might have thought about doing it on QI Probably the modern ones are bigger and they're deliberately made to make screaming noises and the original ones, like you say are more windy basase. More wind base. Yeah, I think that's I think and some people are trying to push that they were used on the battlefield. But again, we've got so little info about it, but it was found in this temple. But that scream is a very realistic sounds like a woman wailing U I mean, it sounded like restarby whaing I'll check with them. It sounds like restary whaling after he sat on a hot bomb. Save more on what you need to get the job done right. Right now, add Lowe's. Get fifteen percent off, select custom entry and interior doors. Plus, save eighty dollars on the DWalt twenty Volt Max two tool combo kit, now just one hundred sixty nine dollars. And at the Lowe's Pro desk, bring us your materials list and get a quote in minutes. Handwritten, a photo, or even a sticky note is all you need. Keep your jobs moving faster and on budget At lows. Valid through seven eight while supplies last. Selectioner is by location Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. That is Andy. My fact is flat worms sometimes grow heads at both ends by mistake How do we know they're doing it by mistake Would you do it on purpose? It's a party trick yeah. Yeah do they normally grow them the right way around and occasionally things go wrong And so that's why we think it's by mistake. Okay. ye, scientists haven't done the requisite interviews to find out if this is just like a fun thing for them. So right, flat worms, right? These are for anyone who's not familiar, these are just I mean they're as they sound, they're flat worormms. They're not your fancy posh ringed worms. They're not even related to earthworms really are they? No. L things that you get in your garden are completely different. He's just But useless little flat worms, you know No. Okay well you got a disagreement of opinion about them, but they're only flat at the edges, like toasties, like those jackles. That's what they remind me of. Yeah yeah yeah. Well, they're very ancient lifeforms, obviously and There are loads of different species of them. Some of them breed by just separating themselves in two These are the ones that if you cut the head off, they grow another head. or if you cut it into, it becomes two worms. Or if you cut off a tiny bit, it grows a whole new worm from that So imagine if I right now grew a head in like roughly where my stomach is. Oh yeah. and then everything above that head And grows a new pair of legs from there. Does the head look exactly the same as yours Or does cling like a brother or I think it's a cloning thing. So it's a new Andy's head in the middle of my stomach. Yeah. And then from above that, I just grow new legs and hips and everything. And then that Andy has my legs already. Why is it got the same name? I would give it a different that's gonna get confusing. Even if it's Andy two, that's better than Andy. Okay, yeah, sry. So Andy two gets my old legs R Does Andy and Andy two communicate with each other? Do they We're not close. We're all friends, but yeah, we're colleagues. Yeah. I mean, that's as close as you get to a friend really Look, I know you grew out of my body. I just don't think you're quite there yet. So that's how the fat wororms do it,? Yeah I didn't understand that explanation. I don't Even though it was really good. So you're saying grows up of your tummy and then he keeps your original legs. Yeah. but some new legs grow er up your body oldld Andy, me, I grow new legs. Okay, o. he gets my legs and he grows a new head, right? Let's it look at him because you have very long legs. keepull out of your height.actly. I've got a real job growing another pair of legs as long and list them as those. but No one said, listen, but okay. And sometimes these flatworms get it wrong, right? Oh dear. They will grow a second head. This is quite confusing. They grow a second head halfway out of them, facing the right way But then at the bottom of the top half, so old Andy, right? me I accidentally grow another head after separating off. So I Andy, am now ahead at this end and a head at the other end as well. Is your new bottom head Is that facing upside down or the right way? A you like the king of clubs? Yeah. Yes.h Yes, rightight Facing the wrong way. And you've got no legs now. Right? Or do you also still grow the legs? Well, I'm a worm in this, so it doesn't matter. But you've got just You just said you grow new That was right you grow new legs. That was the analogy I was But actually a good point. worormms don't have legs. hang on. In this whole analogy, whenever Andy says legs, you have to imagine it's the taail of a worm. I don't think I could have made it any clearer than I have done. I think you're right So Let's imagine Andy one and Andy two. Yeah okay Andy won has now got two heads and has no tail. Yeah How are you gonna poo? I don't know You don't know. Haven't thought this through? We've consulted with each other, and neither of us know. And That's why I said by mistake in my original fact because I do think this is error. Do you know James? I do know. How in a poo Well, the lucky thing is that flatworms poo and eat in the same hole Yes That's not lucky for most of your life, but in this specific instance where you have two heads. It doesn't matter so much because you can poo out of your mouth right? But surely. I'm sorry, this is now getting a bit gross. But if I've got a head at either end, Yeah Are't things heading the other way towards only two? I'm not gonna have to poo out anything he's been eating me. You would eat it and poo it out of your face, R then And the two will eat it and pour it out of his face. Okay Well, that's five. You'd have come to a compromise if it was that other version,n' you'd take turns in eating and then being the anus for the meal, wouldn't you? Oh, I thought like no curries or something. Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Becauseuse you don't w want tona be a date and then suddenly you're just ping it out in your mouth. I don't think I'm going get all many dates Let me tell you about my list and legs. for God sake Over there, there's Andy with two sets of legs upside down. He's surrounded by weben The thing about the heads coming off And the new heads coming is the new heads have the same memories And we don't understand that. U So crazy. They tested this with planarian flatworms, a kind of flatworm. They trained them up on a half on a rough surface, half on a smooth surface And then they got them to find food all on a rough surface. And the ones who've been trained on a rough surface dartted to the food because they like traveveling on it. The ones who'd beenised on the smooth surface were like, Uh, what's this rough surface Anyway, then they cut all their heads off. and then when the new heads came back The heads that had been raised on the rough surface remembered to be chill about the rough surface It's like a really complicated way of showing they have memories. I don't know why they didn't just ask, you know, do you remember nine and eleven or whatever? But That's how they did it and they remember their upbringing, even though it's a different head. They do wild. They do really stupid experiments with these things soough don't they? Yeah Because they're so wacky, they want to see what their limits are. So there's a guy called James McConnell in nineteen sixty four who put some flatworms in a maze and taught them how to complete the maze And then he chopped them up and fed them to another flatworm.. And then put that flatworm into the maze and the flat wororm could also complete the maze without being taught how to do it And his theory was that basically they had learned through their food Interesting. Is it like talking to them from inside? Well, it turns out that no one's been able to replicate this experiment. And what they think happened is the first fl left a load of slime in the maze and the second one just followed the sl. We didn't clean the maze out.. But given what we know about that, given that they can regenerate memories after being decapitated I mean, yeah, it sounds like that experiment was flawed, but it's crazy what they can do. yeah. What can they do They can regrow their head and remember I thought you meant once it's regrown, what they can do. Well we know someone who can't remember things even with the same head. it is just nuts, isn't it? Like if we could harness these abilities, we'd be unstoppable. we would. they can regrow from one two hundred seventy ninth of their original mass That's insane. So I don't know what that is for a human. It must be your little finger or something. Yeah. And also there's so many firsts in the flatworm world. So they're incredibly old. They're about eight hundred thirty nine million years old. I'm gonna to take away the about because that's a very precise number. Yeah. They are eight hundred thirty nine million years old They're probably the first hunter and the first thing that moved with any kind of purpose rather than just floating like plankton. so they chose what direction to go and moved. They're the first animals with a nervous system, a head, a brain, eyes. They're the first animal ever to internally fertilize rather than just leaving eggs around and they were the first bilaterally symmetrical animals, i. e, ones with left and right sides like pretty much all animals we know today. They pioneered that, having a left and right side So obviously you get like jellyfish and stuff or stuff that symmetry in lots of directions. but U yeah, and I was looking at other I was looking at asymmetrical animals. There are some really cool. canan you think of asymmetrical animals Ameiba they symmetrical what you mean, but they're just as likely to be blobby on one side as the other, right? It's not like they'll always have this on the left and always have that on. Right. Well I was thinking like starfish, but I don't think they are, are they? They're symmetrical. I'm talking like fiddle of crabs. Oh, fiddle of crabs Yeah, because they have one massive claw. a massive claw. Flatfish Remember that eye migrates around a flatfish so that it has two eyes on one side. Jvelin throwers. Chavelin throwers and Ruff and a doll? Yeah. Chronic masturbato. Fiddle of people. Welcome back, Anna. Thanks very much ye Did you read about the new flatworm they discovered that was named after COVID No. Humberurtium Cvidium. They just named it after that because a lot of the study was written during lockdown But there's another flatworm called Hancock anus, which has nothing to do with COVID surprisingly. But they get involved with penis fencing. Oh penis fencing. It's because they're all hermaphroditic. They're always fighting over who will be the one that puts their sperm into the other one. And the way that they do it is by a little bit of a penis fight and then the winner gets to inseminate the other one. Yeah, because it's worse to be pregnant As I personally know, than to not be pregnant. Yeah, but at least they get nine months off Off. Wow. I'll see you after the show, James I was reading about the native and non native flatworms because o, they're great, they're very interesting lots of them are not native to the UK and they absolutely decimate normal earthworms Do they hunt them, they kill them and native earthworms, which are really good for soil, obviously and are know brilliant in all sorts of ways just get written off when flatwmss invade. That's because we' trading plants and trading soil and stuff As a result of this I found and joined the The Earthworm Society of Britain. Oh Yeah nice, nice. Membership is five pounds per year. okay. How did these guys make any money in all of these people that you join? like the lightighthouse Kepers Association or the wallpaper association? Yeah They got so little money from you. Well, those guys are twenty five queid. This was a Fiver. It didn't say anywhere what you get for the Fiver, but I was so excited by that point that I just joined. Maybe you sponsor an earthworm, you know you' get letters from it.. I think youve got it cheaper because you got an early bird discount . Why isn't that on their website I'll tell you what happens when my membership is processed. I'm very excited. Yeah. Oh, so that's it. You're a member. Yeah. Okay, looking forward to installment two of that. God for James' a joke. Everyone wass going to think they forgot to put in the end of that anecdote. There wasn't one guys. What happens is han' it? I've developed this tactic where I just say something and then these guys save me that was my thing. Did you guys come across the Mayers's tpeworm trap The Myers Tapeworm trap. Yes. No. So tapeworms are a kind of flatworm, famous for living in your tummy and eating all your food. and they're things that you don't necessarily want living inside you. And so in eighteen fifty four, a doctor called Alpheus Myers patented a trap And it's so good. I don't know why it wasn't mass produced actually. It's a hollow tube gold that contains a bit of cheese.es. And you swallow the trap, you leave it in your tummy and as he explains, the worm will eventually seize the cheese You have to fast for a few days so that the worm's really hungry. It will seize the cheese and then the trap will spring shot on it and trap it and then you can pull it out with a string. So he says And he says the convenient thing is you can just fix the cord that hangs out of your mouth somewhere on your shirt.ight. A bit like a baby's dummy. Right? Yes. So you can go about your day, but it's dangling out of your mouth all the time But eventually he says you'll feel the tugging and you'll see the string move