No Such Thing As A Fish - 133: No Such Thing As Paranoid Ants

Episode Date: October 1, 2016

Live from Up The Creek in Greenwich, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss ants in frogs, upside-down perception, and the best way to watch a presidential debate.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from Up the Creek in Greenwich, London. My name is Dan Schreiber. Please welcome to the stage it's Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chizinski, and James Horkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, James Horkin. Okay, my fact this week is that this week's presidential debate was best watched with

the sound turned off. What do you mean by that? It's just my opinion. No, this was a study, this was a study done by the Professor of Economics at Dartmouth and also the University of Chicago, so it was two people together, and they found that if people are watching a debate, you can tell who's more likely to win the election by seeing how charismatic and how kind of relaxed and how confident they are. But the problem happens when you turn the sound on and you're distracted by their policies,

you can't tell anymore. I can tell you for a fact there was no chance of being distracted by the policies being discussed last night, so I think we're okay. That's true. So obviously I'm talking from a British perspective, so I can't vote in this election, so it doesn't make much difference to me who I think I should vote for, but it does make a difference to me who I think will win or who I think will lose, and so if I watched 10 seconds of each of the candidates on silent, I should be able to tell who's going to win the election.

And I did this, and it's bad news, guys. What? Hillary gets in? Yeah, I mean, what can I say, apart from the fact that I watched the first 10 seconds of each person's speech, and Hillary was kind of blinking a lot and mucking away, and Trump just looked more confident. Yeah, he's a very confident man, I don't think anyone's ever denied that. Huge revelation from you, though, James.

Even though, didn't he want a secret service codename to be humble at one point? That's true. I think he did answer that. That's right. So a confident man with a sense of irony. Did you guys see that the Kansas State Police, they have a Twitter account, did you see that tweet that they sent out? So they sent this tweet out just before the debate started, which said, reminder, in

capital letters, we realize politics can make emotions run high, but being mad at a presidential candidate in a debate is not a reason to call 911. And I think they've been inundated with calls, yeah. I saw some people warning not to play. There was this idea of a drinking game where every time Trump tells a lie, you take a shot. The cirrhosis figures have mysteriously rocketed across America. So there's been a lot about fact-checking about whether journalism has the duty to fact-check and whether, because there are so many fibs being thrown around in this election.

And I love the rating systems they have, so Politifact is a website, and the rating system goes true, mostly true, and then the three bottom categories are mostly false, false and pants on fire. And I measured 260 give or take statements from each candidate. Trump's seven out of 10 were in those last three categories. For Hillary it was 27, but still, and the Washington Post gives, they have fact-checked 75 Trump statements, and of those 75, 49 received a four Pinocchio rating, which is totally false. And this is the interesting thing, is average Pinocchio rating is 3.4.

And in 2012, in that election, the highest rated was Michelle Bachman, who got 3.08. And I think she believes in witchcraft, so that gives me an inclination. Mind you, that's not a lie if she believes it. I think you can only lie if she says witches are real. I don't think she's lying if she genuinely thinks they're real. That is true, actually. And I read, there was a kind of a Republican commentator who said, actually, Trump isn't lying, because he just hasn't checked it, and he's just saying it.

And technically, that isn't lying, that's bullshit. My ears are burning. You are off the Pinocchio scale. People are reporting now in America, Trump-induced anxiety. As in, this is a column that Michelle Goldberg, a slate columnist, did, and she investigated, spoke to a bunch of therapists, of psychologists, of psychoanalysis, and they're all reporting cases of Trump-induced anxiety. So one of them in New York said, six out of seven daily appointments will be

someone discussing how they're made to feel anxious and uncomfortable because of the election. There was a victim who described nightmares, insomnia, digestive problems, and it turned out she realized it was triggered by when she turned on the news and realized what was happening, so she's now determined to cut down on her news consumption as a way of curing it. Well, this is interesting because Trump is experiencing the opposite. We actually got sent in a fact by someone in the crowd here, Tom Boyerson, and he sent in the fact that Donald Trump's doctor has done an analysis on how he is anxious

and how he's doing health-wise. Yeah, so the idea is that everyone thought that Hillary was particularly sick because she coughed that time and she took some time off her pneumonia, and so Trump decided to release his medical record. Yeah, so these are a couple of quotes from his medical record. His blood pressure is astonishingly excellent. What's this doctor's name, Mr. Tunnelled Rump? Yeah, and same thing, his physical stamina and strength are extraordinary.

So on debate preparation and things like that, so do you know when the first one was televised? No. Oh, no. So it was Nixon against Kennedy, which was 1960. Oh, yeah. Was that the same as Sweaty one? That was the...

Sweat theft. That was our last series of... No, so, well, this was the thing. There's always a load of horse trading about what you get in, and there's actually a commission on presidential debates who have a senior Republican and a senior Democrat to try and make sure it's completely level. And Nixon wanted no reaction shots.

He said none at all. And Kennedy said, no, I do want shots of reactions and see what the other person's doing while someone's speaking. But there was a concession, which was that nobody, neither of them was to be shown wiping sweat from his face. Yeah, because Nixon was famously sweaty. That sounds like Kennedy was at home going,

oh, I've got such cool reaction shot faces. Do you know how Clinton got around that? Hillary or Bill? Bill, sorry. Yes, I forgot we have to specify. I think it was Clinton who got around this because it used to be that you weren't allowed to show the other person in the debate

while someone was talking. So when he practised his debates, his advisers got him to practise on a grid layout of the stage, so he could plan exactly where he was going to stand. And they worked out what the camera angles were going to be. And in his debates against Bush Senior, they made sure that where he stood, usually the camera angles would have to catch a shot

of Bush Senior as well so that you could get the reaction shots. And in fact, one of the downfalls of Bush Senior in that him versus Clinton campaign was when during one debate he checked his watch while Clinton was speaking. And that went down really badly because people don't care about policy. And so they were like, oh, he's bored.

Don't have him. And so Hillary has been preparing for these debates whereas Donald Trump hasn't at all. He's been flying around on his jet, meeting people. He's too busy with his astonishingly excellent blood pressure. Whereas Hillary has been practising and she's been practising with lots of different Donald Trumps for all of his different personalities.

So she gets people that might be the angry Donald. The sexy Donald? But her main... Because he's got no problems in that department. Let me assure you. Is there like a list that she can grade them on to see which one is the best? What I'm asking is, is there a top Trumps kind of thing?

So her main Trump was a guy called Philippe Reigns and he's one of her most trusted advisors. He's a bit like a Malcolm Tucker kind of person. He just swears at everyone and shouts at everyone. And so in that way they thought he'd be a bit like Trump. He doesn't mind picking on her faults and all that kind of stuff. And I kind of tried to find some facts about him. There wasn't really much.

Apart from that, he has two cats. And they're called Uday Hussein and Kuse Hussein. So he's got two cats that are named after Saddam Hussein's sons. What? Yeah, I know. It's good though. It's such a strange fact to know. Do we know why?

Yeah, he gave them surnames as well. Well, in Saddam Hussein news this week... There has been some. There's going to be a golden statue of Saddam Hussein sent into orbit. And this is by an Iraqi-American artist who's doing it as kind of a way of expressing himself, I guess. Did he do this? That's what artists do, right?

Is it going to be tiny though? Yeah, it's going to be pretty small. There used to be a kind of... Wait, no, hang on. Someone in the crowd... Someone in the crowd expressed audible disappointment that we weren't going to get a larger statue of Saddam Hussein in space. You were hoping it was going to be like the size of the ISS.

Yeah. So you know it's going to go over and you go, oh, you see that? That's actually not a star. I was thinking... The guy's on the ISS. Is that... Saddam Hussein?

It'd be great if he was, like, mechanized so he was waving. In other presidential preparation, so George W. Bush, he used to prepare with Rob Portman, who played Al Gore in the year 2000. So Portman used to argue with Bush and shouted at him and did what he thought Gore would do, which is go up really, really close to George W. Bush and stare him direct in the eye

and be really intimidating towards him. And apparently when he did this during one of the enactments of the debates, George Bush just put his arms around Portman and kissed him on the head, which feels like he'd missed the point of the presidential debate reactions. I have a fact about Al Gore. Go on.

In Al Gore News, in 2012, Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama to try and prevent him from winning office again, and he was really dedicated, so he started practicing a month early and he built accurate practice podiums to match the debate stage ones, and he had 16 mock debates, so he was super prepared.

And right, this is a thing I've read. I can't quite believe it's true. It's supposedly, he arrived in Denver several days earlier so that he could prepare for the altitude of the debate. Which I don't quite believe. It is high. It is high. It is high, but it's not the Himalaya, you know?

So Obama had a really bad night on the first debate. He wasn't good at all. Everyone said that... Nine of oxygen. Al Gore half jokingly said it was the altitude. Yeah, so there we go. They've made lots of elaborate, like previous presidents have made lots of elaborate mock stages,

so Ronald Reagan converted Elizabeth Taylor's garage into a complete TV studio in which he practiced his debates. I mean, that doesn't sound true, does it? No, but he was an actor, wasn't he? He was a B-movie actor. He just knew her. Al Gore, was he? No, Reagan.

Sorry. The news was so current, I didn't know which one we were. We need to move on to our next fact. Oh, wow. Yes, yeah. Abraham Lincoln. The structure, you might want to know, the first ever kind of big political debates in America.

So this was in 18, I think, 58. So it wasn't presidential, it was for the Senate, and it was him against Senator Stephen A. Douglas. And the format was, the first guy got to speak for an hour, the next guy got to rebut for an hour and a half. And then the first guy would close off with another half an hour, so they'd have an hour and a half each. And we're talking with this as a podcast format,

so if you guys are pro. I read that he was such a charismatic speaker, that there's this one very famous speech of his, which was so good, it was so brilliantly awesome. All the journalists there were so captivated by what he was saying, no one wrote it down. And it's called the Lost Lincoln Speech, no one knows what it is.

Because they said literally people were holding their pencils and they were like... And they just listened to it, and to this day, we have no idea what he said during the speech. That sounds like an assistant flattering Lincoln because he forgot to write the speech down. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chizinski. My fact is that a frog just formatted up a new species of ant.

That's this week, right? That's this week, that's just happened, and it's the little devil frog, or Diablito, and it's this bright orange poisonous frog, and it just threw up this new tropical ant species. Although, when I say threw up, it didn't voluntarily throw up. This is a thing that scientists do to find new species.

They've got so desperate now, that's basically sticking their fingers down animals' throats in order to survive them. So because they know that these frogs go hunting for bugs in places that are hard to access for them, this is in Ecuador, this happened. So they hunt these bugs in places that the scientists wouldn't find.

The scientists then insert a tube into their stomach and flush all the contents out of it. So they pour water down the tube that's gone through the frog's mouth into its stomach, flush the contents out gently, the article said. But they don't just like squeeze it. It's more of a massage, a light massage, and there's...

Dan is very amusingly miming a massage on a frog. What a physical comedy in this film today, Dan, for what is essentially an audio show. Did you say they have a tray? They put the vomit into it, yes, and they used a pan for gold, in fact. They sort of find the new species in the... And then I read that they let the frog back into the wild,

and you said they're going to be all right, but I once drank five pints of water in four minutes for a bet, and that frog is not going to be good. Like, he is going to be wandering around, busy, not really knowing what's going on for about 15 minutes. But we did find a new species of frog in your vomit. Weirdly, that ant is not the only new species that they found in that batch of vomit.

There's other insects in there that they just haven't classified yet, but there were a bunch of new unknown species inside, yeah. So what they do, they give this... If they get a live thing in the vomit, which does sometimes happen, they do a thing called a cafeteria test, which is where they offer the insect they've found multiple different prey items,

and they see what it goes for. It's not the only species that's been found inside another species, either, that's been named inside another species, and this one I find really cool. This is the Duns Earth snake, and this was found inside another snake in 1932 in Nicaragua, and no one's ever found one since. Inside another snake?

Inside another snake, so it was found inside a coral snake. Like a Russian doll of a... My favourite bit of frog news from the last year is that they were trying to work out... There's a frog called the Bombay Night Frog, and they were trying to work out how it mated, because they'd never been observed because it does it at night. So they went and they managed to track one down,

and they got their sort of night vision stuff, and they followed it, and they saw it mating, and it was an amazing discovery, because there were six sex positions in the frog world, no more than six, so... Froggy style? Yeah. But so when they observed this,

this frog was doing it in a seventh position, a never-before-seen position in frogs, so they've had to add a new position to frog sex, but it's so far exclusive to the Bombay Night Frog, and what it does, and it's crazy, it climbs onto the head of the other frog, and it just starts doing the heads. Again, for people listening at home,

that is very amusingly showing someone doing the head. So the frog is kind of rotting on the other frog's head. It's just there, yeah, and then what it does is it lets loose, and then it dribbles all the way down. Yeah. Just on frog vomit, this is a cool thing. So scientists are currently trying to clone a particular frog,

and it's gone extinct, right? So this is two kinds of frog that went extinct in the mid-80s, and they were the only known frog species which incubated their offspring in the mother's stomach. So once the eggs were fertilized, she ate them, and they have this chemical in them which says, stop producing hydrochloric acid immediately, because otherwise they'll just be dissolved in the stomach.

And so it turns off the production of hydrochloric acid, and when the eggs hatch, the tadpoles have to keep producing this stuff in their mucus to say, don't digest us, and then they get bigger and bigger, and eventually the mother is entirely stomach on the inside, and eventually the pressure builds up, and she vomits out the offspring. Oh, she vomits out her babies?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, one terrifying frog, actually, which there's been news about recently, is the scrotum frog, which you might have talked about before, is the Titicaca water frog, and this year it's transpired that they're critically endangered because they are being eaten in Peru or drunk as part of a smoothie which is supposed to be an aphrodisiac. So they came second to the blobfish.

Do you remember a few years ago, there was that contest for the world's ugliest animal, blobfish1, they were second. That's even worse, isn't it, really, than being the ugliest? Being the second ugliest. It isn't, also. I think that's so sweet. Well, they look exactly like scrotums. They are more attractive than scrotums, I would say.

Even more attractive than a scrotum. I know, it's almost impossible to believe. I've actually got a picture, if you want to... A picture of what? Look, so I think it's unbelievably sweet. It's got this flabby, flabby skin, but that's because it lives in areas without much oxygen, like aquatic environments or high altitudes,

so it needs lots of surface area to absorb it. But I mean, I think it's adorable. The person who's studying them says they have permanent smiles and dark, forward-facing eyes that give them a sweet, cartoonish look. But I know about scrotums. We need to move on in a sec. Well, all of my research was about ants. One thing about ants, this was in New Scientist two weeks ago.

There are ants trapped in a nuclear bunker, and they're developing their own society. What do you mean? So there's this nuclear bunker underneath a forest somewhere, and there's a ventilation pipe, and the ants just keep walking past this ventilation pipe and falling in, and they can't get out again, and so they've kind of built their own nest

and they're living as a little society. I thought you meant they were just very paranoid ants. So unfortunately, as far as they can see, there's no food, and so they kind of set up a nest, and these ants keep falling down into this society, but then they all die because there's no food, and there's a carpet of ants that's two centimetres deep over this whole nuclear bunker.

So that's what we've got to look forward to, when the nuclear apocalypse comes. As soon as Trump is elected, that's what we've got to look forward to. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that a group of Saxon soldiers is marching 300 miles towards Hastings, and this is happening now.

It's topical. It's a re-enactment that they don't, because what we've just had is the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and that was the battle three weeks before the Battle of Hastings, so we're about to have the 950th anniversary of that. And English Heritage have kind of been involved in this. They've set up a group of soldiers,

and they're marching. They started in York on day one, and they are marching all the way down the country. They're going to stop in Hyde Park in London for a bit, and... When you say soldiers... So re-enactors. Right. That's a bit different.

This is unkind. It's unkind. I spoke to one of them this afternoon, actually. Oh, yeah. That's an embarrassing moment when you re-enactment mode it. Time trouble! Not quite from the present, though. I still got that Nokia ringtone from ten years ago.

So I spoke to a very nice man this afternoon called Phil Harper, who's from English Heritage, and he's not one of the guys doing the full stint. He just sort of helped a bit with the setup. But they're going all the way down. They're half horse riding and they're half walking, and they're sleeping in churches and villi-tools along the way, and, you know, tying up their horses at night and things.

They've had to improvise a bit with the route, because they think that the route they would have gone when the real Saxon army was going from Stamford Bridge down to Hastings was directly on the A1. So they've compromised there. But there are bits which they know they would have gone through, so there's an old Roman arch and Lincoln that these guys would have gone through,

so they're going to go through that, and they're going to go on various Roman tracks and things like that. That's kind of cool. Do you know who the chairman of the Battle of Stamford Bridge Society is? No. It's Chris Rock. I assume it's the same one, but... No, so he said this week, Chris Rock said this week,

that the reason they're doing it, and he's led this, is because the battles in Yorkshire are overshadowed by the whole Battle of Hastings thing, which is actually very true. So we don't, I think, give King Harold enough sympathy for the fact that he'd been under attack from the Vikings for a long time, England had, Britain had, and he finally got up to Stamford Bridge

and defeated the Vikings, defeated Harold No. 2, Howard Hardrada, and his brother at the same time, didn't he? So as in King Harold of England's own brother was fighting him, he defeated him, he defeated Harold Hardrada, he went, thank fuck for that, we've actually got our own country for once. Three weeks later, he went down south and got defeated by the Normans, who essentially still in charge, I think. But yeah, so three weeks of independence, England had.

Actually, I read a letter to the Hastings Observer from this week, and it was from a man called Ethelred Ronaldson. And he said, I have just visited the Seafood and Wine Festival in Hastings, and I must say it was an excellent event. I was, however, dismayed to see that the flag on the logo representing King Harold was a St George flag. This St George flag was brought in in the 13th century to replace the Saxon white dragon.

It is therefore a symbol of Norman oppression of the Saxon people. The Normans stole our land and were nasty and unpleasant to the English people, and they're still in charge. So I think he needs to get over it a little bit, but... But they are still in charge, the Normans. They are. Well, this is the interesting thing, is that there's... Norman names today still belong to people who tend to have more prosperous careers. And tend to be wealthier.

Like, Norman. So another thing they did is brought us surnames, thank you, the French. So before the Normans came, everyone had weird-ass names like Ethelred and Edric and Lofric or whatever, and then the French came over, and we loved them so much, we adopted all their names, but they only really had two names, so we all became called either William or John, and then there was all this confusion in England because everyone was called either William or John.

I think by 1379, half the men in England were called William or John. No! So that's why we needed surnames, because we all had the same first name. Because we couldn't think of just getting more first names. And they used to have amazing names. So, right, King Harold Goebbelsen, who... King Harold, who was killed at the Battle of Hastings, his mistress was called Edith Swanneck.

Oh, yes. It was a shame that that name has fallen into abeyance. I think it's a really nice name. English Heritage have just done a survey of how many people recognise the key participants in the Battle of Hastings and Stanford Bridge and so on, and more people recognise the names Stannis Baratheon and Daenerys Targaryen

than they recognised Harold Hadrada or Edgar the Atheling, who was pronounced... So which one was Daenerys? Was she Stanford Bridge or was she... But most of them recognised Duke William of Normandy and Harold Goebbelsen. So, actually, it's not a terrible result. I mean, Edgar the Atheling was a minor figure. He was the one who was pronounced King after the battle, and then he was King for about a week, and then... Right.

I think that is asking a lot of people to... I agree. I agree. Bloody idiot didn't recognise Edgar the Atheling. I reckon that was James's newspaper writing guy, writing it again. Typical Norman oppression has seen Edgar the Atheling. Forgotten. Forgotten, unjustly forgotten.

Every school in the county should have an Edgar the Atheling room. The historical re-enactments of this battle have been going on, obviously, for ages. And there was a guy I just want to tell you about in 2006 that was a man playing King Harold, who was Roger Berry. He was a sergeant in the military provost guard service, and I just wanted to read out this quote from him. He said he was fairly confident that the onlookers will know who he was.

He said, Then I will retire to the beer tent. You're a legend, Roger Berry. I've just been reminded by my fiance when she was younger. She worked at this festival, which was called the War and Peace Festival. It was out in Kent, and she was serving beer, so she was in the beer tent. So everyone came, but everyone was kind of really into the idea of the War and Peace theme to it, and they were going to re-enact a battle.

So they started, and she was in the beer tent on her own, and they started the re-enactment, and guns were going off, and all this fighting was happening, and no one had told her that there was going to be a re-enactment. So she flipped out, she got onto the ground, she crawled to the St John's Ambulance, and she got there, and she... They're all killing each other!

I love the idea of the St John's Ambulance being on hand at a war. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that scientists have concluded that objects look smaller when viewed from between the legs. I was going to say, if you're viewing an object between your legs, then... As it looks smaller than... No, no, scientists say it! Go on, explain.

OK, so this was actually published a while ago, but hopefully all of you saw this week was the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Ig Nobel Prizes, if you don't know, is an award... It's a scientific award for people who do research that first makes you laugh and then makes you laugh. And so, all the little bits of research that might get ignored because it has a slightly odd element to it or it doesn't have huge impacts to our understanding of the universe,

this is the award system that allows for them to be recognized. And so, this was one of the awards that was given. It was given to a Japanese team who had discovered this. I mean, it's pretty much what it says on the tin. It's smaller when you look through your legs. Yeah, but what do you mean by through your legs? Oh, not like X-ray. Like, you got to look through the hole.

You stand up and you bend over. Yeah. It's like the eighth frog sex position, isn't it? Yes. But you kind of... You look backwards through your legs and you can kind of see things behind you and they're supposed to look a bit smaller, is that right?

Yes. OK. And they've looked... So, in the study, then they investigated whether or not it was because the image had been inverted or because you were physically bending over. And they found out that if you were just inverting glasses, so you know you can get those glasses which turn everything upside down,

and then you looked at an object, it didn't have the same effect. So, it's not the effect of the image turning upside down. It's the physical effect somehow of you just flipping your body upside down that causes you to see objects are smaller. Amazing. And we don't know why. There is a famous, I think, Native American tribes

that would tell the height of a tree by walking away from it and then bending over until they can just see that the top of the tree, is level with the top of the... Like, the groin region. And then you would know the distance that you are from the tree and through trigonometry,

you'd be able to work out the height of the tree. Wow. And that was the way that they did that. Really? So, they actually... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what did women do for the same thing, I guess? Yeah, yeah, I mean, they would have to subtract the height of the scrotum from...

I mean, we still have legs. That's so interesting. They did do that. I love when I hear stories of testicles being used for scientific purposes, if you're, like, out in the wild. So, that's... The Polynesian travellers, if they were on boats

and they were looking for which way they wanted to go, where the tide was going, what they would do is they would dip their testicles into the water, because it's the most sensitive bit of man's body. So, they'd dip in and be like... That is true. That is true.

What they did, they had these things called matangs, which they were made... They were kind of maps that were made out of sticks and rope, and they would be in the shape of the waves. And waves change if there are islands around. So, you can tell where nearby islands are, depending on which way the waves are going. And actually, waves are quite hard to detect.

You need to use your most kind of delicate part of your body, and for them it was the scrotum. I mean, they would sometimes use their elbows as well, and stuff, but... Right. So, you went to test how warm a baby's milk is with your elbow. Have I been doing it wrong? You test how hot the baby's bath is with your elbow.

Oh, God! You have been sticking your scrotum into that milk for no reason whatsoever. I've got a lot of babies to apologise to. Worst uncle ever! I was googling upside-down things, and I... Because I just thought, OK, look upside-down,

and what else is upside-down? So, we were talking about new species that were discovered. Last year, a new monkey was discovered, and they've nicknamed it Snubby. It's a sneezing monkey, and its nose is upside-down. And it lives in rainy areas, and so, as a result, its nose just takes in all this water, and it sneezes because it has little puddles,

so it has to go... and sneeze out of the water. So, mostly when people are trying to observe this monkey and it's raining, their head is literally in their legs because they will drown. Oh, yeah, they hide in their arms, don't they? Yeah, they hide in their arms because their nose is upside-down.

I didn't know it was upside-down. Really? That's amazing. I can't work out if it would be more annoying. You know, when you have a trickly nose and it goes into your mouth, if it would be more or less annoying, if it trickled into your eyes.

But it would be different. More, yeah, more. More, probably more. So, this prize that this Japanese team won for the objects are smaller through your legs, it was also quite a big prize because the ignoble prizes had been going for something like 25 years, is it, James?

Yeah, at least, definitely. And this is the first time that a single country has managed to make it 10 years in a row of winning an award. Oh, okay. Japan are the first people. So, a few examples of previous awards that they got. They got an award for chemistry, which was someone had invented

an infidelity detection spray that wives can spray onto their husband's underwear so that when they come home, they can see if they've been unfaithful. At least let me take them off first. That was the problem in the first place. I've had enough of this. I've got to go and get the baby's milk.

There was another testicular ignoble award this year. What, sir? Because they have different categories depending on which papers they want to win. So, they don't always have this one. But this year, the ignoble prize for reproduction went to a contraceptive device where you have to put your testicles in a polyester sling.

So, this sling device, it raises the temperature of your testicles, and apparently that is measured by the rectal testicular temperature difference. Oh! So, hang on. What if the temperature of your rectum is raised as well? If they test with the rectal temperature increased?

I think the testicular temperature increases, which decreases the difference between the rectal and the testicular temperatures, but I might be wrong. Unless the rectal temperature increases as well, in which case the difference between them stays the same and your experiments void. Yeah, but I...

I think there are holes in this experiment. And that's it for our show! That's it! That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shrybland, James. At H-shaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Chazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep.

And also follow at Mark Abrams. He is the creator, founder, and the host of all the ignoble prizes. He's an incredible guy. And also go to our group account at qi.podcast, or go to our website. No such thing as a fish. We have all of our previous episodes up there.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.