No Such Thing As A Fish - 142: No Such Thing As Edward Binbag-Hands

Episode Date: December 2, 2016

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss aeroplane-chasing bumblebees, spiky penises, and the weighing scales in the Oval Office.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Czenski, and Andrew Hunter Murray, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the White House's Oval Office is a giant weighing scale. What do they use it for normally?

Weighing the president. No. Do you see how heavy he is? No, it's not. That's why you weigh things. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's to see that he's there full stop, so the Secret Service need to monitor where the president is at all times.

However, they're not allowed into the Oval Office. He doesn't want them in there, so they have to stand outside. Now when the door's open, they can see where he is, but when the door is shut, they can't see where the president is. So if you look at pictures of the Oval Office, there is a giant oval carpet that literally spans the entire office room except for a few inches to the wall, and underneath it are weighing pads that are connected to a line that goes outside, so the Secret Service can see where he is in the Oval Office, purely by where he's standing.

I think I would get a load of objects that weighed exactly the same as me and just keep moving them around the office just to wind up the Secret Service. Like Indiana Jones at the beginning of the first film. Yes. But it's kind of like if you've seen Harry Potter, the Marauders map, where they just follow the footsteps on the map. That's what the Secret Service have to have. Except it's not on the Marauders map, because the things aren't labeled as the president.

It's just someone who weighs roughly the same amount as the president, right? So it's definitely Obama's in the Oval Office, or someone who is also human-sized as in the Oval Office. Yeah, or two people in the Oval Office. It's just a way of making sure that no one kidnaps him through a window, maybe. Why aren't they allowed into the Oval Office? I don't know, actually. This is a fact which I haven't seen in many places.

It's from Brad Meltzer, who is a best-selling novelist, but also works at the White House and gives tours. And he did a Huffington Post piece where he said, here is Secret Service, Secrets, and that was the top one. Because he has lots of randomers into the Oval Office. I'd be a bit insulted as a Secret Service if I wasn't allowed in. Well, I think it's more, they're probably allowed in at some point. I don't think it's like a total ban on Secret Service people.

I think when he's working on a day-to-day basis, he doesn't want Secret Service people in there. Let's say they're doing something really important, which is quite classified, and only the people who need to know are in there, so the other guys just stood outside like playing cards or something. Do you think if he puts on a bit of weight, they start giving him sly looks? All right. Are you sure about that biscuit, Mr. President? This article by Brad Meltzer also mentions that any time we hear about the White House

going under renovations of an old room, it's actually that the Secret Service are conducting an investigation, and it's the only way of giving an excuse to allow for the first family to be out of the White House while renovations are going on, but it actually means they're conducting an investigation. Is that right? It can't always be that. No, no, but I think there's been a few cases. It's a sort of like inside knowledge thing that if there's an investigation by the Secret

Service, they will say currently under renovating. Sure. What are they investigating? I don't know. That needs the president to be away. It's hard to research them because they're quite open about some things, but then other things are surprisingly secretive. It is surprising, isn't it?

What is that? That they would want to keep anything from us? It's controversial. Are they telling the truth? Is the author telling the truth? We know a bit too much about the Secret Service, it seems, recently. It would just be called the service. Exactly.

Yeah, the open service. Yeah. You know, we have a lot of presidents and leaders who like exercise and like jogging. Obviously, when they go out on a jog, they have to be accompanied by their little Secret Service cabal who have to jog with them. And so, for instance, there was an article, I think this was in The Atlantic, by someone who'd been in the Secret Service under Clinton, and he said it was a complete nightmare because Clinton loved running, and they even built him his own little running track inside the

White House grounds, but he didn't like it. He liked to be out there with the people. So whenever Clinton went for a run, a bunch of them all had to go for a run as well, but not just for a run. They had to go for a run carrying like all their guns and weapons and be super alert and always be ready to attack someone if they attack the president. And so it sounds like absolute hell. Imagine if Moll Farah became president.

Oh, my gosh, who would you... That's true. There are five people disqualified from being president, and they're the five fastest people in the world because surely you need five people faster than the president. But Moll's not in the five fastest people in the world, is he? Whenever running distances, which is what Moll Farah was doing, I mean, it's half the Usain Bolt becomes president, and you can only run 100 meters or 200 meters. What trouble could he get in?

But he will be able to get away because at least the Secret Service can bus in more people to start running after the first 5,000 meters that President Farah has been running. So when President Farah is running, what they'll do is they'll all be running in like a relay. And they pass the gun. Yeah, they do have to... It's quite funny when you look into sort of odd little things that they have to prepare for in the safety of a president like Clinton going for his runs. So do you remember that famous incident where George Bush swallowed a pretzel and started

choking on it? Apparently, that was a thing that they had to try and work out how to avoid from ever happening again. So did they all like suck the pretzels? Suck all the pretzels first. Exactly. What do you do in that situation? You just elect a new president eventually.

The only thing that they could come up with was a sort of emergency push button, which I assumed he should have had anyway. What, the pretzel button? No, it's not exclusively for pretzel. Is it pretzel shape? I hope they made it pretzel shape. Some of the Presidential Secret Service things, I read in one book called Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House, I don't know if it's true, that Gerald Ford, whenever

he farted, would blame the Secret Service who were around him. God, Jesus, guys, can you keep a bit of decorum? That's amazing. Apparently, that's true. I guess that's true. Who was the, we spoke about this before on the podcast, there was one president, I think it was Johnson, who would just, if he was taking a piss, would just urinate on the Secret Service member and say, I can do this, I'm the president.

I think the story went something like, it was LBJ, wasn't it? And I think what happened was, he went for a piss on the side of the road when they were driving somewhere and they kind of did like a human wall around him and then there's like a gust of wind and it blew the pee onto one of the guys and he said, excuse me, Mr. President, you're peeing on me and he said, well, it's my prerogative to do that. I think that's what the story is anyway. Okay, make some slightly less unpleasant than deliberately weeing on his... Yes, yes.

Every time he needs to do it, calls one of them into the office. There was an assassination attempt that was made on Ronald Reagan and it was made by John Hinckley Jr. and one of the Secret Service guys, a guy called Jerry Parr, is the guy who got Ronald Reagan into the limousine and got him off to, and noticed that blood was coming out of his mouth and said, we need to get to the hospital right now. So he's said to have saved Ronald Reagan's life. Interestingly, he became a Secret Service officer because he had watched a movie called Code of the Secret Service years before, which starred Ronald Reagan as a Secret Service

guy. No way. Yeah. So he ended up saving the life of the guy who got him into it through... So Ronald Reagan saved his own life in a way. Exactly. Wow. That's incredible.

Yeah. That's really cool. That'd make a good movie in itself, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Just one thing about the British Secret Services, which I thought was interesting. So during the Second World War, they obviously requisitioned a load of, you know, country houses and castles and things like that in stately homes.

And one place they had was in Scotland. It was called Invaler Lodge, and it was used for spies who weren't good enough to spy, but had already learned too much secret information to be allowed to leave. No way. Yeah. Wow. And they had to stay there for the rest of the war. One of them, one unfortunate man who had signed up to spy, he was refused leave to actually

go and spy on the field because apparently he was outstandingly ugly. So there was a report which said he'd be recognized anywhere, once seen, never forgotten. He has no teeth at all, except two gold tusks and two incisors. Poor man. But they must, they must admit as well, like by the time they all left, everyone would have known the secrets that they were meant to be keeping as well. Yeah. How come you're here?

Well, I got told this thing about. There's one guy going, no, come on, Mike. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that because male bumblebees rely on sites to find females, they sometimes find themselves chasing after aeroplanes. So presumably their eyesight is not very good. Well, it's good. It's good for an insect, but it's not good for like an eagle.

Oh, OK. OK. Bumblebees do have kind of good eyesight, as in they can see lots of colours. People didn't realise they could see colours, and then Karl Frisch, is it called? That guy who worked out that they did the waggle dance, he's quite a famous scientist. Oh, wow. Yeah, he got Nobel Prize for that, didn't he? Yeah, and he did an experiment where he proved that they could see colours by getting loads

of grey, like grey card, and then one coloured card, and always put the food on the coloured one, they could always tell where it was. So they do have colour site. So are you saying we need to stop painting our aeroplane stripy, black and yellow? Well, there is a stripy, black and yellow aeroplane, and it is the smallest aeroplane that has flown. Is it the size of a bee? It's called the Bumblebee.

It's a bit bigger. It's eight foot ten inches in length, and the wingspan is five foot six, and it's tiny. It's so small. It's so small. Yeah. It's a biplane as well. Yeah. I mean, it does not look like it should get off the ground.

The wings are so small that you shouldn't think it has enough lift. It looks like your car has just had some wings, and not even as big as your car, because it fits five people in a car. This is my armspan. It's six inches shorter than my armspan across the whole plane, wing tip to wing tip. Looking at that, despite the fact that that's black and yellow, and it's the smallest plane, I still think bees are idiots, because they look something that size and think it's genuinely a bee.

Do they chase after the plane once it's in flight, or is there a lot of bees at Heathrow? It's in flight. So, I got this from a newsletter of the Bee Conservation Society. It's all about how bees fight, how male bees find the queens, and there are different ways of doing it. One way that they do it is by all load of males kind of leave their smells around in a certain area, their pheromones, and they kind of do it as a gang, and they put loads and loads of stuff around, and then the queen just smells tons and tons of males, and then

goes down, and then they make that way. Another way is by kind of chasing after a female, so they'll see one in flight, and they'll chase after the female. Even though their eyesight is kind of good for insects, it's not quite that good, and so if they see something which is small looking, but actually is far away, and is flying, then they can sometimes, according to this newsletter, mistake it for an aeroplane. Do we know how far they get towards the plane before they realise they're mistaken, and then they have to casually turn around, so they weren't chasing?

You mean like you're trying to get onto a tube train, and it goes away, and you pretend you weren't boffering? Or do they think that there's just certain female bees out there, or male bees that are extremely fast? Man, she was like President Usain Bolt of the bees. No, it didn't go that far into the psychology of the bees. That makes more sense that it's at a distance though, I sort of can forgive the bees slightly. I think a plane looks like a bee from far away.

Sorry, just one more thing on the colours that bees can see. They can't really see red, but they can see things that are further in the spectrum, so they can see ultraviolet. They can see a little bit of yellow and orange, they can see blue, they can see violet, and they can see another colour, which I saw on a website, it was called Bee Purple. Bee Purple is a colour that we can't see, which is like a combination of yellow and ultraviolet. Really? Wow, that's so cool.

How do we know they can see it? Have they done paintings, and there's just these big blank spots? I don't know, I think you can, if you know the wavelength that something gives off, you can know that there is a colour there even if you can't see it. So they can tell that it's a sort of purple-ish in the spectrum area. That's so cool. I didn't think you could mix normal colours with ultraviolet as well. I guess it's a spectrum.

But it makes sense that you can, doesn't it? Yeah. I don't know. I actually think that as you mixed it, the colour would gradually disappear, because we can't see stuff in the ultraviolet spectrum, so it would be like putting an invisibility cloak on. Manufacturers of invisibility cloaks should take note. I imagine that it doesn't quite work like that. I think she's absolutely right.

See, I'm not the only one who gets slammed for my Harry Potter references not being right. Do we know if there's anything in our day-to-day life that is actually that B purple, but we obviously just see it as purple? Well, there are plants which have colours that if you shine a UV light on them, you can see that they glow in a certain way, that you can't see as humans, but bees presumably can see because they point towards the centre of the plant. So they're pointing the bee to the centre of the plant, but if you or I were to look at it, we would never see those arrows.

But we would see it as a different colour. We wouldn't see it as nothing. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it wouldn't be invisible. You look, bees aren't the only things that make honey. I did not know this. Really? Wasps.

Some wasps make honey. Do they? Yeah. There's a particular species of it called the Buraki gastramelificata, and apparently you can even eat that wasp's honey, but I don't think it's farmed because it's quite hard to breed wasps. I don't know why it's not farmed. A single pound of clover honey requires 8.7 million flowers to be manufactured.

8.7 million flowers for one pound of clover honey. Oh my God, I go through so much honey. That's terrible. I mean, the flowers can do multiple pollinations. It's all right. Have you guys heard about, and I only realised as we were about to start recording, that actually this article is from 2015, so potentially this already now exists, but the Highway for Bees in Norway?

No. In Oslo and Norway, they want to make life better for bees basically, and they have a lot of green spaces, and the idea is that they want to create networks so that the bees can go between the green spaces through sort of alleyways that are created in buildings and between buildings and so on. In buildings? Yeah, so like literally tunnels inside, but it's like trying to get in the lift.

Well, no, imagine in this room, they would have their own lift. I'll get the next lift. Yeah, it's like tunnels and so on, and the bees can travel and find their way to the next green place that they're going to. I think it might be that, but I thought it would be like rooftop gardens and stuff rather than actually inside the buildings. Yeah, I probably made that up.

They put signposts on rooftops saying bees, you're allowed to fly over there. What they do is that bees are in one place, they might want to go to another place, and they just make sure there's a corridor of green spaces where they can go. So they put green on the rooftops. Yeah. And flowers that they like and things like this. Because you can make your garden really bee-friendly.

There are all these specific flowers that you can grow, and you guarantee bees. And London is basically covered in bees. It's true. Basically. Yeah. When you say basically, you mean not. So many rooftops. Do you mean the hipster beehives in Shoreditch?

No, I mean the Royal Festival Hall has a beehive on top of it, Harrods has a beehive on top of it, and there's one specific London beekeeper who goes to all of these different places. And Issy, does he do parkour? Just jump from one to the other. But it is a problem because it's really fashionable to have a beehive, and it's really cool. But what they haven't done is planted 8.7 million flowers.

So you get exhausted beehives, and they haven't got enough flowers and plants to pollinate. So what you should actually do is plant a wildflower meadow. Because that's not as sexy as getting a load of bees off the internet. That's true. If you do have a garden, but not many people do have gardens in London, but if you do have them, you should plant lots of flowers, shouldn't you? Yeah.

Yeah. Did you know there's such a thing as a bee beautician? No. A bee beautician. Yeah. So her job is to brush bees' hair, to wash them with shampoo. So bees are, when specimens are collected, then they're preserved in ethanol,

and that makes them kind of soggy and slimy. And she has to prepare them to be fit for display. So she's got, she's concocted a special bee shampoo, and then she dunks it in the bee shampoo, and then she hangs it out. So she inserts a tiny, tiny pin, I think, at the hinge of one of its legs. And then she's created a blow dryer for bees.

What? No. Yeah. So she at first tried actual blow dryers, but she found that they were too violent. So it used to... I forgot. She's got the little legs left in the gland for the rest of the bees. She does say so.

It used to blow their limbs off, and then she'd have to glue the limbs back on, which is the whole other process. Glue the limbs back on? Yeah. But she did say something interesting about bees, which is that they have lots of split ends. And so that's why she has to use a special shampoo.

It's because they get very clumpy and frizzy when they get wet. What is this shampoo? Just asking for a friend. It's a mixture of... Can't remember. I think it's like a mixture of water and sodium bicarbonate or something. Okay.

But wasps don't have split ends. Do they not? So if you don't want frizzy hair, be a wasp. It's a bit late for me, really. Okay. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that running a leaf blower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a pickup truck 3,800 miles. No way. That is incredible. It does sound unbelievably untrue, doesn't it? Yeah. I'm following the words of James Fallows,

who's a correspondent at The Atlantic, which is a very reputable magazine. And here's Andrew Hunter Murray. And he has a campaign against these things. Well, I guess if you were a pro of them, you wouldn't work out the emissions. What he says is that about a third of the petrol they use, because they use petrol or gas in America,

is vomited out in aerosol form, right? And that gets mixed in with, like, tiny particles of oil in the exhaust, in the droplets. So he has calculated that. Which, if true, means that you could drive from Covent Garden to Jerusalem. Wow. I think they compared it to a particular type of pickup, didn't they? Sorry, yeah, F-150.

Maybe it's an unbelievably clean. I think it is. I think it is an extremely efficient one. But it's still good. I mean, it's still amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought the F-150 was a model of Casio watch. Is it not?

That's the F-91W. Great. Anyway. So is he suggesting we all try and clear our leaves with pickup trucks? Because I think it's a little harder. If you use the F-150 and you can blow it in the right way, I guess you could save technically on emissions. You could.

The exhaust pipe pointed the right direction. Imagine trying to dry a bee with the leaf blower. There were legs everywhere. Yeah, so I mean, people really hate these things. Yeah, they're horrible. I think they make the most disgusting noise and they should all be banned. I genuinely do think that. They're very, very, very loud.

And I think they're unnecessary. Just rake your bloody garden, guys. It must be easier to blow it than rake it, though. You're blowing it into someone else's spot, aren't you? Or do you blow it into a pile? Blow it into a pile. Okay. I've got leaves all over my bloody garden at the moment.

I would kill for a blower. Your garden's small. I don't need to be rude. Well, that is quite rude. What I'm saying is it's eminently rakeable. You couldn't fit a pickup truck in your garden. I think kill for a blower was the most routine in that sentence by a long mile. Oh, dear.

Yeah, but I can see that they are. I think my neighbors have got one. They are pretty loud, aren't they? If your neighbors have got one, you will definitely know about it. Well, there is a big loud noise coming from my neighbors every now and then in the autumn. That's what it is. You don't want to pry. Well, it could be that.

It sounds a bit like an airplane taking off. Is that what they sound like? Yeah, they do. Unless do they have an airstrip in their garden? They do, yes. Well, no, it's a bee. Oh, dear. In California, there are 20 cities that have banned.

Wow. Yeah, I was reading an article by the Kendall family who are from California are in a state where they want to get it banned. And they're pointing out that the reason it's so annoying, and this definitely does ring true, is that compared to a lawnmower, which can be as loud but operates at the same kind of frequency and volume the whole time, leaf blowers really go up and down, don't they? So you can't predict it. So you're constantly being shocked by its volume increases and decreases.

Interesting. That's what stresses you out. How long have we had leaf blowers, by the way? Does anyone know? Since about the 50s or 60s. Yeah, 50s. Yeah. Except in Japan in 19th century, we know they used like bellows that you use for a fire

as leaf blowers, don't they? Yeah, I haven't seen a photo of the bellows. I tried to find one and I couldn't find a picture of Japanese ancient leaf blowing bellows. No, but there is an early book, but the 1950s reference is weird. If anyone couldn't tell us if this is true, Wikipedia claims, and this is from a book called Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Leaf Blowers. So you would have thought this would be the authority on it. But this claims it was invented by a guy called Dom Quinto, who originally designed it in

the 1950s as an agricultural sprayer, but people were taking out the spraying device and just using it to blow their leaves. But there's no evidence aside from this book that there's Dom Quinto chap ever existed. So if you are him, always offspring, get in touch. Do you know who invented the rake? No. Is it Mike Rake? No, it's not Mike Rake.

I mean, these are always a bit dubious, aren't they? But apparently the steel rake, which is kind of a bit springy and the modern day one that's good for raking stuff with, was invented by a guy called Chester Greenwood, who also supposedly invented earmuffs. Really? Apparently. Wow. And he's quite famous in North America in Maine that there's a certain town where

every year they have a celebration of his inventing. What do they do then? Put a load of earmuffs and go on raking stuff out. Yeah. To drown out the noise of the leaf blowers that they're trying to protest against. They kind of do that, I think. They kind of wear earmuffs. They have an earmuff parade and stuff.

Earmuff parade? I think they don't really bother about the rake part of it that much. They're more bothered about the earmuffs because he was quite young when he invented them. He was like 16 or 17 or something. I thought it was 13. 30, yeah, it could be. Yeah. Maine sounds like a very exciting place to live, doesn't it?

If that's their highlight of the year. Well, the thing is it's cold and they have a lot of trees. So earmuffs and rakes are the kind of things you might invent if you live there. And they have every major horror story that we know of in popular culture set there through Stephen King because he lives in Bangor, Maine. So it, the clown, is from Maine. Okay, you can't credit an entire state for one person that it's produced. Well done, Maine.

There is a cool thing you can do with leaf blowers, which is turn them into a hovercraft. Can you? Yeah. There's a very cool video online of a Texan man called Ryan Craven. So shout out to Texas who created Ryan Craven. Who has sort of four of them together into a kind of platform when he puts a skateboard across the platform. And it hovers very, very low off the ground.

It does hover. You know, on Fallen Leaves, I was actually looking at this focus in the TV show we did this week. No such things in news. We were talking about Chernobyl. Well, still available on iPlayer. I think it might be. Yeah.

And actually, if you're international, it's on YouTube. Is it? But that's besides the point. But how would you find that? Oh, you go to know such things as the news.com. Thanks for asking. Yeah. Anyway, we recorded a TV show this week and we mentioned Chernobyl and leaves in Chernobyl

don't decompose because the radioactivity means that the bacteria are no longer there can no longer survive. So they can't decompose the leaves. And so there are, you know, that it's missing this fungus and the worms and the microbes and stuff like that. And so it's just building up this huge floor of dead leaves. And at the moment, if a forest fire started, which can't happen at certain temperatures, it would be a complete disaster and would spread radiation much, much further and wider

than it is already because it would just catch fire to all these dry dead leaves on the ground. That's like in Australia, a sort of Aussie non-nuclear version of that is the eucalyptus tree because their leaves, when they drop off the tree, they have a kind of sort of what's called like a toxic name palm thing about them in that they're too hard to break down for all the insects and animals. So they sit there dry as hell. And if a forest fire starts and it hits a eucalyptus patch, that will just go massively up in flames just sitting there waiting to be caught on fire.

And this must be because eucalyptus trees, one of the trees that love being set on fire. Yes. How they spread their seeds. Yes, they love to be set on fire. They have an inner tree waiting to break out of the bigger tree and forest fires is what brings that to happen. I think they're pretty much ambivalent about the whole thing really. Do you think they don't even know their trees?

Yeah. In 2011, someone patented a glove rake, which is really cool. It's a normal glove except it's got these five long, you look a bit like Edward Scissorhands except we were able to rake hands and you can just go around raking stuff up with your bare hands. You have to be on your hands and knees. You have to be on your hands and knees. Nice.

I mean, because it's the middle of autumn. Yeah. It's going to be dumb. Edward rake hands, by the way, would have been really useful in that scene where Edward Scissorhands cuts all the hedges. He could have been on the side cleaning up. Well then what? Edward been back hands comes along.

Guys, why are we all called Edward? We're not related. We've got different surnames. They've all got the surname Hans. What is that? It's a double barrel surname. Yeah. One of the married Mrs. Scissor.

One of the married Mrs. rake. I've never noticed before the moment where we come up with the title of an episode. I think no such thing as Edward been back hands. Okay. It is time to move on to our final fact of the show and that is Chesinsky. Yes. The final fact is that early humans had spiky penises. That is insane.

How early? I actually couldn't believe it just a couple of weeks ago. About 630 this month. No, this was a study on human genes that was done in 2011 and it found that about 700,000 years ago, so before our common ancestor split into modern humans and neanderthals, then we had a gene that carries penis spines and then that gene seems to have been deleted when we evolved into modern humans today. But almost all other primates still have penis spines.

Do they? Yeah, they do except for spider monkeys, I think. All primates have penis spines. And what do the spines feel like? If I gripped a chimp's penis, would I cut my hands? Would the palms of my hands be sliced? The ones on primates, I think, are more bumpy. Some animals are really spiky spines, like cats, I think, do, but I think they're more

like lumps, slightly blunt spikes. You've never seen the film Edward Tisapines, have you? So just to go into quickly, the reason that men might have had spiky penises in the past, we're not totally sure about it, but we think it might be because what it can do is it can help clear out rival sperm from a female vagina. So if you get the spikes in, then, as it's sort of retracting, they scrape the edge of a vagina and they'll bring out any sperm that's been left in there by someone else. And they can break through a little sperm sack and break it open to make the sperm released.

That's true of some animals, isn't it? I think dragonflies have spade-shaped penises that they do that with. It must be really hard to study the evolution of human penises because the lack of bone means that how can you, you just, there's nothing. So ironic, or boner, no bone. Or boner, no bone. Sounds like you've said that a few times. I've got to change my strap line on a lot of dating sites.

We might have had a bone, I must stop saying we in reference to our penises. Men might have had a bone, we don't know, but other primates do have a penile bone, I think, don't they? And it has a lot of advantages having a bone there because it means you can push it out much quicker than having to wait for the blood to engorge it, just flip right out, and it can stay out for longer. And I think Richard Dawkins in... That's one! Richard Dawkins in the Selfish Gene wrote that the advantage of humans not having this is that having to get blood flowing in there shows that you've got a healthy blood flow,

shows is kind of a sign of good health, so women are more attracted to it. So that might be why we've, men have evolved to have penises without the bone, because it's harder to get it blown up. I've heard so in place of the bone, there is a new thing that they're testing out, which is a metal rod. So some men could now have a metal rod inside their penis. And the idea is for, it's done, do you remember where it's done, Andy? In hospitals mostly. If it's being offered to you in a bar, you should be very careful. So the idea is that this is for people suffering from erectile dysfunction, and if they've gone through various courses,

they're going to then say on health services or whatever they will say, you can have this. And the idea is that it's a little metal rod inside, but when you want an erection, you can press a button, like a remote control, and it preheats this metal bar to a heat point where it expands within you. You're never going to get on a flight, are you? I mean, that's just not, it's just not going to happen. Every single time you're going to set it off, they're going to get that paddle thing. You're going to go up and down your body, you get to the rod. What, and you think you just go, never mind, I'm going home, doesn't matter.

I think that would happen, yeah. The other thing is you can get a bit of cartilage put in there if you have erectile problems, and then you have to just kind of manoeuvre the penis into position. So it's kind of permanently erect from that point. That's in Mary Roach's book, Bonk, which is about science and sex, and it's an amazing book. Oh, it's an incredible book, yeah. So this is partly about how males of various species manage to get rid of competition, because the spines are often used to scrape other sperm out of the vagina.

And so I was looking at other ways that you get rid of the competition, and one is that in mice, sperm club together as a group to beat rival sperm. It's exactly like... Like West Side Star. What? The Jets and the Sperms. It's exactly like in a cycling race, which James will know more about, where they move faster if they move as a group,

so they can tell if they're the sperm that belong to the same person, and all the sperm that belong to that person get together, and all the sperm that belong to another person get together. This is in these mice, inside this female mouse. And so they, as a group, they move much faster than they do individually. What's that called? It's like the... Peloton.

Peloton effect. It's a peloton. It's the peloton of sperm. And then when they get near the finish line, suddenly they all start competing with each other. Someone breaks away. Yeah. And then the Mark Cavendish sperm wins.

Exactly. Yeah. So they're just programmed. It will be smell or... No, what is it? What is it? How do they know this? How can they grow together?

To know they're just a cell, yeah. Yeah. Well, cells can be programmed to do things. So I imagine it must be that. It's inside the DNA of the cell. And that has instructions of what it should do. It makes the tails wag. Yeah.

And also, if they have that specific rendition of keep cool from my side story, then they can tell and move forward. Which is the best song to sing for a sperm. Yes. Because you do need to keep lower than the ambient temperature of the body. Yeah, it's weird that they want the lyrics in the original West Side Story, actually. Okay, that is it. And as all of our facts, thank you so much for listening.

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We will be back again next week with another episode. Goodbye.