No Such Thing As A Fish - 186: No Such Thing As Russian Hacking in the Cockroach Election

Episode Date: October 13, 2017

Anna, James, Andy and Alice discuss portable bridges, sneeze-based votes, and why you can't detect magnets with your mind. ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name's Anna, I'm here today with Andy, James and fellow QIL, Alice Campbell Davies. And once again, we've gathered around the mics with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go, starting with you, Alice. So my fact is humans should be able to sense magnetic fields. Should be. Should be. So there's been a little bit of research into this, not that much actually, but we have cryptochrome in our retinal cells, which is what's responsible for pigeons, migration and that kind of thing. And we also have magnetite
Starting point is 00:01:00 in our brains, which is a magnetic nanoparticle which helps direct other animals like bacteria. So why the disappointing lack? Why can't I say where I live from here? Well, Andy. You live south. Can you point south from here? Yes, I can actually. But only because you know where the river is. I know where the river is. Well, they have actually done some studies on this. There's a really controversial study
Starting point is 00:01:21 from the 1980s done by a guy called Robin Baker, where he took a bunch of students out on a minibus, drove them on a really securitised route all around Manchester, and then blindfolded them and told them to point to home. A bunch of them that didn't have magnets strapped to their heads could point home, and a bunch of them with magnets strapped to their heads couldn't, which suggests that magnetic fields were interrupting their ability to point home. But then no one else has managed to replicate this study, have they? In fact, it's been disproven multiple times. But he has said that he has replicated the study. So it ascends.
Starting point is 00:01:54 Maybe all of these people lived in that massive tower on Deansgate in Manchester, which you can see from pretty much the whole city. I think they were blindfolded on the journey, weren't they? Yeah, I'm not sure if they were blindfolded on the way home. That might have... Takes it too far. It's an amazing beginning for a horror story, though, where you have to put on the blindfold and get on the professor's bus, and then it goes away and you don't know where you're
Starting point is 00:02:14 going. I mean, I would have assumed that there was a really exciting surprise awaiting me, like a head and party or a big champagne picnic if I was blindfolded and put on a bus. If I was just strapped to a magnet and told the point at something. Would you not think you have been kidnapped, maybe? By my professor? No, I had perfectly normal professors. What normal professors who take you on head parties?
Starting point is 00:02:37 So there were two people who tried to replicate this called Max Wespey and Karen Partridge, and they were at the University of Sheffield, and they were unable to do it, and they quite sniffly said, maybe it depends which side of the Pennine Hills you're on, whether it works out. That's an academic slam and a half. It is, but I think maybe people from Yorkshire just aren't as good. It's ironic, considering that a Partridge, a real Partridge, probably would be able to sense which side of the Pennine's it was on.
Starting point is 00:03:07 That's irony for you, right there. There are a lot of different kinds of ana, and sometimes actually weak jokes can disqualify us. Irony being particularly appropriate because they use iron to sense where they're going. That's ironic. You've got to admit that, Anna. It's still not ironic. So some humans are magnetic, and they can literally pick things up that are...
Starting point is 00:03:32 I can literally pick things up. With my hands. I can't. That's why I always have to ask you to do it for me. Can you pour that coffee into my mouth? Do you mean they can just hold their hand hovering over a magnet, and the magnet will fly towards their hand? They are people who've had magnetic implants in their fingertips.
Starting point is 00:03:50 Wouldn't that get very problematic, though, opening a fridge or something? Yeah. You'd just be stuck to the fridge the whole time. Absolutely. Fortunately, you buy the fridge, so you're all right. So these implants are quite weak. You wouldn't actually stick to your fridge, but people are getting them bio-hackers, and there's a lot of interviews with these people saying they really don't regret it.
Starting point is 00:04:07 They think it's fantastic, because you're finally able to pick up tiny metal objects and determine whether metals are ferrous, which is something that we've all always wanted to be able to do. And you can feel electric fields if you have one of these little implants. So if you go near a microwave, then your finger starts vibrating. I think I also can tell when I'm near a microwave. You have visual clues, don't you? That's true.
Starting point is 00:04:30 It's only useful if you're worried about being near a microwave, and you have hidden microwaves in this environment. Or if you don't know if it's a prop microwave, like if your house is also a film set. So it is a useful implant to get. Unfortunately, it has to be done by a tattoo artist or something, so you can't get an anaesthetic to have it done, and it is relatively painful, according to one of the people who's got it done. They put a massive syringe in your finger, and then they fire a magnet into it.
Starting point is 00:04:57 What? Is it in the fingertip? Yeah. Or is it? They could put it anywhere in your body, I guess. Yeah. No, James. I would not say they would.
Starting point is 00:05:05 If you're suggesting a world in which my magical penis tells me where the microwave is. Like a pointer. It would be like dousing for water, wouldn't it? Dousing for microwaves. Imagine being near a branch of curries. There are people who claim to be magnetic, but who aren't really. You know, you see pictures of them online, and they've got spoons attached to them. Yes.
Starting point is 00:05:32 They're circus-performery type tricks. Well, often it's just people, and they get into the local tabloids, don't they? Because they're magnetic, but they never are. Like a lot of the skeptics kind of go there and try them out, and it turns out a lot of people are leaning back in the pictures, and if they lean forward, the spoons would just fall off. Also if you've got kind of greasy skin, then it will stick to the kind of sebum in your skin, so that everyone's kind of sticky in a way.
Starting point is 00:06:00 So not only are you a liar, but you're kind of a greasy, sweaty liar. Yeah. James Randi, the famous skeptic from Australia, he would douse people in talcum powder, and suddenly they would not be magnetic anymore. But surely you could just disprove it by putting a magnet next to them and proving it didn't stick? Yeah, although they would be able to make it stick. How sweaty are these people that random fridge magnet?
Starting point is 00:06:25 So I've got a little pen here, and I can kind of stick it on my head if I kind of lean back a little bit. Yeah, we do need to get aircon in this room, James. I'm remembering that humans have magnets in their nose that maybe we once used to navigate, so they found magnetite in our ethnoid bone in our nose. And so there's lots of speculation about the fact that we might have been able to use this at some point to navigate, isn't there? Yeah, I think the theory about there being magnetic stuff in the nose was disproven
Starting point is 00:06:55 by a guy called Joe Cushvink, or something I can't pronounce his surname, a Caltech, who is the biggest critic of Baker's work. And he has just conducted an experiment last year where he set up a big Faraday cage in a Caltech basement to block out other magnetic waves of sorts and put people in it, and then subjected them to magnetic fields from different directions. And he has actually shown that when you have magnetic waves coming from one direction, there is a massive change in your EEG spec, so your brainwaves, so that it does show that there is something in your brain that is responding to the direction of magnetic fields you're
Starting point is 00:07:31 exposed to, which is really interesting, okay? Does it have any effect on, not your thoughts, but is it sort of... It's not mind control, Andy. No, it's not mind control, but I'm just trying to work out how that could have been useful. I think in the past, when we were maybe migrating over larger distances, it was something we could have relied on, but now we don't really need it. So maybe in the past we could sense magnetism. Perhaps, yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:53 And also the cryptochromes we have in our eyes, because they're in our eyes, which is the same as with birds and other animals, suggests that at one point we did use it to see magnetic fields. Okay. And basically what we're saying is loads of animals can see magnetic fields and can sense magnetic fields, but we just can't, right? Yeah, maybe. Do you know which animal has some magnetite in its tongue?
Starting point is 00:08:15 It's a little mollusk, isn't it? It is. It's mollusks. Mollusks have magnetite-capped teeth, but when I say teeth, their tongue is made of teeth. Radula. Radula, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:28 So they can do that. And this is very cool. There are some bacteria which contain magnetite in them, and a baker, the scientists we're talking about, I see the him or someone else. There is a theory that the very earliest bacteria were magnetic, but get this, some bacteria are aligned towards the north pole, and some bacteria in the southern hemisphere are aligned towards the south pole. Do you know what I found about bacteria, actually, looking this up, which I think is quite cool,
Starting point is 00:08:53 is that one of the things is when bacteria multiply, then they split in half and they keep splitting in half. And when they're magnetic, that's really hard to do. And the reason is that normally the way they do that is by belt tightening. So literally, when a bacteria splits in half, it just tightens. They spend a bit less money that month for. Yeah, absolutely. They just cut down until a bit of them starve to death and it falls off.
Starting point is 00:09:15 No, they literally, around their middle, they squeeze their membranes tighter and tighter and tighter until it just kind of chops them in half. Oh, that's terrible, because if a bacteria family thinks, oh, we have too many kids, we're going to have to tighten our belts, then suddenly they've got twice as many children all of a sudden. Another animal that has magnets in it very often, your children, possibly also cows. So cows, there's this problem that they don't actually chew their food. So what are they doing when they're doing that chewing thing that they do?
Starting point is 00:09:47 I think they're chewing their previous meal, aren't they? They're chewing a meal that they've regurgitated, I think. So first time round, don't chew. And often there's a little bit of barbed wire or metal or nails in the grass until they swallow them. They end up in their stomachs. They usually go to their second stomach, their reticulum, I think it is. And then that's really bad for them because it can poke through the stomach lining and
Starting point is 00:10:07 damage them in various ways. And so you tend to have to feed a magnet to a cow. And so this is very common. A lot of farmers give their cows magnets when they've got what's called hardware disease, which is literally when they've swallowed a nail. And you just literally feed it to the cow on a little tube and it sits in your second stomach and it will attract all the metallic stuff to it. And then it stays there for the rest of the cow's life and it stops.
Starting point is 00:10:30 But don't you just end up with a cow with a large lump of metal in it, a large lump of barbed wire and stuff like that? I guess it's not floating around. Exactly. But if it gets big enough, surely it would form a blockage. You know, I think there comes a point where that cow deserves to die once it's eaten. You know, a hundred coils of barbed wire in a row. But the way they check as well that the magnets still in place is they use a compass and then
Starting point is 00:10:53 they can work out that way whether there's a magnet in their stomach. So what we're saying is actually quite a lot of cows are magnetic and you could stick like children's drawings on them like a fridge, right? Yeah, absolutely. God, why didn't we try that? And presumably if we actually could sense magnetic fields, we'd get incredibly disturbed and disrupted by large fields of magnetic cows. Yeah, whenever Andy walked past a field of cows with his penis magnet, he'd be immediately
Starting point is 00:11:19 arrested. But I'd have a cast iron case. But then you'd be attracted to that cast iron case as well. Now onto fact number two. That is my fact. And my fact is that the army has tanks that carry fold out bridges for when they meet a river that they can't cross. And I think this is so cool.
Starting point is 00:11:45 I saw this on popular mechanics website this week, which is a great website. And there's been an exercise that's been done in America, in California over the Colorado River where the army's built a temporary bridge over the Colorado River. And I didn't know that they did this and this is a crucial part of being in the army is that you have to get these tanks, which don't carry any weapons. They just carry a little foldable river and then another tank carries a bridge to go over that foldable river. Yeah, sorry, they carry a foldable tank.
Starting point is 00:12:17 They carry a foldable tank. And inside that tank is another tank. They're actually Russian tanks, these ones. Inside them, they have a foldable bridge. And when they get to a river, then they unfold the bridge, pops out and they cross it. So when you cross over the bridge that you've been carrying, then do you pick it up back up and put it on top of your tank again, or is it there forever? It's not there forever.
Starting point is 00:12:40 It's temporary. So the last vehicle to cross over the bridge is the one that was carrying the bridge and that is attached to the bridge. And when it's crossed over itself, as it were, it rolls itself back up into its body and goes on. It's amazing. It's really cool to watch. And the US Army has one of these things that can make a bridge in, what was it, they were
Starting point is 00:12:57 saying 98 seconds, and it can still travel at about 30 miles an hour. It can't... What, the bridge? No, yes. No, it can't travel at 30 miles an hour while it's doing it, but it is awesome. It is. And if you watch, you should watch the video on it because it shows exactly how they do it.
Starting point is 00:13:13 So there are lots of different types, but this one across the Colorado River, a tank goes up to the edge of it and these folded lumps of bridge kind of spurt out of the tank like a projectile. They spurt into the water and then they pop open. It's like one of those blow up tent things, it like pops open in the river and then boats hook onto the popped open bits of bridge and then they tow them into the right place and they slot together like Lego and then everyone slides over it. So wait, they have boats?
Starting point is 00:13:39 Why are they not going over on the boats? Because they need to carry like huge numbers of tanks and like a whole battalion across. That was a problem with tanks for a long time, wasn't it, they just kept getting stuck in holes. Yeah. Like in the early days of tanks in World War One, you get loads of pictures of them just stuck in a trench. Yeah, you do.
Starting point is 00:13:58 There was one that was designed so that it could go into a trench and then it would spurt little... Why is everything spurting all the time? It's very graphic. Have you heard of Hobot's Funnies? No. No. Good.
Starting point is 00:14:13 Great. So these were tanks that were used in D-Day and there was this whole range, like a range of superheroes basically. They all each had their own special superpower, everyone's rolling their eyes, but it's true. So there was one called the Swimming Sherman, right? This was an amphibious tank which could operate in water and on land. It had a massive canvas screen all around its middle like a skirt and it would just inflate the skirt when it was in water and that would buoy it up enough for it to go
Starting point is 00:14:40 with the propeller. Oh, wow. And then as it got out of the water, it would just drop its skirt to the ground and then roll off onto land. Wow. That's really impressive. Very cool. Oh, there were loads.
Starting point is 00:14:51 There was the crab. There was the bobbin. So the crab could go sideways? The crab could not go sideways. It was a terrible crab. It had a massive flail on the end of it. It was used for clearing mines on beaches and things like that. Oh, like crabs do.
Starting point is 00:15:02 Exactly. What? They're all perfectly named. Right? What about the bobbin? What did that do? The bobbin, well, it was a bit like this bridge one in that it's got something on its front, this massive rig on its front, but instead of a bridge, it's matting.
Starting point is 00:15:16 It's like rush matting. It sort of lays down a path up the beach, so if the ground is too soft or if the sand is too spongy, sinking sand, you just have this one track laying tank which makes a road as it goes. I couldn't find if they used it. We'll see him say. They must. I think you wouldn't go to the expensive building and not use it.
Starting point is 00:15:35 Even in fact, after the invasion was over, you'd probably still say, can we just use that to see if it works? And the other thing is you don't lose anything by using it, do you? Even if there's no sinking sand, at least you've got a nice little path to drive on. Yeah, he designed the flamethrower one, I think, as well, didn't he? The Churchill crocodile flamethrower. Again, the crocodiles don't throw flames. So he wasn't great at naming things.
Starting point is 00:15:58 You know, that wasn't the focus in the Second World War. No, the flamethrower could fire flames 100 meters over 100 meters, and it looks incredible. It's like robot wars. Yeah, it genuinely is like a real life robot wars. I can't believe it took so long after this to make robot wars, I think. You would have thought that the TV commissioners who were watching the Normandy landings would have. But the Imperial War Museum has an amazing page all about the various different Hobart's funnies and all about the different weird things they could do.
Starting point is 00:16:26 It's very cool. Oh, wow. Yeah. Hey, I read about another bridge, and no one seems to know about it, except Beachcombing, which is this, like, weird block. But I mean, literally no one else has picked up on this thing they found, which is in 1850, there's an article that I found it in the English Civil Engineer and Architects Journal, and it states that the Academy of Sciences in France was considering an idea for a suspension
Starting point is 00:16:51 bridge between England and France, so going from Dover to Calais. And the idea was that it would be four barges would be sunk at equal distances apart across the channel, and then they'd have chains going up from the barges to the surface, and then the chains would be fixed to the bridge, which would run from England to France. And then above the bridge would be these huge balloons. It described them as giant balloons of elliptical form and firmly secured, which would support in the air the extremity of these chains. And so it would have these balloons floating in the air, attached to the chains, and then
Starting point is 00:17:26 also attached to the abutments at the end of the bridge that would keep the bridge over the channel. I think I can see why no one else has picked up on this, because it's a pretty stupid idea. Do the balloons have to stay in the air forever? Yeah, of course they do. That's problem one. Yeah. Why?
Starting point is 00:17:42 I think these are these puncture safe balloons. Entropy, that's a problem. That's what you always say, James. Whenever anyone proposes any idea, do you want a cup of tea, James? Well, what's the point? We'll only be cold by the end of the universe. Okay, moving on to fact number three, and that is James's fact. Okay, my fact this week is that a new law in Oregon has banned the game called Big Engine.
Starting point is 00:18:12 There is no evidence anyone has played Big Engine since the 1950s, and no living person appears to know the rules. Sorry, they have just banned this. Yeah, they banned it this year. Sorry, I didn't take that. I just thought you were saying that there's this crazy old law that bans a game that we don't know about. This year they have banned it.
Starting point is 00:18:28 So this year they had a new gambling rule that came in, and they had a whole list of things you're not allowed to play, including things like Chinese chukka luck, and Wheel of Fortune, Shemin de Fer, don't know what that is, Penquinkui, Red Dog, AC Juicy, and one of them is this thing which is called Big Engine, and as far as we can see, no one has ever played this in the last 50 years. And I found this in an article on Williamette Week, which seems to be a local newspaper in America, and they have a column called Doctor No, and he looked into it and he couldn't find any evidence of it either.
Starting point is 00:19:05 But I mean, it's good to take the precaution, isn't it? Exactly. So he says quite rightly in this column, if they did decide to get rid of it, then it's just going to set up a load of Big Engine kind of card games in the whole state, and everyone will just start gambling on it, won't they? That's so true. Because it'll be a loophole. Oh, it'll be a loophole.
Starting point is 00:19:24 But we don't know the rules. Yeah, but they could just make them up. Well, can't you just make up another game and play for money on that? Yeah, that's true. Actually, it does say any other gambling-based game has banned. So I don't even know why they did the whole thing. Well, what did they include? Shaman De Faire, for example.
Starting point is 00:19:38 No. But do you remember at school, when you weren't allowed to play British Bulldog anymore, you would just give it another name and play it? I don't remember that. No. We used to do that. We were always allowed to play it. Why are you?
Starting point is 00:19:50 Did you always get a bit out of hand? Oh, yeah. It's a very violent game, British Bulldog. Yeah. I think they like us to pick each other off sometimes, and keep the numbers down. So where have they got these game names from? So it appears to be that they were in an old, very, very old law, maybe in Nevada or something like that.
Starting point is 00:20:08 And then they've been picked up by the next law and picked up by the next law, and they just basically copy-paste the rules from another law. Okay. That's really slack. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. I wouldn't bespoke artisan laws and crafted by masters.
Starting point is 00:20:24 Just for you. For the state game. Yeah. Do you know you weren't allowed to gamble in libraries until 2005, and we've just re-legalized it. Are you really allowed to? We do now. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:37 Re-legalized gambling in libraries. We sure have. So in 18, 19... What do you do bet on, like, what book is going to go out next, or what? You can do whatever you like, James. I mean, I... That's a really good idea for a bet, because the odds of you winning are astronomical. You could have a lottery, frankly, at those odds.
Starting point is 00:20:50 Well, you would just go for a popular one, like Fifty Shades of Grey or something, wouldn't you? True. You would choose an extremely rare book. If I got better odds, I would. Would you? But then I'd try and game it somehow. It's too open to corruption, James, because you could just ask your friend to go in and
Starting point is 00:21:03 get out, you know, a book about the Merovingian dynasty or whatever. I think you could clamp down on that kind of thing, and I'm sure they have now that they've legalized it. That's... You see a lot of armed guards outside libraries these days, but it was banned in libraries in 1898. And when was it legalized? 2005.
Starting point is 00:21:17 You're not allowed to, like, put a casino in a library, are you? I don't think if you walked in dragging a slot machine behind you. It's going to be more like just playing cribbage or something, is it? I think it's just poker, yeah. But if there were more slot machines based on 19th century novels, I would certainly gamble more. Oh, you could have to get all three Bronte sisters in a row. That would be fun.
Starting point is 00:21:37 And would you lose if you got Bramwell? Yes, you would. You lose everything. This is very niche banter, guys. What a niche joke about the fourth Bronte. So on things being banned, I was looking into computer games being banned. And there was a game in Australia called Getting Up, and it was banned for the reason that it glorified graffiti.
Starting point is 00:22:00 Okay. Because it was, again, involved graffitiing? Well, it was. Yeah, it wasn't that bad a decision, but... Is it a bit like Grand Theft Auto for graffiti? Not really. It's a really wholesome graffiti game. Basically, it's about a youth who used street art to take down a corrupt mayor who murdered
Starting point is 00:22:17 his father. Wow. And then the mayor launched an anti-graffiti campaign to try and cover up the fact that he killed this kid's father. But the authorities thought, oh, well, this will encourage tagging and graffiti, so they banned the game. So it's like street-pictionary. They should call graffiti that, actually, and I think people wouldn't get so much trouble.
Starting point is 00:22:37 Is it Cock and Balls? Yes, it's Cock and Balls. South Korea banned video games between midnight and 6 a.m., didn't it? It was a very short banter. They woke up, and they immediately repented their decision. What are we thinking? Get back to the chamber before anyone finds out that we've done to them. What was it, midnight to 4 a.m.?
Starting point is 00:23:02 Midnight to 6 a.m. every day. Every day you were allowed to play video games from midnight to 6 a.m., and it was to combat the video gaming problem, which is kind of a thing in South Korea because a lot of people are addicted to it. It's called the shutdown law, and it was under 16s who couldn't do it because they were staying up all night and playing. But they've recently, sweetly, they amended it in 2014, and the law can be lifted as per request of the children's parents.
Starting point is 00:23:28 So I guess you call up the government and you say, look, my kid's fine. He needs it to concentrate. He just hasn't finished level four yet, and he needs to finish it. So I've got something here about porn star Ron Jeremy says that Nintendo bought the rights to two adult film parodies, Super Hornio Brothers, and Super Hornio Brothers 2 in the hope that they would never see the light of screen. They made the movies. They didn't make the movies.
Starting point is 00:23:52 Well, the movies were made. Yeah. This is what's confusing. These exist, but they were never released. Well, I do have the plot of Super Hornio Brothers, and it's shockingly unsexy. I'm not going to read out the whole thing, but basically it stars Squeegee Hornio, who's Ron Jeremy, and his brother, Orneo Hornio, and they're trying to save Princess Polina from King Pooper.
Starting point is 00:24:13 Well, my wife's called Polina. My pet name is Pooper. What was it? King Pooper. King Pooper. Actually, your love interest is Orneo Hornio. Orneo, Hornio, yeah. Wow.
Starting point is 00:24:27 Also on Nintendo, I learned that Nintendo was very close to releasing an accessory and game that let players create their own knitting patterns. During its market research period, all seven of the beta test volunteers died of old age. OK. On to the final fact, and that is Andy's facts. My fact is that African wild dogs have a sneeze-based voting system. I swear to God. It doesn't sound particularly true, does it?
Starting point is 00:25:03 It doesn't, but researchers from Brown University have looked into this, and so African wild dogs, they're a kind of dog. They live, any guesses? Oh, in the wild. In Ruon. They live in South Africa, and they live in packs of between about 10 and 40 animals, and there are not many left. There are only about 1,400 left in the wild.
Starting point is 00:25:23 And basically, they have these, what they call rallies, where they just spend all day sleeping. Sorry, what they, the dogs call rallies. They, the dogs, they call them, they, the dogs, have what they, the researchers, call rallies. OK. It basically just means they spend all day sleeping next to each other. But they get up after a while, and they sort of say, shall we go hunting? And they get up and sneeze, and if the more sneezes there are, the likelier it is that the pack will go hunting.
Starting point is 00:25:55 Wow. And it's them basically voting to do it. And also, different votes carry different weights. So every pack has an alpha pair who are in charge. If those two sneeze, it's much likelier that the pack will go off hunting than if two junior dogs sneeze. That is so weird. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:14 Do they know, have any idea why they do this? To decide whether to go hunting. Why sneezing? Yeah, there are other ways of making noise. I guess it's, yeah, the option's limited when you're a dog. They can't bark actually, can they? Can they not? Oh, there we go.
Starting point is 00:26:30 They can kind of scream. That would be a very upsetting voting system. I don't know if you went into the voting booth and you had to just scream. I always do that. Oh, God, these guys again. Especially the recent elections. It's been a tough time. I always thought that sneezing was a thing that you did without doing it on purpose.
Starting point is 00:26:50 As in, you can't make yourself sneeze, you have to have some kind of input. I think these guys can. Yeah. Yeah. That would make sense, I guess. Otherwise, just like a little bit of pepper goes across the African plains and suddenly they're all off somewhere. Or never goes across and they all starve to death.
Starting point is 00:27:07 Where's the pepper guy suddenly? They're very cool animals. They're amazing, yeah. So they might be the nicest animals that I've ever studied. They're speaking to someone who's not a zebra. All statements. They're very altruistic, aren't they? So the way they operate is that they really care for each other.
Starting point is 00:27:28 So for instance, if a wild dog becomes ill or injured or gets older, the rest of the pack really cares for them and will sacrifice a lot of food for them. And similarly, if there are a lot of young wild dogs around, African wild dogs around, then the older members of the pack will bring them food and sacrifice food for them. And sometimes the older members of the pack will die prematurely because they've starved themselves in order that younger members can thrive. Wow. And they regurgitate meat into each other's mouths throughout.
Starting point is 00:27:57 So some animals do this to their young. So when they do it, they're altruistic. And yet when I do that, I'm apparently a really creepy boyfriend. Your girlfriend's vegan, aren't you? That really is unfair. Yeah, so they'll go and hunt and then they'll bring back some food in their stomachs and then they'll vomit it up into their fellow pack members' mouths if the other pack members were just too lazy to hunt.
Starting point is 00:28:26 We have previously mentioned, I think, that a buffalo vote with a sort of standing up and sitting down system but loads of animals vote. Go on. Cockroaches. Do they? How do they vote? Mostly Lib Dem. At least someone votes for them.
Starting point is 00:28:47 At least when the whole of the planet is blown up by the nuclear war, the Lib Dems will be the... The majority, finally. No, so they vote by movement. And there was a scientist called Jose Halloy from Brussels and he did an experiment with robot cockroaches in 2007. And he made robot cockroaches, which were not what you think of robots with sort of implants in them
Starting point is 00:29:13 as they started doing these days. He just made little machines which could move around. They just look like cockroaches. No, they didn't even look like cockroaches. So why are they called robot cockroaches? Because he covered them in paper which was infused with robot pheromones. He covered them in paper infused with cockroach pheromones. So they smelt like cockroaches.
Starting point is 00:29:33 Honestly, they look nothing like cockroaches. They're just little white boxes with wheels. And then, so he infiltrated their society and got them to be accepted by the cockroaches, right? And then he managed to screw the cockroach election by moving all his robot cockroaches to the wrong place where they were going to build their home. And they were all voting to build their home over here,
Starting point is 00:29:55 even though the actual cockroaches had previously considered and rejected that site. I tell you what, if the Kremlin are listening to this. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to get in touch with any of us, these guys can be found on Twitter.
Starting point is 00:30:13 James is on. At James Harkin. Alice is on. At Alice Scrambled. Andy is on. At Andrew Hunter M. And you can email podcast at qi.com to get in touch with me. Or you can go to at no such thing,
Starting point is 00:30:26 which is our group Twitter account. Or go to know such things at fish.com where you can book tickets for our tour that's coming up. Or you can buy our book. Okay, that's all for this week. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.

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