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1:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Why Would

1:02

You Tell Me That?

1:07

A

1:11

question I often pose to the man sitting opposite

1:13

me at his desk in his wonderful giant

1:16

mansion in Leaky Dublin. I

1:19

say to him, why have you told me that? I

1:22

didn't need to know that. But frankly,

1:24

you do need to know things. That's why we're here. We're here to learn. We're

1:26

here to expand our minds. We're here to hear stories that

1:29

we don't know, but probably should. So

1:31

Neil, I'll tell everybody where they can find us. You

1:34

can get us on Instagram. He is at neildaylamarcomedy.

1:36

I'm at davetodayfm.

1:37

And the show is at Why Would You Tell Me That?

1:39

And we tell you that each week because we would

1:41

like you to get involved with us. So, you

1:44

know, you can go and offer us online abuse

1:46

for supporting whatever football clubs we support if you like. Or

1:48

you can suggest things we could do for the podcast

1:50

because we look for, you know, between 10

1:52

and 15 episodes a season. There's

1:55

a lot of work in there and your suggestions have been brilliant.

1:57

I was just thinking during that whole monologue.

1:59

You're very smooth. It's almost like you're on the radio

2:02

every day. It's almost, oh, I

2:04

mean, there was no umms and ahs. I was very impressed. And

2:06

the reason I didn't say anything is because I was looking for a picture,

2:08

which I will send on to you in

2:11

the course of our discussions this

2:13

evening. All right. Cause it's got something it's, it's part

2:15

of the episode. It is part of the episode.

2:17

Yes. Fantastic. Well, look, we should say we're probably part

2:19

of the Acast creator network. And Neil is now going to

2:21

tell us why we're going to be wowed, amazed,

2:24

and frankly, aghast

2:26

of whatever he's going to bring us in part two. I would,

2:29

I would say appalled as well. Oh, wow. We're

2:31

chatting to Dara Ennis, um, in

2:33

the second part of the show. Dara Ennis, the,

2:35

the guy on the TV show. Yes.

2:39

The menace Ennis from the chase,

2:41

uh, because not only is he a brilliant

2:43

television quizzer, he also has a proper job

2:45

as well.

2:46

He is a neuroscientist. I get

2:48

asked for it. Yes. Talk

2:50

about brains, brains to burn. Serious

2:53

brains and a very good Gaelic footballer as

2:55

well. Um, he's going to tell us about the

2:57

animal, the study of which has led to more

3:00

Nobel prizes than any other

3:02

animal.

3:03

Oh, that's very cool.

3:05

Now I'm like that. My brain is racing

3:07

to think what animal it is. What

3:10

do you think?

3:11

Um, is

3:15

it the smartest animal? Is it like an ape of

3:17

some description or, uh, Oh, it's

3:20

Alfin. Yes. It's a dolphin. It's flipper.

3:22

Flipper actually, he won the Nobel

3:24

prize.

3:25

Yeah. Well, the reason flipper actually stopped

3:28

making the TV series is because his research

3:30

work took up too much of his time. Yeah. He

3:33

started getting funding and then it was all, it was

3:35

too difficult to do. Yeah. It's also the reason

3:37

phone guys gone missing. He's actually doing a doctorate. Well,

3:40

you know, you know what they say in dolphin circles.

3:49

No, we're not talking

3:51

about that dolphins. We are talking about something that

3:54

breeds quicker than dolphins. So we can

3:56

study them quite quickly, but I'll let, I'll let Dara tell

3:58

you who it is. Okay. Do that.

3:59

we're talking about his work, right? And

4:03

I'll give you a clue. It's in the insects world,

4:05

right? Okay. Let me give you

4:07

a bug fact to start

4:09

with, right? God, like

4:11

you couldn't really start an episode. But the

4:14

only thing you could impress me more with by starting

4:16

an episode with with like saying, let me give you a bug

4:18

fact would be either let me give you a guitar or

4:20

sneakers facts that you don't know Dave. But the next

4:23

in line is let me give you a bug fact

4:25

because okay, are ridiculously brilliant.

4:27

I have an insect one for you. And I also have

4:29

an accompanying

4:29

picture that I'm going to send to you when you're

4:32

sending me momentarily. Right, right, right,

4:34

right. So you're knocking around East Africa, right or

4:36

Malaysia. And you might look down and you see this

4:38

little insect and it's called an assassin

4:40

bug.

4:41

Straight away. We like this. What a name,

4:43

right? Great. It's called a Canthas

4:46

piece petax, right? Now

4:48

this lad is what David Attenborough

4:51

would describe as one bad

4:53

bastard of the auction.

4:56

This lad is a forbidden whore.

4:58

That is what my father would call him. So

5:00

like many other assassin bugs, it hunts

5:02

its prey by doing this usual thing. Pearses

5:05

it

5:06

with the proboscis, injects

5:08

paralysis inducing saliva and

5:10

an enzyme that dissolves tissue, right?

5:13

So basically turns you into soup and then sucks

5:15

out your innards. Wow. Right. I

5:17

mean, these creatures are living on

5:19

a level. We're not allowed to no,

5:22

I mean, for a very good reason. If

5:25

somebody cut you off when you're driving into town

5:27

and you just fired a stroll into

5:30

them and then sucked them out

5:32

like a milkshake. If I had a proboscis,

5:34

there'd be a lot of

5:36

unexplained road deaths. I'll tell you that much.

5:38

It's the one place I get ratty. And that's not

5:40

on the roads, just in car parks. People

5:43

who pull up to car park exit barriers

5:45

and put on their flashers and open

5:48

the corridor together, they would immediately be greeted

5:50

with a giant proboscis from

5:52

BMW behind them straight into their

5:55

jugular. Oh,

5:56

what's happening? I'm turning in the soup

5:58

and then they'd be gone. I'll just have to get the lads

6:00

to move the car. Oh, I thought my milkshake

6:02

brought all the boys to the yard and now I am a

6:04

milkshake and now I'm being sucked up by

6:07

Dave Moore. My car is being brought to the yard

6:09

because I can no longer drive it. Do you know what?

6:11

I've, I told you my, what I would bring on dragons

6:13

then, which was

6:15

this is my theory because we're talking about car parks.

6:17

Yeah. I'm getting way late. I'll get back to it. I

6:19

wanted to put lip balm

6:22

on car park tickets because

6:25

when you drive into a car park, press

6:28

the little buzzer and the little thing comes out.

6:30

Yeah. And what do you do with the tickets? You

6:32

put it in your mouth. You put it in your gob, don't you?

6:35

And if that had a little cherry thing on

6:37

us. Although

6:39

I've been in a couple of car parks where

6:41

they say, please refrain

6:44

from putting tickets in your mouth.

6:46

Really? Why? Now I don't know, was this

6:49

maybe was a COVID thing, but like

6:51

there's one, the one I park in all the time,

6:53

when I go to the movie premieres, the

6:57

Smithfield and you drive in there, you drive

6:59

down and use your drive down underground. You get to the bottom

7:01

thing and it says, please do not put

7:03

tickets in your mouth. Has somebody died

7:06

from tickets in their mouth? I mean,

7:09

Do you know the Greek she used to put coins in your eyes? Is

7:11

that, then that's the next one. Just a

7:13

cue park right across your gob. What

7:16

does it mean? Oh, it means that,

7:18

um, he can get across the river sticks

7:21

into Hades, but it does show up

7:23

at midnight. And that's

7:26

the main thing. And also please do

7:28

not park in resident spaces. Yes. Yes.

7:30

The ferryman has actually forgotten where he's left

7:32

his boat. That's what it is. And he's walking

7:34

around the river sticks with his little beeper,

7:37

seeing which

7:38

hazards go off of what random gondola

7:40

he has to bring a soul across into Hades.

7:43

Yes. But I've gotten distracted. Yeah,

7:45

that's my fault. Yes. So that's sort

7:47

of proboscis. That's where we were. You

7:49

kill people. I think we both know I would. Right.

7:52

That's not that weird because a lot of other folks

7:54

do that. Okay. It gets weirder. So

7:57

it sucked the innards out. It has an

7:59

exoskeleton.

8:00

say of an ant. It then

8:02

carries its victims around with

8:04

it like in some sort of

8:07

serial killer trophy bearer

8:10

and the insect can carry as many as 20

8:13

dead ants at a time. What?

8:16

I am sending you a picture. The name of

8:19

Silence of the Lambs bullshit

8:23

is this. Look at

8:25

your phone. No no no

8:28

no no no. It

8:32

is. How do I describe this to people? Jesus.

8:35

Do you know the bit in in Beverly Hillbillies,

8:37

do you know when the Clampets are lugging all

8:39

their possessions from the movies? I'm sorry, what age

8:42

are you? Like what what is

8:44

your cultural reference? A black

8:46

and white cartoon from the 60s or

8:48

it wasn't even a cartoon. It was a cartoon.

8:50

Yeah well hang on why is that your cultural reference

8:53

for this? Because it is the

8:55

most accurate and also it was repeated

8:57

in the 90s. I didn't see it when it was first time around

9:00

and don't you're older than me

9:01

so fuck right off. I'm a droll that will make references

9:04

to 60s tv shows. Excuse

9:06

me any chance I get to throw a jalopy

9:09

in there? I'm gonna throw it in there.

9:12

If there's a Dustball John Steinbeck

9:14

novel reference I'm gonna throw it in. It

9:17

looks like okay it looks like when you drive

9:19

down the motorway and there's a fella who's of ill

9:21

repute trying to carry 47 mattresses

9:23

on top of his van. That's what it looks like. Yeah

9:26

I mean I will go as far

9:28

up maybe as the

9:30

late 80s early 90s in

9:34

what was Catch the Pigeon Dasterly and Muttley

9:36

the Penelope Pitstop.

9:39

Hey up! There was the little thing where they

9:41

weren't

9:42

the Keystone Cops were they but there was

9:45

loads of them they were small and they

9:47

got into an old-fashioned like 1930s

9:50

cop van whatever and then it was just small on

9:52

the bottom and then it was massive on the top

9:55

so like it just grew out of the chassis

9:57

and then it was just like this big mound. of

10:00

a car with loads of head sticking out of it. That's

10:02

what it looks like to me. Or do you remember

10:05

on, well we do Guinness Book of Records

10:07

and that record breaker show where

10:10

it always have like 47 lads on a motorbike.

10:13

That's usually a pyramid. But this is what this

10:15

looks like. It's basically a bug

10:17

with up to 20 dead ants

10:19

at a time. And I should

10:21

explain this. Yeah, I'm thinking why,

10:24

right? I'm thinking a couple of things based

10:26

on the knowledge we've amassed

10:28

over the time we've been doing this podcast. Okay.

10:31

The first thing's first is I would lean into the serial

10:33

kind of thing. I would think this is a

10:35

like a threat

10:37

to maybe other assassin

10:39

bugs going, I'm harder than you.

10:41

I've got a shinier track suit.

10:44

My tash is skinnier, you

10:47

know, like something along those lines.

10:49

But then I'm thinking,

10:51

like, is it just more innocent than this? Is it

10:53

just like, does he feel bad? You know

10:56

what I mean? Does he go, I had to

10:58

give them all honorable

11:00

burials. Yeah, what he does is he

11:02

sucks the innards out of you. But then

11:04

as like in a war film, he just,

11:07

he holds your head as you pass out and

11:09

he goes, what is your

11:11

last wish? I'll tell

11:13

your mommy you was fighting brave. I'll

11:15

tell your mommy you was fighting brave, Jimmy. And

11:18

then you bury me. And

11:20

it's just, yeah, he's,

11:21

he's not, you know, what did

11:23

you say to me? The cart in

11:25

bring out your dad, bring out your dad. Yeah,

11:28

he just, he gives all of these honorable

11:30

burials. That's what he does. Though it is not

11:33

innocent. It is not a threat.

11:35

Okay. I do like that idea that the more

11:37

that you have, the more threatening and like his cousin

11:39

has 20 exoskeletons and sovereign

11:42

rings and he has six legs. Yeah.

11:45

And a tat with love and hate in between

11:47

his various legs. And it

11:50

gets, it gets a little bit weirder

11:51

than this because if you look at those, I mean, they're

11:53

not like monks building dry stone

11:56

beehive huts. Like you know, they're not to be unstable,

11:58

right? Nobody wants to.

11:59

dead ant jenge, so it

12:02

binds them together with an excretion

12:05

into a cluster that is clearly larger than

12:07

its own body in the picture I've sent you. Find

12:09

excretion cluster. These are

12:11

words. This is bringing me back to

12:13

the frog

12:14

spawn episode with Simon Watt in series

12:16

one. Like, I don't need the, why

12:19

would you tell me this? I don't need to know excretion

12:22

bind cluster of dead

12:24

empty exoskeletons of

12:27

ants. I don't need this information. But

12:30

you're still curious as to why they do it, right? I

12:32

really am. So in 2007, there

12:33

was

12:36

a lot of researchers from New Zealand, 2007,

12:41

the assassin book finally broke his silence.

12:44

He told the last, he said,

12:46

okay, fine. I've held

12:49

off for too long. There's a picture on New

12:51

Zealand television. It's just a blacked out

12:54

ant and Paul McLuhan from last

12:56

year's episode, when he said the voice

12:59

of the IRA and Sinn Féin does

13:01

the voice of this

13:04

one particular assassin book.

13:06

Okay, sorry. I'll stop interrupting now.

13:08

Go on. No, no, no, no. Finally,

13:11

in 2007. No, like

13:13

we should say that this entire species of it does.

13:16

It's not one, you've made it sound like it's one

13:18

fella. You've made it sound like

13:20

it's an ant with a problem. It's

13:22

one ne'er do well. It's Dexter and

13:24

he does live by a code. That's the only

13:26

reason that this assassin

13:29

guy will only kill ants that have killed

13:31

other things. Of course, of course. So

13:33

what it is, is

13:35

this is what they reckon it is anyway. So a team

13:37

of researchers, 2007, they wanted

13:39

to test whether it helped

13:41

them protect themselves against predation.

13:45

So in this study, they left a load

13:47

of assassin books alone in glass cages

13:49

with several species of jumping spiders, which

13:52

like to eat these assassins. Gotcha. Gotcha.

13:54

They're natural predator of them, right? So

13:57

some of these insects were carrying bowls

13:59

of ant carcass. cause this is on their back. The

14:01

sentences you never thought you'd say on this podcast,

14:04

they call these masked bugs, right? And

14:06

then the other ones were left in the nip. Nick,

14:08

a la mode unmasked, by the way, write

14:11

this down the masked ant killer.

14:13

It's a Joel Dammit vehicle for ITV

14:15

and Saturday night, that singer,

14:18

masked dancer, let's go one extra.

14:20

And these jumping spiders have

14:22

brilliant vision, but their sense of smell

14:24

isn't great. So they hunt

14:27

by just seeing something and

14:29

then they just pounce, boom. Right.

14:32

The result was they attacked the

14:34

naked bugs 10 times

14:37

more roughly

14:38

than the masked ones.

14:41

And they even tried this with dead preserved

14:43

assassin bugs to control it for the effects of movement

14:45

and behavior. And results remain the same.

14:48

So carrying a ball of dead ants,

14:50

it turns out, is a great strategy

14:53

for an assassin bug.

14:54

Okay. So what it does is then it, does it confuse

14:56

them or does it like, I wonder

14:59

why it they're confused. Yeah.

15:01

So that doesn't match the shape of an assassin

15:03

bug. But I like to eat. You're a spider. You're

15:05

looking at, looking out for assassin bugs

15:08

and you see this thing and you think, what the fuck

15:10

is that? Christ.

15:14

What's that Terry? I'll tell you what that is. Have you

15:16

seen the Beverly Hills? Yeah, listen, Beverly

15:18

Hill abilities. I have seen it. I mean, it's a seminal

15:21

work that is repeated off. Oh,

15:23

it's a proper cultural reference.

15:24

Yeah. It is a cultural reference. I

15:26

think in many ways, Terry, it'll stand the test of time. I

15:28

think you're dead right, Termit. I definitely think you're right.

15:32

Um, so they don't know, I suppose the

15:34

prey profile of them is

15:36

entirely changed. They also apparently don't

15:39

like to attack ants, specifically

15:41

the spiders because ants can tend to go,

15:43

be attacked and swarm and send out

15:45

a chemical signal. Right. Right. Right. And

15:47

either way, 10 times.

15:49

That's insane.

15:52

Like, cause this is terrifying

15:54

and appalling, as you said,

15:57

and something you don't want to think about, but.

15:59

What a strategy. Yeah, I

16:02

mean, okay, if you were, I don't know if you

16:04

ever gone in a self-defense course or something like that, but

16:06

like- Self-offense. So self-defense.

16:09

Oh, self-offense is amazing. So

16:11

what you wanna do is you wanna get into the room and

16:13

immediately crack the biggest guy over the skull

16:16

and go, now I am the alpha! Self-offense!

16:19

I need two glasses! Come at me! I

16:21

would've thought self-offense was trying to offend

16:23

yourself. It's just good.

16:26

What a fucking prick of you. Can

16:30

you offend yourself? I don't know. Now you're

16:32

getting into existential questions. True.

16:34

But it's all right. Self-defense course. No,

16:36

I haven't ever done one. But if somebody said to you,

16:38

okay, what's gonna make

16:40

you 10 times less likely to be attacked

16:43

is- Is strapping

16:45

a lot of scoby skeletons here back

16:48

still in their tracksuits. You know what? It

16:50

would probably work.

16:51

Cause if you went strolling down the wrong part

16:53

of town with 10 like-

16:56

10 heys. Defeated foes. A raptor

16:58

and a dreary. Be like, lads are going, like,

17:00

I don't care what's going on. I'm not getting involved with him.

17:03

Yeah. Like if you had skulls tied

17:05

to your belt, well, you don't wear

17:07

belts. Tied to those two

17:09

things that make a hoodie slightly

17:12

tighter. Which is how

17:14

you dress. A drawstring,

17:16

Neil. Drawstring are the words I'm looking

17:18

for. I think people would leave you alone. I

17:21

just think we were having a go at this ant, Coo Cullen

17:23

did it and we all thought he was hard as nails. And

17:25

this ant is fundamentally

17:27

misunderstood. But that's my bug fact

17:29

for you. I thought I love it. I absolutely love that.

17:32

I'm going to top it now because this

17:33

is possibly my favorite

17:35

stat that we've had on the show so

17:37

far. That's a big claim. I just think it's really

17:39

eye opening. In Japan, 98%

17:42

of adoptions are actually adult men

17:47

between the ages of 20 and 30 years of age.

17:51

Okay, I'm going to start at the beginning. In

17:54

Japan, 98% of adoptions.

17:58

So nine, so. I'm going

18:01

to say 98% all because it's practically

18:03

all. All adoptions pretty

18:06

much

18:06

are not by men in

18:08

their 20s and 30s. They are of men. Yes.

18:11

In their 20s and 30s. Not children. So

18:15

let's go back to the beginning. This is how I came across this.

18:18

I was watching House M.D. the other day.

18:20

As you know, I've been watching for ages because of

18:22

a million episodes. There's

18:24

a character who wants to leave his business to the next

18:27

generation. And he mentions this particular company

18:29

that does exist in real life. And I went off and

18:31

I looked it up. So let me ask you a

18:33

few years ago, not long ago on the ground, green the

18:35

things, if I said to you, how old is the oldest

18:38

company in the world? What year was

18:40

it founded?

18:41

What would you say? Jesus,

18:45

sorry, still existing, obviously,

18:47

not not began and has

18:49

since closed. Began and

18:52

still exists. I'm losing

18:54

eternity. Okay. Because I would jump into

18:56

some kind of.

18:57

I don't know why I jump into printing press and all

19:00

that kind of era, like 1500s and

19:02

kind of go like unless

19:04

the church is a company, is it? Is a church

19:06

register for tax? No,

19:08

I think that's pretty much the opposite reason

19:11

you set up a church, isn't it? Right. Okay. Okay.

19:14

In that case, then I would say, yeah, I'll go for

19:16

I'll go for Gutenberg's company. Whatever

19:19

he set up in 1576. Police

19:22

Academy Limited. I'll

19:26

see your Beverly Hills, little

19:29

Billy's reference and raise you

19:32

with a Gutenberg reference. Bob

19:36

Bobcat Goldthwaite.

19:38

That was the name of the actor

19:40

who did that. Hey, man, we got more. It

19:42

was yeah. Dr. I

19:45

was hoping you wouldn't you wouldn't say who was. I

19:47

was hoping you would make no further reference to the noises

19:49

you just made. And our younger

19:51

listeners would go, what the fuck is wrong with him?

19:55

He's having his insides smooth

19:58

the fight. 578 AD.

20:03

Whoa. Okay. Okay.

20:06

When William the Conqueror was invaded

20:08

in England, these lads were beginning to

20:10

think, well, we've got the 500th birthday

20:13

coming up, lads. We better book the venue.

20:15

They are called Kongo-Gumi.

20:19

It's in Japan

20:20

and they build

20:22

Buddhist temples. Wow. So

20:25

on current time, 1500 years. Right.

20:30

So building both temples. Yeah. So

20:32

to be exact, it was founded in 578 to build

20:34

the temple Shuteno-G,

20:38

which is a massive national project. They were invited in by

20:40

the prince to do this. And

20:42

they have pivoted over the years in

20:45

World War II. They made coffins. Okay.

20:48

As you would. Largely speaking, Buddhist

20:50

temples, expert carpenters, 40 generations.

20:53

And as I said to you, if

20:55

I asked you this a couple of years ago, they did

20:57

this from 578. To 2006.

21:02

And in 2006, their

21:05

borrowings, their debt became quite large.

21:07

It was about 350 odd million dollars. And

21:10

they were acquired by Takamatsu,

21:12

which is a large construction company. But so they

21:15

are a subsidiary of that now. Okay.

21:18

So they still exist today,

21:21

just not independently. Exactly.

21:23

Yeah. Okay. Now it's unbelievable

21:26

when you think about what to do. That

21:29

is ridiculous. That they've been doing effectively.

21:31

Okay. Slight pivots throughout history. But

21:34

effectively they've been woodworkers and

21:37

manufacturers. Master carpenters. And construction master

21:39

carpenters for 1500 years. Yeah.

21:42

Do you know when you go into a business

21:44

and they have the

21:45

people on the wall of the

21:47

past chairman? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I

21:50

think that's possibly the reason Japan had to invade

21:52

China. They needed to use the Great

21:54

Wall for the pictures of the 40 odd

21:57

generations of people who looked.

21:59

or after this company. And so what has this

22:02

got to do with adoptions? Oh, yeah. Well,

22:04

it's a family business. So these

22:07

guys decided that we don't always

22:10

leave the company to the eldest son,

22:12

because what happens if he's not great at management?

22:15

So there's documents from the 1600s

22:18

and they show that a company would decide not

22:20

necessarily to put the eldest son at

22:22

the helm if he didn't have what it took to be a

22:24

good leader. So they could give it to the middle

22:26

son or the next son or

22:28

the youngest son or whatever.

22:29

If the family had no male heir, they

22:31

would get the daughter to take

22:33

a husband and he could be the

22:36

head carpenter. He could be the head of the

22:38

whole thing. And he would change his

22:40

name to her name. Gotcha.

22:43

And a lot of the time he would be adopted

22:46

into the family. So not just through marriage.

22:49

Yeah. Yeah. So nowadays, legal adoptions

22:51

of this kind paired up with an arranged marriage,

22:54

meaning the adopted son also becomes a son and a

22:56

son-in-law at the same time. Right. Right. Right.

22:59

It's quite common. And some of the most famous

23:01

companies in Japan have family-run

23:04

businesses because of this. The

23:06

carmaker, Toyota, Suzuki

23:08

is one of the most famous ones. Suzuki is

23:11

famously run by an adopted son. He's the

23:13

current chairman and CEO of Sama Suzuki.

23:15

And he's the fourth consecutively

23:16

adopted son to

23:18

run the group. So 98 percent

23:21

of adoptions are of

23:24

men between 20 and 30. And

23:27

a

23:27

lot of it is to do with businesses.

23:30

A lot of it are all of it. I mean, pretty much all of

23:32

it. Yes. And obviously

23:34

there's so much of this practice

23:36

that is it culturally?

23:39

I'm trying to basically see, and

23:41

maybe you don't have the answer to this, but like, is

23:43

the fact that only two percent then presumably

23:46

are of children. Yeah. Is that standard?

23:48

Yes, exactly. Standard. But is that a

23:50

cultural thing and that adoption isn't a thing in Japan

23:53

or is it just that it's so widespread

23:55

to adopt somebody to make your business better

23:57

that that just dwarfs the numbers of. regular

24:00

normal adoptions. I suppose you'd have to think that they're

24:02

just entirely different processes, aren't they? One

24:05

is for a very specific reason and

24:08

marries somebody's expertise with a company's

24:10

need. And one is entirely different.

24:13

It's a child's needs in the family. Yeah. So like

24:16

adoption is a word you'd use for both, but

24:18

they're so entirely different processes

24:20

as to be, they probably use different words entirely

24:23

in different languages rather than just adoption.

24:25

Right. That's amazing. And while you're

24:27

talking about babies and children and adoption,

24:29

I've got

24:29

one last one for you. It's very quick. Newborn babies

24:32

don't shiver. Newborn

24:34

babies don't shiver. No. Why

24:38

not? I think we should show them a picture of

24:40

a bug carrying 20 dead ants. I'd

24:43

see how do you like that there?

24:47

Due to their high surface area to volume ratio,

24:50

infants tend to lose more heat

24:52

to the environment compared to adults, to us,

24:54

right? But they don't have the

24:58

skeletal muscle mass essentially to maintain

25:00

body temperature. Actually shiver. Yeah.

25:03

Yeah. To maintain body temperature through shivering

25:05

thermogenesis, it's called. A baby basically

25:08

is, you know, those kind of inflatable lads that you

25:10

see on top of, that's the same size.

25:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what a baby is, right? And

25:16

humans, we shiver and we contract

25:18

the muscles quickly and Elon get them again and that

25:20

creates heat. So

25:22

evolution has provided babies with more brown

25:25

fat, brown adipose tissue that

25:27

converts chemically stored energy in the

25:29

form of fatty acids and glucose into heat through

25:32

non shivering thermogenesis. Right. So

25:34

we shiver, but

25:35

they don't because they have more brown fat

25:37

than we do, particularly around their necks

25:39

and their chest and their backs and their bones.

25:42

Particularly, I would also say their ankles and their

25:44

wrists, which until a child is about two

25:47

are the cutest things in the world, those huge

25:49

little rolls of fats into their feet

25:51

and hands are amazing. That makes sense though.

25:53

Yeah. Like they haven't got what it takes

25:55

to shiver. So you got to wrap them in something.

25:58

Yeah. And fat is what it is. Look

26:00

at the ants. Look at the ants. Look

26:02

them in the eye. Look

26:07

them in the eye. Look them in their dead

26:09

empty eyes. Look them

26:11

in their eye sockets.

26:14

Right, bring on Dara

26:16

Ennis I say. Yes, Dara Ennis

26:18

is going to tell us about the animal that has

26:20

been studied. So much that has led

26:22

to six Nobel

26:24

Prizes. That's in part two.

26:28

And this is

26:30

When Science Finds Away, a new

26:33

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26:35

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26:38

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26:40

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26:42

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26:45

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26:47

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26:50

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Thank you.

28:00

Welcome back to part two of Why Would You

28:02

Tell Me That? Now we are joined by not

28:04

just an entomologist or a neuroscientist,

28:07

but also everybody's favorite chaser.

28:10

It's Dara the Menace-en-us. Listen

28:14

Dara, before we get on to what I promised Dave, you

28:16

revealing the animal that has led to six Nobel

28:19

Prizes. We want to bestow

28:21

a special special favor,

28:23

a special honor on you because you're the only person we've

28:26

asked this because you're always tweeting weird facts. What

28:28

is your favorite fact that is not related to the

28:30

science that we're going to talk about today?

28:33

Well, my favorite fact is one that no one ever really

28:35

believes is true and they're the best kind

28:37

of fact. So the guy who invented

28:39

the submarine, the very first submarine

28:42

knew William Shakespeare personally and

28:44

they met on several occasions. What?

28:47

No, I'm now in that camp and

28:49

I don't believe this is true. Yeah, everybody

28:51

thinks submarines are a new invention. Carpathides

28:55

were invented about 300 years before tanks

28:57

were.

28:58

So the guy who invented it is called Cornelius

29:00

Drebbel and he was a Dutch guy and he

29:02

was at the court of King James I, same

29:05

time that Shakespeare was writing plays for King

29:07

James in the early 1600s.

29:08

Oh my God, that is incredible. How

29:11

in the name of all that's good and holy did someone

29:13

look at the sea or a river and go we should

29:15

go under that before someone else looked

29:17

at land and said we should go over that. What

29:20

sort of lunatic mermaid influenced

29:23

inventor did that? Well,

29:26

submarines are just

29:27

fancy diving belts. Like if you put any

29:29

sort of container underwater, it'll hold the air

29:31

in it and somebody just put it together. The

29:34

fact that they did it so early is amazing. That

29:36

is amazing. But they use submarines in warfare

29:38

in the American Civil War in the 1860s. So

29:41

Dave, I actually looked this up because I knew that I was

29:43

going to mention this particular fact. Right.

29:47

The king himself is the first monarch who went

29:49

underwater and they put him in and he went up the

29:51

Thames. You

29:54

don't see that in the credits of EastEnders, do you? Look

29:57

at the picture

29:57

of the king. That

30:00

is fantastic. That is why this man is on this show, apart

30:02

from his expertise. Right. What is the

30:04

animal, the study of which has led to

30:06

six Nobel prizes there? Well,

30:09

believe it or not, it's the fruit fly.

30:11

You know, during the summertime

30:13

when you've got a fruit ball, you've got some bananas, these little

30:16

red eyed guys are a couple of millimeters long,

30:18

hang around your house. Those exact ones are

30:21

one of the best studied organisms in the world.

30:24

And why the fruit fly? Well,

30:26

for lots of reasons, actually. And

30:29

I work with them every single day. My real day

30:31

job is people don't seem to realize

30:33

that I actually still do the science gig. And

30:36

I go into our lab

30:37

and I do experiments and I look after our fruit

30:39

flies. But fruit flies have a lot of advantages. One

30:42

of the main ones is that you can keep them in a lab.

30:44

So, you know, if you're going to have an organism

30:46

that you're keeping in a lab,

30:48

it's really easy to keep fruit flies. Like my

30:50

lab is not that big. It's about 10 people working in it. And

30:52

we've got thousands, tens of thousands,

30:55

hundreds of thousands of fruit flies that we keep really,

30:57

really easy. You know, Nadera, all I'm

30:59

picturing is you walking into your opening

31:01

the door. It's just a swarm of free

31:03

fruit flies and a load of rotten bananas sitting

31:06

on the table. Are they contained

31:08

in some way? Yes, they are. Well, it's not quite

31:10

that manic. So they're kept in little tubes with sort

31:12

of cotton flugs or polyurethane flugs in

31:14

them.

31:15

And we need to keep them separate from each other. Because

31:17

one of the best things about fruit flies is you

31:19

can control their genetics really easily. So they're

31:21

really good for genetic experiments. They've been used

31:23

in genetic experiments for over 100 years.

31:26

And they're brilliant.

31:28

So if you want to do an experiment on mice, you have

31:30

to plan it months in advance. But

31:32

an egg of a fruit fly can become a

31:34

grandparent in about two or three weeks.

31:37

So, you know. Now

31:39

Darragh, I have to say when I moved to Dublin first, that

31:41

was the norm in some of the places I lived. Can

31:46

I add to the imagery of Dave imagines you

31:48

surrounded by flies? I also imagine loads of frogs

31:51

just lined up outside the window. It's

31:54

Christmas. So

31:57

they're easy to breed.

31:59

a fruit fly can become a granddad in 20 days

32:02

and they mutate quite frequently, don't

32:04

they? Yeah, they do. But you can control those

32:06

mutations really well. So they've got very sort

32:08

of weird genetics.

32:10

One of the things that is called balancers. So normally

32:12

when you mutate anything, it's a bad thing. People,

32:15

mutations cause problems and some

32:17

of them are beneficial, but most of them are bad. And

32:19

a lot of the things we want to look at, the animal

32:21

wouldn't do very well. And it would

32:23

lose that genetic, it would use natural selection and

32:26

get rid of that mutation because it's not good. Well,

32:28

you can actually play around with the genetics of life.

32:30

So they keep your mutations indefinite, which

32:32

is really rare in any animal and

32:35

especially rare in any animal that's actually very

32:37

complex. So one of the other great things about it

32:39

is they're scarily similar to humans.

32:42

I know they don't look,

32:44

but about 60% of our DNA is the same as

32:46

a fruit fly. And if you're looking at 60%, yeah,

32:49

yeah. Because how are it's more than

32:51

a bouncer like. Yeah, exactly. It's

32:53

all about 60%. So

32:55

how our cells work

32:57

compared to a fruit fly, they're remarkably the same when

32:59

you go down to a cellular level, which is what we're looking

33:01

at. And for diseases, it's

33:03

about 75%. So about 75% of disease

33:06

genes have the same or very similar one

33:08

in flies that are really good model

33:11

for disease as well.

33:12

So that includes Down syndrome,

33:14

Alzheimer's, autism, diabetes, and cancers

33:17

of pretty much all types. And

33:20

our nervous systems work almost exactly the same way,

33:22

which is really weird. But, you know, so

33:24

if you want to study a brain of a mammal, it's really,

33:26

really hard to do.

33:27

In my lab, we study brains of fruit flies all the time

33:30

and they're so small we can, we can use a microscope

33:32

to look right through them. They can manipulate them.

33:34

And

33:35

for ethical reasons, it's an awful lot nicer

33:37

working with small insects than it is with mammals.

33:40

So it's got a huge amount of the advantage.

33:42

Yeah. And sorry, just Neil, I listed off those,

33:44

those conditions there. Like, does

33:46

that mean then that you

33:48

can use the flies genetics

33:51

to, to study those

33:53

conditions or do you have

33:55

an autistic fly, a Down syndrome

33:57

fly? Like, I'm trying to understand what you're doing there.

33:59

So you can use it to study the conditions because

34:02

the fundamentals of how it works at like a cellular

34:04

level and at a molecular level is the

34:06

same. So the best example of this is

34:09

there's a gene in humans that when it's mutated

34:11

you present with Parkinson's. So you can get,

34:14

you start to tremor. If you mutate the same

34:16

gene in flies their legs start to shake. No.

34:19

But the best bit is if you give them the same drug

34:22

that you give humans they stop shaking.

34:25

Wow. Yeah. So it's

34:27

that similar. Now it's a lot of things are

34:29

different, but for some things that the pathways

34:32

and the way that the genes interact and everything

34:34

is almost exactly the same. So there

34:36

are really, really good way to study these things

34:39

in great detail. And because

34:41

so many people study them and so many we understand

34:44

them so well, we can really make a lot of

34:46

progress very, very quick.

34:48

And you're studying at the moment, aren't you studying

34:50

their brains and memory as well? So yeah.

34:53

And you described cells as a factory,

34:55

right? Yeah. So you've talked us

34:57

through RNA. So I've seen videos where you

35:00

describe a cell as a factory. There's lots of processes

35:02

going on. The DNA is in the office,

35:04

which is the nucleus.

35:05

Yeah. So if you think cells, when

35:08

we go to school, we get this, you know, the diagram

35:10

of the cell and it looks like it's empty and it's not

35:12

cells are really, really, really busy.

35:14

There's constantly things moving, changing,

35:16

being made, being destroyed. It's

35:18

much more like, you know, a music festival

35:20

where you're pushing your way through the crowd. It's

35:23

a lot, a lot of things happening

35:24

all of the time. Your DNA is there,

35:26

but it's so huge. Your

35:28

DNA is about about a meter long in each

35:30

of your cells. In each cell? Yeah. So

35:33

if you stretch all of your DNA out, you can go across

35:35

the whole solar system

35:37

about seven or eight times. There's that

35:39

much DNA in your body. Even DNA

35:41

for Dave, which clearly has gone wrong at some point. Yeah,

35:43

but it's still very long, even if it's, you know, if

35:45

it's gone wrong. Long and wrong. That's

35:48

what I've got many times. It's meant to be CTAG. You got

35:50

extra letters and stuff in there, Dave. So you've

35:52

got this massive amount of information, but actually

35:55

accessing that information is really difficult. So

35:57

the way we describe it is it's like, it's like an instruction

35:59

book on how to.

35:59

make a human,

36:01

but it's thousands and thousands of pages long.

36:03

And if you really want to, you know, do anything in the factory,

36:05

you're not going to carry a book that's got thousands of pages.

36:08

So instead what the cell does is it takes one

36:10

thing, the one thing that it needs to make a copy of it. And

36:13

that's called RNA. And RNA is what

36:15

happens in the cell. So that gets moved out. That's

36:17

the instructions to make proteins. You know, so

36:20

we work on the RNA. We don't work on the DNA. We

36:22

work on what gets copied, what gets sent

36:24

out, what gets moved around.

36:26

I mean, in nerve cells, that's really important

36:29

because they have to react very quickly if you want to make a memory,

36:31

you have to make it in seconds. It's a physical

36:34

thing. You have to build a new signups. You know, that thing, they say

36:36

all the signups are connecting. Yeah. You have to make

36:38

those connections. And if you don't do it in seconds

36:40

or definitely minutes, it won't

36:42

happen. So you can't wait for the DNA

36:45

to be done. It has to be there and ready. And we look at

36:47

how that's all controlled.

36:48

This is kind of mind blowing there because this is in

36:51

Dara's videos that he does online.

36:53

When your brain, as he said, when your brain makes new

36:55

memory, it physically makes a new connection.

36:58

The cell grows, new synaptic

37:00

connections are formed. So in this

37:02

kind of factory analogy, it's the factory

37:04

wants to make an extension. Isn't that it Dara? Yeah.

37:07

And it stores the RNA locally rather

37:09

than having to go back to the DNA, which is back in

37:12

the office there, which is down the other end of the factory. And

37:14

that's what you're studying essentially how, which

37:16

RNA is stored locally when the, uh,

37:19

the office extension, shall we say, is going to be built. Yeah.

37:21

So we, we're trying to understand which

37:23

genes, so you've got lots of genes in your genome

37:26

and in a fly, it's still even got 13 or 14,000

37:28

genes. So

37:30

we're trying to figure out which ones of those are involved when

37:33

a memory is made. And

37:34

the good thing about that is a lot of these processes

37:37

in biology are kind of they're backwards and forward.

37:39

So if you can understand how they're made, you get an idea

37:41

of how they're, they're lost.

37:43

So we're not studying disease

37:45

directly, but this is the kind of thing that can open

37:47

up better understanding of how

37:50

neurodegeneration happens. So, you know, Parkinson's

37:52

memory loss, Alzheimer's, that kind

37:54

of thing. Cause memory loss is very normal. If you didn't lose memories,

37:57

you'd go mad. You know, it's really, if you

37:59

remember it,

37:59

everything. So it's a natural

38:01

moving, changing thing, your brain connections

38:04

are always firing on and off and doing that in

38:06

a fly brain is

38:07

infinitely easier than trying to do for humans. And

38:10

given that, as you said, they've given rise

38:12

to six Nobel prizes, they're studied around

38:14

the world by

38:15

maybe even millions of scientists, certainly thousands of

38:17

scientists. So are they all looking

38:19

at things like what you're looking at or are you looking

38:22

at a very specific thing in

38:24

the study of fruit flies and someone else is looking at

38:26

something else completely in the study of fruit flies? Oh,

38:29

yeah, absolutely. So there's like in our

38:31

lab space that we work in, there's two different fly labs.

38:34

So

38:34

the other lab Petros' lab

38:36

are looking at immunity. So they're looking at,

38:39

you know, gut bacteria, the immune system, which is

38:41

again, one of the Nobel prizes and flies

38:43

was about the innate immune system. We only really

38:45

understand that because of that early work of plants.

38:47

Wow. Well, people are studying everything from,

38:50

you

38:50

know, in neurology, they're doing circuits and how

38:52

the brain works. They're doing

38:54

development. And how, how does

38:57

an embryo know where a head is and where

38:59

the tail or the feet ends?

39:01

How does that happen? Where does that pattern come from?

39:04

So that was all first described in flies as well. So

39:06

when you've got a single cell that's fertilized

39:09

egg, how does it decide where the head

39:11

goes? And that's all done by RNA

39:13

location within, within the done and it was first

39:16

described in flies.

39:17

So when you're doing the memory, when you're

39:19

looking at how a fruit fly remembers

39:21

something, talk me through that. I find

39:24

that hard to even comprehend. How do

39:26

you test a fruit flies memory? So

39:29

we use, we actually use the muscle synapses

39:31

as a model for this. So we

39:33

don't, you can test for all these memories

39:35

and people have done this where they, they do things

39:38

like, um, they give them a smell. So

39:40

some smell that's not related to food, but

39:43

it's where the food is. And then they go back

39:45

and see if they remember and they offer them choices

39:47

and all this kind of stuff. It's all this weird, complex

39:49

behavioral stuff. But in our lab,

39:51

we're actually, we use the muscle synapses as

39:53

a model because it's really easy to study them. You can open

39:56

up the fly, larvae usually,

39:58

and you've got a sheath muscle with nerves on it

40:00

and you can see where it connects. So you can see individual

40:03

synapses you can look at

40:04

and if you stimulate it with electricity or chemicals

40:06

you can make them grow up. So you can make synaptic

40:09

growth happen

40:10

and we can look at that live under a microscope

40:12

looking at single molecules at a time and

40:14

that's a model for memory. The other thing

40:16

that we can do is we can

40:18

play around with their genetics and turn certain genes

40:21

off and see how it affects their movements and then

40:23

when we open them up we can count the number of synapses. So

40:25

we can use that synaptic number and how

40:27

they connect and how they grow and how they shrink as a

40:30

model for memory. But yeah you can definitely do

40:32

memory tests in flies. I know that sounds

40:34

bad. Not flashcards

40:37

but far more important. No, no it's usually

40:39

things cues that animals react

40:41

very positively to and that's usually food

40:44

or mating are the two that they really know.

40:46

I've seen this cow shite before. This

40:49

cat, this fly looking

40:51

at you. You said that it's well

40:53

over 100 years, six Nobel prizes

40:56

there right? The love affair kind

40:58

of started with this US biologist called Thomas

41:00

Morgan. And isn't he

41:02

the guy you figured out basically genes are on

41:04

chromosomes like beads and string? He's

41:07

the one who kind of proved it. Yeah so

41:09

up until this point they weren't really sure how chromosomes

41:11

worked

41:12

but he was the one that showed not only that genes

41:14

are on chromosomes they had an idea about that but they were

41:16

on specific ones. So certain

41:19

genes are on certain chromosomes and we know this now

41:21

it's fact. So in humans we've got 23 pairs

41:23

but in flies they've only got four

41:25

and the fourth one is actually so small that we generally

41:28

don't talk about it. But he

41:30

figured it out because he realized

41:33

that wide eyed mutants. So flies

41:35

have red eyes. That's the standard one. But occasionally

41:37

you get a white eye. This is a really recessive

41:40

gene and it doesn't happen very often.

41:43

But

41:43

he noticed that the ones that did have it were almost

41:45

exclusively male. It was really rare for females.

41:48

And through a series of sort of clever experiments he

41:50

was able to show that

41:51

it's linked to the X chromosome which is the

41:53

sex chromosome. So if you're a male you get an

41:55

X and a Y. That's what makes you male.

41:57

For females of two Xs.

41:59

Does that make sense? Yeah. So

42:02

when you have a female, if

42:04

they've got one red eye and one white

42:06

eye gene on their two Xs, they just have red eyes

42:08

because red is dominant. It's like brown eyes and blue eyes

42:10

and humans. But the males, because

42:12

it's on the sex gene, if they get one copy

42:14

of the white, because they don't have another X,

42:17

they immediately get white eyes. So males were

42:19

massively more likely to.

42:21

And he showed that that

42:22

was sex linked and it was linked to what chromosomes.

42:25

So it's the same with hemophilia in humans. Men are

42:27

way more likely to. I'm

42:30

remembering now as a child getting a

42:32

biology microscope set

42:34

as a Christmas present and it did nothing for me.

42:36

Dara, I ended up on the radio instead of actually having a science

42:39

career. But in it were like

42:41

those little glass,

42:44

I can't remember the terminology, slides.

42:46

There you go. That you would put in. Sorry, you

42:48

forgot the word slide. Yeah. I mean, again,

42:51

like I said, not a scientist. Go

42:53

and ask the neuroscientist the question. I can't wait

42:55

for this. So

42:56

I looked in, I looked into the tiny telescope

42:59

at the slide. At the

43:01

glass thing. I'll think of what it's called, Neil. At

43:03

the glass thing. And on the glass thing, you

43:06

could make your own slides. Yeah. I never, I don't

43:08

think I ever really got to that, but there were three prepared ones. Two

43:10

of them were,

43:12

I don't know, some kind of cross section of a plant,

43:14

maybe a stem or something like that. And one of them, now that

43:16

I'm thinking about it, was a fruit fly.

43:18

I mean, I don't actually remember anything other than

43:20

that. Sorry. There's a handful

43:22

of like model organisms that are

43:24

really widely studied around the world. One

43:27

is a worm. So nematode worm microscopic,

43:29

but it was the first animal to get its genome

43:32

sequence. And I used to work on nematodes

43:34

actually before I was doing my PhD. Right.

43:36

And fruit flies is another one.

43:38

And there's a little plant called Arabidopsis. So

43:40

these, they're called the model organisms and

43:43

they're so, they, the scientific

43:45

community basically settled on these and went, you

43:47

know what, we're going to, everybody's going to try and work

43:49

on the same thing. That way we can build up

43:51

resources. We can compare results. When we,

43:54

when we do things, we can work together or we can, you

43:56

know, go, that isn't right or this is right. And

43:59

fruit flies. is one of them. So they're everywhere. I

44:02

was reading about Cambridge and so they're studying,

44:04

you know, various studies

44:06

going on but only two of the studies are

44:08

actually about the fruit fly. The poor old fruit

44:10

fly is being used so we can

44:13

extrapolate from the him or

44:15

her, you

44:16

know, applications for us. No one

44:18

gives a shit about the fruit fly. It's terrible.

44:21

You do get ecologist and stuff because fruit flies are pests

44:23

as well, you know, so they get into fruits and

44:26

they get into like, and they carry

44:28

vector diseases or fruit trees and stuff.

44:30

So people study them from that point of view, but 99% of

44:33

the study is trying to figure

44:35

out genetics

44:36

rather than what the fruit flies actually do. Neil

44:38

mentioned that. What kind of things, I mean, you've

44:40

mentioned, for example, neurodegenerative

44:43

disease study, other conditions,

44:45

like what are the things that we hope

44:48

to be able to benefit

44:50

from as human beings from our study of fruit

44:52

flies? What kind of areas? Well, if we go through

44:54

what the sort of the prizes,

44:56

the Nobel Prize, we've

44:59

already talked about Thomas Hodd Morgan's, that was

45:01

genetics and chromosomes, which was a major

45:04

part of like scientific discovery that made

45:06

that opened up tons of other avenues. Right.

45:08

And another

45:09

one was Muller,

45:12

I can't remember Muller's first name, but Muller in

45:14

the 40s got one for

45:16

how x-rays can mutate genes. So

45:19

this is this is a double sided thing.

45:21

One is that you can do it on purpose if you want to mutate genes.

45:24

But the other one is that lots of x-ray exposure is

45:26

not very good for you and gives you can't. So, you know,

45:28

a very good thing. After

45:31

that, there was all the embryo development, the stuff

45:33

that I said, so when an embryo is done, so they

45:35

figured out really quickly

45:37

which genes are in control of causing

45:39

head ends and tail ends and stomach and how

45:41

it how it's all controlled. And that's

45:44

generally applicable across sort

45:46

of to all the way to humans, not

45:48

the same kind of thing, but good, basic

45:50

ideas. And that's

45:51

really important for studying developmental disorders

45:54

and all sorts of stuff. So it has a huge impact.

45:56

There was also DNA immunity.

45:59

So our other

45:59

understanding of how the innate immune system. So this

46:02

is,

46:03

you know, when you get vaccinated, your system

46:05

adapts and it learns. That's the

46:07

adaptive immune system. The other one is the one that just blanket

46:10

works. The one that causes allergic

46:12

reaction and things like that.

46:13

Our understanding of that was heavily influenced

46:15

by flies. How the sense

46:18

of smell works was another one. That was Richard

46:20

Axel. I know that sounds weird, but flies

46:22

are really, because they find their food by smell,

46:25

they're really responsive and really easy

46:27

to model with smells. So that was why I said

46:29

the smell thing for learning. That was one of the experiments

46:32

they did for that.

46:33

That was Richard Axel, which wasn't that long ago, actually. I think that

46:35

was like 10 or 15 years ago. Yeah. 2004.

46:37

I'm looking at the list here to see, see can he

46:40

do all six and he's done. Well,

46:42

the last one was really recently and that's

46:44

easy. That's

46:46

circadian rhythm. So how we understand how sleep

46:48

works. So that was the policy. Of

46:50

course he's got the money. The

46:53

medicine. Of course he's got the money. I

46:55

don't know everything, but I literally work on this every day. And

46:57

I'm also my boss's head of

46:59

the public engagement research

47:01

in our department. So I do a thing where

47:03

I go to schools and I talk about this a lot. Okay.

47:06

I've done this a lot of times. So I can't remember

47:09

all the names. One of them was an English guy

47:11

and yeah, it was all about circadian rhythm.

47:13

So how we understand how

47:15

sleep works

47:16

is largely

47:18

down to early work on flies.

47:21

It's a big part of it. Jeffrey C. Hall,

47:23

Michael Ross Bash and Michael

47:25

W. Young. Oh, there we go. Yeah. Just let everyone

47:28

know Neil's reading that as opposed to

47:30

who knows it all off my heart. Also

47:32

I have a feeling that there's a huge

47:34

Jeff Goldblum sort of flight just outside

47:36

his shot. And he just has a gun

47:39

towards Dara's head. Big us up motherfucker.

47:41

Big us up. How

47:44

do they sleep?

47:45

They sleep in sort of short bursts,

47:47

but they're diurnal. So they're awake during

47:49

the day. So these aren't, these are nocturnal flies.

47:51

They're awake during the day and at night time. So in our

47:54

rooms that we keep doing, we've controlled temperature and light

47:56

rooms. The lights go off for eight hours at night so they can sleep.

47:59

So they have to go. for a nap, but they don't

48:01

sleep for very, very long periods. They sleep

48:03

for short periods and then wake up.

48:05

So when they're testing them for sleep, they have these really

48:07

cool, sorry, I'm very nerdy, really

48:10

cool experimental setups where it's these really thin

48:12

glass tubes with a laser going across them. And

48:15

the flies keep moving all the time. They're always bouncing

48:17

around. But

48:18

then when they go to sleep for a period, they

48:20

don't break the laser. And that's how they know they're asleep. So

48:22

this was how they registered and measured different

48:24

sleep

48:25

patterns and everything. It was really clever. That's

48:27

genius. When that film was Sean Connery and Catherine

48:29

Zeta-Jones. Yes, yeah. Entrapment.

48:32

That's how the new Sean Connery had fallen asleep. When he

48:34

didn't try and go through the lasers in the museum,

48:37

he was older at that point. By the way, the

48:39

point to apologize for being nerdy was not 25

48:42

minutes into this conversation. It was very close.

48:44

It was very much at the start, but

48:47

I introduced you as an entomologist.

48:49

Yes, absolutely. What are you doing

48:51

with maple syrup plantations?

48:53

Oh yeah, my time in Canada, that was fun. Yeah,

48:56

I worked in Canada for three years. I was

48:58

in Montreal and I worked in a lab there where we

49:00

worked on forestry pests.

49:03

One of them was called the Forest Tent

49:05

Caterpillar. And what it is, it's

49:07

a little caterpillar for butterfly. It's

49:09

fairly everywhere in Canada and North

49:11

America. And it eats aspen

49:13

and maple leaves. So not only that a

49:15

problem, but about once every 10 years, there's outbreaks

49:19

that are unbelievable. When you

49:21

walk into a forest during an outbreak, you can hear

49:23

the caterpillars eating. You

49:26

can hear their poo hitting the ground.

49:28

It's like gentle rain. There's

49:30

just so many of them. So they go from

49:32

one or two ish on average per treat,

49:35

thousands and thousands and thousands of every

49:37

tree. They just, they destroy the leaves and it

49:39

really affects the crop. What causes that

49:41

balloon then every 10 years or so? That was what we

49:43

were trying to figure out. So the thing is, it

49:46

isn't national, it's local. So it happens

49:48

in like a radius of a few rows. And

49:52

Neil, that

49:54

is one of the most niche references. I

49:56

think anyone has ever made any fuck

49:58

ass. If you were to like.

49:59

in the 80s and didn't hear Shaw's

50:02

almost nationwide. 90s? No,

50:04

no, not 90s. 90s? No

50:07

way was 90s. Shaus was almost nationwide. Sorry,

50:09

I'm not culture enough for that. I didn't think about that.

50:12

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay,

50:14

let me explain the reference. Don't worry, we're getting back to

50:16

maple syrup plantations. There

50:20

was an ad on Irish television which speaks

50:22

to Ireland's lack of ambition

50:24

in some ways. It was Shaw's almost

50:26

nationwide. That's what I was referring to. Sorry, Taryon. Sorry,

50:29

Taryon, please continue. I

50:29

know, yes, these outbreaks

50:32

would be a couple of kilometres across

50:34

or less

50:35

and down the road there wouldn't be one

50:37

but then two or three years later it would happen down the road.

50:40

Okay, right. It's not a big wide climate thing

50:42

that causes it. It's local situations. So we were trying

50:45

to figure out what those triggers were

50:47

because if we could remove the triggers

50:49

and stop the massive outbreaks there wouldn't

50:51

be a problem because in the background they cause negligible

50:54

damage. So that was what we were trying to figure out.

50:56

Well, yeah, I was out with maple syrup plantations. It was really

50:58

good fun.

50:59

Did you figure out what it was then? We had

51:01

a few ideas but you might be

51:03

surprised to hear this but the ecology

51:05

lab in Montreal that's trying to figure this stuff out

51:07

is not very well funded.

51:09

So we bought most

51:11

of our stuff in the dollar store. We made our own

51:13

thing. So we have a couple of papers. We have a few

51:15

ideas about

51:17

different ideas about predator movements

51:19

and behaviour and cycles in the trees

51:22

themselves and all that kind of stuff.

51:24

We only scratched the surface. You should

51:26

have said that this book French to caterpillars. You

51:28

get an awful lot more money in Quebec. An

51:31

awful lot more money. Can I just say, Dave,

51:34

when I was caught in the forest in

51:36

Montreal, I wasn't talking. I

51:38

was taking part in

51:41

a very... You were a caster-filling.

51:44

...forest pest. Dara

51:48

Ennis, not only is he a star on television

51:51

but he's absolutely a star to talk to us about the

51:54

humble

51:54

fruit fly, Dave, which has led to,

51:56

as I promised, six Nobel

51:59

Prizes. forget about everything else, all

52:01

the other scientific breakthroughs that didn't result

52:04

in a prize. Darr, you're an absolute legend. Cheers,

52:06

thanks very much for having

52:07

me on, that's... Welcome

52:19

back to part three of Why Would You Tell

52:21

Me That? Well, Dave, my friend,

52:24

my quizzer, my, and now,

52:27

educator, Darr Ennis. I was not

52:29

expecting the fruit fly.

52:32

You know, when we talked about the animal

52:34

whose study has given us the most Nobel

52:37

prizes, I don't know why, just the lowly fruit

52:39

fly was not the type of creature I predicted.

52:41

You were going to go rats, lab rats,

52:43

or probably monkeys or something. Yeah, I

52:46

thought, like, chimps might be the one, but no, yeah, here

52:48

we are, fruit flies. And he's so good,

52:50

like, he's such a good science communicator. Like he was

52:52

able to rat love every single prize,

52:55

pretty much, so. I mean, that's why they pay him the

52:57

big bucks, and that's why you can see him on television pretty

53:00

much every day. The chase is on forever and ever

53:02

and ever. Okay, well, look, next week, I

53:04

am

53:04

going to bring something that is dear to my heart

53:07

to you, Neil. Okay. And

53:09

I'm going to tell you that scientifically

53:12

proven, on a number of occasions,

53:14

without any doubt, people

53:17

who listen to death metal... Yes.

53:21

...are intrinsically happier than people

53:23

who do not. What? Yeah.

53:27

And it's not some kind of, like, I haven't gotten some,

53:29

you know, the lead singer of a metal band to come in and tell

53:31

us this, that he thinks his crowds

53:33

are happy. No, this is a professor who's

53:36

been a professor for decades,

53:38

one of the most qualified people we'll ever talk to, and

53:40

he has proven on a number of occasions that

53:43

listening to death metal makes you

53:45

happier.

53:46

Color me skeptical. Right.

53:48

Well... But I remain unconvinced, but

53:51

you've convinced me before, so I'm here.

53:53

Join us next week and find out, and your

53:56

mind will be blown.

54:01

I'm Alicia Wainwright, and this is When Science

54:03

Finds a Way, a new podcast from Wellcome about

54:19

the

54:25

science that's changing the world. I'll

54:27

be speaking to a truly global

54:30

range of experts working at the forefront

54:32

of scientific progress, as well as

54:34

people who have inspired and contributed

54:36

to their work. We'll explore how science

54:39

is helping to build a healthier future

54:42

for all of us. When Science Finds

54:44

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54:49

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