Luke O'Neill
speaker
4,575 appearances
24 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard yesterday
Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And the third thing it has is acid.
And a particular acid called formic acid is in nettles.
Now, formic acid was first found in ants that sting.
That's where the name came from.
Formic, I think, is from the name of ants, the Latin name.
And lo and behold, nettle stings have a formic acid as well.
And that acid, of course, is very irritating to our skin.
And so the combination of histamine, acetylcholine acids, is causing all the pain and irritation.
And that's what's in nettle stings.
Now, why has the nettle got it?
Well, to stop it being eaten.
You see, that's obvious in a way.
It's got its own defense system to stop it being eaten.
Under the microscope, it's remarkable.
They have these little sort of glass tubes, a bit like little bits of glass, I suppose, glass tubes, made of silica.
They're called silica chips.
And they are the, again, the needle that squirts this stuff in.
So it injects these things into your skin.
And therefore you feel the pain or whatever the animal might be that's rubbing off the nettle.
A silica tip breaks off the nettle and then it's full of all these liquids that go in the histamine, the acetylcholine, the acids and cause all this irritation.
Showing 561–580 of 4,575 · page 29 of 229
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