Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tyshinsky. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with fact number one, and looky, looky, it's Anna Tyshinsky.
My fact this week is that wild oats sow themselves. Yeah, so basically they're plants that look a bit like oats and they have seeds at the top of them that come in a little cluster that's called a panicle. But they don't panic. They very calmly have two spikes sticking out of them called awns and they look a bit like very long hairy legs.
And basically when the seeds come off, they go onto the ground and when they dry out, they twist one way and when they get moist, they twist another. So as the moisture goes up and down, they twist back and forth. And it reminded me a bit of one of those moves you used to do in the gym where you lie on your back and splay your legs out and roll around.
You're not allowed back in that gym anymore, are you? We just sort of did the bleep test and stuff at my school.
Yeah, our teacher was sacked, actually. But it makes them sort of crawl around and then they'll find a crevice. Eventually, they'll fall into a crevice. And once they've fallen into a crevice, this motion makes them drill down into it. So they literally bury themselves.
It's the closest thing you'll see to something that's not sentient being absolutely sentient. It just looks like it's got a mind. Let's not get into your sentience and trees stuff. I think it's alive, guys. I think it's alive. It is alive.
No, honestly, it is alive.
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Chapter 2: What surprising fact about wild oats is discussed?
What about you two? Wild oats, are they the ancestors of the oats that we eat?
We think so, although there seems to be some disagreement, but I think they are, yes. Although the oats that we eat, the cultivated oats, have lost these awns because they're bred out so the seeds can get much bigger.
And wild oats are, I think, a weed, right?
Chapter 3: How do wild oats demonstrate unique self-sowing behavior?
And they're quite annoying because they can plant themselves. So the idea of sowing wild oats... is something that you would never need to do it because they do it themselves, but also you wouldn't want to do it because it gets in the way of all your normal plants. So sewing wild oats became a phrase that meant just doing something pointless and stupid.
Yeah. So go out and have fun in a promiscuous sexual way because you're not going to marry these people, but go out and do that and then find the person you're going to marry.
Yeah, so it was not originally sexual as well. It was just people having fun and messing around and stuff. And actually, an interesting thing that I found is that the word haver, which I've only ever heard in the song I'm Gonna Walk 500 Miles by Proclaimers. You know, if I haver... then I know I'm going to haver with you or whatever it is. Okay.
The word haver means oats and havering means sort of messing around, not doing anything properly and it's the same origin as this wild oats thing.
Oh my God. So that means that we have a new sentence person to add to my list, Nigel Havers.
Yes.
That's a thrill. Anna, I've been updating the list.
Oh, have you? I was going to say, it's been a long time.
Anna, there's a new list.
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Chapter 4: What does the term 'sowing wild oats' originally mean?
You just came back.
No, really sad not to be involved in that, but it wouldn't make sense, would it?
Oats had a renaissance since the 90s, hasn't it? It sort of appears everywhere in different things. Now, oat milk, particularly. That was invented in the 90s. I thought we had that for a very long time. Ricard Ost, O-S-T-E, which is almost an anagram of Oates. He's a Swedish scientist.
And as well as inventing it, he is a professor at Lund University, where we will be going very soon to be doing our live show. Is he still trading? Is he... He's still there, so we could meet him. But he only spends 20% of his time there at the university. So hopefully we land in that 20%. He's doing one day a week, I think is what you mean.
His official biography says he only spends 20% of his time.
Wait a minute, because there's seven days in a week. That's a good point. So he must do, I suppose, 1.4.
Yeah, 1.4 days. So hopefully we're there on the 1.4 day. We'll see.
That's brilliant. Yeah. I didn't actually know how they made oat milk. It's just because I've never thought about it. We always have some in the house, but I thought it was just, gosh, they're dry. I mean, I suppose there is moisture in there.
If you zoom in, there's those tiny udders hanging off each grain.
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Chapter 5: What innovative uses of technology are explored in the episode?
They trained them up on a half on a rough surface, half on a smooth surface. And then they got them to find food all on a rough surface. And the ones who've been trained on a rough surface darted to the food because they like traveling on it. The ones who've been raised on the smooth surface were like, oh, what's this rough surface? Anyway, then they cut all the heads off.
And then when the new heads came back, the heads that had been raised on the rough surface remembered to be chill about the rough surface. It's like a really complicated way of showing they have memories. I don't know why they didn't just ask, you know, do you remember 9-11 or whatever? But that's how they did it. And they remember their upbringing, even though it's a different head.
They do really stupid experiments with these things though, don't they? Because they're so wacky, they want to see what their limits are. So there's a guy called James McConnell in 1964. who put some flatworms in a maze and taught them how to complete the maze.
And then he chopped them up and fed them to another flatworm and then put that flatworm into the maze and the flatworm could also complete the maze without being taught how to do it. And his theory was that basically they had learned through their food. Interesting.
Is it like talking to them from inside?
Well, it turns out that no one's been able to replicate this experiment. And what they think happened is the first flatworm left a load of slime in the maze and the second one just followed the slime.
He didn't clean the maze out.
That's loose.
But given what we know about that, given that they can regenerate memories after being decapitated, I mean, yeah, it sounds like that experiment was flawed, but it's crazy what they can do. What can they do?
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