Is it a Bird, is it a Plane, no it's a Tree!

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0:57Exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average.

1:35See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

1:56Alice Fraser: Welcome to The Gargle, a science and technology podcast brought to you by The Bugle. Breaking news, science is. After a study by scientists about what science is out of the University of Science, the researchers have concluded that doing research is a valid methodology for studying science, and that in fact, under examination by the latest tools, science is. which means that welcome to The Gargle, a science and technology podcast brought to you by The Bugle. I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and first up to the plate, she headbutted her way out of her father's skull. It's the goddess of wisdom, Rialina.

2:33Alice Fraser: Hello. Thanks for having me. It's been a tough journey out of the skull, but I made it, and not too many bone fragments lie around, so I think it's a win all round. and conversely emerging from the froth of the ocean standing astride an open shell presumably after fly kicking a mollusk to death it's Jaws Norris Hello I grew my hair long though so that I can cover any bits that your viewers don't want to see while I'm standing on the shell so don't worry about it All good, modesty preserved Modesty preserved by hair which has always helped me sort of dicing with discomfort it at best yeah you've got to grow it pretty long and thick for it not to be sort of like blown off by any kind of strong breeze i feel like to be confident that you're really going to be able to preserve your modesty from every angle for anybody that might be around you you've really got to put the effort into kind of like conditioning volume all that kind of thing so there's also plaiting you could plait it yes yeah yeah make it into a nice thick rope and then coil it around yourself There was a guy that did that.

3:41You know, that guy that lived on top of a pillar and he lived in a barrel and he wrapped a rope around himself and lived in the rope and it gave him maggots because he hated people so much. He just wanted people to leave him alone and that's why he went and lived on top of that pillar.

3:55Alice Fraser: Wow. True story. That's the thing about maggots, I suppose. I always like to imagine that there's someone who's tuning into this podcast for the first time and we've gone in so hard with like eating rope maggots up the top of a pillar. Before we jump into our top stories for this week, let's have a look at the headlines in science and technology. Tesla has literally launched its new model car in a recent demonstration that the car can flip and jump. Responses have ranged from speculation that this flashy display is designed to distract from the fact that the company still has not delivered its promised roadster to the population.

4:33Alice Fraser: to the sudden depressing realisation from everyone who's ever dreamed of flying cars that if they do become road-approved, they will be being driven by the same people that drive normal cars, but now they'll be coming at you from above. Stressful when the future comes close enough for you to see the problems with it. Hackers have heated French supermarket fridges to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, spoiling millions of euros worth of food. 50 degrees Celsius is too hot for cheese, but the French government is considering making hay by throwing a national fondue party. And apparently AI companies have spent$230 ,000 per day so far in the first six months of 2026, lobbying Washington$230 ,000 a day in the first half of 2026.

5:23Alice Fraser: When asked, AI bosses replied, you're right to push back. That is an encroachment on democracy by oligopolist corporatocracy. Would you like me to write some protest chants for you? This week's top stories, top stories, things that are not Amelia Earhart's aeroplane news. Now, Rialina, you're not Amelia Earhart's aeroplane. Can you unpack this story for us? I am not Amelia Earhart's airplane or her navigation system, which apparently she left behind on one of the legs because she felt that it was too heavy. And so that they think that might be one of the reasons why she disappeared on her, as they put it in this article, third to last leg, which really took me a moment to think about it.

6:08She got lost on the third to last leg, which to me is just a leg. I would just say that's a leg of the journey. But essentially, since 1938, this object has been visible in photographs of the Toraya, I think I've said that correctly, peninsula of Nikumaroro, which is a remote uninhabited coral atoll belonging to Kiribati. And so this is since 1938, we've been looking at this object on pictures going, is that her plane? And the reason that we think it might be is because there was a skeleton that was also discovered on this atoll that at the time was thought to be male. The bones have since been lost, but then somebody else looked at the measurements and said, no, actually, it would fit a woman of Amelia Earhart's size.

6:58So now we have this missing skeleton that leads us to believe that she might have crashed on this atoll and that this might be the remains of her plane. So this week, literally this week, a team have battled El Nino and weather and everything else to get to Nikumaroro to look at this sort of Y-shaped object that even though lots of it has blown away over the decades, there's still this one bit left. And they're like, is it the remains of her plane? And they found out yesterday, it isn't. It's a tree.

7:31Alice Fraser: It's some wood. It's a bit of tree. It's some trees that have been growing there. I mean, unless she was trying to fly that, and that's what explains the missingness of her. It would be hard to get far if she was on that. There's so much science that has been done to posit this as the location of the plane that it sort of feels like at some point they ought to have checked the thing and that it's taken them this long to do it. I mean, I assume weather conditions were very bad for 100 years, but also it makes me think what are just trees? Sometimes I think there's a person looming out of me in the darkness and that's just a tree.

8:15Alice Fraser: Once I thought that there was a gunshot and it was just a tree branch breaking. Jos, what are some things that you've thought were something that were just trees? I think I definitely thought that trees were a werewolf at one point. I remember I set myself a weird challenge where I was going to go and camp in the Brecon Beacons for a night just for a laugh and I thought I was being chased by a werewolf and it turned out it was just spooky shapes in the trees. I feel really, the big disappointing thing about this story for me is I think it's been a really bad couple of weeks for just like putting the kibosh on unsolved mysteries.

8:48Because I don't know if you saw last week that they thought they'd found the wreck of the Mary Celeste and then it turned out that that was two kids in a trench coat. So that's been really sad. And then also they thought they'd found out who the Zodiac Killer was, but then it turned out that was just sort of moonlight that was refracting through swamp gas. so it's just been it's been a real downer for thinking that we finally got somewhere

9:08Alice Fraser: what a shame sometimes I'm reading what I think is going to be a life-changing piece of literature and as I turn the pages I realize that they're just bits of trees I once waved at somebody thinking that they had been waving at me and it was actually a tree behind them in the breeze and I was just an idiot going hey I was hoping it might be one of those tube guys that you get outside petrol stations because at least then there's a little bit more like oh well that's that's close yes it's meant to look like it's waving i didn't know that she turned off her um her like navigation thing i didn't realize she hadn't turned it off but she had this long 250 meter cable that was supposed to improve her navigation also if you look into it she'd actually been offered some additional navigation uh training but due to the the schedule that they wanted to keep to they politely turned it down which i think in hindsight was was foolish uh but she did leave this long cable behind because i think she didn't truly appreciate how much she probably needed it so we don't know whether she just misnavigated to the wrong island because of course now she's definitely not there it was a tree so now we still don't know why but she was supposed to go to this and this is what's crazy this uninhabited island to refuel that the American government spent loads of money like getting to in order to put a fueling station so that she could refuel there because otherwise it was just uninhabited in the middle of the Pacific and she never quite made it.

10:37Maybe she'd seen Star Wars and she'd seen that bit where Luke turns off his navigation system but he still gets the missile in the chute and blows up the Death Star. Maybe she was like I could do that and I know it hadn't come out yet but there's a lot of mysteries around Amelia Earhart anyway so maybe she somehow saw it. Didn't you have to have midichlorians and Florians in order for that to... Didn't he feel the force? Didn't he use the force? Yeah, maybe her count was too low.

11:03Alice Fraser: Speaking of Star Wars, that brings us to new star news, which is apparently that a fraction of white dwarfs are colourful. A fraction of the stars that have hitherto been called white dwarfs have actually been mapped to a colour spectrum and would be perceived by the human eye as various colours now, including now apparently for the first time including green uh hulk star as i'm and no one else is choosing to call it uh has entered our universe um joss norris can you tell us a little bit more about this color star news i can so first up i should flag that i i've i'm filling in sort of relatively last minute today so i haven't had as much time to get to grips with the full details of the stories as I normally would like to, but I am able to give my gut feelings on these.

11:54And with this one, I'm kind of angry about this one because my understanding of it is that we have always called white dwarf stars white dwarf stars because the way they appear on certain electromagnetic readouts is that it can only represent them through white or something like that because we've not been able to see them with our own eyes. So we're seeing the way they're represented through the instrumentation. And then very recently we've developed the technology to be able to see what they actually look like. And some of them, due to certain substances in their atmosphere, actually take on a slightly different color.

12:24Normally they range from red through white to blue as they sort of heat and cool. But now we're seeing that you can have green ones, purple ones, maybe turquoise, maybe cyan. I don't know if it goes through the entire kind of deluxe range of, you know, snowman's hat or whatever. I, you know, bleached mushroom. I have no idea whether they're going into that much detail. The thing I'm annoyed about is that they've led with this story about the green one. They said, wow, we can have green, white dwarf stars, which I guess they're going to call green dwarves. I'm a bit of a fantasy nerd and I feel like a green dwarf is a goblin.

12:59I don't think you get green dwarves. Like if you have a dwarf like thing and it's green, that's a goblin in my eyes. And I I'm a huge fan of a goblin. I think they're adorable. I think they're very funny. I think they're cheeky little dickheads. and I think they're not given enough respect in our popular culture, in our media, and I think the fact that we've discovered this goblin star, something that we could call a goblin star if we wanted, and we're calling it a green dwarf, I think is goblin erasure. And I'd like to be here flying the flag for better goblin representation in astrology. Or the other one.

13:35Which one is it? Astrology or?

13:37Alice Fraser: Astronomy. I think it's the one which is real. You've got your options. Yeah. There's already pretty good goblin representation in astrology, I think. Oh, absolutely. The goblins in your house of Venus is kicking shit over. Look, I think it's fantastic. I think it's fascinating because one of the features of these stars is, of course, the previous colour range ranged from the colours that we would understand as sort of the colours of the temperature of fire going through from this sort of reddish, coal-y kind of dark to very bright white and blue spectrum shades. but apparently these additional shades are now provided by things like pollution in and around the star.

14:17Alice Fraser: And if the star happens to be sitting in, as with this green star, a bank of sodium. So it is a salty green star, which to me reads maybe water goblin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Love those guys. Yeah. Ria, what about you? You've got a lot of rainbow colours in your hair. How do you feel about the addition of this star? I, you know, I feel really good about the addition of this star. You know, as as a as, you know, someone who feels probably more akin to stars of color than I felt to white dwarfs. I feel like this is this is a great step forward. I'm open to I'm open to the goblin perspective. I'm open to to the renaming of it.

14:59I don't really mind. I don't I wonder how it feels about socks. I'm wondering if it you know, does it like does it does it like the odd sock? Does it does it like housework? I mean, I'm excited. I'm excited for what this means. That's elves. You're doing house elves. This is goblin erasure.

15:19Alice Fraser: No, I mean, the shoemaker, the elves are the ones who have the fraught relationship with, you know, the elves and the shoemaker, they're the ones who have the fraught relationship with domestic labour. Basically, the whole thing is that they'll help you until you say thank you and then they f*** off, which to me is like deeply troubling in our ideas about what is owed to the fairy kingdom. Are goblins not elves that have gone a bit naughty? I think, yeah, you might be right. I think an orc is an elf that's gone naughty, isn't it? It depends on your cosmology. Which universe are we in here? Some universes, they're just dark elves.

15:58Alice Fraser: You know, that's a thing. So wait, what's Elphaba in Wicked? Is she a goblin? She's green. She's just a witch. She's a green witch. I think her mother either banged a potion or maybe fucked a man and he turned out to be a tree, actually. He was just a tree all along. That makes the most sense, actually. A very salty tree. Easily done, as we've learned. I like this one. I think it's exciting that, you know, because we used to look up and all the stars were white and the sky was black, And I feel the same excitement about this as people probably did when the first color television came along. And they went, oh, my goodness, Lucille Ball's a redhead.

16:46I thought that, I mean, that blew my mind when I first found out. I was like, no, because I thought she was blonde. She looked blonde and black and white, but she's a redhead. And I was very, very excited by that. So I'm very excited by Green Dwarfs.

16:57Alice Fraser: Marco Marx, too, also a redhead. he's an Irish caricature in the way that Tico Marx is an Italian caricature Harpo's a redhead yes apparently that's mad there is some audio of Harpo Harpo at like a dinner a formal dinner and he's the guest speaker and he says unaccustomed as I am to public speaking and then it's just laughter for the rest of the audio track it's funny because he's a mime but apparently the reason he's a mime was because his Irish accent was dog shit oh my gosh i'm seeing them all in a completely different light now wait so wait what chico was italian what was groucho new york jewish jewish new york okay they all were yes and then the and then what was the name of the good looking one zeppo zeppo was just white yeah you'll be telling me groucho's mustache wasn't real next this is crazy

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18:35You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S. offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

19:18Alice Fraser: and that brings us to your ad section your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy and this episode of the podcast is brought to you by cell tracker you've heard of tracking your ancestry your ethnicity your racial heritage but why stop there we know for a fact that all the atoms in the universe are coming from somewhere else they're being moved between objects over time were the atoms in your body ever in a star a dinosaur butthole the titanic find out for sure with Cell Tracker. A measured life is an optimized life with Cell Tracker. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Jim's Gym and Quantum Gymnasium, the first of its kind quantum gymnasium that posits an infinite multiverse in which at least one of you is always working out.

20:00Alice Fraser: Using our deeply experimental vibe-coded flux capacitor, we will transport the benefits of exercise across dimensions and directly into your body. Terms and conditions apply. Side effects apply. Schrodinger's cat both applies and does not apply. Jim's gym and gymnasium does not accept liability for health effects, sudden Vin Diesel syndrome, or infusions of dread knowledge. Some clients may experience dizziness, visions, or irreversibly becoming a dinosaur. And that's your ad section for today. And that brings us to enzyme news now. Apparently there is a plastic-eating Pac-Man enzyme in the mix.

20:43Alice Fraser: The scientists have discovered this enzyme that helps bacteria devour certain types of plastic. Jaws, Norris, you've drunk from a plastic bottle before and then eaten it. Can you tell us this story? I do regret that, but I do think you should try everything once. I think, you know, they talk about recycling, and I thought maybe this is a great new way to do it. But don't try it. Really can't recommend it. Yes, so they found this enzyme that eats plastic. my big takeaway from this story is the fact that they've called it the pac-man enzyme i'm afraid i got so caught up with that and excited about that that i didn't really take in much of uh what it is or how they found it or what it does but what i really i love it when there's a science story like this that they they try to make palatable to people that don't necessarily follow science that closely or or understand all the intricacies of it so they choose a kind of a pop culture reference to make everyone kind of get it and i really love that they went with pac-man for this presumably mainly because it eats things and i'd like to know how many different pop culture references they went through before they were like pac-man people will understand pac-man i'd like to know if they tried like the mr greedy enzyme or the mr creosote enzyme if they wanted to go for a more kind of like comedy history sort of thing um and i also want to know whether there was a deciding factor in them choosing pac-man like whether if it eats a piece of plastic that's shaped like a cherry then suddenly it can eat ghosts and then it sort of changes the way it behaves for a little bit but then it resets so you don't want to get caught by the plastic ghost or whatever because if that's the case then completely fair enough to go with pac-man you couldn't go with anything else but i would like to know how many things they workshop before they went i think this is the one people will click on the most i mean it does it does redcon uh pac-man history to some degree if we think of all of those i sort of thought those cherries represented cherries but if we think they represent plastic cherries i think it changes our idea of who and what pac-man is and and yeah how much of it is a kind of a simulation of a simulation or a representation of of a representation of a representation is there in pac-man really i mean it's existential i i think we need to do like a waiting for ghost oh that is like a pac-man waiting for god oh remake also who died the audience because you know it's very easy for the ghost to just be like oh they're bad you have to avoid them but like they're ghosts they died they're so they have unfinished business they have a purpose for being there that we gloss over presumably also you know ghosts uh stick around because they have an unfinished business and all of their unfinished business seems to be with pac-man so it's chasing pac-man yeah pac-man is a serial killer like we don't know killed all these people could they be the kind of ghost that was in that poltergeist movie that was called a poltergeist but was actually a ghost did anyone notice that poltergeist didn't have a poltergeist in it it had a creepy or was that a goblin but it wasn't a goblin goblin erasure but some ghosts were never alive because some ghosts come from other dimensions it's like ghost energy or something isn't it and sometimes if at the end of that poltergeist movie there's a you sit through it and then there's a post-credit scene and pac-man turns up and goes i want to talk to you about an arcade game i'm gonna create as an autistic i'd be really irritated if i sat all the way through poltergeist and pac-man didn't show up till the end and was like sorry i was eating cherries in the back i'd be like you could have could have done with you sooner i thought that with the new mario movie this year i sat through the entire post credits because i thought wario and waluigi were going to show up and instead it was like daisy or something livid absolutely livid well this is i think this is one of those examples where science journalism has done done us slightly dirty by giving a more hopeful um headline this is quite hopeful news uh that there is this enzyme that can break down plastics but the only plastics that it can actually break down are already biodegradable plastics plastics that have uh yeah that have made from biodegradable materials that contain the kinds of chemical bonds that these microbes can break apart but these microbes are breaking them apart more rapidly than scientists had imagined that they might basically uh so it is um i always feel like i get sort of a rug pull with science writing headlines where they promise something really hopeful and then it turns out to be like, oh, it's still good, but, you know, you had to, like, you had to, it's very first date, sell, pitch kind of vibes.

25:01Alice Fraser: You're not an architect. Well, I've lived in a house. There is some hope here because, remember, we've only really been dumping plastics in humanity for, like, the past 50 to 70 years. Like, this is a fairly recent thing that we've been doing. We didn't have plastics in the 1800s. And the fact that we've already found this adaptation in nature that at least some of our plastic is able to be completely degraded in roughly about nine to 11 months. And that's the experimental stuff is quite exciting. Cellulose went in about 80 days, but we still can't break down some of that. Any plastic that comes from oil and petroleum, it can't do it, but it can do this.

25:37So maybe evolution is going to see, you know, maybe we will get to a point where Pac-Man and it's called Pac-Man. It has a really big mouth, like the enzyme itself it's a really big yeah it has a big mouth and that's and then you put the plastic in there and it like you know i'm you know so right that's that's helpful also weirdly can break down penicillin just in the lab at the moment we think but it it might be another clue to antibiotic resistance where we're like oh hang on so maybe penicillin are all the little dots in pac-man um and pac-man was like the simpsons of the 80s and it was just predicting everything that was going to happen and we were blind to it and do you say it is it is an adaptation then it's not like a new enzyme that they hadn't discovered before it's like something has evolved to be able to do this because that's that's exciting if so well i mean it's i mean because it comes out of a you know it comes out of these microbes it's coming out of microbes so so i mean fundamentally we couldn't study this before we had plastic now we have plastic yes we can study it

26:42Alice Fraser: got it yeah this is i mean i find that a very hopeful thing because maybe you are a plastic eating enzyme that just hasn't that plastic for you to eat just hasn't been invented yet maybe we all maybe have an optimized function and the thing for which we are optimized just hasn't come into our sphere yet i think that's a very hopeful and in other news an enzyme found in the brain this is enzyme news uh an enzyme found in the brain could help to preserve cognitive resilience with advancing age. They've done some mice studies, but also human studies. Ria Lina, how does your brain fog feel about this?

27:20Well, I tell you what, I'm quite excited by this, because it's all to do with lipid breakdown, which is fat buildup in the brain. So they found that mice that had this enzyme sort of switched on or produced in higher quantities, had better cognition in their old age. They had less inflammation in the brain, less neuron degradation, which is all great things. Of course, they knocked it out in some mice and went, how do these mice age over time? They found, of course, that they did not do as well. And then we went and looked in humans, analyzing, they say, two large data sets. I think that they covered about 13 brains.

28:01To me, that's not a large data set, but they analyzed two data sets in humans and they found similar sort of activity. And this enzyme is very sexily named PLA2G2F or Platygochtofa, I think.

28:19Alice Fraser: The next installment in the Fast and the Furious franchise. Number 72 was highest. So when they looked at brain donors, so they used gene activity data from deceased donors who'd had cognitive tests before death. And they found that this enzyme was highest in resilient people whose thinking stayed intact despite having brain deposits of amyloid beta, which is the protein that forms plaques in Alzheimer's disease. And it was lower in people with no impairment, but no amyloid and in people with severe Alzheimer's. So it has something to do with breaking down lipids or clearing the brain of lipid droplets, which are tiny fat filled bubbles inside cells.

29:03So this is an exciting step in research towards helping us with various forms of dementia, which is exciting. And the theory behind it is something called cognitive reserve, which is the idea that some brains have compensatory mechanisms that let them tolerate damage like amyloid plaques without showing symptoms. And the team argues that this is one of the first concrete molecular examples of such a mechanism so that some people are designed to resist these lipid droplet buildups or they have a way of clearing these droplets better than others. I mean, the windscreen wipers of the mind, as again, they're calling it the Pac-Man enzyme.

29:50Alice Fraser: That brings us, of course, to our reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars. Jos Norris, what have you brought for us this week? I would like to review Finding a Newt, please. Yes, I allow it. We're currently in Switzerland, in Alice. We're on Alice's Rites Retreat. I've never been to Switzerland, so I don't know what kind of wildlife to expect. I was mainly expecting goats, cows, large mammals, that kind of thing. didn't even consider reptiles and amphibians it wasn't on my radar i didn't come here thinking that's going to happen but on the steps down to the the little uh shallot where i'm staying yesterday little kind of nutty salamander thing um it's going to be a rave review from me guys this uh oh yeah yeah you might be able to see just if you want to see it's just there that's new that's new location if you're watching this on youtube which you can somewhere around there go and see if it's still there find it um i'm gonna rave about it i'm gonna give it five stars just because of the the breadth of emotion that gets involved there's uh there's a sort of initial excitement of like what is this um it's very cute so there's a sort of like you know it feeds you your heartstrings a little bit because it was so cold it was doing that thing that reptiles do where it just freezes for a bit and like charges up so then i thought it was dead and that that was quite sad i then prodded it this is the bit i feel bad about i prodded it to be like is this dead is this thing okay i thought maybe if i nudged it it might get out of the way because i didn't want it to get trodden on didn't move uh so i thought oh it's probably just like either it is dead or it's recharging and then a lot of guilt a lot of guilt involved because i remembered sometimes if you touch things then they can never go back right they can never go back to their families or something like if you touch if you touch something from nature then it can't live isn't that a thing is it in your hood now have you adopted this newt might have imprinted on me and if it has then i haven't seen it since so i'm doing a terrible job of parenting it because it might well have been like that's my dad and now i've just been off you know recording podcasts and you know just generally setting a bad example to the thing um so guilt a lot of guilt involved there uh then also i actually did a little bit of confusion and self-doubt because i then wasn't sure if it was a new i was like is that a new i'm happy to send a picture to to the producers so they can put it in the show notes if anyone wants to chip in i started wondering if it's a salamander or some kind of lizard because i thought newts were more frondy i thought they have more kind of like fin like appendages which this didn't have but i'm told it might be an eft which is a young newt so then you know i'm learning stuff as well uh so for the sheer kind of emotional roller coaster i've gone on from just seeing this one little guy charging up oh also it reminded me of that bit in Zootopia where the snake charges up by giving Judy Hopps a hug and then they can stop the bad guy and then I just start crying but that's a weird look so then embarrassment you know the other people on the writers retreat going why is he crying on the steps so I've been through a lot and I've got to give it five out of five no other single event has prompted so many different emotional responses in me in such a short time so five out of five for seeing a new from me that is delightful and exciting and I've had two similar roller coasters while in Switzerland uh one was um walking on the mountainside with my two small children and seeing a uh slow worm a legless lizard uh that at first glance i was like is it a snake my australian immediate australian reaction was these are here it's my children i need to kick this snake off the mountain uh but before i could i noticed that it was not it didn't look like a snake and was in fact just a lizard that had decided not to have legs um and so then we all just stared at it for a little while uh My children asked if they could bring it home and I said no.

33:41Alice Fraser: And then I had to deal with their extremely upset and outraged reactions to that. Yes. The other thing is vaguely science related, so I'm going to tell it anyway, which is that I was on my way out for a walk and I said to my four-year-old daughter, please put on your puffer jacket. And she said, no, I don't want to put on my puffer jacket. And I said, why not? And she said, it'll make me fat. And I had this like, like oh no my foyer and I said oh what what makes you say such a thing why would you I mean what do you what do you think that's a bad thing and she's like yeah I was like why do you think that's a bad thing and she said because if you get too round you explode and I said sorry what and she said oh no that's puffer fish and I went oh okay right so that was a five stars roller coaster of emotion deeply upsetting followed by hilarious.

34:40Can I just be the voice of the listener to say I'm slightly disturbed and naively so, I'm sure, at the amphibian and reptilian life that you're finding at the top of a Swiss mountain. To me, it screams climate change has gone too far because I wouldn't put either of them. Well, amphibians maybe, although a recharging newt on a rock, I'm like, yes, you shouldn't touch it, but can you breathe on it if you know that you're giving it warmth? Do you know what I mean? Could you just... Would that kill?

35:10Alice Fraser: Sorry to clarify, my daughter is not a puffer fish. I did see, though, this weekend, a puffer fish in a fish tank at the entrance of a hotel that was designed like a ship. And I went, I think you don't quite understand where the water's supposed to go, because the entire hotel was a ship, but then in the middle of the lobby was a fish tank. And I went, they wouldn't do this on the ship. Yeah, that's the problem. it would be outside at best it would be outside the lobby but not inside but it had a puffer fish never never expanded or put on its jacket the entire time I was there well I mean I then I was telling this story to one of the writers and I was like they were like why would your daughter think that puffer fish explode that's not a thing that they do and I was like oh no we live in Kaloundra where they wash up on the beach all puffed up and boys poke them with sticks and that's that was the dread process that was going to happen in her mind if she put on a puffer jacket So I had to explain that those are two different etymologies.

36:05Alice Fraser: Ria, what have you brought in to review for us out of five stars this week? I would like to review, even though I don't have one, but I want one. And so I feel like if I give it a good review, it'll manifest in my life. I would like more doors in my house to be bookcases, both the slidey sideways ones, but also the open and reveal a secret room ones. I have a lot of books, as you can see. love books, love a bookcase, love an intelligent use of storage. And I've actually just been spending way more time than one would think on YouTube browsing shorts of people who have made a variety of bookshelf doors, whether that be you pull a secret book and it opens it, opens the door, whether you open a side of the paneling in order to open the door, whether it leads to a secret cupboard, whether it leads straight through to another room, all of the above.

36:59I have at least two places in my house, but I can think of more where I feel like the door needs to be a bookcase. And I don't know how to even begin. Like, I don't know where to start on my journey, but I want to give them five out of five because I have yet to see a bookcase door that I wouldn't give, in fact, 10 out of 10. Like you name me one place. I can't think of a single place where there is a bookcase door that you wouldn't go. Yes.

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38:49Alice Fraser: what if it's a swinging bookcase door and someone slams the door in the argument and all the books fall out no a well-made bookcase door nothing false there's there's no slamming do you know heavy they are they are majestic these are you don't you can't slam a bookcase door any more than you can you can then i don't know slap an elephant's ass to get it to canter i i can't I just they're too majestic for that you know and also there's always the option of that tiny little lip on the front of a bookcase which I also think isn't a bad idea where you can put the book in but it still just gives it a nice little little edge for the knickknacks I wanted to try and have one I wanted to try and have one as well and started I thought I'd try and build up small and start start in an easy more manageable way so I turned all my windows in my flat into their bookcases and it's rubbish can't see anything out of them now and no light gets in so I can't recommend that don't do that straight to the door if you're going to do it that brings us sadly to the final story of this week's episode of the gargle and that is the news uh that apparently elephant graveyards are extremely interesting um in terms of soil chemistry.

40:06Alice Fraser: This sort of deriving from the idea that a whale fall, when a whale dies, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and it can provide a nutrient dense base that provides nutrition for an ecosystem for up to 100 years. Some scientists started looking into soil chemistry and microbial communities around dead elephants. Jos Norris, you never forget. Can you tell us a little bit more about this story? I think this is a pretty cool story. But for me, I spotted a story within the story that I've become even more excited about. And this might be because I've been reading a lot of murder mysteries and whodunits recently to help me with the thing I'm writing.

40:41So maybe I'm just looking for these clues more. But the story basically is that some scientists, 10 years ago, they were at the death site of an elephant and they kind of surveyed and they saw what happened and what other animals it attracted and what sort of biodiversity that led to and what it did to the soil as it as the as it decomposed and then 10 years later they went back to have a look at it again and see how much that had kind of fed into the the local area and what these sort of things do on a on a longer term scale for me i don't know if the listener has spotted the same thing i did but i'm i'm at the moment looking for clues and i thought who goes back to the scene of a crime the killer so these scientists i think killed the elephant that's what that's what's being buried in this story is that these scientists were responsible for it, which presumably now means they're haunted by these elephants' ghosts.

41:32We're back to the Pac-Man thing. So these scientists are trying to kind of resolve it.

41:35Alice Fraser: No, Joss Norris, it's a red herring. It's the microbes that are the killer all along. And I think among the enzymes you'll find the Pac-Man enzyme. I won't deny I thought it was a weird thing to wonder because whale fall was found by accident in 1987. like nobody went out and went i wonder what happens when a whale dies they came across a whale that had died so i'm pretty sure they didn't kill it uh and that's where they discovered that when a whale falls to the bottom of the ocean it creates this wonderfully diverse ecosystem because you know it tracks all sorts of of of wildlife and at different stages of decomposition It feeds and it creates this new habitat for a number of years post fall of whale.

42:27And so they went, oh, that's incredible. And so somebody looked at a dead elephant and went, huh, I wonder if it does the same thing. But it doesn't. It does the opposite. And that's what's crazy is that when an elephant dies, it actually kills the biodiversity in the area that it falls in. So it actually, there's so much nitrogen and ammonia that leaches into the surrounding soil that it pretty much kills everything that was there. But then after that produces this really exceptionally nutritious grass. And they said it turns, the comparison was it turns watery iceberg lettuce into a juicy romaine.

43:05And I, to my mind, I was like, I would have liked a rocket for all of that.

43:10Alice Fraser: If you're going to put an elephant's worth of death juice into it, you'd want to have it be rocket powered. A spinach, a kale, at least. If I'm going from iceberg to romaine, I'm like, that's, to me, that's still diet food. Do you know what I mean? I want something that I feel like I'm actually being a good person. I want something that justifies the chocolate cake afterwards. They're different species, right? Like iceberg lettuce to romaine. That's like you've literally turned it into, that's like a magic. You're going to say elephants and lettuces. Yeah, elephants and lettuces. I'm really on the ball today.

43:41It's a lettuce. But I mean, it's literally turning things into different things. That's cool. Well, it's just the grass that grows there just becomes way more nutritious because of how much nitrogen leaches into the soil over the course of the elephant decay. Do you reckon it could turn like a Kit Kat into a Twix? Because that's an upgrade, I think. I agree. But sometimes... Oh, you know the premium meal deal at Sainsbury's where it's like£3.85 for a meal deal, but if you pay£5.50, you can have a nicer sandwich. Can you turn up with a£3.85 meal deal and then stick it on an elephant's skull and then you'll get a premium meal deal?

44:14Dude, I think you just go to the rhinoceros graveyard and get the one from M &S. Yeah. Whoa. Same price. Same price.

44:21Alice Fraser: You've got to dream big, Joz. I think that's a lesson for all of us. Dream M &S meal deal big. That brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. I'm flipping through the ad section at the back of this scientific journal. Ria, have you got anything to plug? Yes, my book is available for pre-order now on Amazon, but also other places. I'm building a link tree, but wherever you buy your books, you should be able to pre-order it. So please do. It's called How to Erase a Woman. And it's all about the mechanisms by which society and patriarchy has erased women and women's work for the benefit of men.

45:02But through the case, through a number of case studies.

45:04Alice Fraser: I love a case study. Jos Norris, thank you so much for stepping in on very short notice with the Gargle team. It's been a pleasure also working with you this week at the Writers' Retreat. What have you got to plug? A couple of things to plug at the moment. We're releasing on YouTube on the 5th of November an independent sitcom pilot that I made with a bunch of comedians and filmmaker collaborators. We've sat on it for a while and we've decided it's time to release it. So we're putting that out and we're making a sort of making-of series which is going out on YouTube over the next couple of weeks so you can watch that.

45:34We're also doing another egg box show on the 10th of November where we show a program of short films and live readings of new scripts. And I'm doing a little run of Christmas shows of my new show, Jos Norris is Hugh Jackman is the Phantom of the Opera at the Pleasants from the 17th to the 19th of December. So all of that and more is on my website and Substack and places like that.

45:55Alice Fraser: You can find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. You can sign up there for free or for money. I am doing, I basically don't trust the algorithms anymore, So that's my one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts, blogs, short story writing, poems, my weekly writers meetings, which you can join. And I'm going to be running some masterclasses in November. If you would like just a one-off shot of learning stuff sometime in November, there will also be the Christmas reboot between Christmas and my birthday, which is the 7th of January. I run a reboot. So if you are an artist who would like to just juice yourself back into a good practice for the coming year, that will be all coming up out there, patreon.com slash alicefraser.

46:38Alice Fraser: This is a Bugle podcast, an alicefraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next time.