Crumbs of Science

Join us this week as we pull back the loincloth on this classic tale of swindling and subservience. Learn why our big human brains make us susceptible to delusion, why children always say the darndest things, and how to make sustainable clothes! In the studio this week: psychology researcher Holly Blunden and fabrics enthusiast Stephanie Terwindt.Recorded by Sarah-Jayne Robinson and Tim Newport at CPAS Podcast Studio.Edited and transcribed by Tim Newport.Intro music sampled from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/--TranscriptSJ: Many years ago, there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed.[Intro Music]S: Hi , everyone . My name's SJT: And my name is Tee.SJ: And we're Crumbs of science. And this week, if you couldn't tell, we're talking about the Hans Christian Andersen tale the Emperor's New Clothes. This is one that you've probably heard about before in school and it's really quite a simple tale, very easy to tell the morals in this one.T: There's no Disney version of the Emperor's New Clothes, although there is the Emperor's New Groove, which has similar morals?S: You've got an emperor who is not that nice .T: Yeah , quite vain . And he learns to -- I don't know if this one learns anything.S: He does! He's learned something at the end. The tale goes that the Emperor didn't care anything about caring for the kingdom or making sure that he was being a good ruler. The only thing he cared about was making sure that he had a good looking outfit on. They had a lovely saying, which was "The king's in council, the Emperor's in his dressing room.” He lived in a place where everything was good, so it's all right that he was a bit of a sucky ruler because life was going okay for them. One day there came to town two swindlers who said that they were weavers, and that they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. And there was something very special about these clothes: Not only were their colours and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or who was unusually stupid.T: “Those will be just the clothes for me,” thought the Emperor. “If I wore them, will be able to discover which men in my empire are unfit for their posts! And I could tell the wise man from the fools! Yes, I must certainly get some of the stuff woven for me right away.” So he forks over a large sum of money to start work immediately.S: And the swindlers, they've got him, hooked him in. They set up their looms, which is what they used to use in olden times to weave and they put nothing on there. They demanded all the exciting materials to make this cloth, so fine silk and gems, gold. But they put all that into their bags and still just set up on this empty loom. Clickity clack going ahead, weaving nothing, which really is a great deception, it seems.T: And so the emperor thought I'd like to know how those weavers are getting on with their cloth, but felt slightly uncomfortable because he remembered that those who were unfit for their position, would not be able to see the fabric. Now it couldn't be that he doubted himself. Yet he thought he'd rather send someone else to see how things were going. The whole town knew about the cloth's particular power now, and they're all impatient to find out how stupid their neighbours were.S: So the first person that the emperor decides to send is his minister because he thinks he's very smart, fit for his job. Minister turns up, can't see anything. But the swindlers, because seems like they were pretty good actors, described the cloth to him, saying it about the excellent pattern and the beautiful colours. However, this poor old minister still couldn't see anything, but he didn't want anyone to know that he was a fool, so he just pretended that he could see it. So he said, it's beautiful, it's enchanting, such a pattern, what colours! I'll be sure to tell the emperor how delighted I am with it.” The minister went back to the emperor and pretended that he saw the fabric, and described to him how amazing and wonderful it truly was.T: The swindlers, of course, merely asked for more money, more silk, more gold threads so they could make more of the clothes. But all of it went straight into their pockets--never a thread went onto the looms, though they worked their “weaving” (in scare quotes) as hard as ever. The emperor then thought I'll send another trustworthy official to see how it's going. That official? The same thing happened as to the minister: He looked and he looked, but as was nothing on the looms, he couldn't see anything. The swindlers went “Isn't it a beautiful piece of goods?” and they displayed and described their imaginary pattern, and this other official thought, “I'm not stupid, so it must be that I’m unworthy. Hmm, I mustn't let anyone know.” So he praised the material he didn't see, he said he was delighted, and to the emperor, he said: “It held me spellbound.”S: So finally the emperor decides that he's got to go see this cloth. So he goes along with a band of people--two of them the ministers who had already gone to see the fabric--and he couldn't see anything. He didn't want anyone to realise that he was unintelligent and unfit to be emperor, so he pretended that he could see it as well and said “Oh, it's very pretty. It has my highest approval.” The whole team he brought with him stared. But not wanting the emperor to think that they were foolish, they continued to compliment the clothes and say how wonderful they were. The emperor even gave the swindlers a cross to wear in their buttonhole and the title of “Sir Weaver.”T: All the Emperor's advisers advised him “You need to wear these amazing clothes in your procession that you were going to do tomorrow.” And so before the procession, the swindlers stayed up all night and burned more than six candles to show just how busy they were finishing the Emperor's New Clothes. They pretended to take the cloth off the loom. There had cuts in the air with huge scissors. And at last, they said, “Now the Emperor's New Clothes are ready for him.” Then the emperor himself came with his noblest nobleman and the swindlers raised up their arms is if they were holding something, saying “here are the trousers, here is the coat, here's the mantle. All of them are as light as a spider web, and one might always think that he had nothing on, but that's what makes them so fine.” “Exactly,” all the noblemen agreed, though they could see nothing, because there was nothing to see.S: So everyone complimented him. He assumed that he was ready, assumed that he looked fantastic, went outside and everyone who was to carry his long train behind him-- Because, of course, that was the height of fashion at the time--they reached down to the floor and pretended to pick it up. And so the emperor went off in his procession under his splendid canopy, and all of his subjects were in the streets and saying to each other, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor's New Clothes? “Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train?” Although no one could see anything, no one would admit this because they didn't want to be seen as unfit for their positions or a fool.T: But then the tiny voice of a child was heard through the clamour in the crowd, saying “But he hasn't got anything on.” “He hasn't got anything on?” “A child, says he hasn't got anything on!” “But he hasn't got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last, and the emperor shivered because he suspected they were right. But he thought “this procession has got to go on. So walked more proudly than ever, as all his nobleman held the train that wasn't there at all.S: A very simple tale of morals. I think of honesty, vanity, don't trust swindlers. So this is a Hans Christian Andersen tale, as we said it was first published on the seventh of April in 1837 was part of his third and final instalment of his Andersen's Fairy Tales Told for Children. The original version of this story was published in 1335 in the book “Libro de los ejemplos”, which is book of the examples by Count Lucanor or Juan Manuel, who was the Prince of Villena and this version of the story was “the king and the three impostors”, and it's very similar in terms of the king is presented with a cloth, but the people who can't see the cloth in that version are actually people who are off illegitimate birth so everyone says that they can see it, especially the king, because he doesn't want to think that he's a bastard and therefore would not be fit for his position. And at the time being of illegitimate birth was considered quite a controversy, So everyone pretends that they can see it until finally, it's not actually a child who steps forward, but it is a black person who at the time was considered to not have anything to lose by admitting that they couldn't see anything. And then suddenly the whole the same thing happens: The whole crowd swells, and everyone realises that the king is actually wearing no clothes. And Anderson didn't see this the original Spanish version, but he did see a German translation of it, which I had to Google. Translate this, because I do not speak any German, but the translation was “That's the Way of the World. When Andersen wrote it, he originally gave it a different ending: He originally had that the emperor's subjects just admired the clothes, and everyone in the town pretended to lie and continued on with it, and the manuscript was actually already at the printers when Andersen went up and said that he wanted to change the ending Historians think that there's a couple of reasons why he might have wanted to change it such as when Andersen himself met the King when he was a young child and he met King Frederick the sixth, and Andersen supposedly said afterwards “Oh he's nothing more than a human being.” There's also the idea that Andersen presented himself to the Danish bourgeoisie as a naive and precocious child, and the Emperor's New Clothes was his expose of the hypocrisy and snobbery that he found within the Danish bourgeoisie. There was also a lovely anecdote that said that after he had written this tale, the king then presented him with some gifts of rubies and diamonds. Because in the Emperor's New Clothes and another of Andersen's tales, the Swineherd, he actually voices a satirical disrespect for the court. So the king was trying to pay him off so that he stopped writing tales of political satire and instead wrote lovely storeys like The Ugly Duckling, which is actually one that he made up entirely by himself and didn't come from previous stories.T: What happens in the Emperor's New Clothes is basically an almost textbook case of mass hysteria. In this case, it's mainly motivated by trying to please the royals. Everyone's trying, to, you know, not get fired, which happens in workplaces a lot. But historically, there have been many cases off large groups of people, all behaving in a strange manner all at the same time. We've actually spoken about this on the podcast before we spoke about the dancing plagues of 1518 in StrasbourgS: in relation to , the pied piper of Hamlin .T: The main mechanism through which they work is still largely unknown. What happens is basically people transmit illusions of threats or rumours, and that influences the behaviour and especially in the small, tight-knit communities. This can happen quite fast. There's an example of this recording 1844 medical textbook, speaking about something that happened in sometime in the 1400s, where a nun in a French convent began meowing and all the other nuns also began meowing, eventually, all the other nuns began meowing together at the same time every day, and that this meowing and didn't stop until the police threatened to whip the nuns for disturbing the community. Other examples include one of most famous ones, The Salem Witch trials, which often gets carted out as the dangers of false accusation, dangers of isolationism and the dangers of mass hysteria. This resulted in the execution of 20 citizens accused of practising witchcraft. Going further forward in 1938 we had the Halifax slasher in the town of Halifax in England, two women who claim to be attacked by a mysterious man with a mallet and bright buckles on his shoes. And then further reports of a man wielding a knife and a razor came in, and the situation became so serious that Scotland Yard was called in to assist the Halifax police to catch this Halifax Slasher. But then one of the victims admitted that he'd actually inflicted the damage upon himself just for attention. Soon after that admission, other people came through, and eventually, they determined that none of the attacks has been real. But everyone in the town had been whipped into a furore because of this fear of this attacker.S: So we've been talking about the psychology of mass delusions, which are pretty relevant to the Emporer's New Clothes, and we decided to get on an expert. So we asked our friend Holly, who has an Honours in psychology and then has spent the last five years working in population health research. So thank you so much for coming on our show, Holly.Holly: Thank you for having me, it's lovely to be here.S: So we have a couple of questions for you in relation to the Emperor's New Clothes. Holly, how does mass delusion work?H: Such a cop-out way to start an answer, but that is a really good question. And I think that’s the-- sort of like group psychology and anything to do with this, sort of, thinking of lots of different individual people is something that's really interesting. I think these stories , like the Emperor's New Clothes, remind us of some of the really dark aspects of humanity and what it means to be ah, part of a species that's this intelligent but also this, sort of, social and so dependent on the impacts and the outcomes of these sort of social hierarchies and the way that we interact with one another. It's hard not to see parallels with those real-life examples when you talk about things like you know, the Heaven's Gate cult and things like that, where there are these otherwise sort of educated, functional members of society committed a mass suicide, in order to like ‘graduate’ --quote unquote-- from their human form and transcend their consciousness as an alien spaceship was passing by the Earth .S: So I haven't heard of the Heaven's Gate cult before. How many people was that they were part of that mass suicide?H: Well, it was actually 39 people who all at this one moment in time, it's very much that kind of Jonestown punch sort of approach, where there was this ‘Hale-Bop’ comet, I think it was called, that was like meant to be passing overhead at this specific time. And the members of this cult believed that they needed to sort of transcend their physical forms at the time that this comet was passing over the Earth in order to transcend, I suppose, and become one with this, like, greater existence. And like it's really interesting as well because as we talk about delusions, I think it's important to kind of differentiate between like like mass delusions and mass hysteria. And like, there's something else, that they called like mass psychogenic illness. So there have been these cases where otherwise healthy people have come down with these sort of like physical ailments of different kinds, so whether it's like twitching or fainting or weird physical behaviours, or like different types of pain and things like that, that could just spread through a community with no attributable physical cause. But a delusion is a bit different, it's more an idiosyncratic belief or impression that you maintain, despite contradicting evidence. This is a delusion because --and this is what made me think that we needed to sort of differentiate-- some of the members of this court were actually returning their telescopes, and things like that, because they bought telescopes to see this comet coming and its trajectory, couldn't find it, and so they've then returned their telescopes because they've rationalised this as the telescopes need to be faulty, because the comet is there. So it's the maintenance of that belief despite contradiction, sort of, evidence or reality.T: Are there any factors that lead to the sort of mass delusion? Like any common factors?H: I think this is one of the reasons that these sort of things are so interesting to people because there's a lot of debate about, like, what the possible reasons for this actually are, because obviously whether it's the psychogenic illness or the mass delusion, like, just the logistics of how this actually happens is really complex. Because you can sort of you can understand how one person's thinking can become, like, disordered or deluded, based on their experiences, or like mental illness… Brains are complicated, and if different things go wrong, like, we can see how that can manifest in lots of different ways. What's really hard to explain about these sort of mass delusions is how does how does a whole group of people go down this same idiosyncratic path of thinking? And how do they all sort of not respond to the evidence and things like that? So there's --I don't know if you've heard of it-- something called Folie à deux, which is like ‘dual madness,’ and so it's this idea, and it's often between people who are in, like, romantic partnerships, or like these very close, sort of like one on one relationships, where they will have these sort of shared dual kind of delusions. And there's this really quite an active debate as to whether this is a real concept, whether it's actually possible for two people to be deluded in the same way, or whether there's like one person who's like fully in the delusion and another person who either, like, sort of you wants to believe, or is kind of enabling those beliefs--T: --acquiescing to those beliefs.H: Acquiescing is a very interesting word choice, and I think I think there is a really core question there, which is is a mass delusion something that can exist? Or does it have to be something that's got a bit more to do with that acquiescence and that natural tendency for people to sort of want to fit into a group and have that sort of sense of place and social cohesion?S: We wanted to ask you about the psychology of acquiescence because from the sound of it, a bit more into acquiescing rather than [delusions].H: It's hard to really tease it apart because obviously like, you know, 39 people isn’t everyone in the world sort of thing. So there are limitations to how kind of compelling this sort of acquiescence or delusion can be. So I think, like, you could put forward a solid argument. Humans are really social species, and our societies often tend to gravitate towards hierarchies. In evolutionary psychology, there's an argument that we actually feel social rejection in a similar way that we would feel physical pain. So because of that, we go to great lengths to avoid feeling rejected by social groups. It is important to acknowledge that evolutionary psychology, while it gives us some really compelling kind of ideas, doesn't lend itself to the kind of falsifiable hypotheses that we do really love in a lot of science. So that's difficult one. But we do have a lot of-- there is a lot of research on acquiescence and how humans will respond in these kinds of social situations. And one really famous example is the “Ash Line” studies from the 1950s-- really straightforward, really powerful kind of social psychology experiments. So they put people in this kind of like classroom environment and, you you'd be like one participant in this class full of other people. The experiment was that, other than the one participant in the room, everyone else in the classroom was in on the experiment. And so they'd hold up two lines that were like, really, really obviously very different lengths. And every single other person in the classroom would be like, oh, they're the same. And so what they found --and I'm sure you know where I'm going with this-- is that most people would actually acquiesce and would be like yep, no, they're the same length, even like knowing that it's wrong. Like there's nothing ambiguous about this situation's very much, I think, comparable to that sort of Emperor's New Clothes situation. It's just being directly confronted with, like, just wrongness. And one of the things as well is that people often tend to have a bit of that, kind of, like self-doubt. So we often look to other people in our social group for answers when we're not sure of the situation. So in something like this you might start off pretty sure. But when everyone else is like convinced that these lines of the same length (or so you think) there's a natural kind of tendency to assume that maybe we've got something wrong and to sort of check yourself. And like often people will go with the group answer, especially if there's someone else that they perceive as like an authority or an expert in that group, because they'll second guess themselves. But they'll trust the group, and it sort of again, like, leads back to that whole, sort of, humans are pretty much useless on our own. But we have very good once we're in a society and we're all sort of working together. But that does come with some pretty interesting drawbacks, which I think you know. What's really highlighted by this Emperor's New Clothes story is that sometimes it's so damaging, and the consequences are so high, of violating these norms or disrupting these hierarchies that exist in the societies that we exist in, that it's easier to either just like acquiesce and agree with what's being said, or potentially to convince yourself that you are wrong and they're seeing something that you know you're just missing, because clearly you're an idiot, and everyone else can see that the lines are the same, that the Emperor is wearing fantastic clothes, and you must be the one who's like screwed something up. Unless you want to end up off on your own.S: so there is one person who in our story doesn't really fall into this power of acquiescing. And that is the child, who instead, even though everyone around him is saying that the Emperor's wearing his delightful suit, says no, he doesn't actually have anything on. So we thought that we would ask you about children and how they don't particularly fit into that power of acquiescing...H: Well, right off the bat, I think there's a definite truthiness to that, isn't it? I'm sure we've all been asked a question or heard a child ask a question every now and then, where we'll be like, hoo, you did not think about the effect it would have on that person to ask that question, did you? Well, first of all, it is pretty demonstrable that it takes a little while to become an adult. There's a lot of processes and brain development and things we need to learn, and neural pathways that need to be consolidated as a function of that learning.S: It takes until you're 25 before your brain is fully developed.H: Absolutely right. And so the last part of your brain to develop, because it sort of happens in stages, are your cortical areas, which are the outside bits that do all the human stuff. These are the sort of structures that have evolved later in development, but they also develop later in your life, so it tends to start from the back and move forward. So things like motor function and things like that will be refined a lot more quickly than some of these more complex social processes. So you see, you know, like a 12 year old or something, and physically in a lot of ways, like they could do most of the stuff that adults could do, especially if they practise a specific skill set and things like that. But emotionally, cognitively, there's still a lot more development to happen. So a lot of things obviously happen during puberty, a lot of emotional kind of attachment and regulation and reward systems and things like that. But this processing of, like, the sort of longer term, higher-order, more abstract connections and consequences of your actions is one of the last things to develop. So that's one of the ones that actually comes in right around that 25 mark, so kids don't have that same kind of like a reason to take pause and sort of consider, like, what are all the things that could happen. And, like biologically and experientially, I don't know about you, but I feel like a lot of people have a real crash course in social politics and hierarchies, and the potential unintended consequences of small things that people say when they go through high school. And by the time you come out of that, you sort of, you know, you're not prepared for a lot of situations that you’ll have at work, but you kind of get this mental map of like, these are the potential consequences that these actions can have.S: If someone turns up naked, you can't tell them that they're naked!H: It's not what people do! It's just it's not the done thing.S: Thank you so much for coming on and having a chat to us, Holly, We really appreciate it.H: Thank you for letting me!S: So the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes, It is about mass delusions, but I also think it's a lot about and I suppose the inventiveness of creativity of these tailors. And at the time, making a fabric that was invisible to some people but visible to others wasn't particularly possible, but nowadays we're almost on the verge of making it be able to make something like that happen. So we decided to speak to Stephanie Terwindt about her passion project, which is making clothes.[phone rings]S: Hi, how's it going?Stephanie: Yeah, not bad.S: Steph, I've known you for a number of years now, and you're a bit of talent at making your own costumes.ST: I am , although don't just do costume, so I also do daywear, and arts and crafts--bit of everything, really.S: And as someone who uses a lot of different fabrics, we thought we might talk to you about some of the current innovations in fabrics and how people make fabric. So I’ve just been doing a bit of research and there have been some amazing innovations. We've come very far from the original using flax fibres to dye clothes. Do you have a favourite fabric that you like working with?ST: Well, see this is a hard one. Because I have fabrics that I like to wear and that I like in clothing, but they're actually probably some of the most horrible fabrics to work with as a seamstress. So, for example, I really, really love chiffon as a fabric. It drapes beautifully. It looks glorious when you're making skirts or dresses and it just has a really nice wow factor. But it is so slippery and so hard. to pin together and to keep in place while you're sewing it, that it’s actually the worst and probably my most hated fabric to use in sewing, even though I love it as a garment.S: So usually worth it in the end, but while you're making it, sort of hating the whole thing.ST: Absolute agony.S: At the moment, personally, I'm trying when I'm looking for clothes, looking to buy clothes, I try and go for ones that are made sustainably, because the actual process of making fabrics can be really harmful to the environment. Do you have any knowledge of current sustainable methods of making clothes, and how that might differ from traditional methods?ST: Definitely. So I guess there's a couple of elements here, and if we think to really more traditional clothes in the modern sense, you're thinking of natural fibres like cotton or linen or silk. They aren't always produced in the most sustainable way, particularly a fibre like cotton. It's a highly water-intense crop to grow, and traditional cotton farming actually uses a lot of chemicals and pesticides in its production, so there's that whole element of producing the cotton. But there's also the aspect of how the fabrics are produced, once you have your thread elements, I guess you could say. So that's the more traditional side of things, and then you get into the synthetic world. Then we're into the area of, you know, single-use plastics almost, and your clothing can almost be regarded that way because as much as you use clothing over, you know, the period of a couple months or a couple of years, depending on your taste and your preferences, once a garment is used, it's very hard to recover those plastic fibres that have gone into making the polyester or lycra that is making up your garment. So there's a big issue around re-using the plastic fibres as well, what we are starting to see. There is a lot of businesses that are looking to alternative natural fibres, though. There's a fibre called TENCEL which was actually developed in Australia, which is made from eucalyptus tree pulp, I believe. And they used that to make the threads which they will then weave into the fabric. And it's a much more sustainable crop then something like cotton, while still being a natural fibre.S: What you're also saying is companies trying to reduce waste the way they make the garments.ST: Traditionally, when you are making garments, you have a large piece of fabric. You cut pattern pieces out of it, and you connect all the pattern pieces together to make your shirt or your dress or your pants. What some companies are doing is weaving fabric or knitting fabric specifically to the pattern pieces so that they don't have to cut the pattern out, and they also won't have any excess fabric as waste. So they're really able to cut to make all of their garments and also reduced the waste in the manufacturing process.S: So I know that people are also making fabrics from a lot of really, really you'd almost say bizarre things nowadays. So one of my favourite brands, Allbirds, which makes shoes from merino wool first. But then they've also started making shoes from tree fibres, and most recently, I think, from sugar plants, they started making flip flops, I think. There's also some companies that will make clothes out of plastic bottles.ST: Funnily enough, a friend of mine has started her own swimwear label, and all of the bikinis in her swimwear range are made of Lycra that is produced from recycled plastic like plastic bottles or fishing line stuff like that. And it's actually becoming increasingly common in particularly swimwear, I think is that connection to the ocean, and people are talking a lot about, you know, cleaning the oceans and removing the plastic from our oceans, and so they’re moved to take that plastic, repurpose it into fabric and then make swimwear out of it, which is fantastic.S: I realise that we can't predict what's gonna happen in the future. But if you were to try and predict what will happen in terms of fabrics, where could you see it going?ST: Ooh, this is a hard one! Because I think there's a lot of work that already underway or that people are already starting to test that I think in the very near future we’ll see and it will be a reality. So I think we're going to continue saying this push towards recycling fabrics I know that H&M has actually been testing recycling garment fabric, pulling apart old garments, re-using the threads from that and creating new fabric from scratch. So I think we're going to see more of that. We're going to see more reusing other natural fibre sources or plastic or whatever to create your fabrics. I think we're also going to start testing or playing with other ways of making fabrics there, not just weaving in a traditional sense, but 3D-printing or a mix of 3D-printing and weaving, and we are also starting to see that happen.S: Thanks so much for chatting to us about that, So the history of clothing is a very, very long one, and people have said that people have been wearing clothes for between 500,000 to 100,000 years ago, and of course, it's evolved a fair bit since then. About 30,000 years ago, people made needles, when people used to make fabrics, and this is how they would have done at the time of the Emperor's New Clothes. You would harvest and clean your fibre and wool, then you'd cart it and spin it into threads, weave the threads into the cloth and then finally fashion and sew the cloth into different clothes. And this sort of technology, people have said that you can find it from about 30,000 years ago, but it's pretty hard to find a lot of history about fabrics because , of course they rot. People have mainly guessed this based on the tools that they found and imprints that they found about things. Nowadays, there's actually-- I went down such a rabbit hole when I was looking at this, and Tee has seen the amount of pages of notes that I have. I found a whole bunch of odd things that I'd never would have suspected that you could use to make fabrics such as orange fibre, which is this company in Italy who's trying to find a way to use the 700,000 tonnes of orange peel discarded yearly in order to create juice. And they make a material similar to viscose blended with silk and cotton and, if you know anything about brand name Salvatore Ferragamo, who makes beautiful, amazing high-end clothes, actually used this fabric to create a capsule collection. There are also companies making bioplastics from potato waste, which is this company Chip[s] Board, which makes a fabric Parblex, and they are working with the potato company McCain's in order to use their potato waste from their wedges and, so on, all their other potato products. And the company has a zero-waste production system because even the offcuts of their material production is incorporated back into the system. There are legitimately so many weird ones out there. I found ones using grape marc to make leathers to make vegan leathers. There are lots and lots of different types of ones, you can make them from pineapple skin. There are hemp fibres --now have turned out to be a very fantastic material because they're antibacterial, durable, resilient. However, there are a few problems with using hemp fibres because the growth is often limited, as people are a little bit worried about that whole connection to cannabis. There are clothes made out of coffee ground fibres, so just think the next time you have your coffee that the grounds could also actually be used by a Taiwanese company to turn into a different type of yarn. And that company, Singtex, is working with Starbucks to take the coffee grounds and use them to make fabrics. Banana fibres, lotus fibres is a super high tech one, and also supposedly makes really high-end ones. And then there's even just new companies that are making different types of fabric, like Stone Island, which is working with reflective glass microbeads and temperature-sensitive outerwear.S: So we've come a pretty long way since the Emperor's time, and though we might not have invisible fabric just yet, there are some really cool options,S: Alright, so hopefully you've learned a little bit about the Emperor's New Clothes. How to avoid being caught up in a mass delusion. And also if anyone tells you that the fabric you're wearing looks fantastic, but you can't see it, do not trust them because it is most likely that they are lying.T: This is actually the final episode of Crumbs of Science. We hope you've much fun listening to this is we have had recording it, and we just like to thank the ANU Centre for the Public awareness of Science for the use of the recording facilities, we’d like to thank Will Grant for getting us set up in the space.S: To all our guests that came along and gave interviews and answered such bizarre questions.T: We hope we didn't get anyone fired. Yeah, that's it from Crumbs of science.S: If you have any questions in the future, please feel free to email us at crumbsofscience@gmail.com.T: Until next time we hope you have--T&S: a happily ever after.[Outro music]

Tired of the same old skincare routine? Have you considered bathing in the blood of the young? Or perhaps eating a seven-year-old's liver? Join us this week as we learn about poison apples, anti-aging science, and "nutritional cannibalism"! Featuring pediatrician Dr Jake Barlow and vascular scientist Dr Hannah Thomas.Recorded by Sarah-Jayne Robinson and Tim Newport at CPAS Podcast Studio.Edited by Tim Newport.Intro music sampled from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This week, we're Scrooge McDuck, diving into a big pile of science around making gold, from the 16th century to the present day, and the odds of guessing a stranger's name. Joining us in the studio is green chemist Len Gordon and chemical engineer Nicole Delaroca.Our source text: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/13/fairytales-rumpelstiltskin-brothers-grimmGold nanoparticles from wheat: https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0829/p02s02-usgn.htmlBismuth into gold: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/Recorded by Sarah-Jayne Robinson and Tim Newport at CPAS Podcast Studio.Edited by Tim Newport.Intro music sampled from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Follow us down the garden path as we explore the history of ratcatching, the science of training rats, and how gullible children are.Recorded by Sarah-Jayne Robinson and Tim Newport at CPAS Podcast Studio.Edited by Tim Newport. Transcribed by Sarah-Jayne Robinson.Intro music sampled from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/--SJ: [Fairytale music underneath] In the year 1284 a mysterious man appeared in Hameln. [Fairytale music continues]SJ: Hi, my name’s SJTee: And my name’s TeeSJ: And we’re Crumbs of Science, a podcast about the science in and around fairytalesTee: So today we’re talking about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a Brothers Grimm fairytale which was first published in 1816 but the story dates back well before that.SJ: There’s a lot of evidence showing that this event that occurs in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, actually happened. So to give you a rough idea of what was happening around the world in the late 13th Century – Marco Polo was making his journeys around the globe, the Ottoman empire had just been founded and King Edward the First was on the throne in England. The story of the Pied Piper continues – he was wearing a coat of many coloured, bright cloth, for which reason he was called the Pied Piper. He claimed to be a ratcatcher and he promised that for a certain sum that he would rid the city of all mice and rats. The citizens struck a deal, promising him a certain price. The ratcatcher then took a small fife from his pocket, which is a little musical instrument a bit like a flute or a recorder today, and began to blow on it. Rats and mice immediately came from every house and gathered around him. When he thought that he had them all, he led them to the river Wesser, where he pulled off his clothes and walked them into the water. The animals all followed him, fell in, and drowned.Tee: So here’s the thing about, uh, training rats to do things – uh, they can be, rats can be trained. But the, I mean, people do train rats for all sorts of things, uh scientists use them in labs, they, the rats are really smart and they’re used for analogues for humans, um, because we have quite similar physiology…physiological reactions to things, um, and they can be trained.SJ: Could I train rats to follow me when I played my flute?Tee: You could train rats to follow you, yes, but you couldn’t train them to follow you because you’re playing a flute or a fife or uh, whatever you’ve got on hand, um, because when you’re training rats, um, it’s all about quite simple stimuli and quite simple commands. So, there’s an article in the New York Times, uh, from 2016, by Malia Wollan and she interviewed a guy called Mark Harden, from Animals for Hollywood. And the way they train the rats, is they reward them with food and they, uh, when they perform an action after a simple trigger like a click or a light going on, something like that.SJ: Do you think, that if I laid food in front of rats, that they would run, if I put enough food in, they’d run into water and die?Tee: I don’t think so, like we said, they’re actually quite smart, they’re not as, yeh, they’re not that dumb.SJ: So, they couldn’t sew me a dress and they probably wouldn’t follow me when I play my flute, that’s very unexciting.Tee: Music does actually affect rats though. It does, you can, it’s not so much useful for training them, but if you want to change the way rats behave or their physiology, a 2018 review of 42 different studies on rats found that rats really were affected…music, listening to music increased the neuroplasticity of the brains, so the brains ability to reprogram itself, um, it improved their ability to learn, it reduced their anxiety. Uh, it also affected them physically as well, and, it, they tried a bunch of different types of music as well.SJ: I was just, I was trying really hard to find a joke, for what, [T laughing] for what were the favourite, uh a rats favourite music, but sadly I don’t have anything yet.Tee: Well, science says, a rat’s favourite music is, uh, classical music. Um, they use specifically, it’s a very specific Mozart tuneSJ: YepTee: Which we’ll play for you now[Mozart K448 plays]Tee: And it’s Mozart, uh, K448, so it’s just, it’s a particular composition of Mozart’s.SJ: I feel like Mozart usually had more creatively namedTee: Yeh, this wasn’t one of his bigger onesSJ: music. Ah.Tee: I think that scientists just really like using this one. But they’ve alsoSJ: OKTee: used, uh, house musicSJ: YepTee: Um, listening to house music improved the rat’s serotonin levels. Rock music…SJ: That, that, that very much confuses me because house music does not improve anything.Tee: [laughing]SJ: I mean, other than my desire to leave the place where house music is being played.Tee: Um, the, listening to rock music, uh, lowered the blood pressure of the rats. Uh, listening to The Prodigy, um, listened, lowered anxiety.SJ: This is very specific, hopefully it was a scientist’s favouriteTee: [laughing]SJ: I wonder how much effort went into deciding specificallyTee: Mmmmm…SJ: Prodigy, is what was needed.Tee: Yeh, uhSJ: I would also like to know what Taylor SwiftTee: [Laugh] They also listened to Night Wish, as well.SJ: I’ve never even heard of them.Tee: Really? OhSJ: What type of music is that one?Tee: It’s like a goth, pop, high-fantasy...how do I describe?SJ: Those words often don’t go together.Tee: Let’s just play some Night Wish.SJ: I feel like that’s going to be copyrighted.Tee: [laughs]SJ: So, we know what type of music a rat’s favourite, or at least which changes their brains a bit, but what is a rats favourite game?Tee: I don’t know SJ, what’s a rats favourite game?SJ: Hide and squeak!Tee: [groans]SJ: But anyway, so the story continues that once the citizens had been freed, it says specifically of the plague, so the plague of rats, they regretted having promised him so much money. And using lots of excuses, they refused to pay him. So he went away, bitter and angry, as you would if people had refused to pay you. But then he took it another step further and he returned on a specific day, June 26th, St Johns and St Pauls day, early in the morning at 7 o’clock, now dressed in a hunters costume with a dreadful look on his face and wearing a red hat. He sounded his fife in the streets but this time it wasn't rats and mice that came to him but rather children, a great number of boys and girls from their fourth year on. Among them was the mayor's grown daughter. The swarm followed him and he led them into a mountain where he disappeared with them. So the Brothers Grimm the way that they worked was that that they went out and collected stories from around Europe and then just wrote them down. There was a window, a church window in the city of Hamelin which depicted a man playing an instrument, playing the flute or his fife, surrounded by children and then I think it read in their town register that ‘in the year 1284 after the birth of Christ from Hameln were led away 130 children born at this place led away by a Piper into a mountain’. Now that's part of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale but it’s also, was actually written in their town register, which is where he got the story from. The town of Hamelin still believes in this so much so that there’s actually a street, that has has a very German name so I apologize for my pronunciation, Bungelosenstrasse, which is known as the street without drums, and this is the street supposedly where the children were last seen and still, to this day, people aren't allowed to play music or dance there, to the point where if you were having a wedding procession and you had a band with you and you wanted to cross the street, all the musicians would have to stop playing, walk across the street, and then they could start on the other side. So they still really really believe in this. So there’s a couple of theories about what happened to these children, I’ll admit, none of them good.Tee: But before we hear the theories, let’s take a look at the actual story. So the story says, he played music and the children all followed him. So children are affected, like, the science is, the science says, basically, children are affected by music, and every few years, someone publishes an article saying music is good for learning, music will make your child a genius, listening to Mozart in the womb will make your child the next Stephen Hawking.SJ: I have definitely heard this, however there has only been one Stephen Hawking and I somehow doubt that he was played Mozart in the womb.Tee: [mmm]SJ: You never know, my kids are going to have Taylor Swift played for them so.Tee: [laughs] Well, so here’s the thing, we know it has an effect on children's development, there was a review of 46 studies published in the Frontiers in Psychology Journal, um, that found that while they couldn’t definitively say that music didn’t have any effects, they also, it was unclear in every regard, the specific effects of the music.SJ: But there’s so many storiesTee: Yeh, I know rightSJ: It means it must be true.Tee: Well because there’s these, these studies get done all the time because we all want to know how to, like, how we can improve our children’s development, how we can make people, make people smarter generally,SJ: Some children, are dumb,Tee: But they found it was basically unclear whether music had any effect on motor skills, social skills, language skills, cognition, academic performance…SJ: [sighs]Tee: There was basically, you could, you could say there is...SJ: Rats, is it really just homework, just doing homework and being generally smart.Tee: Yeh, I think just going to school and being a good student, makes you a better student. That was pretty much it.SJ: So upsetting, what about osmosis, by putting your textbook under your pillow and then going to sleep in the morningTee: I mean, that was my strategy for many years.SJ: [laughs] Mine too.Tee: And well here we are.SJ: I don’t think it actually worked. Sad to say I never remembered any of the answers I needed.Tee: So music doesn’t hypnotise children, that’s probably pretty clear. What are the theories on how these children were taken?SJ: There have been lots of ideas about what could have happened to them. So one of the ideas is that they all died from the plague, because the bubonic plague swept through Europe. However, this theory doesn’t really stack up because the Black Death actually swept through Europe about 100 years later. It was pretty horrible, it did kill around a third of Europe, however it’s very unlikely that it did kill these children in Hamelin. So there's another theory that maybe the children were sent away from their parents because of the extreme poverty. There's some other theories that maybe the children were part of the mysterious dancing plague. So dancing plagues, the most famous one that I found was in 1518 in Strasbourg where hundreds of citizens danced uncontrollably and supposedly unwillingly for days on end and overall it lasted for about two months before ending as it began and I, from the sounds of it, it's just people went out on the street and started dancing and wouldn't stop for anything. They would collapse when they were exhausted and then they’d just get up and start dancing again when they could.Tee: Were they, like, aware that they were dancing, were they conscious?SJ: [high-pitched] I feel like they were. There’s a couple of explanations, some of them more plausible than others for these dancing plagues, like demonic possession, there’s other ones like overheated blood which I suppose was a diagnosis in the medical, in medieval times, cause I haven’t heard of that. There’s also eating some weird sustogens.Tee: There was one theory about um, ergot, the, which is a psychedelic um, psychedelic fungus. That was the one that they thought might have been the, um, the ah, the Salem Witch trials, could have been a similar deal, yeh. Basically it gets into the water and then you drink the water and then you, uh, experience altered states of conscience, you react in different ways, but, I reckon that one was, they didn’t really think that one was a good theory because not everyone would have reacted in the exact same way, whereas the dancing plagues, everyone just went out dancing.SJ: The most accepted theory for dancing plagues, was from the American medical historian, John Waller, who believe that it was a form of mass psychogenic disorder which takes place under circumstances of extreme stress, which, once again, makes sense, living in the middle ages was very very stressful. So, there was the idea that maybe these children were part of a dancing, a random dancing plague but once again, doesn't really stack up because the most famous ones were around 1518 so that's a couple of hundred years later. The very, well the last popular theory is that, once again, pardon my German, that Ostsiedlung, which was the mass movement of German people eastwards, to go colonise other countries which happened during the middle ages. So then the theory is that the Pied Piper was a flamboyantly dress recruiting officer and convincing the townspeople to leave and colonize Eastern Europe and this theory’s sort of backed up by later on in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale that, there’s actually the line that says, ‘Some say that the children were led into a cave and that they came out again in Transylvania’ so that supports the theory. And there's a linguist, Jurgen Udolph, who researched that the names from Hamelin may have found their way into modern-day Polish names, so Poland-Transylvania, not that close really, but this is…Tee: Yeh, a linguistic link across the two. And the, I mean, there is the thing where they may have referred to the townspeople as the children of the town as well in this, in this original inscription that the Brothers Grimm took a look at, it could have, they could have been talking about adults. They’re just saying the children of the town were led away, rather than not specifically meaning the young people of the town.SJ: However we didn’t mention a really interesting part of this story is that today, you always hear it as, the children, the rats were killed and then the children were taken away but thenthe, in the first, from like when it actually happened, from the 1200s through to the, about maybe the 1600s, the story was just about the children being taken away, the rats weren’t actually part of it. That was added later. I think there was another story?Tee: I mean, ratcatchers were a huge thing, like when, especially when the black death came around, it, if you were, if you come into a town and get rid of their rats, people would sing songs about you, people would write stories about you. So…SJ: Very popular people.Tee: The, um uh, the Black Death was going, going around in the 1300s so, both these stories would have been old when the Brothers Grimm were collecting them, so it’s entirely possible they just got mashed together.SJ: So this story has actually, it’s so popular, there’s heaps and heaps of versions around the world, so there’s versions, a couple of versions from Germany, there’s versions from Denmark, there’s versions from Austria - where it’s the ratcatcher of Korneuburg, there’s the rat hunter from Denmark, England had their own go with the Pied Piper of Newtown. There’s also a version of Syria of Avicenna and the Mouse Plague at Aleppo. So this was a really big story in the middle ages and it’s also pretty popular now. It’s a bit, it’s a pretty horrifying story,Tee: YehSJ: So I don’t quite know why it turns up so much.Tee: And here’s, and here’s the thing with this story, is that it really doesn’t, there’s not really a moral orSJ: No, usually these stories are like,Tee: YehSJ: children, be good and listen to your parents, this one almost seems to be - remember to pay people.Tee: Yeh, pretty much, it’s yeh, don’t, don’t stiff people or they might take your children, which.SJ: Is a really extreme reaction.Tee: Yeh.SJ: Gosh, there are laws against that sort of thing nowadays.Tee: I mean, as a, as a freelancer, I want to get paid, but I’m not going to resort to kidnapping.SJ: [laughs] Then you’d have to look after the children, which, let’s be honest, will cost you more than you agreed to get paid.Tee: Um, don’t try to use rats for useful tasks, is I guess the main message.SJ: But you could, we can train them to make my clothes.Tee: Mmmm.SJ: We can, make them walk into water and die.Tee: Mm.SJ: Not at all?Tee: Not at all.SJ: Rats!Tee: [laughs]SJ: Ah, that, didn’t even plan that one, one. So thank you very much everyone, hopefully you learnt something or at least enjoyed listening to us blabber. So we hope that you have a happily ever after, at least until next week.[Fairytale music starts and then fades out]

Join us down where it's wetter to learn all about the history of mermaids and the science of land-fish!Recorded by Sarah-Jayne Robinson and Tim Newport at CPAS Podcast Studio.Edited by Tim Newport, transcribed by Sarah-Jayne Robinson.Intro music sampled from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/---Transcript:SJ: Far out in the ocean where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflour and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep, so deep indeed that no cable could fathom it. Many Church steeples piled one upon another would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above. There dwell the Sea King and his subjects.[intro music]SJ: Hi everyone, my name is SJ.Tee: And my name is Tee.SJ: And we’re Crumbs of Science and this week if you couldn't tell by the introduction we are talking about The Little Mermaid. But, not your Disney Little Mermaid, gosh no, that's a way too pleasant. Instead we want to talk about the original Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, published in 1837.Tee: Yeh, we’re real hipsters like that we're going for the, uh, the OG Little Mermaid.SJ: Now often when we’ve mentioned fairy-tales on here there's been heaps of previous versions and it's come through. But Hans Christian Andersen was, I think a little bit more original than the Brothers Grimm because they just collected the fairytales, whereas Hans wrote it himself. So there are some previous versions of this fairytale such as Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, very fancy name, published in 1811 where a watersprite marries a knight named Huldebrand in order to gain a soul. Very popular German folktale. There’s also a French folktale, Melusine where a watersprite marries a knight, on the condition that he shall never see her on Saturdays, when she becomes a mermaid again. Casual Saturday, as you do. And there’s also a theory that he was perhaps inspired by the occultist Paracelsus whose full name, get ready for this one, was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who was around til 1541 and he was pretty big in the medical industry and he believed that sickness and health in the body relied upon the harmony of humans and nature. So if plants looked like part of the body they could cure that part of the body, for example one that I found was that orchid roots look like testicles so they can cure any testicle-associated illness of course and he thought that the four elements of a body had to be in-line with each other and the four elements corresponded to four elemental beings. Salamanders for fire, gnomes for earth, sylphs for air and undines or mermaids for water. So these might have been some of the inspirations for Hans Christian Andersen. But also at this time, it was relatively well-believed that mermaids were actually real and we'll discuss that a little bit later. There was lots of evidence out there that mermaids existed. Many well-renowned thinkers believed in mermaids and there were even exhibitions of mermaids that would tour around England and around Europe at the time displaying mermaids or mermaid bones or artifacts from mermaids.Tee: So Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid opens in a similar way to the Disney version. There is the Sea King at the bottom of the ocean who lives in a beautiful, beautiful castle. The Sea King is a widower and in this story, the Sea King’s mother is also around the home. She, the Sea King and the six daughters of the Sea King, uh, all live in this huge castle at the bottom of the ocean. Each of the daughters is told by their grandmother that ‘When you've reached your 15th year, you'll have permission to rise up out of the sea to sit on the rocks in the moonlight, while the great ships are sailing by and then you'll see both forests and towns.’ Each of the sisters is one year older than the other. The first sister goes up and she sees beautiful stars, beautiful towns… Second sister goes up and she sees a bunch of things and so on and so forth until it's time for Ariel.SJ: She’s actually never named in this one. I think they came up with the name Ariel for The Little Mermaid, which actually used to be a male name before they used it in Disney.Tee: Mmm interesting.SJ: Fun fact, I’m pretty sure.Tee: So the littlest mermaid floats up to the surface and as she gets to the surface, she sees a beautiful ship. The ship so brightly illuminated that all the people and even the smallest rope could be distinctly and plainly seen, and how handsome the young Prince looked as he pressed the hands of all present and smiled at them while the music resounded through the clear night air. But then a storm rolls in and picks the ship up and dashes it against the rocks. And during the storm, she finds the young Prince who's floating through the water. Uh, who's fast losing the power of swimming in that stormy sea. His limbs were failing him, his beautiful eyes were closed and he would have died, had not the little mermaid come to his assistance. She held his head above the water and let the waves drift them where they would. As soon as they wake up she makes sure he's ok and then she dives back into the water. He wakes up and he, but he has no knowledge of who rescued him.SJ: We said before that Hans might have been influenced by some stories at the time and mermaids have actually been around in culture for centuries and centuries. The first merperson really that was imagined was around 4000 years ago and it was Ea, a merman who was the Babylonian god of the sea, with the lower body of a fish and the upper body of a human. Helped people, brings them arts and sciences and battled evil, all the good stuff. And weirdly, he was the patron god of cleaners. You may be more familiar with his name when he was later co-opted by the Greeks and the Romans as Poseidon and Neptune. But the earliest mermaid they suspect was the ancient Syrian goddess Atargatis, Atar-gatis?, Atar-gateus?, Atargatis, who watched over the fertility of her people and their general well-being and of course, fish below human above. Now people really actually believed in mermaids before the 18th century. So there was the Great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, who wrote Natural History which is pretty much the scientific gospel for the following centuries and that was published around 77ish AD. And he wrote of Nereids and nymphs, which are half-human, half-fish mermaids, and just wrote of them as being actually real. So the princess watches this happening and then she goes back home but she is depressed. She is so lovesick and she pretty much just hangs out being lovesick. She eventually tells some of her sisters why she’s so sad and they tell her where his palace is, which conveniently is right next to the water. Then there's a big party one night and she has a wonderful time at this underwater party that she's attending until she realises, I can never be truly happy until I am with my one true love, the prince who has never met me and has no idea who I am. So she goes to see the Sea Witch. In this version, there is a very important distinction between mermaids and humans, not just the whole tail thing.Tee: In this story humans have an immortal soul and that immortal soul means that they, once they die, get to live forever in theSJ: The unknownTee: Yeh, yeh, the heavens. But mermaids don't have an immortal soul, and so even though they live for over 300 years once they die they just turn into sea foam.SJ: They gone.Tee: They become the foam on the surface of the water and ‘have not even a grave down here of those we love and we shall never leave again like the green seaweed once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more’.SJ: As her grandmother tells her ever so sweetly. The Little Mermaid heads over to the Sea Witch and she makes the deal to get legs. Now, the Sea Witch demands payment of course for it, which is her voice, as it was in the Disney one. But in this one she actually cuts of her tongue so she can no longer speak. The other side of it is, the Little Mermaid must marry this prince in order to get an immortal soul and live forever, which is really her goal. She's a bit sad about the whole living and then just turning into seafoam. She wants the immortal soul that people have. So if the prince marries her and loves her wholeheartedly, she will get this immortal soul. However, if the prince marries someone else, the day after, she will die immediately. Become that seafoam she's so scared of. But she is given more time in it, she's got more than 3 days so maybe this Sea Witch was slightly more generous.Tee: And also more motivation.SJ: Little bit.Tee: Eternal deathSJ: Yeh, yeh, however she did just cut her tongue out, so you know, swings and roundabouts. So she’s given this potion by the witch, swims up to the surface, on the way, saying goodbye to her family forever, takes the potion and then, with a ginormous amount of pain transforms into a human with legs.Tee: So life moved from the ocean, with predators and lots of competition for food, onto land which at the time was covered in entirely plants and had zero predators. That evolutionary jump was made about 400 million years ago, but it's something that still going on today. Uh, there’s an article in New Scientist by Alice Klein about fish that are evolving to become land-dwellers because of predators. These fish which are called Blenny fish or Blennies live in Rarotonga in the largest of the Cook Islands, and at low tide, these Blennies are found at swimming around in rock pools at the edge of the island, but when high tide moves in, instead of going into the ocean like most fish do at high tide, they instead move-climb up onto dryland and shuffle around the rocks. And what these researchers found is that, this is because there’s predators that swim in with rising tide like flounders and lion fish, the fish have decided to instead of risking that in the ocean, they've evolved to instead spend time on-land to avoid these predators. These Blenny fish have gills but they also have strong tail fins that allow them to jump from rock to rock. So by avoiding predators that, uh, obviously increases their survival and this is exactly how evolutionary pressure works. If you can, if the species survives better in a different place, then things that allow it to get to that place will be selected for, in natural selection.SJ: Now also because Hans didn’t do things lightly, every time she walks, uh, it feels like blades are running through her feet. So at the moment she doesn't have a voice, to seduce the Prince but the Sea Witch said that you will be able to do it because you'll be so graceful in your dancing, never mind that it’s blades through your feet, and you have very expressive eyes and you’ve got a nice face. So Prince, he’ll just fall for you.Tee: You can get a long way on a nice face.SJ: That is true.Tee: It’s worked for me.SJ: [laughs] No comment. She’s hanging about, meets the Prince. He thinks, uh, this is some cute little chick, but he thinks of her as a little sister, which was not the goal and he treats her like a foundling. So sometimes she gets to lay just outside his door cause she's so lucky and he pats her on the head sometimes. She sees a party where people sing and she gets very sad and thinks I could sing way better than that, but then she dances and everyone goes, oh, your dancing is the most amazing dancing ever, so the Prince thinks she’s pretty cool but sadly not interested in her as a love interest. So he’s said that the only person that he could love is the girl who rescued him when he had that shipwreck which he thinks is some random and the Little Mermaid knows that it’s actually her but she hasn't figured out the whole writing thing to tell him and of course she can’t speak. His parents have said, time for you to marry, you’re a Prince that’s what you do. So they head out to meet this other princess and the Little Mermaid’s going, ‘no way he’s going to love her, the only person he can love is that chick in the temple, and me, also she thinks’. Gets to the land, has a whole bunch of cool parties and then he finally sees the Princess that he’s supposed to marry. Turns out, she was the chick who rescued him. OH MY GOODNESS, oh NO for the Little Mermaid, her life is over. So throughout history, lots and lots of people have said that they’ve sighted mermaids. So Pliny had the Nereids, or Nereides, um, Christopher Columbus has claimed that he spotted mermaids off the coast of Haiti in January of 1493. However, he did say that they were pretty ugly and had some masculine traits. Then we had sailors who found little tiny mermaids that were Jenny Hanivers in the 1500s and they used to actually get them and they would dry them out and then sell them in Antwerp for tourists and people believe that they were visible proof that mermaid-like creatures lived in the ocean. John Smith who you might recognise from another Disney story of Pocahontas, fell in love with a mermaid in 1614, um, he says that he sighted one and he was very attracted to her, musing that her long green hair imparted to her an original character that was by no means unattractive. She also had large eyes, a finely-shaped nose and well-formed ears. He began to fall in love with her until he realised that she was a fish and then decided, no, can't love a fish. So there have been lots and lots of sightings about mermaids, but you could really put it down to a bit of hearsay because there wasn't a lot of scientific evidence behind people. Whenever they’d sighted them people would say, I saw a mermaid, look at me go! But then there were a couple of articles that came out in the 18th century, so in the 1700s that were published where people had scientifically examined these mermaids. So there was an article which appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine, it was the 1700s, you were allowed to call things stuff like that then, in December, which Jacques-Fabien Gautier, who was a really prestigious member of the Dijon Academy and recognised for his skill in printing images of scientific subjects. He had looked at this mermaid, examined it, recorded everything about it, and then illustrated it in detail. To a lot of people, this would have then been considered almost incontrovertible proof that mermaids exist. There was a couple of other articles that then, such as in the Mercure de France, in April 1762 there was a story of two girls discovering an animal of a human-form leaning on its hands. Not that pleasant, the girls then stabbed the creature and cut off its hands but these hands were then examined by a surgeon so, and they saw the web between the hands and the fact that it had a tail and this once again, because a surgeon was able to back the story, helped prove that mermaids existed. And in May of 1775, The Gentleman's Magazine again, published an investigation into mermaids, by a merchant man who was trading to Anatolia and then it’s, he had some interesting ideas about these mermaids. Let's just say he was a bit racist, um and he encountered mermaids that had some broader features and then was saying that they were more like African, uh, mermaids and then there were the more daintily-featured white mermaids and then had some ideas about race and how mermaids related to race and this also reflected quite well with the idea that everything in the sea had a counterpart on land. So you had sea-horses to horses, sea dogs and so on to dogs, and then people had their own counterpart being mermaids. But they also had some really, they managed to find the equivalent of the clergy in the ocean, um, where they found a clergy-fish because it looked like a cowl, looked like it was having a cowl so this was discovered in mid-16th century by Guillaume Rondelet, he found monks and bishops, so we'll make sure we put a photo up on the website but they found, I don't know if he realised that they’re just clothing so you can take them off, so perhaps the mermaid just reflected these other ones and it was a profession choice rather than a choice made for them but he found mermaids that were, that looked like monks and mermaids that looked like bishops. So around this time lots of people believed mermaids, they were real. There were some people who held out on it, but many, many highly respected thinkers did believe that mermaids were real.Tee: So having met this princess and fallen in love at first sight, they plan a wedding on a boat and they bring the boat out into the harbour and are going to do a beautiful, beautiful wedding and the little mermaid is despondent. She's crying over the edge of the ship and then she looks down at the ocean and she sees her sisters all show up. The sisters have also paid a price to the witch they've given her, given their hair to the witch.SJ: I feel that’s a little bit unfair. I feel like the Little Mermaid should have been given that option, that she could have just had a crop cut and kept her tongue. But this Sea Witch works in mysterious ways.Tee: I think the Little Mermaid just needs to get better at bartering. So her sisters have sold their hair to the Witch for a knife. If that knife is plunged into the heart of the Prince, when the warm blood falls upon the Little Mermaids feet, her feet will grow together again and form into a fish's tail and then she can return to the sisters to live out her 300 years before she dies and is dead forever. So they say, ‘Kill The Prince and come back. In a few minutes, the sun will rise and then you'll die’. The Little Mermaid goes into the Prince’s tent on the ship and she has the knife in hand and she's ready to stab the prince as he lays there with his new bride. Then she can't go through with it and she instead throws the knife into the ocean and then throws herself into the sea, just as the sun rises which is when she was fated to die, but she says it doesn't feel like dying and instead of sinking through the ocean, she floats out of the ocean and she floats above the waves because she hasn't died, she's turned into a Spirit of the Air. So mermaids, they live for 300 years and then they die forever. Humans live their lives and then when they die, they have an immortal soul, so they head off into the great hereafter. The Daughters of the Air have a different deal which is that they have to spend 300 years doing good deeds around the world just as the Little Mermaid tried to do a good deed at some point in this story.SJ: By, by not murdering the prince I think?Tee: Ok, I suppose that's a good deed. So she gets a deal where she has to spend 300 years with them, doing good deeds and after that she gets an immortal soul and gets to go to heaven.SJ: ‘After 300 years thus we shall float into the kingdom of heaven and we may even get there sooner’ whispered one of her companions. ‘Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children and for every day on which we find a good child who is the joy of his parents, and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct for we can count one year less of our 300 years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow and for every tear, a day is added to our time of trial. So if Santa doesn't work, to get your kids to be good, this one really hammers home not only can bad children get coal and kill fairies. Also, Little Mermaid, you’re making her trial longer and cry.Tee: That's a rough deal, for air spirits, for the kid, for everyone involved.SJ: Mmmm.Tee: I think this is sketchy contracts here, I think.SJ: We’ve already worked this out, she's not a good negotiator. So, we've only explored about 5% of the ocean so maybe mermaids are just super-duper crafty and are hiding out there but most of the reports so far, and investigations have determined that despite the centuries of belief and the fact that they decorate boats, they decorate temples, churches the world over it is very unlikely that mermaids exist. But you can see them a lot in popular culture including of course Disney’s The Little Mermaid and the upcoming live-action Disney’s Little Mermaid so it shows that even though they’ve pretty much been disproven, people still love the idea of mermaids, though perhaps the Disney version a little bit more than the Hans Christian Andersen one. Thank you very much for listening.Tee: And join us next time on Crumbs of Science where we’ll be talking about Rumpelstiltskin and the science behind alchemy.[Fairytale music starts]SJ: Until then, we hope you have a happily-ever-after.[Fairy tale music continues]

Welcome to Crumbs of Science!Join us in our very first episode, where we learn all about building with gingerbread, making fat birds, and the best way to make sure a child is cooked all the way through. Special guests: structural engineer Will Horton and pediatrician Dr Jake Barlow.Recorded by Sarah-Jayne Robinson and Tim Newport at CPAS Podcast Studio.Edited by Tim Newport, transcribed by Sarah-Jayne Robinson.Intro music sampled from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/---Transcript:SJ: Next to a great forest, there lived a poor woodcutter who had come upon such hard times that he could scarcely provide daily bread for his wife and his two children, Hansel and Gretel.[intro music]SJ: Hi everyone, my name is Sarah-JayneT: And my name is TeeSJ: And we’re Crumbs of Science, a podcast about the science in and around fairytales. Now because this is our very first episode, we thought we’d give you a little bit of a background about ourselves. SO my name is Sarah-Jayne or SJ and I think that I decided at about five years old that I was going to be a fairy princess in my future to the extremes where my 21st birthday I had, it was themed ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I went as a fairy princess. But I also have a science background, I have an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering and arts from the University of Western Australia and after I graduated I spent five years travelling around the world working on oil rigs and I’ve worked on six continents so far, so almost made it to all the continents, so almost made it to all the continents of the world, one more to go.T: Is that one more Antartica?SJ: It is Antartica – it’s very hard to get to. But I have experienced at least a little of all the others so far. So I’ve also done a fair bit of science and now I’ve left that job and I’m currently studying a Masters of Science Communication (Outreach) at the Australian National University, which is why we’re doing this podcast.T: Ah, and so my name’s Tee and I’m also studying this, the Masters of Science Communication (Outreach) at, uh, the Australian National University. Um, and I’d just like to thank the Australian National University for their facilities in recording this podcast today. I studied journalism and geology at university and I actually worked for several years putting on science kids parties, where I’d go to children’s birthday parties and instead of a clown, I would be a scientist and everyone would get to do science experiments, um I’ve also done …SJ: What was your favourite? Your favourite science experiment that you did at a kids birthday party?T: Um, so one of my favourites was definitely, uh, making little rockets, where you mix alka-seltzer and water in little pointy test tubes and then put them on a little base and you just put it on the ground and count down 5…4… and then it just goes off. Uh, great experiment, definitely need safety glasses for everyone though, those thing uh, move very fast. Um, but I also did a bunch of science as well, during my geology degree, I did a three week field trip out to the, out to Broken Hill, um, out to the desert where they filmed Mad Max and got to camp for three weeks uh, and stare at the ground, it was great.SJ: I think that’s most of geology isn’t it?T: Yeh, it’s really, [sigh], it’s really tough to make sound exciting.SJ: Is geology a real science, oh, who knows? So, our podcast is about fairytales and this week, if you couldn’t tell from that opener, we’re discussing Hansel and Gretel, which is the, one of the most famous fairytales, originally published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm and a fun little fact, this story was told to them by Dorchen Wild, who later on actually married one of the brothers, um, she married Wilhelm. So, the story of Hansel and Gretel, it’s a fairly tragic start to it – two children and their two parents, who are living in their lovely little cottage, in the woods, and one evening, their father suddenly comes to the realisation that, we have no food, so his wife turns over to him and says ‘Listen, man, early tomorrow take the two children, give each of them a little piece of bread then lead them into the middle of the thickest part of the woods. Make a fire for them and leave them there, for we can no longer feed them. The man protests a little bit, says that he can’t do this, he loves his children, but then the woman says ‘if you don’t do it, all of us will starve together, and she gave him no peace until he said yes’. Little interesting thing about this, you would have heard there that I’ve said that it’s his wife or the mother, uh, which is how the original version in 1812 went, but the version in 1857 actually had it as the stepmother. So the Brothers Grimm realised that they could make this story more exciting then included it as a stepmother instead and then that was part of the whole stepmother trope that you also see in Cinderella and Snow White and pretty much, if you’ve got a stepmother, they’re going to try and kill you, I think is how these stories go.T: After their father has been convinced, to take them in the woods, by his wife, the children hear everything that the father has said, um, and Hansel tells Gretel that he has a plan and he’s going to get them back, and so he goes outside, he fills his pockets with pebbles and then he goes back in the house and goes back to sleep. In the morning, the mother comes and wakes them up and says ‘get up children, we’re going into the woods, here’s some bread. Don’t eat it til midday. The father leads them out, into the woods and starts a fire for them and says, ‘Just go, take a nap, and I’ll go back and cut down some trees and I’ll be right back. And of course, he doesn’t come back, but because the kids already know about the plan, Hansel has been dropping pebbles through this entire, on the journey there. And so, when the moon comes up, he can see his way back. So he follows the pebbles all the way back to the house.SJ: Family was all happy again, everyone was nice and cheerful. Until, about a month later, when they realised, hmmm… we still have no food. This story is actually part of, there are a bunch of stories about children being abandoned, there’s the French one which was Le Petit Poucet, there’s Finette Cendron, which was the story of three princesses abandoned by their parents and there’s another version in Italy by Giambattista Basil, where the cruel stepmother kicks the kids out. And this actually has some origins in a human event which happened in 1315 – 1317 or 1325 depending on what you look at, which was the Great Famine. Now, the Great Famine was due to some horrible weather conditions in Northern Europe, specifically affecting the English Isles, France, and those sort of areas around there. And all their crops died, the situation got worse and worse until 1318 when they finally had some good weather again, but through those three years, times were really, really tough and it’s been said that between 10% and 25% of the villagers in those countries actually died. Pretty much due to starvation or if they didn’t die due to starvation, they were so weak that then the diseases came and picked them off really quickly. And during this time, people went to some really extreme measures to try and get enough food to feed their family and these measures included murder, robbing your friends and neighbours, the old voluntarily not eating so that they would die, cannibalism and also abandoning your children in the woods to fend for themselves. So, this horrible fairytale, probably actually happened. Maybe not the rest of it, but the origins are based on actual life events. So, the mother, once again, convinced the father, we need to get rid of these children, or we’re all going to starve. And Hansel and Gretel, once again, because they had no food, they were awake at night, very hungry and Hansel thought again, that’s alright, I’ll go down, get some pebbles, I’m a smart cookie, I’ve got this. But it turns out, that the mother had actually locked the door, so they couldn’t get out. Now, they were given two slices of bread, to carry in their pockets for the walk, because these parents weren’t totally heartless, so this time Hansel crumbled up the bread and left it behind on the walk. Then once again, got to the woods, the parents try the same trick, ‘You stay here, rest by the fire, we’re just going to go chop down some more firewood and once again, the parents disappeared. Hansel, waited til that evening, until the moon would rise and he could see his trail bed..bre.. trail of breadcrumbs but then, turns out, they were all gone. Animals ate them. I don’t know what, how this could have happened, animals eating breadcrumbs, but Hansel, though he was a bit of a thinker, didn’t think that hard.T: So, quite regularly, you’ll see articles going around, um, saying, ‘oh no you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t feed birds bread, oh you can’t be feeding the ducks bread, you’ll kill the ducks.SJ: Like the very famous scene in About a Boy, when he’s feeding, feeding bread to the ducks and then he throws the whole loaf and the duck dies.T: You can actually, you can feed bread to birds. It’s totally fine to feed bread to birds, just like it’s totally fine for humans to eat bread. But here’s the thing, you shouldn’t eat it all the time. So,SJ: But Oprah loves bread, she would eat it all the time if she could.T: So would I. But it’s not healthy for us and it’s not healthy for the birds either. It’s a lot of uh, empty proteins, it fills the bird up without actually providing any nutritional value. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK, advises that you should only feed small, small amounts of bread and you should try to mix up the types of things you feed so you’re not just feeding them bread. Wholegrain bread, much better for birds, as opposed to white bread, um because, partially because wholegrain bread has all those little seeds and grains and other things that are nutritional by themselves contained within the bread whereas white bread is purely, purely the bread itself and is not very good for the birds. There’s an article in the Washington Post about, uh, different types of bird seeds and how many bird seeds are actually filled with a type of seed that birds don’t eat. So there’s a type of seed called Milo, it comes from a particular plant. While it’s really good agricultural feeding, so feeding various fowl like chickens and so on, it’s not so good for backyard birds. Backyard birds will just leave it in the container. He says, on a theoretical scale from 0, where no bird has any preference to it, and 30, where every species eats this type of seed, uh, red milo seed, that makes up the majority of bird seed, rates a 6, which is the lowest score of any seed type. At the top of the list, of things that birds love to eat, is sunflower seeds, black oil sunflower seed or shelled sunflower, sunflower seeds that humans like to eat are not the kinds that birds like. TheySJ: [Disappointed sigh], well that’s good because I don’t like sharing my food. So, the story continues, they couldn’t find their way home, so instead they wandered around the wood, all through the night, the entire next day. They were horribly hungry because they’d only managed to find a few small berries to eat, then on the third day, they walked until midday when they came to a house built entirely out of bread, with a roof made of cake and the windows were made of clear sugar. Now, to any child, or to any person really, this sounds like a dream, but to two little children, who’d been wandering for three days with nothing to eat, probably thought that it was a mirage. But by that point, they’re willing to eat anything, enough mirage stuff, [cough], so they sat down and they started eating this house. Whenever I think of this story, I always think of it as a gingerbread house, though it doesn’t actually say that in the narration of the original 1812 or 1857 version. And, as an engineer, I’m not quite sure how great bread or gingerbread would be as a house.T: So, there are actually competitive gingerbread-house making competitions. And one of the largest houses, gingerbread-houses ever built had an actual internal volume of 1000 square metres, uh, built as a charity fundraiser in 2013.SJ: Can you think, 1000 square metres, that’s a bit hard to visualiseT: YehSJ: What sort ofT: So it’s nearly 20SJ: SizeT: It’s nearly 20 metres long and 12 metres wide and it is 6 metres tall at it’s highest point, so that’s, it’s about the size of a small actual house.SJ: That would require so many stepladders to build. So, we called a structural engineer, Will Houghton, currently working at GHD, to ask him some questions about gingerbread houses, which is a very normal thing to do in your work day.[ring tone]SJ: So Will tell us a bit about gingerbread houses - would you build with gingerbread and why?Will: In the construction of something like this, you tend to need to look at it in two ways. There’s the, um, the materials you use for the construction and also the applied loads. So, in those two avenues, the capacity of gingerbread as a construction material. I mean, there has been some research done to date, obviously not on this scale. But in essence, it does appear to behave quite nearly as a concrete in that, um, well I will say unenforced concrete. It is quite brittle in nature so if you do load it, if you do stand on say, a floor panel made from gingerbread, it would crumble beneath your feet. But when I say brittle, it’s more it has no tensile capacity. So if you try and pull it apart, it’s very weak and if you try to compress it it would have some strength but it would probably crumble. So as a construction material you would really need to either have limited load to ensure it works within capacity or you would need to somehow strengthen it. And there are various ways you could do that, you could use some sort of taffy or marshmallow to really reinforce it and give it more tensile strength. But if it was to be loaded and it was to form, the marshmallow or the taffy would act as a cement and hold it together and give it that additional strength.Tee: So Will, with gingerbread as a building material, how big of a house could you make?Will: It comes down to, in one sense the location of the building. So I see there would be no actual constraints on how high or how wide it could go. You can always engineer the materials to take it. If you go higher with these buildings you are exposed to more winds loading, that’s something I can’t really imagine you can design out. If you imagine a building with four walls you obviously have a windward face. I think what probably helps in this case given my understanding, is the site would be in a forest of some sort, typically you would get some, um, some shielding from any wind source, um, by the trees or whatever was nearby so could be working in our favour and you could then go higher. With these kind of structures, especially with brittle materials like gingerbread, you can actually strengthen it by having a compression load acting on it. So in this sense here, with your walls, they’re obviously supporting the roofs, the roof is exerting a dead load, so that weight on those walls. That load is compressing those walls and would strengthen them under any lateral forces like wind or whatnot. I don’t know if this would be a two-story house, I think with a gingerbread cottage you might want to keep it single story and that would definitely make construction easier. It comes down to what she needs, so does she need a four-bedroom house or is she fine with a two-bedroom. Might be fine to go single-story.SJ: Now we know that it’s a little bit hard to work out 14th century prices and also magic of course is priceless, but can you maybe give us a bit of an estimate of how much this gingerbread house would cost to build?Will: Typically, with a construction like this, there’s several different avenues where the cost comes from. You obviously have the design itself which is a proportion of the fee and the documentation thereof to assist in the construction. There is the procurement of the materials, the procurement of the resources, so the manual labour required, any plants or whatnot that you might need to help pour the gingerbread. In terms of the manual labour, I’m sure there is a portion of magic that can be involved to assist with any lifting, so any heavier pre-carved elements, if they were to be used. Why would you hire a crane, when you can use a witches magical powers, I don’t know? So I imagine there’s not that many of them and they would be a specialised resource, perhaps they would be quite expensive, if it’s a very remote site, it might be that the higher cost comes from transportation. So gingerbread, luckily enough would be quite light to transport, I’m not sure if they would be baking it on-site or if they’re baking it say in a workshop nearby and then transporting it to site, so there’s a few variables to really look at before we give a final cost to this.SJ: Thanks so much Will, we really appreciate you coming along and lending your expertise to our podcast.Will: Thank youSJ: So we left off in the story, before we got very side-tracked by amazing gingerbread houses, that Hansel and Gretel had just started eating this house of bread, when they heard ‘Nibble, nibble, little mouse, who is nibbling at my house.’ Hansel and Gretel were obviously terrified, then out of the doors walked a lovely, little old woman who took pity on the children and said ‘oh you dear children, where did you come from? Come inside with me and you will be just fine.’ So she took them in, she gave them some nice food. They then went to bed thinking ‘Yay, we’re so lucky’. But the twist is that this old woman was a wicked witch who was lying in wait there, for children. So she had built her house of bread in order to lure them to her and if she captured one, she would kill him, cook him and eat him. And for her, that was a day to celebrate. Pretty horrific celebration, but still, once again, no judgment, 1300s, life was tough.Tee: Yeh, 1300s, get what you can.SJ: When this story originated from, in the 1300s, witches weren’t seen in the same way as we view them in the 15 or 1600s or how they are viewed now. So, in the 10th century there was a canon or book of sorts called Epsiopy which talked about women being seduced by illusions from the devil, and then they would think that they could fly on the backs of certain beasts in the middle of the night alongside the goddess Diana. However, these women were dismissed as being stupid and foolish, thinking, how an earth could they do that, how silly women, goodness. Then it was only in the 15 and the 1600s that inquisitors started to believe that women could actually make magic happen by pacts with the devil and they were pretty terrified of them because they thought that they could do things like putting a broomstick in water and causing a storm or a flood, So then you had all the horrible witch hunts of the 15 and 1600s where, how was it that they told if women were witches?Tee: One of the most famous tests is to, uh, chain someone up and throw them in a river, because, if they floated, they were a witch and should be killed but if they drowned and died, well good news, not for them, they weren’t a witch.SJ: Fool-proof method really.Tee: I mean, it’s just, it’s just science.SJ: Simple science, it’s obviously the best way to tell if someone was a witch. So, Hansel and Gretel, they were sleeping peacefully, the witch said ‘They will be a good mouthful.’ So she grabbed Hansel, threw him in a little stall and she made Gretel cook for him for the next few days. So cooking him delicious things to fatten him up, so she could eat him when he was fat and delicious, not skinny and tough. So, and all Gretel got to eat during this time was crayfish shells. So, poor little Gretel, she’s not doing great, but Hansel’s about to get eaten, so he’s not doing great either.Tee: No-one really comes out on top in this story.SJ: Nope, they’re pretty upsetting. So, everyday, the witch tested Hansel to see if he was fat and fat enough to be delicious food. So, she would get him to stick his finger through the bar, because she didn’t have very good eyesight, uh, Hansel was actually able to trick her by instead by sticking a stick out, so it didn’t seem like he was getting any fatter despite all the delicious food that he was eating. However, after four weeks, the witch got fed up and said to Gretel ‘Hurry up and fetch some water. Whether your brother is fat enough now or not, tomorrow I am going to slaughter him and boil him. In the meantime, I want to start the dough that we will bake to go with him. So, Gretel was pretty sad. Um, in the 1812 version of the story, it actually says that she sat in the kitchen and cried tears of blood, which once again, horrific, uh honestly, that could probably happen in the 13th century, people weren’t very healthy.Tee: The Brothers Grimm clearly thought that that was a little bit much though because in their 1857 version, they’ve now edited it out and it’s not in the, uh, traditional retelling of the story.SJ: Not saying that Gretel cried tears of blood? But that would look so pretty in the animations. Uh, eh. So the witch called Gretel over and the witch said to her ‘Look inside and see if the bread is nicely browned and done, for my eyes are weak and I can’t see that far. If you can’t see that far either, then sit on the board, and I’ll push you inside. Then you can walk around inside and take a look.’ So, if you can walk around inside, pretty big oven. But Gretel was a little bit clever and she realized that the witch probably didn’t good have, probably didn’t have very good intentions if she was going to push her inside the oven. So instead, Gretel said ‘I don’t know how to do that, first show me. Sit on the board and I will push you inside.’ So, the old woman sat on the board and because she was light, Gretel pushed her all the way inside and then quickly closed the door and secured it with an iron bar. The old woman in the hot oven began to cry and wail but Gretel ran away and the old woman burned up miserably.Tee: We decided to see if the witches plan was going to work in the first place, even if she hadn’t been foiled by these clever children. Could she have actually cooked and eaten them in this oven?SJ: So we did some calculations of our own and since neither of us are experts in cooking children, we decided that we would call on an expert, Dr Jake Barlow who is currently working at the paediatric wing at the Royal Children’s Hospital.[ringtone]SJ: So Jake, you’re a doctor, very wise, know lots of things, could you tell us, could this witch survive on a diet of children?Jake: Uh, it probably would be reasonably nutritious, it’s, you know, decent quality red meat. I think the main concern, uh, from a medical point of view, would be developing a disease known as kuru, which is a form of prion disease. Now prion disease is pretty cool. So the way they work, essentially you have a protein that is folded, well, assembled badly in such a way that it will both cause other proteins to fold badly and therefore it sort of spreads itself. Mad cow disease would be the classic. Its, um, protein causes a degeneration of the brain, sort of like a dementia-type process and then that would lead to, um, progressive loss of cognitive function and then death. The problem with this is that the proteins when they fold in this way, they also bear a resistance to heat, so they might need to be heated to three and a half thousand disease celsius or something similarly difficult to achieve in your standard kitchen oven especially in your gingerbread house that will probably burn down at temperatures much below 3500 degrees Celsius. And so the protein survives the cooking process, and then when you eat them they start doing their folding problem in you, and so they are transmissible but they’re not sort of alive in the same way that something like a bacterial, bacterial infection is transmissible and alive.SJ: So Jake, if you were going to roast a child, how would you do it?Jake: Uh, I haven’t considered this before. I guess I think you could think of a number of options. And I think it would probably depend on the child, I mean my concern would be the surface area to volume ratio of the child. Obviously children are small so they have relatively high surface area compared to their volume which means that they gain and lose heat quickly which is relevant from a medical point of view but I imagine is also relevant from a cooking point of view. And once you have your child cooked, or burnt on the outside and all cold on the inside, so you’d want to make sure that they’re cooked through evenly. Therefore I’m thinking your options would either be to slow-roast the child so that, especially a larger child, so that the core is cooked through, or potentially something like a spit-roast like you would do with an entire whole pig or something like that.SJ: So Jake, these children have been wandering for three days in the woods, what sort of state would they be in, by the time they made it to the witches cottage?Jake: I think there’s a lot of issues at play here, obviously you need to think about the environment that they’re in so exposure will be a factor, the quality of their clothing, if it’s sort of threadbare, homespun potato sacks that will provide minimal insulation and so the child will develop hypothermia more rapidly as we discussed sort of previously with the surface area to volume ratio element. Weather will obviously affect it, especially if it’s raining and their clothing becomes sodden. The environment they’re in, windchill, protection from other elements, their, either, availability of skill, or ability to light a fire to conserve heat and provide wool. The bread will provide a degree of sustenance, but obviously it is mostly carbohydrate and doesn’t really have much in the way of vitamins and minerals and micronutrients. Three days, certainly possible, for children who are acclimatized to the environment. Uh, it would very much depend on the weather.Tee: Well, that’s a lot of information I didn’t know and probably shouldn’t know. Thanks Jake for coming on the show.Tee: So the story continues with the witch having burnt up, Gretel runs to Hansel and unlocks his door. He jumps out, very excited to not be killed and eaten, as you would be and then they look around and find that the whole house is actually filled with precious stones and pearls.SJ: This is an amazing house by the way.Tee: And these children are just not very observant. They walk into a house, they don’t see the cage, the don’t see…SJ: The human-sized ovenTee: Yeah, and they don’t see all of the gems, but anyway. They find these precious stones and pearls, they fill their pockets with all them and they find their way back home. Their father rejoiced when he saw them once more for he had not had a happy day since they'd been gone and now he was a rich man. However, the mother had died. Now when I was reading that I thought, ok, what happens after that? But no, that's how the story ends is, however, the mother had died.SJ: Such a great last sentence of a children's fairy tale, that let’s be honest, probably your mum is reading out to you. So this story might not seem like it has a whole lot to do with science but there's a pretty cool mix between magic and science that was around in those sorts of days because they had a bit of a definition of magic and let's be honest, a weird definition of science. So William of Auvergne who was a 13th century French priest and bishop so just before the time of the great famine, he believed that magic was superstition however, natural magic was a part of science and if you didn't use it for evil, this was all fine. And some elements of natural magic were that seal skin could be used as a charm to repel lightning, vulture body parts were obviously a protective amulet, and if you wanted your garden to grow well you would get virgins to plant your seeds because that was a scientific way of promoting their growth. So, probably not quite how we’d define science today but they also had some other weird things going on with the science and the medicine of the time because they believed in sympathetic magic which was using imitation to produce effective results. So for example, if a patient was suffering from a liver complaint, they would use the liver of a vulture to cure it.Tee: So an example of this is using a treatment to help, to stop the flow of blood of a wound, by using wool soaked in olive oil from the Mount of Olives and combining that with a spoken story about Longinus, who was famously healed of his blindness using the blood of Christ. So these were religious elements blended with the magical and with the scientific.SJ: So, it’s a little bit cagey on what you’d call science, but then again, science wasn’t all that advanced at the time. They had some famous scientist around that era such as Fibonacci who you've probably heard of, with the very famous Fibonacci sequence named after him who was actually an accountant and was famous for introducing Arabic numerals to Europe and making accountants lives easier and also a very famous scientist at the time was Roger Bacon who was called by some as the first modern scientist and he wrote on all areas of science and even managed to envision machines for travelling on land or water, submarines and air travel which is pretty advanced when you think that they were mainly going around via horse and buggy. Now we’ve spent so long learning about Hansel and Gretel, maybe you can answer a question for me. How did Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods?Tee: I don’t know SJ, how did Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods?SJ: The trail was crumby.Tee: [groans]SJ: Thank you very much everyone for listening. Um, hopefully you’ll tune in next week when we're going to talk about The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, one of my all-time favourites.Tee: So until then, we hope you have a happily-ever-after[Fairytale music]