Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshensky,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go.
Starting with fact number one that is Andy.
My fact is there is a scientist at Imperial College who's been studying the same bag of dust for 15 years.
Are you are you grusting him up now for being lazy is that what's happening here?
Yeah that's right he's clearly taking his time over it you know I'm not accusing him of swinging the lead outright but then again he is analysing every single speck of dust in his bag so I can see why it's taken time.
He's called Matthew Genge,
he's a planetary scientist at Imperial College and he specialises in micrometeorites which is basically grains of dust from other worlds and they land on earth all the time.
He's got a bag which he collected in Antarctica in 2006,
it took him five minutes to collect but that was the easy bit
because then he has to go through it speck by speck and just work out which specks are micrometeorites which is the exciting ones and which ones are just dust and yeah.
He's got 3,000 of them so far, 3,000 particles he's managed to pick out of this bag yeah.
That's not good going at all.
Wait he's been doing 15 years and he's only managed to get a 3,000.
Look he's got other stuff on I mean he's got to eat you know he's probably other bits of work on.
I think I could count 3,000 grains of dust within a couple of days Max.
No you couldn't, absolutely not.
It's not okay sorry he's not counting to 3,000.