Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray,
and once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with you, James.
Okay, my fact this week is that the Great Wall of China is held together by sticky rice.
Right.
This is not true.
It's true.
It's true.
How is that possible?
Well, it's the mortar that holds the bricks together.
It must be extremely overcooked, because I don't think that's good sticky rice if it's like cement.
Well, what they found is that they've got this kind of mortar,
which is half organic and half inorganic, and the organic compounds in it is something called amylopectin,
which is like a starchy stuff that you would get if you cook potatoes or rice or whatever,
and they're pretty certain that they got that through cooking sticky rice,
and then extracting this starch, and then just mixing it with lime and making the mortar.
Wow.