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 and I am sitting here with Anich Zinski, James Harkin and Andrew

Anjamari.

And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last

seven days and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that a group of scientists is currently making their own lava.

Pretty cool.

So there's a lot of scientists who are the University of Buffalo's Center for Geo Hazard Studies

and they want to study what it's like when lava and water meet because it's something

that you don't get to study a lot in the wild in the natural world.

It's really important as well because when lava and water meet it gets really, really

explosive as opposed to normally normal lava explosivity.

And so they are making their own stuff and they melt ten gallons of basil tic rock at a

time in a furnace at 2500 degrees.

Is there not a thing about water and lava meeting which is related to the laden for

us to effects, one of James's favorite effects?

I think it's which is when two substances of vastly different temperatures meet each

other and it means that the water isn't caused to boil straight away because this layer

of gas suddenly forms between the water and the lava and I think that might be what makes

it so explosive because this layer of gas forms and then eventually that layer of gas

collapses and then this massive explosion happens.

...