Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covenant Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here next to James Harkin who is sitting next to

Andrew Huntsamari and then rounding off the circle in between Andrew and myself is Anichesenski

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 the man sitting next to me

James Harkin. Well if at home you can work out because there's only one man sat next to Dan

if you remember the situation of Azora on the table genius so who's it me?

Sorry. My fact this week is that animal metabolism was first proven by Antoine Lavoisier

in an experiment where he put a guinea pig in a freezer. Okay so a couple of caveats to this

freezers haven't been invented yet. It's the first one. So it was in an ice calorimeter which is

a container inside another container which is full of ice so it's a way that people would keep

things cool in those days but it's not a freezer per se I wouldn't say. It's kind of like a thermos

flask but it's got ice instead of a vacuum. Yes. Okay yeah that's very enough and but it was

important that it was ice rather than a vacuum because it was the amount of ice that melted which

he measured and that worked out how much heat was given off by the guinea pig and it was heat

just from living from the guinea pig and he realized that this was a kind of metabolism

which is a bit like combustion so combustion is where you burn organic material to get energy and

metabolism is where you burn sugars to get energy for the body and he worked out that these two

were kind of the same thing. And I thought he'd sort of invented the device. All is it there anyway?

I don't know about that. The way I heard it describe which is quite good to visualize is like one

of those water coolers in an office but so it had the guinea pig in the middle and then it had

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