Hello and welcome to another working from home 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'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and

Anna Toginski, 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 this week with

my fact, my fact is sand dunes are brilliant at social distancing.

Oh yeah, topical. Very topical. So they're safe.

Sand dunes are inanimate objects. Okay, so I would suggest that if they're two meters

apart, they will always remain two meters apart. Is that as in they're not moving? Are they?

Sand dunes do move. They constantly are traveling through the desert. They are a body that falls

over on itself and travels. So yeah, sand dunes are constantly shifting and that's why when deserts

encroach on places, you've got these giant waves of sand dunes that head towards you. It's like an

army, but scientists in Cambridge University have sort of simulated, they've built an experiment whereby

they've been able to study the movement of sand dunes and they've discovered that basically they

do communicate with each other in, you know, inverted commas communicate with each other by sending

signals to not encroach on their patch so they don't collide. We still fully don't understand

why it is. I mean, it's pretty extraordinary. The latest theory that they've come up with is it's

much like if you're in a boat and there's the wake of the boat pushing the water back behind you,

it's pushing the sand dune behind it to keep it at a regular distance.

Although we should say, because otherwise I think people will be confused, but when you say

collide and it's a mystery why they don't crash into each other, obviously the main reason they

don't crash into each other is because they're moved by winds and air currents and so you don't get

...