QI

Hello.

Welcome to QI, where tonight we've gone absolutely pathological.

Pathology is the study of diseases,

so let's examine tonight's case studies:

The alarmingly feverish Rhod Gilbert.

The worryingly pale Ed Byrne.

The incurably romantic Sindhu Vee.

And my own raging headache...

...Alan Davies!

Now, you can ring for a nurse at any time.

So, Rhod goes...

Nurse!

Ed goes...

Nuuuurse!

Sindhu goes...

Nuuurse! Nurse! Nurse! Nurse!

Nurse! Nurse! Nurse!

Sounds serious, yeah.

Alan goes...

The Funeral March by Frederic Chopin

Hey-ho.

We begin in the Pacific Islands.

When is the best time for a coconut to fall on your head?

Could it be just before you're about to impersonate a horse

in a recording studio?

When you're feeling a little shy. Come on.

Is it when you're asleep? No. It is in fact... When you're awake?

Yes. When you're awake, yes.

The answer is in the daytime.

Is your head harder in the day? No, you heal faster in the day.

In fact, you heal twice as fast.

I like the idea that your head gets harder in the day

and softens up at night.

No, we have cells called fibroblasts

and these help heal a wound when the skin is cut.

And they seem to kind of switch on and off

in sort of day and night cycles.

It's likely that it's evolutionary because historically,

people were more likely to get injured during the day.

And it has a really serious medical application

because if you can trick the body into thinking it's day all the time,

people who've had surgery might mend more quickly.

Do you think that's going to change

now that most accidents happen on a Friday or Saturday night?

Because eventually, we will evolve so that we heal quicker after that.

And also after a few pints.

We are slow to evolve, is all I can say, Ed.

Speak for yourself.

He was a lizard this morning.

I had a friend who had a coconut fall on his head, Sandi. Yes.

Ask me if he was upset. Was he upset?

Oh, he was desiccated.

Here's the thing, if you were hit on the head by a coconut

in the Pacific, in sort of the 19th century,

they might use the offending coconut to patch you up.

They cut out the damaged part of the skull

and then they replaced it with coconut shell. No!

Yes, taken at a very precise growth stage called niur,

and new bone would grow around it.

Would they also take the hair off the coconut

and just put it on like a little wig?

No, it's a younger part of the coconut, at an earlier growth stage,

when it wouldn't have all the hair on it.

People would throw balls at your head.

But you can also replace broken or missing bones with wood

and the new bone would grow around it. Really?!

I know. You'd think that it's only an old thing

but it is absolutely something that people are trying these days.

You use a coconut patch

when you're trying to wean yourself off Bounty bars.

What you want to do is, you want to protect the brain

so new bone can grow over it. So does it expel the coconut part

or does it just become a permanent part of your head?

No, it becomes a part of it. It becomes like a scaffold.

But when you get dandruff, you can put it in your rice.

There was a 2001 study of the period 1994 to 1999

and one in 29 of all injuries that were presented to the surgical

departments in the Pacific Islands were related to the coconut palm.

85 people fell out of a coconut tree.

16 people had a coconut fall on them.

Three had the whole tree fall on them.

One kicked the tree and injured his foot.

And then a coconut fell on him.

And then a coconut fell on his head.

There are lots of things you can use.

Sea urchin spines can also be used to fix broken bones.

And again, it's creating a sort of scaffold

around which the new bone can grow. If you look at the spines,

they're porous, they're strong, they're biodegradable,

they're easy to cut to a specific shape.

This is using very old techniques in modern medicine.

What's wrong with a titanium rod? I think it's cost.

Also, the anemones don't set off metal detectors at airports.

That's true.

Anybody got any idea how you could work out

if somebody's got a broken bone

using a stethoscope and a tuning fork?

You hit them on the leg, and they go, "Ow!"

That is one way of doing it.

You set off a tuning fork by hitting it on a hard surface

and then put it against the bone and listen with a stethoscope

and if it rings like a bell, then the bone's absolutely fine

and if it doesn't, then it is broken.

It's a bit like if you put a china plate down on a table,

you can tell if it's got a hairline fracture

because you can hear it make a strange noise.

Anybody know where the word coconut comes from?

No.

Is it something to do with the fact that you can see a face in one?

It is that. So, Coco refers to a character in Portuguese folklore.

The name means grimace, or grinning boogey man.

So it was basically Portuguese and Spanish seafarers from that period.

And the three holes on the top of the coconut represent the face.

In the Philippines... you've spent time in the Philippines.

I grew up there. It's known as the tree of life. Yes. The coconut tree.

They use all parts of it. You know, they build their houses from it,

you eat it, they use every part of the coconut.

Now, this is in the Philippines. It's the Coconut Palace Court.

This is a government building built entirely from coconuts.

They used coconut husks to make those shirts

that Marcos used to wear with all that embroidery.

And my mother bought my dad one. He looked like a complete weirdo,

but he would walk around saying, "This is my coconut shirt",

which no-one in India understood what he was talking about.

Now, here's the thing, we were going to try and open a coconut

but I don't trust any of you boys at all,

so I've only given Sindhu the coconut.

And what I thought is, you could have the coconut

and a hammer and a screwdriver.

No, no. You don't need a hammer and screwdriver? No.

Do you want the boys to mansplain what you need to do to open it?

They're probably going to anyway, so do you guys want to get into it?

Actually, because we open coconuts all the time,

whenever you do anything auspicious, you start with a coconut...

OK. Yeah. This is the way it goes.

There you go.

Brilliant!

Oh, that's so impressive!

Here's the thing, it's something you do before any auspicious prayer

or anything... or when you get something new.

And, you know, people take it, like, if your grandmother's involved,

she takes it very seriously, so, when we got a new car, she did it.

Not in front of the car. Oh. But... On the car? On the car.

And it didn't work because the car is not concrete, so she said,

"This is very inauspicious. You have to return the car."

How many cars did you go through before you found one that...?

No, no, we didn't. We told her, oh, you know, "Granny, go sleep."

And then when she woke up, we said, "This is another car."

But did you just strike it in a particular place?

You have to hold it here. Right.

And if it doesn't crack the first time, it's your fault and you've

done something inauspicious and your mother gives you a tight slap.

So, really, you just learn from the beginning.

But what if the reason you want to open the coconut

is to drink the coconut water inside?

These coconuts are not the drinking ones. Those are the green ones.

Because I didn't trust you boys,

I have got each of you a coconut with a ring pull.

There you go, and you just pull the ring. Would you like one of those?

I would love one. This is crazy. Have you broken yours already?

Mine has come off as well.

Nothing?

Oh, you guys, here we go. She's done it as well.

Is it a total fad, all this coconut water nonsense?

Everyone's drinking it and it's expensive.

It can help dissolve kidney stones

and it can be used to replace blood plasma in an absolute emergency.

Anyway, how can you tell the sex of this skeleton

by looking at its bones?

The pelvis.

The pelvis. You're absolutely right. Why? What about the pelvis?

Is a man's pelvis wider so he can take up more space on a train?

Yeah.

What is that about? How big can a person's testicles be?

I mean... LAUGHTER

Maybe the man's trying for a baby

and he's trying to keep it aerated down there.

There's a lot of men on the tube trying to have a baby, then.

I also find it weird that boys have to shift it about a bit.

You never see a woman on a tube go, "What's that doing up there?"

Anyway, nothing to do with anything. So a woman has got child-bearing...

Something to do with child-bearing hips.

So there is no 100% accurate way if you look at a skeleton of telling

whether it is male or female,

but the pelvis is probably the most reliable.

That's female, that one.

The way you can tell that's female

is, there's a large sign under it says female.

The pelvic gap - that's the space between the top of the thighs,

it's wider on a female.

The hip bones flare slightly more outwards, all of these things

allegedly aiding childbirth.

Never tell a woman actually having childbirth that it's fine,

she's got the pelvis for it.

You can sex a watermelon, I think. Or is that a myth?

But if you do, they throw you out of the greengrocer's!

You're looking for a female watermelon... Why? Exactly.

Unlike panel show hosts, I find the female ones are sweeter.

Oh!

You know, my chair is on wheels now.