Sep 29, 2026 · 50 min · 11 segments
In an attempt to combat the seemingly non-stop bleak news of 2026, today we're discussing some positive news stories that may have flown under the radar this year.
Who'd like to go first? I'll give your voice a little break, Robin.
Martin, what have you discovered this last week?
I've learned a little fact about a little creature, and this creature was a snail.
So a particular species of land snail, I'm going to butcher this, but it's called Eremina desertorum.
And, um, I mean, it's a bit of a random facts and apologies.
It's a bit going from a left field, but anyway, the British museum, uh, had the species, you know, they have their species and they have these index cards, right.
Of, of what the species is, um, and where it's from and a little, a few facts about it.
Right.
So in March 90, in March, 1846, sorry, um, This particular snail, this dead species of the snail, you know, the shell, was glued onto an index card to, you know, to be a visual representation of what the card says.
So it said, Eromina desertorium, land snail from Egypt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, glued onto this index card.
Right, that was 1846.
Four years later, in March 1850, they realised that the snail was actually alive.
So it popped its head out of its shell and they were like, oh my goodness me, this has been there in a hibernation state for the last four years and it was still alive.
So they gave it a warm bath and And they also, what else did they do? They let it live from then on, rightly so, on some leafage, if you want to call it that.
And it lived another two years after it was deglued from this index card in the British Museum.
So a surviving snail that hibernated and then they realised it was alive.
after four years so i didn't know snails could live that long that was the next thing i did looked up facts about snails most snails live between two to five years which is which is interesting uh for for us uh lovers of snails and and then this prolonged period of hibernation i looked up a few facts about hibernation as well so there's a metabolic drop when an animal hibernates where they use energy less than five percent of energy that they'd use at their normal kind of baseline level.
So it did work to survive four years regardless.
So anyway, yeah.
A fact about a snail from the 1840s.
There we go.
That is extraordinary.
I've never known anything could hibernate for four years.
Let alone a snail, which must have very little body mass to exist
Who'd like to go first? I'll give your voice a little break, Robin.
Martin, what have you discovered this last week?
I've learned a little fact about a little creature, and this creature was a snail.
So a particular species of land snail, I'm going to butcher this, but it's called Eremina desertorum.
And, um, I mean, it's a bit of a random facts and apologies.
It's a bit going from a left field, but anyway, the British museum, uh, had the species, you know, they have their species and they have these index cards, right.
Of, of what the species is, um, and where it's from and a little, a few facts about it.
Right.
So in March 90, in March, 1846, sorry, um, This particular snail, this dead species of the snail, you know, the shell, was glued onto an index card to, you know, to be a visual representation of what the card says.
So it said, Eromina desertorium, land snail from Egypt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, glued onto this index card.
Right, that was 1846.
Four years later, in March 1850, they realised that the snail was actually alive.
So it popped its head out of its shell and they were like, oh my goodness me, this has been there in a hibernation state for the last four years and it was still alive.
So they gave it a warm bath and And they also, what else did they do? They let it live from then on, rightly so, on some leafage, if you want to call it that.
And it lived another two years after it was deglued from this index card in the British Museum.
So a surviving snail that hibernated and then they realised it was alive.
after four years so i didn't know snails could live that long that was the next thing i did looked up facts about snails most snails live between two to five years which is which is interesting uh for for us uh lovers of snails and and then this prolonged period of hibernation i looked up a few facts about hibernation as well so there's a metabolic drop when an animal hibernates where they use energy less than five percent of energy that they'd use at their normal kind of baseline level.
So it did work to survive four years regardless.
So anyway, yeah.
A fact about a snail from the 1840s.
There we go.
That is extraordinary.
I've never known anything could hibernate for four years.
Let alone a snail, which must have very little body mass to exist
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