A Little Bit Of Science

 The whole of science is stuffed full of delicious stories, and we really want to tell you every damn one of them. But we know our little human brains can’t absorb too much at one time.    So today we’re introducing our new line of Wholesome SnacksTM, where we bring you a selection of new and tasty tales that have been consumed, concentrated and reconstituted just for you.    Get your bib out beca...

It’s simple. We work too much. There’s evidence that shows we work too much and it’s not a fun time for anyone. So what would a world with shortened work hours and no loss in pay look like?   Pretty damn good. You’d be a fool to disagree.   The weekend is a sacred thing. We live for it, we get our rest from it, but the two-day weekend as we know it has only been around for about a hundred years. T...

Let’s go back to the 1960s. A time of Richard Nixon, moon obsession, hippies, the Vietnam war and… no ethics committees.    Born in Oklahoma in 1930, Robert Allan Humphreys was a man of many disguises. Ordained an Episcopalian priest in 1955, Humphreys changed his name to Laud after William Laud, a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury (he was very holy).   Humphreys followed the traditiona...

Alfred Ely Beach was a good and decent man. Born in 1826 in Springfield Massachusetts, Alfred loved his family, he loved the opera and he loved inventing. In fact, he invented the world’s first practical typewriter. He was legit.   Hailing from a rich family in the newspaper business, Alfred made his way to New York where he learned the family trade. Heading up Scientific American Magazine, turnin...

How far would you go to get to the truth, or perhaps more pertinently, to the bottom of things?    William Beaumont was one dedicated scientist. Some might say ethically… ambiguous, but hey, he was born in 1785, so, old school. Later becoming known as the Father of Gastric Physiology, Beaumont did whatever he had to do in order to understand the juicy details of the digestive system.   But did he...

Charles Vance Millar was the greatest troll ever. Born in Aylmer, Ontario in 1854, Charles was a fan of practical jokes. Some might have described him as a cantankerous man, capricious and out to do whatever the hell he wanted to do.  Extremely intelligent, and top of his class in law school, Charles built a silly amount of wealth by investing in companies and real estate. Then he bought some race...

Is your workplace overrun with unqualified managers, red tape and bureaucracy?   Are you asked to sit in on arduous meetings with no real consequence when you’ve got deadlines coming out of your ears?   Maybe that’s just office politics.   Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a deliberate ploy against you, decades-long in the making with deep roots in espionage and sabotage. Welcome, friends, to the world o...

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're separating the lupine from the canine from the vulpine. Or...

We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth.   But... how did we come to know that?   It’s fairly common to see a healthy set of pearly whites now, but scroll back just a few decades, this wasn’t the case. A study in Sweden in the 1930’s found that even 3 year old children had cavities in 83% of their teeth.   That’s bad. That’s real bad.   See, the Swedes love their sweets. They even have a speci...

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're re-living the horrors of Easter Island.   Easter Island is...

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we try and understand why oh why people drink their own urine.  ...

Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work.   So, who on earth is John Cunningham Lilly?   At the age of 16, most of us can barely organise our way out of a paper bag, hold more than a grunting conversation with our friends, or ask anything intelligent of anyone.    But Lilly wasn't just anyone....

Humans really love a hobby and it seems the more obscure the hobby, the more obsessed we become. But if you’re looking for the gold medal in obscure and obsessive, you need look no further than Victorian salmon fly-tying.   Back in the Victorian era ‘recipes’ for the perfect fly-tying involved the most exotic of materials - fancy threads, unusual bits of fur and, most importantly, exotic and rare...

Battleships are very large, belch smoke and move pretty slowly. If you were tasked with hiding one out on the open water, how would you go about doing it?   This has been a long-standing challenge and the military’s best attempts were all pretty average. Low visibility grey was their answer. Not a great answer, but an answer.   In April 1917, German U-boats were sinking 8 battleships a day! Grey b...

Have you ever had a curiosity so strong that you’ve considered staying awake for 180 hours, tapping your spinal column with cocaine, consuming deadly parasites or pumping 6L of hydrogen up your bum?   Probably not. And that is most likely because you are not an idiot.   But - there’s a fine line between idiocy and genius, particularly in medical science.   And so today we explore some of the most...

Sexual performance, in particular impotence, is something that’s plagued chaps since they first crawled out of the swamp, rose up onto our hind legs, looked down, and bellowed WHY WON’T YOU WORK YOU BASTARD!   If there’s one thing you can rely on history to provide, it’s infinite examples of how men across the ages have laboured to enhance, increase, or at the very least enable performance…   Erec...

A little bonus episode for you today, and we hope you enjoy the shorter format. Let us know in the comments on YouTube or by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts if you would like more episodes in this bite-sized form.   If you have listened to the previous episode “What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?”, you’ll know that National Geographic sent out a survey using scratch and sniff cards b...

If you’re left-handed you're part of a group that makes up about 10% of the population. And this rate of left-handedness has been consistent. Historical and archaeological records, reaching as far back as the Neanderthals, tell us that we’ve had this background rate of left-handedness for quite literally all of human history.   All of human history, that is, except for a small blip between the 19t...

There is no better way to conquer things than with great big explosions. The thing to be conquered in this episode? Rain (humans just love punching on with nature). This story begins with a strange observation. After the Civil War in America, soldiers of all ranks, abilities and backgrounds often spoke of drenching drain after battles. This apparent connection rose to the level of received wisdom....

The way the story goes, the Summer of 69 was when all hell broke loose in Cleveland.   It was the summer the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Choked with industrial effluent and chemicals it burst into flames. It is said that this is the event that birthed the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Authority. America was galvanised by this shocking event. Things started to change.   But th...

The car has been around for over a century, which makes it easy to forget that there were real-life humans behind its invention, not to mention a messy, complex journey of invention.   There are of course some well-meaning gentlemen that were involved in the invention of the automobile. But, possibly one of the most important figures was a woman by the name of Bertha Benz.   Bertha Benz’s husband...

Scurvy is zero fun. We’re not sure how much you know about this disease but it’s not a walk in the park. Okay, it’s fair to say that not many diseases are a gentle stroll through a pretty field of flower-filled gardens, but scurvy really is an incredible bastard. The only thing going for it is that you’re generally dead pretty quick. You start off feeling a little tired, sore and short of breath....

If you were knocking on death’s door and the door wasn’t opening quickly enough, would you want to be able to give it a shove yourself?   To have agency over your death is a tricky subject, but that hasn’t stopped Philip Nitschke from diving into it head first.   To understand why Nitschke felt compelled to go down such an onerous path, let’s first give you a sense of his personality as a young ch...

In August 1968, a rather innocuous letter to the editor was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.   Dr Ho Man Kwok had written in speculating on the reason he felt so ghastly after eating at a Chinese restaurant. Was it the soy sauce or the cooking wine? Or perhaps, he offered up, it was the monosodium glutamate seasoning - MSG.   The prominent symptoms, as he described them, were numb...

Our episode today begins in the 1960s with Laszlo Polgar and his hot and saucy epistolary courtship with a foreign language teacher named Klara. Correction here. Laszlo's letters were less hot and saucy and more….precise and instrumental. There was no time for detailing THE karma sutra. László was on a mission. He wanted to raise child geniuses. So, in his letters to Klara, he outlines the pedagog...