A Little Bit Of Science

A drag racer can accelerate from a dead stop to 160 km/h in 0.86 seconds. That's a horizontal acceleration of 5.3 g. For most of us that would mush our brains to the backs of our skulls and leave us in a state of piddling confusion. But to John Paul Stapp that's baby steps. Rod tells Will about John Paul Stapp's mission to see just how fast the human body can start and stop! The Wholesome Show is...

Have you ever tried to bring together a grand unified theory of character development, proletarian revolution, alien invasion and orgasms? Well, Wilhelm Reich certainly tried, and this is his story! The Wholesome Show is Rod Lamberts and Will Grant, joined today by Sam Vilkins! Proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener...

I hate to break it to you, but the highest mountain in the world is no longer a wilderness. Far from the distant unclimbable of Mallory and Hillary, Mt Everest is now a heaving festival of the best and worst of humanity, and an oversize garbage dump with its own nightclub. Rod tells Will all about it! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian...

Between the 1870s and the 1930s hundreds of zoos in Europe and America included people - yes human people - as part of their display collections. Will tells Rod all about it! The Wholesome Show is Will Grant and Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I don't want to - ahem - blow smoke up your arse, but tobacco is not 100% satanically evil. Wait wait, before you shoot us, yes - tobacco is 99.9999% satanically evil, and has caused untold cancers and deaths and other bad things. But... there might be a tiny sliver of a silver lining? We explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian Nat...

In the 1960s and 70s the United States and the Soviet Union had a shitload of nuclear weapons... and when all you have is a hammer, the whole world is a nail. So they started using their nuclear hammers to solve other... civilian problems! The Wholesome Show is Rod Lamberts and Will Grant, joined today by Sam Vilkins! Proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awarenes...

Political polls... aren't having a good run. After spectacular failures of polling in the UK in the Brexit vote and the US in the 2016 election, the malaise has come to Australia - the recent election was specatularly poorly called. We sit down with poll analyst Dr Kevin Bonham to explore why! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, joined today by Sam Vilkins! Proudly brought to...

On May 14, 1945, Albert Stevens was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 µCi) of plutonium - the highest known radiation dose in any human - without his knowledge or informed consent. This is his story. The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Statistics, you might be surprised to learn, is the science of the state. At heart the whole discipline was born from an effort to count how many people your country had, so you could know how many taxes you could collect / armies you could raise / pyramids you could build. But the business of counting people has never been... straight forward. Sam Vilkins tells Rod and Will all about it! The Whol...

In our galaxy there are billions of stars like our Sun, many of them probably billions of years older. In all likelihood, many of these stars will have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, at last some may have developed intelligent life - perhaps even billions of years more advanced than us. It's just simple probability! But... why is the galaxy so... quiet? Today, we explore the worl...

Between 1946 and 1993 a bunch of countries dumped 85 PBq* of radioactive waste into the ocean. Slurries, solids, reactors - you know, the stuff you find lying around and just want to put in the ocean.** It was terrible, and it seems we've mostly stopped it. But that shit is still down there... So we explore! * I don't really know how much a PBq is, but it's a lot more than 'nothing', and 'nothing'...

Corn flakes are delicious. But did you know they were originally invented to lower sexual desire? (Try it yourself next time you have a bowl, but be careful!) Their invention was part of a quest of John Harvey Kellogg's not only to improve the health of society, but to stop people from a range of other practices, including drinking, smoking, having sex and masturbating. In this episode we explore...

In the dying days of the Second World War, allied troops entering Strasbourg made a grisly discovery - the purpose built beginnings of a skeleton collection. This pseudoscientific collection was an attempt by the Nazis to showcase - in physical form - the alleged racial inferiority of the "Jewish race" in contrast to the German Aryan Übermenschen. It's both disgusting, and very definitely not scie...

Everyone has food they hate eating. For some people it's mushrooms, for others it's onions, for others it's aniseed. (For Will it's watermelon. It's the lamest melon). But if you're starving on a desert island and there's only mushrooms, onions, aniseed or watermelon there, sure, you'll bend your rules. But what about... other humans? How hungry do you have to get to turn to anthropophagy (it mean...

Do you listen to The Wholesome Show in the shower? You can, it's totally fine with us! So... if you're in the shower now, take a look down at the floor. Look at the drain and watch your suds go down... Where do they go? Well, down the pipe, down the river, and all the way down to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench!* So that's fine if your suds are wholesome and non toxic to the environment, but...

Listener I distinctly remember being told, when I was about 4, that even the Queen does poos. (It's true, she does!) Well, there's nothing to be ashamed about, it's all part of life. But about 4.5 billion of us don't have access to safe and hygienic toilets, and that is a shame. So for this episode we explore the history and technology of the toilet! Enjoy! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts an...

Have you ever wished the made up dinosaurs from the latest Jurassic Park movies were real? Well, you're not the only one! It turns out fossil hunters around the world are ... a little prone to inventing their own dinosaurs! We explore the Piltdown Man and other fossil fakes! Enjoy! The Wholesome Show is Rod Lamberts and Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the P...

Have you ever wanted to be just a little bit smarter? To think a little bit more clearly, to remember better, to have a higher IQ? Well it turns out, people are trying a variety of government approved - and home made - techniques to do just that. But they're not consequence free... We explore Transcranial Electromagnetic Stimulation! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly...

Earlier this year teenagers around the world began* to receive* sinister text messages... from a half bird half woman half ghoul thing from the depths of despair. The messages instructed* these teenagers to do bad things - to hurt themselves - or the creepy ghoul known as Momo would get them! But - you know the story listener - it was all bullshit. Just a scary image and a made up moral panic, whi...

Human brains are, quite simply, one of the most astounding things in the cosmos. They've written the works of Shakespeare, composed the lyrics to most Tool songs, and put people on the moon! But they've also got... some terrible loopholes. In particular, there's a bizarre loophole in our brains where we can decide if someone we don't like ... isn't really human. And then, we can do awful things to...

Warning - this episode somewhat less safe for work than normal! Azog is an underappreciated cavewoman in her tribe. The cavemen treat her like a piece a meat, and disrespect her at every turn. Azog cannot change this unless she proves herself as a hunter. But when she discovers a clutch of baby velociraptors and decides to kill them and triumphantly bring them back to her tribe, things start to ge...

On first glance, the idea of meritocracy sounds like a pretty sensible way of organising society. Put simply, all the good things - rewards and privileges and crowns and jobs and things - go to the people who work the hardest and are the best at things. Sound pretty fair? Well it probably wouldn't surprise you, intelligent listener, if we told you that the world today isn't 100% meritocratic. We s...

An adult - if they've been good and brushed their teeth properly and haven't had any removed - can have 32 teeth in their mouth. That's right, 32 teeth in their mouth... We say 'in their mouth', because if they've been good and brushed their teeth *and they're lucky* they can have a fair few more in other parts of their body! We explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, joi...

What do you do if you have an itch? You scratch it! Of course you do, you're only human. But what if the itch is on a limb YOU NO LONGER HAVE? How do you scratch that, smarty pants? We explore the weird (horrible) world of intense, intense itchiness! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science...

Numbers, by definition, go on forever. Whatever number you think of, you can always find one bigger - all the way out to infinity. But have you ever stopped to think about what a really big number is actually like? That there are numbers you can't even write out long form inside this universe? This episode we explore the march of big numbers, all the way up to Graham's Number! The Wholesome Show i...