A Little Bit Of Science

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...

Our goal here at The Wholesome Show is to make you feel happy, amused and entertained. But a fair warning that we must sometimes journey through a rather astonishing volume of grotesque and sad death to get you there.   We won’t apologise for it. It is our duty.   In this episode, we travel back to the 18th and 19th centuries - a generally dire time to be alive. Infanticide - the killing of unwant...

Have you ever had a dream that you just had to do no matter how crazy or how dangerous it might sound to anyone else? A dream so core to your being that nothing was going to stop you realising it no matter the obstacles?   Nail Armstrong sure did. As did Marie Curie. Edmond Hillary too.   But recently, we found out about a human who eclipsed all those wannabes.   That man was Larry Walters.   Even...

Six friends gather around a patch of dirt in the Netherlands.  Cornelis, Dirk, Symon, Reynier, Other Cornelis and Andries (clearly this is not 2022).  They’re digging up something that is meant to be worth 30 guilders. That is, the price of a pretty modest house back in 1637. A whole house worth of value in a small buried item. Gold? Gemstones? An incredibly well bred and fanciful horse?   No dear...

In this daring episode, Rod and Will take us back to 1894 Paris, when a small newspaper had a brilliant idea to boost circulation.    A wacky endurance race that would take no prisoners.   In this race there were no fewer than 20 different methods of propulsion from steam, petrol, compressed air, clockwork, a system of pendulums through to a mechanical motor. From a four tonne monster tractor righ...

There's a whole bunch of reasons to not be fans of the Proud Boys. In the words of the Southern Poverty Law Centre they're a 'general hate' group, their members played key roles in the January 6 attack on the US capitol, and they're pretty goddamn misogynist. But it's rule number two of their by-laws that's just weird. It states “No heterosexual brother of the Fraternity shall masturbate more than...

In the olden times people used to climb mountains wearing all sorts of odd things - wool, leather, or just in the nude! But George Finch was an ideas man... Rod tells Will the story of the invention of the puffer jacket! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener...

Guess what listener - it's possible that people alive today might live a very long life... like 1200 years maybe. That sounds fun, but maybe it might lead to dystopia? Will agonises with Rod about what we should do about longevity treatments! 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! Source...

At the end of the 19th century in Paris there were a range of weird and wonderful acts - but one stood out... Rod tells Will the story of Le Pétomane! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Le Pétomane By The Wholesome Show is licensed under a Creative Commons License. See omnystudio.com...

Old timey people put a lot of stock in maps, but they didn't always get things exactly right. They joined Tasmania to mainland Australia, got Africa in the wrong place, and moved Siberia a long way to the east. But was this by accident? Or design? Will tells Rod the story of lying with maps! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National...

We all go to the movies right, we see the sights, we hear the sounds! But what if we could smell the smells? Rod tells Will the history of Smell-O-Vision! 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.

People have been cooking food for as long as they've been people - and for almost as long other people have been pushing against it. Will tells Rod the history and science of raw food evangelists! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Sources Bismark Daily Tribune: Apostle of Raw Food E...

Ettore Majorana was a physics genius who really could have won the Nobel Prize... but in 1938 he disappeared. The question is, what happened to him? Rod tells Will the 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.

Ok, the Americans won the race to the moon - but do you know what the Soviets actually did land on the moon? It's something a little bit special. 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.